The power of listening and the Rainbow of Wishes

Designing a creative engagement activity for a Co-POWeR community event at the Southampton Arts and Humanities Festival 2021.

(Photo of a rainbow, shot by Alda Terracciano in north London during the first lockdown.)

Engaging communities

The overall aim of Co-POWeR, the Consortium on Practices for Well-being and Resilience in Black Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) Families and Communities is to attract a wide range of people from these backgrounds and dig into the vast ocean of data, content, and stories of the COVID-19 pandemic. One way to achieve this is to create artworks co-designed and co-produced with members of these communities. CO-POWeR has a specific work package devoted to this and I am one of its members. It was therefore with enthusiasm that we accepted the invite by Olatundun (Tundun) Gafari, a fellow researcher on physical activity and food, to collaborate on the delivery of an annual event at the University of Southampton marking October’s Black History Month (Southampton Arts and Humanities Festival 2021). We agreed the event would be held on Zoom and titled “Telling your untold pandemic stories through creative activities”. My contribution to the event was an interactive exercise, which I based on my previous work with culturally diverse communities in London, aimed at giving participants a taste of how storytelling is employed in the creation of the theatre play and graphic artworks, which we will produce as part of the other creative outcomes of the project.

The Rainbow of Wishes exercise

This is a group exercise designed for an online environment, in which half the group is made of storytellers and the other half is made of listeners. In this instance, the storytellers tell their stories of love, friendship, or other important relationships during the COVID-19 pandemic to the listeners, while the listeners attentively and creatively listen. The session is divided into four parts, each reflecting a different moment in the creative process of devised theatre and participatory graphic arts.

In part one the participants decide if they want to be storytellers or listeners. The storytellers choose a story that happened to them or someone very close to them, which still resonates in their lives. Storytellers are paired with someone who wants to be a listener and each pair is sent to breakout rooms by the Zoom host. The storyteller is asked to turn their video off, as eye contact is a distraction to the image building process of the listener. In fact, the exercise is not about paying attention to the body language of the storyteller, but to the internal image that the story creates in the listener, as if it was listened to with eyes closed. Meanwhile, the listeners take notes of the story, and either draw a picture of it or imagine a physical action that can represent the story.

In part two the listeners are asked to share the images produced as a result of the storytelling. It is important to note that at this stage the storyteller and the listener do not need to disclose the verbal story to the whole group, but only the image through the drawing or the physical action, focusing on this rather than the story. At this point the storytellers have the opportunity to comment on the drawing and give some instructions on how it could be improved, and the same happens with the physical action, which is performed to the camera.

In part three all participants in the Zoom workshop are asked to think about personal experiences and emotions they were reminded of during the exercise. As mentioned before, the aim of part two is not to verbalize the story, but to create an image that can engage Zoom participants and stimulate their empathy by recalling their personal stories. They can write it down for their own record.

In part four, called the Rainbow of Wishes, the storytellers and the listeners who shared the images with the whole group, get the opportunity to express up to three wishes to change the story through its image. For example, the storyteller might want to change the story radically and get an altogether different image of it; the listener might wish an image that is more in tune with the emotions felt during the listening. It is up to them how they want to carry out their Rainbow of Wishes and modify the image by rearranging poses, expressions, postures, and positions in the drawing and the physical action. The other participants might identify elements in the image that resonate with their personal experiences during COVID-19 pandemic and write down their own wishes, but they are not asked to discuss them.

(Image produced and shared by the listener, Raminder Kaur, 

at the workshop held on 14 October 2021).

Final thoughts

Although the time allocation did not allow for everybody to show their images during the exercise, every storyteller and every listener should have the opportunity to share their images or perform their actions. This will allow the Rainbow of Wishes to become a more collective endeavour as everybody will have witnessed each other stories through their images, and wishes might tune in at a more profound level. Time permitting, I would also add a final part in which all participants are asked to pick up on an image that most resonated with them, and express their wishes in relation to it.

In closing, discussing the design of the Rainbow of Wishes exercise on this blog is a way of sharing a practice of participatory theatre and graphic arts, and stimulating comments and questions both within and outside the consortium. More importantly it aims to invite community participants to the creative space. So please, come and join us in these fun and creative activities. You have great stories to tell, and we can’t wait to hear them! They will help us in producing artworks about unseen stories of the pandemic, which we can then use to make recommendations that can influence change and hopefully reduce social inequalities.

"Fields of white powder

A frigid desert in the North 7,000 miles away

The sun beats along thatched roofs

Heat radiating from the earth

Finding my way back home.

Where is home?"

(Poem produced and shared by the listener, Michael L. Bahrami-Hessari, 

at the workshop held on 14 October 2021).

Blog post by Dr Alda Terracciano