Conference Paper

Leeds, 31 July 2024  

  

Dear Steve,  

  

I like letters. I’ve always found them useful as a space to say things that I can’t say elsewhere, or by other means. They give me enough time to get my thoughts in order, and enough shelter to bring them into the open.   

  

I’ve been thinking about the roots of this conversation we’re starting, and the question you raised when we spoke last week – ‘what are we here for?’. And I suppose at TaPRA, specifically, we’ll be there to share what we’re up to, and to reflect on and unpack some of what’s emerging from our work, in the hope that that process of thinking might resonate with, or provoke, the people we’re addressing. Basically, I think we’re at TaPRA, to think in public about our emergent sense of what we’re here for, in Finding the Story Arc. I think that might be it. 

 

So let me begin by talking about what’s started to emerge, at the end of July. Probably what’s come up for me most strongly in the opening weeks and now months of this project is how much of a stranger I am in many of the conversations I’m joining, and how incompetent I am in many of these worlds; how little I know, how stumblingly I speak the language, and how out of time my rhythms sometimes are with the people I’m talking to.  There’s something about the relationships I have in these rooms, as an academic (and being recognised as one), that seems somehow out of place, and out of time. 

 

At the same time, when I’ve spoken to people one on one – and particularly in the longer interviews – I’ve been struck by how joyful they are, by the end. I don’t think that’s my influence, sadly – I think it’s more an effect of the mode in which they’ve been asked and allowed to think and speak. It makes me think back to one of my Cambridge interviews, which was in effect my first short supervision. Afterwards I remember feeling so intensely alive. It was like learning that the earth was round, not flat, and that what I’d thought was an edge was a horizon – beyond which I could go, and over which things could appear.   

 

I think that might be what I’m there for, somehow. I think those two qualities are probably linked, and I think they have something to do with what my being an academic means to the people I’m talking to. I think this joy does have something to do with my sense of a different rhythm, a different tempo, a different language, a different competence and frame. 

 

So when I think back to the question, ‘what are we here for?’, I suppose my additional question and provocation for you would be this. Officially our remit with these interviews is to engage people with ARC. But might it also be that we’re creating a space for mutual learning, and discovery? Is there perhaps some benefit to be derived from this sense of disorientation that I’ve felt? 

 

Yours,  

  

Milo                                 

​

​

Manchester, 12th August 2024 

 

 

Dear Milo,  

 

My apologies for the delay in responding to your lovely letter. I’ve been on holiday, and Lord knows I needed one. But I suppose we should now increase the frequency of response if we want to have anything to say at TaPRA   

 

You asked me about that question ‘what are we here for?’ I think the question itself, when I voiced it, was an expression of that sense of disorientation you mention. Like, what are we doing here? But I wonder if the question might also offer a way to orientate ourselves. Because reading it back, it poses issues of role and context. The ‘here’ part of the phrase seems critical – what are we here for? – because any conversation has a situation. It has a time and place and context. And then there’s also the question of purpose, or role – what are we here for?  

 

In the case of our ARC interviews, you have been asking businesspeople about their attitudes to climate resilience. They understand that yours is the role of a researcher, and that their role is thus one of respondent. This is important, because it frees them up to respond freely and honestly. Whereas if we had told them that you were going in as a salesperson for ARC, then (a) you might not have got in the door, and (b) if you had, the interviewee would be playing the role of prospective buyer – and thus making a guarded assessment of your offer. That would fundamentally alter the terms of the conversation.  

 

As it happens, I suspect that the whole role-dynamic that ARC is proposing – of taking money from businesspeople conceived as “buyers” -- and then passing it through to farmers and landowners conceived as “sellers” – and on whose land these NFM interventions will occur… I think that whole transactional proposition is probably the wrong one for ARC. And that we might need to tell them this at some stage. 

