Narrative Mandalas: Improvising with Word and Image
Four people walk slowly into a darkened room and occupy four chairs surrounding logs positioned to resemble a camp fire. In front of them, twenty people sit in three snuggly packed rows of chairs. Behind them, a fire crackles on a projection screen. One of the four begins to tell a story which the other three develop and complete. It is the story of the old woman of the world who has spent her days since time immemorial in her mountain cave weaving a beautiful tapestry and tending to a cauldron that contains the seeds of all life. One day, while she is tending to the cauldron of seeds, a black dog enters and unravels the entire tapestry. The old woman calmly sits back down and begins weaving a new tapestry even more beautiful than the first.
"We are a people who weave stories," one of the four around the campfire tells the assembled group. "The seeds of our people are the images that come to us in dreams, and we tend to them when we gather. We weave stories out of those images to create meaning and to participate in the continual renewal of the world." On the projection screen, images of the "seeds" of the gathering -- images drawn largely from the dreams of the four storytellers -- are slowly rotated through, named but not explained. The four storytellers then proceed to tell a second story, very different from the first. This story is completely improvisational. The tellers use the "seed" images as prompts and inspiration for their narrative. When each teller has spoken and the tale has come to a close, three of them leave their seats. Members of the gathering are invited to occupy the vacant chairs to weave new stories, improvising and collaborating with one another and with the seeds of the unconscious.
The ritual described in brief above was the culmination of a creative collaboration amongst myself and three classmates in a course titled Creative Dialog and Design at the Pacifica Graduate Institute, and it proved to be a remarkably powerful, moving, experience for those in attendance. A central theme of the course was creative collaboration, and the project provided an abundance of experiential material to reflect upon with regards to this topic. In effect, the project involved three distinct but interwoven collaborations: the development of the presentation/ritual with my three cohort members; the collaborative, improvisational space the "story weavers" were invited into; and, on a depth psychological level, the collaboration between the four creators and the material arising from the unconscious in the form of dreams and synchronicities. In this paper, I will highlight elements of creative collaboration that were illuminated during these three processes, sometimes intentionally but just as often stumbled into. Furthermore, I will consider how this ritual of collaboratively creating what I would call "narrative mandalas" may address unmet needs in a culture starved for meaning and connection.
Creation of the Ritual: Design Thinking and Wu-Wei
To highlight and bring to life the academic content of the course Creative Dialog and Design, cohort members were divided into small groups of two to four and given the task of collaborating on a creative project to be presented during the cohort's quarterly residential gathering. Each group had approximately one month of preparation time and could choose between presenting creative work, researching and delivering findings on a creative circle of artists, or teaching the rest of the cohort members a craft or skill.
My group members and I were quite geographically dispersed (New York, Washington, California, and British Columbia). In our initial conversation, our geographically diverse group (New York, Washington, California, and British Columbia) decided that we were most interested in developing an original creative project, that we use Slack as the primary digital tool for our collaboration, and that we would engage in a few improvisational exercises (such as the exquisite course) as a way of "priming the collaborative pump". We developed a Slack channel titled "the soup" in which we posted images, songs, videos, dream material, or our own creative work from which we were drawing inspiration. We agreed that we would not rush to develop the form and structure of the project and would instead allow for ideas to emerge, percolate, and cross pollinate.
It quickly became clear that our intention to carry a flexible, adaptive approach into the collaboration was warranted. Life, as it is wont to do, intervened on every front. All of our group members were experiencing a major life events (my own was the birth of my daughter) that made it difficult for us to coordinate on the exercises we had developed. We shifted course, abandoned the exercises, and focused on supporting one another through the challenges we were each facing. We began using "the soup" as well as the Slack discussion board as a means of sharing creative inspiration and as a forum to reflect on how the events in our lives were influencing our creative process. This "off track" period proved to be invaluable for building the trust and goodwill our group members felt for one another. It also led to a sense of trust in the process itself, and we decided that we would each bring four pieces of artwork to the residential and would lean into emergent spontaneity during the day set aside for preparation. This is not to say each of us did not occasionally experience some anxiety or discomfort in resisting the urge to impose more form and structure earlier in the process, but we grew more assured that the life experiences we were in the midst of and the creative material that we were generating would suggest the ultimate form of the project if we could be patient. Furthermore, as the primary concern of the group shifted from the final output of the collaboration to the wellbeing of our fellow group members, we paradoxically developed a more relaxed and playful attitude toward the project itself, one that was essential for the largely improvisational form our project ultimately took.
