How re-learning how to play can help us truly ‘co-design’
Week one of Improvisation at ‘Imprology’ King’s Cross. I’m sweating. And being told to look into a stranger’s eyes. I can’t think of anything more uncomfortable.
I want to giggle, so badly. My mind is spiralling out of control. How did this become so difficult? Isn’t looking into someone’s eyes a natural thing to do? I bite my lip until I can focus. Staring.
But how is it possible to look at the two eyes opposite at the same time? Can they see my lazy eye? Are they looking at my mole? I panic. My mind is whirring but the room is silent.
What are they thinking about my face? Urgh.
The session goes from bad to worse in a matter of moments — the next exercise involves laying a hand, a real hand, one of mine on each other as we navigate the room. Touching a stranger — I shudder.
But with each game we grow stronger. Building trust across the room, growing in authenticity. After each game we have a moment to process, asked by our teacher, Remy to reflect and pause, how did it feel for us? Why?
By the end of the first session I’m buzzing, feeling alive in a way I haven’t felt in a long time. But it wasn’t from an adrenaline rush or from performing. The entire first five weeks of the beginner course with Imprology doesn’t involve any ‘performance’ — it’s all play.
Relearning how to play. Embracing the revelation that watching another human for hours sitting in ‘neutral’ is endlessly fascinating. We know this because this is one of the games we played, and believe me, it is genuinely fascinating to stare with abandon at another human. Try it next time you’re on the tube.
In fact, the more we try to be entertaining the less interesting we actually are. Just perpetuating an endless attempt to avoid intimacy (which is a completely normal reaction Remy reassures us). A weak smokescreen of anxiety telling us we must not (at any cost) reveal how we are really feeling right now.
Week by week I begin to learn how to pause. And to recognise and embrace its power. The power of letting the audience bring the narrative, fill in the gaps. To feel what I feel and honour it, play with it, acknowledge it. The power of taking up a space — for me, in that moment. A deeply radically feeling thought that I encourage everyone to experience feeling, even if just for a moment.
“For all we have people, is time and space,” Remy tells us. “Do one thing at a time — for choice makes fools of us. We’re going to fuck up, it’s ok. All we can do is pick up the pieces.”
I’ve been immensely comforted by these words over the last few months. The permission they bring. To make a choice, to lean in to whatever the choice brings. To know, there never was a right choice.
Running a start-up can be hard. Isolating. Constantly filled with doubt about which way to turn, knowing whether something is possible, how to ask for help and from whom. When you’re the only person in your echo chamber it can be a lonely place, staring up at the walls.
It was from the invitation and permission to play. Not to perform but to really play. To let go of what I think of as good. To find a place where my creativity will not save me — to switch off my coping mechanisms and truly let go of the outcome. To release the pressure to plan, to organise, to control, to mimic, to even be polite and learn instead how to truly be in the moment, to seek pleasure — and feeling when I’ve had enough — believing that it’s ok for me to end or change something, to follow the fun.
By week 5 I had started to find my body again and release myself from my own judgement. When a game required us to ‘use the floor’ — I moved across it making noises and shapes I’ve never made with my body in the last twenty years. Movements that didn’t have to be (and weren’t) beautiful or graceful but a moment by moment way to fill the time and space we each have, and letting go of everything else. Do you know what your body can do? I had forgotten. I spend my days largely static from the neck down. Apart from when engaged in a sports activity or my cycle to work. We have a whole body to play with, and it’s with us, all of the time. To seek moments of delight and joy, see what we can do with it is a real pleasure and gift. To connect our physical selves up to our emotional selves. To realise we’re not as stiff as we thought we were.
It was all this that has led to a huge transformation in me. To really know when I’m trying to push or control something — an outcome. To really understand when I’m leading or following and how to embrace the uncertainty of everything in between.
As a collaborative design practitioner, one would think I’d be well accustomed to embracing uncertainty and losing control. When I am playing or imagining I feel at home. Creating new systems, streets, spaces or stories, finding new ways to work with people and supporting them to see things different to how they are, but instead, how they could be. Believing the answers will emerge from listening and building relationships and connections within and across people in communities experiencing the ‘problem’.
But overtime I have definitely boxed this in — learned that this frame of mind is so often not compatible with funding applications, with what the client thinks they want or in line with organisational aims. Instead, I listen and support people to reimagine but I also lead and shape the direction of travel. I don’t completely let go of the reigns.
I can’t remember any project that has truly embraced process as an outcome. I can’t remember any so-called ‘community led’ project that has given the real time and space to create an environment that genuinely fosters and embraces all participants as leaders or followers and the natural flow of energy between these states in an equitable way. There is always this thing called power, stuck, in the way.
It gives me great hope that collaborators, funders and other fantastic organisations are starting to talk about this and what the challenges might be on the way to getting there… have a look at everyone connected to Losing Control if you’re interested in joining in.
At last week’s Improv session we created a non-verbal game in groups of three. There was no right answer. There was no ‘should’. There were no rules, just space to play, to try and to test. The whole of the playing is about negotiation — a skill we could probably all do with learning a bit more about — to feel how it feels, with no one in control.
After the initial shock improv has transformed me and helped me to re-learn how to play, to believe in the lightness of the human spirit, the joy of collaboration (I’d forgotten), negotiation and how to lean into the unknown — letting go of a temptation to control or even trying to understand what’s happening.
By genuinely letting go of the outcome and believing in whatever emerges puts a new-found trust and faith at the heart of negotiations and the only way to meaningfully enter into any project that has the aspiration of bringing about any kind of transformation — by believing that the answer will emerge, from time and space, but only if we create it together, right now, in this moment.
