In Conversation

Manda: [00:00:15] Hey people, welcome to Accidental Gods. To the podcast where we believe that another world is still possible and that if we all work together, there is still time to lay the foundations of that future that we would be proud to leave as our legacy. I’m Manda Scott, your host and fellow traveller in this journey into possibility. And this week we are looking at something really close to my heart. We’re looking at how we tell stories. What stories we tell of ourselves and each other, to ourselves and each other, and how we tell them. And this last is the bit we’re really going to look into. How do we tell the stories of transformation in ways that engage everyone? In ways that give everyone the agency, the support, the encouragement and the freedom to be what they need in every moment, at any moment. How do we encourage the kind of emotional literacy, the kind of energetic literacy that enables people to make the most of this in real time? This seems to me one of the crucial questions of our time. And this week’s guest is someone who spends her life asking exactly those questions and then dreaming up the most imaginative answers. Jenifer Toksvig is creator of the Copenhagen Interpretations, which takes concepts of uncertainty and fluidity that evolved to describe the quantum process in physics and then applies them to theatre. To the telling of living stories in a shared space in a way that fosters connection and creativity and personal growth. And this, I really believe, is crucial to how we navigate this moment of total turmoil in our cultural and energetic and biophysical and narrative worlds. If we tell ourselves stories that everything is screwed and there’s no hope and we’re all going to die, and we just need to learn how to grub food out of the land and everything will be fine; that’s where we’ll end up.

Manda: [00:02:31] And I say this because I spent the weekend listening to people telling me this. And then I also spent the rest of the weekend exploring potential and the edges of inter becoming. And I genuinely think that the world is not what we think it is. The possibilities are not what we limit ourselves to seeing, and we have to find ways to expand what we see. We not only need new stories, we need new ways of telling those stories, new ways of experiencing different ways of being. And this is what Jen is creating. When I first learned of the Copenhagen interpretation and the broad cloth that arises from it, when I first took part in one of Jen’s Gatherings of a Fairytale, it felt as if someone was opening doors in my mind. That here is a way safely to explore the emergent edges of inter becoming that are where the magic happens, that are where uncertainty exists, that where the boundaries that we impose on our world dissolve away and let us see the other gateways that exist ahead of us. So I wanted to bring some of this magic to the podcast, to give Jen a forum in which to tell her story, and to see if we could make it alive for you. So here we go, stepping into this place of magic and emergence; let’s all go together. People of the podcast, please do welcome Jenifer Toksvig of the Copenhagen Interpretation.

Manda: [00:04:13] Jen, welcome to Accidental Gods on this lovely summer morning. We have summer where we are for pretty much the first time. How are you and where are you this morning?

Jen: [00:04:23] I am in sunny Surrey, where we also have lovely sunshine and I am sitting in my little garden office where I try to make theatre, sometimes.

Manda: [00:04:35] Very successfully, I would say. And you’re not just making theatre. Maybe my concept of theatre is not as expansive as it could be. You make very expansive theatre.

Jen: [00:04:46] I try to, yeah.

Manda: [00:04:48] So finding a way in to this; you are the creator of the Copenhagen Interpretation, whose core aim is to create transformative story world experiences that foster connection, creativity and personal growth. Which is pretty much aligned with everything that we do. So as a starter, tell us a little bit about what it is and particularly how it arose and how you came to be the person to create it.

Jen: [00:05:21] Yes. I used to write musicals. I suppose I still do write musicals, and I realised increasingly that I could not be comfortable in traditional theatre spaces. And I thought about why. And at the same time I got a diagnosis of neurodivergence, which explained a lot to me about not being able to sit still and not being able to focus for two hours in the darkness and not disturb anybody else and all of those things. And I thought, well, this is silly. I make theatre and I can’t go into a theatre, so I’ll just have to make a way that I can. So I looked around for ways that people can engage with storytelling that are a little bit more accessible and inclusive. I looked at immersive theatre, which is often what I like to call portable fourth wall theatre, where the audience still does the standing watching thing, they just sort of move around and do it. I looked at immersive gaming, which is more interactive. I looked at live action role play, which you have talked about at some point. And so I looked at participatory things where there’s sort of an obligation or an expectation that you will take part, which isn’t great for people who don’t necessarily want to take part. And I couldn’t find a model of engagement with storytelling that gave what I was looking for, which is the kind of agency that I want people to have that I need in order to get involved with theatre.

Jen: [00:06:55] The closest I could get was a system called Open Space Technology. It is a beautiful system and it was realised by a man called Harrison Owen. Harrison spent a year organising a conference, and he booked speakers, and he arranged what they were going to talk about. And he arranged seating for everybody to pay attention to the speakers in that same traditional theatrical fourth wall sort of way, which I will talk about in a second. And he realised when he got to the actual conference that the most important and really useful work was being done in the coffee break, which was the one thing that he had not organised. So he looked at a coffee break and considered what constitutes a coffee break, and he created this thing that he calls open space technology, which is basically a set of principles that people can use to gather collectively and create their own schedule of what they are passionate about and what they care about and what they’re most interested in and most motivated to explore and examine and work on.

Jen: [00:08:00] And I took the principles and the sense of open space because it gives the most agency that I knew of. And on top of that, I stitched in things that I need to be able to engage. The kind of freedoms that I need, the kind of principles that I need. So what I now have is a system that uses the very zen, in the moment principles of open space, and other systems that allow people to have their own agency, have their own involvement. I like to say that it enables people to be their own first responder. So I think in looking around at all of us, all of us who engage in anything, we all have our own access needs, support needs. So for some it’s really obvious and those things are typically provided; British Sign Language, those kind of things that you’d expect. But many of us wouldn’t say necessarily that we have access support needs, and yet we all do. Even if we just have a bad day, we all have something that will help us get involved where otherwise we might not be able to as easily. So that’s how it began. As I looked around for a way that I could have the freedoms I needed.

Manda: [00:09:20] So before we move on, can we dive a little bit more? You talked about the principles of open space. Can we look at what those are in a meeting context? Because I remember you introduced me to Open Space well over a decade ago, because I used it in the early days of the Historical Writers Association to help people come together. And it was genuinely transformative, although also people came with quite linear ideas of what a meeting was and then they were faced with, we’re not going to do the meeting like that. And that in its own way, probably made it less accessible for the people who wanted to just sit down and be talked at. But tell us what the principles are, and then let’s explore how you’ve enfolded them into things.

Jen: [00:10:02] Yeah. And we’ve slightly changed the principles as well. But I suppose I should start by just clarifying two things. So the Copenhagen interpretation is a theory in quantum physics, which I’m now going to very badly and quickly explain, with apologies to all of the quantum physicists in the world. So the Copenhagen Interpretation is a theory that a quantum particle exists in all of its possible forms simultaneously. And when it’s observed, when you do an experiment on it, it presents itself in one form. And if you look away to pick up your cup of tea and you look back at it, its suddenly presenting itself in a different form entirely. And the beauty of that is it is very responsive. So quantum computing is a really good example. We use binary computing mainly, which is ones and zeros. And theatre is mainly binary; you sit in an auditorium and there’s a stage, and the fourth wall is how we refer to the space between the stage and the audience, the thing that separates us. It’s the wall that isn’t there, the invisible wall. And I realised very quickly that the fourth wall is not just that space. It’s not just what they call the proscenium arch. It is a box that we all carry with us, that we all sit inside. If somebody next to you in the theatre coughs, they break that wall of your little fourth wall box, and then you have to make it solid again to enclose yourself, in order to engage in the way that theatre has set up its architecture. Not just the building architecture, with the seats facing the stage, but also the architecture of productions, which all work through this fourth wall system.

Jen: [00:11:42] So there’s that. Whereas quantum computing and the notion of quantum particles and the notion of the Copenhagen Interpretation is that we all exist in all different forms simultaneously. And stories have different forms, even if they’re the same production, the same play presented the same way. So every experience of that play is going to be different depending on whether we’ve had a great day, a terrible day, we’re with friends, we wanted to see this, we didn’t want to see this, we felt obliged to see this. Whatever the reason, whatever the day is, whatever’s just happened to you on your journey to the theatre, it’s going to affect how you experience that play. But theatre architecture doesn’t allow for that, it doesn’t respond to that. It’s not responsive. It’s binary. We are the zeros, the play is the one, and that’s it. Whereas in quantum experience, so I refer to Copenhagen as quantum theatre, it is responsive. And it can be and it should be, and it embraces the fact that it is different every time. So the beauty of open space is that it does that same thing.

