What is Care Practice?? What/How/Who

an impromptu session borne from questions and thoughts i was reminded of through various conversations across the weekend - encompassing all the buzz words: accessibility, diversity, inclusion, mental health, wellbeing, sustainability

and became a conversation about how we can care about the industry whilst caring for the people who work in this industry too

I started this session fully anticipating no one to come talk to me. i didn't announce it, i just added a piece of paper to the matrix, settled myself under the jellyfish flag, scrawled a question at the top of an A2 piece of paper, and started putting thoughts into ink

this was an attempt to define Care Practice for myself, something i think about a lot as a director. i had the privilege of being introduced to a care practitioner on a show i worked on a few years ago, a glorious human called Jen Smethurst, and have worked with them a few times since, allowing me to experience what the thing i have come to call Care Practice could look like, and integrate it into my own directorial practice since then. it's a job role i am very interested in and wonder how much it is beginning to emerge across the industry at large, thinking about wellbeing support and intimacy coordination and access support and how all of these things intersect.

i began writing a list of Things under a subheading "Embedded Practice", a list that i added to over the course of the 45 minutes i was sat on the floor and as a conversation unfolded around me/from me. it ended up including:

- Check-ins

- Check-outs

- Regular breaks

- Fidgets & stim toys

- Room Agreements

- Schedules

- Clear communication

- BOUNDARIES (capitalised)

- Accountability

- Responsibility

- Active

- Anti-Racist

- Environmental & Sustainable

the line got blurred in my mind between Things I Implement in my rooms and Values I Hold as a practitioner, but all feel a part of the same thing

whilst beginning to try and define this for myself, a curious soul floated by and read my heading, and began asking me questions. "What do you mean by care practice? I don't think i know what that is". turns out swirling concepts and ideas and ideologies that i have been trying to pin down for myself for quite a while are a lot harder to articulate than i initially thought.

the answer i gave started with "i don't really know" - and i think that's still true. all i could do is describe what i think i mean by care practice, echo the words and tools i've gleaned from various mentors and creatives and practitioners i've shared spaces with and learned from across the last few years (Jen being a huge one of them), and reach for the thing i think of as Care Practice - a practice of caring for ourselves and each other as much as the work, and not sacrificing our wellbeing to achieve it.

i was surprised to end up sat amongst a small group of 3 or 4 people i perceived to be older than myself, and definitely further along in their careers than i am, and informing them of the ways i operate that i align with Care Practice in my work, and to hear that it isn't necessarily as common of a thing as maybe i had thought. almost all of the people who came by, which admittedly wasn't many, hadn't heard this phrase before. it wasn't what i had anticipated, but it was interesting and inspiring in a different way.

i do wish i had announced the session so i could maybe hear from other folks with different experiences and specialities, some of the access workers in the space, people who have more direct experience in access and inclusion in the arts and where these things perhaps overlap.

Is it that different at all? is it just the same under a different name? im not sure.

To me i think Care Practice is as much a personal practice as it is a collective responsibility - eventually i think it is something that would require a radical shift in current industry standards and the culture of Making Theatre.

A culture that asks us to work for free first with the promise of funding and payment in the next phase, the expectation to burn ourselves out "for the art", that it's all worth it when the show goes on, a culture of hustle and competition and application after application, Product-oriented and financially focused.

of course it is. creating art in a capitalist society, as we well know, is hell. but it doesn't mean we have to implement these capitalist structures into how we make that art. that, thankfully, is something we have control over.

what i aspire to is a Practice, a process that is mutually supportive, co-created, celebrating the steps, the successes and the failures, something adequately funded to support the individuals and their needs, encouraging self-awareness and self-advocacy, and a space for intentional reflection and feedback and development. active change and evolution and accountability. something that sees the art in its wider context and is intentional about the space we create and the space we take up, what we bring to the spaces we are in and what we can learn from them too

"leave your shit at the door" isn't how art is made. and is not how people work.

it feels impossible to me to ask artists to view their art as work. and yet it is so important that we do so we can have healthy boundaries in place to protect our energy and our mental health. that, i think, is a constant negotiation - but i do think it is a helpful reminder sometimes. it certainly has been for me.

i spoke about this too in my report on Directing and Neurodivergence - it's all interlinked to me and all feels very aligned with Open Space as a concept. The values of whoever/wherever/whenever/whatever being Right, and the permissioning to Be that comes with that feel all like care practice to me, and learning Improbable's language for it has given words to the Things i have been practicing and discovering and attempting to implement myself across the rehearsal rooms i have held as a director and facilitator so far. it all goes hand in hand to me, and is inseparable from my experiences as a neurodivergent, queer, trans person and theatre-maker - it's encompassed in NeuroQueer practice, Slow Practice, maybe they're all synonyms, maybe they're separate, maybe they're not Things at all but just the way i make work. who's to say.

i don't know if i can articulate anything more, it's all still very swirly in my brain, i was going to say i don't know

but i think i do

even if i don't have the words

it's an approach, a concept, a model

that i think i am embodying, or at the very least am trying to

and that i think it's something that is emerging in the industry too

and it's something i am going to continue to pursue

i know im not the only one, i don't claim to be, many have been doing this with different words for a long time

i am curious to learn more, and learn from them

i might not have the answers, but i think having the questions is as important, if not more

Someone told me it sounds like applied theatre - something i need to look into more to learn more about - and informed me of a writer called James Thompson who wrote about the Aesthetics of Care as well as the Ethics of Care

Another name mentioned in a different session but feels relevant was Jen Toksvig and The Copenhagen Interpretation - from what i understood they're a neurodivergent theatre-maker talking about accommodations and access support for all sorts of people and situations, including various disabilities as well as like, life events and stuff

i'm very interested to read what that all means as well, perhaps you might be too

some food for thought. i hope you can maybe find something in here that resonates with you