Anni Raw reflects on the dynamic between trust and risk set up through crafting activities at QUEERCIRCLE – mediating doubt, shock, and other impacts on people’s sense of ‘safety’ and collective belonging.
My area of research is understanding the value of Creative Health practices across different (global) contexts (see Raw 2013, 2014). So I was delighted to be asked to become part of the QUEERCIRCLE Research Group, looking at what is often dismissed as a low value or diversionary arts activity – crafting, in this instance – in a queer context, exploring its value for participants. This article includes reflections from my own fieldnotes, plus feedback from participants and workshop leaders.
Over 2023-24, QUEERCIRCLE piloted a number of open crafting sessions led by various facilitators under the name of ‘Make Time’. I found that these workshops commonly produced a rare kind of malleable ‘community’ with unusual properties: a fast-building, temporary, definition-resistant collective (or collective of resistance) was formed surprisingly often. This occurred alongside – and through – the creative making activities themselves, both because of, and irrespective of, people’s LGBTQ+ identities. I wondered whether this process of community bonding was perhaps inseparable from how people see and understand QUEERCIRCLE itself, and who they assume is in the space with them.
People who reflected with me on their workshop experiences found them rich and beneficial in various ways. So beyond accepting that QUEERCIRCLE communities feel benefits from crafting and creative making (together), this blog reflects on the value and risks of unspoken identity assumptions in the context of intense shared moments, and the ongoing work of co-curating a different kind of creative space that is specifically hospitable and safe (enough) for LGBTQ+ communities.
Image: QUEERCIRCLE
Making a safe (enough) space
Vulnerabilities are a common product of queer lived experience. In some ‘Make Time’ groups participants benefited from this creative, facilitated space for revisiting difficult personal struggles, and felt safe enough to reflect on their lived experience in the company of strangers – verbally, somatically, collectively, creatively. One person involved in the series told me it became possible “to unpick a great amount of shame in the studios at QUEERCIRCLE”.
Opening up personally in a workshop is each participant’s choice; they can also choose not to risk exposing a vulnerability. But it was interesting that so many people – for example in David Shenton’s three-hour queer cartooning workshop, which focused on representing people’s ‘coming-out’ stories – did share very personal, even traumatic, experiences through the cartoons they made.
The expertise of the artist facilitator is central in the work of developing a trusting environment that can be safe enough for participants in the workshop process, and these are high level facilitator skills. QUEERCIRCLE has a growing network of queer-identified artists and creative facilitators, with extensive experience in shaping how a space or workshop feels – its ‘affective atmosphere’ or vibe – a medium through which ‘intensive space-times can be created’(Anderson 2009, 77-81; Raw 2013, 219-21, 329).
However, equally important in developing the relative safety people needed was the mutual, sincere recognition and identification with each other’s lived experience offered by group members. For some, the affective atmosphere of a session seemed to carry something difficult on their behalf – e.g. one participant described being “in this imaginary vortex of a shared experience – we were all together in this frequency. It was quite a spiritual space”. Along with a sense of creative achievement from having crafted something of (personal or symbolic rather than economic) value during the workshop, many participants quickly built group-wide emotional coalitions of mutual trust, grounded in recognition of shared struggles and marginalisation experiences. So what kind of creative making is this?
Image: QUEERCIRCLE
Risk and bonding
Common benefits noticed by participants in creative group activities generally include a positive emotional boost from new social connections, and a sense of community (of something shared) that can build in groups meeting regularly over extended periods.
While time – duration of projects – is often a clear factor in developing trusting bonds, interestingly at QUEERCIRCLE several of the one-off workshops also seemed to produce such trust bonds between participants, at a speed and depth surprising even to experienced artist facilitators. So how was this happening so quickly between strangers at QUEERCIRCLE, and what are the implications of these processes?
Research on the dynamic mechanisms found in creative processes has suggested that shared moments of intensity can accelerate person-to-person connections, triggering a phenomenon known to anthropologists as communitas (Raw 2013, 290-92, 340-56; Raw 2014, 20-21). With origins in ritualised (often sacred) events, communitas produces a powerful sense of human encounter (Van Gennep 1960; Turner 1974, 2002).
Communitas was a likely driver of trust and intimacy in some QUEERCIRCLE workshops. In David Shenton’s one-off queer cartooning workshop various factors arose that are known to trigger a communitas-like, heightened, intensity (Raw 2013, 283-8, 293-4, 349-57). These are all related to social risks experienced by all participants together, with this shared pressure escalating social connections:
- Participants’ drawing skills were exposed, and publicly tested (entailing acute risk of failure to communicate through inadequate drawing);
- There was intense time pressure to complete challenging tasks – ‘at breakneck speed’, according to participant AR;
- The deeply personal workshop subject of sharing our ‘coming out’ stories meant encountering our own personal disclosure boundaries in the moment. We were ‘bonded in the fire of disclosure’ (AR) as we revisited and shared often difficult or even personally devastating experiences.
