Social Dreams, Social Matters: Artistic Affluence in Social Dreaming
Image credit: Bongsu Park, Dreamscape
Join us on Thursday, 17 November, from 5-8pm GMT/UTC, for the Opening of this new art exhibition!
The Tavistock Institute of Human Relations, London
In this exhibition, a range of art works critically explores the generative and performative nature of dreaming. Connecting the richness of artistic responses with the theory and practice of Social Dreaming – a radical exercise in sharing, associating to and working with dreams – this exhibition is not to be missed.
Come to the opening to speak to artists, researchers, academics, Social Dreaming practitioners, and Group Relations consultants. Come to think and enquire about the power of dreams and their potential to change how we think about ourselves and the wider world.
During the pandemic, the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations held weekly online Social Dreaming matrices. Why were they so popular and what did they offer to those who came to them? Join us to find out and to experience the meaning of Social Dreaming yourself… What is the societal unconscious trying to tell us? Listen, see, feel, and sense… Think, envision, imagine, free-associate…
The event is open to all. If you would like to see the exhibition but can’t make the Opening, get in touch with Maria at m.markiewicz@tavinstitute.org to see the artwork another time. We look forward to dreaming with you!
Artist bios:
Bongsu Park is a London-based, multidisciplinary Korean artist and long-term collaborator with the Tavistock Institute. Her recent work is founded on how our innermost thoughts may connect with other people’s and how these can then be shared publicly through dreams. She has exhibited internationally including at Zona Maco Arte Contemporáneo, México, FIAC, France, and The Moving Image Istanbul, Turkey. Her performance work was shown at Camden Arts Centre, Gallery Rosenfeld, and The Coronet Theatre in London.
Marie Beauchamps is an Amsterdam-based poet, creative entrepreneur, and an academic working across humanities, social sciences, and law. She has published extensively on affective politics, national identity, and the politics of movement, now engaging with questions of pedagogy and knowledge-writing practices in their relation to knowledge production. She is an Associate Researcher at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, and one of the pioneering practitioners of the Deepening Creative Practice programme.
Juliet Scott is a visual artist with an interest in still life and object relations, and a social scientist interweaving between these disciplines through her studio research. She oversees organisational curation projects and the creation of dynamic learning environments including as programme director of Deepening Creative Practice with Organisations at the Tavistock Institute.
The event will take place on Thursday 17 November, from 5-8pm GMT, in person, in the Tavistock Institute’s office on Gee Street, London (3rd floor, 63 Gee Street, near Old St tube).
It was 2019 when I was asked to give a workshop on creative writing for PhD students at the University of Amsterdam. In retrospect, this was the start of the journey that has lead me to become a creative entrepreneur and to develop a series of workshops, such as Creative Writing for Academics and Storytelling for Grant Applicants.
This blogpost invites you on that journey, providing you with five tips to explore how to integrate creative writing into your academic work.
Curious about the foundation of this work? In my article Doing Academia Differently, I tell the story of what pushed me to explore creative writing as a tool in academic writing.
Creative writing is an effective tool to catch readers’ attention while grounding them into scenes. It is also a tool that helps develop a narrative even though you may think that your work is not a story—it is.
Academic authors who insert creative writing into their texts provide their readers with splashes of sensory experience. They draw their readers into the world that they researched; they take them by the hand, cracking the codes of conventions to help them enter some of the most obscure areas of our brain, of our bodies, and of our societies. Smells come to life; colours become pointers for grounding the reader into a scene; the light signals specific moments in time; shapes arise, taking the form of human and non-human characters.
With creative writing, an author is no longer only telling, but showing what their research led them to discover, and what that means for our understanding of the world. Creative writing endows a text with more space and more freedom for readers to appropriate it. A creative text doesn’t tell the reader how to read; it creates a setting from which subtexts emerge, there for the reader to immerse themselves in an experience.
Tip 1. Ground your
reader into a scene
A rule of thumb to get
your reader immersed in your material is to ground them into a scene, again and
again. A scene is like a zoomed-in photograph; it pauses on a specific moment
at a specific place, giving cues for the reader to experience that moment.
