Abstract
Metaphor, Music and the Re-Making of Meaning: A Workshop Offering a Live Study of Improvisation in the Dynamic Life of Groups. Run by Marit Joffe Milstein, Ido Peleg, John Schlapobersky, Linde Wotton.
This was a workshop spread across two days, looking at how change might come about in groups through improvisation - based on the musicality of communication and developed through metaphor. We started each day with a brief theoretical introduction illustrated with material from a large group, followed by an action exercise and then a small group fishbowl experience. A different pair of conductors led the workshop on each of the two days with the other two conductors in the outside circle of the fishbowl. The composition of the group was also different each day as not all of the original participants were able to attend on the second day, when we were also joined by some new members.
I wondered what expectations we had set up with our title when I realised that we had dancers, musicians and drama therapists amongst the participants - and feared that we would disappoint. However, I was struck by the participants’ pleasure in being invited to take part in a joint exploration rather than being told ‘this is how it is’. The paradox is that this opportunity was created by the firm structure imposed by the conductors - and this, of course, is true of all analytic groups.
The members of our workshop were courageous - especially those who came back for more on the second day - because action techniques pose quite a challenge for group analysts, comfortable with free floating discussion. As one participant commented, ‘It seemed that I could more easily be eaten up/engulfed by the others in the non-verbal exercise than when we used words.’ The metaphor of being eaten perhaps linked to the introductory material which came from a large staff group in a psychiatric hospital where part of the discussion related to the size of plates at meal times. Even the fishbowl format that we used for the verbal part of the workshop held particular associations for some people - to do with conflict resolution rather than experimental improvisation. Indeed it was renamed, through the humorous ‘Freudian slip’ of one of the participants, as the bowl-fish or, as I heard it, bull-fish (bullying / bull in a china shop?). The re-naming generated laughter and with it the heightened emotions of relief. As John noted in retrospect, we could construe this as either ‘the moment of novelty’ or the condenser phenomenon at work – they are closely related and we might explore the connection in future work.
There was a marked difference in tone between the two days. The idea of ‘home key’ is set out in my paper on communicative musicality in groups, Between The Notes (Wotton 2012), which lends a vocabulary to the analysis of the workshop. Was the home key set up by the action technique, the conductors of the inner group or the make-up of the group as a whole and the patterns of tension and release already established in the matrix from the previous day to which we resonated?
The first day was unusually restrained - despite the apparent creativity and expressed emotion. The improvisatory technique involved one member of the inner group initiating an action, which the rest of that group copied until another member felt the impulse to take the lead and change the action to a new one, which would then be taken up by the group. It was in fact difficult for people to initiate change that day, in an atmosphere that quickly became highly charged - and perhaps competitive? It was as if people felt that the only way in was to ‘interrupt’ the other’s flow, rather than to play with it. It had, as Marit pointed out later, a monologue quality (Shlapobersky 1993) and indeed, the small group went on to talk of the fear of annihilation. When the outer group joined in with the improvisation exercise, one of the new ‘actions’ introduced was walking rather than staying on the spot. At first everyone happily took this up, feeling that at last we were all connected, however, the sense of pacing in a circle soon became oppressive and we longed for someone to break that pattern. It was an example of the way in which one member’s free movement can oppress another (Peleg 2012), which the group went on to discuss later - including the question of which group in the fishbowl had greater freedom and power - the inner one with a voice or the outer one, observing and reflecting - and who was constraining whom?
On the second day, during the conversational part of the exercise, the inner group members spoke in strikingly quiet voices, despite repeated requests from the outer group to speak up. Although the inner group was made up of people who had not been there on the first day, it was as if they knew about what had happened and were keen to protect the shared rhythm, the intimacy, which they were developing, from a possible spoiling/attack by the outer circle. It perhaps also linked to one aspect of the introductory material that day - about a castle in which groups of people have always hurt others.
It was noticeable during the improvisation exercise on the first day that rigidity quickly became apparent - and was experienced as oppressive - whenever repetition went on too long, without sufficient variation being introduced (initially in the reluctance for anyone to take over the role of instigator in the exercise and again later, when the pacing, which was at first experienced as ‘at last we are connected, we have a joint rhythm’, persisted for too long). How hard it is to define how long is ‘too long’ - and yet how exquisitely sensitive we are to it. Similarly, an attempt to move a long way from the form that was set up by the conductors and to break the boundary of the inner group before the shared temporal frame was safely established, led not to greater creativity but to disconnection and a lack of shared meaning. Nonetheless the group persevered and improvised ideas around the limits of freedom and control that are inherent in interactions with others - a theme that had been introduced by the conductors of the inner circle in their talk at the beginning but which was developed on the basis of the experience of the group members that day.
For myself, in the inner circle on the second day, I was concerned that, in such a short period (30 mins), we might not be able to achieve a shared temporal frame within which to improvise. However, one member of the outer group noted a faster rhythm of exchange between the two youngest people in the inner group than between other members and it seemed that it was their exchange (about a non-Portuguese delegate being offered ‘hashish’ by a local drug pusher) that brought about a change of pace. The group generated metaphors about inside/outside and rich/poor and these were developed and explored and then applied to include the immediate context of the inner and outer groups in the workshop. Images of inside and outside, rich and poor, ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’ in the symposium and beyond, were explored as polarizing opposites. We concluded with the idea that personal riches could only be experienced through connection with others - something that was perhaps already contained in the expressive hand gestures accompanying the first speaker’s description of Lisbon’s higgledy piggledy medieval streets. In turn, this could be linked to the other aspect of the day’s introductory material - about our deep interconnectedness. One important aspect - very relevant to the process of improvisation - was the idea of making creative use of whatever is available, which stemmed from one members’ account of staying in an unexpectedly disappointing hotel in Paris and finding a way to use and enjoy the experience.
Strikingly, there was a wish for a third workshop - to unravel (remake the meaning of) what had gone on across the two days. As Ido said, our symphony needed a third movement. This very human wish to remake meaning is embodied in music in the recapitulation in sonata form, the da capo aria or the twelve bar blues, where the themes are restated at the end of the improvised sections - by which time they are heard differently and a new meaning is developed.
Our thanks go to everyone who joined us in this live study and improvised with us in order to explore these ideas. It was very satisfying to hear the term ‘musicality’ - from the theory of communicative musicality (Malloch & Trevarthen 2009) to which we had introduced the members of the workshop - extending beyond it. It was used in the large group on the final day of the symposium. In fact, as Marit pointed out to me on reading this, there are many parallels between our ‘bull fish’ workshop and the last large group – particularly our difficulty in establishing a joint creative rhythm. People repeatedly cut across or interrupted each other, contributions felt too long, even if in ‘clock time’ they might have been shorter than those of previous days, and rarely built on what had gone before. We often remained at the level of monologue; where one person’s freedom curtailed that of the others, and it was very hard to improvise together in order to create some change. This large group did, of course, mark the end of the whole symposium - could that have been significant? (My word processor lacks the reversed question mark, which I understand is the Esperanto punctuation symbol intended to express irony.)