Creative Reconcilers
I’m Black, formerly incarcerated, and I grew up in the toughest neighborhoods of NYC. My dad is white, right-leaning, and lives in rural Pennsylvania. We don’t see much the same way, but I think we’re agreed that we’re both human.
In December of 2019 I went to go visit my dad at his stall in a large enclosed converted-warehouse flea-market. He showed me his collection of Trump 2020 hats and assorted right-wing paraphernalia. I noticed what looked like mild chagrin on his face as I glanced around his walk-in-closet-sized stall. In one display case he sold lighters, multi-tools, and knives. In a lower case he had vintage pistols and a rifle. He’s a skilled machinist by trade and he’s always loved guns.
We talked about freedom of speech, core values, current events, and throughout the conversation he continued to allude to an ongoing spiritual battle of epic proportions. Fast-forward to December of 2020. I text my dad amid the post-election madness. He tells me he’s planning on going (with a few of his buddies) to the Trump rally on January 6th. “It’s going to be crazy,” he said.
The day of the capitol riots, I called my dad while watching the news. He tells me he’s back in a hotel, and that a group went on to the capital. “I don’t know if they’re Antifa or not,” he speculates gently. On the television, I watch as the crowd meets little resistance from sparsely stationed capitol police. I watch as they smash windows. I see the mixture of confused glee and loosely-nefarious intent, a complex mix of righteous indignation, uncertainty, something-like-hate, but mostly that quintessentially human here-we-are-doing-something-what-the-hell energy. I found myself urgently wishing that no one would be harmed. It was not dissimilar to the feeling I had watching the Black Lives Matter protests.
Several months before the “insurrection” I’d reached out to some skilled facilitator friends and the awesome Artistic Director at Rattlestick Theater, Daniella Topol. I had an idea to do a small pilot of a creative arts workshop with people from widely different backgrounds and identities. Perhaps it wasn’t groundbreaking, but I felt the need to get people together and make room for difficult conversations. Rattlestick had been running awesome virtual programming and community conversations in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder and the ensuing protests.
The concept for this workshop was to lower the stakes for participants and allow them to play, create, and improvise together while opening room for deeper discussions about our shared humanity. I envisioned someone like my dad or like the corrections officers who thought of themselves as good guys or like the cops who face hatred and distrust every day. I thought about my experience and the experience of many others who have struggled to emerge from the clutches of the US criminal legal system. What I hoped would manifest from this workshop was an understanding grounded in practice that fundamentally, we are all much more alike than we are different. The hope is that this understanding could be a starting point for creative reconciliation.
The dream, of course, is outsized: global utopia and freedom from harm.
So my wife and I (as the power duo SpokeAndFeather) planned the sessions along with the help of Daniella, and Josie and Billy, our two co-facilitators. We borrowed heavily from our backgrounds and influences. I was a participant with Rehabilitation Through the Arts for years. RTA teaches theater, visual-art, dance, and music in several New York prisons. I’ve also done years of group-based arts and recovery circles. My wife went to Emerson for theater and studied public policy at Johns Hopkins and has taught in a wide array of contexts. I’d started arts programs for men who were residents in the prison-within-a-prison mental health unit at Sing Sing. Our two co-facilitators both had experience starting and running powerful workshops. Josie had taught me almost a decade ago and works with kids on Rikers and with system involvement through her organization Drama Club. Billy is a trained clown (like professional clown), an expert in movement work and has facilitated with me at Columbia Law School’s Theater of Change through the Broadway Advocacy Coalition. I figured we had the right people.
Core philosophical approaches I look for in facilitators are similar to what I’ve learned from many teaching artists, including my former instructor, Daniel Levy. His comprehensive book, A Teaching Artist’s Companion, remains a guidestar.
Honor all responses.
Model the behavior you’d like to see.
Lead with curiosity instead of judgement.
Expose the mechanisms of thought behind your approach.
The workshop was based on a few core principles:
- Everyone has earned their perspective
- It is very difficult to convince anyone to change their mind by telling them they are wrong or using definitions and rhetoric
- Formal structures and trappings can turn people off and perpetuate stifling hierarchies and power dynamics
- Group creativity leads to an innate understanding and appreciation of members of the group
For this pilot session we invited an NYPD officer participating in a non-official capacity, an experienced defense attorney and his interns, a formerly incarcerated woman who had previously been a police officer, a formerly incarcerated man who is now a community advocate, two self-identifying victims of domestic violence, a non-profit philanthropist, a professional non-profit community arts practitioner, and a young man who was about to enter the police academy.
In the first session we had two main goals: for each participant to recognize the humanity of all other participants, and to derive a shared set of “humanity norms” that we agreed on. (This is a replacement for community agreements or a similar mechanism, it was also the final activity of the first session).
For the second session, we focused on individuality, with the main goal of emphasizing play and collective vulnerability.
By the third session, we were a cohesive group with a clear warmth and affinity toward each other. The trick is realizing that this is not something the curriculum creates in people, it’s the magic that’s always there waiting to happen once we’re allowed to get out of our own way.
This means collectively avoiding identity politics, left-on-left attacks, snap judgments, and superiority. It gives me hope every time we humans succeed in connecting in this way, and we are dedicated to creating opportunities for this to happen more often with people who are convinced they are right. Cops want to act silly. Hood folx want to feel free to be playful and share their joy with the world. People who’ve survived the criminal legal system want to laugh and be a part of society. Together, we can do all these and more. In fact, I think the broad changes and inroads to reconciliation we’d love to see could start right here.
We can lower the stakes. We can erode some of the hate. We can transform toxicity into health.
Coming in Part II of this series:
- The curriculum, games, and philosophy outline we used
- Key takeaways from the pilot
- How to try something like this out and more resources for creative vulnerability