The broken white colour of the wall, the smell of coffee lingering around, the tic-tac-tic-tic-tac
of fingers pressing laptops keys, the moist eyes of the dog looking at you
while you write. Scenes transport the reader into another space and time.
A scene could be close to
you, a moment during the research process, such as when you open a dusty, classified
box in the archive; your first encounter with a respondent; your sensations
when arriving nearby the embassy hosting a political refugee. But a scene can
also be about something more distant. The setting of a speech, the atmosphere
of the parliament, the mood of a crowd, the frame of a report.
Not all your writing needs to be staged as a scene. But inserting a scene regularly will make the reader come with you along your research journey. If you lose them along the way, they’ll find you back at your old woden desk, by the window, or at the river side. Just allow them to be on your side, wherever you are.
Tip 2. Evoke all the
senses
Have you written your first scene already? Great! Now, check how many senses your scene evokes. The more senses, the stronger the scene becomes. Was the coffee bitter? Which noise came through? What kind of light shone on the walls? Was the room smelling of wooden floors, or was the building sweating with concrete off-gassing? Was the air crisp, thick, warm? Make your reader taste, hear, see, smell, and touch what you have been tasting, hearing, seeing, smelling and touching. Or even better: steer your reader’s experience by evoking those senses that will make them concentrate on the details you want them to see. Each sensory detail is a tool to attract their attention, paving the way for your theoretical and analytical claim to land naturally.
Tip 3. Keep the language
as simple as possible
Academic writers are
notorious for throwing expensive words at each corner of their sentences. Sometimes
those words have their purpose; they bring in nuances or technical details that
couldn’t be mentioned otherwise. Although they have qualities in common, metaphors
and metonymies are not the same, and identifying a synecdoche can at times be
helpful. But the most powerful texts remain those where jargon has been
replaced by everyday language.
Your best ideas will especially land if you can convert them into simple and elegant images.
Take Virginia Woolf’s credo for instance: “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” No one can claim not to understand her claim because of the language. And yet, her sentence shelters a powerful criticism of patriarchal societies, which has resonated worldwide for nearly 100 years.
Tip 4. Establish who
and what are the characters of your story
While scenes should be cornerstones of your writing on a micro level, your narrative will especially thrive if you establish a conversation between different characters throughout your entire piece. A character can be human: yourself as the researcher, a respondent, a historical figure; but it can also be a non-human actor: a building, a document, a plant, a concept, a theory.
To get you going, here is a list of question that may spark a beginning: how do your characters feel? Are they introvert, extravert, complacent, stubborn, conservative, expanding? How do they make you feel and why? What would you like to know about them that you don’t know yet (think wild, imagine they are human)? Is it easy to communicate with them, why, why not, what do they keep secret? From experience, I noticed that these questions are particularly generative when your charachter is a non-human one.
The point is to
establish dynamic relationships between the various characters in your work. As
Helen Sword suggests in her fantastic writing guide Stylish
Academic Writing, you may want to play around and copy classic plot
structures, such as the murder mystery plot where the researcher searches for
clues, follows a few hints, and applies their deductive power to solve the enigma.
Or such as the Pride and Prejudice structure, where two seemingly incompatible
concepts are brought into a single conceptual space, where they flirt, dance,
argue and laugh to the point that they will never leave each other ever again.
For more examples of possible plot structures, see Helen Sword’s chapter “The Story
Net.”
Characters and their relationships
will help you create focus into your writings; they will allow you to play
around with points of view; and they will help the reader experience the
different facets of your truth.
Tip 5. Work on the overall
plot of your piece
Every writer experience at some point a writer’s block. I remember working on the introduction of my book and feeling completely lost in the myriads of possibilities to tell why I wrote the history of denaturalization law in the first place. I was saved by applying a very simple exercise: what was the story of that book? What happened? Why? And where was this going next? Instead of writing full paragraphs in all their details, I wrote a two-page sketch of my introduction plot. This allowed me to visualize the structure of the narrative. The rest came naturally.
In the end, every writer
is a storyteller. Developing the overall arch of your story will help you find
focus and directions, paving the way to insert scenes, sensory details, and
character relationships.
