Cynefin Manifesto

Cynefin Manifesto

Social Perspective

The progress of industrial society has unfortunately required communities to forget our connectedness with all living things; otherwise the harm that has been done would not have been permitted. The resulting comfort and convenience of our daily lives in the developed world has further inured us to our connectedness, with great cost to the developing world. But the cost to the developed world has been equally damaging on a psychosocial level.

A sense of community depends on that same sense of connectedness, yet almost all our modern rituals for expressing this are mediated by commercial interests and therefore promote the concept of ‘doing’ and ‘having’ over ‘being.’ One can trace the psychological root of the current crisis facing humanity to a gross imbalance between the having/doing mode and being mode of human consciousness. ‘Just being’ is considered insufficient and uncomfortable because of an ever present sense of something lacking. The irony is that what is lacking is an awareness of our connectedness.

Cynefin works through the arts to create spaces within communities that remind people of this connectedness: the untrammelled joy of being alive. An awareness of which is sleeping within us. The medium through which this new awareness of an archaic wisdom, universal to all indigenous peoples, is brought about is through Context Oriented Applied Intercultural Participative Arts (COIAPA).


Practical Perspective

Participative Arts are artistic and creative activities which:
engage and encourage communities to create together as opposed to consuming culture produced by others
are humanizing and democratic in nature

Applied Participative Arts:
involve participants in their own immediate individual experience
enable participants to bring new awareness to their lives and rehearse changes
aspires to create spaces where there is dialogue that is embodied and manifest through the total sensory and dynamic language of the arts

Intercultural Applied Participative Arts:
celebrate cultural difference while transcending or subverting cultural barriers
challenge participants not merely to tolerate or understand other cultures but to embrace the possibility of friendship between cultures in conflict


Context Oriented Intercultural Applied Participative Arts:
draw attention to the context rather than the content of experience: that which is experiencing rather than that which is experienced.

Cynefin’s mission is to create a skills base for COIAPA practitioners. Where new and creative methodologies can be developed that activate communities and bring about an orthogonal shift in our awareness of ourselves and our world so that “being” is seen to be the source of all doing and having and not the other way around.


Non-Dual Perspective

To be present to and present…

“What if” is redundant. All there is is this.

Cynefin creates theatre that is about this moment and contrives only what is necessary to frame an event called ‘theatre’ to attract people called ‘audience’.

Any performances an audience might experience are secondary to what actually happens.

There is more drama in this moment than all that has or will ever happen on page or stage.

…shared moments in space and time…
There are only ever three characters in Cynefin’s productions: the actor, the audience and the moment.

There is only one play that Cynefin performs: the story of the apparent arising and falling of sensations that we interpret as these characters.

…where fear and mediocrity…
Cynefin does not do spectacle. Cynefin embraces ordinary being.

An aversion to uncertainty creates a tendency to channel our consciousness into a ‘mainstream’ groove that Aldus Huxley called ‘the ruts of ordinary perception’. This is a way of seeing, doing and being which is willfully constricted to what we know or think we know. But deep down most of us are numb with fear: terrified by the sense that the real meaning of our short lives is evading us. This double bind leads to a social collusion towards a perceptual regression to the mean and even the extraordinary over time becomes ordinary. Mediocrity has nothing to do with ordinary being and everything to do with being ordinary (while being afraid deep down of not being extraordinary).

…are transformed into awe and wonder…
Cynefin productions embrace the ordinary in circumstances that only appear to be extraordinary. Every day we wake up and step into a labyrinth. Cynefin only imitates the labyrinth in which we are always walking. Within this context the ordinary becomes extraordinary.

…and the inner and the outer…
Theatre is an expression of the illusion of separation. There is the audience, and there is the stage. There are protagonists and antagonists. There is character and plot. There are actors and props.

