ASC Cohesion
Processes

Crowdsourced Poem

A crowdsourced poem is made from community members' reflections and actual words.

  • Community members write responses to prompts, tailored according to relationships developed over site visits.

  • Those responses shape a spoken word poem reflecting the community's feelings, beliefs, values, inspirations, trepidations and aspirations.

  • Anonymous participation encourages candor.

  • The poem is scored with original music and shared back live with the community.

  • The poem is like a survey, revealing both what’s in common as well as unspoken tensions and disagreements with the group.

Listening Labs

Listening Labs are gatherings in which moving stories told through powerful spoken word, music, and theatrically projected sand animation facilitate generous listening with fellow participants in conversations that are honest, intimate, and alive.

Ponder to Page Workshop

Ponder to Page is a fun, easy, safe step-by-step process for crafting resonant stories out of seemingly small, meaningful experiences --- even those that may seem quite ordinary.

  • This workshop was created with the "non-writer" in mind.

  • It offers story skills useful in many situations —personal, community-based & professional (e.g. both Regie and Guy's children recently used these skills on college/high school applications, resulting in acceptance and scholarship)

  • • Along the way, participants listen to, and share, real-life stories, strengthening emotional connection.

  • • The workshop unfolds with “emphatic not-big-dealness,” extending from writing “experiments” (90-120 seconds!) to connection. Participants ease into depth with their own experience, those of fellow participants, and the resulting bonding with people who, at first, are often strangers. Looking back, participants cannot pinpoint a “big-deal plu

Ten-Toasts Dinners

Participants join each other for a dinner as we regale each other with meaningful conversation and stories in the form of toasts reflecting a theme, (e.g., “To Those Who Shape Us.*”)

It’s like a game: Participants dine in groups of 8-12 fellow travelers (hopefully whom they do not know or know well). At some point in the dinner, each participant is invited to ding their glass and share a brief story or experience that ideally no one at the table has heard before, relating to the theme: For example, a story about a person that shaped the teller, and about a way the teller was changed. At the end of their story, the teller raises their glass and toasts to an element or value their story highlights (e.g.,  to those who taught us resilience!) and invites all others in their group to raise their glasses as well.

The only other rule is that the last person has to sing their toast!

(*Note: this theme is a sample. Actual theme reflect specific groups)

Culminating Events

This takes various forms, ranging in production complexity. Examples include: 

  • Performances in which participant’s stories (from Ponder to Page workshop) are set to original music and professionally performed

  • Books and audio archives of group members' stories

  • Full-on multimedia productions in which real-world stories, told by the community members who've lived them are filmed and theatrically projected together with live original narration, cinematographic score & musical segments designed & performed by a world class artistic team