Jamming as a way of (dis)organizing life?

Regenerative Culture Social Technology
#1

Im not really happy with that header but this is what i mean,

Willem spoke of story-jamming and i guess we’re all familiar with music-jamming, let’s call all jamming groups “band” for the time being. So, being in a band and jamming with them makes the band gain an enourmous amount of awareness. Now i’ve read about tribes about which it was written that the persons in the tribe seemed to be extremely attuned to eachother, i think this is what happens with jamming as well. What are the possibilities of jamming for rewilding? what activities can we JAM instead of organize? Do you thinks tribes live their lives “jamming” making life one big jam session? to think of it this way makes me feel really good and positive about the world ! :slight_smile:

edit i realize that with good and positive i actually meant that looking at life this way it makes life seem so full of possibilities, variations and freedom and fun!
cheers!

#2

i totally agree with this view - in fact, I already use Viola Spolin’s ‘Theater and Improvisational games’ toolkit for teaching tracking, group connection, one-mindedness, outside of the storyjam thing. In fact, I’ve dragged my feet using it for storyjams for various reasons.

At Tom Brown Jr.'s Tracker School, he uses very similar games/exercises as Viola Spolin to create the single ‘scout mind’ of a group of scouts in the apache tradition. I assume his apache mentor encouraged these kinds of games and exercises.

In a sense, it shouldn’t surprise me I guess; humans work much the same the world over, and what creates one-mindedness will tend to do it wherever people use it, on a very basic human level.

This goes back to issues of family and land…if we feel detached and rational when talking about these connections, rather than feeling our hearts torn from our chests and a knife’s edge at our nuts (or pick your sensitive zone…speaking from my own body here), then rewilding and a human future just ain’t gonna happen. So we need experiential things that make us go ‘gack!’ when we think of supporting whom we love (much a like a mom who squirmed all through a scene in a movie with a baby crying, while i just sat there. finally she said ‘will somebody pick up that baby’, to the movie! i have the ability to ignore the connection empathetically, while supporting it intellectually - ‘oh yes! lovely. yes, we should support babies.’ for her, she has no choice. why? the visceral first-person experiential improv game of motherhood.)

We write words for a certain purpose, and I (of course!) value that purpose highly. And, a time comes to back up our mouth with real money, so to speak, and get experiential. get ‘real’, so to speak.

we must jam. we have to jam, in as many ways, and for as many reasons, as possible.

#3

Recently had an idea to do story jamming with words played in scrabble with my brother. Came spontaneously - I didn’t realize we had done story jamming until about an hour ago. Pretty fun so far!

Edit: Uh, not what you guys tried to get at.

#4

Wow. its been a while.

Well, the good part about “jamming” is ofcourse its spontaneity and fluidness. So there’s a good chance that what you were doing resembled some parts or even all of this behaviour. It isn’t really tied to any specific activity which was kindof the point i tried to make in the OP.

Just trying things out together and getting attuned to eachothers ideas and mannerisms until all participants find themselves being able to work together without “organizing” in the way we are used to do these days ( top-down and rigid ). Thats why the term jamming, because it kinda resembles the whole musical band jamming.

If instead you were thinking more about story-jamming / story-telling when you said:

Uh, not what you guys tried to get at

I think you might have been. Sounds like you had fun :slight_smile: