On Reshaping Relations

MicroCosmos is an inquiry into our ability to affect meaningful change on a small scale through the inner dimensions of artistic practice. How are artists tapping into those inner dimensions to be in dialogue and right relation with the outer context in which we live? When things feel out of control on a macro scale, how do our artistic gifts meet the needs of the world?

In response to these questions, MicroCosmos co-curators Javiera Benavente, Matthew Glassman, and Nick Slie created a framework of creative prompts and then convened artists who are knee deep in this inquiry to reflect, study, and then encounter a fellow practitioner they’ve never met. In this conversation, Jennie Hahn and Sharon Mansur come together to discuss their responses to the MicroCosmos framework in a conversation facilitated by Matthew Glassman. Jennie Hahn (she/her) is an interdisciplinary, performance-based artist committed to social repair and environmental care in Wabanakik/Maine—a place with which she is in multi-generational, settler-colonial relationship. Jennie is co-creator of In Kinship Collective, a cross-cultural performance project that follows the tradition of Wabanaki guiding. Sharon Mansur is a dance and interdisciplinary artist, curator, educator and community engager based in the Mississippi River town of Winona, Minnesota, on Dakota land. A facilitator of people, spaces and imagination, Sharon guides The Cedar Tree Project, centering Arab contemporary art and artists, and SHIFT~ performance salons, facilitating new experimental and interdisciplinary collaborations among local creatives and places.

This encounter represents the culmination of a three-part process of individual work. The process began by convening pairs of artists who are knee deep in this inquiry. We invited each to reflect, study, and then encounter a fellow practitioner they’ve never met. Each participant in the MicroCosmos project undertook a three-part process of individual work. They were asked to meditate on five questions:

What questions and callings are you living?

What are the places, spaces, and relationships that are undergirding you and your work?

What seeds are you planting and tending?

What are the practices that would help you?

What are the experiments you yearn to conduct?

Then, participants engaged in shared study of excerpts from Symbiotic Planet: A New Look at Evolution by Lynn Margulis, “When You Meet the Monster, Anoint its Feet” by Bayo Akomolafe, and "Communication is Sacred” by Nora Bateson. Finally, participants created a short expressive response in any creative medium as a way of sharing what the prompts and shared study activated in them. Those creative responses appear interspersed throughout the following conversation.

Sharon Mansur: My main practice is nonverbal, so this is always interesting—to find words.

I’m a movement-based artist, which really just meant that there was finally a container for my hyperactive wanderings that started when I was young.

My father trained as a visual artist when he was younger. He wasn’t encouraged to pursue that professionally, but that was really infused in our home growing up, as well as the love of music from my mom. She trained in piano, had wanted to go to a conservatory. Similarly, as both my parents are from immigrant families—more practical-minded professions won over. But the music, movement, art… that really just felt like a natural way my family would interact and appreciate life.

I love to find and create situations where people can explore questions and experiment and take risks in a safe space. Questions of in-between-ness, that’s really where I feel I dwell naturally and where I’ve dwelled as an Arab American, as someone who loves urban and rural environments.

Aside from creating and performing, I eventually started to curate and support other artists, creating a couple of platforms that I now shepherd loosely: The Cedar Tree Project supports Arab/SWANA contemporary art and artists, and SHIFT~ experimental performance salons are a DIY space to try new ideas for my local community. And I teach in different outlets for different populations.

I’m always fascinated with that conversation between verbal and nonverbal, and languaging, and how to even give a glimpse into inner experience, into interiority, into those unnamed places that unite us—our common humanity.

Matthew Glassman: Great. Jennie, do you want to talk about yourself?

What are settler responsibilities to place, and how do settlers participate in Land Back movements and in returning land stewardship, place stewardship to Wabanaki communities through creative practice and storytelling?

Jennie Hahn: Sure. I am based in Maine, in Wabanaki territory. I was born here and grew up in the town of Thomaston in the St. George River Watershed, which is adjacent to the Penobscot River Watershed. My family has a long-standing entangled settler-colonial relationship with this place on both sides of my family, in two different watersheds.

I grew up with a really specific story about our relationship with this place. All of my work and creative energy has always been about relationships with place, my relationship with this place, the way that I’ve felt cared for by this place, my desire to care in return.

Initially I was really, really, really caught up in the story that I grew up with, which basically situates my ancestors as having been here in Wabanaki territory forever, from the beginning of time. There’s an obvious sort of erasure of Wabanaki presence in that, but there’s also a really complicated and concrete process of identity formation. I’ve been grappling with that to one extent or another, I think, my whole adult life.

