The Productive Postshow: Facilitating, Understanding and Optimizing Personal Narratives in Audience Talk Following A Personal Narrative Performance

Abstract

By staging the personal narrative and asking people to stay and comment afterwards, the performer and hosting organization can encourage a degree of intimacy and vulnerability in participants unsupported by the formal structure and management of the interactive event. Audience members frequently want to respond to autobiographical material in kind, and it is the contention of the author that the facilitation of such events, if they are to be optimally successful, requires not only careful planning and consideration, but special skills. This article describes a case study in which a facilitative communication research method known as Coordinated Management of Meaning (CMM) was explored for its potential utility in the community conversation following a personal narrative performance by a woman living with Stage IV breast cancer. The adapted approach was found to afford many benefits, providing a critical orientation to the event and giving the facilitator and other participants a systemic way of drawing connections among stories. The facilitative tools of CMM-circular questions and reflecting team concepts-provide form and focus without agenda, while also helping to distribute, among all who are present, responsibility for maintaining or redirecting that focus. By emphasizing in its use the rules implicit in talk, CMM "teaches" members of a system to listen to one another in a different way and to ask (in new ways) questions of themselves, of one another, and of the text produced in interaction. It helps to give the "unspeakable" a voice.