"Art can hold testimony with respect." - Phil Kingston

Current Impressions of Dublin & Ireland

A New Technique

"Art can be celebratory." - Phil Kingston

Last week at Ireland's national theatre, The Abbey Theatre, we experienced a place-based storytelling workshop led by the Community and Education Manager, Phil Kingston. His storytelling workshop was tied specifically to Ireland, but I imagine myself adapting the exercise to work with Asian American communities in the U.S.

Phil's exercise protocol:

Phil placed two maps of Ireland on the wall for our reference, which was helpful to me as someone who isn't familiar with the geography of the island. We were to imagine that the floor was a map of Ireland. Phil indicated which walls indicated north, south, east, and west. 

He cued us to go to a place on the map that holds personal significance for us. Once we moved to our spots, he asked us to think of a sentence that incorporated sensory details that illuminates something about our personal connections. Phil provided a personal example, which modeled what sorts of details we should add. Here are some of the sentences I remember (these are approximate quotations as I did not write down verbatim what everybody said, but the sentences were so vivid that many of the images have stuck in my mind):

1. My sensory sentence: "As the painful pins and needles of the freezing water at the Forty Foot enveloped my skin, an elated smile spread across my face with the realization that I could adventure independently."

2. "A man from Honolulu looks up, sees an eroded plaque on a church, and realizes that he thinks this is where his name came from."

3. "My sister came down out of her headstand along the Cliffs of Moher, and we joyfully ran back to the car through the pelting rain."

4. "As I smelled the breeze along the River Liffey, I felt my shoulders unclench for the first time in a very long time."

5. "A steep hike and sideways rain became worth it when the cliffs came into view and I smelled the fresh sea air."

After each of us shared our sentences, Phil would either highlight the dramatic elements embedded in our sentences or push us to add greater detail. I remember when sentence #4 above was shared, Phil noted that he could sense a long journey leading to that moment. He compared the syntax of sentence #5 to The Road by Cormac McCarthy. Other debrief points he pulled out were:

• Some of these stories were like the starts of epics

• Some were denouments of tension

• Phil also pulled out common themes, like belonging, family history, or the presence of grandmas in our lives

His intense attention to the details of each of our sentences made us feel affirmed and demonstrated to us that we all have the capacity to create dramatically compelling stories. 

We then divided into small groups and came up with "headlines" for each of our stories. (I did not feel this step was necessary; I felt the sensory sentences were more interesting than the headlines we came up with.) He had us pick one headline that felt dramatically compelling to work with and asked us to come up with a tableau for the pivotal moment in that story. We then came up with beginning and ending images to bookend that pivotal moment. On campus at NYU, I have often been told to come up with beginning, middle, and end, but by cueing us to start with a "pivotal" moment, I felt that we were able to more effectively capture the heart of the drama more effectively than I had in the past. Final step in this phase of the devising was to add one line of a song that captured the spirit of the story that all ensemble members would sing together.

He then had the person whose story was being portrayed step out of the group and move to another group. Those group members taught their new member the staging and song line. Those of us who were the storytellers then got to see our own stories performed by our classmates. Seeing someone step into my story with curiosity and respect felt like a gift. 

How I would use this exercise in my practice:

I work with communities of Asian Americans back in the U.S. -- mostly with young, college-age students, but I would like to expand my work into older generations of Asian Americans who are not in a school setting. So often when I gather with other Asian Americans, or people of color in general, our conversations focus on lack: lack of connection to our countries of origin, lack of ability to speak our mother tongues, lack of access to resources, etc. These conversations can get very depressing very quickly. It is vitally important to talk about the inequities, violences, and internalized oppressions our community grapples with. And, it is equally important to bring jubilance and a sense of belonging to our community so that we can continue to be resilient. 

I would adapt this exercise to the specific Asian American community I am working with. If I were working with a college group or some kind of university resource office, I might have the first floor map be one of the college campus. My first prompt might be, "Go to place on the map where you feel a sense of belonging." That would help me assess the extent to which the participants feel a sense of community on their campus, and the sensory detail sentence would give me even more information. Then I might expand the map to include the entire state, country, or globe and ask them to do the same thing with a place of personal significance. I have done exercises with Asian Americans that involve physically standing on maps, but I feel that they often divide us into ethnic groups or highlight the lack of connection we feel with our cultures rather than building unity or a sense of home. 

If I were doing this exercise with a group of more elderly immigrants of mixed ethnicities in the context of a larger storytelling workshop, I might start global and ask them to stand on a place that feels like home. I would then repeat this prompt two more times, asking them to find new places each time. My aim would be to help people identify multiple places where they had made a home for themselves, and to build camaraderie among the group. The sentences my classmates shared made me want to know more about their stories, and I'm sure that other communities would feel this pull as well. I would follow Phil's tableau exercise as he did them to help student participants begin to devise their own theatre pieces exploring themes of safety and home. 

I feel ready to facilitate this exercise because it was powerful for me to realize that I had already built a strong personal connection to a unique place in Dublin even though I had only been here for five days. I imagine that this exercise could help people of many different backgrounds who have had to adapt or code switch to new places realize how they have been able to make these new homes their own. I would take care to get to know specific details about the community's needs, strengths, and challenges before the workshop so that I could curate the prompts with care. I would also want to remember our impro instructor Darren York's commitment to improvising and being flexible during the workshop by reading the energy in the room.