3pm, May 27, Thursday in Olympia, Washington—Cool, rainy weather, deserted streets… Suddenly the friendly Olympia Community Center is swamped with a group that will swell into 122 people over the next three days—participants in the 2010 Thinking Outside the Box health care system design intensive.

Where do they come from? A large number came from the U.S, but also from Canada, South America, Africa, Japan, Europe. Participants are health care providers, students, health profession services, complementary care providers and students, herbalists, mental health healers, community workers, clowns, designers, composers, city planners.

And what do they come to? The Thinking Outside the Box health care system design intensive is a four day working conference, organized by Patch Adams MD, the Gesundheit Institute, and by the School for Designing a Society. Its aim is to seed designs of a variety of local projects that move health care systems away from the corporate business context into models of compassion and service.

Yipes! “Models of compassion and service”?!? Can anybody do that?!?

Excuse me, this health care system doesn’t work!
Sorry, you can’t change it.
But the health care system doesn’t–
—Sorry, it can’t be changed—
—But it—
—Sorry, you can’t change it doesn’t work
But—
Sorry, you can’t change it doesn’t work sorry you—

Jabberwocky, anyone? (“Beware the Jabberwock, my son! / The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!  / Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun / the frumious Bandersnatch!”)

The Thinking Outside the Box intensive attempts to be anti-jabberwocky and pro-change, and is organized on three levels:  speaker sessions, design group work, and afternoons of ‘tremendous tries’.

Keynote speakers brought up an array of directions and models: Stephen Bezruchka, MD, “Do you want health or health care?”; Paula Murphy, DC: “My Ideal Clinic”; Martin Donohoe, MD: “Stories and Society”; Patch Adams, MD: “What’s Your Love Strategy?”; Carl Hammerschlag, MD: “Community Mental Health”.

Design groups—which are small working groups facilitated by a design teacher from the School for Designing a Society—used as their starting points the desires of the conference participants. Over the course of the four days, teachers and participants used ideas from the Designers’ Toolbox to transform these desires into working designs. Ideas included:  false statements, formulation, framing, hierarchy, patient participation, metaphor, nesting, consequences , performance in everyday life.

Afternoons of the Tremendous Tries brought in 10 different design projects from across the globe, enabling conference participants to listen and engage in small group settings. with visionary doers. The design projects were: Ideal Medical practice; Karma Clinic; Olympia Free Herbal Clinic; Barrio Adentro; Children of Fire; Population Health; Olympia Free Clinic Planning Effort; Olympia Free Mental Health.

In between these sessions, there were performances in theater, music, and movement by the Health (s)Care System Theater Ensemble and Orchestra. These performers (students of the class Social Change, Design and Composition at Evergreen State College) offered a variety of creative critiques of the system as it is, and tender exposes of the system as it could be.

And to top it off, Patch Adams MD celebrated his 65 birthday on the second night of the intensive May 28th. A fabulous dance and music birthday party was organized for him in Seattle WA, and we all drove there and back and danced past midnight with Patch!

Throughout the four days, the need to radically change health care systems was connected to creativity and variety. Why?

Calls for change in health care systems are, amongst other things, calls for creativity. The health care system crisis is a crisis of bankrupt ideas. We need a variety of new ideas, projects, designs, configurations, proposals—alternatives to look at and weigh. To address this need is one of the core aims of the health care system design intensive.

Why is there so little call for creativity and variety in relation to the health care system crisis? I consider it symptomatic of the stuckness of the situation and the identifying signature of those who consider themselves the players. Entrenched industry is not creative, nor is it looking for creativity (expensive technological innovations, yes). Rather, under the guidance of these ‘players’ the discussion of health care system change is pitched at the level of choosing between already available policy options within market capitalism.

While participants to the “Thinking Outside the Box intensive” came from all over the globe, there was a self-critique held in common. We obey a homogeneous culture of disease management (that continuously falls into corporate hands) instead of our creating and supporting a variety of cultures of health care.

Thinking Inside Meets Thinking Outside
The 2010 Thinking Outside the Box health care system design intensive is the 7th one we’ve offered over the last five years. The premise for the intensive is that our health care systems are fundamentally flawed. This means we need to think, and to think creatively, towards the design and implementation of systems we desire. The thinking that leads to desirable systems needs to be radically different from the thinking that leads to the current systems.

