The opening session of Imprology with Remy Bertrand was an unusual, lovely and really successful way to open a weekend with at least forty people closely packed in a flower-and-buddha-adorned oak panelled room. Remy introduced a flowing series of exercises inviting deep exchange in a comfortable non-verbal harmony that included looking, listening, sounding, feeling for sound on another's back/neck/head, hand massage, passive limb (arm) movement to encourage the body to let go and relax, and more that has now blurred into the start of a great weekend!
Emily and I had spent a solid day before preparing our workshop session in person, everything prior having been done over skype. We facilitated eachother through the exercise several times with different focuses: problem, desired outcome, something to explore. And poured over the words and structure fine-tuning, cleaning up, and getting a multifaceted and complex exercise to be silky streamlined for an hour and a quarter session. And it worked :) 11 people took part in the first session on Saturday morning. The timings ran beautifully, rapid prototypes were amazing and the profound space and presence created in the room as people 'showed' their 'story' to each other in small groups was a very special gift to share in. Clean questions worked well for people with lots or little experience of Clean. We provided a stream-lined handout, with questions acting, much like the structure, with a meta-driver quality that worked well content free and encouraging non-verbal and tacit knowledge to emerge and be expressed through multisensory forms.
The Sunday session was smaller with a different pace within the still-effective timing. Lovely improvisations in this and the previous workshop with how people interpret the story-showing in solo and with their groups. Again an exquisite experience, with generous contributions from everyone taking part.
Interestingly there were similarities with the differences of Saturday and mid-Sunday sessions in the Clean Touch workshops Jeni Edge and I presented last year at NToC. The Sunday lunchtime slot is notably at a different stage of the weekend flow, with people processing 'stuff' from earlier workshops, whirlygig and bodywork sessions, digesting the tastes of new experiences and ideas - as well as Shaun's sumptuous food. In contrast the Saturday morning has a feeling of everything opening up and taking off.
Saturday evening was book launch - with Caitlin launching her new book
From Contempt to Curiosity – creating the conditions for groups to collaborate – with Clean Language and Systemic Modelling. [Written in Caitlin's style of oral presentation, as a personal journey with Clean and groups, the book has interesting case studies and great insights showing how the work has developed over a decade and through some groundbreaking projects in diverse fields. More food for thought!]
One challenge with NToC is the rich programme with 4 (and more) different strands simultaneously. After the impro start and our own hands-on making and moving session I navigated through the weekend with a choice of creative and embodied workshops that included Mark's metaphor drawing, Lisa's sensory pleasure and dance session, another Imprology this time modelled-in-the-moment with Caitlin co-facilitating, and Sophie's Clean for relaxation techniques. A beautifully coherent, complementary and inspiring route through a nourishing weekend.
More at https://www.facebook.com/events/576463442421814/
Including a review by David Brown on the sessions he attended, with this comment on our Saturday session:
"Clean Creativity with Emily Walker and Jackie Calderwood
During this session we did a rapid prototyping exercise, producing physical objects to represent something we wished to work on. Then we used a highly focussed set of Clean questions to ask each other about what we had made.
This was simple, elegant and powerful – perhaps the most potent experience of the weekend in terms of looking at my own stuff."
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