CHAPTER FIVE
CHAOTIC COMPLEXITY: THE JOURNEY FOUND BY WALKING
Introduction
The opening chapters of this writing involve feeling for the edges of a path forward. One side of the road captures the rural setting; the other side marks understanding of non-visibility of mental disconnection/disorder. The previous chapter uses conceptual aspects of the methodology and analysis as the lights to navigate this study through which “interstanding” emerges.
This chapter discusses what we, as a group, did and how dynamics were uncovered as we explored lived histories and experiences among group members. Data sources and processes for making sense of what occurred are also covered. The first part of the chapter works through the cast’s birth, the performative re/searching we conducted, and the evolution which led to its own understanding of the world. Appendices F and G, describe the results of the performative inquiry, through popular theatre.
The second part of this chapter covers the analytical process of written records I carried out when making sense of cast (Chapter 6) and audience (Chapter 7) awarenesses, and my own (Chapter 8) interstanding. The analytical work is largely a linking of initial textual labels to sub-themes. These more concrete front-end clusters are themselves used to create relationships that support the three key anchoring themes, of personal power, identity, and voice, which were explored with this project. These two pieces are joined together at the end of this chapter, and the following three chapters look at the three central groups/individuals reflected within this study.
The remaining pages contain a glimpse into the extraordinary educational experience excavated by a group emerging from silence, exclusion, and invisibility, to be seen, heard and ultimately acknowledged in all their difference, similarity, uniqueness, and in their full humanity. Like any process where previously estranged individuals come together the evolution was never easy, smooth, or predictable. This process was targeted to be tentative, open, and flexible; at least that was into what the process evolved. But let me take a step back to the first days of our group.
Figure 16: The Opening Circle
Emergent Chaos as Home Place
That opening session, September 19, 2002, I had no idea how many people would arrive. My initial community contact meeting (set up as in Picture 1) had resulted in over 25 people so I arrived that evening in the Community Centre’s Rehearsal Hall hopeful and optimistic. I had thought through, for days, how I would proceed with forming a group. I was drawing heavily from popular theatre as my processural guide to keep in mind my lens of performative inquiry. Assembled in the room that first evening was a group containing a number of individuals who were living with a wide variety of mental disconnections. Under the mental “illness” umbrella, labels of “brokenness” included: schizophrenia, agoraphobia, substance abuse, social phobias, obsessive-compulsive disorder, unipolar depression, bipolar; with some people dually/multiply diagnosed. Cast members/learners came from a number of different backgrounds, as described briefly in Chapter Three.
I had inadvertently arrived with my own biases about mental “illness” to those opening meetings. Through the education I received working with the group I became aware that much of my own understanding had come about through the pervasive power/influence of the medical industry and to some degree the media’s effort to create within our culture the despised “Other.” In those early days I had subtly learned to change my demeanour from speak softly; being over-cautious with my use of language; standing just a little further away than I would with “other” people to being up front and open with who I was and about what I did not know. We shared our experiences of living; soon framing everything within mental disorder made little sense. What we were exploring were life issues, not mental ones. I was guilty of what society, generally, does when faced with someone labelled as having a mental “illness.” As one is labelled, so he/she acts, so society responds. The ritual of the stigma circle spins until individuals say, “No, I want to know the person behind the label.” Otherwise, everything in that life becomes reduced to the category and seemingly there is no return from that box to the individuality of the person.
I’ve been in Duncan for a long time, and I lived with General Delivery for ten years. At the post office - the post office in town. A lot of people with mental illness get their mail there. There was general delivery. …There was …people who…some people who find them scary. Some people like Cary…find people …find him scary looking ‘cause he’s very tall and big and he’s got wild hair and at first he had the wild beard. But you see I have known Cary for twenty-five years or more. So it’s easier. Like I said some of these people [in the cast] I’ve known or met before. (Josette, p. 5)
Before I could be a support in the group, I educated myself on the issues and encouraged the group to teach me about their lives. Members live not only with impairments within their bodies, but the more profound disability of society’s handicapping as well. Like everything within those first few meetings, much was open to negotiation. After that first evening I realized I had miss-stepped for other reasons as well. Jean, a social worker accompanying many in the cast, pulled me aside at the end of the first evening to ask if we could change some structural elements.
The four hour blocks
…..too long.
We need to shorten them……..to two hours.
Oh….and twice a week
……too many.
Let’s aim for once a week….
Energy levels for many living with mental disorder/disconnection quickly dissipate later in the day. Four hours, it turned out, was a long time to be active during what was the very low energy period of most days. The beginning time of 6:30 p.m. was great in that it was shortly after dinner at the Open Door and early enough in the day for the group to engage in physical activity. Jean suggested that sessions be cut to two hours and only once a week. As the group became more accustomed to the activity we extended the time to three hours or more, but that was several months later. The second item that was raised was the level of physical moving around we necessarily, had to do in the, then, current building. Within the community centre (our first meeting location), the rehearsal hall was also the “green room” for incoming professional arts companies. Because of this we had to move to other rooms in the building periodically, and occasionally move among days in a given week. While it wasn’t the best of situations, I hoped confusion would be reduced if I provided a printed schedule for the group. It wasn’t. Coupled with quickly fading energies at the end of the day, the group required as much consistency as possible to their timetables. Changes, I was told, were not handled well. Inconsistency had to be kept to a minimum; something I learned early on when we discussed the possibilities about the eventual performance. Much was quickly being thrown into chaos.
