 I hope you are hearing well. Thank you for joining us today. I'm Pilin, I'm program manager at Contac and today I'm here to introduce Contac, let you know about housekeeping rules and facilitate Q&As. Contac is a theatre and arts venue based in Manchester. At Contac we aim to put young people at the heart of our decision making to create an artistic program that is diverse, accessible and for everyone. Health, science, care and well-being are key strengths of our program. When our building reopens which will be very soon it will include a dedicated health and science space funded by Welcome Trust. New diversity and new models of leadership are important to us and to our young people we work with so we are really excited to be hosting this event. We would like to remind you that you keep your cameras switched off and microphones muted for the first part of this event. We recommend you to choose the setting hide non-video participants while watching. During the Q&A section we will invite you to turn on cameras on however please be aware that this event is being recorded and live streamed and if you switch your camera on you may appear on video. Turning on your camera is total optional you can also participate in the Q&A via chat function or raise your hand. Feel free to make any comments during the lecture however we ask you to post your questions to the chat when Q&A starts. We want this event to be an inclusive, accepting and welcoming space for everyone. We won't tolerate any form of discrimination or hate speech. If you have any issues or need support during the event you can contact Chloe through Zoom, chat, production contact theater or send an email to her chloecourtney at contactmcr.com. This event will be live captioned you can turn the captions on by pressing the CC button below. Welcome everyone. Now Ale, co-creator of Performing Orders will have a few words. Thank you. Hello and welcome everyone and thank you for joining us today. Catalyzing change through heartfelt agitation via yield discipline is part of Performing Orders Live 20, a program that runs until the 25th of October. I am Ale Sander Cianetti, co-creator of Performing Orders alongside Xavier de Sosa who is in the audience today. Before introducing our amazing artist today I'd like to thank our events partner for hosting us and for their brilliant work. So thank you contact the all-round theater commons. Also I'd like to thank the Arts Concealing Club for supporting us and Andrew Howell, our live captioner. So today I'm really excited to introduce Kai Singtan's Performing lecture and multidisciplinary work. Kai is an artist curator and academic who leads the neurodiversity in and creative research network. She's senior lecturer at the Manchester School of Art and visiting artist at the King's College London. Networks she has funded include also Run Run Run, Running Cultures Research Group and she's the co-founder of Arts and Mobilities Network. Also she's the UK Adult ADHD Network's Creative and Cultural Consultant, Psych Art Advisor and Music in Detention Trustee. Kai argues that artists with non-standard and neurodiverse ways of thinking can help invent new pathways towards solutions to the major challenges facing our societies and work to co-create a better and fairer world. After Kai's lecture the Q&A with the audience will be facilitated by artist, writer and curator and also member of neurodiversity and in creative research network Ashok Kumar Mistry. And now over to Kai. Time to learn how to be ill discipline. Thank you everyone. Thank you. Thank you Alessandra and thank you Pellin for the introduction. I hope everyone can hear and see me. So I'm just going to share my screen now and I hope that works. Great excellent. So first of all let us be clear. So this is a talk about leadership and there will be a ship somewhere during the PowerPoint but no there will be no request for you to there will be no request for you or for anyone to do any power poses. But if someone can send them a memo to the self-help and leadership development industry which is worth £336 billion that power doesn't quite work like this that would be really good. Sure there are glass ceilings or glass labyrinths so you have to man up and take up space but for too many of us no amount of power poses will actually get us through another architectural feature which is the door. And even then we will soon hit brick walls of racism. So while we're here so just another quick memo while we're here so stop saying things like we didn't build those walls or they are racist not us in the arts and culture we're liberal and so on we're liberating other marginalised people. So and also stop saying things like oh our oppression might be more important than yours and here's the backlash goes then against the wall that we didn't build and so on and so forth. And I must apologise for the absence of post-it notes for this leadership talk because usually they are everywhere in these sort of events and it's for brainstorming and co-creation you know that sort of thing but don't get me wrong I do have a profound fetish for stationery and I use them at this workshop that you can see on the screen and I don't know if you can see um yeah there's somewhat some post-it notes on the walls around me. Still no amount of post-it notes or for that matter marker pens or whiteboards or bullet points or whatever will enable me to finish all the tasks that I need to do or even get and start it so there's so much so much to do so little time but there you go. There will also