Conclusion: From
research to communication, and back again
Not only is creative writing an attractive means of communication for reaching a broader audience, but it is also a way to investigate the most complex aspects of our subjects of analysis.
Try it out, and you’ll be surprised by how creative writing doesn’t only change the way you write, but also the way you see and understand your own material in the first place. Five easy ways to start are: 1. Ground your reader into scenes; 2. Evoke as many senses as possible; 3. Keep the language as simple as possible; 4. Establish who and what your characters are; 5. Work on the overall plot of your piece.
As one of the participants in Amsterdam elegantly summarized: “When you are stuck, go and play.” A lesson that is not only valid for writing, but for life in general.
It has been a year since my article “Doing Academia Differently” was published. Writing the article had been a transformative experience. It inspired me to design my workshops Creative Writing for Academics, and it pushed me to start working as a creative entrepreneur, staying in touch with academia, but from a different position.
While the article was finding its audience, and after I had had the chance to experience the power of making space for researchers to explore their writings in new ways, I experienced one of the most severe winters of my life and had to shut down for a couple of months.
Reading Katherine May’s Wintering helped me make sense of that experience. I loved the way she pays attention to nature’s capacity to adapt to extreme colds. From afar, it then may look as if nothing happens. But when we look closely, we see all kinds of activities going on: burgeons have formed on bare branches, still closed, but ready to burst open when spring comes. Hibernating animals breathe differently, lower their body temperature, change their chemical balance.
Nature doesn’t stop when winter comes. It adapts; it transforms.
So did I, breathing through extreme nauseas, dizziness, and complete exhaustion that came with pregnancy. I entered a subterranean kingdom, a kingdom where time and space function differently. A kingdom of silence. A kingdom of untold stories.
The extremes of being in a woman body is full of silences and is such an untold story. An untold story that I may start writing, bit by bit, as I resurface into the world. Revisiting what it means to be a mother; revisiting what I do for work; finding new patterns in search of equilibriums.
What’s coming up:
And so, we are now a year later, as I gear towards a new season of creation.
These are a sample of activities I look forward to, and I hope to meeting you along the way:
New workshop for grant applicants:
Thanks to a request from Université Saint Louis Brussels, I’ve developed a new writing workshop for grant applicants. The workshop provides tools to uncover the research proposal’s narrative, one of those tricks that tilt a proposal on top.
Sounds like something for you or for your institute? Contact me!
Creative Writing for Academics:
I’ll continue providing series of workshop Creative Writing for Academics, with sessions already book for various institutes at the University of Amsterdam, Nijmegen University, and Queen Mary University of London.
These workshops make space for researchers to explore a diverse and creative pallet of writing styles in their academic writing practice. They are open to all disciplines, and welcome researchers from PhD students to full professors.
Following on previous projects on Social Dreaming, I’ll contribute some of my poems to an artistic exhibition on Social Dreaming held at the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations in London. Details will follow, but I already know that the opening is on November 17, 2022.
I remember
the time just before my first piano lesson. I was nine. My father is cellist, and
he was playing sonatas with a wonderful pianist. A young woman, short hair, soft
hands, eyes that were full of life. She rode a motorcycle. I found her one of
the most fascinating women around. I loved her to be around, but I also felt
very shy to address her personally.
I had
decided for a long time already that I wanted to play the piano, and it was
without a question that she would become my instructor. When the school year
would begin, I would start with private lessons. During the summer, I would
join the two-weeks chamber music retreat that my father organized for children,
in the middle of the mountain area where we were living. I still see her approaching
me one late afternoon, after their sonata rehearsals. I don’t remember what she
said exactly, but I remember it was about me and her becoming pupil and teacher
of one another. And I remember becoming very shy, to the point that I might
have given her the impression that I was not really into this.
I was. I
had been for years already. And it was just the beginning.
Since then,
playing the piano has become one of my most precious moments in life. Almost everything
else has changed in the twenty-six years that separate today from that summer. But
playing the piano has remained. And as the years passed by, I started to realize
that playing an instrument yield many a lesson for doing our jobs and for being
humans.
Before anything
else, playing an instrument requires concentration. In that concentration,
technique finds precision to the extent that it can almost be forgotten. But as
soon as the concentration breaks, technical weaknesses take over to the
detriment of the play. Playing an instrument thus means training one’s ability
to concentrate, which has served me many a times. It has served me when
teaching, when reading, when writing, when brainstorming. The faculty to
concentrate is a gift: it is one of the best tools we have to make space
where we first see only chaos. In that space, meaning can emerge.
Autonomous Artists Anonymous
Playing an
instrument also goes hand in hand with an intense training in listening. And
that goes deeper than it seems. On the surface, we listen to the notes that we
play: the melody they form, the harmony they carry, the rhythm that propels
them forward, or that let them linger. To hear all of this properly already
requires training and perseverance. And suddenly we start to hear more: we start
to hear the details in-between: the silences without which the music would not
sound; the interstice between the notes, forming in themselves melodies, harmonies,
and rhythms. We start to hear the pulse of the piece, precise and steady as the
heart of a living creature. In that listening, we enter the realm of music in
all its magnitude, leaving behind the daily chores, our worries, and our
ambitions. Listening makes us live the moment in all its dimensions, and that
is a skill that has enriched my life and the relationships within it. From family
to friends to students and colleagues, I have noticed many a times how much
listening helps when things need attention. Listening allows emotions to be
there, but to be there at rest. Listening creates a space of consciousness in
which we connect to better understand, leaving space for the unexpected.
Above all,
playing an instrument comes with a practice of knowing that has nothing to do with words, books, or
encyclopedia. The knowing that we do through music
has to do with being present. From the very first note of the simplest
technique exercise, making music comes with a kind of devotion and intensity
that is kind of unique. The body takes over in a matter of concentration that
not only makes it possible to play a possibly technically difficult piece, but that
also makes it possible to use flows of energy and flows of emotions as if these
were words, sentences, and stories.
Just as language,
music is all about communication. When I play a piece, I always see a story unfolding.
It can be a simple bedtime story, but most often, it is a whole journey. I traverse
magic forests where I meet trolls and giants. I hear thunderstorms and raindrops
merging with the glittering of the sun. I hear people dancing of joy, sadness,
or anger. I sense fear, regret, and hope, their relation and their separation.
Most of
all, I sense the depth of respiration in which multiple layers of life connect
with one another. It starts with the very physical sensation of my own breathing,
the air moving through my lungs and filling up my belly; it grounds me in its
quiet rhythm of in and out; and it provides me with the necessary stability to perform
the technical rhythms of my play. Somehow, becoming attuned to the physical rhythm
of breathing also opens the door to sensing the rhythm of life: from the banal
flow of people and things in my direct surrounding, to a much bigger and diffuser
reality. Sometimes, it even seems as if I can begin to sense the loop of time
at a scale that is much bigger than a human life, and maybe even bigger than
humanity. Sometimes, the scale is no longer about human breath, but about the
breath of magma, of stones, of mountains, of rivers, of oceans. In music, the
scales of million and of the infinitesimal cohabit.
Photo by Kimberleigh Aleksandra on Unsplash
And yet, playing
music is one of the most sober experience I know. Without practice, no music. And
practice has nothing to do with the grand sonata that we eventually want to
play. Practice is about repeating a series of notes over and over again, in
order to find the physical sensation that will allow to eventually play the
notes with musicality. For an amateur like myself, we are not talking here
about ten times. Not about fifty times. It’s about hundreds of times, sometimes
even thousands. It’s incredible what it takes to find the right balance between
tonicity and relaxation. Without tonicity, the music cannot take off. Notes won’t
be precise, and the rhythm will disaggregate and wither away. Without
relaxation, notes will sound hard and dry, and it won’t take long before
muscles stiffen and slap your body with cramps.
In that
practice of repetition lies a life lesson that I find both humbling and
sobering. Humbling because music is infinitely bigger than what I will ever be
able to express in words. Sobering, because with patience, practice and repetition,
we can train our body to make music. One note after the other. If we
find the discipline to repeat those notes, we can reach the beating heart of
the grand sonata, and with it, feel, just for a moment, the whole cycle of
life.