 

But let’s talk for now about us. ‘What are we doing here?’  You’ve mentioned that, insofar as your respondents understand you to be a researcher, they tend to assume that you’re something a bit sciencey. A geographer or a metereologist, perhaps. Whatever connects in their head with ‘climate’. So then, if/when you need to explain that you’re a researcher in Drama, or Theatre, they might look a bit bewildered. Your role position does not fit with pre-existing assumptions. Because a reasonable person might reasonably ask, what has talking to businesspeople about climate resilience got to do with Drama?  

 

But for me, there is an equally reasonable response to this question. As any UCAS applicant can tell you, Drama helps us to see things from the perspective of others. It functions to put us, as the saying goes, “in their shoes.” The philosopher George Herbert Mead referred to this as “role-taking”. Drama can help to humanise those strangers whose life experiences may be quite dissimilar to our own.  

 

And so, in these interviews… if we are actively placing ourselves in a situation where we are trying to role-take the position of strangers, by engaging them in dialogue … And if we are taking critical account of our situation, and of our roles within it… And if the dialogue process then gives rise to a kind of shared “narrative” – which perhaps elicits insight, or understanding, or even an emotional response of some sort (you mentioned joy?)… then what is this but Applied Drama? And that’s even before we get to the question of what we might make, as practitioner-researchers, with the insights derived from these dialogues.  

 

Over time, I’ve come to regard the interview process as a form of experimental performance practice. That might sound pretentious, but I honestly believe that the research interview and the devising workshop require the same principles of attentive response; of remaining alert to emergent possibilities. And to do this properly, we need to lay aside our assumed “expertise”, and inhabit a position of not-knowing. I don’t know what the possibilities might be here. I don’t know who you, the respondent, are – and I don’t know what you might know – but by rubbing together our disparate life experiences I’m trying to find some shared understanding.  

 

For me, it’s only really in that zone of conscious incompetence that we can start to learn anything new. Which is why that sense you mention, of feeling like a stranger in these interview situations, is something to cherish. It’s about getting comfortable with being out of your comfort zone – so that some kind of Drama can occur.  

 

In closing, I have a question for you. Can you say something more about that quality of joy you mentioned? Because, while I know exactly what you mean about respondents having unexpectedly positive responses to these conversations, joy is not necessarily the word I would have used. You humbly say that – “sadly” – this joy is not a consequence of anything you’re doing. But I wonder if that’s true. An audience’s response to the playing of any role will depend in part on the personal qualities of the actor.  

 

Lots of love, 

 

Steve        

  

  

  

Leeds, 14th August 2024  

Dear Steve,  

  

It’s probably relevant that I notice myself hesitating, before beginning these letters. I suppose it’s an anxiety about how I’ll come across. And it makes me think – as an aside, but probably relevantly – that what we promised to present at TaPRA was a work in progress, or a report on something that was developing. And I suppose one thing that’s developing is our working relationship, and/with our personal relationship. Just a thought, but – is that what we’re presenting?   

  

Anyway, joy. It’s true that the joy I understand people to be feeling does relate to something that I’m doing. In simple terms, it’s probably from being listened to – and more specifically, most often it seems like the joy of realising you’re actually being listened to. That’s why it tends to come later on, as a response to my responses, rather than existing from the start.  

  

I suppose I don’t really know why I don’t think that’s something I’m doing, because I am the one doing the listening, after all. But I think it’s because it feels like an aspect or quality of the situation. It’s part of the encounter; I don’t own it. It’s just a result of the roles that we’re giving each other. I might serve my role well, I suppose; I might serve them through that role, and I try to. But it’s more that it’s understood that the situation not only allows them to talk about themselves but encourages them to do so on and in their own terms. Those terms, in fact, are to a large extent the point. So it’s not just that they are at the centre of the discussion, but that the centre of the discussion – in one limited sense – is theirs. 

