Week 6 - Content Development Strategies by Jo

Jo writes about week 6

How do collective practices go?

Three different people, three different backgrounds, influences, languages, different desires, goals, aims…And a fair amount of spoken and unspoken “we/I don’t want to do “x”.”

As we know dancing and moving together is pure metaphor for collective non-hierarchical anything. How can a making process go, what is there to consider?

We are challenged to design a process for how we might work together.

Content development strategies.

Where does it begin? The first time we met?  This week? Is it hypothetical or can we relate this to the imagined potential we would make a piece of work together? 

We began by sharing starting points from previous work, everything from: it begins with a question, an image, a sensation, a desire, a movement provocation, a conversation… or the accumulated lived experiences, heritages, which in turn opens the door to values, driving motivations and the current, 

What's in the air? 

Which comes first, the chicken or the egg? I have the sense as individuals we are collating, drawing upon and following our interests, sometimes we hold onto an idea or moment, sometimes it’s clear, sometimes we hold on with absolutely no idea why this feels important.

Once I made a show and only realised 5 years later why that was an idea I clung to 

And indeed to cling to, to commit to an idea is essential, so that when it gets hard, we’ll absolutely know why we began in the first place. 

Yet how does this go within a collective context?

What is the thing we can all get behind?

A strategy 

Moving, Questions, Social

..:

in no particular order

Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

Some light intention, creative challenge, lots of openness and hanging out in the uncertain, it takes time.

And there is joy and the discovery this week that we are capable of healthy creative challenge, get underneath something, poke a bit… and top tip for the week “no despair”,  just don’t go there, moving through instead of attempting or forcing agreement, keep going, shimmy, knead and drag together, it will form itself.

Patience, enjoy the limbo.

We named our way, 

The Gut Method

We took advantage of some of the keys from maker Jeanine Durning, no-stopping, un-censoring, all is valuable, all process is on the way to becoming.

Traditionally, funding strands say there is research, then the development of that research, then the make, I’m convinced it starts way earlier and that the research and the developing and the questioning doesn’t stop, its layered, it’s rather a mess for a long time, be ok with the mess, it bounces from one strategy to another and I would like to say in all that intentional chaos it should be fun, remain curious, as Deborah Hay would say “What if?, What if?”

Some ideas come from a dance, some ideas come about from a need, a response, we talked about the state of the world, yes we need to talk about the state of the world,

(remember “no despair”, it just isn’t helpful).

Written by Jo.