Four Reflection Processes on the Village
Origin of the Village practice
The Village is one of the oldest practices in Social Presencing Theater (SPT). It arose in the 1970’s from a time in which dance improvisation was more or less “do whatever you feel like.” A friend suggested to me that in order to teach dance improvisation, I would need to know what the elements were that enabled “good” improvisation — particularly because I was interested in improvisation as performance. I was also on a path of art as meditation in action.
This led to simplifying the movement choices, practicing the Village regularly (sometimes for days on end) with City Dance Theater in Boston, studying Mudra Space Awareness and Shambhala Art at Naropa University, collaborating with Lee Worley, and recognizing that the basis of a “good” Village had little to do with talent, technical prowess, attractiveness or cleverness, and had all to do with embodied presence and awareness of the whole.
Fast-forward about 40 years to 2004 and the auspicious coincidence of meeting Peter Senge (Systems Thinking), and Otto Scharmer (Theory U) at the Shambhala Institute for Authentic Leadership in Nova Scotia. They generously and bravely invited me, the Village, and other movement practices into their ‘village’ of Systems Thinking and Theory U practitioners. The Village was introduced at Society for Organizational Learning’s ECW program and at Otto and Beth Jandernoa’s Theory U capacity building programs as a way to directly experience a social field through open awareness.
The Village is now part of the Presencing Institute’s SPT practices — building capacity for social field and space awareness. The team or group spontaneously creates a series of events and relationships using everyday movements. By engaging in this activity, the group is able to sense itself as a living system that is co-creating itself moment by moment. Movement practices are not easily conveyed in written instructions. If you are interested in learning the practice, it might be good to locate a regional SPT Practice Group or SPT Basics Course. Contact people are listed at the end of this blog.
Four Reflection Practices for the Village
In this blog I would like to focus on the process of reflection or debrief that happens after the group has done the Village practice. SPT practitioners have been using these to sharpen first person observations skills, to give a language to non-verbal experience, to learn from the Village experience, and to make connections between the Village practice experience and working in the various “villages” of our everyday life — our teams, organizations and families. We assume that SPT practitioners have developed their own reflection methods appropriate to their client contexts; however, I would like to describe the four approaches that have arisen in the work of the Presencing Institute: I. Description — Reflection, II. Well-being — Awareness Scale, III. 1 to10 Scale, and IV. Aesthetic Language Cards.
I. Description — Reflection
SPT is an invitation to deepen our first person felt experience, to slow down and to be present to the vividness of the present moment. After we complete the practice of the Village, we reflect either in small groups or in the whole group in three steps.
Step 1: Stillness
We have a couple of minutes of silence to let the resonance of the Village be present.
Step 2: Description
We describe our experience using “I saw…, I felt…, or I did…” We do not interpret or project what we think. For example, I might say, “When I saw you walking away from our group, I sat down.” Or, “When I saw three people standing together, I felt curious.”
Step 3: Generative Conversation
Conversation arises around themes, values, or patterns that might have arisen in the Village such as inclusion-exclusion, inside-outside, following, innovation, etc.
Step 4: Application
The group makes connections between their experience of this Village and how that might inform or influence our everyday ‘villages’ — teams, organizations, families.
II. Well-being — Awareness Scale
Our colleague, Manish Srivastava, has developed a Well-being — Awareness Scale. This is particularly revealing when you are able to work over several days with the same team or organization and can do the Village practice several times. It allows the team or group to notice if there has been any shift over time of the social well-being in the Village.
Step 1: Create the Scale
We draw two horizontal parallel lines on paper on the wall (two flipchart papers taped together on the wall). One line measures the sense of well-being in the Village — did you experience wellbeing in the Village as low (left end of the line) or high (right end of the line). The second line tracks the level of awareness from aware mainly of myself during the Village (left side) to aware mainly of the whole Village (on the right).
Step 2: Participants indicate with dots their experience of the Village and what they noticed about their own awareness. The dots can be placed anonymously with no judgment or desired outcome.
Step 3:
Reflect together on the relationship between awareness and well-being and to the shifts in the felt sense of the social fabric that the group is co-creating.
III. 1 to 10 Scale
A third method for investigating these qualities is the 1 to 10 Scale.
Step 1: Stillness for a couple of minutes to settle into the after-resonance of the practice.
Step 2: Description of the Scale
At the end of the Village practice we ask, “If this were an enlightened society that is inclusive and supports everyone’s basic goodness nature, that would be a 10. And if this were a Village that you hope you never ever revisit, that is a 1. What number would you give to this Village that we just co-created?”
Step 3: Indicating a number and forming a small group
People indicate by raising their hand when the number is called that corresponds to their sense of the Village. Then they sit in small groups with those who have voted like them — the 5’s sit together, the 6’s, etc., to share why they gave the Village the number that they did.
We can also use the 1 to 10 Scale to ask “Do you feel you were able to participate fully in this Village or do you feel that for some reason you were not able to participate fully?” It is interesting to note that for some people, the Village is related directly to their level of participation in co-creating the Village; and for others these two do not seem to be that closely aligned. They have other criteria for measuring the “success” of a Village.
IV. Aesthetic Language Cards
These have been prototyped with our colleague, Ricardo Dutra, over the past couple of years with input by SPT practitioners who have tried them in Advanced SPT courses and in client contexts. These were created to heighten awareness of the Village experience and to offer a fresh language for describing non-conceptual and non-verbal experience. The link to Ricardo’s blog that goes into detail about the Aesthetic Language Cards, is included here.
Briefly, the 36 cards invite practitioners to closely attend to three levels of perception — to what is visible, to what is sensed or felt, and to what is created from the collective state of mind of the Village. They are prompts to bring fresh thinking and language to the process of reflection.
1. Visible Structure Cards increase our ability to see clearly.
By attending to what is visible, we notice the choices that we and others make — to stand, to sit, to be close to others or to leave distance, to face toward or turn away. We notice the center of the space, the periphery, the dense grouping, the duets, the circles, the lines — the visible structures created and dissolved by what people do.
2. Relational Structure Cards deepen co-sensing.
Our sense of the Village influences our choices — how we engage and what we engage in. Our choices create relationships. The field of relationships in the Village creates a feeling tone. The cards deepen our ability to sense and give fresh language to the feeling tone of experience.
3. Deeper Structure investigates the Source from which we operate.
These cards invite us to expand or relax our awareness, noticing a sense of spaciousness out of which our gestures arise. We notice the emerging of moment-to-moment experience and how our “true moves” create social fabric of open curiosity, deep care and courage to be truly who we are.
We hope that these descriptions can add depth and clarity to the work of the SPT practitioners.
Regional Contacts for SPT Practice Group locations:
Europe: Maria Sturm, msturm@salineadvies.nl
Latin America: Laura Pastorini, constelcionesuruguay@gmail.com
Africa: Aggie Kalunga-Banda, akalungabanda@presencing.com
Asia: Manish Srivastava, speaktomanu@gmail.com,
North America: Louise Jorgensen, socialpresencingtheater@gmail.com
