Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more
We’re casting and crewing for World 2. What’s your role?
For a while at Absurd Towers we’ve been holding the hunch that theatre might somehow hold the key to navigating The Shitshow.
Many of you will already have read our Clare’s piece on how building World 2 needs to be a massive play. If you haven’t yet, please: do it now, it’s a great piece. In equal measure, clarion call and thoughtful.
What I’ve been charged with as part of all this is exploring the archetypes that might help inform the roles within The Play. I can only guess that my haphazard performances as the wizard that reads the nation’s cards on Britain’s Got Tarot has hoodwinked everyone here into thinking I might possess some great thespian insight 🙈.
One of the things I’ve always loved about the theatre as metaphor for what we’re trying to do is that there are so many distinct specialisms essential to the staging of a play. Sure, the ‘actors’ may get more than their fair share of attention, but without the person selling ice creams at the interval, who gives a shit about the embodied experience of going to a play, right? And what if there’s nobody to raise the fire curtain? 😖
The other great thing about thinking of our work as a play that is actually produced, is that it frees concepts of ‘narrative’ from unhelpful ‘story’-obsessed tropes. Knowing that we need to rid ourselves from Hero’s Journey narrative arcs, or believing that someone is going to write A New Story for us is utterly pointless. We can’t just write things or think things – that work has to be attached to other actions. Writing and thinking in isolation (or worse still, ivory towers) is So World 1.
Thankfully, as is so often the case in our great collective unravelling that hasn’t quite coalesced into a conscious everything movement, way-cleverer people have already done a shitload of work on this kind of exploration.
Ecosystem Change: with us, not to us
Anna Birney from the School of System Change is one. Writing on Medium, she outlines a series of archetype roles that contribute to system change, and it’s very good – it’s the next piece I’d like you to read to contextualise this newsletter.
What I find particularly compelling in what Anna writes (and this diagram) is the broad view pragmatism. Not only attempting to make sense of the landscape, but doing so to make multiple interventions more effectively fundable. Music to the ears of anyone toiling in the dizzying midst of The Shitshow.
In case you haven’t just read the piece, here’s Anna:
This is an analysis that has the potential to move the entire philanthropy market. For this is a mapping that simultaneously recognises symptoms, cause and change – and recognises it as a continuum. Activity in one area is essential to the other, and (eventually) vice-versa. It’s a perpetual motion machine! 🌀
I also love this:
This approach’s market-moving potential lies in how it so clearly illustrates the folly of much of the current funding world, beset as it is by the personal preferences of those at the top. Or five year strategies that have little hope of keeping up with reality. Translating for context, navigating methods is crucial for the dot-joining so urgently required in our worlds.
This loop clearly sets out how change, and the funding that supports it should be driven by what is necessary, not personal preference or ideology.
And perhaps the best thing about it is that it also gives ample room for people to see themselves as part of the change. Driven not by what someone on high thinks they’re minded to fund, but by what people are actually good at. Are you a Disrupter or an Illuminator? A Stabiliser or a Weaver? Go do that. There’s plenty of need for it.
What it also does is provide a framework for different actors to be aligned across the landscape. Tactically distinct perhaps, but definitely situationally aligned. The field doesn’t have to agree on strategy, but it’s bloody helpful if its noses are at least pointed in a similar direction. It’s a diagram that speaks to the mobilisation / organising dilemma of old (TL;DR: we need BOTH) and to my old favourite, Bill Moyer’s Movement Action Plan.
Act up!
And there it is, at the beginning of that last paragraph, bringing us back to where we’re supposed to be: actors. Or maybe more usefully, to coin an XR term: crew.
Can we map the School of System Change’s work to our play’s cast and crew? Can we audition Navigators and Experimenters, Responders and Bridgers? We think so.
And more pertinently for our work on the Fête of Britain, we think this system-wide analysis can drop-down into neighbourhood-level action. The bottom-up aligning with the top-down. For if Disruptors and Activators in Truro and Middlesbrough, Hospice Workers and Stabilisers in Rhyl and Fife can see the vital work they are doing in their immediate world mirrored around the country and in systemic flows, then we’ve got proper alchemy.
We’re going to start finding out next week, in Wigan. We’ll report back how it goes.
Such an approach to casting might also help us see the longer arcs of history and change too – the Weavers and Bridgers on whose shoulders we stand. Because just as Anna’s analysis doesn’t seek to reinvent the wheel, it helps enormously to know that change has happened before, and this work exists in a historical continuum too.
Does this make sense?
If so, we’ve got one last question: what’s your role going to be as we begin rehearsals?
Are you into Conservation: a Stabiliser, staving-off collapse and sustaining a community of care; or a Responder, coordinating resource in the face of disaster?
Is your thing Release? The Hospice Work of composting, of good endings, or the Disruption of raising awareness and activism, the Activation that seeds new ideas.
Maybe Experimenting with new models or Weaving the connectivity between players that starts the vital Reorganisation?
Or Growth (not THAT kind of Growth FFS) that needs Navigators to help with resourcing, the artist and writer and creative Illuminators who’ll bring public consciousness and the Bridgers who synthesise all into new systems.
Finally, the Cultivator who somehow sees all of the above and works out how to navigate and nourish and help it all flower.
There’s plenty of work for everyone.
More than enough, as Cory Doctorow puts it, to keep everyone currently alive employed for ever.
So pick your role. Join an audition. Work out with your cast and crew how your skills combine.
Write your own script, learn your lines. Rehearse rehearse rehearse.
Then let’s all put on the greatest fucking show on earth.
Elsewhere in Absurdity...
Diya joined hundreds of people at the Gandhi statue on Parliament Square standing in solidarity with everyone protesting against voter fraud in India! 🗳️🇮🇳
Stella nabbed the hottest ticket in town – Caryl Churchill’s Triumph. And triumph it is by all accounts! 🎟️🔥
Clare went to Tom At The Farm at The Barbican: “intense and dark and weird. It was quite good!” 🎭🇧🇷
Charlie went to the Up Yours Collective’s she-punk epic God Save The Queens. Members of X-Ray Spex, The Raincoats, Slits and more in homage to the late, and very great Poly Styrene 🧷🖕
Alanna and Clive are off to the PV of our dear friend Immo’s new show Victoria’s Trees tonight 📸🌳
