Ci Xuan’s Experience (Facilitator) [she/her]

This is the most interesting experience, because I have always been experiencing split in an embodied manner. How I access the work is based on “being”. Putting on the hat of the facilitator meant that I was going to have a different sort of participation. 

At the start, everything was visual to me, I had to sense visually, access the work as an audience, it felt like I was learning new vocabulary. But now I finally know what the audience sees. But a facilitator is different from an audience member, there was a lot of appreciation and criticism, but there also had to be constructivism. There is a lot of unpacking on my part, on what does “facilitating” mean? To “help”? What sort of help? What if they don’t need or want that? Because I am someone who hates to connect through words (I’d spend time with a person through moving), so finding the unique language between me and another participant is what I needed to do, and what I really enjoyed doing. 

I realise that it’s been awhile since Split has members that are new to the work. It took me a long journey to understand different things in the work, but the participants only had 10 weeks (for a crash course). It was so exciting, because a lot of participants were asking things that I have taken for granted, things that I have pondered before myself, and now I’m listening to all these, searching for answers, it helps me articulate (as much as I hate that word), it gives rise to clarity. I feel more like the student going in. 

Another thing that excited me a lot was having conversations with the participants, finding out what their background was, and how they have been looking at the work. It made me see how the work could apply and clash with so many other things. The conflicts in the space are always fascinating for me, because experiencing something that is making you doubt your background, will always make you think twice as hard about what and why you believe in.