The intensives, and this premise on which they’re founded, have met a resistance over the past five years—interestingly, a rapidly changing one. This resistance is a portrait of the status quo thinking around health care systems.

For fun, and for historical reference points, I’d like to describe shifts of resistance to the Thinking Outside the Box Health Care System Design intensive.

2006: the first design intensive in Urbana Illinois. “Thinking Outside the Box” began in the context of Americans having been told for decades that we have the best health care system in the world. Thus, resistance to attending the design intensive: since we’ve been told that the US medical system is the best in the world, why should we redesign it?

2007: second design intensive in Harrisonburg Virginia. Resistance: ok, some people think that there are a few flaws in the US system. Let’s wait for the experts to fix those little itsy bitsy problems. Why should we REDESIGN it?

2008: third and fourth design intensives in Urbana Illinois and Hillsboro West Virginia. Resistance: Ok, we’ve just elected the people who will get the experts to fix it. I guess there are some big problems. Why should WE redesign it?

2009: fifth and sixth intensives in Baltimore Maryland and Hillsboro WVA. Resistance: Ok, the experts are fixing it. Let’s wait til they get the job done. We don’t need to redesign it.

2010: seventh design intensive in Olympia WA. Resistance: Huh. Err. Umm. We guess the experts fixed the health care system, but we don’t understand exactly what they did. Are things better or worse? Let’s wait for the experts to explain it to us. For now, we don’t want to hear anything more about health care systems, we’re sick of hearing about them. Been there done that. Say, how’s your golf?

On a personal note (but all this writing HAS been a personal note!) for me the 2010 health care system design intensive was the best of the 7 we’ve given. Why do I say that? Because I felt the most interest and concentration of attention from an assembled group of people on the ideas, projects and vocabulary that were being offered by speakers, presenters, visionary doers, and conference participants themselves. The excitement of people proposing new directions was met and matched by the excitement of people seeking new directions. Since I myself am both seeking and proposing, I met myself both coming and going in a circular loop of deliriously happy tizziness. I was so PROUD of everyone who participated, so liking myself in the presence of the event and the people. The health care system is NOT too big to change!

Representative Dennis Kucinich (Dem, Ohio) has long supported these intensives. He sent this special message to the 2010 intensive:

Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
“Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!”
He took his vorpal sword in hand:
Long time the manxome foe he sought—
So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
And stood awhile in thought.
And as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!
One, two! One, two! and through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.
“And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!”
He chortled in his joy.
’Twas brillig, and the slithy tove
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
—Lewis Carroll

Originally a composer only of music, I have in the last decade become interested in composing not only music, but also social contexts for music, so that music be an input to society (not only an output).  In the face of this interest, I note the insufficiency of the typical tried-and-false concert format, which, if I am designing any event to present music, must be added to, compounded with, or completely ignored and contradicted.

It is in this spirit, of tinkering with containers, that our compositional cooperative and instrument library—ODDMUSIC-UC for short—makes its offerings, poses its challenges.  On June 27, 2010, two handfuls of experimental musicians and a basketful of audience participated in a guided backyard ‘garden tour’ of oddmusical performances.

Berimbau, fipple pipes, human voice, and boviphonic ohm cannon were among the instruments featured, and each location lent its own microclimactic peculiarities to the particular performance chosen for it.  (In Illinois, the ground is not as flat as they say it is, and “green” at the height of summer describes a rainbow.)

Cicadas ceded the noise floor to box fans as the concert migrated indoors, for the electronic instruments: Otonal organ, Lambdoma Starrboard, Chapman Stick, and a few systems too convoluted to be so elegantly named.  The temptation to explain the instruments was contagious, while the music and its composition remained curiously unexplained.

Listen to Andrew Heathwaite’s “remem“, as performed on otonal dulcimer and organ by Andrew and myself.  Words:

I can do without yr telling me
what I could do without
6 chicken chicken pyre
reflection & action, reflection & —
Is this th conversation I couldn’t have known I wanted to have?
How do I convince you of th fallacy of trying to convince?
I know I’m not convincing enough
4 chicken chicken coop
action & —
Did I wait long enough for me?
Are you going to — ?
Did I already — ?
Did I say that?
What have you done w/ yr words?
What have I done w/ my yr words?
embers & yawning
remem —

Thanksgiving, November 26, 2009

We are exploring a pedagogy of desire for four days in a smoggy corner of Milan.

