Breakdance meets Social Impact
Kata x Social Impact.
A dark stage; the arrival of a single breakdancer; the envelope of an organic percussive beat; artistry and intensity begin to layer each other; and the human spirit telling its story.
Last night, sitting in the audience of Kata, a dance performance by Anne Nguyen Dance Company at Adelaide’s OzAsia Festival, I felt intensely this troupe of dancers breaking a wider story about what it means to seek, engage and experience impact.
Kata is a system of individual training exercises in martial arts. Dancers blended this discipline of kata with the broken down, raw energy of breakdance in shadow dance battles. As Anne Nguyen sees it, the dance is “a form of discipline and ritual” where the individual reveals to us “spontaneous movement of resistance on the part of living”.
As a designer of social programs, these concepts of discipline and resistance are so apt and yet at odds. Often we design to support and guide people seeking to make change, where their ingrained reactions in challenging situations can be detrimental and the discipline to accept, learn and practice new behaviours is tough.
The trance-like soundtrack and repetition of controlled and contained break movements drew me in to meditate on three facets of social impact design.
Integration. Breakdance and martial arts may at first seem an opposing combination. But the integration of discipline and resistance has a power that increases a completeness of skills and widens human capacity to understand and react effectively. Are we integrating the best mix of learning within programs to equip clients with the capacity to apply new skills and sustain behaviour change, including borrowing from disciplines beyond our natural borders?
Curation. In social program design a common tendency is to address the many presenting dilemmas of a group needing support, leading to program staff expected to achieve diverse results. Are we better to understand and focus on root causes for individuals with interventions as early as possible in the problem cycle? The fundamental skills of self knowledge and self awareness, so critical to martial arts, might lead us to acknowledge that in good design less is more. Are we willing to carefully curate program design with a laser focus on the smallest number of program elements needed to achieve and measure the most critical social outcomes?
Positivity. Watching breakdancers express their fight against imagined countervailing forces, it seemed each was their own hidden protagonist. Their solo actions highlighted how the power of change is truly within. Measurable social outcomes in areas such as employment, learning, housing and mental health are built on the scaffolding of personal change driven by positive wellbeing. Do we need to flip some social design on its head and focus primarily on developing and measuring positive wellbeing as the platform for change, knowing the end results sought by program funders are potentially short-lived without it?
I wondered are these questions with answers? Looking inside our practice of social impact design with a renewed mindset may tell us. A kata mindset would open up new possibilities.
