Creative Calgary Congress — Exploring ways that the arts and artists can play a leadership role in making Calgary a more curious, compassionate and creative place for all citizens.
The Artists — Col Cseke and Elaine Lee
What happens when we focus on actions rather than conversation?
Never Read The Mandate!
When you’re working in an environment that acknowledges differences and then champions those differences you are able to create something that is greater than the sum of its parts.
Elaine Lee is a visual artist, writer and public speaker who was recently appointed Playwright-in-Residence at Inside Out Theatre. Col Cseke is a playwright, director, performer and documentary-theatre maker with an interest in community generated theatre, non-fiction theatre and storytelling. They are currently co-creating a new play Make Love Not Art.
Intro
Elaine and I are playwriting partners. We’re very different people. Our families, our bodies, our genders, our training — we have great differences between us and that’s what makes us really great as a partnership. So that’s what we’re going to be talking about — when you’re working in an environment that acknowledges differences and then champions those differences you are able to create something that is greater than the sum of its parts. There is a need to be radically honest with each other and acknowledge things.
Case in point — I really liked Jim Dewald’s talk but to disrupt the veneration of Nellie McClung, while she was a champion for white women’s right to vote, undeniably something that was vital and important, Nellie McClung was also an advocate for eugenics, which means that the people that I work with at Inside Out would be forcibly sterilized under Nellie McClung’s vision. So when we are talking about technological progress, I’m deeply interested in our social, political and cultural progress that we’re still very much in process of.
So those are the kinds of conversations Elaine and I have all the time and that’s the kind of conversation we’ll try to have with you.
Open Session #1
Elaine and I are very different people. It’s because we are different that we are able to write the play we are creating.
The Commonalities Game
First we played the ‘commonalities game,’ where anyone can make a personal statement and the rest must stand with or across from them depending on whether they agree. Statements such as: “I was born and raised in Calgary,” or “I watch cheezy things on Netflix,” or “I’m smiling but this freaks me out,” or “I was raised in a Buddhist household,” or “I play an instrument…”
Through it we acknowledged and celebrated ways in which we are the same and ways we are different. Even if you play for only a short time, chances are that you will have stood on both the same side and opposite every single person at least once.
The Chain Story Game
Secondly, Elaine started a storytelling game where we sat in a circle and went around with every person adding one word to a story. Together we built a story, each person adding to the story up to that point. The one rule was that you must always say yes to someone coming with ideas, everyone’s ideas matter. This project yields something that would not exist without all the people involved.
Giving up control means facing questions of judgement and power.
Afterwards, participants offered examples of different games that each required people to work together to create something without knowing what the end result would be. An example was Lisa Murphy Lamb’s collaborative writing project where 10 authors wrote a chapter book in sequence in real time. You got one week with the previous work before your chapter had to be presented. A noir book — characters were introduced and sometimes eliminated. Some authors were okay with being fluid and starting from someone else’s start and others wanted to know the beginnings and endings — some felt their work was diminished by others. This was a process experiment not an end-product experiment.
Other examples included a whimsy project that involved woodworkers starting a project and then sending it to another artist to work on; an Energy Renewal project Newtonian shift real life board game used by The City of Calgary; and an exquisite corpse game used in post-secondary drawing classes.
Elaine reminded everyone that it’s not about being perfect, it’s about working together and trying our best.
Suspending Judgement
Col shared a story about an improv workshop he runs through Inside Out for people with Alzheimer’s or dementia. At the beginning there was some consternation about people with more advanced conditions and how much they would be able to participate. But, as time went on, the women with more advanced conditions actually began to participate much more actively than those whose dementia was less advanced. And it was a shock to everyone, a shock to the staff and to our facilitation team.
Our theory was that perhaps at this stage in their dementia they’ve let go of that self-judgement, that fear of looking silly or saying the wrong things, all of those hurdles we all face. It made us think of those cognitive hurdles that we have to jump over, maybe in a split second, but we still go through — that process of judgement and self-censorship and fear and embarrassment and all those things that can curtail our creativity.
Self-judgement seldom helps us be creative, says Elaine. Perhaps the key to success is the ability to let go of self-judgement, allowing us to get past our own self-imposed barriers and work with others.
Acknowledging and Celebrating Differences
We need to create safe spaces. And to give value to both lived experience and trained/professional experience. Having conversations about the value of both types of experience evolves to discarding an ‘either/or’ mentality.
We need to ripple these messages out to the larger community instead of having just a few individuals sharing. Let’s encourage people to have these conversations and acknowledge and celebrate differences at the outset of working, rather than as a by-product. Let’s make these conversations part of the regular cycle.