Life is an expression of the illusion of separation. There is the person inside and the world outside. There is the self and the other. There is cause and effect. There is object and subject.
The only difference between these two illusions is that the first is cause for entertainment the second is this mortal coil…until, that is, when the second illusion is seen to be no different from the first illusion. This is theatre as gnosis – comedy and tragedy…

…become one.
Nobody knows the first thing….not the first thing.
A few know the second thing, a few more the third thing, probably a little more the fourth thing and many more the fifth thing. Almost all think that what they know is the first thing but it never is. It never can be because no-body can know the first thing, and it’s not a thing anyway. It’s…isness.

Freak Show Hippy Idiots

“The mind of man is a maze but his heart is a labyrinth”

The difference between a maze and a labyrinth is not commonly known and seems to the uninitiated as insignificant. But to ‘initiates’ it is the difference between happiness and madness, between illusion and reality, between tragedy and comedy.

At the gates of Caerdroia, the largest labyrinth in the world cut into a pine forest on a mountain in North Wales, is an oak plinth and lying on top a relief in slate of the labyrinth’s design: seven circuits, winding outwards and then inwards, back and forth, a sinewy intestine doubling in on itself to a definitive end at the centre. The plinth has been recently vandalized; someone has taken a hammer to it, smashed the labyrinth into pieces and knelt down in the dirt to engrave in the soft blue stone –

“This is Pen Parc not some freak show, hippy idiots.”

Pen Parc refers here to the farm that once laid underneath this Forestry Commission plantation and before that the house of Sir Richard Wynn’s Gamekeeper.

The earth’s crust and Pen Parc upon it is a palimpsest, defaced and drawn upon by nature and its prodigal son. Is Pen Parc, the people who lived and died there, the grass that grew, the cows that grazed, the hunting dogs that barked, the words written on countless maps: is that place any more valid than the temporary superimposed path lain among the superimposed spruce, the stage for regular performances of Sensory Labyrinth Theatre created by Cynefin - the ‘freak show’ mentioned in the graffiti, performed by ‘hippy idiots’ - an intercultural mix of local volunteers of all ages, and artists and performers from across Europe?

You see, the maze has dead ends and at each turn you must think what to do before deciding which way to go, and it could be the wrong decision. You might need to turn around and go back and find another way. Maybe there is no way out.

A labyrinth has only one path. It goes round and around up and down, in and out. But it is only one path. You have nothing to decide, no need to think and nowhere to go other than where you are going. There is nowhere else you should be. No right or wrong, only is.

The maze and the labyrinth correspond to the two different modes of being - doing and being. Doing of course is a type of being (you can’t do non-being) and we are all familiar with it, we are forever doing being. But ‘just’ being is a mode which is as elusive as it is ubiquitous. It is Thomas’ Gnostic pearl, the Emperors rosy flesh, and the childlike state of simple bliss and belonging for which there is such a deep and dreadful yearning that we have grown a husk around it like bark around barbed wire.

Sensory Labyrinth Theatre is a response to that longing to be and to belong. To scrape the palimpsest right down to the papyrus, to let a gentle breeze blow apart for a moment the 40 veils of illusion behind which we hide our true face. We are told that it is our culture, our national identity, our family, our heritage, our lineage, our beliefs, our friends, our maps that tell us where we belong. Or that we are what we have and what we do, what we want to have and what we want to do, what we’ve had and what we’ve done. But really we don’t know the first thing, not the first thing about whom we actually are and why we are here and deep down we are terrified of this: so terrified that we will kneel down in the dirt and carve upon the palimpsest “I will not be not go gently into that dark night, you freak show hippy idiots.”

The Art of Looking at Ourselves 1

What happens when you look in the mirror before going out? What are you doing and why? What exactly are you looking at…or who?, as Derrida might differentiate. ‘What’ being the components that make up the body and it’s surroundings. The hair, skin and features framed by the environment immediately behind. Perhaps we focus first on the most changeable aspects. We might have an idea of what we want to see and anything askew to this desire is corrected to a best fit within the limitations of time, money and motivation.