Jen: [00:12:46] Instead of setting up a system where a bunch of people are going to talk about specific things, and we are going to be the zeros in the audience and the speakers are going to be the ones, we all come in as a big group, and we sit in a circle and the process begins by what they say calling sessions. So if you are moved to address something to to bring an issue or a thing that matters to you, you can step into the centre of that circle and you can write your thing on a piece of paper. And you can say to everybody who’s there my name is Jen, I want to talk about why there aren’t more musicals about knitting, for example. And then anyone who cares about that, hopefully someone else cares about that, can come and talk to me about that thing. And I put my session on the wall, and the wall is set up with various different time slots and different spaces in the room. And I might say, I’m going to be in the elephant space at 10:00 talking about this. And then when everybody seems to have called all the sessions that they are moved to call, we all go and look at the wall and see what’s up there and go and have the conversations that we want to have. So that is the basis of how open space works. But the genius of it, the very great beauty of it, the real power of it, is in the principles. So I’m going to share with you our version of the principles. But I encourage people to go and look at Harrison’s originals.

Manda: [00:14:11] Yeah, we’ll put the original up on the show notes so people can look at that too.

Jen: [00:14:15] The reason we’ve tweaked them is Harrison was working in the corporate conferencing world, and we are working in the immersive theatre sort of world and so the principles didn’t quite land for us. So we have I like to think, with Harrison’s blessing because he gave this freely to people to use, so I like to think he would like this. So the principles are: whatever brings you there to that space and whatever you bring with you, those are the right things. So if you arrived to see a play, that’s brilliant. But if you arrived because you thought the people who were seeing the play might like this cake you’ve just made, that’s also a great reason to be there. You don’t have to stay the whole time, you can just bring the cake and go. Or if you want to stay for five minutes, great. But the thing you’re bringing, the interest that you have doesn’t have to be the story, it doesn’t have to be the characters, it doesn’t have to be that you want to come and see a telling of this story from start to finish. You might come and see The Wizard of Oz and just care about the Scarecrow and that’s all you’re coming for, and that’s great. You might come because you’re an expert in Munchkinland and that’s wonderful. Lollipops, whatever. Whatever brings you and whatever you bring, those are the right things. The next principle is: what’s happened is what’s happened, and what’s happening is what’s happening. So in open space, we say you are inside the experience from moment to moment, in the same way that a quantum particle might change from moment to moment, your experience will change from moment to moment.

Jen: [00:15:55] So it’s very responsive to anything you encounter in that space, because it is a collective, it’s a community space. So it’s very difficult to come in with a set intention and see that intention through in the way that you want to, because: people! But that’s glorious because what happens is you make discoveries of yourself. You might surprise yourself with things that happen in the space. Other people might surprise you with things that they bring. And you might bring your intention and somebody else gets something from that that you weren’t expecting them to get and so on. So what has happened is what’s happened and what’s happening is what’s happening now. We try not to bring ‘I could have’, ‘I should have’ or ‘I wish I would have’. We try not to do those things. So we try to just say this is what’s happening. So if you come to talk to me about knitting and actually we end up talking about something else entirely, sheep, then I’m still knitting related, aren’t I? It’s fine. Whatever is happening right now is what’s happening and we’re inside that and it’s amazing.

Jen: [00:17:05] ‘Wherever you get involved is the right place’ is the next one. So there’s many a time when I’ve gone, oh, there’s a session in the elephant space that I should be going to; I’m just going to go to the loo. And then I meet the person in the loo who’s going to run that session, and we have our chat in the loo!

Manda: [00:17:20] Yep. And then you don’t need to go there.

Jen: [00:17:22] And then we don’t need to go to the space because that’s fine. Or we might have our chat and then go to the space and have a chat with other people. Or we might not be in the room at all and it’s a year later and we meet in a shop and we have a chat, and that is the right place to have that chat. So it’s about saying to people, we don’t have to be in the meeting room to have the meeting. We don’t have to be there to do the thing. And the same with the next principle: whenever it starts for you is the right time. And the next principle: it’s over when it’s over for you. So the great beauty of these things are you can come and join our play whenever is the right time for you. So if you get stuck in traffic, you don’t have to arrive stressed. You can just rock up when it’s right for you to be there. And that’s great. You can just take your time. If you need a minute, that’s cool. If you are done after five minutes because this doesn’t feel right or it’s not what you wanted or because you get overwhelmed by something, then you can go and nobody will care. Everybody will care in terms of they care that you are considering yourself. That’s what they’ll care about. So this the beauty of this system is people stay in conversations for as long as they are moved to stay in the conversation. There’s no obligation. So you don’t feel like you’re talking to a bunch of people who are obliged to be there. You feel like you’re talking with a bunch of people who want to be there, and if they don’t want to be there, they go. And that’s nothing to do with you or the conversation. It might be that they go because they need a drink. It might be they go because they want to go to the loo. It might be that they’ve stopped being able to engage in this conversation, and that’s fine. They go and they’ll be useful somewhere else. And that’s great.

Manda: [00:19:06] Brilliant. I have so many questions, Jen, but have we got to the end of the list?

Jen: [00:19:10] Those are the principles. There are some freedoms, but feel free to ask me questions. There is a lot of depth to all of this and I’m happy to go there.

Manda: [00:19:16] Yes, there is a lot of depth. So let’s go on to the freedoms in a minute. Things that were arising for me: one of them that came up and this is an aside, but I think it’s interesting. I spoke to somebody recently or I listened, I can’t remember, one or the other. There was an interaction that landed in my head about the fact that when Western people go to South America to do ayahuasca ceremony, they very often don’t really scratch the surface, and they come back thinking they’ve become enlightened and their behaviour is completely unchanged. And she said partly this is because in the cultures that work with this, they’ll take a week to tell a story. And it won’t be that the story takes a week to tell, it’s that there are 150 different iterations of that story, and they need to tell them all, because you need to get the depth and the nuance and the dimensions of it. And most Western people glaze over after the second repetition because they think they’re hearing the same thing, and they don’t understand that there is depth and they don’t give it a week. They come up, want to do the ayahuasca and go, you know, I’ve got a meeting on Tuesday, I’ve got to get home. And so it doesn’t happen. And what seems to me is what I’ve written on my pad, one of the many, many things, is that you’re creating living synchronicity and it offers people the capacity to engage their emotional intelligence. It had never occurred to me until speaking to you, and actually probably not until just now, the extent to which theatre, which felt to me a very free form of expression, compared to say film, where it is the same film on the screen. Whereas in theatre live people are there and they might be having an off day too, the actors, or they might be having a really good day, or they’ve just had a party or whatever. The energy that comes off is very different, and yet there are such rigid rules. I don’t go to theatre much, it wasn’t my thing, and so I hadn’t really perceived the extent to which those rules are there to be broken. And in my quest of taking us from a trauma culture to an initiation culture, which I think is the way forward for humanity. I’m then exploring in my own head and feeling in my bones the extent to which, I wonder when the rules were engaged? And whether in initiating cultures, the living indigenous cultures now, whether they come to sit around the fire and hear a story which might be acted out, there might be shadow play on the walls, or there might be people standing up and taking parts. And whether it has that freedom or whether you are creating this as a kind of a new quantum technology for social interaction. And there’s probably no answer to that. I just think it’s a fascinating inquiry. So any response of you to any of that, because I’m just burbling. And then tell us what the freedoms are, because this is so exciting as a new way of engaging people.

Jen: [00:22:06] I mean, you’re not burbling at all, you’re talking about the great depth. And of course you are, because you understand and see the great depth of this. So it’s really interesting that I have a friend who is in a lot of West End musicals, and there’s a saying they have, which is ‘track’. I’m doing the such and such track in this musical. And what that means is they’re playing this character, then this character, then that one, and they’re doing this chorus bit and then that chorus bit, and they have different tracks. And to me, I grew up with paper theatres, and it does sound like somebody hooking you onto a track and then moving you across the stage like you’re in a cardboard theatre. Theatre in its architecture, in its fourth wall architecture, and here I’m going to make an enemy of many people in theatre. There are many sayings: oh, it’s live, isn’t that exciting? And I think the exciting part is, when you say to them what’s exciting? They say something could go wrong. And I don’t really want that kind of excitement.

Manda: [00:23:04] High adrenaline and then we all have to panic until it’s right again.

Jen: [00:23:07] Yeah, I don’t want to put people on stage at risk of messing up. Why would I want that? All these expressions: ‘the show must go on’, all this kind of stuff, it’s all very pressured. And I don’t really want that for the mental health of the people who work in theatre. And also, it is film. We might as well make film. We rehearse until we know the moves and then we perform it every day. And yes, it’s live, but it really isn’t much different. The audience are very limited in what’s acceptable in terms of expression of emotion. You know, you can only clap in certain circumstances. And even if it’s spontaneous clap, it still can only happen in certain circumstances; you can only clap if everyone else is clapping or other people are clapping. You can’t clap on your own. You can laugh. But generally it’s funny if somebody laughs on their own and then that person has everyone laughing at them because they laughed on their own. And so on. Like there are all these complex acceptable responses that define how we can get involved. And in fact, the research that we are including, that we’re stitching into this work, is around those things. Around what the value of theatre is currently in its current architecture and what the value of theatre could be, should be. What the value of storytelling is. So we can talk about that a bit as well. But let me not get distracted from the question.

