'Improvisation as Intercultural Practice' by Ned Lunn. # 157. 23/04/2024
Out of Many, One People
Welcome. I am particularly grateful to Canon Ned Lunn Canon for Intercultural Mission and the Arts at Bradford Cathedral, for permission to reprint this article, which first appeared in the Anglican Network of Intercultural Churches Journal. I think this understanding of ‘improvisation’ is particularly fruitful in developing authentic, reciprocal (as opposed to either passive or confrontational) intercultural relationships. As ever, your responses and extensions of the theme are especially welcome.
I will not be sending out blogs until May 14th as I am on holiday.
‘Improvisation as Intercultural Practice’ by Ned Lunn.
The term ‘black history’ is problematic as it suggests a singularity rather than what it is: an often competing set of multiple histories. This article argues that the principles of improvisation can help navigate the challenges of telling and hearing conflicting accounts of historic events. Not only that but they can also lead to a collaborative telling of a shared narrative of the past, present and future.
In October last year we at Bradford Cathedral hosted, in partnership with the University, an exhibition called ‘Journeys of Hope’. It told the stories of both the Ugandan Asian diaspora, who travelled to Britain in 1972 after being expelled from their homeland by Idi Amin, and ‘the Windrush generation’, who arrived in the 1940s seeking to fill labour shortages after World War II. These particular black histories of migration are just two examples of the many journeys of peoples who have made Bradford their home and make it the intercultural city it is. The exhibition aims to open up dialogue between ‘different journeys of hope from the various communities who continue to tell important, positive stories of Bradford’s own black history.’[1]
Bradford is a ‘city of travellers’[2] and is proud of its City of Sanctuary status. Each neighbourhood is a weaving of different and contrasting stories of departures and arrivals; some forced others chosen. For some the life before Bradford is tinged with sadness of pain while others hold onto that previous life with pride and delight. Some have found the life in Bradford challenging and hard while others have thrived and discovered new life. The various migrant and refugee communities are not all natural bedfellows and we should not simply group them under one demographic umbrella. The Ugandan Asians’ experience, for example, is very different from those who came from the Caribbean in 1940. Even the large number of people who came from across the different regions of South Asia after the partition all have different cultures and faiths. The issues that have ravaged lives in other parts of the world are not solved by a shared experience of foreignness in the UK. To see these distinct groups just as “UKME” or “GMH” peoples is, therefore, unhelpfully reductive, as is equating their experience one to another.
The conversation we are hoping to facilitate by hosting this exhibition is how we all, no matter our race and ethnicity, tell our histories truthfully and reconcile our understanding of the past when others’ may differ. We want to ultimately acknowledge that ‘Black History’, like ‘White History’, is not one history but many histories of different cultures and experiences. So, the history of Ugandan Asians is shaped significantly by their poor treatment by some indigenous, black Ugandans. Black Ugandan history is shaped by their experience of the white British who colonized them. These histories also interact with the history of South Asia, particularly when others were sent to Uganda and they were left to fight for independence and face the poorly managed transition by the British Empire afterwards that included the Partition of India. Pakistan’s history, uniquely, tends to tell the benefits for the Muslim majority of the Partition and, therefore, the scars of the white British colonizers is different from their neighbours on the subcontinent.
All these are ‘black histories’ but they relate differently to, say, ‘White British history’, which is also not singular but multiple. All are necessary to tell and to hear but all require different responses. We, with ancestral links to empire, can maintain a colonial mindset if we generalize ‘others’ history into a unified category of ‘Black History’. This also leads to exacerbating the issues around historic wrongs and, in some cases, misunderstandings. The telling of history is not straightforward or simple and attempting to legislate or police it is complex and dangerous.
This is my point: all history is selective and interpretative. The way we look at the past says more about how we see the present and what we hope for the future. The temptation is to rewrite the past or erase the problematic parts from history that do not help tell our story into the future. We naturally cherry pick from our cultural memory to shape our present-day policies and decisions. To pretend otherwise is ignorant and reckless and opens us to authoritarian ideologies. This is why the intentional telling and hearing of black histories in all their diversity and conflict is so important. It should inform and challenge both ‘white histories’ and other ‘black histories’ but should also lead us to know and tell shared histories so that we can all enact a global, intercultural present and future.
I am increasingly aware of the stories we tell ourselves, the cultural frameworks we place around our understanding of the world and how we cast ourselves in certain roles within our different personal narratives. I have also become more aware of the role people cast me in, as a white British man, whether I fit the character or not. I can be, in their vision, a mere totem of wider categories that I may or may not identify with. I experience the way others treat me differently; some with unwarranted reverence and others with unmerited disgust. As I attempt to listen and engage with my neighbour, hearing the story they tell about themselves and the world we inhabit together, I try to see through their narrative lens to make me more conscious of the barriers that hinder understanding and relationship. This is an improvisatory exercise and one that, I want to argue, should shape our intercultural practice.