The ‘who’ is perhaps that expected image we have of ourselves before we look, which is confirmed on looking or otherwise adjusted over time to compensate for those changeable aspects we can’t adjust. The ‘who’ is not limited to this, of course, it is as deep as we are willing to peer.

What if, as you are about to finish a quick preen, you engage the eyes of this person in the mirror. Immediately there is a reckoning. Why? The eyes are just like all else, perishing flesh and bone. A green, blue, brown or gray iris or a combination of these set in white or off white, pushing through a hair lined slot in the skin and pierced by a small black hole. But they are also the locus of a terrible lie.

The eyes are the instruments we ascribe to verifiable certainty -“I saw it with my own eyes;” yet through which in perceiving themselves are unnerved. To engage with that gaze is to slip towards something that cannot be comprehended directly and for which inner narrative is immediately invented to compensate, reassure and fend off the gaze. I’m getting older. I look like more and more like my dad. I’m still a child inside. Unlike our features we skew the truth to better fit the speculative ‘who’ rather than correct the askew concept which the gaze penetrates. The gaze that whispers…”That’s not me”.

There’s a parallel here with that moment the twin towers of the World Trade Centre collapsed in New York on the morning on the 9th of September 2001. Like most around the world the incident was watched live on television. The second plane caught in the act of crashing into the second tower. It was incredible, unbelievable and happening ‘in front of our eyes.’ Only the June before I had caught the Staton Island Ferry and watched the huge edifices unfurl into view as the boat withdrew from the port at their feet and with distance their incredible height could be appreciated. The next day I stood there at sunset on top of that tower with my partner marvelling at the cityscape below: a thing of indescribable beauty which I never expected to feel for so much concrete.

I invite you to cast your mind back to that very moment when the first monolith of concrete started to crumble and fall straight down into its own footprint. Who did not have the thought pass through their mind…”NO, THAT’S NOT POSSIBLE!”? Only to have the doubt obliterated like the tower itself with the thought, “But it’s actually happening. It’s not a special effect, it’s actually happening.” Of course, if it were a special effect in a movie, where the second tower collapses identically some minutes afterwards, our suspension of disbelief would be mightily challenged.

That afternoon World Trade Centre building 7 collapsed into it’s footprint without needing to be struck by a Boeing 747. At 44 floors the third largest building in the complex collapsed, like the other two, at freefall speed: the only three steel framed buildings ever to completely collapse due to fire.

Clearly, the whole event was a special effect in which some 3,000 innocent people died and for which twenty times that number of innocent people have died in Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet we succour on that supplied narrative that helps us avert our gaze from the fiction that is 9/11 and gives a continuity to the world and a sense that all is in its rightful place, even if and maybe because it’s a pretty tragic storyline.

That tragedy plays out on a microcosmic scale every time we look in the mirror. Is there a more private space than between the eye and the reflection of the beholders eye in the mirror? Is there a Rubicon on whose banks we dance so inconsolably? When we avert our gaze from the locus of our lie, from the crucible of truth embedded in our own eyes in the mirror, we concede again and again to the given fiction that we are that which we see reflected back: a person, separate from others and most definitely making decisions and ‘acting’ on them in a world out there which needs daily and exhaustive negotiation to get through.

It’s a lie and theatre can be a mirror in which the fiction is exposed, a simulacrum of us, deconstructing the way we use narrative to clothe our nakedness. But more often it feeds the thirst for narrative and meaning and shies of entering that private space of uncertainty which is the domain of Sensory Labyrinth Theatre.

Speech made at Robinwood conference

A Voice from the Community
Speech to Robin Wood Conference, Llandudno February 16th 2007
Iwan Brioc, Community Activist

Hello. My name is Iwan Brioc. I’m a Community Activist. I like the sound of that. I’ve never been called that before. I’m actually a theatre director. But the theatre which I direct involves communities and a recent project I did, which some of you visited yesterday, called Caerdroia, involved working with the community that live in the Gwydyr Forest. I’m not here to represent that community group by any means. They can do that well enough themselves, so the titled ‘Voice from the community’ might be a little misleading. What I am here to do is to argue the case that communities should be centre stage in forest management considerations. Having been here over the last few days I see that there is an aspiration to do this, what I’m not sure about is whether there is an understanding of the cultural shift necessary in some institutions to make this happen.

