Community Agreement

The text below represents community agreements made by the participants of 8 DAYS 8, part way through our time together. These agreements were made during an exercise set up by Davis Plett and facilitated by Rianne Švelnis, drawing on a workshop Rianne had taken with mia susan amir. Usually the practice of community agreements prefaces a shared artistic or community experience, but we felt that it would be valuable to introduce the practice to 8 DAYS even if it would only have an effect on our last few days together. Making these agreements about how we wanted to treat each other as members of a temporary artistic community was framed as a choreographic exercise, an opportunity to think about community as a genre of movement practice dealing with the location, motion, and interaction of bodies through space and time. Rianne proposed several agreements and as a group, popcorn style, we raised our concerns about different agreements and made changes and new additions for about an hour.

Below is a transcription of what we came up with. It is meant to reflect the idiosyncratic nature of this exercise and how the goal is not so much to create a public document as a shared understanding for a specific group of people.

proposed community agreements

• Respect ourselves and others
• Take care of ourselves -- SELF-DEFINE CARE
• Communicate needs -- self care and community care
• Honour each other's self-determination and identity
• Ask before assuming/assume everyone is trying their best
• Expect discomfort and failure and welcome these as generative
• Failure exposes possibility
• Value conflict and different ideas as opportunities for transformation and connection
• Listening - durational - time - space - planting seeds - create silence - obliterate silence
• There are many ways to participate
• Possibility for "start again" "oops!"
• Take self-responsive risks
• Awareness of intent vs impact
• "This is my current thought"
• Joy
• Be aware of time constraints
• Allow others space to share
• Consent is an ongoing process
• Accountability
• Confidentiality - integrity - speaking from/investigating one's own experience
• "Ouch" - expect a lack of resolution/closure