The Gathering: What Now?A Call for more Clues and Collaborators

Picture: “Jedi Mole” By Riddley McDermott

 Last night my son asked me to make him a promise.

It was past midnight. He couldn’t get to sleep. He was very distressed.
“Mummy, I want you to promise me something,” he said from his top bunk.

“What?” I was crouched on the bedroom floor.
“Promise it, and then I’ll tell you.”
My son is ten. He is also autistic. He hates school. Yesterday was his first day back after Easter.

I was suspicious, so I didn’t promise him anything.

“I was going to ask you to kill me,” he said, furiously.

He did get to sleep. This morning I got him, and his sister, dressed in bed, as I always do in term time, and I bundled them out the door to school. Now, I am back here, on their bedroom floor, feeling sad and a little desperate.

My son talks about school as if it were a terrible monster. He attends a Steiner school, so as monsters go it is a biodynamic one, made of 100 per cent natural materials, like felt and wax crayons. But nonetheless it is an environment where people tell him what to do, and he doesn’t like that. Last term, when the rest of the class were drawing cuttlefish, he wanted to draw a Jedi mole. This term, salmon were expected - he wanted to draw a Basilisk snake. He likes to be able to follow himself, so school is hard for him, hard too for his teachers and classmates.

My daughter also struggles with school. Yesterday, while we were walking home, she said to me, “Mummy, I am shy even with my friends. At school people don’t know me deeply. I find it difficult to interact with the other children. “

My daughter is 5. The above is word for word what she said to me. She doesn’t have a diagnosis yet but let’s just say that ’neurotypical’ doesn’t feel like an accurate description of who she is and how she communicates. She says she wants to go to a school with horses – riding, and archery, must be central to the syllabus.

This will be my children’s last term at this school. I will be sad to leave it - the staff have made every effort to support and accommodate our children. I don’t know where we are going to go next. I feel exhausted when I think about visiting new schools.

But why am I telling you this? You signed up to a newsletter about  Improbable’s quest for a home, not mine for a school - what has any of the above got to do with The Gathering?

Well, I think it probably has everything to do with it, and not only because these are my and Phelim’s kids, and so wherever the company goes has a direct impact on us and on them. I think it has everything to do with it because what we want to create is a home not so much, ultimately, for Improbable, as for our practice, what we care about most and believe in. And one of the things we believe is that things don’t have to be done the way they usually are. Things can be done differently. Specifically, the fixed, hierarchical models of leadership and learning that are present throughout our culture, could be radically different. In fact, if we are going to survive then ‘doing things the way they are usually done’ is not the best of plans.

Here is a quote from one of our (many) NPO funding bid drafts:

"From mathematics to economics and disaster relief to education, old models of cause and effect are becoming obsolete because the systems that surround us are complex and chaotic. Flexibility, fluidity, spontaneity and real time responsiveness are the qualities needed for this speeded up world. This is the moment for improvisational practitioners to step up and deliver the fruits of our decades of research and experience. A viable future depends on our ability to improvise. Only then might we imagine, and take, a different path.”

Here we are grandly claiming that it is time for us to step up and deliver - but how?

The Gathering is a big part of our answer. As shared in our last post, we think we may have found out where to base it - at the inspirational Bore Place, home of The Commonwork Trust. We held our first event on site at the start of April, two days of Open Space, a chance for Improbable, and some of our associates, to gather together with those who live and work at Bore Place, to start exploring what could unfold between us. It was hugely exciting, and it emphasized the extent to which, even though we may have found a site, our quest for a home has only just begun. We have only answered the ‘where.’ Now we have a whole lot of ‘what’ and ‘who’ to wonder about too….. 

Over the last three decades, for the most part, what Improbable has done differently is make shows, held conferences. Now, in order to pass the practice on, in order to do things differently that really make a difference, we need to make a significant shift to include more sharing and teaching in our work. Which leads me back to the children…..

It seems to me, this afternoon, with the spring sunshine pouring in, with both children at home now, neither having made it through the whole of the school day, that the question of how to educate our kids - and I mean mine and Phelim’s but I also mean all of our kids - could not be more relevant to our quest, to the big questions that underpin our Gathering vision.

My son is most engaged at school when – wait for it - his class is putting on a play. They do this once a year. Recently his teacher commented on how much the children learnt through this process and dreamed, momentarily, of most of the curriculum being delivered this way. But then, of course, she had to go back to her lesson plans. But I like the dream. To be honest, it’s all I’ve got at the moment. A dream of a school - maybe it wouldn’t even be called a school - that would be able to celebrate neurodiversity since it would be arts-led, because I think that is what the arts, what we as artists, can do well: we can do things differently and we can, therefore, hold difference. A few years back Improbable claimed, in one of our business plans, that we were working on creating a world in which an orchestra, not an army, would be sent to a site of conflict. Now I am dreaming of a world in which my children’s education could be delivered entirely through the staging of plays.

 We are improvisers - we know how not to know, which is lucky because at present we are facing a great deal of not-knowing. We do not know how to build a barn, or any other physical structure, to house our work, and cannot possibly do it alone. We do not know how to turn Improbable from primarily a show-making company, into one with an extraordinary education and participation offer.

Last July, when we sent out our first post about The Gathering, we invited you to send us clues as to where we might go on our hunt for a home. We received an incredible response, one which has led us directly to where we are now, with a possible place and some new, invaluable collaborators.

So, we are reaching out to you again. Everything is, or could be, relevant: part of our way of working differently involves listening out for what it is most easy to marginalise, for what doesn’t fit in with our plans. My children rarely fit in with my plans - I had planned an early night yesterday evening. Today I had planned to help write our ‘NPO uplift narrative,’ detailing the reasons why the Arts Council should give us more money. Instead, I have done four trips to school and back, and I am writing this, because I think my children are clues, to which I should listen.

I didn’t promise my son anything last night. But today I promise to find him or found him a school, where he can follow himself. I promise to make an Improbable home that can hold difference – his and mine and yours – since we are all, in some measure, different. If you have any clue, piece of straw, image, answer, idea, story, offer, to share with us, for this next stage in our Gathering quest, anything this post has prompted, please send it to: office@improbable.co.uk

P.S. My children gave me their permission to write this post, and if you want to help me, and them, make an arts-led, equine school, where the curriculum is delivered through the staging of plays, I’d love to hear from you too.

To come to our Open Space on 25 - 26 June on creating an arts-led learning community, you can book tickets here