Although I have the great pleasure of directing and training artists in other European Countries my only experience of forest projects is here in Wales and I hope what I have to say resonates with at least some issues and feelings in the partner countries. For a better chance of this happening I’m likely to try and paint with some broad brush strokes and introduce some concepts that might not be so familiar to you around how communities and the feeling of community is generated and how forest and woodlands have an important part to play in this.

Several speakers have talked about the challenges and opportunities that face forestry. Personally, I think challenge as a word is a little bit weak. Crisis is a more realistic word, as anyone who works with the environment should be aware. And it’s about time that policy makers stopped diluting the severity of the problems we face with management speak. Having said that, I am about to use a well worn management cliché called the ‘China Crisis.’

In Chinese languages, concepts are not expressed in written form with letters and words but with ideogrammes that are sometimes combined to create new meanings. Now ‘Crisis’ in Chinese is represented by two ideogrammes. The first is ‘danger’ and the second is ‘opportunity.’ We must be acutely aware of what those dangers are if we are to take advantage of the opportunities.

One danger that has been screaming out at me whilst doing this project is the poor relationship between forest communities and those charged with managing those forests. When I started the project the Forestry Commission were talked about with such vehemence that when people referred to the “The Bloody FC” I thought they were being polite and the FC stood for something quite different. I’m not here to bash the FC. I’m also aware how difficult it is to work with the different expectations, values and priorities forestry and community have but more work needs to be done to reconcile those differences. In doing this I suggest the FC is hampered by the history of which it is so proud. It’s like a super tanker emerging from the mists of colonialism but, and here’s another management cliché you might be familiar, there’s always the ‘trimtab.’ The huge rudders on these super tankers have within them a smaller rudder which turns before the big rudder turns. That’s because it take a large amount of energy to shift the big rudder and the turn can be started earlier with the trimtab with a smaller investment of energy. I venture to suggest that projects like Cydcoed, which fund community led forest and woodland management projects and which partly funded Caerdroia, are the trimtab of the FC.

I strongly urge the captains of this ship to follow through with steering the big rudder in the direction Cydcoed has ventured and jointly manage all forests and woodland with the communities that live in and around them. The greatest danger is that they flinch at the can of worms Cydcoed has opened. The sudden outpouring of community frustration in dealing with the FC is inevitable after having put a lid for 100 years on people’s feelings in response to fencing across informal pathways; blowing up people’s homes rather than pay rates on them; clear felling vast tracts and changing peoples living environment without consultation…and communities have long memories.

You see…and this is a fundamental point – People are the function of their environment and expectation. This is so important I’ll say it again…People are a function of their environment and expectation. I heard that first from a fantastic community artist called Bill Strickland. Bill’s a potter who started out showing kids in Detroit how pottery was a metaphor for their lives and how they could shape their own lives. He’s a kind of modern day urban Robin Hood because he steals from the very rich, or rather charms from them money to build training centres of excellence. His first – the Manchester Craftsman’s Guild, had no expense spared – a fountain at the entrance and priceless art in the lobby and halls. Despite continued gun violence beyond its gates, there has not been one case of vandalism within the centre in 20 years. Only a steady stream of highly skilled and employed young people who a year before couldn’t read or write.

