‘THE ORMOND POLIS’
Do you make the College or does the College make you?
Poetic Movement Workshop and Participatory Forum
Ormond College, Melbourne University
24 May 2006
Conceived and facilitated by Raffaele Rufo with Liminal Theatre and Performance and A/Prof. John Rundell (Ashworth Center for Social Theory)
Participants: 30 members of Ormond College Junior Common Room (undegraduate students at Melbourne University) and Senior Common Room (postgraduate students and academics at Melbourne University)
“Tonight it was great because it was unfolding. Because we were all learning about what we were doing. No model was proposed, but an open ended model, a model about open endedness. ”
Pedagogical and philosophical proposal:
The Ormond Polis is about us, for us, by us! It is a corporeal, imaginative, and meditative encounter with oneself and other voyagers unfolding in the shared carriage of Ormond College. The aim is to feed self and mutual recognition and to fuel critical engagement with the constraints and possibilities of living at Ormond College.
IMAGINE Ormond College as a train carriage on which you have jumped from your life-platform.
IMAGINE a place in and through which you can see yourself traveling.
IMAGINE The Ormond Polis.
The Ormond Polis is initiated by this questioning.
ASK YOURSELF: Where is the training going? Are you a passenger or the conductor? How much of the life running on the rails are you capturing? Reflect on how you make and experience connections, and what thoughts and dreams can or cannot be articulated and materialised in the Ormond College carriage.
ASK YOURSELF: Is this the only carriage you are travelling on? Is this the train, your life-train? For the multiple-carriage train voyagers: reflect on how you make and experience connections between carriages and on the possibility of finding continuity in the making of the route.
ASK YOURSELF: What does your life platform look like from the window of this running train? Is tit moving as the train moves? Is the train moving away from it?
My imagined Polis travels across four dimensions:
PREPARATION: Shift the conventional spatial arrangements. Connect with self and others through simple exercises on the floor. Lead and be led, resist and surrender, breathe! Dance!
AGORA: Raise questions, enter and exit conversations. Become the storyteller. Hit the passion inside and let it unravel. Follow one rule only: to always be in dialogue.
REFLEXIVE IMAGINATION: Go deep to find what has been disclosed in the Agora. Give it a poetic form: write, draw, paint…feelings, sensations, thoughts…leave a mark!
DISTILLATION: Reflect on the stories that have been told. How do they relate with each other? How do they relate with the broader social dynamics and arrangements?
For references and quotes from the text of this page, cite Raffaele Rufo, 2023, ‘The Ormond Polis’, https://www.raffaelerufo.com/improv-performance/the-ormond-polis.