Stopping in-between:

(Inter)playing moments of a theatre workshop

Warren Linds

Concordia University, Montreal

            There is a crack in everything.

                                                            That’s how the light gets in

                                                                                    Leonard Cohen, Anthem, 1992

I arrive

Where?

To this opening, to this moment

            a crack where the light slips through

                        A stopping in-between

From where?

            (Inter)playing moments of a drama workshop

            Experiences facilitating^[i] theatre for social change

                        Answers

                                    Moments of hesitation

I facilitate theatre workshops for social change with pre-service teachers, educators and high school students. The workshops are designed using an adaptation of Theatre of the Oppressed (TO) introduced by Augusto Boal (1979). Such an adaptation has been developed within a local public school board program that enables students to develop their understandings, and address experiences, of racism, and other issues of discrimination. The workshop format is designed so that meanings may unfold through storytelling in a step-by-step process. I work in different pedagogical landscapes each time I am called to facilitate. Each situation requires the development of trust through performance in the workshop as a knowledge space (Turnbull 1993).

One such landscape a few years ago opened up aspects of knowing, involving sharing stories as risk-taking, the emergence of community, and the role of the in-between in drama facilitation.

March 21, 2000. A high school in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada

A day to commemorate the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. I have been asked to explore racism through drama with a group of twenty self-selected high school students. This group of students are representative of the diverse population of the high school, and are mostly in grade 11 and 12. About one-third of them are English as a secondary language (ESL) students, recent immigrants to Canada from Poland, China, Bosnia, Russia, and Iran.

We begin our morning together with warm-up exercises. A sense of community emerges as we stretch our bodies, move around the spaces at various speeds, shout out our names, and keep our eyes closed as partners guide us around the room. Next we played with Images, a static positioning and re-forming of body to communicate a feeling, or a theme (in this case, racism will be explored later with the group) as a tool for communication.

Drama opens up spaces for exploration between bodies through stories, told both one-on-one and in groups. At the beginning of any workshop process, I begin this story-telling through non-verbal storytelling. The students sculpt partners, one minute showing a runner beginning a race, another minute showing a parent scolding a child. We put these forms together to create a story from these relationships. The students are engaged and laughing at what stories emerge from randomly developed Images.

Based on the idea that a “picture is worth a thousand words” (Jackson in Boal 1992, xx), Image refers to the theatricalized use of bodies in frozen motion, thus visually crystallizing an issue, feeling, or incident so that meaning emerges in the creation, and viewing, of the Image. I use this non-verbal technique to put a story “on its feet,” or to generate themes that then lead to oral storytelling. Working with non-verbal images leads to an exploration of new themes that emerge from our interpretation of what we see. This then leads to the emergence of more information about a story, or new angles that the audience has seen in it, thus emphasizing not only the theatrical saying of “show us, don’t tell us,” but also leading to participants/observers being able to “enact” themselves in the stories of others.

10:00 AM – A stop in the workshop

I call for a break in the morning activities, and, as the students chat, I ponder my next step. How can I help students learn to use the Image technique as an entry point to discuss racism. So far, the Images have been general and impersonal, created without the context of these students, their school, and their lives. I want to encourage them to share in the intimacy of Image work; to work closely with an image that comes from a personal story. But how to find the story? I call the students into a circle and invite them to share stories of their lives....I see this is unexpected. There is a pause. Uneasy silence. Eyes avoiding each other. I am a bit nervous.

in the in-between

Always in this space, between coming and going and coming

            here I am/we are

Hesitating        for a instance

            in a journey

Will anyone speak?

What preceded this momentary pause?

What will follow?

This moment of hesitation is an “incipient” (Gadamer, 2000, 17) beginning, meaning something which is not yet determined in this or that sense, not yet determined in the direction of this or that end, and not yet determined appropriate for this or that representation. It is “just starting to be,” on the edge, in the middle....

Such moments awaken uncertainty, yet are excited by the possibilities that lie ahead. This is movement that is open and fluid, a seeking without knowing when and where awareness will unfold.

