What a rehearsal room asks of you

The first thing a rehearsal room asks is that you stop explaining yourself. Not because your explanation is unwelcome, but because the room has other ways of finding out who you are, and most of them are faster.

We spent eight weeks with a group of eighteen people, half of whom had used mental health services and half of whom had not, and for the first three weeks almost nothing happened that would look like progress from the outside. People arrived. People made tea. Somebody read a page out loud badly and somebody else laughed, and the person who had read it laughed too, and that was the week’s work.

“A group learns more from the first time somebody leaves the room than from any amount of stated intention.”

What was actually happening

The room was establishing what it would do when something went wrong, because something always goes wrong. In week four, somebody did leave. Nobody followed them, because the facilitator had said in week one that nobody would, and because she had said it in week one it was not an abandonment. They came back forty minutes later and picked up a script.

That is the whole method, more or less. You make the room safe by describing in advance what it will do, and then you do that, repeatedly, until people believe you. Everything artistic that the group made in weeks five to eight rested on that.

The mistake we keep watching organisations make

And we have made it ourselves: treating those first three weeks as overhead. They are not overhead. They are the load-bearing wall.