These shared moments of risk lowered participants’ social defences, and a direct and emotionally charged honesty characteristic of communitas was evident in several participants’ disclosures.
It’s interesting, however, that in this workshop there was no point at which the group discussed their identities directly. As facilitator David reflected: “I was expecting the people who come to QUEERCIRCLE to be out and out queer people. But that’s not the case…” He was surprised to discover through the task of storyboarding their ‘coming out’ moments that some in his workshop had no lived experience to work with. For me, realising that we were a more diverse group than expected did alter the connection experience: it created a minor rupture in the social connections that had built up, by making me aware of the inappropriate assumptions I had been making about each person and our shared LGBTQ+ lived experience. It led to a sense that we were sharing LGBTQ+ coming-out stories in a more public, or less specifically queer-safe, space.
Communitas-like bonding was also achieved in Ly Orrock and Becca Parkinson’s one hour ‘Eco-healing’ workshop on ‘hopes for our queer community’, through the magic of non-verbal ritual practices, reminiscent of communitas examples in the original anthropological theories. Again here the presumption expressed through the phrase ‘hopes for our queer community’ seemed to be that all those involved in the workshop would identify as queer, yet there was no direct discussion of identities to confirm or dispel this assumption. I wonder more generally what identity assumptions may be guiding QUEERCIRCLE participants’ creativity and bonding in their making activities, and how common minor rupture experiences like mine might be for people during or after workshops.
Can QUEERCIRCLE, through its workshop programme, create moments of communitas: ‘a direct, immediate, and total confrontation of human identities’ (Turner 1982, 48), that increase a sense of solidarity, intensifying trust and social connectedness, and provide a form of rare, liminal ‘antistructure’(Turner 1974, 46-52)? A space with the potential for unity and reciprocal validation of the kind that participants might rarely find beyond known contacts, where new trusting bonds can be like discovering a pop-up ‘family’ amongst whom you feel immediately affirmed? Perhaps. However, as I put in my fieldnotes, in the workshops I attended, “the sense of shared / embraced identity felt quite strong, but might have been quite flawed!”. The fragility of an automatic trust based on assumptions about values, and particularly lived experience, shared in common, is for me a live question: what might happen between people entering intense moments of connection at speed in a creative making workshop, if realities surface which might confront these assumptions?
Image: QUEERCIRCLE
Making it collective
QUEERCIRCLE ‘Make Time’ participants have made spaces together of a kind that have embraced and empowered them, and enabled them to embody a release from – as participant TW phrased it – “the things that don’t serve them’” Some have then had to negotiate a rupture of the sense of embrace, as they recalculated the nature and extent of its safety for them, or reframed the basis of the solidarity and trust with new knowledge about who was in the room.
These temporary collectives of participant bonds (strong yet fragile) can provide gently but fiercely activist spaces, where the personal is political. As artist Lady Kitt crystalised: “Physically making things together …[is] different from just having a conversation, it’s realising we have ‘material agency’. It’s a physical manifestation of our agency to change things.”. This, then, is something else made through making at QUEERCIRCLE.
About the author
Anni Raw has been active in community and participatory arts for 40 years, as a singer-performer, community musician, project producer, evaluator and academic researcher. For her doctoral thesis, Anni worked with 40 expert practitioners in the UK and Mexico across art forms, developing a shared articulation of creativity in community-based arts practice as a catalyst for change. She continues research and publishing, presenting her work nationally and internationally, within and beyond the academic world. Anni can be contacted by email.
References
Anderson, B. 2009. ‘Affective Atmospheres.’ Emotion, Space and Society 2, 77-8
Raw, A. 2013. ‘A model and theory of community-based arts and health practice.’ Doctoral thesis. http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/7774/.
Raw, A. 2014. ‘Ethnographic Evidence of an Emerging Transnational Arts Practice? Perspectives on UK and Mexican Participatory Artists’ Processes for Catalysing Change and Facilitating Health and Flourishing‘. Anthropology in Action, 21(1), 13-2. https://doi.org/10.3167/aia.2014.210104.
Turner, V. 1974. Dramas, Fields and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society. Cornell University Press.
Turner, V. 1982. From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play. Performing Arts Journal Publications.
Turner, V. 2002. ‘Liminality and Communitas,’ in A Reader in the Anthropology of Religion edited by M. Lambek. Blackwell.
Van Gennep, A. 1960. The Rites of Passage. Routledge & Kegan Paul.
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