Making Sense Under a Midnight Sun

Abstract

This essay analyzes the sense-making practices at work in directing a Russian–American youth arts program that included 2 weeks in Russia, and the production of a documentary film about that program. Both the filmmaker and the transdisciplinary art program director examine together their efforts to make sense of the event as their expectations for it collapse. We explore ways the creative practices of our disciplines shape our sense making and structure how we understand success, failure, and art. We trace how our experience both eludes sense and makes sense, and seek to reflect the provisional, incomplete, and emergent status of both our collaboration and our experiences of sense making. We struggle with the impulse that knowledge must be tamed and stabilized by narrative to be theoretically productive, and we suggest that the processes of thoughtfully and creatively contextualizing lived experiences have knowledge-value that exceeds the “success” or “failure” of their expression in conventional forms.