Manda: [00:24:27] Yes, because that’s getting to the heart of what is humanity for.

Jen: [00:24:31] Yeah, let’s talk about that in a second. But yes.

Manda: [00:24:33] Let’s go through your freedoms first, yes.

Jen: [00:24:36] So yes, the freedoms that we have. So there’s one really important rule. It’s only one rule. These are all principles, these are all things that tend to happen anyway. You tend to turn up at the time that’s right for you and you tend to leave at the time that’s right for you in life. And the ramifications of that are how you feel, how we all feel about that. So we either show up on time but we’re stressed or whatever. So those are just principles. They’re just things that happen. And Open Space says, look, let these things happen; you can feel okay about them, that’s fine.

Jen: [00:25:08] But there is one law and it’s called the law of freedom. And it states that if you are in a place where you are not getting anything out of what’s happening and giving anything to what’s happening, you are free to go somewhere else and be useful to the universe somewhere else. And we call it a law because it must be obeyed. You are free to be where you choose to be and do what you choose to do, and the only rules really are social rules, like the normal rules of society within groups of people count. And that’s it. You should pursue what brings you joy, you should chase whatever has a special interest for you in that moment, which is great for me because I’m neurodivergent, so my brain is all over the place.

Jen: [00:25:53] So when I’m presented with a play that has been very carefully crafted from A to B to C in a sort of arrow narrative, in a Joseph Campbell narrative, (and I can talk about that as well) and I’m presented with that take on that play, it’s just one thing, and I can’t focus for two hours. I can’t care for two hours, I can’t care. And it’s very interesting, you say about they take a week to tell a story, because there are many tellings of it. We see one telling of each story in a play. We see one thing. We don’t hear the different diversity of views and experiences within the audience. We don’t even know who’s sitting next to us. We might happen to talk to them while we’re queuing for the loo in the interval. We might happen to mention something in the bar, but it’s unusual. Mostly you’re likely to go to the theatre either on your own or with people you know. And then if you go with people you know, if they happen to be people that you have a tendency to have philosophical conversations with, having seen a play, but like, not everybody does that. People go and see a play, they say wasn’t it great? I loved this bit when thing and then that’s it.

Manda: [00:27:01] We also tend not to see the actors in their multiplicities. I was reading an obituary of Donald Sutherland, and he said he had to learn early on not to argue with the director because he would go, no, but this character would do this. And the director was like, no, you do what I tell you the character is going to do.

Jen: [00:27:15] And interestingly, directors being like that is a fairly new thing in history. It’s fairly recent. But yes, it is very filmic. And it makes me say, well, we should be making movies if that’s what we want. Nothing wrong with that. But, you know, movies are great. So the law of freedom is one of the freedoms. Harrison observed various sort of types of behaviour that happen when you apply the principles, when you accept the principles and when you apply the law. And he wrote them in the form of animals. So there’s butterflying and we describe butterflying in various ways. It can be that you are just hovering at the side of the process, bearing witness to it, being beautiful, fluttering your wings, not doing anything, not engaging in conversation. It might be that you are experiencing some kind of transformation, that you are cocooning yourself and emerging. And constantly through Open Space there is the opportunity to transform, in small moments during the process, and also through the process as a whole. It does tend to be in some way transformational because you have agency to engage in that way. Hovering is just being seen. Bearing witness is as important as any other part of the process. If somebody is working on something and they know that others are bearing witness to it, there’s a depth to it that is difficult to explain. Talking to you about this means that you are bearing witness to this, and it gives me a greater depth to my practice. So that’s also butterflying. And being open to receiving, just being still and  having a moment of feeling delicate or being shy and just allowing something to emerge and allowing yourself the space to notice it and let it come to you and not chase it. So we call that butterflying. And also just being beautiful, just hovering and having a beautiful moment of being the beautiful person you are. That’s enough.

Jen: [00:29:17] And we also talk about butterflying as enabling the long, slow thinking that we rarely do, that we rarely have time for. And that’s another thing that’s really interesting about you saying they take a week to tell a story. Of course they do. Because you hear a bit of the story, and then you go away for a couple of days and you make food and you clean clothing and you think, and while you’re thinking you want to go back and ask again: tell me more about that bit. Or what if that bit was different? Or what if I play that character tonight around the fire? What if I have a different idea for it? Can we look at that? So all of that stuff is sort of butterflying.

Jen: [00:29:51] Then there’s bumblebeeing, which we see as more sort of active, in terms of physically active. So there are people who will love to cross-pollinate ideas around all of the conversations that happen in a space. So take little bits of a conversation and go and join somebody else and say, oh, over there they were talking about this aspect of this thing. Which makes it a whole process, as opposed to lots of little separate ones. And that’s because whenever it’s over for you, it’s over for you, and you can move on to a different conversation. So all of these things are enabled by these principles. Bumblebee is also about manoeuvrability, the ability to to move about and adapt and be busy and buzzing and bring energy and use the energy that’s in you in that way. And of course, it is a healthy ecosystem. Pollinators, movement, diversity, things are moving around and growing and that’s what Bumblebee is. And then I’ve added one, and the one I’ve added is the Bluebird. So the bluebird is used typically as a symbol for hope and the pursuit of happiness and it’s a sign that you’re welcome to do the same here.

Manda: [00:31:00] Or Twitter, but we’ll leave that one aside.

Jen: [00:31:03] Well, yes, a Bluebird, not a blue bird. And collaboration. So I think it’s really important to bear in mind that everybody comes in seeking their own bluebird, seeking their own dream. That thing they hope for. You might come in with some kind of intention and behind your intention is always something that you are hoping for or dreaming of, and you might not even know what it is, you might not be able to articulate it. And figuring out each other’s bluebirds is a really useful thing, because we have these different views and we tend to communicate in terms of how to fix the problems that we perceive. Or what systems we should be using. And we don’t often talk about the actual Bluebird, the actual thing that we all want. And if we talked more about what is it that we’re actually looking for, then we would find far more things that we have in common. We would talk about the things that we all want, rather than the ways that we think we should get it. I think there’s a real misunderstanding, in politics apart from anything else.

Manda: [00:32:09] I was just thinking, wouldn’t the general election be different if that was the core of what everybody was doing was let’s find our collective bluebird.

Jen: [00:32:16] I mean, honestly, if we could go into open space and choose who should run the country, I think that would be a much better process. But. But let’s not try and fix the world. I’m just looking at theatre right now. I think it’s really useful when people come together and have conversations, to try and understand what it is that we want in our hearts. This is why one of the things I do with the Copenhagen Interpretation is gather people’s fairytales. I don’t know how much we’re able to talk about that here.

Manda: [00:32:42] I would love to talk about that. I also want to talk about Broad cloth and we’re already halfway through the time. So yes.

Jen: [00:32:48] All of the things. Anyway, those are the freedoms. So the idea is that you have agency over your own involvement. And this was really important to me, because I didn’t want to just look at, oh, I’m neurodivergent; let’s see what neurodivergent people need and then give them that and tack that on. What has happened in theatre because of the difficulty of the architecture, the physical buildings of it, and the architecture of the productions that are shaped by the physical buildings, it’s been very difficult to stitch in inclusivity and accessibility. So we have signed performances, but we only have a few. And we have relaxed performances, but there’s no standard of what it means to go to a relaxed performance across the board, because everybody needs different things apart from anything else. So there is no easy way for the architecture to be responsive and that’s the problem. So yeah, we’re trying to stitch Copenhagen in.

Manda: [00:33:42] So in logistical terms, are you having to take the theatre outside and do productions on a lawn somewhere?

Jen: [00:33:50] Yeah, yeah.

Manda: [00:33:52] Right. Tell us a little bit about how this works in practice, because I’m not a great theatre goer, but they’ve all been quite dark places with exactly that: strong walls and seats in rows and I struggle to imagine how you could make this work. Take us through a production that works under the Copenhagen Principles.

Jen: [00:34:10] So there are three sort of models of it at the moment. One of them is the fairytale moment, the fairytale library, where I sit with another person and I gather a story from them, and it’s one on one theatre. It’s a very gentle conversation led by the person who is the participant, guided by me only in that I want that person to feel comfortable. And we gather stories that mean something to them. But it isn’t like, tell me a story from your life. Effectively, it’s a way of finding their bluebird.