Take this conference for example this environment - me here on stage, you sitting there. The environment imposes an expected behaviour from you and of course on me too. Right now we are a function of your environment and expectation and this almost never changes. There is an exception which I’ll come to in a moment. The point is when a community feels it has no control over the environment in which it lives and there’s an expectation that they should like it or lump it, you can imagine what feelings might arise. If you can’t, imagine having to spend another three days there listening to people like me telling you what to think. Imagine sitting there for twelve to fifteen years. But by then I imagine any idea you have about having a say in how things are in your environment will have been forgotten. And you know what…that’s what we do to our children. Is it any surprise then that sometimes it appears the only time communities seem engaged in deciding on their environment is when major change is threatened. There’s that old adage ‘How do you get people to vote in local elections? Charge them for parking outside their own homes.” But I suggest a community engaged in protest might have its uses initially, but this is not a sustainable community. There are other ways of engaging community in dialogue. But before that can happen, and I think this is something even community development overlooks again and again…A community has to feel like a community. The irony is that people feel a sense of community when they are not functioning according to environment and expectation.

So let’s try a little experiment. Please reach out with your right hand and massage the ear lobe of the person sitting on your right….Now reciprocate, and massage the earlobe of the person sitting on your left. I bet you didn’t expect to be doing that in this environment. What we just did is to invite a liminal state. Perhaps the rules and roles dictated by environment are flouted. Being together in this liminal state produces something the anthropologist Victor Turner called Communitas. I see my role as theatre director/community activist is to produce communitas – just like the primary role of a forester is to produce timber. Communitas is the psychological glue that creates communities and without it there is no community to consult…just a group of individuals angry about something. When communities – that’s people + communitas are consulted you get creativity, imagination, enthusiasm, commitment, passion and most important perhaps…fun.

Now the interesting thing is that the forest is an universal symbol, in all cultures, of liminality. Basically because if you go back long enough, that is where we’re from. Unless you are a creationist, in which case it’s not. Just think of all the folk tales to do with forests. Hansel and Gretel…Robin Hood. Which reminds me, I have some bad news for the Italian translator, who’s from Nottingham. Robin Hood is actually Welsh, it’s official. An American Historical novelist has just written a book about it and as we all know, we can all trust that American evidence of Welshmen of Mass Redistribution is accurate and reliable. So the forest is a storehouse of Communitas, demonstrated by the immense cultural value forests have.

Let’s try another experiment. Please close your eyes for a moment and take a deep breath. Now imagine yourselves in your favourite forest or woodland. Imagine a gentle breeze rustling through the leaves. On the breeze is a scent, you smell that scent….Coming back. Can you please put your hand up if you saw ‘timber’. Now put your hand up if you saw trees. It’s often the case, isn’t it, that we can’t see the wood for the trees; also sometimes we can’t see the trees for the ‘wood.’

This conference has come from a very utilitarian perspective of forests…the hard products. What I’m talking about here is the soft products, the cultural value which includes wellbeing, leisure and heritage. Communities are tuned in the cultural value of their forests…for now. Another danger in this crisis is that this cultural capital is lost. The best description of this danger I’ve read is from Nigel Pennick –

“Modernism recognizes no real spiritual or even physical differences of note between places. Implicit in this view is the tenet that any differences that do exist can be overcome by the power of technology. The effect of this is the innate tendency of modernism to reduce the land to a random series of ‘nowheres,’ brought into being by the denial of place.”

All forest products are enriched immeasurably by the soft products – their cultural context, and the only way to release this added value is not just to consult with communities but put them at the centre of how forests are managed.

I’m reminded of that wonderful book, which might have influences some of you to become interested in forestry – “The Man Who Planted Trees” by Jean Gionio. That book has a subtitle – “The Man who planted hope and reaped happiness.” I suggest to you, that if you want to engage with communities this is preferable to – “The man who planted conifers and reaped timber.”

The economic rewards of our forest are not incompatible with their cultural value, they are enhanced by their cultural value. But it’s communities who know how to balance those priorities. Institutions have a role to play, as we have seen, in co-ordinating information sharing between initiatives, and of course giving the support necessary to plant that hope in fertile soil.