be no post-it notes today because obviously we are doing this remotely on Zoom because we're in the middle of a pandemic. One final memo so in spite of us being in the middle of a pandemic I will not be talking about resilience because I won't be asking us to suck it up and enable and normalize or reproduce bad behavior or bad practice. So what will I do well I will what I will do is to um raise questions around leadership so some of us might be cringing right now oh leadership um what a toxic neoliberalist filthy filthy word I don't use those words somebody might be saying that but others might be thinking oh I am a leader we're all leaders so my invitation for us is to unpack the term together today and to think about how leadership relates to other terms like change and power and could we change and own and reimagine what leadership could be and what if we throw in a couple of more terms you know for example um for example creativity and neurodiversity two more words into the mix so could we think about a kind of a creative neurodivergent leadership a model of leadership that is creative and neurodivergent and what could that look like or mean or do and I'll give my version the name and I call it artful agitation am I in today however it's not quite to answer that question but simply to kind of map up the scene and to catalyse some thinking around these terms so I'll be really keen to hear your version of leadership and your version of creative leadership or creative neurodivergent leadership um so good afternoon or good morning wherever you are I think it's 7 a.m in San Francisco or 12 a.m already the next day in Sydney again so little time so much to do so wherever you are thank you for joining us and I wish to thank contact theater performing borders and how around for making today's program possible and also Andrew for captioning this um because this is live streamed I was thinking it would be quite fun if we show the live live broadcast on my screen and then to show that to you and then there would be a kind of a hall of mirrors but we won't be doing that um but high speed internet isn't a reality for many colleagues worldwide or even in the UK and elsewhere so we will be publishing this video clip a recorded version of this on multiple websites so they can watch it at your own time and also rather than my usual 300 slides or so we'll be using only about 282 and I also upload the slideshow on my website so who am I my name is Kai and um my I'm an artist curator and so on an artful education is a new framework that I'm kind of touring around with um it's a kind of a framework around leadership and with a focus on being ill disciplined um there are quite a lot of words that I'm using and and abusing but don't worry will be unpacking those words as we go along so today for the next um hopefully 28 minutes or so it will be a kind of a montage of a range a divergent range of concepts and practices drawing on research findings by myself or readings or lived experiences observations and so on and so forth so I will share nine interrelated provocations and um part two of this will be happening next year so I'll be developing this idea as we go along so what we're what we are um looking at today is the first iteration but in November um next month next couple of months there will be um something called Being Human the Being Human Festival that I'm participating so if you are keen you're very much welcome to join that that's free of charge it's it's going to be delivered by UC out University College London so please come to there as well so I'll be talking and um I would very much welcome questions afterwards I'm really keen to hear your feedback so before you start maybe you can introduce yourself say where you are who you are and so on and today um Ashok Kumar Mystery will be leading the Q&A session Ashok of course is a Leicester based multi-disciplinary artist and writer so I do check out his website and also do have a look at his forthcoming podcast and he's just written a really nice meaty robust provocation so go and have a look at that and when people were entering the room there was music and that was by a colleague called Phillip Tan so please um have a look at his work on his website as well Ashok is a member of the Neurodiversity in or end Creative Research Network and this is a new hub that I co-founded with the London based social sciences and artists called Dr. Ranjita Digital although I alone take full responsibility for the rather clunky title I don't know what that business about the forward slashes um so I did it I can't correct it anymore and there are quite a few mistakes on this page as well there you go um so what do we do on this page well there are about 182 of us and we celebrate the messy and magical definitions and entanglements between neurodiversity creativity and research unstable and really contested terms as they individually are but we're also really interested in how they kind of interact with one another so we like to also think of ourselves as critical friends to one another so people share their ideas questions that are working on and so on and we come from all walks theater visual arts brain and mind sciences health dance from diverse sectors including museums high education and we're from Taiwan Canada Exeter and so on many are neurodiverse many aren't there isn't a criteria at all it's free to join so please join us so right that's all the memos for today and we're going to get going so first up what does and what could leadership mean so the old