Thoughts on the arts and development.....

Tonight, I attended a performance/talk given by Dovie Thomason, a Kiowa Apache and Lakota Sioux storyteller. The reason why I call it a performance/talk is because it was a storytelling performance, the flow was led by stories, but it was also a talk - a talk about her life, about multiculturalism, about being an indigenous person, about being human, about respect and our struggle to understand one another. Needless to say, I found it absolutely captivating. If we could learn something from storytellers, it would be that there is no good reason for giving talks that are dry and fact-filled and make your audience fall asleep. She talked about how her grandmother used to tell her a story instead of punishing her or praising her. She wouldn't sit her down and say "now let me tell you a story of what happens to little girls who do that" - she would simply say "come here baby girl - do you want some cookies? Did I ever tell you the story of how....." and never said a word about what Dovie had done, instead letting Dovie make the connections herself. If only more public lecturers knew how to lecture like that, we might get moving a lot quicker in this world.

After she finished speaking, we had the opportunity to ask questions. She had mentioned her involvement in the conflict resolution process in Belfast, and so I asked her if she could talk about how she got involved with that and what she did, since I'm very interested in the use of the arts for conflict resolution. She said that in fact, she really did very little more than listen. She and the others who had been called in to help made a rule, that no outsider could speak - they could only listen to what everyone had to say. And they heard many many important things that needed to be said: that people were tired of fighting, of bombs, of not being able to just date who they want and be friends with who they want. This surprised me at first - coming from my background I had, I guess, expected her to run activities with storytelling workshops or something goodness only knows what. But she went on to say, (serious paraphrasing here) "....We did a lot of just listening. Listening, providing an open space....I think that's something that artists often do, is leave a safe space open for discussion and talk...." WOW. Something so simple, and yet it had never really occurred to me in that light before. Artists do their thing in order to allow discussion to take place. Now this may not have been exactly what she was doing in Belfast or what she was even talking about, but that is what it meant to me. Yes, sometimes it is important to just listen. But in order for that to happen, a listening environment needs to be created. This can be done in a multitude of ways, I'm sure. One very important thing that I think could be done through the use of performing arts is the guidance of people who have something to say toward actually putting it in a format that can be heard, and giving it an opportunity to be heard - for example one experiment that I like to reference often, of a director who got a group of teen refugees together to put together a show about their experiences, of how they had become refugees and what their lives where like because of that and since. They were given the opportunity to present it to their peers and teachers as well as to the public and it was a very powerful means of communication - giving them the power to present these things to people who they had so often wished to communicate with and were just not able to. Because in day to day life it is very hard to tell your story so that people will simply listen and not talk. And sometimes that is something that needs to be done.