Institute for Non-toxic Propaganda — ——– Society for the Promotion of Human Rites

The Polish Tramp

Earlier in the week, I’d gotten me two front teeth snapped off in this very hall by an errant knee. Eager not to miss the main event, I was back for more…

After a torchlight parade through the night (where my lack of dragon-bearing prowess had accidentally singed the jacket arm of a local trumpet player), and after four hours of vibrant polkas with young women of all ages, the party was understandably sagging. The host orchestra, and the assembled visiting musicians, plus the local village wedding band had all exhausted each other’s repertoires. The Gardzienice theatre troupe singers’ last song had been sung. But there remained yet life in the old legs. Alone on the floor and unwilling to stop, one veteran of the evening trod on. Slapping the floor with my feet; plugging away at a standard jig rhythm over and over. Throwing in mild variations, but keeping the beat and the energy of the floor, I spoke to the needs of dancers everywhere. Gradually the band came back to life, picking up the rhythm of my tramping and throwing in their improvisations until the floor once again filled with dancing bodies. It was a triumph for the ancient conundrum: Which came first, the dancer or the dance?

*****

Bembo Davies’ linguistic choreography may seem haphazard: he clearly doesn’t follow steps. Rumour suggests that he writes as he dances, with a sly grin on his face. Conveying the temperature of the events cited has required his best moves: dancing rhythmically, asymmetrically with words. Nodding to tradition, he still allows himself to wallow in dazzling fresh twists; irrepressibly gurgling with glee at his own invention, while shaking loose the joints of language as one must that wonky knee.

The book is out:
available for a ridiculously low sum of €12 : printed in at your command in Canada, UK, France, Australia, India or the US.

Vision Distillery
Circles Research Mill

Ideas evaporate easily.  Constructing them again in public view, so that others can probe and query their structure and validity is a vital step if our gems are to survive.  Fighting for my favourites is a classic manoeuvre of the journey home. Hammered out mid-flight, these don’t always amount to common conceptual breakthroughs… usually, they end up wallowing in the bottom of a digital briefcase.

Since the health of any organisation is reflected in the thoroughness of its self-evaluation, I feel the need to preserve at least something for the mix.

I left our collective weekend retreat just about as clear headed as I arrived — it seemed a sincere case of win some / lose some.  Some of us aren’t naturally patient enough to be content with an approximation; I expected more…. While airing occurred, so did obfuscation.   Operating through a mild cloud of pain and painkillers, I wasn’t always diplomatic.

At my bruskest, I blurted out :  Facilitation makes things facile. –  Them, at least resembles, fighting words.  (note:  Facile in some languages simply means easy; in High English it denotes superficiality.)  My challenge boils down to : ‘Did we go deep enough ?’  Do we now know both what we are doing, and why doing it weaves into a greater strategy? (The often tempting ‘how we do it’ is always the longer process involving considerable doses of that old favourite – trial and error.)

So what gets us deeper?  Personal urgency?  A vision that lifts us out of our immediate concerns; that aligns our potential efforts with some truly massive social cohesion priorities?  Coming home to the presence in our kitchen of a genuine guerrilla fighter fresh from the front, provokes humility.  

Musing in our several garretts
In our world, many of us spend most of our waking hours living in our laptops.  We expound upon our own ideas more than we absorb those of others.  It may not yet have dawned on us that sending a message out into the ether offers no assurance that anyone has ever read it.  If they have, it may be as a passing crumb in the midst of a cascade of equally pressing communications that each drag the consumer in yet another direction…

What I might personally hatch out as a house vision is therefore not so very relevant unless it can be shared.  The finished product may look impressive, but it is infinitely more useful when several voices have provided the component parts and actively participated in assembling them.  Facilitators call this ownership; it helps to be able to point to one’s own contribution.  It goes slower; it runs deeper.

I spoke up at the planning meeting:  I was looking for a banner title for the weekend.  It is a familiar tool in my work with “Non-toxic Propaganda”.  In the theatre, we work with clear units – everyone needs to known what we are focusing upon.  Bold poetic labels are preferred over ambiguous generalities.  We search playable verbs.  I hatched a suitable suggestion:  Distilling Vision.  It was politely brushed aside as useful but belonging perhaps somewhere else in the process; it didn’t merit a mention in the next day’s preliminary sketch.  Pity.

Rooting vision in such a floating collective as ours* may sound overly ambitious – if we operate with the lifestyle badge of artists, aren’t we then meant to be somewhat nebulous?  But rooting is a highly playable verb:  dig a hole, climb in, provide fertiliser, introduce your best seed, initiate symbiosis, and give sufficient warmth and raw time for very organic processes to kick in.  What one mustn’t do is climb out of the hole prematurely; pointing back to its conceptual existence, proclaiming therein lies our growth.  Prolonged wrestling with your very essence is often rewarding.

