My friend Robert Oetjen was a key member of our hosting team at Altmoisa. He brings a lovely capacity to the work, being the head of an environmental learning centre in southern Estonia, he understands the deep connection between human and world, and is a practitioner of the most ancient arts of human kind: tracking and fire building. He is a man who is a beautiful learner from his environment. Born in New Haven, Connecticut, USA, he moved here in the early 1990s as a Peace Corps worker, teaching English in the days in which Estonia was hungry to claim it’s relationship to the west. But like all good improvisers, he allowed the climate to change him, and he began deeply intimate with Estonian culture and language, married and Estonian woman and moved into becoming a steward of Estonian natural places. He speaks the language fluently and beautifully and Estonians, who are normally wary of outsiders, embrace him and respect him, and always forget that he wasn’t born of this land. I can imagine, after being here for only a week, how it must have happened that he became so quickly embraced here. The land and the people are reserved but when they open to you and you open to them, the embrace is deep and multi-layered.
Robert brought this consciousness to the beginning of our third day, leading us in a check in exercise on the land that taught so many things on so many levels. We simply stood for a while in the cold gloom of an early Estonian autumn morning. The air was very still, but an occasional light breeze reminded one that one still has bones. Robert invited us to first of all become aware of the extent of our vision, noticing how wide it extended on either side of us, and how high and low a soft gaze can perceive. From there we closed our eyes and let our ears open to the subtle soundscape around us. For me this was wonderful because this is my morning practice at home. here the soundscape is similar, but the sounds are totally different. Many birds were quietly moving in the trees and shrubs around us, among them bullfinches, bushtits, creepers and hooded crows. A raven called far away and a dog barked softly across the fields. Deepening into this sense of place, Robert invited us to smell the mud, and the leaves on the ground, the apples that had fallen from nearby trees and were slowly decaying, turning sweet and pungent on the ground. Our senses fully awakened, Robert then taught us how to walk again.
One foot softly in front of the other, gaze open, like a hunter becoming aware of every sound and movement around us. Each foot develops eyes of its own, feel its way on the land, so sensitive to what is underfoot that it’s is possible to walk without making a sound . You become a part of the landscape, joining it completely, becoming enmeshed within it, so that everything that happens happens WITH you rather than as a RESULT of you being there. This is a huge and important teaching about harvesting. As you learn to walk in this way – Robert called it “foxwalking” – you become a little quicker, a little more sure footed, you are able to move deliberately and yet not disturb anything around you. It was a powerful way to experience hosting and being hosted, joining the field and harvesting in the moment, becoming fully present.
And it was just the first of two morning acts. Following a walk on the land in this way, Robert invited us inside and proceeded to make a fire, using his tools of a fireboard, a firestick, a bow, a handhold and some dry moss tinder. He gave a beautiful teaching about the archetypal elements of this practice, the fundamental unity of male and female with the firestick and fireboard, the notch that allows dust to come into the space that is created by the friction to birth the spark, the notch is the womb and the spark emerges from the union, the bow that turns the stick through the four directions, gathering the energy of the circle to create powerful life. Such a rich practice, such a beautiful fundamental teaching about application. It continued to resonate through our final day. As I left Estonia this morning, Robert gifted me a set of these tools for my own, a deep invitation into practice and learning this ancient art, the first act of survival to build a fire out of nothing, and the primal act of community building. the spark begins the possibility of coming together.
The rest of the day flowed. Toke and I gave very simple teachings on application. I talked a little about the improv principle of “notice more and change less” speaking about the fact that what we had experienced is a more profound way to open to possibility than feeling that we need to change all the time. the world changes enough as it is. If we can simply stay still long enough in one place, everything we need will flow past, timing will present itself and pass away, the possibilities for action become expansive.
The group went into Open Space to work through their design questions for projects that they are deep within. We rolled and flowed and talked and drew and at the end of the day, ran a little intention grounding exercise that involved milling around and collecting questions on our next steps, and then we checked out with voices of appreciation and gratitude and an eager commitment to meet again in February when this cohort of learners will assemble for their final co-learning journey.
It has been a great pleasure to spend time with this group, to make many new friends who are cracking good work in Estonia, exploring the leading edges of participatory leadership in a country that is slowly coming back to life, and to remembering its deepest gifts and resources. Many stories, practices and inspiring thoughts are coming home with me, right into work with First Nations on the west coast of Vancouver who are reclaiming their own resources of cultural strength and the renewed use and management of the marine ecosystems on which they depend. My big learning is that the skills and practices of participatory leadership are all around us, deep in the ground of the cultural legacies we have inherited as humans on this planet. And when we can talk and learn and share between traditional indigenous peoples, we discover so many modalities that are from the same root.
Sad to be leaving, but happy to be coming home from four days of teaching, fuller than when I left.
From Bernie DeKoven, funsmith: Four freedoms of play:
Scot Osterweil (MIT Comparative Media Studies, Education Arcade Project) has observed this truth: play has no agenda. Freedom is central to the experience of play. To understand the anatomy of play, Scot has identified four components that he calls the “four freedoms of play.” If these freedoms are not respected, the play experience is severely compromised or even ruined.
Freedom to Experiment
The player’s motivations are entirely intrinsic and personal. The process is open-ended.
Freedom to Fail
Losing is part of the process.
Freedom to Try on Different Identities
Players aren’t necessarily limited by their bodies or surrounding physical context.
Freedom of Effort
As described in Peter and Iona Opie’s classic ethnography of playground culture, children may scramble around in a game of tag, avoiding being caught for twenty minutes, and then suddenly stop and allow themselves to be tagged once they have reached a certain degree of effort or perhaps want to move on to another activity.
