Living Room: An Emergent Practice of Creative-Relational Health

Abstract

This essay is an account of creating a learning encounter for other artists. We write our becoming together, finding our way to do justice both to the fluidity of (our) process and to the fluidity of processes of “making good practice” to creatively care for the health and wellbeing of artists in a context of precarity. Our “creative-relational” inquiry frames the learning encounter and co-exists in the planning-testing-doing process we used to design it and to create this essay. We explore how being well and making good practice as an artist in the world might be described as an emergent becoming—a creative-relational health.

Prelude

This is a story about making good practice and being well as an artist in the world. It is a story about what good practice and being well might feel and look like for all kinds of artists, and how making what we might call creative-relational health is an emergent practice that happens in the act. It is also a story about our experience as artists and how that experience shows up and shapes our work to create a learning encounter for other artists. Three of us—Margaret, educator and musician, Aura, musician and educator, and Stacy, a writer and performance maker—have ongoing work in the academy. Katherine, musician and facilitator, works independently across social, cultural, and educational spaces. Our diverse experiences, commitments, and struggles are part of the story of our process and the questions we asked ourselves along the way.

Finding Our Way

I am nearly at our gathering place: Snape Maltings on the River Alde in Suffolk, England. I step down from the train at Saxmundham station into the bright Saturday afternoon sun, eager to arrive after 36 hours of travel. I feel the pull of a long shower and change of clothes as an antidote to the onset of jetlag, but there are no taxis at the train station. I call the phone numbers given to me by the travel agent, plus a few others displayed on a billboard outside the train station. No answer, a recording about being away on summer holiday, an offer to pick up in an hour’s time. I drag my suitcase down the cobblestone street toward the pub. “Call Voltaire,” the barkeep suggests and passes me a card with his number. Miraculously, Voltaire is 5 minutes away and swings by to pick me up and deposit me at my destination.

I also feel the weight of a need to make the most of the week ahead, supported as it is by university research funds and the privilege of international air travel, comfortable accommodation, meals, and time away from usual work duties and home and family obligations. The responsibility to do good work that does good in the world for artists considering these privileges—and the toll they take on the environment, those who take on labour in my absence—sits heavy in my body.

Aura repeats this same process a few hours later—same missed train in London, same failed phone calls to taxi companies, same walk to the pub, same call to Voltaire, who is now regrettably in London, so she does the hour-long wait for the one available cab. Margaret and David arrive a few hours after Aura, having encountered snarls of traffic on their way from Lincolnshire, rather than a lack of taxis. And on Sunday morning, Katherine arrives at Snape Bridge House or “Katherine’s house,” as she’s spent many hours planning and plotting and facilitating with and for artists. But of course, it doesn’t begin here, once we are all gathered. Our creative-relational becoming emerges across time, finding its way through collaborative classroom and workshop encounters; the spark of an idea in response to a funding call, in shared stories, songs, and meals; in connections and commitments emerging across time.

The creative-relational focuses our attentions on emergence—drawing on Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s notion of becoming—an ongoing process of becoming pushed and pulled into ever-new relations driven by desire, a “force of liaison, a force of linkage, conveying a transformational tendency” (Massumi, 2015, p. 11). It also asks us, following Brian Massumi, “to home in on the in-the-moment, improvisatory process of change as something that takes us beyond ourselves, into the other, into becoming-other,” into “something new that happens in the act” (in de Andrade et al., 2020, pp. 6, 5). Taking these ideas together, Jonathan Wyatt sees creative-relational inquiry as a:

process of becoming, with desire as its force. Creative-relational inquiry is concept, not methodology. Its inquiry that seeks not to “capture” and hold still, but to find a way, through desire, to do justice to the fluidity of process. (de Andrade et al., 2020, p. 6)

In this essay, we write our becoming together, finding our way, through desire, to do justice both to the fluidity of (our) process and to the fluidity of processes of “making good practice” in ways that creatively care for the health and wellbeing of artists. Our work feels urgent. Amid a groundswell of funding, research, policy, and care provision in support of “creative health” efforts to improving health and wellbeing through engagement with the arts (Arts Council England, 2024; Australia Council for the Arts, 2022 & 2018; Fancourt et al., 2020; National Centre for Creative Health, 2024), the health and wellbeing of artists is precarious at best (Canham, 2021; Collard-Stokes & Irons, 2022; Duarte, 2024; Naismith, 2019). We chart how we come together to design a learning encounter for other artists that supports them to create the conditions for sustaining mutual care within a context of compounding challenges.

We spoke at length about care as a community responsibility, not (another) burden placed on artists as individuals. You cannot practice self-care in a world that denies you care. Does that ethos and our relation to it come through in our writing? As Sara Ahmed (2014) says, when the world is designed to promote your survival, you don’t have to be inventive to survive. The three of us who have ongoing academic positions benefit from the structures that support our care. That doesn’t mean we are not also in need of care, but in a model of “radical self-care” we must reckon with how care is a resource in relation to larger contexts and divergent experiences.