A beginning also implies an ending. Yes, the circle I convene will have an end, just as it has a beginning. “The anticipation of the end is a prerequisite for the concrete meaning of beginning” (Gadamer, 15). So saying that we/I come here means that I/we came from somewhere. In the in-between says there is some beginning and some end, even if we are/I am always here in the midst of a journey, it implies perching on a fulcrum, a hinge point, between two places/times.

This work is about a journey in drama facilitation. This journey is about the “here” and it brings into knowing the come from and the come to.

This stop calls us to reflect by paying attention to all that happens around us. What does drama bring to this journey?

Theatre of the Oppressed investigates relationships, embracing and recognizing the tacit and implicit knowledge that emerges in the telling of stories through Image. This knowing is expressed kinaesthetically (Clive Barker [1977] calls it “body-think”[29]) which means that sensing and being sensed do not happen separately; but function and flourish in bodies of interaction in the interplay between our lives and the stories of our lives that is opened up by participants through the drama process. In this way drama is an enactive process where “every reflection brings forth a world” (Maturana and Varela 1992, 26). Work informed by and respectful of such complex worlds become situations where our knowing unfolds with/in communities-in-the-making. The work enables opportunities for shared, relational, and embodied interpretation practice.

A dialogical relationship is created, as knowing emerges in the communication between Image and audience. Augusto Boal (1995) Boal calls this process metaxis. Although Boal doesn’t give any historical background, its roots are in the Greek word metaxu, which Aristotle and Plato wrote about and means between + in, In the state of in the middle, betwixt, between, between-whiles, in the interval, neither good nor bad [Liddell 1996, 1115]).

Boal explains metaxis as

A different kind of knowing emerges from this process between the observing, the in-situ, and our interactions. We begin to see everything in new ways. We hold up a mirror to the world and, instead of trying to represent it, find it accessible. We can see that this co-emergent self/other/world is flexible, dynamic, and changeable. Observation through metaxis allows us to experience knowing as it is enacted, and, as it occurs in/through the artist’s body, embodied in each moment of the present.

Then we play with the reality of the images before us. The storyteller must forget the world outside the workshop which was the origin of the image, and play with the image itself in its artistic embodiment. S/he must practice in this second world (the aesthetic), in order to modify the first (the perception). Boal calls this aesthetic transubstantiation (43).

Through the process of metaxis, drama becomes the interplay between the imagined and the image, the tangible and the ephemeral. Knowing begins to unfold, to emerge and to become more explicitly known. Because it happens through the body, learning becomes more tangible and is made available for future deepened exploration.

Facilitating this metaxic in-between has no straight line to some predetermined goal. Rather it provides a frayage, an opening or an interruption that "breaks a path" (Nancy 1997, 135). The crack that opens up in dramatic (inter)play involves a space where movement occurs, because these spaces “present an absence which creativity seeks to grasp” (Kershaw 1998, 68). At the same time, the workshop develops as a space of safety, where risking, testimony, and witnessing is possible. This is a space that is not totally closed as that would be suffocating and too separated from the world outside the room, but has openings small enough so that people may share and risk. It is that adventuring that maintains its energy.

As facilitator I am both outside and in, standing in the crack of the in between, and also keeping it open. Then into this new empty space, full of meaning now, it is my responsibility to ask new questions that, through a series of moments in the embodied process of drama, probe further through thought, voice, and action. I live constantly in this liminal space, the land betwixt-and-between, a “fructile chaos…a storehouse of possibilities, not by any means a random assemblage but a striving after new forms and structures, a gestation process, a fetation of modes appropriate to postliminal existence” (Turner 1986, 41-42). In this in-between-ness, the exploration of this land is helped by reflecting on my experiences of facilitating transformative drama workshops.

I must become aware of my own role in the playing—and, in the journey, when I ask a question I might not get the answer I expect.

10: 15 AM A Circle of Stories

The talking circles we use in our work are spaces where we share with one another. Aboriginal architect Douglas Cardinal explains such circles this way

I am hoping someone will share a story that I could work with to create an Image. This would show the group how Images can not only be created to tell a story but can also emerge from a story-moment, where conflict or a crisis occurred. This sharing of story is the beginning of building community that engages the imagination, establishing an atmosphere that is theatrical, nurturing and about dialogue (Rohd 1998).

