I am just back from Leeds. I was there for a 2 day Storytelling Lab for organisations working with refugees. It was very good and the power of people who had been thru deep horrors was extraordinary.
However, this post is not about that. It’s about some of the things I saw and some ideas that were discarded during the two days. It’s about the importance of connecting the skills we have to live today with the skills our ancestors developed to live. How we maintain the past for the future because it is valuable in the present.
Palio and Pub Crawl
I was staying with relatives who showed me photos of their visit to Siena in Italy. They were not there for the famous Palio event but even so they saw groups in full regalia marching and performing in the city square.
While I was in Leeds, l also walked back in the evening and encountered large groups of people walking along the Headingley road. This is the Otley Run. A 15 venue pub crawl over 1 mile. Many people do it in fancy dress.
These events are different.
These events are distanced by centuries of time. The Siena costumes are full of ancient meaning and deep craft, the Leeds ones are TV characters and easy clean materials.
These events are the same.
Both of these events allow people to be together in public with a purpose that provides some sense of meaning to them and is recognised by the people around them.
One thing is about old skills and folklore. One thing is about mixing modern culture and tatty costumes.
Both are about Survival.
Surviving and Survival
During the workshop, there was some discussion about how to bring together documented and undocumented people. How to find a connection that was not about the Having or Not Having of official identity. This proved difficult to find as some shared Categories of Being did not mean that people with very different life histories actually connected.
There was a discussion that was discarded in the workshop but seems relevant to the ideas that link the Palio and Otley Run.
How to create an event or a project the binds together the past, present and future by explicitly showing how historic skills and social events move thru place and time to enable people to have the shared capabilities to survive in the present?
The rituals, the costumes, the presence, the public awareness hold people (young and old, new to an area or just arrived) in a way that helps them survive personally and communally.
Yet what the people gain is also linked to how they help the skills, practices and memories survive.
This is cycle of support: Survival Skills and Surviving Skills.
The Palio is a historic global cultural event. The Otley Run is a modern local commercial event. Funders and organisations view these as two very different categories.
Yet what if you deliberately bring them together. Make people aware of how their desire to find connection and community now (and have fun) links them backwards thru time to people and places. How cultural organisations can bring the pasts they hold and try to maintain into the present and have more people help them preserve them for the future.
This is definitely not about seriousness and tight curation. It’s about showing how what we do today is rooted in the past. Also how much chaos and fun has been lost in these modern times.