This creative-relational inquiry, as Wyatt observes, takes us beyond ourselves into becoming-other. We become together in the service of creating something new—something that happens in the act. This process also pays attention, as Fiona Murray (2020) writes, to the “necessary awkwardness of fledgling knowledge and concepts striving to matter. It . . . strives to create space to lay out the indeterminate” (p. 31).

Making space to lay out and hold the indeterminate means that concepting with the “creative-relational” as a frame for a learning encounter doesn’t seek to replace or supersede other concepts for becoming and thinking-with, including notions of caring encounters, the existential relationship of art and education, embodiment, emergent practice, and autobiography. Rather, our writing is about how these moves to concept (as doings) co-exist in our talk and movements, in our planning-testing-doing and here, in the writing that emerged in the process of putting together the learning encounter and essay, and now, in our creative-relational encounter with you.

Walking the Marshes

Before breakfast, before conversation, before preparations for the work of the day, there is the walk. Tiptoeing through the house, shoes in hand, opening the huge lock slowly, and stepping out into the damp, fresh air of the early day. Some walk for health, some for pleasure, some to think, some to notice, some to “take stock,” and some to be at peace. Ellen Mueller (2023) observes that walking as a practice disrupts the conventional, as it connects the walker to the “. . . larger world where boundary-crossing and critical thinking are necessary for solving the complex problems we all face in the current globalised moment” (p. 2). She writes of observational walking, the politics of walking, for whom, where, why and how, of “. . . embodiment and the meditative qualities of walking” (Mueller, 2023, p. 2).

We are all walkers.

Snape Maltings lies in a landscape designated as an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. Walking from the buildings, walkers can turn right; past Barbara Hepworth’s monumental bronze sculpture, the “Family of Man,” to walk through the fields along the bank of the Alde River toward Iken Church. Or we can cross the bridge to trace the path that snakes through the marshes and returns us through the village of Snape.

Each sets out at different times. This is not a shared venture. It is a moment to be silent, to listen, to place ourselves in that landscape, to imagine ourselves into what drew composer Benjamin Britten and tenor Peter Pears to this place. What makes this landscape so open to creativity? The flatness of the marshes, the openness of the sky, the sounds of the curlews, ducks, and gulls, the seeming stillness that belies the intense activity of the natural world going about its business. In these moments, we are observational walkers, heightening awareness of where we are, through sight, sound, touch, smell, and taste. And feeling the differences to the places and landscapes in which we usually walk.

We encounter each other stepping out along the paths, exchanging the first words of the day with another. To make good work in the world, one needs acts of self-care, of self-awareness, of contemplation, and the capacity to quiet the mind in preparation for “the trouble.” Rebecca Solnit (2000) writes of walking as an act of contemplation, an aid to thinking through the daily ritual of a steady pace. Our steady-paced walking through the morning light both quietens the mind as we are in and with the emerging day and sharpens our focus on the work ahead.

Some walk to reach a physical destination, others to find a way. Philosopher Tim Ingold (2010) writes of “becoming knowledgeable” through the processes of walking along and the experience of weather. For him,

. . . knowledge is grown along the myriad paths we take as we make our ways through the world in the course of everyday activities, rather than assembled from information obtained from numerous fixed locations. Thus it is that walking along from place to place . . . we come to know what we do. (Ingold, 2010, pp. 121–122)

Ingold (2010) investigates the “. . . relation . . . between ambulatory knowing, pedestrian movement, and temperate experience” (p. 122) to argue that knowledge is “made” not transmitted. Rather than a cognitive construction, knowledge is an “improvisatory movement—of ‘going along’ or wayfaring—that is open-ended and knows no final destination” (Ingold, 2010, p. 122).

Walking permeates our planning and shared “knowledge-making.” In the conservatory, we will share practices of creative participation, pooling ideas from our experience and practice. Aura’s impulse work begins with the mantra “I can walk,” an embodied exploration of a space through walking, running, standing still, falling, and rising. We are prompted to think and enact walking as an artistic practice, a meditative practice, and a creative practice of exploration and reflection. Through the regulation of rhythm, tempo, direction, breath, and muscles, walking becomes a way to focus inwards and outwards, to engage with self and other/s. It becomes a means to interrogate critically the social, material, political, and affective entanglements of walking as an inquiry practice (Springgay & Truman, 2022); to think about the complexities of making good work in the world. For whom, why, where, and when, along with the question at the center of our thinking: how?

Larder: Trying to be at Home

The work of creating a 3-day learning encounter centered on care, good practice, and being-well-as-an-artist-in-the-world together needs sustenance; it needs a well-stocked larder. As we are all making our way to Snape, Margaret looks after the larder, so it can look after us. She writes, could you send me your preferred breakfasts? I can then pick all this up on the way down on Saturday. As a starting list:

1. milk, butter, yogurt,

2. bread,

3. muesli—other?

4. jam/honey,

5. eggs,

6. fruit.