I want to finish by giving you a glimpse of how significant these soft products can be by showing you a short video of some responses by audiences to the first of the Labyrinth performance we made at Caerdroia two years ago. Thank you.

Yn Gymraeg...

Here it is again in Welsh...in which its central theory sounds more convincing, I like to think.

Fel ewyn ton a dyr ar draethell unig,
Fel cân y gwynt lle nid oes glust a glyw,
Mi wn eu bod yn galw'n ofer arnom-
Hen bethau anghofiedig dynol ryw.

o’r gerdd Cofio gan Waldo Williams

Gan mai Cynefin ydi enw’r cwmni y bu i Mike Hotson a minnau ei sefydlu yn y flwyddyn 2000, mae ceisio egluro ystyr ‘cynefin’ i bobl ddi-Gymraeg wedi bod yn dasg i mi ers peth amser. Mae iddo, wrth gwrs, yr hen ystyr amaethyddol ynglŷn â defaid a thiriogaeth. Ond teimlaf fod y gair, yn nwylo ac ar dafod hudolus ein beirdd, wedi ei gyfoethogi i’r fath raddau na ellir ei gyfieithu’n syml i eiriau ieithoedd eraill. Yn arbennig felly’r ieithoedd hynny a ddatblygwyd o gwmpas y syniadaeth fodern, cwbl estron i ddiwylliannau brodorol, mai eiddo dyn ydi natur.

Fe es i drwy gyfnod o egluro ein bod ni’n teimlo poen hiraeth oherwydd cysylltiad corfforol rhyngom ni a bröydd ein mebyd - cysylltiad o atgofion synhwyraidd am leoliad a chyfnod ein plentyndod sy’n plethu’n rhaff, yn llinyn bogail, sy’n ein clymu ni i’r fam ddaear.

Erbyn hyn, wedi dilyn trywydd yr eglurhad i’r fath eithafion, mae’r argraff yr ydw i’n ei greu ar yr holwr diniwed yn un o ddyn sydd ychydig yn wallgof. Ond nid trigfan atgofion dwfn a phersonol yn unig yw cynefin. Mae o hefyd yn ymwneud â theimladau encilion yr ymwybod - bod y graig, y coed, y dŵr, y ddaear, yr awyr o’n gwmpas yn ein cofio ni ac yn llawenhau yn ein dychweliad atyn nhw.

Cefais ryw gyffyrddiad o hyn wrth i mi ddychwelyd i Gaerdroia am y trydydd tro, i baratoi Heuldro Gaeaf. Ond digon tymhestlog fu’r berthynas ers hynny. Bu’r gwynt a’r glaw’n diasbedain o’n cwmpas ac oni bai am y grŵp anhygoel o actorion a gwirfoddolwyr fu wrthi, mi fyddent wedi achosi tranc y prosiect gor-fentrus efallai, hwn. Roedd y syniad o greu perfformiad ganol gaeaf ar gopa bryn ym mherfeddion coedwig Gwydir yn hynod apelgar yng nghanol haul Mehefin, pan fuom ni yma’n perfformio Heuldro Haf - o leiaf mi fuasai’r piwiaid cythreulig yna wedi diflannu. Rhyw ddelwedd ramantus o dawel nos, clustog o eira ar y coed a’r wybren heb gwmwl i guddio Siôn Corn a’i geirw, oedd gen i!

Y gwirionedd oedd gwynt a glaw, llifogydd a mwd llithrig ac, wrth ysgrifennu hwn, yr un yw’r rhagolygon ar gyfer gweddill mis Rhagfyr. Ac felly fe hoffwn i dalu teyrnged i chi, oherwydd os ydych chi’n darllen hwn mi fyddwch wedi bod ar antur anghyfforddus Heuldro Gaeaf. Rydw i’n gobeithio’n arw bod y daith wedi datgelu trysor o ryw fath i chi. Mae llwyddiant ein perfformiadau’n crogi bob amser o linyn main tenau, y llinyn unigryw hwnnw y mae angen i bob aelod o’r gynulleidfa ei ddarganfod a’i ddefnyddio i gysylltu’r profiadau synhwyraidd y maen nhw’n dod ar eu traws wrth gerdded llwybr Caerdroia. Bwriad Heuldro Gaeaf yw dod â ni’n agosach at yr hyn a welwn ni ydi ysbryd y Nadolig.