Ye olde Whisky Distilleries are among the height of human ingenuity.  Clean grain is spread across the wooden sprouting floor.  It is then carefully moistened for four days until the tiny roots and budding leaves reach the most potent phase of aspiration.  After a precise number of hours, the malt is gently smoked dry before being subjected to life as a mash.  Fermentation has its own pace; the mash must bubble.  Heat and pH are monitored.  Tasting occurs.  It is only once we reach an advanced stage of ennoblement that we can approach distillation itself.  Heat is applied; pressure builds up.  The vapours rise through a set of tubing and then condense, rise and then condense a second time.  But the idea of the whisky is not even near finishing.  Now, it will be put into wooden barrels for ageing.  After four years with periodic rotation; it is suddenly deemed intoxicating enough to be scurried across the yard and behind the high gates.  Now it is subject to quite other laws…

If only the manufacture of bathtubs could provide an equally fitting metaphor…

There were at least two other cannon blasts out of me during the weekend.  One failed to be ignited.  I wanted to acknowledge the daily linguistic imperialism with which I write this post.  Canadians are meant to be familiar with multilingualism; we are trained to make at least token gestures.  I was obviously too out of it with my pet pain to remember to make the plotted amusing after-dinner toast to the linguistically oppressed.  The other blast was likely even more essential because I cannot remember it —  Ahhh, I got it…

It was on our investment in the Circle Economy.  That I, perhaps naively, assumed that our partaking in Circles and paying our keep in Circles local currency meant that I would contribute to at least daily endless group process to pursue key deeper understandings in community efforts.  I still suspect that this is essential to fulfilling the contract of exploring Moos as life-form.  (The formula of one third practical work, one third personal projects, one third contributing to the collective project has been mentioned.) But could the house tolerate such a discipline?  It would dictate a lot of life rhythm — how soon would it sour if 1/3 of our waking day was dedicated to the house’s spiritual precision?  Is there a balance to negotiate? (In Jo-jo’s podcast from Costa Rica, that circulated yesterday the community had its group circle life down to 25%.)

Ahhhh – now, I remember, it wasn’t the clever rework of the Circles image that was my big theme. What I wanted to pound into Moos Lore, was the potential in deconstructing and then extrapolating upon the term Residency itself.  This got a partial mention and reinterpretation, but then got pushed off the agenda.  Pity.  The central point was that language remains a most powerful tool.  Again as a Non-toxic Propagandista, I wanted to dissect that which we truly wished to accomplish and then encapsulate it in fresh terms which could then stand forth in resonant Deutsch as a resounding picture of which we are on about.  Notes were made in a small group, only to evaporate.

And so a return to the theme of this old scribe’s utterances:  the suspicion that while some of this re-evaluation may have be going on privately, until the inner machinations of each other’s brains are rendered transparent, personal ideas lack the vital potency of shared understandings.  I look forward to our next circle…

*The We this time is a collection of activists/artists perched above a restored bathtub factory in Berlin South. Time will tell what evolves.

I am livid.  Once again I’ve been forced to witness ‘presumed’ theatre:  now is the time for directness — the naked concept unswathed in cumbersome allusion or metaphor. 
A chorus of aspiring somethings have let themselves be recruited by their earnestness.  The brains behind the project appreciated them; couldn’t they become unadorned stand-ins for humanity?  Their very lack of stagecraft would itself signify sincerity.  

I have endured such before.  Many times.  Called in as an understanding Uncle, I am meant to delight in the purity of action as sketchy symbols are leant against one another in an at best tentative structure.  My task is to approve of this deft reconstruction of the elements of performance.  I am not to get bored…

My problem is that, in my antiquated mind, the theatre remains a sacred space.  Things could happen, plots could unfold, transitions might move you.  Indeed, stage persons may even challenge the outer limits of their skills.  As my true love, living theatre is rooted in mad invention.   We are sharing the pilgrimage of rehearsal, the fruits of collective voyage.  Is it my burden to be weaned in an age where organic improvised explorations were always considered good taste, where the pivotal moments of a production’s growth are not your own, but the palpable breakthroughs of your fellow players?

But to have breakthroughs, barriers have to be approached at some velocity.  The play is to be played.  Polite indications that in that direction lie many a profound association, don’t really carry much weight. 

Still, I’m not demanding the exoskeleton of the well-wrought vehicle for the stellar actor propped up by his props in the ninth month of a West End run soon to be a major studio film adaptation.  Such a well-lit Saturday matinée can also easily slip within the range of boredom.   I seek something more primordial.  My naked shaman is by definition a minimalist; in my world the only essential scenic element required to render an event – theatre – is an audience, a movable audience.

The unfortunate dilemma with last night’s offering was that I constructed it entirely myself.  The flimsy premise, gnawing tedium, my crankiness and familiar disappointment were all supplied by my own dreamtime.  So walking wounded have I become that my subconscious presages that this evening’s realtime, perhaps under-wrought covida-adapted, unveiling at the dance festival might just fail to remove my socks?* Having seen it all before, have I become the veteran bee-keeper whose immune system won’t allow him to go anywhere near a living hive for fear of that one more sting that will trigger his last anaphylactic spasm?

*In fact, that evening’s event proved crystalline unpretentious and honest. 
Clearly ‘Uncle-land’, but what we saw was what we got; both were something.

Many things are inevitable. Some just take a long time. For reasons unbeknownst to me, I said yes. It couldn’t have gone better…

Being swaddled in the vestments of a bloody artist may have gotten me as far as a pensioner existence, but it hasn’t yet blessed me with a cult following. Yesterday evening, I may just have found a short-cut.

Of course, I broke all the rules. The traditional laboured pace of stand-up comedy: peppering not necessarily innocent observation and measured pithy quip with gaps of subtle breathing designed to ease the extraction of a well-known dairy product, didn’t quite fit my subtextual morass. Rather, this would be skin of your arse survival, baby. It helped to be on.