Best, m

Katherine replies: Amazing. Tea and coffee please, a request we all resoundingly support.

After we walk, we gather for a breakfast made from those ingredients, basking in the sun streaming into the conservatory and the delicious anticipation of how and what will become over the next week. We enter the existential task of considering what bringing together creativity and health might mean to the work of making good practice and being well as an artist in the world. Our creative-relational inquiry resonates with the bringing together of art and education that Gert Biesta considers in his book Letting Art Teach (2017) and further, in his reflection on that writing 5 years on (G. Biesta, 2021a). Biesta argues that art and education are existential dialogues—ongoing, never-ending explorations of what it means to be and become (human, artist), rather than instrumental—useful tools for accomplishing something else (mathematical skill or empathy). Similarly, because of their existential qualities, creativity and health are more than instruments for accomplishing something else (improved medical outcomes, wellbeing). They, too, are ongoing, never-ending.

Biesta says that taking up existential challenges—the being and becoming of the world in relation to our own existence including our own potentialities and limitations—requires both the suspension of time and the sustenance of support. Suspension, in G. Biesta’s (2021a) conceptualization, is learning and creating that “. . . slows down, gives time in order to try to figure out, again and again, what it might take to try to stay ‘in the middle ground . . .’” (n.p.) in the middle space of pushing for things to happen or come into being and stepping away to let things and others come together. The actions of slowing down and making time to figure out how to stay engaged in the middle space require the nourishment of sustenance; it’s what makes it possible for us “. . . to stay with the ‘difficulty—the difficulty of the world and the difficulty of [ourselves as artists] in the world’” (G. Biesta, 2021a, n.p.).

Sustaining our collaboration means stocking the larder—literally, theoretically, and creatively—for our work together. It means using the ingredients in the pantry to make and share meals together, meals that will nourish and support us as we make time and space to stay with—and play in—middle register of the unknown and the speculative. The in-between of creative health and being well as artists in the world.

Staying with the difficulty of the in-between described by Biesta calls up another collaborative thinker, maker, and sustenance-giver in our collaboration: Donna Haraway (2006) and the work of “staying with the trouble.” Staying with the trouble, she says, is the serious and lively (and seriously lively) work of meeting each other “in unexpected collaborations and combinations” in which we do the hard work of “learning to be truly present” so that we might “become—with each other or not at all” (p. 4). Staying with the trouble. Playing in the middle. Doing the never-ending, never-resolved, truly lifelong working of “trying to be at home in the world,” to quote Biesta quoting Hanah Arendt, another thinker whose ideas on praxis provide a drumbeat to the dance of making good practice.

Trying to be at home as an artist in the world starts in the larder.

Conservatory: All of It Then

The conservatory has a vaulted ceiling threaded with fairy lights and is graced by large windows and double doors that open onto the old, sweetly disheveled garden. The room is large enough to hold different zones—comfy sofas in which to sink and ponder, a big table for writing on and pacing around, creamy walls to hold our growing sheaf of flip chart papers and sticky notes. It’s a thinking space, a working space, a making space, and an open space. Its fluidity mirrors the way we are circling and spiraling into this practice and the varied qualities of our individual thinking rhythms.

Entering this process of work in close collaboration with colleagues who are in the academy is both a delight and a mystery to me. We four have not worked together in this constellation before. There are active relationships between different twos and threes, and an easy warmth has swiftly arisen between four, but we don’t yet have a shared practice—of planning, of artistic creation, or of leadership—and the whole “artifact” we are here to design is a 3-day learning encounter for 12–15 artists that we will co-create and co-lead.

We come to the business of making from different directions right on Day 1. I am thinking we’ll start on our feet—singing, moving, improvising, then perhaps writing and speaking—to find the concept of the work through our experience, and others think that we’ll start with concepts; locating ourselves within our theoretical home before we move to design. I feel a moment of anxiety—maybe I’m the wrong person in the wrong place—and then exhale in the recognition that it is our very differences that will bring depth, resonance, and relevance to what we make.

Sitting on the sofas, we tell stories—Why are we each here? What is important to each of us? We share the question to whom or what am I accountable? Which opens the multiple levels on which we’d like to be working. Stacy says, “. . . the big picture/meta/ontological, the dreaming space of what might be, the specific, and the micro space of who what when . . .”.

All of it then.

We move around the table to define concepts (artistic citizenship, good practice, public pedagogy, wellbeing): How are they used now? How would we love them to be used in the future? Flashes of energy crackle—frustrations, inspirations, confusions, and connections.

We begin to feel the integration between our ideas and ourselves, and touch into the alignment we seek—to make the work as we would like the work to be experienced.

We notice the obvious and say it out loud: Negotiating the process of doing the work in front of us is a learning encounter in itself.

Kitchen: Tea and Biscuit Practice

Coffee, leftover Tarte Tatin, late morning. A fleeting glimpse of our resident family of muntjacs through the large windows overlooking the side garden. Four women are sitting around the dimly illuminated kitchen table.