Two concepts in particular informed and inspired our approach in during our collaboration. The ancient Chinese concept of wu-wei is an elusive, complex term that translates roughly as "no doing". The scholar Edward Slingerland points out that this literal translation hides the deeper, kaleidoscopic significance of the phrase. He explains:
"[Wu-wei] is not at all about dull inaction. In fact, it refers to the dynamic, effortless, and unselfconscious state of mind of a person who is optimally active and effective. For the person in wu-wei, proper and effective conduct follows as automatically as the body gives in to the seductive rhythm of a song. This state of harmony is both complex and holistic, involving as it does the integration of the body, the emotions, and the mind." (2014, p. 7)
Slingerland further describes wu-wei as "effortless action" or "spontaneous action", and our group made a conscious effort not to force events but to stay attentive and aligned to what "wanted" to emerge at any given moment. As one might imagine, this often proves to be an elusive goal, but the concept nonetheless proved to be an invaluable guiding star in that it helped us quickly identify when we were definitely not in a state of wu-wei, times when we were getting mired in narrow, results oriented thinking. As Slingerland notes, "adding the words wu-wei and de [the "charismatic power" of one who embodies wu-wei] to our verbal repertoires will help us gain insight into aspects of our mental and social world that we have tended to miss." (2014, p. 8) Simply having the term wu-wei at our disposal gave us a general idea of what we wanted our collaborative efforts to feel like.
The second concept embraced by the group early in our discussions was design thinking. Design thinking is a largely improvisational, highly iterative process of creative design. The approach favors repeated experimentation and tweaking over careful planning and is used by design firms such as IDEO. (Sawyer, 2017, p. 34) Although I was a history major, I went to university in Palo Alto and was surrounded by engineers, computer programmers, and start-up aspirants. I distinctly remember visiting IDEO's headquarters down the road from campus in 1999 and being incredibly impressed by the flood of creativity unleashed by the company's design process (which our tour guide almost giddily described to us). The design thinking approach is what inspired our group to start our collaboration with a series of improvisational games as opposed to immediately jumping into project planning. Fortunately, we also had the concept of wu-wei to guide us when it turned out that our group was too wrapped up in the exigencies of life to fully dive into design thinking!
Finally, the group was also inspired by principles of musical or theatrical improvisation. Fundamental to developing trust in improv is the concept of "saying yes" or "not blocking". This refers to the principle that when an improviser suggests a new musical direction or a plot twist, they know that their fellow improvisers will pick up on it and not shoot it down or reject it. (Madsen, 2005, p. 27) There are at least two benefits to this approach: it helps develop the sense of trust and safety among the group that is crucial for the inherently vulnerable act of improvisation; and it puts all of the improvisers in an open, embracing mindset. We will work with whatever arises and make the very best of it could be the credo of the improviser. "The soup" channel on our Slack page was very useful in this respect in that we had a place to introduce, entertain, and catalog all of our ideas and images, keeping them in a state of potentiality without rejecting them.
Creating the preconditions for spontaneity through structure
Having agreed to each bring four pieces of original art inspired or informed by our collaborative process, our group arrived at the residential without any concrete plan as to how we would synthesize and present our work. The idea of sharing the story of the old woman in the cave had surfaced one week prior (in circumstances I will describe in part III), but the thought of creating narratives prompted by the images of our artworks and inviting audience members to join us in narrative improvisation did not arise until the day before the presentation. As is often the case in collaborative work, I cannot recall who put forth the original idea or when or what prompted it. Suffice to say, all of our group members were excited (and nervous) by taking collaboration and improvisation a step further and making them central to the presentation itself. Our experience of working together as a group had demonstrated the unpredictable magic of collaborating in the spirit of wu-wei and improvisation, and we realized that our process itself represented our most compelling and creative expression. As opposed to reporting this insight to our course members or even demonstrating it through improvisation of our own, we decided to present the opportunity for our audience to participate in the improvisational act. We began to think of our offering not as a presentation but as a ritual, one that might be both deepened and expanded by including all of our colleagues as potential creators and collaborators.
Creating a space of ritual reveals one of the paradoxes of spontaneity and improvisation: people (and one might venture to say life in general) typically require a great deal of structure and form in order to be maximally spontaneous. Comedy improv, for example, often occurs in extremely structured context. One common model is for improvisers to play on teams and compete in very clearly articulated games that last exactly three minutes. Any soccer match or basketball game exhibits the same phenomenon: the clearly defined structure of the game is the container which enables and gives boundaries to the incredible spontaneity of the content of the gameplay. Boundaries and rules give all-important shape to improvisation (even when part of the improvisation may involve bending and breaking those rules), and they make it easier for improvisers to trust the collaborative space because they know they share a set of common understandings with their fellow players/performers. Structure makes it easier for a performer or a group as a whole to drop into a state of wu-wei and thus express themselves in a way that is both spontaneous and self-assured, a quality we recognize in a great jazz group or a skilled improv troupe.
In his book A Taste for Chaos, writer and literary scholar Randy Fertel explores the inherent tension between order and chaos, craft and spontaneity. Fertel aligns the improviser with the Greek god Hermes, the god of boundaries, travelers, thieves; a transgressive deity who nonetheless exists within and largely respects the cosmic order of the Greek pantheon. (2015, p. 204) The art of improvisation does not aim at perfection in the manner of classical ballet or the Japanese tea ceremony. Fertel asserts that improvisation "scorns mastery" and "invites us to experience the green world, less orderly and more dangerous than the world of civilization, and, in Folly's words, "all the truer for that." (2015, p. 447) Improvisation is about knowing more of the world, expanding and enriching our humanity.
