'Thoughts from R&D residency in Gloucester: Navigating the Grey'
In August I had the absolute joy of joining Beyond Face in a week-long residency in Gloucester, courtesy of Strike a Light. The week was an R&D (research and development) for a show that Beyond Face is creating for young people to tour around schools in the South-West.
This has come as a response to our work with young people. What we have been hearing repeatedly is that young people aren’t being listened to by teachers/adults. When asked what they would like to see in a theatre show we had an overwhelmingly large response saying that they wanted a show about racism and racial justice.
The central question that we began to explore was ‘How do you overcome disconnection in a system that divides us?’ (That system being a cisnormative, heteronormative, white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, one which relies on binary divisions.) How do we listen to one another and really understand? This led us to the grey space….
‘The grey space’ is a term that emerged during our conversations. The grey space encapsulates all that we don’t know, the things we avoid, the sticky, icky, tricky bits. The in-betweens and the uncertainties, the murky blend and realisation that everything’s not as straightforward as black and white, right or wrong…Whilst there is nothing particularly innovative about this concept, it does feel worth reminding ourselves when we live in a society as polarizing as ours.
Brain dump from R&D - What is the grey space?
Without giving too much away about the show, we also began to think about what ‘the grey space’ might look like in abstracted terms in the world of the play. And how the grey might be a place that enables characters to connect and grow. The grey space spilled out from pen, paper, and brainstorms and into the rehearsal room as we continued to immerse ourselves in conversations about identity, power, and privilege as we began to interrogate what the story could be, who the characters were, etc. We ourselves were sitting in the grey. It goes without saying that conversations on social justice can be triggering because of our own lived experience and demand a certain amount of emotional labour, they are personal and can evoke things within us that sometimes we might not even be aware of. It’s easy to avoid these spaces and conversations as a result.
I’m grateful to be a part of a company that holds space for these conversations with recognition of their difficulty and how Beyond Face creates safer spaces for conversations on social justice through nurture, solidarity, empathy, compassion, joy, and laughter. Here are some things from the week which made navigating the grey space easier, a manifesto for the grey if you will:
Eat together
Dance together
Sing together
Cook together
Make Tik Toks in nature reserves
Wiggle and be silly
Surprise each other
Play games
Go for wellbeing walks
Play Dobble (and win)
- Sonia