An administrative glitch had meant that any reconnoitring of the town’s comedy culture would have to be done in situ; I begged myself a spot in the second set. The preceding parade of keen contributors kept so surprisingly clear of underpants and farting that for some awful seconds I contemplated doing a runner. Mercifully, the infectious spirit of amateurism intervened – presenting myself to the compere in the interval, I also begged off joining in the rudimentary participatory theatre games inserted in the program as an amuse bouche: “I didn’t wish to expose my persona.” Some things remain sacred.

My agent self hadn’t gotten off his arse to forward my bio – my intro featured but one as yet unjustified superlative, and no hint, had I lost count – that it was my turn. Eight steps from the stage, there was no reason to suppress immediate muttering; if the mouth was going to save me, it couldn’t really be subject to decorum. I was handed my first ever contact with a dreaded microphone beastie – even if I had prepared a witty line of reasoning with which to dissect its presence in my left fist, I swear that was the last I saw of it. Although, now that you mention it, this morning’s stiff neck may stem from an internalised cramp.

Going out empty-handed is the basic plot of every actors’ nightmare: the dream traces the show’s flavours and premise, and then, presto it is opening night. Nothing is where it should be, least of all your head. For some reason your fellow actors are not always thrilled by your otherwise healthy impulses. You are doomed.  On the other hand, going out empty-handed for a clown turn may have its blessings – it enforces minimalism, you get quickly immersed in your vulnerability.  Somehow the nakedness feels contagious – the room fathoms the absence of conniving rehearsal hijinks, your breathlessness becomes their breathlessness…

At an early point the fever set in. Moments vanished in time. None of the measured composure of the chronically suave, this was the frenzied rant of the dispossessed. Unleashed among his passions, and not protected by the faintest glimmer of a dramaturgy, the performer felt more performed than performing. Any soothing rehearsed character progression were rudely sacrificed for, at best, scattered snippets of life’s universal themes. Reference points were established, ignored, trounced upon and almost coincidently retrieved in the nick of time.

Maybe I started with psychic confession – who knows? After no more than 45 seconds, I was prematurely declaring that this was going brilliantly.  Forced by the responsive splash of laughter to justify this perhaps rash observation, I inadvertently exposed a trade secret: the comic monologue that you witness is ‘iceberg material’. Our meeting actually began long ago, popping up in unclaimed moments for up to several weeks – in the shower perhaps – the fantasies of meeting your very own, wonderful audience people…  If there was a theme it had little to do with the ponderings of my innards, and much to do with the forces rampant in the room. Asked afterwards if I had prepared any of the material, I had to admit that some elements were vaguely recycled from once long ago when I amused myself on the collapsable lecture circuit with something once deemed theatre. But then, bound by artistic considerations of good taste, and enduring the heavy responsibility of providing a wonderful evening, I would take standard protective measures; a text had been harvested, culled and winnowed. Now, in the identical generic costume, but without the props or transition management schemes, I was freed.  No longer the host, I could launch a guerilla attack on the more predictable rites of the peripheral stand-up industry. Given the flimsy frame of ‘fill eight minutes’, it would be a mad scramble to the top of the only available pinnacle in the house. Survival was not an issue.

Mining the Metaphor II

Art by committee can be questionable amounts of fun. Hopefully, the grand idea
gets propped up from multiple directions; but it can easily take a democratic pummeling.
A project’s success may depend less upon one clear image, than a capacity to revel
in the raw variety of human expression…

The local team of eXtinction Rebellion had a mission: one the city’s more magnificent palaces, designed to celebrate the previous previous century’s benign attitude towards species extinction, had had a refurbishment. After six years behind scaffolding, one of the town’s signature buildings would reopen. A hometown girl, the Prime Minister herself, would come to regale us with at least one charming anecdote in her warming native dialect.  Despite crisp morning sunlight mercifully visiting our strip of coast for the occasion, she reminded us of a different, damper reality. Visiting her grandparents’ flat just down the hill, could generate much pent up child energy:  the family cure for a rainy Sunday was — the Bergen Natural History Museum. Built in a more edifying era, when social beneficence was marked, not by shuffling off to an tax haven, but by raising a self-aggrandising cathedral popular; many in the crowd nodded when the PM noted the pinnacle of her trip was always the grand hall at the top of the stairs. Generations had gazed skywards into a suspended whale skeleton.

The irony was not lost upon XR. We had come prepared: among the twelve delicately chiseled mock tombstones was perhaps our pièce de la resistance: the Atlantic Grey Whale. Coincidently, the extinction date carved into our gravestone was identical with the building dates for the original museum. In a pun that resonated a bit better before translation, we declared the whale as ‘deeply missed’.

Bring your own paparazzi
The goals of poetic protest are delicate. The meta-image has to feed multiple depths of field at the same time; while it has to be instantly decipherable for the journalistic panorama, the subjective close-up has to be calibrated to the focal length of an individual by-passer. Your interface is everywhere.

We had trawled our chosen metaphor with some care. The grandeur of the temple featuring stuffed animals from the golden years of colonialism could easily overshadow the precarity of less humble species of today. While the museum’s vaults held a world renowned collection of bumblebees; recent field trips in the region indicated a massive cut in prevalent species. Our central complainte was had the museum reserved sufficient space for upcoming generations ?

The XR central message is ‘Face the Facts‘. We would both mourn the already passed, and warn of the pressing situation for creatures on the endangered list. Our gathering of gravestones included dramatic classics such as the dodo, and the most recent addition of the single remaining male white rhino who’s death had been reported three days earlier. We also regretfully made at least tentative gravestones for the threatened ash tree, local coral fields, and some beloved mountain birds.

