#23: Many Roads Not Taken – A season of experiments

After a very restful Christmas period I have picked up the project where I left off: Planning the next intervention. The trouble is I am not sure what exactly the next intervention is to be, for the past 6 weeks I have been experimenting with ideas and gradually going off them after trying them out. Although it’s a bit frustrating to be coming across so many hurdles, I am comforted by the knowledge of the value of failure and assured that I must be pushing myself beyond what is merely possible or easy. I am not lost, I am taking a journey into the unknown.

It was a slow start at the beginning of 2022 and I found it tough to regain the momentum I had at the end of the previous year. But it was also very beneficial to be able to completely forget about the project after such an intensive creative period, I had some time for distance and reflection.

I wanted to expand the project beyond what I had already built. The Library Of Meaning was good at getting people to open up and think objectively about their lives, but I can imagine a more immersive process in which the participant interacts with the archetypes on a deeper level. I would like to encourage the participant to identify and converse with the symbols that represent key narratives for them. I’m hoping to create positive change in the way my participants think about the difficult aspects of their lives. To this end I am currently working under a new iteration of my research question, it is inspired by the feedback I had from an intervention last year. The participant said of The Library Of Meaning: “It feels like a celebration of your foibles, it makes you proud of the things you maybe would have previously criticised in yourself.”. This struck me as a clear articulation of a key value of the project, and certainly a Change I Would Like To Make. So I think for my next intervention I will be working under this question:

How can we help people to enjoy engaging with the thoughts and feelings that they find uncomfortable?

I think that The Library Of Meaning provides a good foundation for answering this question, but I am planning on adding some more elements to the intervention with the hope of deepening the experience for the participant and improving its efficacy. I will also be doing more to record my findings, with the aim of being able to measure any changes that may occur in the participants over time.

The new elements I am planning to include are:
– A more carefully curated space that evokes a sense of ‘the sacred’
– A more developed or ‘deepened’ process of interaction with the archetypes grounded in therapeutic practises, theatre and ritual.
– More storytelling, poetry and music
– A more embodied experience for the participant, grounded in meditation and mindfulness techniques.

Along with my question and the inclusion of these new elements, the intervention will also be guided by the three key elements for healing trauma that were provided by Emma Connor:
– Empathy
– Mutual joy states
– Offers of Adventure

The trouble was I didn’t really know what the key thing would be that the participant undertakes while in the space, what I have been calling The Process. After a long time spent trying to think my way out of the problem I came across the book Make To Know by Lorne M. Buchman, it helped remind me to stop thinking and start doing. So I began to play.

Doing Is Thinking – Building a space

I spent a week in the woods playing with lengths of hazel to create a space for the intervention. I ended up building these ‘church window’ shaped sections.

I built four of them and placed them around a central pole, I thought I would eventually add material and rope to create a roof and walls. My plan was to develop a small test version of the space, small enough to fit in my car, with a mind towards creating a large version of the space for testing this summer at a festival.

Once I had a rough idea of how it could be, I returned to London to begin to build on to these hazel pieces. This was when I needed to actually decide what exactly would be going on inside the space…

The Process

I was struggling to keep all my ideas in order in my head so I began to cover my walls in them, it was useful to be able to play with them tangibly. At first I thought I was going to use my recently discovered passion for stained glass and make a window for each archetype. The participants would select the archetype that they wanted to explore, place it in the centre of the hazel section at sort of shrine, then undertake some tasks that would allow them to interact with the archetype.

As I was thinking about The Process I remembered my Golden Bough Project where I identified my tendency to run away with an idea and try to create it fully formed without finding my way there gradually. I realised that I was getting ahead of myself by trying to create the whole space in one go. It would be better to hold an intervention that just tested The Process itself. Then once I was more confident with it I could build the space around it. So I thought about it more as a small booth that a single person could enter.

But I began to doubt the idea of using stained glass to represent the archetypes. The prospect of creating 50 stained glass windows was daunting, it would take a lot of time and money, and I would not even be sure that they would be useful. So that idea was shelved, I needed to use something that was cheaper and quicker to produce, something that I could knock up easily and not waste lots of time on if it didn’t work out.

I began thinking about the potential of using paper to recreate the archetypes, it is cheap and relatively quick to produce. I thought that using paper cut outs with coloured tissue paper might be a way to create the feeling of stained glass far more easily.

But I also wanted the archetypes to have a kinetic quality, they should come alive for the participant. I began looking into paper engineering and pop up designs, thinking that the archetypes could be built into books that the participant opens, and as they do the archetype would move.

Then during a reflective exercise set for me by me new tutor Liz, I had a go at re-creating a scene from my past out of cardboard and paper, I thought that the little tableau could be an effective method of representing the archetypes. I remembered the paper theatre I had built long ago and it felt like a good idea to pursue.

I then had a go at creating a scene for The Orphan archetype, I wrote some text and I experimented with adding little led lights to bring the cardboard scene to life.

I was thinking about adding little sections of story on small bits of paper that would be hidden around the scene and need to be unfolded and explored by the participant. I had a feeling that this could be the way to go.

But once it was made I was a bit underwhelmed, I was hoping for a flash of excitement and adrenaline that I know accompanies an idea that feels right, but I didn’t feel it. The image felt too static, too flat, too much on the surface of things. I want these archetypes to come alive, to sing.

As I was looking at it I decided to cover myself with a sheet and turn off all the lights. I then began to explore the image in the darkness with just one led light in my hands. I felt a twinge of excitement, like I was a child under the covers exploring another world. The cardboard image began to come alive as I moved the light around and the shadows of the figures traveled across the small backdrop. There was something adventurous about it, which chimed with the key principle of creating an ‘offer of adventure’. I began to imagine a maze that people would explore with torches, a space that evoked the feeling of building a fortress out of sheets and pillows as children. Participants would journey into this underworld and search for their chosen archetype, needing to collect some key piece of information or to find a part of a narrative.

There was something interesting in there, but I still couldn’t see a clear way to use it. The prospect for creating 50 of these was again a little daunting. And I was probably starting to get ahead of myself again. I wasn’t sure that it felt right. I needed to establish the core elements before getting carried away. I also had to consider how to include the elements of embodiment and meditation. It might be better to do something more simple.

And that is pretty much where I am right now, lots of ideas, not really sure how to find a way through them. The Journey continues…