Chormmunity (from CHOR-eography and co-MMUNIY) is a workshop I created and have been doing for several years. In it, participants are facilitated to access and create movement material from a variety of inroads (sensing, thinking, feeling, expressing, imagining, communicating) and then to …shape, collectively, that material into a set sequence, or movement text. The group spirals around the poles of generating, interpreting, deciding, and enacting. The final “piece” is then done in a heightened way, like a ritual or a performance, but outside a frame of presenting the piece to an audience (so as to deter the strong pull in contemporary Western culture to commodify experience). The meanings the group has explored for itself are embedded holistically in the movement text, and the formal enactment grounds those meanings in a very palpable and connected way.

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In June of this year (2006), I had two opportunities to do Chormmunity in Dublin, Ireland, through the auspices of Have More Fun (havemorefun.org), a creative consultancy. The two instances were equally rich and rewarding, yet differed in several ways. The first group was open to anyone who wanted to participate and who paid the fee, and was a total of five hours. With this group, the ideas behind the process of Chormmunity, of making something together that honors and is grounded in a somatic and imaginal mode, were more the thematic emphasis. The second group was part of a market research project by a multi-national food company, and the participants were recruited to fill out the demographic the company was interested in knowing more about. And they were paid to be there. We spent a total of three and a half hours doing Chormmunity, and the theme was predetermined by the company, who wanted to get richer data about Irish women’s relationship to their body image.

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Economic considerations played out in the quality of the studio the workshop was held in, the accessibility of lunch, and efforts to advertise/recruit participants. Obviously, with a big budget, the multi-national company provided the more comfortable and optimal environment. But what was more interesting to me was how the predetermined theme in the market research group impacted both the way the group (including myself, as facilitator) engaged in the collaborative dimension of building the piece, and the way the use of this methodology supported a strong personal feeling in the participants.

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With the open enrollment group, while there was clearly more interest in the methodology per se, the work of engaging in collaboratively finding meaning that was clear and inclusive enough was a much wider and more complex process than for the market research group, and I would say that the open enrollment group had a less “personally” fulfilling experience. What kind of “personal” experience people have seems linked to the specificity of the theme, and perhaps to the theme’s being about or not being about the process itself. I wonder now about the ways learning and collaborating are so important, and how to balance a “different” kind of “personally” fulfilling experience (in, perhaps, the short term) in practicing and exploring them more head on.

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For the women focusing on their relationship to their body image, the Chormmunity activities were employed “uncritically,” I might say; off we went into making an art piece built from the meaning the women, individually, and increasingly collectively, had around this theme. The role of making something together didn’t get focused on as a theme in its own right, but the effects of having made their piece together deepened their experience around how they felt in relationship to other women vis-à-vis this issue, and indeed around their sense of agency or empowerment. One of the ways I believe this happened has to do with the relatively simple, and very clear choreographic group forms they created for themselves.

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The folks in the open enrollment group created a piece with many sections, where we drew from different activities the participants had designed and led. Most of the activities were quite layered and involved, having been created out of deconstructing and also elaborating the work of engaging the generation and exploration of group movement material. As the theme was about what we were doing together (and its holding the space for any somatic-collaborative work), the participants created improv scores for the group, taking long sections of our time together, highlighting the what, why, how, and who of this kind of work. I played less of a director role, and gave them the challenge to weave the meaning we were making and exploring into movement material, including the level of them, also, “directing” the group in this exploration. The final movement text had very few clear group forms.

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Specificity of theme, the theme being part of a “self” narrative of identity, use of movement-generating activities to enhance and ground the theme, and wholeness of group form, simplicity, and clarity of the final movement text strike me as supportive of more personally satisfying experience. “Personally” in the sense of the strengthening and freeing of the “self.” Learning in these arenas is very important for empowerment, visibility, issues of voice, sense of community and connection around clear, shared meaning, and opening up to delight and joy.

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Focus on the means by which we come up together with not only the movement text, but the processes by which we come up with the material for the text, lends itself to a decentered sense of self. This decentered “self” is dependent on a felt responsibility for collectively creating broad enough boundaries of meaning and “content” that the group feels connected to the main theme of the exploration of means. If that sounds a little convoluted, I think it is. But that is also why it is important learning. Partnering in exploration of creating practice supports large-scale evolution of cultural and institutional structures, an absolutely necessary counterpart to individual agency. It does this by grounding us in belonging to a more-than-human world, and fostering the patience and demystification that enable us to keep showing up when our work reveals more complexity and connectedness to more layers of feelings, meaning-making, relationships, thinking patterns, social conditioning, historical habits, and more.

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Ultimately both workshops served the larger vision of Chormmunity from complementary inroads. One image to express it could be the notion of figure-ground, or actor and environment. The empowering and freeing of the figure/actor feed into its increased conscious interactions with its ground/environment, thus impacting the distinctions that denote “figure/actor” and “ground/environment” in the first place. For then the idea of “actor” evolves not from its own agency but from the context that gives rise to new kinds of actors. And off the cycle goes again, at the next level.

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All right! Now to the pub for a pint!

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