We are at a hinge of the workshop as we move from abstract play about racism to the lives of the players as told through story

What are we hiding behind in our play?         What might be on other side of the hiding?

I begin the circle by asking “Would anyone like to share a story of experiencing racism?”

There is a pause

Silence as the group processes the question

A stop (Applebaum, 1995), "a form of movement purer than that of body, mind or feeling alone" (24).

Andrea (not her real name) jumps in. And proceeds to talk “non-stop” for what seems like ten or fifteen minutes. The story of her life.

This is the first time I have broken our wordless image-playing to invite students to speak their lives,

offering a structure to help step into the in-between the known and the not-yet-known...

We hear all the details of her life in China. A life of comfort and belonging. Her recent move to Canada. Her life here that was alienated and disconnected. The comparisons between the two. How wonderful things were in her home country. How lost and isolated she was feeling here. What had happened one day as she came to her high school...this high school....How she had tripped and her books went flying and no one helped her. The laughter behind her back as she scrambled to pick herself up off the icy pavement...

This experience is her/Andrea’s living in this moment of sharing her story. In telling the story her own inner thoughts intertwined with her outward speaking, in her speaking with us. And, oddly enough, we have a sense of her disconnection with Canada through her connections with us.

Working on the threshold of knowing

An enactive perspective attempts to find a “middle way” (Varela et al 1991), proposing a codependence between self and world—between what we are thinking and what are we doing—by suggesting that the body is that which renders the mind and the world inseparable. As contrasted with a worldview that locates knowing in minds, and knowledge as a relatively fixed and permanent commodity, an enactive approach engages us in experiencing the everyday world with more than a desire to ground, objectify, fix, and reify. The enactive is concerned with the unfolding of a world through collaborative work. We become part of the world that exists and, at the same time, are enacting a new one through our interactions. Our knowing and our identities are dependent on being with/in a world, which is inseparable from our bodies, our language and our social history.

What does this middle way look like in a drama process?

In a creative process we spend time in the fertile in-between experience of ambiguity or perhaps even of contradiction, a threshold of liminality. The word limnos, meaning threshold defines that space between certainty and uncertainty, between what was and what will be. The process contains doubt as well as certainty, and is simultaneously orderly and disorderly, and both rational and intuitive.

© 2004 original work by Andrew Campbell & Marysa de Veer © all rights reserved

Liminality offers a spaced in which to hold things in a tentative way. It provides an opening where we might move beyond singular truths and examine multiple possibilities. In such encounters we can begin to recognize the limitations of our own perceptions of “what life is like.” Maturana and Varela (1992) call this recognition the social imperative for a human-centered ethic. Whenever we find ourselves “holding tightly to certainty,” thinking we know the “best right way,” we can interrupt this certitude and invite ourselves to step into “another domain where coexistence takes place” (Maturana and Varela, 1992). That domain is liminal space where, unconstrained by “either/or,” we can access the full range of our “both/and” creative options. We begin to engage with not knowing: with not being competent and with not being skilled at dealing with new situations. This uncertainty, this not knowing awakens unexpected connections. It can help us to uncover a creative space in which we may encounter new awareness. As we open to not knowing, we pay attention to unexpected occurrences, incongruities, and connections. In this space, new and challenging situations draw open abilities and unfamiliar capacities.

Andrea’s story emerges within a liminal space which contains a wide diversity of components: the participants, their skills, the experiences of their lives, and the particular history of their time in the school that they brought to the workshop. I am also present as the group’s facilitator with my own concerns, limitations of time, learning to learn with the group. And, in the moment of telling, we simply listen. This convergence of the complex factors in the workshop enables Andrea to take risks in an atmosphere of safety and to develop trust across (among others) gender, linguistic, cultural and demographic boundaries. In this process, normal roles are suspended.

Initially a story in a workshop, the telling of Andrea’s life opens up a generative space where it has “the potential to free up human capacities of cognition, affect, volition, creativity, etc” (Turner 1982, 44), thus unfolding new possibilities for forms of relationships, understandings, and articulations about, and for, the world. Such spaces of possibility do not just exist but, rather, emerge through our interactions with/in the world. When spaces interact, delightful possibilities spring forth.

