I had forgotten how hard it is to work in a group, with no one leader. Creating collectively is a challenge, always, everyone must have space for their ideas, and their ideas must be respected. We keep saying "the Canadians work like this and the Indians work like that". I don't think that is necessarily the case.
Most of the Canadians participating are trained in theatre and development and have been working with the same groups of people for a few years now. We develop systems of working together, of building ideas onto the ideas of others and quickly giving it all a shot to be thrown onto its feet.
From what I understand, the Indians participating are used to very efficiently creating through scripts, through getting all the ideas out and agreeing on some sort of path before they get it on their feet. (Correct me if I'm wrong, CSA!).
Both are efficient methods.
I realize during this that I hate to talk talk talk. It needs to be done, of course, a path needs to be chosen. When no one was listening properly, no one was hearing properly (Stephanie pointed out the difference between entendre and ecouter, and I feel that), no one was happy and that never really got fixed, despite a product that I feel we should be quite proud of. I found myself acting unprofessionally, needing to walk over to my bag to grab my water, to take a few deep breaths and just be removed.
I had forgotten about this challenge. I don't have a solution, I know the best things happened when we stopped talking and tried something, whether it worked or not, whether we expected it to work or not. We were the most alive in this project when we were moving and creating, not putting up our hands and waiting for our turn to throw an idea into an unsafe pot of ideas.
A new challenge. A good one. A hard one.
The products were beautiful, by the way.