Designing Demos
The XR ‘artivist’ workshop had deftly jettisoned the central committee’s more cumbersome commission of pallbearers supporting a casket (even with the lightest available corpse.) While human extinction may provide eerie background music, as a unifying image it seemed more prudent to wait in queue behind other species nearer an afterlife aided by taxidermy.  Internally, some confusion reigned: could we mourn the future without summonsing the sorrow for past species? One visit to a local graveyard, provided some clues: among the carefully cultivated recent arrivals, were the intelligible moss-covered remnants from previous centuries. A good funeral provides context. What’s gone is gone, but it is not to be forgotten.

Much as every menu needs umami, good propaganda embraces its own critique. A viable slogan isn’t as much pronounced — as distilled within the recipient. Purity of message has its virtue, but an oft repeated slogan can quickly fall into self-righteous monotony. It is wiser to assemble the elements of a vision through point and counterpoint: among the savoury or bitter, a touch of sweetness… [ see our video of the 1990 prototype: Future Protection Agency : Sweet and Sour Demonstration Relay. ]

But this remains not self-evident to all. Responsibility for the daily operations of a touring circus are divided among two castes: the Kinkers and the Roustabouts. The Roustabouts raise the tent, pop the popcorn, sell the tickets; the Kinkers perform.  Although it is obvious that neither could exist without the other, neither seemingly approve of the other’s lifestyle. Similarly, healthy political organs cannot be dominated by the Roundheads. To exclude either poets or number crunchers, is to invite a stultifying narrowness in favour of temporary stability.  Designing your interface to orchestrate accessibility to both friend and foe is vital.

Active Irresistibility?
Abandoning a central element in our briefing, the XR team perhaps overstepped their boundaries when they deceitfully penetrated the VIP section of the gathering in the museum square. Wearing appropriate mourning black, we thought ourselves indistinguishable from the attending guests and university employees let loose for the occasion. However, our numbers, and the tell-tale placards may just have given us away.  Ever watchful, a local constable had for some reason decided that a conversation with me would be well worth his time. I’m afraid he overestimated me ( or under-estimated the value of his time); he got a respectful earful. In the back of my mind I scanned the precepts of the Extinction Rebellion Non-violent Action training programme that I’d recently attended. I vaguely recalled that it decreed minimal cooperation; however, this didn’t seem the most viable option here.  Instead of passive aggressive passivity, I deftly switched into hyper cooperative modus; judging that the more that I wrapped up his time enthusiastically filling his head with my newly acquired wikipedia of salient facts about extinct species, he’d a) have less time to go in search of the others, and b) he might deduce that we were a harmless bunch of well-meaning kooks. I think I succeeded…

I did remember to deceive him a little bit: I denied belonging to an organisation. It would be hard to call us organised, no one has ever extracted membership fees; technically we were rather a group of incidental friends coincidently sporting matching cardboard gravestones. Oddly, he wasn’t that interested in the fine print of my protest sign (it included a discrete XR logo), our convivial tone was such that he had to endure me reverse-interrogating him about his childhood connection to the museum’s whale display, and my mock apologies for being the one carrying the most light-hearted sign that mourned neither flora nor fauna — but rather the recent demise of the Norwegian National Railway.

Hidden away in the minutæ of our demonstration paraphernalia, was a thematic anomaly.  For some it was a jarring inconsistency, deviant from the party line; for others it reflected an übernorsk salient detail that added a poignant punch with significant aftertaste. It mourned the passing of a very human creation; NSB, the national railway system had been disassembled this past year by the day’s guest of honour.  The conventions of the graveyard’s streamlined minimalism allowed us to bear our grief expressed in six letters, one award-winning logo and the telling dates 1905-2019  (1905 being a magic number etched into the racial memory of Norwegian nationals everywhere.)  As an expression of yearning for the recently departed, it clearly hit a palpable nerve among the assembled masses.

Listening Stations
The sub-goals of street theatre can be subtle. The non-subtle bit is of course to draw attention to the cause; however, once one has captured attention – what does one do with it?  Part of the thought process behind the Institute for Non-toxic Propaganda is that much of the work is best done one on one. Instead of confronting people with your appraisal of their contradictions, you adroitly reverse your status; by allowing oneself to become victim of one’s own imagery, you tactically invite passers-by to appraise you being confronted by your own contradictions. If we are all in it together, everyone’s logical conclusions are somehow equally relevant. I call these staged interactions: listening stations. We are out collecting the inevitable conflicting arguments.  The more we the performer are the victim of our performance, the more we empower the point of view of the observer. Once you have established this human bridge, defensiveness often evaporates in the face of our innocence; deep systemic doubts can be aired and implanted in the vicinity of the audience’s core beliefs — without rudely hammering home your own conclusions.

Of course, we momentarily became a cause celébre on the hidden reaches of the local media; for some reason the minor flutter of a few metaphorical hankies became the lead story:  XR visits a dignitary

all photos: Odin the one-eyed

Full Moon, 16-19 September,
Kokkinopilos, Mount Olympus

Once again the unMonastery succumbed to our favourite fetish:  whenever possible, we place major our occasions along the notches of the Saros cycle. It is as if we still harbour the belief that the heavens might teach us something. While the October Harvest Moon fitted better for some, the logistics of key personnel moved things to September, and the autumn equinox. The Full Moon showed as per schedule.  The same cannot be said for our proposed team…

The meeting mandate decided during the Summer unSummit was clear: Assemble the key players to an i situ core group alignment session. – this with the added calculation that our speedy return to Kokkinopilos would also impress upon local stakeholders the seriousness of our intentions.