Rydw i o’r farn, hen ffasiwn erbyn hyn, bod gan y Nadolig drysor i’w ddatguddio. Dyma adeg y flwyddyn pan fydd y teimlad o gynefin yn ymestyn y tu hwnt i gornel bach yr unigolyn i gynnwys ‘hen bethau anghofiedig dynol ryw’. Wrth i ni ddychwelyd unwaith eto i’r cynefin ehangach hwn, mae’r byd yn cofio amdanom ni ac yn teimlo llawenydd - ac mi fyddwn ninnau hefyd yn teimlo llawenydd yn sgil hynny wrth sylweddoli mor hael ydi’r byd yn ei hanfod. Dyna, rydw i’n tybio, yw tarddiad yr holl chwedlau caredigrwydd sy’n gysylltiedig â’r ŵyl, neu efallai'r chwedlau yw tarddiad y teimlad?

Iwan Brioc, Cyfarwyddwr Artistig Cynefin

The Meaning of Cynefin

I'm posting here something I wrote for the programme of the last Cynefin performance - Heuldro Gaeaf. It has within it some ideas I've been having about interspecies communication brought about by reading a book called - "A Language Older than Words" by Derrek Jensen. It reminded me of my own experience of nature as a child and less so (saddly) as an adult.

Like the white waves that lap at lonely beaches
Like the windsong where there is no ear to hear,
I know they call in vain to us -
The old forgotten things of man.
From Cofio, Waldo Williams

Since it is the name of the company Mike Hotson and I started in 2000, I’ve been trying for some time to explain the meaning of the word ‘cynefin’ to non-Welsh speakers. It has, of course, an agricultural origin involving sheep and their territory. But in and on the magical hands and tongue of our poets the word has been enriched to signify something that can not easily be translated to other languages. In particular languages associated with a modern concept which is quite alien to native cultures – the concept that man owns nature.

I went through a period of explaining that we had this thing called ‘hiraeth’, which was a physical pain from being distant from our homeland, because we had a physical connection to the place of our birth - a collection of sensory memories of the time and place of our childhood which pleats a rope like an umbilical cord which connects us to mother earth.

By now, having evolved my explanation to extremes, I give the impression of being a little crazy to innocent inquirers. ‘Cynefin’ is not only a place in which deep personal memories reside, but places which bring about a feeling on the fringes of awareness, that the rock, the tree, the water, the earth and the sky around you remember you and are joyful at your return.

I felt this a little on returning to Caerdroia for the third time to prepare Heuldro Gaeaf: but since then our relationship has been unsettled. There was unremitting rain and wind which, were it not for a group of incredible actors and volunteers, would have inevitably led to the demise of this foolhardy project. The idea of creating a mid-winter performance on the top of a hill deep in the Gwydir Forest was appealing in the June sun, when we were last here performing Heuldro Haf: at least the midges would be gone. I had romantic images of silent nights, the snow like a blanket over the trees, the starry sky without a cloud to hide Santa and his reindeer!

But as it was we worked every day in rain and wind, flood and slippery mud and as I write the forecast is the same for the rest of December. So I would like to pay tribute to you because if you are reading this you dared go on the uncomfortable adventure that is Heuldro Gaeaf. I dearly hope that the adventure led to the discovery of a treasure for you. It is always by a thread that the successes of our performances hang, and that is the unique thread which each audience member must discover which connects the sensory moments they encounter along the path of the Caerdroia. These moment in Heuldro Gaeaf attempt to bring us closer to what we mean by the spirit of Christmas.

