Welcome.

There are few living platforms at Colgate that bring people together to find voice and speak life from the margins. This limits our individual and collective abilities, as members of the Colgate community, to understand how each other’s struggles, passions, and the expression of these struggles and passions, are inherently linked to others, and instrumental in shaping our entire lives. Collective Breathing (learn more here) is a space where unheard contemporary voices from the Colgate community  engage in a collaborative process of breathing life into our stories for ourselves and the wider Colgate community.


As a member of Collective Breathing I, Sharon Nicol, designed a companion independent study entitled Collective Breathing: The Making and Memory of a Feminist Art/Performance Collective. This blog is the home of my work in the course and an archive of my experiences within the collective.


The Collective Breathing course is centered around three major themes—Shaping(Making), Telling(Living), Remembering(Archiving). These themes exist as a framework for the present collective and future generations. Shaping the Collective Breathing project involves developing the vision for the current collective, understanding who is part of the vision, and determining how the vision will be realized. Telling the project means executing the vision, whether it be a communal creative space and/or an end-of-semester performance. Telling is not only about the end-product, but all that exists between. Remembering the project focuses on how a project’s herstory is preserved for those involved and future generations. Remembering is in conversation with content and medium, asking what do participants want to be remembered and how? These processes can occur simultaneously, at varying lengths, out of order, and sometimes not at all, yet having engaged with other models that uptake such a structure and in recording the collective’s experiences with these themes as they happen, we will be better able to return to order/the vision if there are any missteps during the process, and better contextualize our outcomes post-vision. Through this blog, I will document my reflections as I move through the Collective Breathing syllabus (which can be viewed here, along with the independent study proposal) 


This is my attempt at remaining accountable and transparent with my own thoughts and further humanizing the process myself and fellow collective breathers are engaged in, for generations to come. I am imperfect, and I recognize the value of sharing the imperfections of the building process in order to sustain this work.

I welcome feedback and hope that you will stay engaged throughout our journey. Please visit the larger Collective Breathing Blog/Archive that will feature voices of the whole group.



Tuesday 21 February 2017

The Conflict of Dialogue

"As a result, the difficulties are not in the theatre. The difficulties-- and essential difficulties-- are in the oppressions the group, class, or community wants to confront, and in the struggle to reestablish dialogue" -Theatre for Community, Conflict & Dialogue pg. xi

As a group, we identified that we did not want to replicate many of the toxic practices we'd seen modeled in cores on campus. In our other experiences, toxic practices ultimately led to environments in which people were not able to get to know one another deeply, and subsequently unable to form supportive communities around experiences that affect daily living on campus. Given our desires to form and facilitate a supportive community, it was necessary to proactively address issues that hindered our past and present attempts at community building. In response to this desire, we did an activity that posed the questions:

  • Why am I here?
  • What do I need from this group? What are some tangible ways to fulfill my needs?
  • How do I deal with conflict?
  • What’s something that people often misinterpret about me? How do I want this action to be interpreted?

These questions were meant to get the group thinking about how we interact with others and practicing the vulnerability and critical self reflection necessary to accomplish the mission of Collective Breathing, recognizing that conflict is an inevitable reality in groups.

Mirroring Rohd's assertion of the difficulty of (re)establishing dialogue, especially in conversations about pain, marginalization, and oppression, I recognize that the group was plagued by and had to fight against silence in the face of difficulty/conflict.


In response to the question of "how do I deal with conflict" almost everyone in the meeting responded that they do not address it, shrink back, talk to people outside of the situation, and ultimately never find voice for conquering the issue in the space that it exists. The group felt this was an unfortunate reality, but ultimately a representation of who we are and unsubject to change. We come into Collective Breathing with our relationships, conflicts, all aspects of our personal and Colgate-related lives that have in many ways taught us not to be vocal about what hurts us. Yet if we are unwilling to open up in conflict (with ourselves or others), ultimately we are replicating a culture that stifles honest dialogue, and harming our ability to develop a collective meant to facilitate healing from this very culture. Having read Rohd's explanation of this inability to dialogue as the most difficult part of the community creating process, I see that an unwillingness to change the habits with which we come into a space will result in the exact same spaces that we critique and attempt to run away from. In order to do different work, we have to be willing to be different people. We have to be willing to be dialoguers around our difficulties even if, or especially if, not addressing conflict has become essential to us.

This collective is not necessarily a safe space in that it allows us to practice what makes us comfortable, but that we are able to have support in addressing the very cores of who we are and critiquing how these cores have become. Our workshop this week with Poppy Liu was mostly focused on writing. Most of the writing we did did not have to be shared, but on one occasion we were able to practice speaking to and through our issues and relationships to ourselves, to campus, and to the outside world. Sharing our writing is an act of refusing the silences that we've become accustomed to. It's another assignment in our work as re-dialoguers. In the foreword to Theatre for Community, Doug Paterson said that "we make each other through dialogue" (xii). What we are able to talk about reflects what we are able to be. As we share our work throughout the process in collective breathing, we bring ourselves to collective being.