Stor(y)ing Experiences

As drama facilitators, what do we do with the stories that are told in our workshops? Stories provide the listener with a doorway to an experience different from their own yet, somehow, also connected to our story. This entrance becomes another layer of meaning that is cracked open to probe. The material works for us metaphorically only just as long as it involves several layers of hidden meaning that come from the story of our own experiences. Theatre is a place for investigation of these emergent meanings of interplay. As Jonathan Kay, a performer and teacher argues, “it’s about a dream, a place which is inaccessible. Secrets start to speak through us” (Johnston, 31) as we begin to explore themes and ideas through embodied Imagery.

Accessing secrets is a process of performative articulation, a “bodily boundary that makes movement, positioning, and positional change possible” (Aoki 1996) as well as the hinge point (Applebaum 1995) of that movement. Adventuring into performative articulations forces us to be awake to the living-in-the-in-between so we can awaken experiences and learn from them. This requires openness to experience and a willingness to engage in dialogue with that which troubles or challenges us, risking confusion and uncertainty. In struggling with such breakdowns which are these “hinges that articulate microworlds” (Varela 1999, 11), we encounter opportunities to take creative action.

As Hyde (1998) points out, the terms art and articulate (as in the doubled meaning of the articulated joints of the body as well as speech) derive from the same Latin root – artus, meaning joint. All of these involve changing the shape of things, or refer to moments where there is a potential for transformation. These hinge points are also spaces where we shift the joining of two or more different forms (like storytelling and storying through Image) or stories.

That hinge moment is also the moment of AHA! where, within a single breath, things can change. Hyde points out, that these moments where the shape of things can be changed as something we do “ignites spontaneity” (Nachmanovitch, 83). Placing an individual’s story within a creative form like an Image enables improvisation to act as a catalyst, a frame, like the “seeding of a crystal” (Nachmanovitch, 83). The tension between the individual story and the story as Image enables the story to become a collective one, placing demands on the material so that it may “meet the productive tension” (Heathcote 2000, 33) of performing. Then performance becomes a space which makes a statement that then opens up paradoxes, struggles, and dreams for questioning and further exploration.

But notice that there is a goal, a form, and a process in this spontaneity. Methods in the workshop move participants in their dramatic work towards a performance while, at the same time, because of the flexibility of Image as the form we use, deepening inter-standings^[ii] of the issue which unfolds before and within the actions.

Such inter-standings emerge from the shape shifting that occurs when we move from story to the stop-frame effect of Image or from the static Image to an interpretation that becomes a story. They become a place of perception where the surface “comes alive” (Applebaum, 81), as the patterns of relationship are transforming. These connections are nourished in the cracks between us and the methods we use...

10: 30 AM Stor(y)ing: opening the space of in-between

The content of Andrea’s story as she tells it is unexpected. It creates a palpable change in the atmosphere of the workshop. I feel a momentary sensation of freefall (Haskell, 2000), where I am not sure what to do next as my intellect (as expressed through my “workshop plan”) is arrested. Time stops; we experience time “unqualified by intellect” (Gadamer, 85). Then time becomes part of the event of the telling. In Andrea’s speaking, and in my listening (and feeling), there is a pulse, rhythm, and tempo as her telling rises and falls. I sensed we were all becoming engaged in the telling and the listening.

In this timing I sense how the story relates to the Image we are going to explore and how to engage the others in this process. I don’t know what is going to happen but I begin to sense when to open things up and when to close them down. What would be enough information and what might be too much? What might be entered more deeply (the incident as it relates to the theme of racism) and what might be postponed (an exploration of her alienation). Triggering its initiation as well as listening to its momentum and tempo, I hear the silence of the others and saw the intense speaking of their bodies in that quiet circle. Even when they became absent in the listening I glance at them, ensuring the crack was still there. I am in the crack, listening to her story as a participant, but also, as a facilitator, paying attention to what might come next, as I draw on what I may have done in the past in similar situations. I was paying attention to the timing of the workshop; but also the timing and rhythm of this story. The connections between one event and the other (the story and the Image that was to come) leads to perceptual moments and moments of awareness. Practice in the stop leads to knowing in the complexity of pedagogical action.