We check in with each other around the table—a quintessential tea and biscuit practice—taking stock of each person’s moment and movement. We share in recognizing how “being well as an artist in the world” is a challenge right here and right now—letting each other into the familiar narratives of . . . work pressure coming from outside the “room,” complex family narratives, tiredness, conflicting priorities, too much distance from creative practice . . . and this messy realism makes the design process feel even more vital—in both senses of the word.

Katherine asks, “How is it for you? Is there anything that needs to be shared? Is there anything you need?”

The previous day had been challenging. We’d been working on concepts and key terms as foundational work for our learning encounter design. I felt stuck, slow, not able to keep up with the pace of the thoughts of the other three. I felt adrift, hyperaware of my lack of theoretical grounding in the topics we’re here to explore, and not trusting (perhaps not valuing?) the perspective I bring to this project. In my musical practice, I cherish the “in-between” spaces of not knowing, of becoming—Maxine Greene’s “I am who I am not yet” (in Pinar, 1998, p. 1), such fertile ground for growth and discovery. I’ve come to consider my musical practice as a kind of ever-evolving process of learning to be alive to all kinds of in-between spaces, spaces for imaginative interaction, and transformation. I realize the need to summon this practice here.

I am struck by the visceral dissonance I am experiencing between our passionate advocacy of transition from the ego- to the eco-centric and my inner life. I notice that I have strong attachments to particular activities and processes that I am offering and am besieged by a chorus of jostling internal doubt-criers—“your ideas aren’t good enough,” “your best practices are being squeezed out,” “you are the junior partner here because you have no academic background” . . . all versions of the great Me Me Me—one side being the ego-centric occlusion of self-centered doubt, and the other being the ego-centric straining to be important. I am embarrassed by myself and find myself holding shame. Then, I look around me, see the concentration and commitment of these three strong women, remember why we are making this work and am suffused with a sense of relief at the open invitation to rest in community, and to work eco-centrically together. Letting go of the anxious need to mark my own territory opens the space for a collective making of new territory in which we inspire each other to find ourselves in connection, to feel the gestalt, to create a whole-greater-than-the-sum-of-its-parts in which each and all of us are the right people in the right place at the right time. I tell myself that I am fine just as I am, that I am loved and loving, that I have a contribution to make and gifts to receive, and this in turn opens a deep well of gratitude. This inner shaking and spinning only takes about 10 minutes, and then I drink a glass of water.

Dining Room: An Unashamed Encounter

Katherine’s three simple questions, the feeling of trust around that table and the attentive listening practiced by all as we talk, allow the blockage to melt away. This spontaneous, unscheduled moment of shared reflection and mutual care reconnects me with myself, with my practice, with my colleagues, and with the enjoyment of the process. We reflect on our different ways of approaching the work—some more exploratory and embodied, some more conceptual and theoretical—and different starting points underpinned by shared values and toward a shared goal, the process of collaborative design made all the richer through a continual dance between these approaches, a constant movement between perspectives, modes, between practice and theory.

This unblocking is personal to me but also impacts the group. It is a reminder that no matter the discipline or the project at hand, creativity and collaboration call for full presence, embodiment, and openness from all participants.

A lightness of energy carries us through the rest of the day. It’s as if the sun has come out.

We go outside and move and sing in an unmeasured timespace of shared whole-body improvisation, bringing our new level of connectedness as a group into connection with nature. This moving from mind to body, heart to voice, idea to design, and anxiety to delight becomes, for a moment, the whole story.

We gather around the dining room table and engage in a productive and playful process of shared writing rooted in the sharply forged concepts of the previous day and illuminated by the light of connection, recognition, and embodied expression. It is exciting to hear about each other’s thinking, to share the flavors and nutrients of our work and think how to mix this collective dish so that we keep the distinctiveness of each element, while making something whole, wholesome, delicious, and balanced for our participants. We are experiencing exactly what it is that we hope to share.

Later that evening, I reflect on the movement of the day from tightness to ease, and how familiar those sensations felt. My anxiety about the relevance of my musical practice to this work has hindered me from accessing the very things I have learned through that practice that are so valuable to this work—in fact, they are this work. Embodied listening, curiosity, play, openness, care, embracing the ambiguous, moving toward the unknown, and enlivening in-between spaces—these are not just musical practices, or theatrical practices, or visual arts practices, but practices that underpin good work in and between all disciplines. Our late morning check-in was a gentle and much-needed intervention, a re-connection with what really matters. Perhaps our workshop is for participants what this week at Snape is turning into for me: a process of connecting with our embodied imaginative selves and our creative practices and bringing these into an unashamed encounter with the world.

Living Room: Care-Full Attention

On the third morning, we dive into the design process. We start individually, each writing down on separate small pieces of paper activities/processes that we would like to offer. We begin to see where we have common or overlapping practices and where we bring very different perspectives. There is no leader, and we have not discussed how we will make decisions about the final order of play; we are working from our vision for the learning encounter and focusing on how we bring our individual passions and practices to bear. Sticky notes and flip chart papers cover the dining table, and we move around placing our contributions, noting juxtapositions, and puzzling over contradictions and overlaps.