Manda: [00:34:50] And you and I have done this, and I have to say, it was one of the most powerful experiences of my life. I’ve done an awful lot of therapeutic stuff and this was a really interesting different angle. So yes.

Jen: [00:35:00] And it’s different with everybody that I do it with. It was very beautiful to do it with you because you understand story and there was no problem with you accessing that aspect of it, the depth of it and the diversity of it. And it doesn’t have to be deep, and it doesn’t have to be that. I had a lovely moment where I gathered somebody’s fairytale, and it took two minutes and they were just happy, and it was just joy and there was nothing else. There was no depth because it was just joy. And so there are some lovely, lovely moments like that. It’s different every time and it’s responsive. It is me interacting with one participant, so it’s fully responsive and I can go to them and they can have everything they need to feel comfortable. They can be in the place where they feel comfortable. I can do it online. I can do it in person. And so it’s fully responsive in that way.

Manda: [00:35:48] I’m wondering because people are now going to be sitting there going, so what’s that actually like? Do you want to see if we could do a short one just now? Bearing in mind that the problem with me is I know sod all about fairytales because I dismissed them all as being heteropatriarchal rubbish when I was a child, so I didn’t pay attention.

Jen: [00:36:04] And you’re not wrong about that. The reason I use fairytales and yes we can. I need some paper. The reason I use fairy tales is because most people are familiar with some kind of story, whether they like them or not. And all I need is a very simple thing, a very simple moment. Because it doesn’t need to feel overwhelming. It doesn’t need to feel difficult. It doesn’t need to feel any of those things. It just needs to feel comfortable. So here’s what I need from you:.

Jen: [00:36:33] I would normally say, what’s your favourite fairy tale? And then tell me the moment that you think of when you think of that fairy tale. But I’m going to say, what’s your favourite book?

Manda: [00:36:41] Um. At this moment, the Half Life of Valery K by Natasha Pulley.

Jen: [00:36:48] Valery k.

Manda: [00:36:49] He’s a Russian scientist and his full name is Valerie Kolganov, I think. But yeah.

Jen: [00:36:59] Is it fiction or non-fiction?

Manda: [00:37:02] Yeah, totally. It’s fiction.

Jen: [00:37:03] When you think of that book, is there a moment in the book that you think of, as if it were like a still from a movie?

Manda: [00:37:11] There are many, actually, but the one that’s coming to mind just now, there’s another character who’s a KGB officer, and it’s their first moment of meeting. And actually, this is a spoiler. I won’t spoil it for people. It’s one of the most beautiful books I’ve ever read. So he meets the KGB officer, and the KGB officer is everything that Valery thinks of himself as not being.

Jen: [00:37:34] Say more about that. In a good way or a bad way?

Manda: [00:37:37] Um, well, it turns out in a good way. But Valery’s just been moved from a gulag where he was put because basically he was too smart. He has two PhDs. And they picked him up, and he’s been in Siberia for long enough that he was probably going to die quite soon. So he’s very malnourished and also very afraid because he thinks he’s going to be shot. And he ends up in a corridor in a research institute and everything’s beautiful and there’s caulk on the walls and there’s posters telling you how wonderful the Soviet Union is, and you know, all pull together and everything will be fine. And this guy turns up who is, in Valery’s eyes, he thinks that he is the model on which all Soviet perfection has been designed. His greatcoat fits him absolutely perfectly, because his physique is perfect. And he speaks very quietly and in a very polished, unthreatening way that is in itself incredibly threatening. And his shoes are totally clean, and Valery is still wearing the boots that he was wearing at the Gulag.

Jen: [00:38:35] So does Valery find all this stuff threatening?

Manda: [00:38:37] He finds it. Well, that’s the interesting thing about Valery. He’s so smart that everything is turned into a story in his head. And so, yes, he thinks this guy is the kind of guy who at any moment will whip out a pistol and shoot him in the head. But actually, he’s just intrigued by how this model of perfection came to exist, and what the heck is he doing in what he’s already beginning to perceive is a very, very strange place in the middle of nowhere. It’s a nuclear processing plant. It’s based on one that actually exists. So what are you, this model of Soviet perfection doing in this absolute far flung backwater talking to me, who for the last six years I’ve just been a number. And you just called me Doctor Kolkhanov. This is extremely weird. And a part of me is running around screaming.

Jen: [00:39:22] It’s suddenly an acknowledgement of who he is as a person from a position of power.

Manda: [00:39:28] Totally. Yes.

Jen: [00:39:29] And what does that moment mean to him? What’s this specific split second? Is it the moment where he calls him by name? Is it the moment where he sees the guy?

Manda: [00:39:39] I think it’s the moment he sees him. Because basically, he’s already fallen in love with him. Because he’s just gorgeous and perfect and slightly aloof. He is this model of perfection that is utterly unattainable because he’s on the other side of a power dynamic that the gulf is so wide that it is utterly uncrossable. And it’s that moment of not knowing what the rules are. He’s been in a gulag for six years, and the rules are pretty clear. And now he’s in this place and he doesn’t know why, and no one’s told him anything, and he’s suddenly not a number anymore. And this guy is being very quiet, very polite while looking at him. I need to give you a little bit for context. So Shenkov is the KGB officer and Kolkhanov is Valery. ‘Are you doctor Kolkhanov? Shenkov said, entirely polite, but looking a lot like he’d hoped for someone different. Valery could see why. Shenkov was tall and powerful, probably about Valerie’s age, but with the grace of somebody who considered failure to keep fit a betrayal of the Soviet duty of Labour. Being little and ill was, Valery suspected, hardly better than mooning the Kremlin. Ah, yes, he said. Shenkov didn’t actually say outstanding, but he managed to clang it onto the floor like an anvil anyway’. That was the bit. It was that bit where he doesn’t say outstanding, but that word is like, oh goodness, you’re it? That. That moment. I think apart from the fact that it’s glorious writing, it has that emotional vibrancy to it.

Jen: [00:41:12] What’s the ‘it’ of oh goodness, you’re it?

Manda: [00:41:16] From Valery’s perspective, he sees himself as small and ill and inadequate. And what we later learn is that Shenkov isn’t thinking any of those things, but his perception is that this is who he is. And so I love it, partly because we’ve already got to grips with the fact that Valery is actually quite unique and special and beautiful in his own way and unbelievably bright. And his mind works at planetary size scale, whereas the rest of us are mice. And he’s just so, so smart. And then he’s got this model of perfection in front of him who he thinks is basically looking at him as if he were a smear on its shoe. And Shenkov isn’t, but he doesn’t know that yet.

Jen: [00:42:05] I’m going to jump because we don’t have much time.

Manda: [00:42:08] Okay. Yes.

Jen: [00:42:09] And I’m gonna hope that you are okay with this jump.

Manda: [00:42:13] I am jumping. Jumping is good.

Jen: [00:42:14] This is not how I would hold space for people I didn’t know and think this was okay.

Manda: [00:42:19] But, you and I are friends, we’ve done this before. It’s fine. Jump away.

Jen: [00:42:22] So I’m just going to say that we would probably talk about what it is to see a model of perfection, what that means to you. So you could probably name to me some people you’ve spoken to on the podcast, who are a model of perfection for you, and you were thrilled to have them on the cast because, you know, you you really admire what they do and you really love…

Manda: [00:42:42] Almost everybody, actually. Yeah.

Jen: [00:42:44] And everything I know about you says you look at the world and say, look at all these amazing people doing these amazing things, aren’t they perfection? And I would say that most people who know you would describe you as unique, special, beautiful in your own way, and that you have a mind that works at a planetary scale.

Manda: [00:43:03] That’s because you’re very kind. But thank you. I’m identifying with Valery?

Jen: [00:43:08] Well, if you’re standing in Valery’s shoes, then it’s difficult to see that. But if you’re looking at the world and looking for the things that are perfect and saying to everybody, look at these amazing things that we could have, that we could be doing, that we could be achieving.

Manda: [00:43:24] Yeah, here’s this bright, shiny thing I just found. Look!

Jen: [00:43:27] And I think our conversation hopefully would more gently get us there. And I apologise for the jump.

Manda: [00:43:33] It was a very gentle jump.

Jen: [00:43:34] But I also think you are unique and special and beautiful in some magical ways that other people would also say to you, and I think your mind works in planetary ways, and I think it’s lovely that those words stood out to you, because that is how other people would describe you.

Manda: [00:43:50] Okay. You’re very kind. Listeners, Jen and I will have a conversation later, because this obviously is not how I see myself at all. But thank you. All right. So we’ve gone through the process, which was the important thing. Yes.