Group alignment might prove a hard task. Design principles as to where and how to focus the efforts of the unMonastery as a coordinated practice had taken a great leap back to basics at the Summer unSummit Camp, but not everyone had participated equally in the pleasure of this visceral reinforcement. Pulling the diverse strands together might be painful. Some of us trod carefully, others tramped loudly.  One withdrew gracefully; two others just didn’t show up.

Our party boldly retained its mission:  laden down with copies of the newly completed unMonastery Scriptorium ToolKit to be distributed along the route, and ripe from a warm, if slowly fading summer camp adventure, this was a repeat, more precise journey.  The design of our return gathering had been conceived to fold the unMonastery back upon ourselves. The invigorating challenge of living half-rough, with barely running water and absolutely no kitchen, was be translated into a viable project proposal for our next stage of operations. As a working framework for the gathering itself, two unMonastery classics were to be recycled: Day One, labelled “Mountain Day” would be a transplanted version of the ‘Listening to the Walls’ exercise devised for the original unMonastery in Matera. The suggested concrete task at hand was to locate a site for the legendary Rysjek’s ‘Negativity Pole’ as proposed at the proto-unMonastery founding meeting with Edgeryders in Strasbourg. This was devised as a necessary device to prevent progressive activist organs from succumbing to group disharmony once they start to get anywhere. The Gods know that we have explored the disharmony territory – The Walls we would listen to would inevitably include our own…

But first some practicals… Item one on the agenda was a rash attempt to impose structural elements from the Summer Solstice gathering upon a new constellation of people. Now, exactly three moons later on the equinox, would not the difference in the angle of the heavens dictate a different response (and waking time)?  Wiser heads prevailed; morning practice became a rousing mountain walk—- there beyond the pastures just below our school house hung a breath-taking vista; at a certain moment the rays that illuminated the far away peaks would slide over Olympus itself to bless our mountain meadow. Dodging cow patties, we found our way to a natural outcrop that put a fountain of stone at our backs, and offered a dramatic perch suitable for cleansing and contemplation – could this spot be the negativity pole we sought that would help ground all future discord? 

The post-breakfast re-tox session involved self-interrogation. What walls were we proposing to create, which would be weight bearing, what would be necessary to hold the space for the spirit of the enterprise to protect the unMonastery idea from the vagaries of everyday life? As usual the unMon Card Set and the Book of Greater and Lesser Omissions supplied valuable clues – we seem prepared…

The rest of the day we expanded our listening arc to the designated taverna.  A valuable articulation of the perceived needs of the local community, and their designs upon the school house, provided key input.  A planned lunch meeting with Viktoria and Giorgos demanded a follow-up tour to some local historic sites.  The original row of temples dedicated the Big Twelve had recently been unearthed in the valley below – the remnants long since plundered to build local sheep sheds, we met the foundation stones to temples to Poseidon, Apollon and Artemis, archeologists assure us that the rest of the crowd still lay there, unexcavated.  The more well-known Disneyland option on the beachy side of the mountain were in fact the Roman-built equivalent and a mere 1900 years old; here were the genuine stones – and look, there above us, nestled on the mountainside – the village of Kokkinopilos.

Day Two was flagged before our arrival as “Garden Day”  – the thought being that: a family that breaks nails together, lugs pails together. An active unMon garden is conceived as a supplementary meeting place to the trusty taverna; the simple strategy is that by sharing the ins and outs of gardening, both our inexperience as peasants, and/or our access to innovative technologies and sustainable approaches to horticulture could grow into a collective concern for our immediate nosey neighbours. The key unMonastery rallying cry of  ‘Cultivating the We’ would take on an additional literal meaning in the interest creating a not necessarily verbal meeting place.  Meanwhile, while focussing on the logistics of preparing a plot and meeting seeding schedules, the extended theme of Day 2 was to layout the range of our first strategically designed testLab. ‘Gardening’ implied both planning and maintaining growth. We plotted.

An attempted backroad tour into more ancient ruins was aborted as too challenging for our hired car. Besides, another tribe of the Godly had made their presence known; acting on a hot tip we found ourselves on the far side of the valley looking for Taverna Dionysos – and a small crowd of retro-worshippers who would be performing their seasonal rites upon yet another neglected heap of stones. Wild flowers, wine, fire, ancient Greek prayer texts and a tortoise would offered up in acknowledgement of not-forgotten Gods.  Ecstatic for the international attention (and potential participants under 60), Our Valeria was soon recruited into the role of the fair maid, Persephone. If we turned our backs upon the proceedings, we too would face Olympus; Kokkinopilos was once again glimpsable above the foothills.

Afterwards, back at Dionysos, some truths would emerge. These intrepid pagans had far from just a passing interest in preserving the ancient deities – they were also dead keen on preserving all things Hellenic – we’d landed among a hornets nest of hyper-nationalists. The dessert, served with a sauce of anti-semitism and conspiracy theories, wasn’t quite as appetising as the main course. We beat a hasty retreat back to more nourishing ground.

