How I created an immersive experience to end division
Introducing The Field, created with the Odyssey programme
I’ve been an Odyssey fangirl for years. When I first heard about it back in 2012, the immersive revolution was well and truly underway in cities across the globe. We had Punch Drunk transforming our expectations of theatre in London and New York; Secret Cinema sneaking hundreds of people through a Shawshank Redemption style prison experience, YouMeBumBumTrain ripping up the rule book on audience participation.
And in amongst all that, there was Odyssey. Run by Ayden LeRoux and Abraham Burickson, this is a collective of experience designers based out of New York and Baltimore, skilled in creating intimate and intricate experiences for an audience of one, all founded on principles of empathy and positive impact. Where many immersive experiences delight in disrupting your sense of reality for kicks, Odyssey were embracing the power of experience design for something more worthwhile — transformation.
As they say on their website:
“Our team is made up of artists in dozens of disciplines who study the life of one individual and use whatever means necessary to create intimate, meaningful performances that last days, weeks, or months, and occur not on a stage but interwoven with the life of our audience of one. The experiences are transformative; most of our participants change jobs, move, make new commitments to loved ones shortly after their Odysseys.”
No small promise. But then…
EXPERIENCES CAN CHANGE US
Through my own life, I‘ve learned that a well curated experience can have a transformative impact. Whether that’s in the thick silence of a 5-day meditation retreat, the anticipation of a group mountain climbing adventure, or a month-long roadtrip with good friends in a new land, the big experiences of our lives have the potential to centre us in the present and invite us to see the world differently. With fresh eyes, we can better decide who we are and who we want to be in relationship to the world.
So when Odyssey launched their annual incubator online this year, I jumped at the chance to finally participate from my locked-down life across the pond. One hastily written application, a competitive selection process and $2500 later, and I was in. I was beginning my own Odyssey.
The wonderful thing about an incubator is the incubation. Away from the usual norms and expectations of your job / business / friendships / family, it’s a free space to turn up an try something new. To ask yourself what’s drawing your curiosity right now, or what problem you want to solve in the world, and enter into a container to support you in just that.
And for me, when I asked myself what problem I wanted to solve in the world, the answer was division.
WHY END DIVISION?
I’ve been curious about modes of ending division and creating connection between humans for a long time. It’s part of what draw me to studying international relations at uni, joining the civil service in International Development, and interning at the UN in New York. For a long time I wrote a blog called Border Skipping, and would travel to post conflict zones hunting for stories of reconciliation. I’d write for The Guardian and the Independent about what I discovered, while also running film nights on resolving conflict in the Middle East.
More recently, that drive has become as spiritual as it is political. Twelve years of meditation practice, courses in authentic relating, the dance of 5 rhythms — I’ve come to see so many of the spiritual/wellbeing practices we embark on as being a kind of peace-making; with ourselves, and with others. Connection and peace can’t simply be sanctioned by a treaty or a government. It comes from within. And through our relationships with others. To quote Israeli peace activist Robi Damelin in One Day After Peace, “when you see the humanity in the other, there can be no conflict.”
I’d argue that we’ve never needed this work more. Since Brexit, Trump, social media’s rise and the weakening of global governance; nationalism and tribalism is growing around the world. According to Ipsos Mori, 76% of people in 26 countries think their country is divided; and 59% say it’s more divided than it was 10 years ago.
Meanwhile it’s never been easier to avoid encountering a difference of opinion. We’ve stopped reading papers that trigger us, we unfollow people with different views to our own. We spend less time with people from different generations, and in doing so we entrench a sense of ‘rightness’ to our own points of view. On dating apps, people say things like ‘no Tories’ or ‘no Brexiters’; cancelling whole portions of the population based on political views. There are fewer real life spaces to connect with people who see the world differently to us.
It didn’t used to be like that. Political ideologies didn’t used to separate us so keenly. In my own family, my parents rarely vote the same way. One voted Brexit, the other marched for Remain. But it has never once affected their relationship, because they understand that these views, these perspectives on right and wrong, are just that — perspectives. They aren’t necessarily a judgement on the person, their values or morality.
I think we’ve forgotten that viewpoints are different to identities.
I think we’ve come to identify so strongly with our views, we’ve forgotten how to see the other.
And I think that’s dangerous. I think that way, conflict lies.
And so when writing my application to Odyssey, I started with a question: is it possible to design an experience that would end division?
THE EXPERIENCE
The Odyssey Incubator is designed for progress. Fortnightly check ins, inspirational talks from amazing experience designers, workshops on diagramming, mood boarding and creative referencing — all constructed to develop and test an idea that can create a transformation.
And so I found myself having very quickly, by the end of the 4th week, having designed a prototype for a conversational experience that I hoped might be up to the challenge I had set.
I called it The Field (after the Rumi poem) — a two-person conversational experiment in human connection for a divided world.
Out beyond our ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing
There is a field.
I’ll meet you there.
— Rumi, The Great Wagon
Centred around a card spread of enquiry questions, the tarot-like game is designed to take two people with a difference of opinion through a journey in connection: inviting them to answer a progressive series of personal questions in order that they might see the whole person sat opposite them, their stories and their struggles, before engaging in discussion on a topic on which they disagree.
Crucially, the aim of the game isn’t to change the other person’s point of view. It’s to hear it. Perhaps understand it a little better. But more importantly, to develop a lived experience of building a new connection with someone, even when you don’t see eye to eye on everything.
The hope? That upon leaving the Field, the power of the connection you’ve built with another person is stronger than whatever it is that divides you.
It isn’t supposed to eradicate the division.
It is supposed to create space for it.
Or more put succinctly: this process helps people make friends with the enemy.
THE PLAY TEST
Just a few weeks in, and I was playtesting The Field at Buddhafield festival in Somerset. I’m not gonna lie — I had serious imposter syndrome. Here I was with all these amazing workshop facilitators who had been honing their programmes for years. I had been building mine for 6 weeks.
It also hit me that the success of this thing was less to do with the cards, the process and the instructions, as it was to do with me, and the energy I brought as the Guardian of the space. If I could hold the space with ease and focus, people would feel safe, and relaxed: ready to embark on an experience that wouldn’t always be comfortable, but would be intensely rewarding. I needed to be present, and in a positive frame of mind, if this was going to work.
And work it did. I saw three pairs journey through the Field. Each pair divided by a difference in opinion that mattered a lot to them. And in each case, they left The Field as friends. I saw one pair having tea together later that day. Another swapped numbers for a post festival meet up. Relationships were made — not in spite of the division, but through the mutual willingness to go through a common journey to address it.
The process was more intensive than I predicted it would be. The conversation takes an hour. Connection can not be rushed. And by the end, there is much to discuss. People were reluctant to leave the space, keen to sit in this world, beyond rightdoing and wrongdoing. Where we truly seek to know each other.
The Field creates a space where we can sit with division, and connect with each other anyway.
Isn’t that something more of us need in our lives?
SO WHERE NEXT?
So where do we go from here?
In honesty, I’ve been a bit burned out from driving myself through such an accelerated process. This wasn’t Odyssey’s fault — in fact they were keen to encourage us to take our time with our project development. Creativity isn’t a rush-job. I however found that the energy of being on this programme lit a fire in me…until it burned out a bit.
But I feel like there is something important in this idea: creating spaces where we can be with division, and like each other anyway.
Couldn’t we all use more of that connection in our lives?
Isn’t it time we stopped making other people ‘wrong’?
If you’d like to try the experience; reach out to me over on Instagram.
And I’ll see you in The Field.
Check out Odyssey and my amazing cohort here.