Jen: [00:44:02] So what happened is the things that we connect with in story, and this is really important, when we read stories or when we encounter stories in any form, in any medium, moments of those things catch. The story passes through us like we’re a conduit, and there are little hooks inside us, and bits of the story catch on those hooks and tear off and stay with us, and the rest passes through and goes off somewhere else. And we keep the things that matter to us. So the number of times I have gathered a fairytale from somebody where they have confused two or 3 or 4 stories, and it doesn’t matter. Lots of stories happen in the woods. It doesn’t matter. And they say, I’m probably remembering this wrong. And they are remembering it wrong from the traditional version, but it doesn’t matter. What matters is what hooked onto them. And this is true for all of us. And we all go and watch a play, and we are made to watch the arrow narrative version of it. So shall we talk a little bit about that?

Manda: [00:44:59] Yes. Please do.

Jen: [00:45:00] And I’m just making a note that I’m going to talk to you about the models of Copenhagen, because you did ask me about that, and my neurodivergent brain will forget it.

Manda: [00:45:09] But you remembered and I’d already forgotten, so hey. Thank you.

Jen: [00:45:12] So I have this beautiful thing, uh, called Ursula Le Guin’s carrier bag theory of fiction. There are many theories of narrative in the world, and I’m now going to very badly reference some of them, and I apologise to the scholars who know better than me. Joseph Campbell gathered fairytales and compiled fairytales and came up with the idea of an arrow narrative. So there’s a book he wrote called The Hero’s Journey, and it follows the journey of a hero of a story. And basically the hero is a blacksmith’s assistant, and he doesn’t even know how to wield a sword. This is my terrible, I apologise, terrible story that I use to talk about Campbell. And the villagers come running into the blacksmith for some reason, and they say there’s a dragon on the hill and it’s eating all our cattle, and it threatens to eat the people, and somebody needs to go and kill it. It’s you! And the blacksmith’s assistant goes, do you mean the blacksmith? And they go, no, no, it’s you. And he’s like, why is it me? I’m not in any way… I don’t even know how to use these swords that I helped to make. And they say, yeah, yeah, but it’s you. You have to go, here’s a sword. You have to go up the mountain and kill the dragon and then save us. Okay, bye. Have fun. Good luck. So the first part of the journey is basically the hero being pushed out of the village with a sword in his hand, not knowing what to do.

Jen: [00:46:32] And then he has a little second part of the journey, which is where he goes up the hill, and as he goes, he meets people who threaten him with a sword, and then they discover that he can’t use a sword. And they’re like, you’re never going to kill a dragon, I’ll teach you how to use a sword. And then we have a little montage of him learning how to use a sword and so on. He meets somebody else who tells him riddles, and then he learns how to work out riddles. So as he goes, he learns the things that he will need on his journey. And then he also meets temptation who says, look, it’s nightime and the village is all lit up and beautiful. You could just go home and not face the dragon and have some stew and a nice soft bed. So there’s those things as well. And then he gets to the gates of the dragon’s lair because he manages to to say, no, I’m looking at the village, and I’m doing this for the people of the village, people I love. So he finds it in his heart to go on. And he gets to the gates, and there’s his father, who he thought died years ago, but his father had to leave the village to go and defend. But his father’s old now, which is why the dragon’s started killing cows again. So he has to atone with the father.

Jen: [00:47:31] He has to get rid of the father figure who’s the most powerful thing, so that he can become the most powerful thing. So he overcomes the battle with his father, and then he faces the dragon, and he slays the dragon. And then he’s the hero on the top of the mountain, and he’s holding his sword up high. And then it gets cold and dark, and he’s hungry, and this is the bit of the story that Hollywood tends to not tell, where he needs to go back home. And that’s a bit awkward but at least he can say I’ve killed the dragon. So the journey home is always easier, he gets a magic eagle to fly him down the mountain or something, and then he’s home. And Campbell says he’s the master of two worlds because he understands how to be a hero, but he also knows how to be a blacksmith’s assistant. Isn’t that amazing? So in Western storytelling, there are typically male stories and female stories. The guys start out as a fool, and then they go through this journey and they become a hero, and then they end up as a wise old man, in the village. Women start out as maidens who haven’t had a baby yet,  they become mothers who’ve had a baby, and then they become unable to have a baby again, so they get old and wizened and they become scary witches. And that’s the journey. So the arrow narrative…

Manda: [00:48:44] Can you watch my head explode for two minutes while we go through this?

Jen: [00:48:47] So I’m being very generalising here, but Ursula Leguin talks about this as the arrow narrative. So she talks about how when we were hunter gatherers or in the early days of humanity, people typically say, oh, we made sharp flints to hit things with or we made arrows. We made arrows that we could fire at things, you know sharp spears.

Manda: [00:49:13] We were aggressive, and it mattered that we kill things. Yes.

Jen: [00:49:16] But what she says, and she’s right, is that the first tool that we must have made for ourselves is surely a bag. Because if you’re gathering berries, there’s only so many you can hold in your hands. And even if you only lift up your skirt to make a bigger basket to carry berries in. And surely the first bag that we ever make is where we hold a baby in our arms. So she talks about the carrier bag theory of fiction, which is that it’s not just one arrow narrative, not just a spear that gets thrown where the hero goes on his journey, but  there are story worlds in which all possible stories exist. That there are things like the Earthsea world, things like Pratchett, the Discworld, worlds in which any story, all stories are possible. And for me, every story is that. So if you go and see The Wizard of Oz as the movie, it’s an arrow narrative. But if you just wanted to hang out with the Scarecrow and look at his story and look at alternatives to his story, or if you just wanted to hang out with the lion or the witch or the monkeys or whatever, you can have your own thing that has rubbed off on the inside of you, and you can go and explore that thing, and it can be your entire story.

Jen: [00:50:28] And every narrative is a carrier bag in that way, and can accommodate a diversity of approaches. In gathering fairytales we have a little log we keep, just out of interest. I have more Cinderellas than anything else by a large amount, because everybody knows it. Like I have hundreds of Cinderellas and every single one is different. They are very diverse. You probably wouldn’t know whether the person that I gathered from what their gender is. You probably wouldn’t know what their politics are. You probably wouldn’t be able to tell what their religion is. You probably wouldn’t be able to tell what colour their skin is. You probably wouldn’t be able to tell anything about them, because these are about emotional moments for us that have stayed with us. And some are very culturally specific. Some are very specifically about a certain religion, but mainly, for the most part, they are about humanity.

Manda: [00:51:24] Can you tell us a little bit about what you do with the images that you make and you put up. Do you want to talk about that?

Jen: [00:51:30] Yes, well, I sort of do stuff with them. I have an Instagram account and I, just for fun, I’m not an artist, I very badly make AI images that I put up sometimes.

Manda: [00:51:42] They’re beautiful.

Jen: [00:51:43] Thank you. I’m going to show you. I have these little suitcases that I keep the fairytale moments in, and I hand make little books. They’re all scrap paper. So some of them are tied up with little bits of lace and made out of postcards and held together with binder clips. And there’s a lot on menus because I’ve done a lot of gathering in cafes for some reason. I once took some old Christmas paper, and so you can see this is red and green.

Manda: [00:52:10] You can if you’re watching on video. But for the people who are only audio, just describe a little bit.

Jen: [00:52:15] Yes. So this is a little yellow cardboard suitcase. It’s about the size of my palm. And it’s got little bits of folded scrap paper in it on which I’ve captured the fairy tales, very badly written in my speedy handwriting, because I have to write quickly.

Manda: [00:52:30] And that’s okay, because they’re beautiful.

Jen: [00:52:31] The joy about that is sometimes I photograph the book and I put it on Instagram and I put the text of the story. So when people allow me to gather, I ask their permission to put the story into the library. And if they give me permission, I tell them they are setting it free and they are allowing it to go out into the world and be used by anybody to make a thing from.

Manda: [00:52:52] And it’s anonymous.

Jen: [00:52:54] It’s absolutely anonymous. Yeah. I don’t ever, I mean obviously we’ve now recorded you talking about the book, that’s okay, but yeah, for the most part it is anonymous. And the purpose of it is that these are very personal moments. They are our stories. To the extent that it’s not just about asking somebody for their life story, it’s about asking somebody for the bluebird of hope that they pursue. And it’s a great privilege for me to make that work. And I say it’s the Copenhagen interpretation because it is as inclusive and supportive and accessible as I can make it. It’s about a story that is so personal to you that only you could experience that thing, that moment. It’s an experience that is only for you.

Manda: [00:53:39] And very liberating. When we did it before and we did it deeper and longer, and we ended up boiling down to a couple of words that then for quite a long time fed a lot of therapy, in terms of this is the core of who I am, and I want to explore this. And probably still is. I’ve maybe moved off it and coming into it tangentially, but it’s still really relevant.

