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Yes/And Podcast #2. All conscious performance is improv. Jemma speaks with Miren Larrea and Carey West about power and policy.

In this podcast #2 Jemma Llewellyn speaks with Miren and Carey. Miren, or Dr. Miren Larrea is an ARTist in the Basque region where her action research transformations work is aimed at territorial development with policymakers and politicians. Carey West is a PhD student in critical improvisation studies, engaged with arts based community making.

Both connect around the issues of power and transformation. Both are exploring the possibility of creating more improvisational spaces to inspire and inform significant (if microprocess) transformations. They think and together, about how formal policy is enacted.

For Carey the focus is on how women’s experience of intimate violence  may be heard in such a way that it compels understanding in a courtroom. For Miren, in turn, the focus is on inviting an entirely new kind of conversation in which there is space for talking about power dynamics with an elected politician, but also love. Both discover their work is improvisational. Both discover their experiments inform public policy. We learn that all conscious performances are improvisational.

Carey emphasizes the terrifying but very powerful and empowering experience of “working without a script.” She highlights for Miren how anyone can use vocalizations in regular conversation; we are already harmonizing (or not) with one another. She notes the older we get and or the more formal the circumstances this working without a script and with our body gets more terrifying. 

Miren, in turn, shares about how she and her team listen in on policy making workshops. They “read the room” and listen for how to help in transforming conflict and or sometimes just finding the right moment for addressing a recurring problem. In both these examples we hear how experience and the flow of experience feeds into a much more accurate but also efficient institutional process.

This podcast is in the Yes/And podcast series offered by the AR+ Action Research Foundation. The podcast series explores and presents contemporary Action Research for Transformations as practiced by ARTists around the world.  The podcast is available at the AR+ website and on Soundcloud. It inspires the ARTful change we want to be in the world!