Even though I have heard many such stories before, here I am listening....before I knew what it is I am listening to. Unsure as listener, the story draws me in, commanding my mindful and embodied attention. I look around at the others and see they are also drawn to, and engaged in, the story, becoming “obtrusively present, throughout the testimony” (Felman and Laub 1992, 71). This witnessing event implicates us in a new connection with Andrea. I have a moment of self-doubt as to what to do as her story touches, and directly implicates, me since I, as facilitator, asked the question that invited her story. I am both “imminently present, in the lead” (Felman and Laub, 71) yet also non-directive in that leadership. I am the one who had asked for the story, and I am the guardian of its process and its momentum. Being in the frame of a workshop, with a task to do, enables me to be present and active, letting the fragments of her story have an impact both on me and on the others as we all become witnesses both to her story and to our own responses to it (58).

I am simultaneously a guide for the group in its own exploration, and an explorer into an uncharted land. Knowledge of racism is not simply a set of concepts that are being shared but a genuine advent [a be-coming], that stands in its own right, an adventure. This journey brings forth aspects of “acknowledgment, remembrance and....consequence” (Simon and Eppert, 178), emerging through my own double attentiveness—double in that it involves both an appropriate pattern of acting as facilitator/witness as well as being attentive to the effects of my actions as witnessing facilitator.

Through the telling, the imagining (what it must have been like) and the resonating as we listen, Andrea’s experience is bearing “witness to itself in the image” (Hillman, 1982, 78) she was creating in our own minds as she offers the story to us. Such a connection also includes the obligation^[iii] to re-testify, to somehow convey what one is hearing and thinks important to remember. In this process, a community of memory emerges. These are relationships through which people

The community then has a responsibility to retell the story. We now were all part of that community then and now. We have a responsibility, an obligation to not only to hear her story, but also to take her story and transform it for others to hear and see through Image. Dramatic play emerges in the third space that is being negotiated (Turnbull 2000) between what joins us (the common project of drama) and what separates us (our diverse living experiences). Without knowing it, we are, simultaneously, building a space of possibility as we perform together.

I wait some more as Andrea continues. She pauses once or twice, catches her breath and then keeps on going. It is as if she had waited for this moment to tell her story. Unknowingly, I was responsible for opening the crack and letting her, and the rest of the group, be startled by its light.

10:45 AM From story to Image

How do we story Andrea’s intimate telling of a moment of her life?

I ask Andrea to recount again the moment of crisis when she lay on the ground and others were laughing at her. But this time, I want her not to just use words but also the bodies of her peers in a frozen position. She sculpts them into position, another student playing her laying on the ground, arms and legs akimbo, the others laughing or, backs turned, ignoring what was happening.

I ask the rest of the group what they think the Image is communicating—what is this story about? Then I move the actors back and forth by clapping them through what would happen next, what would happen before, what would be an ideal ending, what would make things worse. Through each stage of the process, new perspectives on the story emerge.

We see an image of a group of ESL students, all with different first languages, separate from the mainstream school classes. Another image has a group watching but without taking action.

A girl showing concern with her eyes, but blocked by a circle of boys laughing at the girl on the ground.

An intertwined circle of students looking after each other.

The energy of the group was now concentrated in serious play, renewing “itself in constant repetition” (Gadamer 1989, 103), as together we develop more and more Images. The work we begin to do together is the playing; translating her story—working it out in Image—opening up its “own possibilities of being that emerge” (Gadamer, 118) as the Image of Andrea’s story and the story of racism, become “a coming-into-existence of the work itself” (Gadamer, 116). On this day dedicated to the elimination of racism, the participants are themselves engaging in the process, listening to the experiences of one of their own fellow students.

And I too open up to her story, moving from facilitator to participant, watching and listening in wonderment, becoming part of the space and, at the same time, the gap within it. Realizing that the planned activity, however simple, exposes something resonating on a deeper level.

