DAY ELEVEN

Something wonderful happens when a group of adult strangers put aside their everyday concerns and personas and just do. No prejudices, no expectations, no 'side'. It's a rare event but one that art or games can readily encourage. 

I was at a conference on art and wellbeing pre-Covid when much to my surprise I was able to enjoy just such an experience. 

 

I'd set out that morning borne down by a sense of duty, to be honest. The subject of the conference was something I'd been interested in for a while, but the agenda seemed to promise a succession of dreary and self-congratulatory presentations by various health professionals and the local authority.  In truth I was attending largely because the event was just down the road, and to represent a local arts centre I was involved with at the time. In fact I was mainly interested in seeing if there were likely to be any funds we might be able to tap into. Such is the lot of small charities*.

 

The morning kicked off rather as I had feared and so I pasted on my patented 'isn't this interesting' conference smile, and buckled up for the long haul. 

 

In between presentations I discovered my table companions included two health visitors, a doctor's receptionist, an elderly careworker (in both senses of that phrase), and two others who described their role as 'community signposts'. Jaded would be too strong a word to describe the prevailing sense, but all of us bore the air of people who had been introduced to 'the next big thing' once too often. 

As the last of the morning speakers finished reading out the last of their Powerpoint slides, which we could all read on the screen behind them, and also in the handout they had thoughtfully provided, the MC for the day took the microphone and said, 'Well, we've all been sitting long enough, now we have something for you to do..."

 

The icicle of doom pierced my heart. What was it to be this time - a role play, a singalong, turn to the complete stranger next to me and reveal details of a painful childhood memory?

As I formulated my excuses and looked for the exit people emerged from the wings and piled each table with boxes of pens and crayons, scissors, glue, staplers, carrier bags of paper, cardboard, paper plates, tin foil, cloth, ribbon and other materials. Then we were told each table had 20 minutes to create a hat on any theme they chose and present it to the room at the end.

At first there was hesitancy and awkwardness, consternation even. We poked at the bits and pieces of scrap on the table, inspected the pens and scissors, put them down again. 

And then the miracle happened. 

"How about a desert island?"

The rest of us jumped on the suggestion and without any guidance or direction, each offered to make some component or other. Someone said they'd make a base and colour it like the sea, others said they'd make the beach, the signposts offered to make palm trees, and I said I'd make some exotic birds to sit in them.  And we set to for fifteen minutes of fun, creativity, cooperation, and silliness. It felt exactly like working with paper and scissors at primary school, that same sense of concentration, playfulness and unselfconsciousness.

            

At the end of our allotted time we had produced a thing which could be persuaded to balance precariously on a head just long enough to show off our efforts. A hat, it wasn't.

I've forgotten the details of whatever else happened that day, but those 20 minutes will probably stay with me forever.

Onwards...

* There wasn't any money for this new public initiative which local arts organisations were being asked to take on.

 

Picture Credit: Christopher Michel, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons