Biography & Social Art in the Time of Covid, by Karen Gierlach

“I feel heard.” “So nourishing!” “I remembered: I have tools of my own...”

The last eighteen, enormously challenging months have awakened the impulse to provide a balm during this time of suffering and loss. To our great joy, the social art of biography was able to be one of those balms.

When everything shut down in March 2020, facilitators from the Center for Biography and Social Art were part-way through our plans for the rest of the 2020 school year. Until then, we had greatly enjoyed visiting fourteen different Waldorf schools around the country each year, presenting Awakening Connections: Creating Community, a three-part series of workshops. These were made available, free of charge, through a generous grant from Janey Newton to the Center.

All our workshops had taken place in artistically arranged indoor spaces and relied greatly on small group, face-to-face human encounters. Initially we questioned using Zoom for that kind of a workshop. It seemed really necessary, however, to provide an opportunity to meet others in heartfelt, open, and sincere ways during a time of the greatest social separation we had ever encountered. Two of our facilitators, Kathleen Bowen and Jennifer Brooks Quinn, were inspired almost immediately to launch two-hour Zoom workshops to the general public called “How Are You.... Really?”

The response was so great that they had to offer this workshop many times over. Additional titles were added to continue this work: “Tending the Hearth,” “Deepening Courage,” “And Now What?” Because Jennifer speaks Spanish, they were expanded to include our friends in Mexico. We also returned to the schools we had visited in person with a two-hour Zoom workshop of support, titled “A Different Kind of Call” to distinguish it from the overload of organizational and teaching Zoom calls that were necessary for schools to remain open.

Within the two-hour format—which always passed very fast!—we began with an introductory exercise in the full group (e.g., show us an object of your choice and tell us your connection to it). More prompts followed which might lead to a drawing (sketch the first meeting with an important person in your life), some journaling (“I remember, I remember...”), or commenting on a postcard image or a line from a poem (reflect on why you chose that image or line).

These doorways access memories in an open-ended and non-threatening way and place them outside our heads, allowing us to see them more objectively. Following the prompt, people shared what they discovered in groups of two or three. After each exercise the whole group heard comments about the other small group experiences. The session was rounded off by participants sharing their “takeaways” from the experience.

“I was able to listen to my own thoughts.” “This deepened my understanding of these times.” “Important to hear another perspective...”

By the end of 2020, over sixty such workshops had kept several facilitators very busy. Beginning in 2021, with new funding to bring workshops to Waldorf schools and to anthroposophical branches, we developed seven more two-hour Zoom topics from which those groups could choose. Again, the response was most enthusiastic, and eventually four of us worked with around fifty communities from all over North America.

Teachers and parents were thrilled to meet outside of business-only meetings in the heartfelt ways they missed and said they sometime lacked even before Covid. The branches often invited members who lived far away to attend our workshops, leading to many new meetings. Even members of the same communities welcomed learning new things about each other’s interesting lives.

“A network of stars – we have so much in common.” “An open-hearted communication.” “I was amazed that this works through technology.”

We learned several things from presenting so many more workshops. Using Zoom with the right intentions and in an artistic way can provide meaningful experiences similar to in-person meetings. And it enabled people from all over the country and the world to meet. For many it had been difficult or impossible to experience a biography workshop before because they lived too far away.

We also learned that if we stay flexible and listen to what is needed in the world, biography is a very adaptable, yet profound social art. By taking an interest in each other it can help people connect and find commonality, even when outwardly they seem very different.

“Renewed empathy through listening to the stories...” “Astonished in such a short time to recognize the grace of darkness.”

“I witnessed my wonder at being human and being with other human beings.” “I was able to connect on a heart level with new people.”

By practicing listening to others, while putting aside our own opinions, assumptions and judgments, we are developing tools which can be used everywhere. Is this not what our times are calling for as we negotiate all the divisions that keep arising among people, even within our own anthroposophical communities? As Rudolf Steiner said already a century ago,

“The longing to be seen and heard in our full reality has arisen in every human soul since the beginning of the 20th century and will grow increasingly urgent.”

For information about workshop offerings in the fall, contact center4biography@gmail.com.

Karen Gierlach (pkgierlach@gmail.com) has facilitated biography and social art workshops since retiring from Waldorf teaching 20 years ago. She serves on the board of the Center for Biography and Social Art (www.biographysocialart.org) and with Kathleen Bowen, Jennifer Brooks-Quinn and Patricia Rubano develops and facilitates workshops for Waldorf schools and ASA branches. She also enjoys creating biography and social art workshops for the general public.