Oh….and switching rooms and some days
…too complicated.
The group needs consistency……predictability.
Let’s move to another space …
First was the construction of a home place where everyone took part in the ritual groundedness of the group. The shifting of time and location/space I likened to when two people, formerly strangers, now lovers wish to live together. Which space does one call home for both? Each carries with it, its own baggage of an individual home rather than a collective one. By moving to a new location, power also was transformed in that we, as members, entered the new space together. No one had a past attachment to it, yet all of us had a piece of ownership in the future of our new place. To move out of what I had established to what we could build together became important for all. Out of order grew chaos…and out of disorder our home place was created. So began the perpetual shifting, shaping, and opening up of the process/structure used within our journey. Our metaphorical “walking” was found through the group holding hands as one; all leading and being led by one another, no one individual in complete control. It quickly stopped being my venture; it had to become our path. There was one other major obstacle for me personally…something I had not considered. Prejudice could and did reside within all individuals including a group such as this…that was to be presented to me early on when I began the first round of interviews….
….I’ll tell you now… I’m homophobic…yeah to a certain extent and ….the voices kept calling me queer… and for some reason … call me queer, faggot and stuff. And for some reason … it was the most hurtful thing that they could say to me. And …and …and it …and it would hammer at me day and night. ….you know …and then I tried to commit suicide with …pills… so you know …so it was something along those lines…you don’t have to use that exact example but …you know …you know …when you get that negative voice in your head … you know it can really …really … get to you … you know. Like it was …for some reason …it was the worst thing that …that someone could call me. It still irritates me you know when somebody calls me that today. Like it’s … I don’t know why I …but that’s the button that I got. The worst thing that you could call me….like I’ve got nothing against any… you know… whether you’re …straight or gay or whatever but for some reason it pisses me off….when people call me that …so …you know and … I wasn’t taking medication for years and …and this woman’s voice kept calling me gay or queer or whatever you know. And … for some reason it was the worst thing that this … voice in my head could call me. And therefore you know …so you know …you could use whatever you want to you know…just I guess everybody’s got a soft spot for something negative and that happened to be mine soft spot. And you know …you know ….I …that was a bad experience (Buster2, p. 9).
Despite Buster’s struggles around homophobia, he and I would become good friends (and as it turned out he visits my partner’s employment to visit with him as well). Through our own set of social differences, we learned something of the “other,” because of similarities, not in spite of our respective difference. There was little discussion or exploration of bias within the margins in the literature: ableist queerness….homophobia in disability.
Ordered Chaos: Where The Study Resides
Popular theatre and performative inquiry begins above all with the bodycontext. The physicality of marginality was where our work had to begin; in the murkiness of lived histories, expectations, comforts, and risk. The early portion of our exploration, numbering 11 meetings, was spent becoming acquainted with a room full of former strangers; to transform our assembly of individuals into a collective working cohesively. Negotiation was done of our physical, interacting, emotional, cognitive, spiritual, and psychological beings within the emergent ritual of our time. Space was often messy, tentative, questioning, risk-filled, and chaotic. It was also filled with much laughter, sensitivity, encouragement, support, animation, playing, and fun. As time progressed, the structure evolved where a ritual was being called forth each time we came together (Figure 13).
Entering the Sacredness of Our Work
The sanctity of our ritual grew as it developed into four phases: entering in; being in; main exploration and; closing out our ceremony of learning. Each session began with a “check-in” to find out who was there, and how each person was feeling that particular session. This was done to help with transitioning learners’ preoccupations with external everyday living into our enclosed nowspace. Sometimes this check-in was formally done in a circle; other times it was done more casually, depending on the mood and energy during a particular evening. Following the “meet and greet” period, we focussed on various forms of yoga in order to (re)connect the mindbodyspace. During these early sessions the second episode was the focus upon theatre games and exercises to reconnect physical body to concepts of relatively unstructured play and communicating. Early in the process, the power of physical communication and of meaning-making became evident. An early exercise was the Boalian “Hypnosis” activity whereby one person held up his or her hand in front of the face of another: his/her partner. The person staring at the hand became “hypnotized,” in that this person followed wherever the hand “led” him or her. The “hypnotizer” was effectively in “control” of another. A variation of this was when one person was “hypnotizing” two people simultaneously by having each hand held up to the faces of two people. Everyone took turns leading and following. The marked sense of power over others was profound for group members.
It’s awesome to know that I can have this much power over someone else. I always thought that I had to follow orders. (Amelia, Interview 20, p. 4)
To have that kind of control over another body, another mind, another’s actions, another’s sense of self, even metaphorically, echoed within Amelia’s life as a client of the mental health system. Within the eventual show, hands that held and guided the face of a person, were replaced by the pill bottle; a symbol of power and control over the bodies and minds of those finding themselves in the mental health system This was the first of several early exercises that found themselves in the production because of the marked resonance between the activity and/or what it represented within the lives of group members.