Returning to a presence in the here and now becomes an “effort to stop the linear, discursive, explanatory mode and return to an organic awareness of things” (Applebaum, 90). I stayed with/in those moments. Remembering not past experiences of Image work but the rhythms and tempos of the engagement of Image through story through Image. Digging deeper through an Image that in response to the story, rather than having a desire to fill up every minute with activity. How, by listening, letting go of the play, and letting going of my perceived responsibilities as facilitator as leader, I have joined in, participating as initiator to this new language of being present.

There is an unfinishnedness to this story. It happened within the middle of the workshop but that circle was also open as we were operating in this high school; outside the school calendar but inside the school. We were not talking about some school somewhere else; some world somewhere else; but here and now—down the hallway, turn left, out the school doors to the parking lot.

There. Here. Now. Then.       

This event is unfinished in the remembering; yet finished through the telling.

Andrea’s story becomes a work that opens a spaced for it to be read and re-read.

Here. Now.

The resonances are still moving beyond this particular workshop. They resound in my discussions with my co-facilitator about what happened^[iv]. They rebound in this retelling of my experiences. As Gadamer says, the experience “cannot be exhausted in what can be said of it or grasped as its meaning” (69).

But these resonances don't only echo into the future; they echo the past. I recall in this writing something that happened in a graduate class on anti-racist pedagogy. Another story at another time, yet strangely parallel to Andrea’s.

Graduate students John and Pria are sharing with our class their impressions of a film about Mexican maquiladoras (low-wage factories on the Mexican-American border). John, in reflecting on their work together, says, “While we were discussing the film I realized that, while to me, what I saw on the film were poor Mexican women in horrible working and living conditions, what Pria saw was her mother—a mother who had done piece work for low wages in East Vancouver.” Not that John could ever understand what it might like to be a Mexican maquiladora worker, nor to be a piece-work labourer in an East Vancouver sweatshop. But John could understand that there was a difference between Pria and his life experiences. And from there a conversation could begin.

I only remember this story now as I write about the high school workshop moving on in a hubbub of action. But when it comes time for the closing circle, we pass a talking object around and student after student comment on how important the morning was for them. A shared exploration momentarily pulling them into a different relationship. They were beginning to know others across the divide between the regular stream of classes and the English as a Second Language students. They also commented on how taking a stand against racism meant more than speaking against jokes or acts of discrimination. It is also wrapped up with/in their relationships with others in school; relationships that we had begun enacting in the world of the workshop. Drama thus becomes an encounter with an “unfinished event which [the encounter] itself was part of this event” (Gadamer, 99). As Gadamer points out, since the development of our work together (as a work of art being performed) occurred in the world of the workshop, and since we were encountering Andrea’s world in her story, our work was not just a product of our imaginations. The work we were doing together moved us beyond simply are-imaging of a story. The Image’s development through Andrea’s story moved beyond Andrea, surpassing her experiences to include our/my own. And yet now, aware of how I am portraying this event as coming to a happy ending, I continue to question the experience:

            How do educators keep themselves present in the (embodied) crack of the in-between?

In 1991 at a training workshop in Vancouver I created an Image of my role as facilitator, stretched to the limit, my body in tension as I attempted to connect and be a go-between amongst two groups in conflict. I don't remember much about the content of the Image; but I still remember that tension, of my muscles stretched to their limit, feeling the heat, the fibres “fraying,” stretched out. An act of mediation, of conciliation perhaps, but also an act of translation. I feel in my body “the selvedges of the language textile give way, fray into frayages or facilitations” (Spivak 1993, 180).

Gayetri Spivak mentions that the word facilitation comes from an English translation of Sigmund Freud’s (German) term Bahnung which means “pathing.” Bahnung is translated to French as frayage (opening a path). The dictionary meaning is the term used by Freud to refer to the excitation in passing from one neuron to another. This passage is said to be “facilitation,” a pedagogical acting in the in-between. Energy will opt for a facilitated pathway in preference to one where no facilitation has occurred.

On the other hand, at a presentation I made about drama facilitation in 2000, one German speaking participant offered me another word – Vermittlung – as a translation of the English term facilitation. Interestingly enough, the “mitt” in Vermittlung means middle, which expresses very well my sense of the in-between of facilitation. So an intermingling of the dynamic roles of facilitation are in the words themselves—opening pathways/being in-between.    

