Change from felt integration

As a dancer and founder of Social Presencing Theater, Arawana Hayashi, uses the body as an organ of perception to make social processes visible and to lead to new potentials. We spoke to her about a collective practice of sensing and wisdom that comes through it.

evolve: Your work one would call social art. What does social mean in your context?

Arawana Hayashi: The social part of Social Presencing Theater is that it is a collaborative, collective listening into our current context or into a particular community. It's collective because it is based on the sense that all of us together on the planet are co-creating our social reality moment by moment. We co-create our family life, we co-create in teams, we co-create in organizations and communities. We are always engaged in relationships. This relationship-building creates a healthy social soil in which we are manifesting positive regard for each other.

The word presencing is a combination of presence and sensing. We would say that it is an art practice because art heightens our sensitivity, our aesthetics. The root meaning of the word aesthetic is feeling, and anesthetic is numbness. Aesthetics increases our resonance with the world, our feeling sense, our embodied intelligence, our embodied knowing. It is an awareness. In Social Presencing Theater, this is not just an individual capacity for awareness. Our work is about a collective presence from which creativity is a natural outcome. We work with the body and movement. We make something visible through the body. The root meaning of the word theater is “a place where something becomes visible.” We make the social body visible. And the social field or social awareness, although it's not concrete or visible, is very experienceable, very resonant with our experience. Theater is always social, it’s always collective. Even as a soloist, you have support people and an audience. Theater is a community event.

Making the Unseen Visible

Social Presencing Theater makes visible the structures and qualities within the society, including parts of the society that are often unseen or unheard. We have worked in companies and organizations, but also with high school students in Los Angeles and Mayan young people in the Yucatan. Our work invites institutional systems like the education or health care system to see themselves, including those who have power and those whose voices we often don't hear. This work is inclusive of the diverse populations on the planet.

Art, in a certain way, is a language that can be at the same time healing, enlightening, inspiring, challenging, provocative, or soothing. In our particular approach, the focus is on awareness, Nowness, or being present in this very moment with our sensing system being fully engaged and appreciative of this very moment of life. All people have the capacity to be present and to sense, What is my experience right this moment? These experiences of the present moment invite us into the process of creativity— to create a healthy and sane society.

e: Would you mind giving an example of how Social Presencing Theater can concretely work?

AH: Yesterday, we did something for the Presencing Institute in one of the institute’s free offerings called GAIA.

Manish Srivastava, our colleague from India, voiced his grave concern about how the pandemic had forced millions of workers to lose their livelihood in service jobs and to walk thousands of miles with their families from the cities to their villages. He experienced that the response from citizens was, on the one side, activism, and on the other side, a sense of apathy or numbness—an inability to connect with this social crisis.

He asked several of us to do a Social Presencing Theater practice in order to support his understanding of what was happening and what his role was. We arranged ourselves to embody the stakeholders: the migrants, the government and corporate people with power, and Manish himself, a change-maker. The fourth person held the place of the highest aspiration of the situation. In the practice called 4-D Mapping, this role always appears, as does a role for the Earth, because the Earth is a stakeholder in any decisions that are made. We set up a sculpture of figures in this current situation from the story that Manish told us.

Social Presencing Theater investigates movement from some aspect of current reality toward an emerging future. We call the process moving from Sculpture 1 to Sculpture 2. This could be addressing a specific situation, like this example with Manish where the movement from our original social sculpture to its Sculpture 2 takes just a few minutes. The movement revealed insights that supported Manish’s work.  Or we could start with a more open practice, like The Village, that continues for 20 minutes where the people in the sculpture move, making gestures that feel like natural responses to create good social soil. Then we see what happens: What shifted? How did we notice our contribution to this co-creation process?

ALL OF US TOGETHER ON THE PLANET ARE CO-CREATING OUR SOCIAL REALITY MOMENT BY MOMENT

We are looking at social field shifts. Some might move from closed or fixated to more open possibility. In the example here, the different parts of the story were integrated for Manish so that he felt not caught in the triangle of victim, oppressor, and savior. He was able to see the incredible strength, agency, and determination of the vulnerable ones. He could empathize with all of the roles, rather than blame those with power or shame those who were apathetic. He was able to integrate the different aspects of the story into a more coherent picture. This allowed him, as an influencer, to shape an initiative which didn't fall into the conventional way of approaching this crisis. It enabled him to be truly innovative and operate from compassion.

This process is like seeking an underlying wisdom, rather than focusing on the surface conflict and what we call “the surface stuck.” We look into and feel the different aspects of the stuck. We feel the body, where we want to stand to be authentic to ourselves and the group. We ask: What would the body do? How would the body shift? What do those shoulders want to do? Do they want to stay there, or do they have a longing or yearning or calling to another place? Once the collective moves to what we call their Sculpture 2, we reflect on what happened: What started the movement? How did the focus shift? This opens a dialogue which can uncover a collective knowing.

Intelligent Not-Knowing

e: How would you describe the kind of insights that come from this social art intervention?

