Creators Connect Community - Weekend Session 4 Feb 2018

4th February 2018, we hosted our creators connect weekend session which is the very similar experience like one of the astronaut once said, â€œOne step for man a giant leap for the Mankind.” As a community creator I experience this whole event as a giant step towards building a trust sourced, creatively nurtured and humanly connected community. The idea is inspired by the way our civilization developed, where women, children, men, nature, the trees, animals, the surrounding, the whole ecosystem thrived along with each other and completed each other. Where learning was not dependent on technology or structured system but it naturally flowed from one entity to another in the community. The flow of learning is challenged today by the current deprived structured system where we are always in the scarcity of the freedom that naturally is ours and the interaction with nature which is the key element of our existence. We observe that when we go for a nature trail, hike, nature holiday or even planting activity or taking care of a domestic animal at home, the vibes that we receive from our surrounding and the entities uplifts us that makes us feel happier. What is this connection which empowers us, liberates us, that none of the modern technology and media can ever sustain in us?

It has been almost a year that we have been actively initiating workshops, community activities, hosted Theatre Festival, connecting with other creators, hosting Creators Envisioning Forum and now the Creators Connect weekend sessions envisioned towards community creation.

The theme for the day is storytelling through acting where participants would explore writing and present. The participants were 8 years old to 60 years old. The idea was to bring this varied resource together and build the Dynamics of the community experience, creativity and nurture the uniqueness of everyone while working together as one. Today's session was process oriented and participants were the Explorers on a Voyage.

To start with, everyone introduced their journey in different roles that they have been playing and evolving in their life through challenges and achievements.

The first started the session by asking everybody - how many of you have read and watched stories? So everybody says yes and then when I ask them how many of you have written stories? To which few hands went up…. This seems to be a false answer! Now I'll ask in a different way….how many of you have lived stories? so then everybody raised their hands but they still could not connect to the question clearly. So I elaborated, one of our participants Manu was coming today from very far away, got lost and Google Maps was directing him in circles but still he was persistent to reach the venue where we were conducting the session. He managed to do that by calling his friend and finding out…. so that itself was the story of today. How everybody took the decision of coming for the workshop and struggled in his or her own way, achieved.

We started decoding the storytelling art into simple ingredients, - character which is the hero, the heroes dream, her/his aim in life, the heroes strength and his weakness, a villain, the heroes surrounding in which there are friends, her/his home….so according to these ingredients we created 7 boxes. participants wrote a chit with information of each of these ingredients…. so on the front side they wrote their hero and the back side they came up with unique character from their imagination that could represent the hero of their story…. similarly for each ingredient they wrote an element and everybody put their chits into the respective boxes. Then all the children picked up the boxes and shuffled the chits inside all of them, they enjoyed it…. we came up with two group…..every member of a group picked up one chit from one box so the whole group had 7 chits… one from each box.

These were the key ingredients for them to create the story and this was designed in such a way that it could Spark off spontaneity and hence creativity because it had all the random information to brainstorm on what story they could come up with. it was just a process of joining dots. Initially, the participants were mechanically joining dots into making sentences so I suggested that they could make it a little more interesting and visually lively through sound, poem, animated gestures….. they improvised and introduced more ideas with the creative energy of performing the stories … they came up with their own postures for each character and how a character would interact… it is a successful step towards the art of telling the story today.

The joy was in the challenges that the group was courageously addressing and working upon. The children of the group showed almost 0% anxiety or the pressure to perform; rather they were coming up with weirdest imaginations in weaving the story. However, the adult participants were struggling to build logic around the key elements that were in front of them. Some of the adult participants became the director of the presentation and were mostly directing the children to perform in a particular way that they thought was the best for their group performance.

In a way, everyone was helping each other to come up with the best presentation possible in the given time. However later realising that they were in a situation themselves which none had expected; In the given situation rather than suffering or struggling to establish the best, the natural course of facilitating each other and oneself and initiating group participation in a holistic way dissolves the pressure that the adults were under.

Conceptually, I experienced this exercise as a family dynamics where everyone is unique and diverse in the thought process, choices, age, beliefs, likewise and yet have their own space; and respect for each other while functioning as one. I also experience this exercise as storytelling in motion where the participants were a character in the story which was happening right in front of my eyes. They came here with an objective, they had their own assumptions, expectations, and thought processes while they were swimming in a given situation which they didn't really expect, yet they didn't give up…but kept on creatively surmounting each and every step… understanding and learning through the struggle, yet accepting and respecting each other… and achieving the final performance which was a celebration of community and togetherness.

Today's session is learning from life and a lot to understand, discover and much more to ponder. At the concluding session, we all appreciated each other and spoke about our experience of the performance and learning. The participants understood that this whole process encouraged them to come out of their comfort zone, they believed that they must not have a rigid mindset, for some it was freedom, fun, drama, play, it extended their limitations, it was self-expression. Spiritually I also experienced that the creative vibes enhanced the vibrations of the participants, the community home, venue, it created positivity, the exchange of energies charged our mind and body, and the whole process brought us together and filled us with happiness. We as a creator envision these vibrations to thrive our community and our generation.