We move to the living room to do this work, and the decision-making process begins tentatively. It feels delicate and sensitive, each one wishes to ensure that the others feel respected and included, and I am struck by how different this feels from my earlier state; how much more pleasant and meaningful. I remind myself to keep sight of the core truth that journeying into care for others requires self-care. We pay care-full attention to each other, reminiscent of Nel Noddings’ answer to her own question: What are we like when we engage in caring encounters: “Perhaps the first thing we discover about ourselves ‘is that we are receptive; we are attentive in a special way’” (Noddings, 2002, p. 13).

There is a tension between time and content emerging, and we need to keep reaching back to the core purpose of the encounter we are designing to ensure that there is space for depth and integration of experience, as well as a variety of processes. We create a filter list through which to rinse our draft plan as it emerges.

Stillness—Movement

Energy: emotional tenor, cycles, flows

Indoor—outdoor

Self + others (looking in or looking out)

Balance of our voices

Individual/small group/large group

Modalities (varied)

Varying lengths

By the end of the day, we have a tentative plan. We also have our dinner cooked for us by the fifth member of our party, and the dining room is filled with vivid smells, rich flavors, surprising textures, and beautiful plating.

Chinois: David in the Kitchen

As we settle into the work of the day, we hear David close the heavy front door, the turn of the engine, and the crunch of tires on gravel. He’s off to forage. That day he drove to Aldeburgh Beach in search of fish fresh from the boats that work the North Sea. As we circled the table in the dining room, re-choreographing the flow and sequence of the learning encounter, David was in the kitchen, contemplating the available equipment.

There’s a pub at the end of the lane that serves food from the local area. A commercial kitchen must have a Chinois mesh sieve, was the reasoning and before long David was describing to the chef exactly how he was going to make a from the roasted prawn shells to accompany the fish. The Chinois was borrowed a further day to refine a stock made from the remains of a roast chicken and more ideas and techniques were shared between our Cook and the Chef on how to extract every last scrap of nourishment from the ingredients. That night we began our meal with chicken soup.

Cooking is often used as a metaphor for caring, for life, for companionship. As David cooks for us he is exploring the possibilities of ingredients, inventing the menu from what is in the market, and considering our personal likes and dislikes. There are no recipe books; rather, years of experience, a focus on the ingredients, and care and attention to the needs and desires of others. He is part of our knowledge-making as we talk over shared meals, listening attentively as we come to know each other more deeply.

Trying to be at home as an artist in the world needs nourishment and care.

Billiard Room: The Walls are Ringing

Our time together at Snape Bridge House is drawing to a close. We gather around the kitchen table for morning coffee and conversation, checking in with each other and on the news of the world “outside.” We review our plan for the day, constellated around what delicious leftovers in the refrigerator might be commissioned for lunch, what market or pub might supply another sumptuous dinner.

I wonder whether we’ve missed an opportunity to engage unsettlement as a creative-relational encounter with disorientation. I am just now realizing that this is what Ahmed (2006) is doing with disorientation: “Moments of disorientation are vital. They are bodily experiences that throw the world up, or throw the body from its ground. Disorientation as a bodily feeling can be unsettling, and it can shatter one’s sense of confidence in the ground or one’s belief that the ground on which we reside can support the actions that make a life feel livable” (p. 157). Ahmed says we can learn from these moments and I value the ways we have learned from our thoughts, feelings and experiences of unsettlement, anxiety, and discomfort here, in this essay as becoming disorientation. Does the learning encounter we’ve designed includes enough space to encounter moments of disorientation to practice and to re-orient practice as an emergent becoming—a creative-relational health?

We splinter into smaller groups to discuss other projects, other worlds. Some of us gather around the dining room table, others pull up to the coffee table in the piano room, sitting close enough to share a single computer Zoom screen. And then, in the afternoon, we come together around the billiard table to revisit and set our learning encounter plan. We return to our filters for another sifting, checking for dynamism, energy, setting, perspective, balance of voices and groups, modes of engagement, and timing. We’re happy with what we’ve done but unsettled by lingering questions around the weight of competitive orientation to practice, the push to view time as a commodity and a weapon in creative approaches to health.

Our unsettlement takes on a new energy and we become enlivened by the possibilities of turning the tables on these destructive understandings of practice through a creative-relational encounter that is caring (Noddings, 2002), suspends time, and sustains an atmosphere of support (G. Biesta, 2021b).

Creative-relational encounters resonate with Michael Chekhov’s concept of “atmosphere,” which he considers the “heartbeat” and the “lifeblood” of creative work (Chekhov, 1991, p. 35). Atmosphere is simultaneously co-created (relying on the desire and the embodied, relational presence of all participants) and discovered.