In a disciplinary sense, I grew up doing a lot of community theatre, and I studied theatre in college. Then I went to work with Cornerstone Theatre Company in Los Angeles for a number of years and really identified strongly with their mission of working in and with community to tell community stories. I was like, “these are the skill sets I need to build.” I wanted to bring them home from day one.

The other piece that feels important in the overall thread is that I grew up in a small town with parents who were very actively involved in the town and in building community. Also, my parents both are artists. My mom, a theatre director and visual artist, and my dad, a piano player and musician. Similarly to your parents, Sharon, neither of them were encouraged to pursue these things in higher education.

My parents renovated a theatre space in my town and started a community theatre group. So I grew up with this kind of investment in community through performance and theatre. That feels very obviously connected to the path that I’ve chosen.

Overall, my practice has become much more interdisciplinary, much less sort of “theatre proper”. But I continued to sort of hold a producing role and got really confused about what my own artistic role was in the work. There was an extended period in which I was primarily working to support Wabanaki-led sovereignty initiatives while still working on some of my own creative projects that I was initiating.

Some initial civic and community-based practice work with the Penobscot River ended up leading to the development of a cross-cultural collective that is Indigenous and settler. Most of what I’m focused on right now is this question: what are settler responsibilities to place, and how do settlers participate in Land Back movements and in returning land stewardship, place stewardship to Wabanaki communities through creative practice and storytelling?

Matthew: There’s so many wild intersections between what y’all are doing.

So you guys were asked to do a creative response. If either of you want to hop into that next, we can.

Sharon: Well, I was going to maybe hold up my synthesis notes from going through the invitations. I did a couple creative responses too.

Matthew: Tell us what’s in that iconography there.

Sharon: I went back to my first project looking at my Lebanese heritage and family. It was called Off-White, which was a phrase I started to use on those forms where they would ask for your race or ethnicity. Legally I was supposed to check “white,” but I was like, “Well, that’s bullshit. That’s not my experience in the world.”

That became a project to explore why I was framed as white in some circles and then not in others. I started to explore what contact improvisation master teacher Nancy Stark Smith referred to as “the gap space”: the place where you’ve left one moment and the other moment has not quite formed yet. So, can you sit in that gap space to wait and listen?

I doodled in this little synthesis page—I don’t know again where exactly—but “Re-”... That little prefix came in: relate, relater, relating, relax, reorient, restate, rebirth, reenter, reboot.

Matthew: When you look at “What question am I living?” were you able to articulate a single question?

Sharon: “What is artivism?” I’ve been wondering what that is. “What does my tender heart deeply desire?” Is one question. “What is an artful life?” Is another one. “Is my body an act of resistance?”

Matthew: And the prefix “Re-” is again. A repeat.

Sharon: A repeat. Yes.

As a mover, repetition is such a main dwelling place to revisit movement. There’s an exercise my colleague, Nicole Bindler, will throw into improvisational workshops. She asks us to improvise without any repetition. And it is so difficult, so hard to do. I didn’t realize it until I was asked not to.

Jennie: Yeah, is that even possible?

Sharon: I don’t know. It was certainly a beautifully awkward attempt our group made. But I think about the power of repetition and all these different ”Re-” words, right? “Reorient.” How many times do we do that in our lives in a day? “Restart.” That possibility.

Matthew: It’s evolutionary.

There’s still a lot of new story that needs to be told in this place, a lot of awareness that needs to be raised. At the same time, that’s not an end. That’s not the goal. The goal is reshaped relations.

Sharon: What a gift, right? The mistakes are also part of our path, our attempts. To get another opportunity is amazing.

Matthew: There’s good stuff in there, Sharon.

Jennie, how about you?

Jennie: I was responding a lot to questions about time or to the question about “what are the practices that would help me?”—which I did not answer.

The overall framework of my practice has always been about relationship to place and commitment to place. However, the specificity of Indigenous-settler relations, the Land Back movement, supporting Wabanaki sovereignty, and settler roles and practices in that work are ongoing focuses… I’ve been holding these for much longer now than how I was taught to think about making theatre and performance work, these grant funding cycle-motivated timelines… The message that you need to always be coming up with a new inquiry, or that your next project has to be focused on something else.

What I was confronting in response to this question was the emotional landscape of navigating my own commitment. It feels different to be working on something for a long time than it does in that new inquiry mode. The newness of new questions is often so exciting and brings so much energy with it. In the space that I’ve been in the last couple of years, it’s both. There are new questions that arrive and new knowledge that shifts things, but the overall inquiry is not new. (Of course, it’s new to me in comparison to the way it’s not new to Wabanaki people. There are multiple lenses to look at it with.) In terms of how you think about inquiry driving creative practice, there’s a different relationship to time and ongoing commitment that I’m working through.