Jen: [00:54:01] I say to people, this is an aspect of the core of who we are and what motivates us, and it’s amazing how many ways that thing then manifests in your life. So my purpose with Copenhagen is to allow space for people to make those connections with themselves. So the other two forms of Copenhagen are a thing where we do a news story. So that’s the broad cloth, which I’ll talk about in a minute. And a thing where we take an existing theatre production and we Copenhagen it. So the broad cloth, which I’ll start with, is the full on Copenhagen experience. And it is a project that I am developing with a wonderful producer in Norway called Oliver Dawe, who lives on an island called Ingoy, which is part of a little archipelago of islands above the Arctic Circle off the coast of Norway. And there are about 14 people who live there year round and one dog, because they recently got a dog. And Oliver set up the northernmost artist residency in the world. It’s just very new and it’s called the Field Station. It’s not it’s not quite there yet, I think, but he’s trying to build a place where people can go and be peaceful in this beautiful environment and explore their bluebirds, their creative bluebirds. He’s a wonderful theatre director, a good old friend of mine. So Oli and I have been trying to create the broad cloth, and the idea is we take 20 or so islands off the coast of Scandinavia and Britain, and I have created a fantasy island, a fictional island called Skylark Island.

Jen: [00:55:53] And it has a community of people whose main industry is the manufacture of broadcloth. So this is a real thing, the old fashioned manufacturing of broadcloth. It’s a bit like Harris Tweed, is a kind of broadcloth. So it’s a woollen fabric. And when it’s made by hand, there is a specific process that is only now done for show, now, to remember history, now it’s automated. But it’s a woven cloth and the last part of preparing it is called walking the cloth. It is a Hebridean tradition predominantly, and it has a song with it. So you put this wet cloth in a circle around a wooden table. You’ve soaked it in urine to break down the lanolin in the sheep’s wool, the grease. And then you put it in a big loop around a table, and people move it back and forth across the rough wood. And it felts. The process is called fulling, and it makes the cloth, tightens the fibres and makes it have that lovely waterproof quality, but it also softens it at the same time. And then it’s ready for use. And the walking tradition is rhythmic, so you’re moving the stuff back and forth across the wood. And as you do that, you’re moving it along to the next person, because everybody has a different strength in their arms around the table. So you move it back and forth and then along, so it loops its way around everybody.

Jen: [00:57:17] And that process is rhythmic and it has different speeds, different tempos. The softer the cloth gets, the more fulled it gets, the tempo changes. So there are walking songs which give you the right rhythm, and they are typical working songs. Proper, you know, British working songs, Scottish actually working songs. And they also exist in Sweden and other countries that have these fabric traditions. And they are call and response, so they’re sort of verse chorus songs, which is a thing we have in musical theatre. So this is now how I make musicals. I make them folky, live, improvised. So the broad cloth is about taking this fictional island with certain things that I have set up about it, like a structure of it, an almanac, and laying it like a transparency over a real island and looking at aspects of life on that island. So we look at tradition, ritual, we look at heritage, we look at the land, the environment, the ecosystems on the island. We look at governance and different models of governance. We look at different models of finance and value. We look at all of these things through the lens of this fictional island. And we invite people to engage in character if they want or not in character. So this is where our open space principles apply. You can engage with this process if you just know about the flowers on the island and you want to come and talk about that, you don’t have to care about the story or the characters, but there are some.

Jen: [00:58:49] There are three main characters. So we have a sort of leader of the community, and we have a person they are responsible for. We leave the relationship very open. It might be that the island decides that that’s a parent or a guardian, we just leave all of that very free and open. And then we have an elder in the community. And those three people hold together a basic story structure that allows us to carry a narrative through, if we want to, about the person who is coming of age. So the young person is having a coming of age ceremony, and I have invented a tradition where when you come of age, your family creates the finest bolt of broadcloth they can for you. And at your ceremony, at your coming of age party, it is walked by people who are important to you and people who are important to the community. And instead of singing songs about gossip, which is what normally happens, songs about history or songs about fun stuff, people sing blessings into the cloth. And they believe that the people who used to live on the island, their ancestors, are there still beyond a veil of reality, and they take the blessings and they make them be real in the cloth. And then for the rest of your life, you are judged by how you cut your cloth. So we take this island and these traditions, and we lay it over the real island, and we invite people to come and engage.

Manda: [01:00:11] And when I first heard this, we had a little bit more detail about for instance, the governance and the finance and the value systems, that this was a way of people in many places. In the end, you could do it in the whole of the UK, which is in itself an island. You can get people to live different governance systems and it’s fictional, so it’s not threatening. It doesn’t undermine their existing politics and how they think things should be done, but they can experience what it’s like to exist in a different financial structure, a different way of sharing and accounting and exchanging value. And all of the things that Accidental Gods is moving towards. We spoke about this in the beginning of this year, and now we’re just after the solstice. Are there islands where this is beginning to happen, or are we still in the development phase?

Jen: [01:00:59] We’re developing still. It’s a lot. It’s big. Everything I think of because I have ADHD, is big. But we went to the Isle of Wight and we made contact with some amazing people. So we met with Ventnor Exchange. So Ventnor is in the south of the island, and it’s sort of right in the middle between the two sides. One side of the Isle of Wight is a bit more arable, agricultural and the other side is a bit more community and towns and things. And Ventnor sits right in between the two areas. It’s really beautiful. It is the largest landslide in Europe, I think. So it is slowly sliding into the sea. And we met with some brilliant people. So there are companies there who are doing work on this, and there are companies there who are concerned with the fact that the population is ageing and what can we do about that? So we met with Nigel George, who runs Art ecology. They make organic sculptures that they put on the sea walls, because the tides are rising. And our tides are no longer coming up the beach and they’re no longer horizontal. They don’t just come up the beach and disappear again, leaving little wonderful rockpool ecosystems.

Jen: [01:02:14] Instead, they are vertical. Because we’re not moving the houses, but the tides are coming in closer. So we have these sea walls that we build to keep the houses safe, because we’re not moving the houses. So that now the ocean rises up and down vertically, not horizontally. So we’ve lost all of the lovely ecosystems of the rockpools. So what they do is they build these brilliant magnetic organic sculptures that they stick on the rock wall, and then those populate and they become these amazing ecosystems. So we met with all these incredible people who are doing this wonderful work, and that gets stitched into the story. We also met with Wolf Guard Viking Re-enactment, who are brilliant and they know all about playing characters and improvising and doing all that stuff. So we’ve met with Lisa Curley, who is our caretaker of the project on the Isle of Wight, who gathers people’s life stories, verbatim stories, so is familiar with all that gathering of storytelling. So we have met some incredible people. We met the Felters. This was my favourite. The first thing we did was we went to see the knitters and felters.

Manda: [01:03:23] Of the Isle of Wight. Yay!

Jen: [01:03:25] Of the Isle of Wight. There’s a wonderful group of women who just let us come and sit with them while they were knitting, and we talked about the project. And it’s just these magnificent people who, if you put up a poster that says we’re doing a theatre piece, you’re not saying anything about what Copenhagen is or what the possibilities are. You’re not inviting anybody into the the bag of the world. You’re just saying, well, here’s an arrow narrative and if you’re not interested in that, bye bye. But with the Copenhagen interpretation, I suddenly realised that I was saying that the story is the last thing we think about. In many ways, it’s the least important thing. All that we have is an invitation, an invitational story world. And if it sounds like fun to you, like I say, a Viking world and lots of people would go, yay! That sounds fun! And they will each imagine themselves in a different way within that world. And if I say it’s a small community on a small island where they raise sheep and they make cloth and they have traditions, people can start to imagine what that world is. They can imagine themselves into it.

Jen: [01:04:24] And then we work with amazing people. So I’m working with Diana Finch, who you’ve spoken to, who ran the Bristol pound. And Diana and I have been creating new systems of value that we might explore in theatre. How how theatre creates value that isn’t just more money to keep the building running and fix the toilets so that they can do more of the things. So we could talk about that. That’s a whole nother conversation.

Manda: [01:04:49] Good. We’re going to need a new podcast for this. But yes, yes, yes, we should have gotten to this sooner.

Jen: [01:04:55] All of these things get stitched into Copenhagen so that we can really embed and engage on Jersey. My friend Adam Flynn runs the battle of the flowers, which is a very traditional Jersey celebration they have every year. And we’ve been talking about heritage and what it is and what it means to a modern community who didn’t grow up with that stuff. But it still happens. And now all it does is it stops the traffic for a day and that’s annoying. So how we make these things that are really local and really rooted in the place, be relevant and continue to be engaging. So that the rest of the world isn’t beguiling you away from where your roots are, because it’s showing you shiny Hollywood movies. Just to appreciate where you are.

Manda: [01:05:41] And engage with your community in a completely different way and meet people you wouldn’t have otherwise met and and experience different sides of people. Is there a deadline within which this is likely to begin?

