This format is quite clear and straightforward. It evolved out of the desire to discover a container that will accommodate working ideas of a group of people, entitling sovereignty and autonomy (ie authorship) to each person’s train of thought, while also facilitating movement within and between. The Pilot Scheme hosted by Dance Ireland has allowed this process to take a solid form as a Thinking Talking Writing Dance.

I introduce myself as facilitator and talk a little about the format, its objectives, and some of the dynamics we might expect to emerge from the process. These are usually presented in my own choreographic terms: I use terms such as container, process, movement etc. I talk about the thinking that has informed the format, and give some guidance on what is expected of participants. There are some basic ground rules:

This is not a discursive or chatty process. Each person gets their moment, and that is their opportunity to talk about where they’re coming from, what they’re at, what’s going on for them in their work, what they are thinking about, what they’re trying to work out. They are allowed to speak without interruption. It is possible to get clarification on certain things from another, but this is not a discussion format.

Usually first time around a person will talk generally about their practice, and what has brought them to the workshop.
Then we go around again, and participants will get a little closer to the meat of the matter, talking specifically about a particular project or problematic in their work. Often people will actually read from their work at this point. At each go round, I go first as facilitator and model how to proceed, talking just as explicitly about some aspect of my own work, or elucidating some line of thought I am struggling to clarify for myself.

Third time around, people generally begin to reflect or ‘work with’ the other ideas and trains of thought present in the room. The general rule is that we try not to criticise other people’s ideas but support them. Participants are encouraged to resist the temptation to give advice but instead to find connections with and between other people’s thinking, and actually add to the thinking in the room. This can facilitate movement in thinking about one’s own work also, and is the moment when things start to dance: dance as a state of lightness, flexibility, ease of movement and novelty.

After the third go round, it’s usually appropriate to turn the music up and have some unstructured work-time. Participants are encouraged to feel free to do as they see fit: they may dance, lie, think, rest, write/sketch/note-take or a flowing combination of all of these. This then is the true workshop space, which has been primed and energised by the speaking, and is contained and structured by the explicit instructions to participants to think of the session as a dance session, to aspire to a state of dance in their thoughts, and to acknowledge the thinking that can be done by the body as well as the mind i.e. to acknowledge that dancing is another way of doing thinking.

Depending on the length of the session, we may break before or after this work time, and then we will come together for a final go round where participants might talk about where their own thinking has taken them now. They may read new material, or offer movement to other trains of thought present in the room. It’s not unusual at this point for participants to offer reflections on the process itself, on their own personal creative process, or the relationship between their work and their life.

It is clear to me that while the workshop was created mainly as a service for dancers, and hence comprised ‘Thinking Talking & Writing about Dance’, that actually what we have developed in Dance Ireland is a dance of Thinking Talking & Writing i.e. a ‘Thinking Talking & Writing Dance’. This dance is open and accessible, and, judging from feedback received to date, very valuable to all artists, or creative workers in any field.

Choreographic sources:
This choreography owes much in its basic form to Steve Valk’s Raw Thinking Circle, which has evolved at Daghdha Dance Company, and which I observed working beautifully at the UNI social choreography in Feb 2009. Five ‘oracles’ each present some ‘raw thinking’ on whatever is occupying their mind. They speak without interruption for usually seven minutes. Then each gets an opportunity to respond to what they’ve heard, specifically or generally.

The task in responding to the Raw Thinking comes in a straight line from Social Dreaming: find connections and become available to new thought. These are the words of Gordon Lawrence, who discovered Social Dreaming and intuited the matrix: the container for the dreams of a group of people. The matrix (Latin for uterus, or that from which something grows) is a labyrinth constructed from the dreams and free associations of the dreamers. From the matrix, I intuited hivemind, and from there, ThinktalkwriteDance. It’s about spaces where we can express thoughts dreams desires intentions as completely as we can, and then put them to work with other thoughts dreams desires intentions, so that we can have our say, and then let it go. It’s about supporting the natural impulse of creativity (whether in its elemental form as dream, or as the working process of an artist) to move, join, expand, connect, associate, grow.

There is another genetic inheritance here, an unspoken shadow: the twelve step movement, a self-created and self-maintained series of organisations that gives aholics a structure and epistemology within which they can get sober and stay sober. As well as AA (Alcoholics Anonymous) and NA (Narcotics Anon), there are GA (Gamblers), SA (sexaholics), CODA (Co-dependents) and even an Arts Anonymous. Each of these movements has a meeting format which facilitates sharing: speaking honestly about where one is at with their recovery, admitting their weaknesses, getting current, identifying with others, sharing ‘experience strength and hope’. Again, participants are allowed to speak without interruption for a set time. There is no cross-talk, advice giving is discouraged, and members are urged to identify with elements of each others stories and speak only for themselves.

‘Creative Recovery’ programs such as The Artist’s Way and Dancing the Rainbow similarly respect the autonomy of a person’s experience, and seeks to defuse counterproductive behaviours ruled by power-seeking, co-dependence, care-taking. Gregory Bateson had a particular respect for the epistemological dance of the Twelve Step Program, because it took a self that was not able to cope with its situation, and encouraged it to surrender control of the situation to a ‘Higher Power’. This Higher Power might correspond to God, the larger system or organisation, the ground of Being, the infinite, as Social Dreaming would have it, or the larger ecological mind. The important thing is for the self to get out of the pilot’s seat and become a collaborator with forces larger than one’s self-

The theology of Alcoholics Anonymous coincides closely with an epistemology of cybernetics. …
…“self” as ordinarily understood is only a small part of a much larger trial-and-error system which does the thinking acting and deciding. This system includes all the information pathways which are relevant at any given moment to any given decision. …two or more persons – any group of persons- may together form such a thinking-and-acting system.
from ‘The Cybernetics of “Self”: a Theory of Alcoholism’ in Steps to an Ecology of Mind, by Gregory Bateson

This is not a hard concept to grasp: it dovetails nicely with the Framemakers definition of choreography, which I expand on in a piece entitled choreonautics:

Choreograph (v.): to arrange relations between bodies in time and space
Choreography (v.): act of framing relations between bodies; ‘a way of seeing the world’
Choreography (n.): result of any of these actions
Choreography (n.): a dynamic constellation of any kind, consciously created or not, self-organising or super-imposed.
Choreography (n.): order observed…, exchange of forces; a process that has an observable or observed embodied order
Choreograph (v.): to recognize such an order
Choreography (v.): act of interfering with or negotiating such an order