As a student in theatrical improvisation the principle of “Yes and” helps to create new, shared worlds with other ‘performers’. This principle, along with the primary principle of listening, is key, I suggest, to all cultural dialogue with others. Improvisation is based on the premise that every interaction/dialogue, in the context of performance, consists of at least two people making ‘offers’. An offer is any word, expression or movement that impacts the shared environment/space. “Yes and” encourages the receivers of an offer to respond affirmatively (“yes”) but to also add an offer of their own that connects in some way to the original offer (“and”). In this way the principle seeks to establish a mutual exchange of affirmative offers that build on one another to a shared reality.
As I listen to someone share their worldview or culture with me, outside of the improvisational performance context, I still need to listen in order to understand. I should, as I listen, try to imagine myself within that perceived world and then respond appropriately. My fellow ‘improviser’ may, at some point, attempt to cast me in a particular, and potentially unfavorable or dissonant, role. How should I respond to that? A great temptation would be to ‘block’ the offer. Blocking is about rejecting an offer and thus breaking the collaborative relationship required to create a shared world. The “Yes and” principle leads me to respond with curiosity, and somehow accept the offer and work from there and, if it is necessary, to transfigure it in someway. So when legitimate, painful and traumatic black histories bring new perspectives to my particular view of history, I can simply utilize the “Yes and” principle, accept the offer and rightly acknowledge responsibility for the role I continue to play within real power imbalances. The “and” could be an opening of exploration in the ways in which those unjust structures might be transformed.
Sometimes, however, the others’ history is too selective and interpretative. The telling of that story is aimed at shaping the present and future for their own benefit. How do we remain engaged whilst challenging the truthfulness of their telling of history? In these instances, we can maintain the “Yes and” principle by utilizing, what is known as, ‘overaccepting’.
Overaccepting is accepting in the light of a larger story. The fear about accepting is that one will be determined by the gift, and thus lose one’s integrity and identity. The fear of blocking is that one will seal oneself off from the world, and thus lose one’s relevance and humanity. Overaccepting is an active way of receiving that enables one to retain both identity and relevance.[3]
Samuel Wells, in line with Stanley Hauerwas’ ethics, outlines this improvisatory move as a way of remaining engaged in differing narratives to our own whilst holding onto our own personal integrity. Overaccepting is a form of ‘out-narrating’ a cultural worldview by situating all the offers ‘within a more determinative, peaceable, and hence more encompassing narrative.’[4] This means seeing our selves and our interlocutors and all their ‘givens’ from the perspective of God’s story; past, present and future. Asking, as we listen to their history, where is God in this and how we can move towards that great eschatological end together?
There is, of course, obvious links between this approach to intercultural mission and dialogue and Jesus’ great incarnational move towards humanity. Too often, however, our vision of incarnational mission stops at the reception of the other and their offers. We dare not take the next, necessary missionary step of responding with an “and”. We either passively accept the history as told by the other and take on the role offered to us, whether it is justified or not, or we block the history and deny its truth, either factually or experientially. Jesus’s overacceptance of us never stopped at accepting the story we told ourselves and others. Instead he redeems the history and changes it by his framing of interaction within the Kingdom of God. He replaces the faulty lenses of all human cultures with the clearer vision of God’s salvation narrative at work in and through himself. Christ’s ‘and’ was not always verbal but performative acts to empower, subvert or redeem.
The path to reconciliation with our own history, personal and ancestral, involves hearing the wider story of others’ telling of the same events. When conflict occurs in the dissonance between these narratives it is important to explore together how we receive an alternative offer whilst maintaining some sense of inner integrity and identity. Overacceptance, along with all improvisational principles, requires trust and unwavering commitment to listening; not just to receive but with an active imagination ready to contribute to a shared creation of new realities together. The way I teach improvisation is by gradual exposure to the counterintuitive magic that occurs when these principles are put into practice. I pray that people glimpsed that redemptive magic at work in our conversations over the exhibition and in the wider intercultural work at Bradford Cathedral into the future.
[1] from Bradford Cathedrals website listing for the event, https://bradfordcathedral.org.uk/event/journeys-of-hope-launch-event/
[2] J.B. Prietley, English Journey (Mandchester: Harper North, 2023) p.197
[3] Samuel Wells, “Improvisation in the Theatre as a Model for Christian Ethics”, Trevor Hart and Steven Guthrie, Faithful Performance: Enacting Christian Tradition (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007) p.161
[4] Stanley Hauerwas, Performing the Faith: Bonhoeffer and the Practice of Nonviolence (London: SPCK, 2004) p.92