Jen: [01:05:53] Ask me about that when I find funders.

Manda: [01:05:57] Anybody out there who wants to fund it?

Jen: [01:05:58] Ask me about that when I find the money to pay the people. It’s tricky because we are working within a system where the people that I’m working with live in a capitalist society.

Manda: [01:06:10] And they have to pay the rent. Yes. Or buy food or whatever.

Jen: [01:06:13] So yeah, in the same way that other people face this challenge, you know, we are trying to do new things within old systems and it’s tricky.

Manda: [01:06:23] So if anybody wants to fund this or if anybody lives in an island and thinks it would be fun to just give it a go, then go for it.

Jen: [01:06:29] I mean, we’re great. We’ve got connections in Denmark. We’ve got connections in the Hebrides. We’re beautifully connected to lots of lovely islands. So it’s a long process. It’s a slow process, but it should be. It should take more than a day to tell a story.

Manda: [01:06:43] Yes, but it just feels so exciting to me. It’s another way of exploring outside the limits of predatory capitalism, exploring what it is to be community. Everybody says we need to build community, and nobody knows how. And what you’re doing is offering a safe ish, I mean, it sounds safe. It’s fictional, so you don’t have to take it seriously. But you will. I’ve done re-enactment and and once you’re in the re-enactment, the bit of you that tells you this is fiction has gone to sleep in a corner.

Jen: [01:07:13] And that’s fine if it happens like that for you. But it doesn’t happen like that for everyone. So I should be really clear. We have as part of Copenhagen, we have navigators, so we call it navigation because these are all difficult things to navigate. And there’s no captain, nobody has the plan, there’s just navigation. And what we have is, as part of this, like lots of people find interactive stuff really intense and overwhelming. Lots of people if you say to them you have to join in, they’re like, well, I don’t really want that. And lots of people will say, I want to sit in the quiet and the darkness and have somebody give me a story. So one of the navigators that we have is my friend Steph, who I call the Navigator of Protected Spaces. And she wants that she needs to go to the theatre and be able to just bear witness quietly and know that no one is going to come and bug her. So we defend that as well. We defend people’s right to have that, to not engage, to bear witness. So you can play a character, but you can also not. You can be in the story world, in the room and just be you. And you are a secret friend to the characters, and they will treat you like that. You can talk to a character, you can talk to an actor. You can switch from one moment to the next. You can play a character in one sentence and stop doing it in the next sentence. And that’s fine. We also have two things that we put in place, because there are things about open space that are overwhelming.

Jen: [01:08:40] So we have a thing called accompanying. And accompanying is where we literally accompany each other and we make that be a thing and make it be a thing that we talk about. And you can have someone accompany you. So if you are a sign language user, you might have an interpreter with you and they are accompanying you, but equally you might have a companion with you because you don’t want to come on your own. And so you bring somebody with you and that is your access support and that’s great. You might have somebody who is an experienced person in this process, so they’ve already engaged with the broadcloth, and you’re new to it. And you can say, I’d like to be accompanied by somebody who has some experience in it, and they just hang out with you and they find out what kind of experience you want to have, and they help you have it. That’s it. So we have that and we have comfortable. We have a saying that we want you to be comfortable enough to feel uncomfortable. So in the moments where the storytelling is difficult, because that happens in the moments where something is unexpectedly harder than you thought it might be, and you feel like it’s difficult; we want you to still be comfortable enough to stay in that uncomfortable place if you want to. If you choose to. And if you’re not comfortable enough to be uncomfortable, we want you to have agency to take yourself to a place where you can be comfortable again. That’s our thing.

Manda: [01:10:03] Which is going to be a very good practice for the world as the old system dies down and the new one is growing. That capacity to understand your own comfort levels and respond.

Jen: [01:10:13] And put your own mask on first before helping others. It is that. There are certain people in the room who have responsibility, so responsibility for health and safety. But we say this person is a person and we say that responsibility is respond-ability. And if you are able to respond to somebody else and help them, that’s great. But if you’re not able to respond, there are other people who can also have the ability to respond. So there’s no one person whose job it is to have the most stressful time if they are also having a difficult time. We all act in consideration of each other and of ourselves.

Manda: [01:10:54] Okay. Time is moving on. You said there were three. So we’ve got the gathering the fairytales. We’ve got the broadcloth. What’s the third part of the Copenhagen system?

Jen: [01:11:05] It’s the National Theatre. Well, it is and it isn’t. So the third part is that I have said to the buildings, the big flagships of British theatre, we can stitch Copenhagen into the architecture that limits access and inclusivity. And I’ve said that because I think it’s true, but we’re gonna hopefully try it in September. So I’ve been working for many years now, in collaboration with the wonderful David Bellwood, who is head of access at the National Theatre. And the wonderful Josefa MacKinnon, who is head of access at the Royal Shakespeare Company. And the wonderful Sarah Howard, who is head of access at the globe. And I’ve also spoken with the amazing Linbury producers at the Royal Opera House. I mean, opera and musical theatre and dance are slightly different Copenhagen things, but focusing on straight plays for now. David and Josefa have been really instrumental in talking to me about how we could stitch Copenhagen into the work that the buildings do, because they are inhibited by the walls as much as anybody else. And they want this. They want access. They want inclusivity, they want it. But it’s just how to make it happen.

Manda: [01:12:20] And the fluidity that I am imagining. Because how are the actors going to cope with don’t just come and go on your track?

Jen: [01:12:27] So we don’t exactly know, but we have a week of workshop in September. Well, I sort of know, but I just haven’t proved it yet. I have a week of workshop in September. So there’s a brilliant director called Erica Whyman, who has just left the RSC as their interim artistic director and knows about buildings and understands about the pressures of being an artistic director and being a director and having to deal with a standard fourth wall production and the limitations that are around that. And Erica has agreed to direct a workshop where we take a short play, we’re doing a short Pinter play, and we spend a week pretending that we’re going to produce it. Now this play is only ten 15 minutes long, and we will have navigators in the room for everything. So we’ll have navigation for your typical things that people provide access for, like BSL interpretation, like, you know, people who are blind, people who are deaf, people who are wheelchair users, people who have the things that you would imagine are barriers that theatre presents them with. So in the same way that the social model of disability says that and is right, that society is the thing that disables us, rather than us being in some way wrong. Society doesn’t make provision. And in the same way, theatre does not make provision for not just those things, but financial access. You know, there are people who can’t afford to go to the theatre. And cultural access. There are people who think the theatre is not for me, storytelling is not for me. How dreadful is it that we’ve made that be a thing? So we have navigators in the room who are incredible people who experience some of these barriers in theatre and are coming to respond as navigators to that aspect of this kind of process.

Jen: [01:14:12] And what we’re doing is we’ll have a workshop where we open space around the project. Anybody can play a character, anybody can make any kind of contribution in the open space way to the play and our exploration of the play. And we create what we call a river. We have an artist who literally draws a river on the wall and maps the way the play goes in terms of access, inclusivity, theme. So we have some context navigators for the themes of the play, and we just all come together in a big community gathering to explore the bag of what this play is with a view to putting it on a stage, traditionally at the end of the process. But we have freedoms. So if you are an audience member in this production, you can speak to the actors during rehearsals, and you can also speak to the actors during the performance. And you can just not be silent necessarily. Or we’ll have a place in the auditorium where it is quieter and you’re not sat next to somebody who might yell. I have a map in my head of how that functions and what kind of spaces we can and what kind we can’t, and how we can adjust to different spaces that are theatrical. If the Arts Council allows me to have the money, then we’re going to try it in September and see what happens.

Manda: [01:15:35] Yay! That’s just sounds amazing.

Jen: [01:15:38] But the whole of Copenhagen doesn’t have to be stitched in. So, my friend Flo, who runs a theatre company called Zoo Co, Flo is one of my navigators of accompanying, and when Zoo Co did their recent play Perfect Show for Rachel, which was directed by Flo’s sister, who is learning disabled and live directed on stage, so Rachel is there on the stage directing the show. They invited audience members to say if they would like a companion, if they would like to be accompanied by somebody who will meet you and bring you into the auditorium and hang out with you. And so already there are aspects of Copenhagen that are out there happening, working. And it doesn’t have to be the whole thing. We’re just trying the whole thing because everybody says there’ll be clashes of access need and it will never work. And I say that’s because we haven’t tried. Let’s just get in a room and try it.

Manda: [01:16:32] And see what happens. Well, we are a bit over time. Just a tiny bit.

Jen: [01:16:38] I’m sorry!

Manda: [01:16:38] No, no, no. It’s grand. There’s so much we could talk about, Jen. There’s so much extra that we haven’t mined. But it would have taken several hours to mine it. So is there anything, in closing, that you feel we haven’t touched on at all that we could do succinctly?