Upon arrival at the location where we will sleep, eat, and teach, we enter a portal emblazoned with the statement Da vicino nessuno e normale, meaning “up close, nothing is normal,” with a broken looking lightening bolt for an icon.

It is a former psychiatric hospital turned youth hostel—a fitting environment for our workshop taught by composers, activists, and clowns.

I arrive in Milan to realize I am exhausted, so I walk every day for as long as I can to chase out this strange fatigue mixed with melancholy. The grounds are outlined with an imposing cement wall. Inside the courtyard we walk across a bright carpet of ginko leaves.   In addition to the hostel, there is a cafe, art museum, school, church, nursing home, agricultural teaching center, and library.

Throughout there is a scattering of public art, but each attempt seems half finished, amateurish, and disconnected from any coherent idea.  One path is marked by is a steel arch which leads to a muddy path.  Next to it is a dry, imitation Gaudi fountain, with mosaic gnomes that have been retrofitted into ash trays.  Half-finished murals—some looking like a child’s nightmare— are painted on random parts of building walls.

I walk past what appears to be a factory building, where I hear Julie Andrews singing “a spoon full of sugar makes the medicine go down.”   A dog appears out of nowhere, barking, playing the game of frighten-the-human.

Yesterday we opened with a large event with Patch.  Two hundred fifty people, mostly volunteer clowns, tumbled in the gymnasium of a former immigrant detention center for our four hour workshop, entitled “The Emperor’s New Clothes.”  I was asked on the day we arrived to write a variation on this traditional story.  And I did, narrating it into a wire microphone as volunteers from the audience acted it out.  In my version the emperor and his entourage of barking TV cameras (not hiding my reference to Berlusconi, Italy’s Prime Minister and media mogul) is derailed by a girl who redistributes power in this attention economy with her small camcorder.  Then I talked about indymedia, the need to develop parallel institutions to overgrow the existing ones, and we did an assignment on revealing hidden consequences.

Afterwards, we were whisked away to a restaurant where were were joined by the famous Italian artist and architect, Luigi Serafini, and his quiet, beautiful partner, who didn’t speak a word.  Exhausted, I could barely walk out of the restaurant, when a group of clowns grabbed me and kissed me again and again on the cheeks saying how much they appreciated me, the performance.  All I could say in broken Italian was “I come all the way to Italy to get kisses—and here they are” which made them slobber me again.  Outside the restaurant was graffiti scrawled in English: “People Hunting Reasons.”

We have a record number of 36 participants, including a Knowledge Manager from NATO, a birthing coach, several doctors and teachers, a gestalt therapist, a banker who plays clown by night, a Professor of communications psychology, a guy who works with Save the Children, an HIV researcher, and 2 high school students.

This morning, we had lively discussions about the distinction between desire (which are not available in the current society) and preference (alternatives currently available) and ways of framing problems that require structural changes for them to be resolved.

Tomorrow I will present on distinguishing between a conflict and contradiction, and how to use contradictions as points of leverage for making a changes in a social system.

In my mind is the ongoing question of how to create a teaching environment where students are not taught facts, or fed content about problems, or invited to imitate existing designs, but rather invited to articulate their own problems and generate their own designs, and given conceptual tools to do so.  I don’t know of other places that do this other than PhD programs, which exist inside feudal systems polluted by corporate money.

And so this project remains interesting to me, despite my fatigue.

Friday, November 27th

It occurred to me today: We are teaching 65 Italian clowns in an insane asylum.  But the asylum has been redesigned, matching the needs and offers of those with mental illness with the needs and offers of a rotating crew of international visitors.  What was once a gated asylum, where people were “normalized” through segregation and depravation, was opened to the public in 1995, allowing residents as well to come and go freely.

“We help people to trust themselves” said the founders of Hostel Olinda.  ”We apply the suspension of judgement…we avoid attempts to control or infantilize.”

Five rooms of the hostel are reserved for those who are “mentally challenged.”  One man with crossed eyes and a pointy head greets me in Italian-English as his head shakes back and forth.  A young immigrant woman scrubs our bathroom six times in one day —she is engaged in “work therapy”, working out her anxiety on the porcelain of toilet and bidet.  There is a surly woman without teeth in the cafe, who shouts at us when we confuse our order.  A young female psychologist apologizes on her behalf, but I wave the apology away, saying that I like loud mouthy women.  At 2 a.m., a man accidentally walks into the bedroom where Rob and I sleep in two narrow beds, our arms falling off the sides.  He shakes his head and apologizes.  I learn to lock the door from the inside.