Atmosphere is not owned by anyone. It eschews polarity and embraces difference, complexity, and nuance. When working with atmosphere, the aim is not sameness or consensus but to explore our connection to ourselves with and in relation to others. This “feeling dimension which links everything together” (Chamberlain, 2004, p. 53) is the space of meaning-making, aliveness, and creativity. It is a binding energy that holds us with care and inclusion as we move and change. Atmosphere is never static. It is, as Jonathan Wyatt describes the creative-relational, “about movement, about process” (de Andrade et al., 2020, p. 7). In its energy, fluidity, and connectivity, it is like the hyphen in the creative-relational, which for Wyatt is:

where its energy lies, never allowing inquiry to be complacent, always encouraging it to consider what’s at stake, where it is, what work it’s doing, what it’s missing, what it’s assuming, and where else it might go. The hyphen does not privilege one over the other, the creative over the relational, nor the relational over the creative, but privileges the possibilities they offer in their constant movement, their uncertainty, their working together. (Wyatt in de Andrade et al., 2020, p. 11)

Our learning encounter begins with arrival-belonging-shared purpose and being here as ourselves. Our time at Snape mirrored this process. We asked: “why are you here?” and “What does this work mean to you?” As we listened to each other’s stories, we wrote down words, thoughts, and ideas that resonated. Each of us brought different experiences, different reasons for entering the work, and different practices. Becoming together as a quartet, the creative-relational space was enlivened.

I am struck by remembering that in our planning week, we tended to stay back in the safe space of words and concepts, despite our focus on the profound importance of embodied practices when we were working on the design process. We didn’t move ourselves through to “release of emotions . . . vulnerability or overwhelm”. We had never worked together as a quartet before—did we avoid that deeper work out of self-protection? In facilitating ourselves to work together in the future would we be more able to step away from the safety net of words and thoughts and enter that richer place?

Our encounter then introduces a relational orientation (me, us, and the world) and invites participants to imagine ourselves and our world differently: what if? And how? Finally, we return to themes of belonging and shared purpose and reflect on the change we have experienced.

Each day of the encounter begins with embodied movement and voice activities and moves through a variety of reflective modalities (creative writing, mapping, walking, discussing, creating) in solo, paired, small group, and whole group activities. The work is playful, varied and light but not always easy or comfortable. Roanna Mitchell observes that “experiential movement work that explores the body in movement and movement within the body (checking in with the self), work that expands the capacity for expression through movement (articulating something to the world), transformations in and for performance (embodying something other/inhabiting character), and improvisation” can bring about a “release of emotions and an acute moment of vulnerability or overwhelm” (Mitchell, 2022, p. 227). These uncomfortable feelings and sensations have a home in the creative-relational space. Rather than aiming for a static destination of knowing or certainty, the creative-relational is about movement and process. Could being well and making good practice as an artist in the world be described as an emergent becoming? A creative-relational health?

Garden: An Emergent Practice of Creative-Relational Health

Happy with our finalized plan for the learning encounter, we move outside into the buzzing afternoon garden. We tell the story of our earlier collective improvisation, recalling how joyfully we moved from mind to body and heart to voice. We remember the slip and pull of grass under foot, rough touch of apple tree bark, and the electric spark of ants moving across our toes and fingertips.

The stories we tell sow the seeds of an emergent practice of creative-relational health—what adrienne marie brown (2017) (drawing on Nick Obolensky, 2014) describes as noticing “the way small actions and connections create complex systems, patterns that become ecosystems and societies” (p. 3). Brown’s (2017) “emergent strategy” is inspired by Octavia Butler’s (1993) writing on our relationship to change “all that [we] touch [we] change/all that [we] change, changes [us].” Brown writes,

Many of us have been socialized to understand that constant growth, violent competition, and critical mass are the ways to create change. But emergence shows us that adaptation and evolution depend more upon critical, deep, and authentic connections, a thread that can be tugged for support and resilience. (p. 14)

We share a toast in the sun dappled afternoon. To an emergent practice of creative-relational health . . .

moving together in small actions

connecting imaginative selves in an ecosystem of creative practice

creating supportive, resilient and unashamed encounters with the world

changing all that we touch as it changes us!

Music Room: Meeting New Instruments

I’d asked to stay in a room closest to the piano. As we’re putting together this essay, Stacy says, “Aura, you’ll want to write about what happens for you in the music room!”

Paradoxically, the music room—the space I am expected to connect with most—is not the room that first calls me to respond. I think immediately of the conservatory, where we shared our motivations and histories, grappled with concepts, and brainstormed workshop activities: an energetic space. I think of the billiard room, where we reviewed our learning encounter design and its conceptual framework came into focus: a space of clarity. The dining room, where we moved through moments of struggle and difference with care, collaborated with rigor and humor and heard inspiring stories: a transformative space. Or the kitchen, where moments of checking in and listening built connection and understanding: a nourishing space. What happened in the music room?

