extracts from Peter Senge's 'Power of Presence' with an emphasis on the importance of breathing

Peter Senge - The Power of Presence extract

originally made for 'Chasing Happiness' with at Goldsmiths College, London with I-Land http://www.facebook.com/pages/I-Land/117974411602936 

Paradise Journey vs. 2012

Sounds Like Happiness 
~ a growing sound archive of voices …  

We can be happy.
We must be happy.
We will be happy.
We have the right to be happy.

We have so much knowledge about what makes us happy, but how happy are we really?  

We live in a country that is not threatened by invasion, and where we can enjoy the highest levels of health and wealth than ever before, but how happy are we really?  

We live in a time when science is giving us greater control over how we look and how long we can live, and geneticists and psychologists are giving us new formulae for being happy, and the chemists are making newer and better ‘happy pills’ increasingly available. We can choose from more than 11,000 books on the subject of happiness.  But how much happiness is any of this expertise actually bringing us?  
In November 2010 Prime Minister, David Cameron, announced new funding for the measurement of our Gross National Happiness in the UK, representing a major move away from our traditional GDP tunnel vision and recognising the problem of a much wealthier, healthier and safer society that is nevertheless not as happy as we were in 1950.  But do we believe this or any government intervention will lead us to any greater happiness?   

More of us are more connected into our big wide wonderful world than ever before.   We have more experiences through international travel and more choices through instant connections via cyberspace than our grandparents could have dreamed of.   And most of us work in conditions of greater comfort and better conditions for greater reward than at any other time.   But is any of this making us any happier?


Sounds Like Happiness is a growing polyphonic sound chamber of a voices blending the many colliding voices bringing their different truths alongside our own voices speaking about what we know already from our lived through lives.

Sounds Like Happiness is the accompanying project to our Happiness At Work programme of training and development
www.bridgebuilders.co.uk

Sounds Like Happiness FINAL - MAMLL 2012

white man’s burden
~ a re-imagining of Yoko Ono’s 1965 ‘Cut Piece’
in a 21st century soundscape

...exploring  the destruction and creation of male leadership styles…


created & performed with the audience
by mark trezona & martyn duffy


This live art show is co-created with the audience and made of:
~ a soundscape of alpha-male voices, chosen for their contemporary immediacy   and contradictions of hope and catastrophe, new possibility and impending crisis;
~ a man in a suit;
~ a pair of scissors;
~ an audience invited to come and cut…

Yoko Ono’s 1965 action Cut Piece, in which she sat motionless on the stage before an audience who were invited to come up and cut away her clothing, inspires this performance. It was born out of an anger about the obdurate collusion and lack of responsibility for the damage and destruction that continues to be perpetuated by men in suits. In this performance we ask: 
what happens when we offer a man in a suit to an audience to cut?

What happens in each performance is over to the audience.

We have set our re-creation of Ono’s original performance standing and inside a soundscape of the voices of contemporary alpha-male leaders– organisation leaders and management theorists, politicians and bankers  - selected specifically for each performance – These dominating voices of power are set alongside more complex questions posed in Night, David Harsent’s poem about what wakes in us when we escape our day-lit selves to a place where the dreamlike and the nightmarish are never far apart, Mark Doty’s city-rage poem Citizens, and in Janis Ian’s song Matthew about a murdered gay college student: What Makes a Man a Man?

What began with questions about identity and power has become mixed with ideas about burden: the onerous burdens of all that responsibility and all our hopes carried our organisation and political leaders’ shoulders, cut through with the loaded expectations we make on our leaders to ‘stand up speak show authority’; the weight of ‘America’ always in our lives, cut through with the burdens of participating and team playing and citizenship and the civil responsibility we all expected to bear and are being asked to increase in this increasingly challenging and unpredictable world; the oppressiveness / oppression of western male domination, still deadly in his smart 21st century suit of apparent liberalism, still owning and wielding and maintaining power, cut through with recognition that surface appearances must always be deceptive, and an individual man can look different to us if we cut away at him. 
All of this - and all the many more things a man in a suit can mean - we offer to the audience to cut.  And it is your coming up that determines how much this is a show of destruction and/or recreation.  

The answers are up to the people in the room...


created by mark trezona & martyn duffy
performed by mark trezona with the audience
soundscape by martyn duffy & mark trezona

... alchemy is the performance-making wing of BridgeBuilders STG Ltd who create learning that aims to help build a world of happier people who thrive on change and inspire the people around them.

... alchemy aspires to make rich experience out of the ingredients of live performance & audience memory and imagination.

... alchemy tries to make exceptional experience happen in the space where performance and audience combine.

www.alchemyliveart.com

01 white man's burden (MAMLL, Lancaster University Management School, 2012)

~ white man’s burden ~
a re-imagining of Yoko Ono’s 1965 ‘Cut Piece’ in a 21st century soundscape

...exploring  the destruction and creation of male leadership styles…

created & performed with the audience
by mark trezona & martyn duffy, BridgeBuilders

~ what do we want from our leaders? and how does this match with what we are getting at the moment?

~ what can we each do to influence and shape the leadership around us?

~ as leaders, what impact are we trying to make, what effect on people do we want to have, and what do we expect to get back from people in return?

~ to what extent does our leadership continue to rely predominantly on male modes of thought and behaviour?

~ what does considering leadership through the different resonators offer to our understanding ... from our history, and from the different dimensions of our lives?

~ what can we learn from what we do with a pair of scissors, a stand-in nameless man in a suit, and complete licence to cut in response to different leadership voices we are hearing?

~ how much do we want to destroy this default 'man' and how much do we choose to recreate him in a different form?

~ do we want to become a unified group and work together or do we prefer to claim our rights to bring our own individual responses?

~ and what might we do out from this experience to reshape and sculpt our work with people and how we go about it?

Too often, highly sophisticated and complex human interactions such as leadership are seemingly reduced to relatively straightforward models.  And yet we know that leadership is anything but simple.  It's real difficulty is manifest in the fact that such a very high majority of pople report that they relationship with their boss is one of the most unhappy aspects of their work, as it is with the very high level of frustration leaders report about their people's performance inadequacies.

What makes great leadership?

What this performance gives us is a way to recognise and work with the many contradictory, difficult, rational and emotional complexities that entangle this question.  From the immediacy of the shared experience we get during this performance we can, together, start to talk more honestly about what actually happens in our relationships with leaders and begin to draw out some fresh new ways of make it better and fitter for the demands of the organisation and its people without trying to detach from all the anxieties and necessities and expectations our contemporary world is giving us.

We now want to find organisations who might be interested in working with us to develop their own version of this show that we could make the foundation for a  half-day workshop  looking at leadership and it's people-related aims ~ working through change, team working,  engagement, empowerment and/ communications at work.