  

So, in a way, I don’t think this joy is only, or even primarily, the pleasure that might come from being heard in a certain way – their appreciation of me putting myself in their shoes. I think, in a specific sense, the joy comes from them being in their shoes. Not being required to think entirely within the parameters of their working lives, or express themselves in its forms. To go back to what I was saying about letters, earlier, these conversations make space for the world to be allowed to make sense on their terms. Krista Ratcliffe talks about understanding as trying to stand under someone else’s way of making sense. I really really like that. I suppose that’s what I’m trying to do, and what that configuration allows me to do.  

 

To pull back slightly – and talking about other people’s parameters, and ways of making sense – I’m conscious that we’re writing towards a context that we haven’t explicitly addressed yet. That is, the conjunction between Performance and Science that gives our working group its name. So – could you talk a little bit about that? Does what we’re talking about have anything to do with that intersection, at all? 

  

Love,  

  

Milo                  

  

  

Manchester, 15th August 2024 

 

Dear Milo, 

 

I am touched by the way you signed off. “Love, Milo.” I guess this was a response to my “lots of love” – but of course that was a bit flippant, a bit silly. You took the defensiveness out of it. Just – “love”. Thank you.  

 

So yes, to answer your first question, I think we are – perhaps inadvertently - describing or even creating a relationship through these letters. It’s a working relationship, but also an affectionate one, as the best working relationships usually are. And it’s one which I think emphasises an equality of intelligence, rather observing some hierarchy of age or academic status. I shouldn’t pretend, of course, that I’m not also your employer just now. But in any relationship, multiple things can be true at the same time.  

 

It strikes me that a lot of what we’re dealing with, in this project, is about relationships. And the way they’re defined by our assumed roles. You play this role, I play that - in complementarity. So you and I could play “employer-employee”, or we could play “teacher-student”, or whatever – but we’re choosing instead to play “colleagues”.  

 

I wonder if this arrival at a kind of relational horizontality also has something to do with the process you’re describing in your interviews. When respondents begin speaking to you, they’re not yet sure how the interview relationship is being defined. They know you’re a university researcher, which probably makes them feel valued in some way – as a person worthy of a researcher’s time. But this might also make them feel slightly cautious: will they feel smart or interesting enough to help with whatever clever thing it is you want to know about?  

 

These are, of course, questions of text and subtext. Dramatic dynamics. But as the scene develops, and they perceive that you are actually listening to what they say, and responding in a way that validates their voice, then they relax a bit, and bloom into flower. And I suspect that your gentle, respectful, curious manner in the interviewer role – which I glimpsed a bit of yesterday – is indeed one that facilitates a kind of joy in the respondent.  

 

Conversely, though, when role relations are misconceived or misconstructed, the results can be questionable. And I think it’s easy for that to happen – since you ask -- at the interface between art and science. In fact, this kind of relational misattunement is a key thread in my new book Incarceration Games. It’s a history of the use of role-playing in 20th century social psychology – and it re-examines some notorious experiments such as Stanley Milgram’s Yale obedience experiments and Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment. These scientists were very pleased about the theatrical ingenuity of their studies: in each case, they cast their volunteer participants in complementary role relations – as Teacher and Learner, or Guard and Prisoner. But crucially, they forgot that they too were part of the relational dynamics of these staged situations. They adopted a natural science model of staring down the microscope at their human fruitflies, forgetting that the participants were equally capable of looking back at them, and of making independent judgements about what was really going on in these situations. And by ignoring this other side of the relational equation, the psychologists fundamentally misread what was happening in their own experiments. 

 

Unfortunately, and conversely, those of us in the arts often misread our relationship with the sciences. It’s easy to adopt an attitude of inferiority – conferring scientists with role of truth-makers, and ourselves with the secondary role of mere interpreters… Your PhD thesis nails some of that, by pointing out the weird way in which plays about climate change often seem to think that their role is simply to report on what scientists have said. Science has the authority. We give it jazz hands. As if the job of the theatre-maker is simply to hand down the wisdom of Moses to the little people in the stalls. This is not, as you say, a useful relational dynamic. But it is one that plagues many discussions of climate change. We are rarely asked to reflect on our own, lived experience of this catastrophic reality, which obscures everyone’s view of the future.  Yet it is precisely through relational, experiential learning that most of us navigate ourselves in the world. 