At one end is a lounge suite and coffee table. At the other end, an old walnut Blüthner baby grand piano, an armchair, and a large window overlooking lush greenery. For our group, this is a room for practical work—not the exciting, energizing work of the conservatory or the dining room, but the necessary, almost mundane late afternoon work of organization, of attending to details, of planning. The music room is also a place of individual hideaway, to tackle a never-ending stream of incoming tasks and deadlines. It’s a room that bears witness to the pressures we each feel on our time and attention, and the challenge of maintaining a period of sustained focus. How can we balance the desire to be fully present in our work together and the pull of “urgent” tasks, the ever-increasing commodification of our time?

In our working lives we are many things to many people, with responsibilities that cannot be left at the door, despite the appearance of apparent “release.” We are colleagues, teachers, leaders, collaborators, consultants, partners; the weight of these multiple roles and responsibilities can distract, disorient and re-direct our thoughts and actions. Staying in the moment, as Biesta would have it, rests alongside Haraway’s staying with the trouble. But which trouble? Which disorientation? How do we balance and move between these, trusting in those with whom we work to help us through that trouble.

And it’s a room for making music and for thinking.

At the old Blüthner, work on Schumann’s D minor violin and piano sonata begins. Preparation for concerts doesn’t cease during this period; moments of practice are snatched in the before and after and in-between times of our workdays, fragments from our discussions continuing to resonate and mingle with piano practice, new connections forming. Encountering this new piano and this new repertoire, the opening sequence of our learning encounter finds new meaning. A pianist’s life is characterized by meeting and quickly forming partnerships with new instruments, learning to work with each piano’s personality—to embrace each piano’s characteristics and discover new sonorities and musical possibilities—to learn from the piano about how it wants to be played. Sensitivity to sensation and to sound is crucial for a fruitful connection between musician and instrument, as well as curiosity, open-mindedness, and imagination. Even the most solitary of pursuits—a single musician with their instrument—is at its core what we’re exploring at Snape: an emergent practice of creative-relational health. Our learning encounter develops the foundations for this practice. It begins with a flow of embodied sound and movement that sets analytical thought aside and awakens us to the sensations of having and being a body, and our body existing and moving in space. Exploring the silvery treble and the husky bass of this new collaborator, feeling the lightness of the piano’s action, the way the keys want to behave and the way the sound resonates in this room, a visceral realization drops in: instruments really do “talk back” to us (Cook, 2018) and we collaborate with them by drawing on embodied processes of listening (receiving) and giving (radiating) that underlie good relational practice; creative-relational health.

Red House: Contemplating the Possibilities

9:30 a.m. on the last day. Two small cars. Five people, five suitcases, computer bags, and several boxes of food. We had stripped the beds, swept the floors, put out the rubbish, checked all the rooms, and left the keys on the table inside the front door. There had been last walks early in the day—a moment of peace before embarking on the last morning of working together in a different location. From Snape Bridge House to the Red House.

Our visit to the Red House began in the gardens. In the warmth and stillness of the morning sunlight, we set out on our own pathways to explore the borders, the croquet lawn, the orchard, and the sculpture collection. Occasionally, we came together for a photo at the gazebo, by the archive house, to document our being in this place, together. Five figures converging and diverging in quiet contemplation of a space that had been a haven of peace and privacy for Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears.

Katherine has organized a surprise—a tour of the private rooms of the house with a guide who provided insights into the private lives of Britten and Pears; lives that were carefully curated to avoid public censure, yet, so closely and lovingly entwined. Their passion for the arts is evidenced in the extensive art collection that crowded every section of wall in the rooms upstairs. Their love of travel, of poetry and literature, and music documented in the books and artifacts set out on every surface. And throughout, a sense of care: for their discipline, for the people with whom they worked and the audiences they served, and, for each other.

In his speech “On Receiving the First Aspen Award,” Britten asks, “How far can a composer go in . . . considering the demands of people, of humanity?” He draws on examples from Beethoven to Shostakovich, Johann Strauss to Gershwin to illustrate the ways in which composers “make a conscious effort to speak with the voice of the people.” He speaks of an “artistic conscience” which guides his work, of the ways in which he seeks not only details on by whom and where his work will be performed, but also “the kind of people who will hear it, and what language they will understand . . . the age of the listeners and performers.” Making art for Britten was a “caring encounter” (Noddings, 2002).

The tour ends in Britten’s studio, a room aloft in the garden. Another music room. Wooden floors, Persian rugs, a desk at the window, a round table covered with manuscripts, photos of meetings in that room with musicians on the back wall, a Steinway grand piano angled in the corner. He composed perched on a stool looking out over the garden, discussed the work at the table, and rehearsed with Rostropovich among others in this space.

An artful piece of curation invites the visitor to press buttons on a display on the back wall to hear snippets of his music. Aura and I contemplate the possibilities. As pianists, it had to be Night Piece (Notturno) composed as a test piece for the 1963 Leeds Piano Festival. As the melody begins over a gentle rocking octave bass, we all begin to weep.

