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Showing posts from June, 2020

We Tell Stories (2)

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Back at the beginning of April, we published this poem, "We Tell Our Stories", which we had written collaboratively. 28 people, from 19 different nationalities reflected on how and why we tell the stories we tell. It says, we think, something about the power and beauty of stories and storytelling. In other circumstances we might have spent time playing with how to perform it: exploring how we might use our voices, individually and together, to add depth and emphasis to the words. Like so many things in all our lives, lockdown made it impossible to do that in the way we would have done in "normal" life. But, like so many things, we have learned to adapt and discovered that we can still find ways to create something beautiful A number of the project participants created individual recordings of the poem. They practised the pronunciation of unfamiliar words. They reflected on the emotions they wanted to express. They each produced something very beautiful.

New ways of staying together

Just in case enough hasn't already been written on the subject already ... we thought it was high time to add to the plethora of reflections on community in the time of Covid-19. This feels like a somewhat overdue update on how a project which is entirely based around the concept of encounter and bringing people together is surviving in a time when we are all being told to stay apart. As we watched the lockdown creeping closer through March, the idea of maintaining this wonderful community felt like a somewhat daunting prospect: being together in shared space felt like it was so intrinsic to who we were: how could we do what we do, be who we are when we were being forced to stay away from each other? But it is not so very long ago that this project was just a vague idea, and with a bit of imagination and creativity it became a reality: so with a touch of that same imagination and creativity, we began to dream about how we could in fact, carry on. And, after all, if you've a