Connecting our Isolated Islands of Coherence: a Mid-Continent SPT Gathering

Adult students sit and stand around a room with a wooden floor as an Asian woman gestures in explanation. A White woman in the foreground is taking notes.

SPT creator Arawana Hayashi teaching an in-person SPT course in upstate New York, 2018.

What do individual North American Social Presencing Theater (SPT) practitioners, arts activists, and leaders of transformative change have in common? As someone who answers to all three, I can say it’s a sense of isolation, even while knowing there are parallel practices and movements out there.

Last year, fellow SPT practitioner Shannon Rabas and I did multiple sensing sessions within the North American SPT community to find out what was needed or desired by practitioners here. Overwhelmingly,  people’s greatest curiosity was around our Social Body, spread out as we are across the varied and vast Earth Body of North America.

There was also a sense of interconnection that’s disjointed — like we’re all in the same river but find ourselves curled into our own small eddies. In his annual U.Lab: Leading from the Emerging Future MOOC earlier that year, Otto Scharmer described this very phenomenon, quoting Nobel laureate, Ilya Prigogine:

"When a complex system is far from equilibrium, small islands of coherence in a sea of chaos have the capacity to shift the entire system to a higher order." 

Scharmer went on to elaborate,

“. . .it is possible to link these small islands of coherence with each other to form beginning ecosystems of coherence.”

We sensed a desire to begin forming an ecosystem of coherence by linking our small islands together.

 

Crystallizing the How, Where & Who

The next question was how to come together. Everyone had appreciated the spaciousness that comes with retreat-style events in beautiful, remote, natural settings. Yet, in practical terms people were simply not able to carve out the time for a 5- or 7-day course every year. The suggestion arose to hold some shorter events in a city with a major airport, allowing people to get in and out within a weekend’s time. 

After letting these ideas percolate, the idea of a weekend course in my current hometown of Minneapolis-St. Paul began to emerge. Arawana Hayashi, SPT creator and author of Social Presencing Theater: The Art of Making a True Move, agreed to teach the course. The spacious Dendros Group headquarters was available to meet in person on the first weekend of November.

Somatic Movement Educators practicing SPT at a conference

With Arawana onboard, it made sense to offer an SPT Basic course, that is, an introductory sampler that also counts toward practitioner certification. The Basic course offers embodiment practices that increase awareness of:

  1. Personal embodied presence: synchronizing body and mind;

  2. The social body and the social field;

  3. Personal leadership challenges and personal transformation;

  4. Systems, their stakeholders and relationships, and sensing movement toward systemic transformation.

Once the how and where crystallized, some exciting possibilities arose. First, we realized that within the Twin Cities there are diverse pockets of “artivists” — people using various forms of embodied social arts to look toward the future. They, too, are isolated socially by generation, cultural community, and the focus of their work as well as by the boundaries of their art forms. Our intention to network the isolated islands of SPT practice broadened to include practitioners of similar forms who are primed to understand and use SPT, and whose perspectives will further enrich the ecosystem.

 

SPT & Leading from the Emerging Future

Arawana teaching in the Leading from the Emerging Future/Theory U community

Historically, SPT has always served the global online U.Lab course community as they seek to lead from the emerging future. This event brings a first-of-its kind in-person opportunity to those in Mid-North America. We have seen how SPT supports people who coach and facilitate for transformational change, as well as organizational leaders who find themselves needing to respond to disruptive change in their systems. And we’re anxious to incorporate their perspectives as we create our inclusive social field. Our fall timeline aligns with the U.Lab schedule, allowing participation by those who are newly introduced to SPT through the course, as well as regulars ready to deepen their SPT understanding and skills. Plus, early November is lovely in Minnesota, well before our famously cold winter sets in.

As you might imagine, drawing from SPT practitioners, local artivists, and leaders and change-makers from across the continent, we already are assembling a fascinating group of people with a rich variety of perspectives. But we’ve got room for more, and we’d love your presence!

And — we know that this kind of event spreads best by word of mouth, so please forward the information to those in your networks.

Rie Gilsdorf