Useful rules for everything from setting up improv exercises to doing rapid prototyping of new ideas and products.
A story of an improvisor with exacting standards:
My father, seventy-eight, is a methodical man. For thirty-nine years, he has had the same job, cataloguing books for a university library. He drinks two glasses of water first thing in the morning, walks for an hour every day, and devotes almost as much time, before bed, to flossing his teeth. “Winging it” is not a term that comes to mind in describing my father. When he’s driving to new places, he does not enjoy getting lost.
In the kitchen, too, he walks a deliberate line, counting out the raisins that go into his oatmeal (fifteen) and never boiling even a drop more water than required for tea. It is my father who knows how many cups of rice are necessary to feed four, or forty, or a hundred and forty people. He has a reputation for andaj–the Bengali word for “estimate”–accurately gauging quantities that tend to baffle other cooks. An oracle of rice, if you will.
Read on: Improvisations: Rice : The New Yorker.
Almost 20 years ago I was a part of pioneering something and I had no idea I was doing that. Gathered under the creative eye of Rob Winslow at The Union Theatre in Peterborough Ontario, a small cast of us put on a weekly improvised soap opera called “The Cactus Hotel: A Western Philosophy” (My God! Here is the brochure for it!) Every Sunday night all summer we improvised a one hour show that advanced the story of a number of characters who found themselves in an imaginary world that owed its existence to the marriage of the Hotel California, Baghdad Cafe, and Trent University’s Cultural Studies department. I now know that what we were doing was a improvised longform that was funny, tender and explored vast emotional and philosophical terrain and character development.
This past week I was in Portland, Oregon at the annual conference of the Applied Improvisation Network, and when I told that story, long time improvisers were surprised and delighted that such a thing was going on in small town Onatrio in 1991. I felt grateful, looking back 18 years to have been a part of that, and I realized this week, just how much of what I know about invitation owes its origins to that summer.
Unless engaging in deep play with a group of 125 giggling, creative and talented extroverts is your idea of a good time, the Applied Improvisational Network is not for you! But show up there ready to learn, eager to test yourself and curious about what is on offer (and willing to offer as much as you get back) and show up to it with Viv McWaters, Geoff Brown and Ann Patillo in your gang, and you have the makings of the most delightful professional development I have ever done for myself.
The gathering was spread over three days at an incredible venue – Edgefield – which itself is an improvisation in action. Once a former poor house, where homeless were rounded up and housed so they could have the dignity of working for no pay, the plae is now an artful quirky and eccentric resort complex with 15 pubs on site and some good restaurants to boot. The owner’s vision was to have people live a pub crawl and then crash in a bed and do it all over again the next day. ‘Twas the perfect venue.
Over the two days we heard from a couple of keynotes including the incomparable Armando Diaz, and the very amazing Nick Owen. Nick should be the standard for keynote presenters. Given that my tolerance for sitting in rows of chairs listening to someone speak at me is zero, the fact that Nick kept me there for there for two hours is unbelievable.
Keynotes aside, there were two days of workshops and breakouts which varied in quality and usefulness to me. My bias was to be there for high play, and so I gravitated towards those sessions that seemed to let me do that. I spent my time the first two days working with Polarity Management and improv, learning about biomimicry and improv with Belina Raffy, exploring Turkish traditional storytelling and its application for improv with Koray Tharhan and Zaynep Tarhan from Istanbul, doing an incredible micro-fiction writing session with denzil meyers, and getting a great grounding in basic improv design with Kat Koppet and again with Gary Hirsch and Julie Huffaker from On Your Feet.
I got to play a little, joining Koray, Zaynep, and Geoff onstage at the Portland Centre for the Performing Arts where we played music for an improv show featuring Special Project Lab and other local improvisers.
On the last day we opened space and a whole slew of other sessions appeared. I dove into music improvisation with Patrick, convened a session with Viv, Ann and Geoff on designing a conference that we are doing in Melbourne and had the most incredible session of contact improvisation with Munir Rashid.
Contact improv is new to me and involves very powerful experiences of working with partners to explore where our bodies want to take us. It is part dance, part martial arts (sticky hands, Tai chi, and aikido are all familiar here) and part real-time non-verbal coaching. It can be as minimal as touching one hand to another and seeing where the movement takes us all the way to rolling around on the floor, lifting one another up and down and discovering how bodies move together. Done with a skillful partner it is an incredible experience of being mentored, led, encouraged and trusted and it can take you well beyond your edge.
Being taught and hosted by Munir was one of the highlights of the entire gathering for me. He is a master teacher and practitioner of this discipline, having devoted 12 years of his life to this. He is able to stand on the edges of safety, intimacy and trust and name the container that will hold the emotional and physical energy of the practice and he is as good a teacher of physical movement as any martial arts master I have ever learned from. I am certain that in lesser hands my experience of contact improv could have been confusing and emotionally challenging. As it was I came out of the session with a strong sense of blissful fearlessness.
Improv of course is all about living the life of invitation in every second. It is about making offers and accepting offers. It is about building on the best of others and contributing something to help them look good. It is a world that works when generosity and attention are activated. And it is instantly accessible. Stories, metaphors, teaching are all at hand. Simply start somewhere and follow it anywhere and see if you don’t surprise yourself. It is in short a new form of old practices I have been doing for a while, but today I am renewed and aligned and excited to see how else we can explore and practice.
Any of you thinking of attending an Art of Hosting with me in the future will be subject to all of this learning I am doing! Expect more games, exercises and improvisational play to explore hosting, harvesting, facilitation, design and collaboration.
It gets fun from here!