Jen: [01:16:53] Yeah. I’d like to really just say some little things about the value stuff that we’ve been talking about. So Diana and I and my lovely friend who was our navigator of gathering, have been talking about the sort of value model that theatre is right now, around fungible currency and that sort of capitalist system of value. And then we’ve talked about what it should be, ideally. And the things that we’re pursuing, which make me so happy, is we think it should be a social experience. It should certainly be an emotional experience, and it should give insight. And there are many people who would say that theatre does that already, that it’s a social experience, you’re all in the room together. You’re collected in a room together, but you’re not connected to anyone. I know it’s lovely when we all laugh together. Well, yes, because it’s a relief that we’re allowed to laugh at that point because everybody else is laughing. So there are many things we say about theatre that I think are just traditional things we say. ‘It’s a collective experience’. No, it’s not. It’s not collective at all. And so I think that Copenhagen brings in genuine social interaction, genuine ability to have emotional catharsis, not just only where you’re allowed to express, you know, otherwise it’s all got to be internal and you don’t really talk to anyone about it. And then that’s it. And genuine insight. Genuinely having a diversity of views around the story. Taking a week to tell a story, hearing everybody’s view of the story, not just the one that’s presented to you.

Manda: [01:18:21] And somewhere back in the past of this conversation, you were talking about something that sounded to me as if we were getting to the core of what is humanity for? And that you were looking at that through what is theatre for? Is this where we’re at with the social, emotional and insight concepts?

Jen: [01:18:38] Yeah, I think so. I think we need to be socialised. We’ve lost the ability to be socialised as human beings. And I think we don’t have anywhere that we celebrate collective joy anymore. Football matches are about as close as I can get to it, but I can’t go to a football match because I find it really intimidating and talk to me about Copenhagening football at some point, because I really want to do that. Talk to me about Copenhagening sporting events and concerts.

Manda: [01:19:06] Or big festivals. I think glastonbury? Not that I could go because I can’t do music, but is that not more of a collective?

Jen: [01:19:13] Yeah. You have more ability to have agency over your own involvement, but you still don’t necessarily have a conversation with the person next to you about what they think about what’s going on. So we’re still audient with fourth wall boxes in many, many ways. We still take those boxes in with us and we don’t even realise we’re doing it. So yeah, I think actually I’m developing this not for theatre. I am developing it for theatre, but I’m developing it for politics. Because I think if we could Copenhagen politics, then we’d get somewhere.

Manda: [01:19:45] Yes. We’re recording this before the election. I’ve been to a few hustings and the candidates will speak for two minutes. There are questions that we collated beforehand that we will read out, and they will have two minutes to answer them. And there’s no interaction.

Jen: [01:19:58] And also because you only have two minutes, you have the thing you get… I saw the Prime minister, whose name escapes me, no, it doesn’t escape me….but I saw that guy say in his question time thing, he was asked about the European Court of Human Rights, and he just kept repeating the same sentence that he’d been told to say over and over again. And it’s a buzz phrase. It is arrow narrative buzz phrase. And it’s a thing that is so carefully crafted that you cannot deny it without looking like you’re denying a thing that’s going to be crucial to everyone in this country. And that is terrifying storytelling.

Manda: [01:20:36] Yes. And I am reading Rory Stewart’s biography. So he walked across Afghanistan and ended up being elected as a Tory for somewhere in the north of England. And then he stepped down. And he’s written his biography of how appalling the system was. And now he’s going to vote green, he says in an interview. So I read the interview on the back of reading the book, and there are parts in the book where they are schooled, he said he was given the phrase ‘the government’s long term economic plan is working’, and he was told by the party managers that he was to say nothing else. And he said, you will be sick of it, the commentators and the pundits will be sick of it, but at some point we’re going to hear a guy from Wolverhampton on one of these panel shows going, yeah, I’m voting Tory because I believe the government’s long term economic plan is working and you will know that it’s worked. And this is just naked propaganda and it’s not right.

Jen: [01:21:26] That’s the thing. It’s not even naked. We don’t see the systems around us. People will say theatre is a collective experience and it isn’t. People say theatre gives you emotional catharsis, and it doesn’t. I mean, it does in very limited ways. But if you say that to people in theatre, they will be aghast.

Manda: [01:21:46] Because their worldview depends on you believing this.

Jen: [01:21:49] Yeah. So it’s very difficult. Like, people say we’ll have clashes of access needs, so it’s not possible to do anything else. These are the things that people say and then we just we take them on board and that’s it. And it’s wrong.

Manda: [01:22:03] Right. And like, we have a democratic system that is the worst of all other systems except for all the others. And Churchill said that a hundred years ago, and it’s not true. And it wasn’t true then and it isn’t true now. But people think we are living in a democracy.

Jen: [01:22:15] And also people will say to me we’ve been making theatre like this since the Greeks, and therefore it must be right. And I say, well, we’ve just been doing it wrong for too long.

Manda: [01:22:25] And that rose out of the trauma culture. I think that we get a lot of these narratives that arose from an already traumatised culture. And just because it’s 2000 years old doesn’t stop it arising from the trauma culture. Trauma culture’s 10,000 years old. Let’s look at the other cultures and see how they do it. All right, I’ll get off my soapbox because that’s not what I’m here for. Jen. It’s been amazing. Thank you. I really look forward to hearing how the islands all around the world explore with The Broadcloth, because I genuinely think it’s transformative.

Jen: [01:22:55] I hope we can make it happen because it’s so fun and it’s so beautiful and these islands are so gorgeous and the communities are so ignored. And I am half Danish and half English and I’m all islands and I just really want to embrace all of that stuff. So yeah, hopefully.

Manda: [01:23:16] We just need to crowdfund it really, don’t we? But let’s think about that another time.

Jen: [01:23:20] Let’s see how we go.

Manda: [01:23:20] Right. Jenifer Toksvig, thank you very much indeed for coming on to the Accidental Gods podcast, and I look forward to continuing the conversation at some point in the future. Thank you.

Jen: [01:23:30] Thank you so much for having me.

Manda: [01:23:33] Well, there we go. That’s it for another week. Enormous thanks to Jen for all that she is and does, and particularly for making the magic happen with such a fantastic creative edge. I spend a lot of time in the podcast talking to people who are pushing the boundaries of reality. But it’s rare that I meet someone who actually dissolves them. Who looks at them and makes them go away. And does it not by ignoring them or pretending they’re not there, but by thinking really deeply about what do individual people need in order to feel safe, in order to explore beyond the boundaries of where we are? And that’s what Jen does in all of the aspects of the Copenhagen Interpretation. So if you live on an island, if you know anyone who lives on an island, and we can get the money together to experience the Broad Cloth, even just exploring it around the kitchen table, it felt genuinely transformative. Imagine a story playing out across a year, starting perhaps at Beltane, or at one of the equinoxes, or one of the solstices or Samhain, wherever you want, starting at a point that matters to the people of your island, of your community. And then exploring what it is to be slightly different in the world, to live in a parallel reality.

Manda: [01:24:58] And it doesn’t mean you’re not still going to work and doing the jobs and raising the kids and growing stuff in the garden. But you’re engaging in something else that allows your mind to explore beyond the boundaries of what you currently believe to be true. Whatever matters to the people of your community will come forth. And Jen is also working, as she said, with Diana Finch, with other people around concepts of community and exchange of value and governance systems. I see this as a genuinely transformative technology. So if you know of anyone who’s got any spare money and would like to put it towards something that could actually change the world, then please as ever, do send them this link and otherwise just go and explore the links. I put links to a lot of stuff down in the show notes, including an astonishing found poem called What They Took With Them that Jen wrote that was done on Netflix, Facebook, I can’t remember; one of the big platforms. It’s what would you take with you if your home was about to be destroyed? If you were about to become a refugee, what would you take? And they asked a lot of people who had become refugees and then gathered what they said, and then turned it into this extraordinarily moving piece.

Manda: [01:26:18] I swear to you, if every village hall, everywhere in the land had this life, nobody would be screaming about refugees anymore or trying to pretend that this is what an election is about. I’m recording this ahead of the UK’s general election. The results will be out by the time you hear it. So anyway, that’s it for this week. We’ll be back next week with another conversation. And in the meantime, thank you to Caro C for the music at the Head and Foot. To Alan Lowles of Airtight Studio for the production. To Anne Thomas for the transcripts. To Lou Mayor for get everything together to put onto YouTube. Thank you for the videos Lou. To Faith Tilleray for all of the other tech, and for all of the conversations behind the scenes that keep us moving forward. Thank you. And as ever, a huge thanks to you for being there, for caring, for giving us your time. If you know of anybody else who wants to feel the magic happen, then please do send them this link. And that’s it for now. See you next week. Thank you and goodbye.

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