Tonight was the night I fell in love with our students.  It always happens, even during workshops like this one when I am folded up into myself and resistant. The Italians make it easy.  They pour their hearts all over you until you relent.   They cooked a magnificent meal for us while I showed several folks how to drum 2 against 3 and 3 against 4.  We played ukulele, clowned, and flew paper airplanes over the dining table.

Saturday, November 28th

Today, Mark introduces the concept of Non Sequitur, saying “When you have described a problem as a contradiction—the strongest articulation of a problem—that is a time for experimentation with non sequitur, to interrupt the logic of the problem.”

Then, he interrupts himself to play Sonata Quijada, a music composition he wrote 20 years ago with a jack-in-the-box, chattering teeth, dice, chimes, clothes pins, clicker, and rattle.  This is perhaps the 12th time I have heard it, and I hear parts of it for the first time.

I hear that the beginning, which is a strange mixture of predictable yet surprising actions and suppression of sounds, functions to prepare the audience to hear the text at the end.  The text, which Mark valiantly translated into Italian, describes the US-aided propaganda campaign against Allende’s government in Chile.

Susan ends the session with “Formulation is social work.”

Monday, November 30th—Venice

10 years ago today, I was pissing my pants on the soaked streets of Seattle helping to bar delegates from getting into the World Trade Organization meetings.  I watched the same cops who escorted us during our protest against the Gap the day before, beat kids with huge sticks manufactured especially for this protest.  I saw police throw can after can of tear gas at us, and kids with large mitts throw them back in defense.  I saw a police pull a gas mask off the face of one kid, pepper spray their face, and then let the gas mask snap back into place, in an attempt to break their will to stay.

That day, I walked into the first Indymedia center, buzzing with possibility.  I watched thousands of people, broken up into affinity groups, make decisions by consensus via empowered spokespeople and fascinating, decentralized group communication.

Today, I am wandering the streets of Venice—a city without cars, full of art everywhere.  A city where the water rises each day and, the foundation which is perched on pillars, sinks into the sea, threatening to engulf traces of thousands of years of human habitation in a murky green water.  Venice smells like fish and dust, flowers and incense, underwear and chocolate and fresh bread.

We stay in a hostel overlooking a piazza, where we can throw the windows open and smell and hear everything below.

I will live here for a month some day soon.  To learn Italian, think, and write.  Every part of the city calls for you to make something, and my wanting self wants to respond.

Wednesday, December 2nd

We return to Milan early, so that Cristina and I can talk about motherhood and to encourage her to continue formulating on the concepts of translation and “transistence”—the act of translating to resist.   She is a professional translator for Patch, Fiat, the U.N.  I invite her to come present at the summer school.

Meanwhile, Carol and Mark present in Darren’s English conversation class.  Carol gives the assignment: tell us a autobiographical story that is linked to a part of history.  The students struggle with this—not with the English, but with the linking part.

In every part of the world, people don’t know how to understand themselves in relation to the structure and dynamics of the  systems they inhabit.  At some point during the workshop earlier this week, Susan challenged participants: Who here can tell me the premises of the system they live under every day?  Is prejudice a premise of the system or a consequence?  Reformers keep the premises and try to change the consequences of a system.  They respond to conflict by generating more preferences to choose from within the the current system.

Thursday, December 3rd

On the plane ride from Milan, the Italians transform the plane into a loud and lively cafe.  They cluster throughout the plane in 2s and 3s and 4s, strangers meeting each other for the first time, their faces open wide to each other, telling stories with animated faces and hands.  What I am witnessing is a social impossibility in the US.  What about Italian history and culture makes this possible?  Is it the consequence of the tradition of two long and social meals each day?  If you spend that much time together, you need to learn how to stay interesting to others…learn the art of performance and story telling.  Or is it a culture of intense solidarity—or, one might also say having witnessed Italian sentiments around immigration, exclusionary cultural identity?  Maybe its a consequence of being a small language group in a large world?

I see demonstrated on this plane why we are successful in having a School for Designing a Society in Italy each year.