 

Does that make any sense? Or am I misconstruing you? 

 

Love reciprocated, 

 

Steve         

  

 

  

Leeds, 20th August 2024  

  

Dear Steve,  

  

No, I don’t think you’re misconstruing me at all – those kinds of reciprocally-negotiated relationships, and some specific versions of that relationship with science, are exactly where my thesis begins.  

 

In the thesis I refer to these configurations of relationship as ‘dramaturgies of encounter’ – a term I use to describe the relationship a piece of theatre invites between artist, audience, and event. This cluster of relationships describes who artists and audiences are understood to be, to and through each other, and why they are understood to have gathered. 

   

The classic example of these roles in ‘climate theatre’, as you and many others have noted, is what Mike Hulme calls the ‘deficit model’ of climate communications. Hulme describes the underlying relationships of that model like this:  

   

if only we can have greater clarity, more access to the public, better science writers, then we will bring these recalcitrant and unruly people to book. We see plenty of evidence that climate scientists think in terms of this linear flow: ‘we are the ones with the truth, the prophets who can see the future, and it’s these people that we have to convince’  

   

In what might be a slight variation on your idea about art’s deference to science, in my thesis I argue that this model of climate communications finds a natural ally in some versions of the autonomous artist, in which the artist knows better, in essence, because of how they tend to look at things, and where they tend to look from. They are, in Grant Kester’s terms, ‘a superior being, able to penetrate the veils of mystification that otherwise confuse and disorient the hapless modern subject’. Within this imaginary, the artist and scientist are naturally aligned: clearer-sighted, and benevolently clarifying; the ones with the truth. 

 

One of the joys of my PhD was that in the detail of its chapters the thesis moves on to discuss artists who think of their role in different terms. I worked with four people who don’t consider themselves to be superior beings, and who make different offers for what an artist might be (and, I suppose, might be ‘here for’). The four artists I study in my thesis don’t work across their relationships with their audiences, attempting to bring recalcitrant and unruly pupils to book. Instead, they work with those relationships, placing them at stake. What I mean is, they don’t lean on relationships that already exist. Instead, in some ways, they’re all asking who and how else we might collectively be.  

 

And I think this is where I reach these conversations I’ve been having around ARC. This is my first academic job, which I came to directly from submitting my thesis, and so it’s been the first time I’ve introduced myself to people as an academic, in public. And it occurs to me that, in a way that reminds me of my thesis, ‘being an academic’ is sometimes understood as a claim to being one of the ones with the truth – but that I’m finding myself, firstly, disoriented, and secondly working with relationships much more than I’m working across them. 

 

So I wonder about it as a shifting role – a role that has to do with the kind of reinvention and renewal that I’ve been talking about. So I suppose my final question, if you don’t mind responding to it, would be: what does that role mean, or what has it meant, to you? 

   

Love, again,  

   

Milo  

  

  

22nd August 2023  

  

Dear Milo,  

  

As I write this, you are sitting in my garden shed making a Zoom call to some folk on the ARC project. Before you took the call, we’d just been reading through these letters, with an eye to an edit. We’ve already said too much.  

  

So with that in mind, my response to your last question will be brief. I feel like anyone listening to this exchange at TaPRA will have their own ideas about what it means to play the role of “academic”. For myself, honestly, I’ve never really liked the role description. So I tend to use it simply use it as a peg to hang other roles on. Writer. Teacher. Researcher. Professional Nosey-Parker. Maybe being an academic is really just a passport to other worlds.   

  

Thank you for showing me a little of yours.   

  

Steve