The people of Kokkinopilos are not actually Greeks – driven up into the valleys of Northern Greece are pockets of a variety of nations. In Kokkinopilos, they speak Vlac. As descendants of the Roman pre-bysantine presence they are linguistically Latin speakers akin to Romanian, French and Italian. This provides several advantages; the psychology of being a noble minority is very much a positive value in a community that seems to comprise of many retirees who have come back to a community that finally allows them to freely speak their mother’s tongue. Also, we unMoaners from afar may find it easier to learn the language, even if it is spoken by as few as 800 people.

Obtainable Objectives and Hidden Assumptions
UnMons travel on their OOs and HAs. The announced OO of our autumn meeting was to hammer out the contours of a potential future collaboration. A hidden assumption that appeared in at least one person’s notes stated that: Working constructively upon a goal will bring forth strengths and contradictions in our understandings.  We feel that we got a clear step forward towards meshing the perceived needs of the villagers with a realistic version of what we and any supportive groups from the MAZI conglomerate can deliver. The village association has a bold vision to keep the village alive by developing services for a stream of alternative experience seekers who wish to meet more of Mount Olympus, and on less commercial terms, than the the coastal approach; we sketched an area where accumulated unMonastery website and cultural skills can support their plans in both prepping fund raising efforts, profiling the community, and providing off-net interface tools that provide information on the pre-image management version of the Olympians.

There was one invisible stakeholder that towered above all others. On the morning of our final night, we were awoken by thunderbolts. Zeus himself was intent on making himself heard – we held no doubts as to whom were the intended recipients.

Properly chastened, we held up to three closing circles both pre- and post cleaning out all signs of our visit. Some decisions to be made were voiced, and personal commitments aligned; our working plan was augmented by some last details and a renewed vision of reality; the next unMonastery seasonal gathering was mapped out in accordance with decisions made during the unSummit.  One last visit to the committee at Antonia’s taverna was in order.

Despite the initial annoyance of having been left in the lurch by half of our conceived delegation, our pared down group proved especially effective in building our interface. Without swamping the taverna culture with our foreignness, we were absorbed into the prevailing mood of mischievousness. That Valeria was revealed as growing up speaking Romanian had a special benefit: the always gregarious Vasilis had perhaps unearthed some long, lost relations down the valley – could she come up to the house and phone a number in Bucharesti of some people who shared his last name? Indeed she could: they returned triumphant seven minutes later with an agreement to visit family that had migrated northward some 180 years ago.

Major elements of Project Design haven’t been solved. Particularly, a collective push to match available funding is necessary. The idea as sketched stands as a three month 2017 TestLab that may or many not blossom into a future operation. Concrete suggestions as to a non-MAZI collaboration that may be interested in absorbing the long-term running of whatever we can cultivate, were aired. We reckon that a core group of 5-7 people could provide stability. A recruitment drive among our natural collaborative partners may help locate additional curious. However, we acknowledge the wisdom of working with an inner group of the ‘devout’ and an outer circle of the perhaps curious…

The Fossil Record is ambiguous. Paleontology cannot detect the minor evolutions in the alignment of bone fragments that could conclusively indicate that a branch of the humanoid family suddenly spent large amounts of time exploring choreographed sequences. Physiologically, it all shows up as the regular drudgery. Any such deduction may just have to be left to the neuro-anthropologists, and frankly, since the painstaking laboratory hours required to render such observations acceptable industry standard working hypotheses would clearly subtract from time spent enjoying the glee of dance floor fieldwork, who can be bothered.

To pinpoint the precise moment in evolutionary history when human beings first formed the dance and /or the dance first formed human beings would require considerable nitpicking. Far from the world of footnote and academic reference points, let it suffice to launch the simple supposition: we can, therefore we did. Dance is so central to every human culture that at some point the swirl of the village wedding evolved from the need to emulate each other’s rhythms in order to best sample the pheromones of prospective mates. Given the propensity of proprioceptors assigned to managing just such a task, we are mostly stuck musing: which came first the sheer joy of it or the sheer joy of it? 
The dawn of paleolithic shamanism may have involved some life or death wrestling match, but hardly more life and death than for your average flock of baboons. The question may boil down to: can a toddler’s capacity for gleeful repetitive movement be dependent upon the attention it generates from a parade of aunties; does a diapered ape left alone in their gyrations cease telegraphing how pleased they are with themselves? We intuitively know the answer…

Dance Talks
Contemporary understanding holds that language evolved to reflect the intricacies of social relations: we didn’t say anything until we had something to say in a context where it would have significance to those within earshot. Consciously or reflexively sound, and then gradually word, carried intention. Is it fair to assume the same with the dance? This may not provide a seamless correlation, arguably one may make the case that one could dance independent of intention. I’d prefer to think not: to repeatedly access the somatic satisfaction of movement in times otherwise available for more energy efficient contemplation implies that a human need is being met beyond a self interrogation of the sinew as a reminder that underutilised neurological pathways await your command. Moving in sync with one another, We address the Us.

This exercise of social cohesion did not require complex protocols of trans-clan diplomacy. Long before we had the intricacies of a conditional tense necessary to politely bid each other up for a twirl, we were already up and at it: the reflexive, individual stretch stretched into the intoxicating social warmup.

