May We Speak For YOU?

May We Speak For You? from sanone on Vimeo.
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At the candle light after our presentations at the end of last term Laurel and I were expressing our shared relief that we made it through our presentations with out having heart attacks. We both hate public speaking. That is the genesis of this project. I told Laurel about a performance I did many years ago where I simply spoke for the artist who was actually performing. She just sat their fuming and I expressed what she was frustrated about for her. It was odd, I didn't feel shy at all, because I was speaking for her, not me. So we had the idea to go out in public and speak for other people, hoping that this might help us get over our fear of public speaking.

Ralph came along and videoed what happened. He has ever operated a video camera before.
We showed this to the SP group on Monday and got some really good critique. It is interesting that even though the video was less than ideal, the editing very slap dash and the project was just a first exploratory effort, I think because we had the video the group was able to give us a lot of valuable and specific criticism. Even the criticism of the documentation itself: meaningless shots, lots of moving around, bad sound (also using the low res of vimeo didn't help) gave me lots to think about more consciously before we do it again. As I said this was just our first exploration of this project, and we were both, well I'll just say I was (I shouldn't really speak for Laurel, though I think we are largely in agreement) really pleasantly surprised by some of the things that happened.

For instance the escalating enforcement of rules applied to us at pioneer courthouse square was not only comical and informative, but seemed to create a dynamic relationship between the guards, some people we were speaking for and ourselves. There was, for the hour or how ever long we were there, a relationship that evolved between us all. What was especially successful to me about the chain of events at the square was that even though we were frustrated, there was humor, and the guards seemed increasingly aware of the absurdity of the rules they were being asked to enforce, but never seemed to blame us for putting them in that position.

Another interesting thing that happened was us speaking for the protesters, who are not part of the union, but paid by the union to stand there four hours a day holding up their sign and passing out fliers. The irony of speaking for people who are speaking for someone else is a beautiful bit of theater. I am not sure exactly why this resonates so loudly for me, but I suspect it is just the idea of lots of communication and energy being expended to convey messages that the active participants have no personal stake in. This is really rich, and I think we accidentally touched on a potential lens to look at the media through. I will continue to ponder this.

Kind of along the same lines, but going the opposite direction; "Charles" asked us when we were in front of city hall to speak about his frustration that the civil union legislation was being held back. He and his boyfriend had gotten engaged and were hoping to follow through soon. As I paraphrased his statement through the megaphone he came towards me and then standing in front of me, he agreed! This seems an interesting other side of the media.... people feeling heartened by their own message, agreeing with them selves.

I feel like we learned a lot, and got a lot of good raw material the day we started this project. Laurel and I also talked about how we might expand it, kind of a how far can we follow up sort of idea. We think we might try to find Ben (our main "client" at the square). We might go to the seventh floor and meet the people who administer the square and look out the window they were watching us from. Maybe we will find out more about the working situation for the protesters and the union that hired them.

We also want to continue our original idea of public speaking. We talked afterwards about some ways we could fine tune it, one idea was a dry erase board with a "topic" posted. Another was having note cards and pens for people to write what they wanted us to talk about.

The most helpful criticism we received from our colleagues addressed the fact that it wasn't really clear that we were "public speaking". We were just conversing through the megaphones. Some things I wrote in my notes were: A more clear system (I think this is really true) to indicate that we are "broadcasting". Maybe a pirate radio sort of set up, or an LCD message board with transcribed projection of text. And as I mentioned there was a lot of criticism of our documentation. I am not sure exactly how we will want to design this going forward, but this is by far the best discussion I have had about anything I am doing since I started the program. I believe we got such good (negative) feedback because we had so much documentation to respond to. This is really interesting to me because I have mixed feelings about the importance of documentation, but I have never before considered its role as a tool for getting feedback and growing my practice.

One last thing I will say about this, I don't know how it will look going forward, but I feel it now has another purpose. It appears that "public speaking" can function as a serendipitous heuristic device that allows the community to plot the trajectory of our next move.