AH: By engaging in the practices, the individuals feel—they sense— their collective presence and that what they contribute has value. This value is not based on their credentials or whether they have talent. Each person can bring their most genuine self, who they are, without any judgment. In a program that we recently did, someone said that “There's an unconditional OK-ness with how I am now.” Someone else said, “I feel like I am exactly like I should be.” In this process, there's no judgment, there's nothing that says, you've done it right, you've done it wrong. There's just enormous appreciation for the fact that people can make gestures and invent things and that there's always a yes to that.

The second thing would be the sense of connection people have with one another. You could be witnessing another person making their gestures or you could be engaged in a trio or duet or a small ensemble. There's a sense of not being alone—a sense of being seen and being able to not only see what others are offering but feel the quality of another person. That can happen even on Zoom. It's so amazing to me that we can do this over zoom and have such an intimate sense of another person who's not physically in the room with us. This practice supports a feeling of interconnection between people, the natural connectedness. Sometimes people feel alone or isolated or burdened in a way that they have to carry something by themselves. This work that we're doing in social art emphasizes the sense of natural connection and natural care that we have for one another.

THE POWER OF FEELING AND AESTHETIC KNOWING IS EVERYWHERE.

The third thing is a sense of collective wisdom that is not just conceptual understanding. Our work is often opening a space in which we can see the wisdom in each other. We see the amazingness in one another rather than just the limitations. The incredible kind of beauty which holds sorrow and the painfulness—sadness and suffering— this enormous vulnerability, but at the same time, enormous strength, brilliance, and creativity in people. Our work tries to make visible and resonant this fullness of what it is to be a human being on the planet with others.

e: Beautiful; I'm struck that we don't have words for this kind of knowledge. We don't think of a sense of one’s OK-ness as a form of knowledge. These kinds of knowing are not conceptual.

AH: It's a description of an experience. Out of this very moment, there's a birth of some kind of future. There's a lot of emphasis in our work on the benefit of not knowing. That doesn't sound like intelligence, but in this kind of work, not knowing is very intelligent. It’s a sense of spaciousness, you just have no idea what will be next. That freshness is uncomfortable for many people. It's frightening and there is a kind of panic that can come from not knowing. But in our work, we develop a certain appetite for that panic, an appetite for not knowing and the ability to stay with that and let something emerge, which isn't just a more sophisticated or attractive version of the same old thing that we've been doing. What's happening on the planet needs this kind of fresh collective wisdom, to actually create what is necessary for a healthy planet and for social and economic equity in a situation in which there's just so much suffering.

No Observers

e: I notice that the observers are part of the resonant field of the collective intelligence.

AH: Yes, this process is always a first-person experience. In other words, it is not a third-person perspective like science claims to use. There's always a viewer, an experiencer, that's looking at things and who is resonant with what they see. Certainly, in our work, there's no objective anybody, because it's a co-created experience of this very present moment. Actually, there aren't any observers on the planet, as far as I can tell. Everybody, whether they're still or moving, they contribute.

We see this art as a kind of research of social system shifts. We have a lot of respect for scientific research, but also there's this whole other way of knowing that you might call spirituality. Art is somewhere in between science and spirituality.

The power of feeling and aesthetic knowing is everywhere. When we do these practices, people will move just an inch over to the side because the group sculpture is not right for some reason. They move a little bit and say, this is the right place. They have no idea why that is right. There's a feeling based on some kind of balance or rhythm. These are qualities in an aesthetic or in a design, and yet they live in our social systems. What we experience non-verbally can transfer to our speaking habits— the balance between listening and speaking at a meeting. All of this is part of a knowing that people have. People want to bring some kind of cheerfulness, or beauty, or quality into their life. That is an underutilized resource in shifting our planet into a kinder and more inclusive space.

e: This knowing that we have undervalued particularly in the modern world, is not propositional or abstract, but actually comes out of the life process itself.

AH: Yes, this knowing is a break from the conventional, the habitual. We have conventional habits that cloud over our experience. We have assumptions, projections, and value systems, based on our gender, our level of education, our ethnicity, our location, socioeconomics, etc. There's all this past-acquired information that makes sense of me. The experience of Social Presencing Theater is not disregarding or disrespecting that, but it opens us to a moment of experience free from what we think about it. We are aware of openness where the limitations of the past and of history do not limit us.

e: One might say that the way these categories shape us is almost a primary stuckness because they create the ways we see.

AH: Yes, that is interesting. I often think of it as a cocoon. We see and feel through a cocoon of “me-ness.” We can say it is downloading.  It's built-in, it's fabricated, it's important—and it has its limitations in terms of creativity or innovation. The beginner's mind is also important, the sense of open wonder. Art is a way of accessing this kind of open wonder and beginner's mind in which anything is possible.

Our intention with this social art is to tap into the basic goodness and basic creativity in each person. This can enrich our life, both personally and collectively. We strengthen this basic aesthetic in our life—this feeling or sensing quality. This everyday aesthetic increases our sense of appreciation for our life and for one another. This appreciation becomes a basis for co-creating a good society.

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