Once we had decided upon the general shape of our ritual, our spent relatively little time preparing or practicing what we were actually going to say but a good deal of time discussing how we would create a space that felt safe and inclusive enough for our audience/cohort members to feel comfortable joining us in improvisational storytelling. We focused on arranging a physical space that would set the right tone for the ritual and developing clear parameters for the improvisation.
Atmosphere
We wanted to transform the feel of the large lecture room into an intimate, familiar, yet evocative space. Ritual space is a space apart from ordinary, clock-time reality. People gathering around a fire to tell stories is an archetypal experience likely going back to the very earliest days of our species. We also wanted to create the sense that, during the ritual, everyone had permission and encouragement to step out of their persona. We introduced the ritual by referring to the members of our gathering as Stove Touchers (a playful name we had adopted for our group), suggesting inclusion in a close-knit group with shared cultural practices.
Creating clear structure
As part of the ritual, our group explained and then modeled the collaborative storytelling process. Each story would be told by four people, and each speaker would have one image as a prompt for their portion of the narrative. We had created a ritual object, a wooden sword engraved with words and phrases that had been significant during our group process, that each teller would hold while they were speaking and then pass to the next teller. To create additional layers of reassurance and support, one of the four of our group sat with each quartet of storytellers.
Collaboration with the unconscious
It became evident early on in our group process that we were not only collaborating with one another but also with the unconscious (our own personal unconscious, but also the collective). Impactful dreams and synchronicities had as much if not more influence on the ultimate direction of our project than any consciously held ideas. Dream images formed the basis of many of the artworks that found their way to the "cauldron" of seed images used for the narrative improvisation ritual. Three images in particular kept recurring in our discussions, art, and in synchronistic experiences: the soup (cauldron), the tapestry (weaving), and the sword. We knew we had to integrate each of these images into our ritual.
One particularly synchronistic occurrence, in retrospect, provided virtually all of the raw material for what ultimately became our ritual/presentation. One evening, I was looking for information on the Lakota Sioux creation myth story of the old woman in the cave to post to my fellow group members. When I first heard a recording of this story more than a decade ago as told by Michael Meade at the 2008 Bioneers Conference, it captivated me and kindled an interest in storytelling and myth that has only grown over the years. I wanted to share the story because it speaks to the creative process, but also to the importance of creative destruction (which several of us were feeling/experiencing at the time). Before I had a chance to post my findings, one of my group members posted a link to an audio recording of Michael Meade telling the old woman of the cave story. It seemed only natural to use the story to initiate the ritual. Furthermore, we integrated the image of the cauldron (with its store of limitless potentiality) as well as the image of the tapestry (to suggest the weaving together of creation as well as the weaving of stories). The old woman of the cave seemed to be the embodiment of the improviser's credo, work with whatever arises and make the very best of it. The image of the knife, wildly recurrent in the lead up to the residential, was integrated as a kind of talking piece. The knife also seemed to point to the creative/destructive power of the black dog in the story, as well as a creative/active yang principle necessary to bring balance and definition to the more passive/encompassing yin quality of the cauldron.
Narrative Mandalas
Reflecting on this powerful experience of ritual some time afterward, I began to think of the creations of the foursomes of storytellers as narrative mandalas. Throughout the second half of his life, Carl Jung gravitated to the mandala as an archetype of wholeness, a squaring of the circle. Diane Fineiello Zervas notes that Jung found that in analysis "during periods of psychic turbulence and chaos, the mandala symbol often appears spontaneously as a compensatory Archetype, bringing order, showing the possibility of order. As such it signifies the center of the whole personality, which is not that of the ego, but of the self." (2019, p. 179)
Just as we seem to be drawn to the image of the mandala during times of turmoil, we are also drawn to stories. The narrative arc of story seems to be fundamental to human nature; stories are how we organize and make sense of the world. And yet even though we are inundated with stories and are living in a so-called golden age of television, most of us do not think of ourselves as tellers or weavers of story. We are consumers of a great many stories, but we do not sit and share and live stories with one another in community the way our species has done since time immemorial. Jung believed the mandala helps the psyche move towards balance and healing. This collaborative experience was a potent reminder for me that stories have this power as well.
References
Fertel, R. (2015). A taste for chaos: the art of literary improvisation. New Orleans, LA: Spring Journal, Inc.
Madsen, P.R. (2005) Improv wisdom: don't prepare, just show up. New York, NY: Bell Tower.
Sawyer, K. (2017). Group genius: the creative power of collaboration. New York, NY: Basic Books.
Slingerland, E. (2014). Trying not to try: ancient China, modern science, and the power of spontaneity. New York, NY: Broadway Books.
Zervas, D.F.(2019). Intimations of the self: Jung's mandala sketches for the red book The art of C.G. Jung. New York, NY: W.W. Norton and Company.