Reception Room: Where Love Makes Its Home

The Red House tour includes a stop in the Reception Room, created for the occasion of Queen Elizabeth II crossing the threshold on her visit to open Snape Maltings in 1967. Maxwell Ashby Armfield’s portrait of the couple, “Double Concerto,” presides over the table where the Queen signed the guest book. Actually, there were two paintings—the one that survived and was displayed for the Queen and photos of Armfield’s earlier version—the one with Peter’s arm resting along Benjamin’s shoulder. The tension, the gap of that absence hits me hard. I learn that Pears, in planning the commissioned portrait with Armfield, suggested the pose, but that later, the more reticent Britten asked that the arm be painted out (Hilton, 2021). The embrace is removed, considering history. Recalling the house and the tour in which the careful accounting of separate lives—separate money, color-coded labels on the insides of clothes (BB green, PP red), separate bedrooms were taken as proof that they weren’t a couple. Because they couldn’t be. Because of history. Because of needing “plausible deniability” of their marriage to skirt the law against them, even though that law had been overturned at the time of the commission. Because of their moving to Red House in the first place to escape the prying eyes of neighbors and fans who turned up unannounced at the house in Aldeburgh. As head archivist and librarian Christopher Hilton writes,

It is easy, over 50 years on, to think of the 1967 act as enabling gay men to come out and live uncomplicatedly at last. Yet, as any gay person alive at the time could testify, and as this painting demonstrates, decriminalisation did not mean destigmatisation, and the habits of discretion formed over a lifetime were hard to shake off.

And yet the love shining in their eyes in the painting and every photograph in Red House defies that story. Every one.

Hilton closes his essay with the observation that the painting symbolizes “the central role of their long marriage in fostering their art” even as it acknowledges “a freedom of which they could only dream” (Hilton, 2021). Listening to Britten play in his studio and looking out on the vista where he created, I weep too. I am moved by both the excruciating beauty of his playing and how the painting evokes the central tension of time and content, history, and their desire to make good practice as artists in the world. As we leave Red House to make our way to the train and later to the airport, I reflect on how our visit to the place where love made itself a home—however measured—lies at the heart of our creative-relational inquiry and the learning encounter of becoming together.

This moment resonates all these months later. I am there, disoriented and still learning from being thrown in another direction. Asking, what does this moment of disorientation “do and what can I do with it?” (Ahmed, 2006, p. 158). I felt these were my own (queer) questions and shy about including it in this essay. But Katherine, Margaret and Aura reminded me how moments of disorientation and what we do with them are affirming—even hopeful. So, I offer it here, a possible moment of disorientation that might move you in new directions, too.

Departures and Returnings

In his 2004 essay Life as narrative, Jerome Bruner (2004) explores the forms of thinking that go into constructing narratives to consider “. . . analysis of the stories we tell about our lives: our ‘autobiographies’” (p. 691). He suggests that autobiography be viewed as a “. . . set of procedures for ‘life-making’” (Bruner, 2004, p. 692), a process which is an “interpretive feat,” a “selective achievement of memory recall” (Bruner, 2004, p. 693). Crucially, he suggests that we “. . . become the autobiographical narratives by which we ‘tell about’ our lives” (Bruner, 2004, p. 694). Are we engaged in a form of autobiography as we engage in this writing process, as we tell and re-tell this experience? Over a period of several weeks, we have written initial reflections in a shared document, met on zoom, written some more, met on zoom, written some more, and so on. Our interactions are care-full and respect-full as we read each other’s accounts of experience, consider the ways in which these expand our understandings of the experience of working together, and contemplate what this means as a component of “self.” We are becoming the narrative we are telling.

There is still discomfort that keeps arising in me which is to do with privilege, time and space . . . thinking of my ordinary life as an artist-in-the-world and how rarely I/we have the space and time to work as we four did that week, funded by The Academy. This privilege is hardly ever available to most of us. Usually when trying to make good practice as an artist in the world I/we are working in much more challenging circumstances . . . which means our processes and practices are subject to different stresses and strains . . . We must find our creative relationality within all and whatever circumstances in which we find ourselves, which requires great resourcefulness and resilience . . . So the processes we have designed in the learning encounter, as I see it, are about a kind of intense recalibration, creating the conditions in which people over a very short time can experience themselves in reflective connection, care, courage, which they then may take forward into their work in the world. What we don’t know is how long the effect lasts, or what kind of use people will make of it.

This is not a process of arriving at a singular definitive account of what happened, when, where, and why. What is not said here tells as much as what is. The histories we each bring to this place, the histories of the place itself, and the new histories we are creating together emphasize the narrative multiplicities that become “something new that happens in the act” of making (Wyatt in de Andrade et al., 2020, pp. 6, 5). To make good practice as artists in the world is to build community, to share histories, to write and re-write and become our autobiographies of what it is to be an artist, an emergent process of constant making, reflection, and re-making as creative-relational health.