I have the now old fashioned impression that Christmas has indeed within it a treasure to discover. This is a time of year when the feeling of ‘cynefin’ is stretched beyond our little corner to include the old forgotten things of man. And in returning again to this wider ‘cynefin’ the world remembers us and feels joy, and we feel joy to know that the essential nature of the world is beneficent. That, I’m guessing,, is the source of these stories of kindness associated with the season, or perhaps the stories are the source of the feeling.

Iwan Brioc, Artistic Director, Cynefin

Enrique Found

At last I've made contact.

Tomorrow I fly to Barcelona to take part in two weekend courses run by Teatro De Los Sentidos and hope in the week in between to get finally to talk to Enrique and members of his company. What to ask I'll think on the plane.

It will be interesting to see how his processes compare with Cynefin's and what common elements there are. I suspect that there will be many but I've no idea yet.

I'm going to section off a large part of January, Februaury and March to knuckle down and create this maifesto and outline for a book. Less and less do I see the book as some kind of scholastic study of the medium with countless references to Living Theatre, Howard Baker etc. And more and more do I see it as an extended manifesto for a new kind of ancient theatre, one in which something elemental, a language older than words, is remembered and in its remembering the body is also re-membered and re-connected to the ground of being.

I must be careful, re reading that last paragraph, to make the book a theatre book and not a self-development or new age fancy. But I would like to ground it in current global situations and show how the paradigm in which current performance practices operate is not entirely redundent but is does not meet the demands for new ways of connecting, new ways of engaing and directing the attention of the audience.

Also crucial to the book is to unravel the nuts and bolts of the theatre interaction in a new language that is understandable to everyone and it's here that modern research into the mind and attention will be valuable. I really want to uncover what is happenning psychologically in a conventional performance setting and then contrast that with the Sensory Labyrinth setting to show how it is fundamentally different but also essentially and essential theatre. In fact, what perhaps theatre was meant to be.

Chasing Enrique

It's been some time since the last entry. I've been busy with Heuldro Haf, the Rites of Passage training and chasing Enrique Vargas around Barcelona...to no avail. Enrique Vargas is the pioneer of Sensory Labyrinth Theatre and he invited me to come to Barcelona to work with him. What to do when you are funded to study with someone who doesn't seem to want to communicate or be studied? Some kind of response from Enrique would be useful. But phone calls, emails even a letter hand delivered to the Teatro De Los Sentidos headquarters (nobody home by the way) have had no reply.

I though last night while lying awake thinking about this that maybe I offended him in some way when I met him in Copenhagen last August...where he invited me to come and visit. In his Sensory Labyrinth Theatre production which I had just gone through, about Hans Christian Andersen, there was an instillation where a beautiful young girl in a white room who, on a lovely white table cloth, carefully cut fresh fruit put them into a small bowl and pored chocolate over them. She then invited you to come under the table with her, the overhanging tablecloth making an intimate little space. Sitting there knee to knee, she takes a spoon of the delicious looking dessert she just made in front of you and eats it herself. The next spoon she scoops she brings sensually to your mouth and quickly whips it away and gulps it herself. Great! I wanted to play! So with the next spoon I grabbed her arm and went for it. She put up a ferocious fight, using her head to bash mine out of the way and swallow the content of the spoon. She then forcefully ejected me from the space.

Did I overstep the mark? Did she go to her director afterwards and have me banned from further contact with his theatre? Performers in the Labyrinth are not working with normal, civilized human beings. They are working with an audience for whom the reality of civil society has been suspended. In that liminal space if you provoke infantile or even animal instincts you can expect not to get a polite applause and a ‘measured’ response. Of course, part of the psyche in a normal healthy person will retain the knowledge that this is theatre…it’s the social contract that permits these things to happen to them and gives a confidence of certain safety…perhaps a bit like S & M (though I wouldn’t know). But the other parts, the id, the unconscious urges, the universal archetypes that frame our deepest patterns of behaviour and repression…the dark labyrinth is their playground.