From: "Ian! D. Allen" To: Ottawa CI Organizers Subject: Ottawa CI reboot: creating consent culture Date: Thu, 15 Apr 2021 04:54:56 -0400 Hello CI organizers - I've been attending the online Boston CI planning meetings for the resumption of CI events in Boston. I was curious about how they were going to incorporate new consent culture. Some people are in a hurry to restart in-person jams (starting outdoors) basically from where things left off a year ago; some people don't want to restart without first establishing a new, shared culture of consent. I've been talking one-on-one with Maxine Gauthier of Boston, and we agree on almost everything, which is fun but isn't good for diversity of opinion. We want to create a new culture of consent before we reopen. Below are some of my current thoughts. Let's start a discussion. It's 2021. CI jams have to become "Safer Spaces". Gone are the days where someone can walk in off the street and start touching other humans or letting themselves be touched. That is not a safe space. You can't just "bring a friend" to a CI jam. Everyone at a CI jam needs basic common consent culture training. People at a CI jam need to know that everyone in the room has the same training and language around boundaries and consent. Everyone in the room knows what behaviours are not part of the jam and who to contact for help. To this end, we need to set up a mandatory "Consent Culture Training" workshop that must be attended by anyone who wants to attend a CI jam. (We've been informally calling this the "CI Consent Boot Camp".) The workshop is also a screening process where Ottawa CI discovers and prevents people incompatible with CI culture from attending jams. CI is not for everyone. Some people are too much (e.g. sexual predators) and some people are too little (e.g. people who don't know or can't set their own boundaries). To make jams Safer Spaces, the Boot Camp has to identify and stop these incompatible people from attending jams. We need to design this Boot Camp before resuming Ottawa CI activities that will be open to the public, and ideally before resuming *any* CI activities. Since attending a Boot Camp is a significant impediment to new people curious about CI, we need a way for new people to sample CI without having to attend the Boot Camp first. We can designate some special CI jam events as "open to the public" with no prior consent training required (i.e. open to friends or anyone off the street), but these events need to be clearly labelled and well- staffed with experienced CI dancers who are skilled in their own ability to set boundaries, who graciously accept boundary and consent violations, and who watch over the space. These free-for-all jams are explicitly not "Safer Spaces" with a common consent language, and some people may choose to avoid them. This is my current thinking. I will no doubt have more thoughts after the upcoming Earthdance "Future of CI" event April 23-25. The topic is huge. How can you visit another CI jam elsewhere and become part of their Safer Space without taking their specific consent culture workshop? Do we need a "Standard Boot Camp" curriculum among all CI jams so that you know that a Toronto or Montreal CI dancer can attend our Ottawa jam without taking our specific Ottawa training? Some (many? most?) people don't know what their boundaries are around touch, so the CI Boot Camp may be an intense experience. For example: "I Spent My Life Consenting to Touch I Didn't Want: A year of isolation made me consider all the casual, unwanted touch women endure — and why it’s so hard to refuse it." https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/31/magazine/consent.html Lots to think about here. -- | Ian! D. Allen, BA, MMath - idallen@idallen.ca - Ottawa, Ontario, Canada | Home: www.idallen.com Contact Improvisation Dance: www.contactimprov.ca | Former college professor (Free/Libre GNU+Linux) at: teaching.idallen.com | Defend digital freedom: http://eff.org/ and have fun: http://fools.ca/