Prioritize Safety, Embrace Vulnerability
For some background on music as possibility and its role in helping us confront the toxic state of our politics in contemporary society see this introductory post.
The practice of bringing groups of people together through musical experiences to imagine new possible futures can be a deeply vulnerable experience for us and the audience. Those challenges can naturally dissuade us from connecting our artistry to the most pressing issues concerning us as citizens, including voting rights, climate change, gun ownership, abortion access, and racial equity, to name just a few. However, these are also the issues which most need collective imagination and possibility in order to communally address. Confronting these social ideas in a creative experience can lower the threshold for bringing people together, leading to less divisive rhetoric, more collaboration, and earnest attempts at mutual understanding. Still, it takes significant trust building to get people to buy into attending an event that looks at sensitive topics in the first place. That is why when planning these events we need to build trust through prioritizing safety and embracing vulnerability.
Now this may seem like a paradox to have safety and vulnerability in the same experience, and that’s correct. However, as Carl Jung wrote, “Only the paradox comes anywhere near to comprehending the fullness of life.” We need both in order to build trust. Safety and vulnerability exist on a continuum. If one party feels safe, it likely means that another party is feeling a certain amount of vulnerability. Let’s take the concert hall for example. That is somewhere that trained musicians feel extremely safe, sure we may have some performance anxiety, but we know how to be in that space. We know what is considered appropriate behavior, how to dress, and what to expect from the music. For community audiences that aren’t well versed in the traditions of the concert hall, it is a very vulnerable space for many of the same reasons, including how to act, dress, the type of music being played, and the financial cost of entry. If we as the musicians and proprietors of the concert space were to make some adjustments to allow for community audiences to feel more safe, we will likely incur some vulnerability as we change our programming. For example, that vulnerability could come from allowing for more types of audience behavior such as spontaneous applause and dialogue with the performers.
“If we as the musicians and proprietors of the concert space were to make some adjustments to allow for community audiences to feel more safe, we will likely incur some vulnerability as we change our programming.”
Building trust starts before we even perform a note of music. We need to be honest with our intentions for the experience and share them up front with people to make sure they are willing to go there with us. We can’t set participants' expectations of the event as a typical recital, and then spring a vulnerable conversation on them. Part of establishing safety comes from allowing the participants to opt into a vulnerable experience where we ask them to share what they believe. The real question then becomes why would someone choose to come to a musical experience where they may feel vulnerable? The answer to that begins and ends with the relationship we’ve developed with them. Trust is built over time, meaning that this kind of musical event isn’t just a one-off concert. It happens amongst a community gathered around our art, one that we interact with consistently and have built a relationship with. Audience members may have attended other concerts or workshops we’ve done in the past. They likely are part of the same community in which we live. Trust relies on us establishing a practice of showing up to the community, so they know us and the quality of our work, before we ever ask them to attend this new creative experience where they will feel vulnerable.
The care with which we make the invitation to participants in these creative experiences also changes our metrics around what successful attendance looks like. We need to be thoughtful about who we invite to these experiences, which may limit how large they are. Wide reach is not as important as the small but powerful group who can engage meaningfully with each other and deepen the practice of imagination each time they come together. The focus isn’t necessarily on unique “butts in seats” but instead on repeat participants and the quality of their engagement. Our method for developing an audience here isn’t marketing a broadly appealing product or experience, but instead developing a core audience who supports our work and adds their own gifts to it. Giving participants the opportunity to offer their own input and contributions to the creative practice is a wonderful way to balance between providing a sense of safety and embracing vulnerability. Furthermore, participant agency is essential to a creative experience’s potential for creating social and cultural change.
“Wide reach is not as important as the small but powerful group who can engage meaningfully with each other and deepen the practice of imagination each time they come together.”
In addition to how we invite participants and structure our events, there are also ways to build trust within the experience. Perhaps the most essential way we prioritize safety and embrace vulnerability is by modeling the engagement and dialogue we want to engender through the music. For example, we can share our own story as it relates to the art and discuss our motivation for embracing dialogue about social causes through creative work. That’s a vulnerable first step to take, but a step which will create a space in which participants will feel safe enough to follow us. We can also make sure at the onset of the event that we establish clear boundaries around the experience, creating a container for music and dialogue. Especially due to the sensitive nature of some of these ideas, it is important that participants know that what they share stays within the room (I’ve written about this before in a previous piece entitled Vault). Taking time at the beginning of the experience to set the participants’ expectations and establish trust is essential to finding meaningful engagement and possibility.
Trust with a community audience is also something that is hard won and very easily lost. We practice this everyday in the Community Performances and Partnerships program at the New England Conservatory. We dedicate a significant amount of time to communicating with our partners throughout the year just to check in and see how they are doing. When student fellows are out performing at a community site, one of the staff members is there as well to make sure that everything goes well and that our partner knows we are invested in our relationship together. We make a practice of “showing up” for our partners at all stages of each project from planning, to execution, to reflection. Many of these partnerships have been built over the course of two decades and yet even with this track record of successful engagement, scheduling errors and underprepared programs can quickly wear away at that trust. Developing a community audience can take years, but the investment is well worth it, because the amount of trust that is built directly correlates to the quality of mutual engagement with each other. The more we trust each other, the more we can approach creative experiences feeling safe enough to share what we really believe, and commit to coming together in dialogue around our society’s most pressing issues.
“Developing a community audience can take years, but the investment is well worth it, because the amount of trust that is built directly correlates to the quality of mutual engagement with each other.”
All parties involved in a communally created art experience exist on this continuum of safety and vulnerability. Mutual trust between artists and community partners is found when we feel both safety and vulnerability simultaneously. Finding that edge where both sides feel safe enough to show up and also bought in enough to be willing to be vulnerable is a delicate but extremely important balancing act to strike. I like the word edge here, because it implies that we are walking out to the limits of our capabilities. There is a lot of research that suggests that human beings, especially in childhood, learn best when we stretch ourselves to our limits, just far enough that we can still succeed, but also fail enough to learn something. If our goal in a creative experience is to learn something about each other and to co-create new futures through a democratic process, then it’s vitally important that we learn to function on our edges of creativity and collaboration. Similarly edges are the place of most creation and innovation in biological ecosystems. Our communities are ecosystems and when we meet with other communities near us at the edges, that is where the greatest opportunity for transformation can be found. We just need an appropriate balance of safety and vulnerability to achieve mutual trust and meet at the edge.
