Convenings

Past Learning Exchange Reports:
Minneapolis, March 8–10, 2002

Open Space Session: What is the place of ritual in arts-based civic dialogue?

Topics:

• The place of ritual in the lives of individuals present
• How it connects to their work
• How they perceive its presence or absence in Animating Democracy
• Everyone there had a great need for and sense of higher power or connection to spiritual in their own lives, and felt a need to acknowledge more than head and heart—feeling that framing didn’t include the spirituality.

Discussion:
Time, deadlines, and paperwork erode our connection to the spiritual. 

Fear factor in organizations connecting themselves to a spiritual identity: people are afraid to speak about it for fear it will become an organizational value; afraid of being “touchy-feely”

When it is appropriate to involve ceremony or ritual, or a sense of spirituality in the work? 

When people use their spiritual privilege to lord it over others, and when the new-age-ness of it becomes a power/status tool, it is inappropriate.

Joan Schirle, The Dentalium Project:  Animating Democracy seems to be staying away from addressing the spiritual.  Social change seems to be the focus.  Can there be success on that level of awareness in the dialogue?  What is the shared basis for ritual?

Treva Offut, The Kitchen:  Urban Bush Women’s statement is “Athlete, Artist and Healer.”  How is it manifested?  Dance and song; finding common friends; building community and working on ideas.

Kwame Ross, Urban Bush Women:  We as artists are priests.  Beauty in Life as Ritual ... How do we enter into ourselves?  How does one open a conference in a way that allows people to get into it—overcoming resistance to participate in things that are not ordinary calls for order?. Drumming is very personal to me, and no one knows the relationship I have with the instrument.  Indigenous instruments have just as much value as western instruments. There is history, transformation in this instrument.  Look at the two equally: it raises the issue of how people are invited to participate.  Need to respect people’s traditions and acknowledge the deeper meaning of things.  Ask, would this be wanted, would this be acceptable? 

Andrea Assaf, Animating Democracy project associate:  It raises a lot of questions for me: the broader question about holding ourselves to same level of scrutiny that we ask our participants to engage in.  What happens in the shift from facilitator to organizer to convener?  I have a question about how to frame ritual or spirituality in a group that is so diverse, that we don’t know what all the perspectives are in the room.  How to do it in a way that is inclusive for everyone?  A learning in the process of planning—don’t make assumptions that we are all on the same page.  Questions should come up in the beginning to allow for conversations to happen.

In response to this discussion, Kwame, Armando, and Treva created and facilitated a full-group ritual closing the convening on Sunday:  the blessing of a new drum.  Armando, in the center, proceeded in Native American tradition, and asked the group to walk and chant in a circle; Kwame played his Congo drums; Treva led a group vocal improvisation, layering songs from the weekend.