I investigate the roles I have played as facilitator by recalling my experiences and the analyses of the world that have emerged from them. Sometimes I work from outside the frame as Trickster^[v], asking questions that disrupt conventionality, rendering “possible, within the fixed bounds of what is permitted, an experience of what is not permitted” (Kerényi 1972, 185). Kevin Kumashiro (1999) engages in such a pedagogy of possibility in ways similar the facilitator’s role as Trickster—“I am not trying to move to a better place but just trying to move—avoiding the repetition of sameness” (40).

At a theatre research conference in the spring of 2001 a theatre teacher mentioned the importance of “breaking open the AHA.” Here the facilitator doesn’t let moments of realization that emerge through the work to “just happen” in the workshop and then be left “hanging,” but uses them as an opportunity to move the group (be it through dramatic work and/or discussion) further and deeper into the work the journey of transformation. Andrea’s sharing of her story (and the group’s response to it) was such an AHA, hinge point, or moment of the in-between, as the mood of the workshop definitely changed from play-full-ness to a seriousness related to the world outside the room we were working in. Was it only an AHA for me in writing about it in retrospect? Does this idea of “breaking open the AHA” also challenge me to be learn to be attentive to such moments, and to take more risks to dive into them in the workshop as well as in the writing?

My own sensitivity to the time or other constraints in a workshop will determine whether, or when, to play with/in the possibilities of such in-between moments. Writing expressively has helped me, and could help others, become mindful of our intuitive and embodied abilities.

Thus, if you ask me,

What have I learned?

If we look at drama facilitation in schools as not just a “creative glimmer” inside content-focused education, but also see that it might enable the unfolding of a community that was only ‘possible,’ then it has implications for other areas of teaching and learning. It also changes the role of the teacher, putting in question the way the teacher develops reflection through action and how the teacher pays attention both in the doing and in the learning.

Thinking of the workshop space as community, the implications for facilitator means we are not just intervening in the worlds of our students, but are becoming part of an unfolding community-in-the-making. The images created in the workshop process provide us with images of this community. These images, which enable students to express their fears as well as hopes for the future, are not merely educational method but are also expressions of the knowing that emerges.

We cannot think of ourselves as just operating in the workshop setting—planning, theorizing, leading, learning, teaching and then leaving the cultures we have temporarily become part of. Educational practices and research informed by and respectful of the complex worlds of schools/community are not just “interventions” but instances of complicity. Our work unfolds with communities-in-the-making through our partnerships with them, as we become part of this community of relations. I must continually sense what kind of community we are becoming, yet, at the same time, I am responsible for opening the conditions for this community to possibly emerge. I am trying to understand what others see, and, simultaneously, creating a safe space for interactions to happen in the landscape of the in-between.

Leadership within this perspective means becoming attuned to what is going on, to improvise within it, and realize that leadership doesn't reside with the teacher all the time, but rather is distributed amongst the participants from moment to moment. Creating the conditions for learning means teaching is not the transmission of some passive knowledge, preconceived, believed to be known in advance, “believed to be (exclusively) a given” (Felman, 56). Educational experiencing becomes opening a space through which things flow. Such spaces emerge within teaching when we pause, when we listen, we pay attention to the stop of the in-between. We must become aware of such moments as we attend “closely to my nonverbal experiences of the shifting landscape that surrounds me” (Abram, 59-60).

3:30 PM Off to the parking lot...

The circle of experience and action through the dramatic process leads us back into the world. Yet the world of performance and embodied exploration has always been with us. We are not now “exiting” the performative space, so much as continuing to experience possibilities with/in the all encompassing world.

I pause before the doorway out of this work. But this is also a doorway to somewhere else. Another beginning. Another middle. Another stop in my journey. Caught (for only a moment) with/in the space of the in-between.

           Ready to move on.

Looking backwards and forwards, perched with the wide horizon before me, still wondering what comes next.....

                                    —Friedrich Nietzsche (1921, 427)^[vi]