–o0o–

Living six months as a troglodyte seemed inviting. The vista was superb, the local cuisine nourishing; however, one aspect of the caves of Matera disappointed grieviously. The porous, readily carvable rock within which the town scraped out over 240 rupestrian churches didn’t actually provide fabulous acoustic properties. Time and time again one entered awestruck, pulled forth ones vocal chords in the manner of actors, and struck lead. Even when the good people carved vaulted roofs in the shapes of their own craniums, the sound wouldn’t soar…

The Missing Link
The archeology/anthropology debate keeps getting mired down in my out-of-date library. No doubt, as the old Gods in the scholarly firmament die out, the lines on the jungle floor are rapidly re-sketched. The tug of war between the bone people and the chipped tool fragment/carved artifact people likely still struggles to pin-point the dawn of human language along the continuum from bipedalism to first fresco. Significantly, somewhere along this line, heroic spelunkers have spotted signs of the theatre of the first shaman and deemed it a clear indication of expanding consciousness. Not really so curiously, some believe that they have finally solved the riddle of why much of the most glorious cave art was sequestered away on the most inaccessible of walls…

The creative act of applying pigment to reproduce meticulously observed bison and lions could perhaps be pure reflex gratitude; a function of sharing the planet with such magnificent creatures. However, there may be a more comprehensive impulse for going to such lengths. That which indicates the most plausible theory builds upon the observation that the often inaccessible walls chosen for adornment were in the spots that offered the best conditions for group chanting. The melodies may not show in the fossil record, but the resonance of rhythmic choral breathing and synchronised tonality may have had just as much to do with expanding our brain function and making us intellectually agile as did the development of the manual dexterity required to smite hand axes. Negotiating vital group harmony may primarily have occurred while vibrating our skulls in search of vital group harmony.

Similarly, the ultra human activity of the dance has never been contingent upon the invention of shoes. The mental proprioceptors are all there – among their first survival skills the human infant is neurologically programmed to internalise and mimic the movement of others. Incorporating (giving body to) the need for social alignment within the extended family band, either into the collective expression of totemic emulation, or into moves replicating the visceral satisfaction of plucking a bounteous bush of berries does more than provide a good party; it hot-wires motor-neurons along the path of the universal social admonition which declares that: ‘together we prosper‘.

It may be pushing things to propose that bipedalism evolved from the survival potential advantage inherent in an unconscious experience that ‘the family that jives together thrives together’, but the message of the collective dance easily predates any articulated text declaring this to be so. Dance is social grooming without artefacts; we’ll have to keep digging.

A Speech of Parts – the Language of an inspired Actor

If theatre is a language, it could conceivably have a stable grammar and strict grammatical rules. But languages evolve, and we who grew up speaking them as our mother tongue are rarely dependent upon an objective understanding of the rules to be functionally literate. Grammar reigns in the realm of the subconscious; in practice, while paying subliminal lip‑service to convention, we would never ascribe these conventions a pre-determining role. Our human creativity is dependent upon rule-breaking, upon tugging and twisting at convention to shape new and unique linguistic constructions.

This paper is non-scientific. It is perhaps no more than an indulgent exploration of word-play. However, the why of why one might make such an exploration, can easily be given a scientific or at least pseudo-scientific rationale. We will here  illuminate the role of the actor, and the perceived role of the actor, through using the terminology of grammar. I will propose that at various occasions there exists a Theatre of the Noun, an Adverbial Theatre, a Verbal Method; I will make a case for a Theatre of the Preposition – and I will speculate as to if any of us are engaged in anything akin to a preverbal, subconscious theatre that must have been our collective pre-language starting point.

I likely risk considerable interjection along the way, but this is a desirable byproduct and by no little co-incidence this linguo-wandering will also serve as a working demonstration of the tools and tactics of the Institute for Non-toxic Propaganda. And so we have already arrived at our first tangent. To be brief – the Institute for Non-toxic Propaganda champions “issue illumination without inflammation”.  We offer practical theatrical applications based upon studies in non-confrontational therapy, and seek to be a non-allergenic agent for those who for some reason may wish to turn to the theatre as a solution to all their problems. Our approach is not solely mechanical and we stubbornly refuse to abandon Art. In a world where aesthetics habitually yield for politics, we insist upon the necessity of being Poetically Correct.

******* Continue reading →

Two Annual Gathering designs as inspired by meeting with Göhrde.

In early September 2015, three veteran unMonasterians descended for two days upon Göhrde, an hour south of Hamburg.  Ben flew in from Istanbul, Katalin came from Lausanne, and Bembo dropped by from Bergen on his way to Athens, Sicilia and ultimately Alessandria.

Background
The unMonastery was contacted through several channels to please investigate a unique resource in Lower Saxony.  Göhrde, in luscious rural surroundings, the site both of historic occurrences and non-occurrences, starts with an incongruously monumental brick chalet standing by an almost imperceivable miniature and overgrown train stop.

One finds out later that it was erected in the dawn of the Prussian railway system as the most convenient stop for the Kaiser and companions on their way to his annual soirees at the imperial hunting lodge in the densest forest of the region.  Confusingly, the station is called Göhrde even when it is in the village of Breese.  We would soon find out why…

History had not always been kind to the Hunting Palace of the King of Hanover.  His conflicting duties had left the resource badly underused and at some point (1827) the magnificent palace building built to echo the grandeur of Potsdam and Versailles was subject to pillage by antecedents dead keen to recycle some hewn rock.  This would not be the last round of plunder.  However, it is that which is left standing that concerns us most…

There are seemingly unlimited pleasant rooms for human habitation; facilities for establishing a meaningful kitchen experience are not beyond reach.  The surrounding countryside houses several sources of pristine food stuffs.  Meetings can be had indoor and out.  Ready to go lecture theatres abound.  That which is more questionable is year-round residency.  The heating system was proportioned to do all or nothing – so until the community exceeds sixty or so, it is a prohibitive economic constraint.

