Exploring Participation, by Susanne Burns

Photo courtesy of Tate Britain

As a consultant working with a wide range of clients, I am passionate about building relationships with organisations over time and over projects that can embed learning in the heart of the organisation. One of the most precious things I can have is a long term relationship with an organisation that is mutually respectful and premised on trust and respect.

When I first started to work with Fevered Sleep in 2013, I was supporting the evaluation of Future Play, a four-year research project that set out to investigate existing models for touring performance for children. The commitment of the company to learning was immediately apparent to me and we found we shared an approach to research and learning that was both rewarding, challenging and productive. So, when in 2016, the company secured stable funding over a four-year period, it seemed obvious that we should seek to find a way to use the journey they would undertake over that period as a research site for developing our understanding of the company’s work and their approach to participation.

Our proposition was that their work is distinctive and that this distinctiveness creates ‘value’ which impacts on artists, collaborators, participants and audiences. We wanted to concretise the embodied knowledge that we know sits within the company and render visible the things that might otherwise be hidden. We wanted to explore the precise nature of the processes and resulting work to be better able to articulate what might sit at the heart of the work and explore what participation might mean in that context.

Our learning journey started with Men and Girls Dance in 2016 and will end in 2020. I am ‘walking alongside’ the company as the programme of work develops over the time period. I am having conversations, carrying out interviews and reading material produced by others in order to examine the work through a range of different lenses – those involved in making the work, those delivering the work, those presenting it, those directly experiencing it as participants or audience members and those further removed from it as funders or commentators.

Through the Funders lens

“For me, their distinctiveness comes from their ability to spotlight difficult issues and deal with them in ways that are sometimes quirky, always powerful and always authentic.”

Fevered Sleep’s work is definitely ideas led, often issue driven and therefore often ‘political’. Interviewees have described the work as ‘risky’, ‘challenging’, ‘brave’, ‘provocative’ and ‘powerful’. However, many other creative artists are making work that could be described in that way.

Others are also making work with a strong participatory element. So, is there anything different about Fevered Sleep’s work and if there is what is it? What is ‘authentic’ to Fevered Sleep?Already it is evident that the journey we are taking is surfacing and rendering explicit some overarching principles.

David and Sam recently took time out to reflect on future plans and came up with a general principle: “Across all of these projects we want to create ways for people to come together to think and talk and listen and debate and reflect on the work we make; and for this to be part of the work we make.” [David Harradine and Sam Butler ‘Projects We Want to Do and Don’t (and Things We Don’t Mind) (and a General Principle)]

This seems to sit at the heart of what we are trying to explore and understand. In the nuanced world of ‘participatory arts’  there is often a distinction drawn between participation and creative practice but what is important to Fevered Sleep is that this distinction does not exist:

“We don’t see our creative process as a mechanism for creating opportunities for participation; instead we have come to recognize the importance of the participation of other people in our creative process as essential to its success.” [David Harradine, Men & Girls Dance, Animated] 

There appears to be a co-dependency between the process through which the work is created and the quality (and qualities) of the work itself.Through the Artists Lens“There is a significant relationship and correlation between the process and the resulting artwork. Something about the process led devising and creation feeds into the aesthetic.”

Sometimes the work the company makes is explicitly participatory. For example, Men and Girls Dance brought together five adult male professional dancers with nine girls who dance as a hobby.

Through the Presenter’s Lens

“The work is not strictly co-created. David and Sam come with clearly formed and strong ideas and structures. They take responsibility to ensure all work sits within a strong considered artistic vision. However, respect was also given to the contribution of the girls who were involved in the process of making something. This is different to other forms of participation – more engaged. Anyone who comes into contact with the work engages with it in some way.”

But, sometimes it is not explicitly participatory - the participation is part of a research process. For example, schools’ workshops with children were part of the research and development of Dusk bringing a child’s perspective to the creative ideas.

Sheep, Pig Goat was an experiment in which human artists performed for animals in front of an audience. The encounters were used to start a conversation with the audience and with experts which led to a deeper understanding of the ideas and further iterations of the work.It is also likely – probably as a direct result of this synergy - that the process will generate more than one art work. For example, Men & Girls Dance was a performance piece, a newspaper and a Talking Shop.

Through the Artist’s lens

“We see traces of the process on stage, it is made evident – they share the materiality of the process with us, the contextualization is shared with us. This is a generous political act and often the process becomes an art work in its own right – for example, the newspapers in Men & Girls Dance. Each element exists in its own right and the same aesthetic compass is applied to the realization of each element.”

This multi facetted approach to making art is characterised by a commitment to genuine two-way dialogue between the artists and the participants. A dialogue that is open and honest and that seeks not just to engage the participants in Fevered Sleep’s process but to engage Fevered Sleep in the thinking of their participants. It is reciprocal and mutually participatory. Agency is challenged.

Through the Collaborators Lens

“In this context the notion of ‘participation’ becomes complex. When there is a material connection between process and the resulting artwork and multiple ways of engaging with the themes and content of the work, participation is multi facetted and layered. We all participate in the world and with one another. FS invite people to participate in their artistic journeys and in return David and Sam participate with their perspective. There is an equity, mutuality and reciprocity that is safe, coherent, that allows space for risk taking but which requires careful facilitation and consideration.  They create opportunities for ‘careful participation’ – empathy, openness, the creation of a space of possibility.”

We see a multiplicity of voices gathered through multiple mechanisms for involvement and participation contributing to the resulting work. This is an approach that requires considerable care – ‘careful participation’ - to ensure that people are treated with integrity.

Through the Commentators Lens

“There are so many traps here that could have curdled my enthusiasm. Glibness, exploitation, grandstanding, incompetence: I’ve seen all of then in participatory projects. Here, I saw care, method, bravery, openness and a consistent consciousness of the risks involved – especially for those outside the company. The decisive element was sensing that these artists were genuinely more interested in those they were working with than in their own ideas. That was evident in each dancers performance and in the projects conception and execution The different elements make a whole with beauty, political resonance and human integrity., That’s a rare trick to pull off.” [A Restless Art]

So, as we start our learning journey we have begun to uncover some things. It is on one level an introspective process and and yet it is involving others and provoking dialogue in the process. It is a challenging process and one that sits comfortably with the ethos of the company. In some senses then, it is a research process that aligns with the company’s approach to making work and we will seek to share our journey as we progress and develop our ideas generating debate and dialogue. The opportunity to reflect this deeply is a privilege and one that we will maximize.

Susanne Burns, August 2017

*All quotes are from interviews and conversations unless otherwise referenced.