City Imagining:

This booklet was compiled by Danielle Chynoweth in 2002 from imaginative descriptions, love letters, false statements, images, and music submitted by 21 people, many of them School for Designing a Society participants.

Download the .pdf (6 MB) in sequenced order for on-screen reading, and/or in booklet form (to assemble, print fronts and backs on legal size paper, then fold in half).

How can activism and music composition be resistence AND a contribution? When do either make a difference to society?

When is activism new? When is music new? Composition of activism or sound is new when it resists identity with already-decayed and absorbed activisms/compositions.          Video -WMV | Video -QT

How do we establish connections and edges between the composition of sound and composition of activism?

Activists generate a problem when they measure society by criteria which that society does not embody. A new projet is reduced when measured by an old standard. Those old standards constitute the status quo. When our best traditional approaches to social protest have lost their ability to influence our governments and each other, we search for alternatives. Composers compose according to their explorations of what is possible, and, out of that, what is desirable.

There is an outcry, at least from us, for a radical change of systems. This means we are living in a time where composition is needed.

Genoa rises up from the sea, a chaotic surface of bricks and stone and tangled streets holding several thousand years of memory in the arc of its harbor.

Our first stop is AutAut – a squatted space claimed by protesting students earlier this year, shortly after our discussions with them last November.

I pause here for a brief history of the student occupations and our role in it:

In 2008 the Italian Parliament signed into law Berlusconi’s plan to slash ~$8 billion Euros in funding for public education and restructure it around regressive concepts of order and authority.

As a result, over 150,000 education jobs will be cut over 3 years.  University tuition will rise from $3,000 to $10,000 Euros in a country that has seen wages and saving accounts literally cut in half with the conversation from the Italian lira to the Euro.

Anyone failing a language test on the first day of school will be segregated into a different class, a move called “positive discrimination.”  School uniforms and rising from one’s seat when the teacher enters, and teacher’s ability to fail students for bad behavior are also part of the legislation.

Hundreds of thousands of students, teachers, and parents took to the streets, and occupied schools at all grade levels in protest.

Last November, the School for Designing a Society was invited to meet with protestors still occupying schools – at a high school in Pietrasanta and the University of Genoa.

We met teachers who wanted to design new ways of teaching.  We facilitated a conversation asking “What does our education need to be if we are to participate in forming society in reference to our desires?”  We met students angry at the “mafioso logic” in universities that protects a caste system still based on blood lineage.  In both cases they complained of the trend of “precarious teachers,” that is, contract teachers who live contract to contract, are often fired each summer, and live on near volunteer wages.

This Spring, we were invited back, to offer a Laboratorio di R(i)esistenza (Laboratory of Resistance/Re-existence) at Aut Aut.  Aut aut, (which refers to an either/or ultimatum in Latin), is an occupied space on the periphery of the University of Genoa, in a magnificent deteriorating stone building that skirts the ghetto.  The neighborhood was once a mandatory place for Jews and is now a tolerated as a favorite place for local businessmen to pick up transvestite prostitutes, and as cheap living for new arrivals from Senegal and Tunisia…

Our Italian friends, who have been attending the School for a number of years as students, held 3 workshops leading up to this one on “Educating to Desire” at Aut Aut this Spring.

We are here to support our Italian friends as they develop projects that create environments of reflection for activists and social change artists.  We plan to continue coming here twice a year if we can continue to scrape together the funding.

Sixteen people attended our Laboratorio, from Milan, Belgium, Bologna, and Genoa, who knew our work through other channels.

Some anticipated a presentation.  Instead we provoked them to describe their interests and started shape shifting the conversation, opening up spaces for composing (not just doing) social activism.

The conversation settled in on the issue of Le Ronde, a volunteer, vigilante security force codified by recent parliamentary action, to respond to fears of immigrants and crime.  The last manifestation of the Ronde was under fascist Italy, a link made clear with their adoption of the fascist uniform style and colors.

“Simply saying ‘Le Ronde’ is not yet stating a problem,” I explained “it needs to be made into a complete sentence to be a problem.”

So we took time working on formulations of the problem, such as:

- La Ronde make a visual normalization of a fascist atmosphere.
- La Ronde absorbs a section of the population that feels powerless (unemployed men) and gives them the crumbs of power over others.
- Our desires to control and be controlled have become larger than our desires to free and be free.
- Instead of taking responsibility for poverty and hatred and its effects, we push this responsibility onto the police and now Le Ronde.