Can something be done in the pleasant months then?
Indeed it can.  The impulse to hold the next annual unMon summit there say April/May/June garnered quite some enthusiasm.  At least three buildings can house as many as we can supply; while providing a trial run for logistics issues.  Ideally we could send a pre-summit crew to lug furniture about and polish the candlesticks.  Even more ideally, a group could extend our presence by a week or two to start the annual programs of The Model School of the unMonastery: offering to host broader gatherings built within unMonastic disciplines and employing the social pedagogic practices of the unMonastery community.  

Two annual TestLab designs came to mind…

1)   unMon Workshop Workshop
—  an open clinic in refining and polishing seminar and symposium presentation skills.

Many people have dreams of making a living being inspirational.  However, that which gets presented at many a public forum is tragically pacifying.  In the polite middle class atmosphere of mutual supportiveness (I’m thinking TED here) one can get away with some pretty bad theatre; a conspiracy of head-nodding may hold artificially alive a carefully sculpted guided tour of your conceptual darlings, but not for long.  While, armed with the mandatory parade of impressive visuals and a pleasing demeanor, the perpetrators may survive a few rounds on the circuit, however, we aspire to something more vital in the realm of mobilisation.  We want our audience up and roaring; What can raise your project beyond a wise and careful presentation to a profound confrontation with the core of the matter?

Using the invigorating unMonastery shell of concentric neo-liturgic disciplines – this Re-boot camp is designed to move social initiatives further faster.  It works by harnessing the energy of a wide variety of brilliant ideas by creating mutually supportive cells of parallel concerns.  You don’t just present once – you hone your thinking within a collective process infused with some basic visceral understandings as to the nature of the task of hosting meaningful gatherings.  Depending upon the mass of participation, cell composition may evolve from natural constellations, or be refreshingly diffuse in choice of tools and strategies.

I can see these as cycles of on going seminar/clinics where participants:

• present raw material – peer to peer
• extract feedback through a series of exercises
• stretch out their goals in participant groups of 4-5
• absorb coaching on performance issues
• design accessible participatory elements
• share final version

One version of this process solves a lot of logistics questions: if people roll in as it fits them, they then place themselves in queue to do each step.  As fitting, we’d need a dry run with known faces on year one.

2) Georgie’s unTongue-tying Clinic of unBroken English
When His Most Serene Highness George of Hanover was summonsed to the British Throne in 1714, it scuppered some of his royal plans.  He had recently commissioned a French architect to build a relatively vast complex at Göhrde for him and his hunting buddies.  Built in 1709-12 under the supervision of Jean Pierre Quelquechose to serve as a main source for royal sausages, protocol would only rarely allow the main building to be taken into use, ( Otherwise occupied by his day job, George I managed only 5 trips back to the old country before his death during the last one in 1727.)  George II was back and forth a bit more, but usually with a military mission.  As it was, the main building fell into disuse; it was dismantled in 1827 some years before the Prussian Kaisers converted the standing stables into an ornate ballroom and installed their residency appendages to host the annual imperial hunt.  Yet a century later, the remaining 8 buildings and 20,000 sq m of land were augmented with a new garden level sleeping pavilion and a functional meeting rooms to host unsuspecting Europeans among the incongruous grandeur.

Besides Handel, the Hanoverians major contribution to British culture was linguistic inaptitude.  Never quite mastering English pronunciation became a perverse virtue that certain strata of British society never quite recovered from.  Lingo-historians differ but during the first two generations of Hanoverian monarchs the fashion in court became either to adopt ironic elements of a strong Germanic accent as required pronunciation, or to over enunciate every syllable so that your Royal Highness wouldn’t be forced to ask what you were on about.  Either way, the nasal calisthenics and the stilted elongated vowels of the English upper classes still reflect the painful dialog between King and subjects; the language of Shakespeare contorted to accommodate a curling stiff upper lip and the haughty inflection of permanent disdain.

“Pain in the Language”
It is only right that the hunting lodge at Göhrde now assembles expertise to reverse this unfortunate evolution: the legacy of a broken English that hampers much international dialog in our de facto lingua franca as diplomats, scientists and others each enter into a personal wresting match with “Pain in the Language”. 

Much of the agony is psychosomatic; years of betrayal by one’s vocal apparatus, and with a chronic mourning of the erudition in one’s mother tongue has left many 2nd and 3rd language speakers cramped by perpetual helplessness and with a residual tongue tiedness.

Not based upon technical vocabulary nor grammatical formations, the work of this second rebootcamp is to refurbish the connection with the basic mechanisms and neurological wiring that accompanies the performance of elusive precision and clamps your learning curve.  Employing the social pedagogical practices of the unMonastery community, the clinic activity recognises speech impediments as as much psychological as mechanical.  Dismantling coping patterns through both physical exercises with vocal and verbal stretches, it also addresses detoxifying the culture of mastery through confession and a sharing of triumphs.  The Hanoverian hunters finally decode the speech of the masses, to jump hedges and mingle with the locals.  (That the Jagdschloss also was home to German Esperanto community — and that its forgotten archives in the attic are in a sorry state of affairs, is not lost upon us lovers of language.)