The Plenary Sessions
Opening Plenary with Sheila McNamee and Saliha Bava
Performing Life: A Serious Play
Henry Miller said, “Confusion is a word we have invented for an order which is not yet understood.” Like children we experience a certain degree of play in unfamiliar or challenging situations as we learn, innovate and construct the conventions for human interactions. Our forms of improvisation and play create our identities, institutions, and communities. There is a playful cliché in Hindi which states, “Understand understanding with understanding, because to understand understanding, is also an understanding.” This brain and tongue twister is the playful performance of the human activity we call meaning making. How do we construct our everyday lives with these twists and turns? One way is to think of it as performance. Performance is the liminal space (the threshold/border) of becoming; it is a space of knowledge production. It is an old, but new, border to be crossed. Performance re-positions culture, place, activity, space, location, identity and, for that matter, performance itself.
In this Plenary, Sheila and Saliha will play with our socio-cultural practices of generating knowledge. They will playfully introduce the ideas of relational thinking, situated practices and coordinated actions as performative practices for socialtransformation. Participants will jointly create the space of everyday life as performance.
"Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted." - Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Frank Barrett, Jazz Musician, Organization Development Consultant, and Professor
Human Activity as Improvisation: Relationships and Responsiveness
Building collaborative relationships has enormous potential for fostering creative and life-giving potential. This session involves an exploration of jazz bands improvising as an example of a group that achieves collaboration by learning in real time. Improvising musicians invent novel responses without a plan or without certainty of outcomes, discovering the future that their action creates as it unfolds. We will explore the 8 factors that allow jazz bands to improvise coherently and discuss how these can be applied to other relational activities inour lives.