Seeing that there were many angles to the problem, we then formulated responses to the various ways of framing the problem such as:

- Reclaiming public spaces and the streets with activities so that the need for security decreases.
- Dressing in mourning and haunting the Ronde as their do their rounds, following them and handing out literature about their origins under fascism.
- Organizing with the Ronde, recognizing them as powerless under or unemployed workers, to generate alternatives to the security problem.

We will return at the end of November.  After visiting the site of the earthquake in L’Aquila, we are discussing whether disaster will be our theme for this year.

I spent a day taping the wierdo champion Chu-uck D as he provided a spanarchist perspective on our little town of Urbana-Champaign. Over the course of the day, several locals received an exposition of da (not the) crucial artz, complete with an arted flyer. Can’t decrypt the deadpan? We were being silly in our seriousness.

Video -WMV | Video -QT

The Health Care Design Intensive is ongoing at the American Visionary Arts Museum in Baltimore and Mark and Danielle have posted some descriptions on a blog here.

1. “How to Ferment the Colon” by Andrew Heathwaite (mandolin/vocals), Jacob Barton (trombone/backup vocals), and Rob Scott (drums)

2. “Jisu Won” by Jisu Won

3. “H2O Yeah” by Anna Hochhalter (banjo/vocals)

4. “Graphic Analysis of Drill Here, Drill Now by Newt Gingrich” by Steven Sparkman

5. “Utopian Choose-your-own Psychogeographic Book” by Kelsey Wuornos, Dongseon Lee, Mark Enslin, Bobbi Bennett, Jisu Won, and Danielle Chynoweth

6. “I have something of the utmost importance to say that I want all of you to listen to” by Candace Walworth and performed by Danielle Chynoweth

7. “Art Installation” by Bobbi Bennett

8. “Popcorn Jam” (a.k.a. intermission with food/kitchen-based music)

9. “Cockroach Opera” by Andrew Heathwaite (mandolin/vocals), Jacob Barton (udderbot/vocals), and Rob Scott (trashball percussion/vocals)

10. “The Terrorist is Watching” by Wislawa Szymborska, performed by Dongseon Lee

11. “Getting to know Dahni” by Dahni Kim

12. “Five poems” by Kim Olsen

13. “(S)now” by Jacob Barton, performed by Urbana-Champaign Udderbot Marching Choir

Amongst the snow-capped mountains of Pruno di Stazzema, in the Lucca region of Tuscany, there was a one-week project of doing the School for Designing a Society in Italian.

We created neologisms using parts of Italian and English words. Before the week was over, Cristina made a presentation on “Transistance” (Translation + Resistance). She spoke of times/places at which the transposition of ideas from one area of human language to another. For instance, the fashion show in Milan where the mysterious designer Serpica Naro debuted — “Serpica Naro” is an anagram for “San Precario” which in Italian would mean roughly “Saint of Precariousness”  which refers to “precarious labor,” a term applied in particular to the exploitation of cheap labor — in this fashion show there were designs to expose the plight of migrant laborers, and to emphasize the body shape of pregnant women, thus exposing the stereotypes that oppress the workers upon whose labor the fashion industry rests. Today, Serpica Naro is a political movement that fights against exploitative working conditions.

Cristina had us chop up fashion magazines to turn the fashion models into puppets for little anti-commercial puppet shows. We debated the issue of culture jamming.

A puppet master named Mariano Dolce paid us a visit, in which he described his 30+ years practicing puppetry in Italy, primarily in Reggio Emilia. Mariano first got involved in puppets during the Vietnam War, and he recalled stories of going from hospital room to hospital room, inspiring debates betwee the patients by using puppets to bring up political issues, such as the legality of divorce (which was an issue in Italy at that time). He went on to work with mental patients and children in an area of Italy renowned for its system of childhood education. See: The Hundred Languages of Children.

Particularly interesting was Mariano’s way of describing the constraints of the medium of puppetry — such that the puppet medium has it’s own language and its own field of potential.

Thursday evening we performed in the nearby town of Pietrasanta. We used a mixture of Italian and English scripts, and pieces which relied on gesture and non-linguistic acoustics. The below video provides a grainy glimpse of one piece, in which a sequence of faces and sounds were performed before the bubbles burst.

Video -QT