There’s still a lot of new story that needs to be told in this place, a lot of awareness that needs to be raised. At the same time, that’s not an end. That’s not the goal. The goal is reshaped relations. Figuring out my role in moving from a primary focus on awareness and education—which has still got to be part of things—into understanding my role in reshaping relations in a really practical, pragmatic way has been the learning process. That is heavy and sometimes I feel stuck. It can be challenging to align long-term community commitments with cycles of creative production.

Matthew: Thank you so much. I’m holding a question about the role of the imagination in these questions and frameworks that we’re all grappling with.

Jennie: I can share. I’m taking a class right now in spatial history and GIS mapping, so I’ve been thinking about maps a lot. And I started ... I was going to give myself thirty minutes to draw a map and then to make am oral history or oral map. But it ended up getting kind of combined into one process. I had the instinct as soon as I sat down to draw with my eyes closed, so that’s what I did.

This ended up being the map that I drew with my eyes closed.

Matthew: Oh, awesome.

Jennie: I got a text in the middle of it, which caused me to open my eyes. It happened to be from somebody connected to... I mean it was very prescient. So instead of recording a separate thing, I made a video in which I’m talking you through the map, and the stories of what’s happening as I’m drawing it, which I can share

Jennie: Okay, I’m going to stop there.

Sharon: So cool. I can’t believe you did that with your eyes closed. I love the narrative. I often have those thoughts when I see a certain map or drawing, like “Oh, what if I could just dive in there and just be there?” So I love that and I could just listen to you narrate that for a long time. And the stories, you’re just bringing aspects to life and the connectivity. Yes, very rich spatial history.

Jennie: Oh, it’s so not my wheelhouse, but I’m having fun.

Matthew: Sharon, would you like to go?

Sharon: Yes, so as typical, my response has a few layers. Could I just show a video?

Video by Sharon Mansur. Music by Yara Asmar (in collaboration with Majd Chidiaac) does not play in video but is available on Bandcamp.

Jennie: Wow. That was beautiful. I was thinking about the way we were just talking about repetition. I appreciate the vocabulary you developed over the course of such a short piece. It was all really beautiful imagery. I was struck by this sort of collection of yellow toward the end. We see only little bits of it in the beginning, and then toward the end we’re seeing a sort of compilation of yellow.

It evoked for me a sort of visceral response. It’s lovely.

Sharon: Oh, thank you.

Jennie: What was the voiceover text piece?

Sharon: I wanted to make sure to acknowledge: those are two Lebanese artists based in Beirut. Yara Asmar, a musician—that’s from her newest album, synth waltzes and accordian laments, and I’ve been following her work for a while. After I put this together, which only started out as me gathering objects that I felt... Then I thought, well, maybe I’ll photograph a few to share. And then of course it just kept going. I wanted to have a little bit of sound somehow. That piece, the title is “are these your hands? would you like them back?” which I loved in terms of the body reference. So I just dropped it in. It’s one of those happy accidents. There’s also a poet, Majd Chidiac, who Yara is collaborating with.

Jennie: Had you already done the sequence at the end with the hand and the squeezing the lemon?

Sharon: I had done the whole thing, yeah. I kept it in the order that I shot the photos, too. That was my exploration.

Jennie: Okay. It was chronological.

Matthew: So this notion of a “microcosmos,” of worlds that exist in small spaces or in small places that we’re sort of carrying, and also that there’s worlds inside of seed cases—did you walk away with anything that connects to this from this experiment, these prompts?

Sharon: Well, I resonated really strongly with all of it.

Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, the developer of Body-Mind Centering, talks about “cellular awareness” and that, more than poetically or metaphorically, that is part of who we are, our embodied lives. A cell is a world in a world, and to remember that, to come back to that is such a value and a place we can draw from and root into.

There’s so much value in zooming in. You can get to the macro through the micro, for sure.

So often there’s so much focus on bigger: “What’s the big idea?” But the small, there’s so much joy and power in the small, the mysterious, leaving space for the unknown.

Jennie: What’s coming up for me is this dance between intentionality or design and the openness to the unknown or the embrace of the sort of organic, unmanaged, uncontrolled process.

For you, Matthew, as a convener, you are making an intentional choice to facilitate connection between other microcosmos or between other micros. There’s a certain amount of intention and design.

From there, it’s left to do what the organic does. I appreciate that because that’s a tension that I find myself in as a convener of things, as well.

Matthew: Anything in closing?

Jennie: No, just gratitude.

Sharon: Yeah, likewise. This was really nourishing, really lovely.