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From Never Again

Never Again International Chair Poppy Sebag-Montefiore writes about a 'photo image body' workshop that opened her mind

Socks and shoes off, in a rehearsal room during a week in August, London, washing itself in sunlight. My muscles ache, but pulse with energy so motivating that I am enthusiastic about washing dishes.

On the course are costume designers, TV producers, lots of actors, dancers, a physicist who performed in Eastenders, some photographers. After memorizing each other’s names, we begin with an exercise in trust. Running with closed eyes, a partner guides us around the space; with only the touch of his finger to ensure we do not bump into walls or any of the other people running blind around the room. With my eyes shut, leaping around in the company of strangers, with the protection of my collaborator, I feel safer and warmer than I have felt in a long time, reminding me that however strong one may feel alone, positive partnerships can be even more strengthening.

Next we move. Each bit of our bodies we exercise, using ball games, memory games; on cardboard tubing we rest our spines. We massage each other’s ear lobes.

Each with one finger on either end of a bamboo cane, we form a circle. The idea is to explore the room without dropping the links our bamboo rods make with our neighbours. Wherever we go we each take almost everyone else in the room with us, however indirectly. Connected, we begin to think like a community.

We are asked to move; to look at each other moving; and to photograph bits of each other’s movement. We look at different objects and impersonate the movements of substances as unpersonable as cotton wool and silver foil. We move together in pairs, we play out different power relationships, we walk across the room as our ideal man, our ideal woman.

‘The neutral mask’ exercise exposes each of us inside out by focusing our eyes on the rhythm and quirks that characterize one another’s way of moving, rather than the facial expressions we may use to present a particular way of being. The neutral mask wears its own blank expression. When someone puts it over their face all you can see are their eyes and their poise. The neutral mask may suddenly reveal something self-conscious in the gaze and stance of somebody who, bare-faced, had seemed supremely confident. Self-conviction whelms in the eyes of one girl who had appeared shy before. Now she is a different person. Because we are able to look in a different way, we see different bits of personality that were perhaps concealed by the face.

As a community we discover each other’s personalities. Not through speech, we spoke little, but through the way we moved.

One of the most difficult exercises – more difficult than taking on a role was trying to take on no role. Trying to be a person who had no history, no experience, nothing. Someone who had woken up from a long sleep and had no memories of anything, just human, just being.

Every so often we print our photos, select some and hang them on the wall anonymously. Facilitated by photographer Sarah Ainsley we discuss what we like, which ones we think work well, which ones don’t and why. Perhaps the photo looks too cluttered, perhaps there was not one thing or too many things to focus on, we discuss the aesthetic of the shapes and spaces within the frame.

Communities are full of different and conflicting personalities, and like any, ours had those elements. Lilo Baur who lead the workshop built a sense of ensemble among us with her charisma and dedication. She would point out little details about each of us that were slightly odd or even irritating or negative in some way and laugh quite loudly about them. We all laughed. The negative, instead of becoming a conflict provoking taboo, became part of our new shared humour. Lilo managed conflict prevention by marrying gentle criticism with humour allowing us to look at each other critically in an open and positive way; while helping us to strengthen our weaknesses and to be aware of the things we do which may annoy others and to giggle at our own shortcomings.

Lilo balanced her incisive critiques with finding something beautiful in whatever you did. The word “beautiful”, she used a lot, to describe the light in a photograph; the strange way someone walks; the way someone else is able to impersonate that person’s walk.

We became aware of ourselves. Understanding ourselves and how we were being seen, we felt confident and close to each other.

The course provided a week of feeling protected and exposed. Feeling our own, mutually-recognized individuality within a strong sense of community; moving from self-consciousness to self-awareness; generating courage in just being, and learning to look with our own eyes and find each others quirkiness and unique beauty. You can imagine we were all sad when it ended and we had to go back to work!

But even if we couldn’t run around barefoot all day playfuly with our colleagues, we hoped to take what we learnt back to the workplace. Surrounded by media images, photographs of celebrities, advertisements, often referring not to the individuality nor the humanity in their subject, but to clichés which convey quick messages to as many people as possible. Surrounded by these images and the bodies of the people near us: which informs the way we look at the other?

“Images were first made to conjure up the appearances of something that was absent. Gradually it became evident that an image could outlast what it represented; it then showed how something or somebody had once looked – and thus by implication how the subject had once been seen by other people.” (John Berger, Ways of Seeing)

Being seen in the media, reproductions exponentially fabricating fantasies about beauty, the desirable, the good-life, all standardized. Media has entered our lives so profoundly that these media versions of reality and our lived ‘reality’ are almost interchangeable. “Reality TV” is which, reality or tv? John Berger writes: “Capitalism survives by forcing the majority... to define their interests as narrowly as possible. This was once achieved by extensive deprivation. Today in developed countries it is being achieved by imposing false standard of what is and what is not desirable.”

Has the prevalence and promise of these media images meant we have stopped looking for and at each other?

Complicite’s workshop was an exercise in personal empowerment, teaching us how we may reclaim the image. Photography can come up “with an image of something that was absent”, when we take photographs of something that is absent in the eyes of everyone else except our own. To look for what is beautiful for you in the humanity of another. How different would our media images look then?

The methods and mood of the photography course, though never stated, and perhaps never assumed, felt like a grand exercise in what for Never Again are the principles of conflict prevention: original, individual inquiry linked to human connectivity.

Photo Image Body was a Complicite workshop conceived by Complicte's education director, Natasha Freedman. www.complicite.org