In theatre there has been a lot of conversation around the value of safe space, mostly thinking about what that means for women. In some cases there was a desire (mostly by men) to stop these conversations about causes. Calgary Sexual Health gave the answer that you have to work on yourself. In the beginning many people came, but after the answer about working on yourself was shared only two people showed up. People were scared of the hard work of excavating themselves but the work really has to start with ourselves.
Sometimes we want to go straight to seeing the change we want in the outside world, not realizing that our own hearts have been the main barrier all along.
The Trump election has triggered a lot of conversation around empathy.
A central theme of today is that we need to LISTEN.
Radical Honesty
And we need to be radically honest. Elaine and Col are working to a comfort level, which also involves being able to ask each other radically honest questions. As they co-create the story, they also learn more about each other. As Col says, “As time goes on the character starts to feel more and more like me.”
Open Session #2
Everyone can feel the passion in the attendees today, it is palpable and inspiring.
Played the ‘commonalities game’ and the ‘chain story game’ as in the first session.
Make Love Not Art
Col and Elaine talked about the play they are co-writing Make Love Not Art. It encourages people to find commonalities. It’s also about what art really is.
They talk about the concept of radical honesty — a working relationship necessarily evolves to encompass the deeply personal, what it means to know each other outside of the box. Sometimes we live with labels that are hard to set down. Elaine lives with labels everyday so she felt she had more comfort around processing those labels. Col always identified as an “ally.” In real life he runs a theatre company dealing with issues of disability and in the story he runs a gallery that promotes an artist as disabled. He’s had to challenge the disproportional reward an able-bodied person may get for working with these subjects. Theatre always has to grapple with power dynamics, especially in a two-person play, but they have become even more important in this context. Elaine doesn’t self-identify as disabled. She wants to break the power of those labels, or acknowledge them in a positive way.
But how do they grapple with vulnerability in presentation?
Elaine answers: I’m a lot more than what people often think of me. There will always be lovers and haters so bring it on!
Col adds: The veil of fiction, that this is not Elaine, this is Doty, allows us to be honest. The opportunity for mutual vulnerability is an exciting prospect of this work.
Col’s and Elaine’s Comments at the End of the Day
Col: We grappled a lot with this question of radical honesty, which essentially means asking questions that are hard to answer and sometimes provide answers that make you feel not great about yourself. We played a game called commonalities, which is a very simple game to demonstrate that we all have at least one thing in common with each other and at least one thing different from each other. I said “I live in the suburbs” and I was joined by only one other person and so the two of us were opposite 20 or so others. We did that again in the second session and it was a one to 12 ratio. So the question I’m asking myself right now is that if I’m honest, I should not pat myself on the back that we’re talking about inclusivity today when we have events where the vast majority of the participants have a defining thing. There are many people in Calgary who are not here today. We can choose what diversity and what inclusive metrics we’re focusing on, but that doesn’t give us the out for ignoring other measures as well. And we also had very lovely, supportive conversations.
Elaine: I hosted a one-word story activity. We were in a circle and we each said one word, and when we had gone around the circle a few times, we had this story that either made sense or it didn’t, but that wasn’t the point of the game. The point is that as a community we are in this together. As human beings, whether we are activators, business people, friends, family, whatever we’re doing in life, it is our job and our responsibility to listen to one another and be able to build on our relationships in order to create something better for everyone. That’s what really created dialogue amongst each other in our group.
Our first session was more on a general perspective about the community as a whole, but the second session was more about issues that we are facing together, Col and I, as we are creating this play Make Love Not Art. The radical honesty aspect of it is actually very true to society every day. Whatever we do, I feel that radical honesty is so important to who we are as people, to our relationships, to solidify our community and to make things go forward.
Elaine Lee
Elaine Lee is a visual artist, writer and public speaker with a Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree from Emily Carr University and a Certificate of Liberal Arts with theatre experience from Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, BC.
Recently appointed Playwright-in-Residence by Inside Out Theatre, she is currently co-creating a new play Make Love Not Art.
Col Cseke
Col Cseke is a playwright director, performer and documentary-theatre maker with an interest in community generated theatre, non-fiction theatre and storytelling, and new work of all stripes.
As a Disability Theatre ally, Col is the Artistic Director of Inside Out Theatre.
About the Creative Calgary Congress
Calgary Arts Development produced the first Arts Champions Congress in 2011 as a meeting place for people who make Calgary’s arts sector a vibrant and exciting place to work and our city a great place to live.
Renamed the Creative Calgary Congress in 2014, it returned on November 22, 2016 as a place to share ideas and explore ways that the arts and artists can play a leadership role in making Calgary a more curious, compassionate and creative place for all citizens.