english origin of the term refers to guidance and since Plato's proposal of the importance of wisdom in leaders in his book republic 2500 years ago as many theories and as many styles of leadership have surfaced so we have for instance 19th century models of mythologizing the leader is a hero as champion by the pro eugenics and then in the exotic far east ideas from thousands of years ago are still alive and kicking in countries like singapore and korea where the government assumes the role of the parent specifically the father and the citizens are children and the idea is that the children are obliged to obey what's given to them so they don't participate quite they don't participate in the unprocessed then there are feminist models that consider how you are only as empowered as the most vulnerable amongst you and i think that very much is exemplified by the prime minister of new zealand uh so since we're here maybe we can take a couple of moments to just look at the way people's hands are placed i know it's not fair um there's a painting there's a sculpture and there's a there's a photograph and one of them is really stiff um you know you want to tell him to loosen up but um but let's just look at where the hands are what does that say so someone has a hand on heart and other people and someone else has the hands around another body and this was after the christian shooting the massacre and if we run with the metaphor a little bit more can we think about hands on or hands off leadership styles what is which is your style which is your approach and also think about handed down systems systems that you might inherit when you enter a new workplace do you what do you do do you maintain the status quo do you blame your predecessors and also think about the body with the hand with respect to the body your own body and another body and the hand is as an extension of the body to other bodies so i'm talking about the relational dynamics and also your body and your hand to the place around you the environment around you and also the body obviously has this medium as this interface and also let's think about how we handle handle situation how we handle crisis and emergencies so check out those hands and check out the polls what does this say well the COVID-19 tragedy tragedy i think has shown us how normative models of leadership have failed we are locked in this human made disaster as we speak and the most vulnerable amongst us are hardest hit we turn the blind eye when the virus hit Asia and declaring a pandemic only when white bodies fail we don't just scapegoat the virus in fact we blame algorithms as mutants they're monstrous they're in other they're alien we demonize migrants as swarms and we proclaim that we've had enough of experts and meanwhile Black Lives Matter times up and we shall not be moved and other movements continue to pose questions for those in power and confirming the need for new prototypes of leadership that prioritize not sideline or do live service only to equity diversity and inclusion spectacles of protests and mass protests so i want us to maybe now think about spectacle and visuality how this how civil disobedience is performed and the performativity of resistance visibility the importance of showing up and being seen and also raising visibility making something visible and also related to that the whole idea of seeing being seen visualizing visualizing role models someone who looks like you above you or if you're a gatekeeper opening doors to others who don't look like you also about vision think about projecting the future since the current the now is the technical term is that is pretty shit now so what do you see in the future what do you want to see in the future and also your power as an image maker and also as a consumer of image and also as a distributor of image because we are all disseminators of images now so what are you perpetuating what kind of discourse is that you're perpetuating when you press the share button on instagram and so on so the next point i want to think about is around neurodiversity so if leadership is in crisis could neurodiversity point away so what is this term well coined by australian sociologist in 1980 1998 judy singer the term the term neurodiversity refers to people with autism adhd dyscalculia and other atypical cognitive modes which around 15 percent of the uk population are so judy singer calls for these to be reframed as valuable diversities and that's quite radical because the norm and was and largely is still about talking about these these conditions as something that is not so good that is deficit that is in terms of impairment for instance psychiatrists they like to frame adhd autism and adhd autism and autism and so on as abnormalities as disorders and they're classified as such neuroscientists however see differences in brain structure and then cognitive psychologists they like to think about the differences in thinking and processing and sensory issues and then those those in disability studies however they don't want to put the task they don't want to focus on the individual however they like to look at the environment and then well what's interesting also then is if you move to the movement side of things so we're talking about the people who are in the kind of cultural side of things the cultural political social social political cultural side of things in terms of understanding neurodiversity as a movement there's a lot of infighting there's a lot of politics but maybe you can say largely that they like to see neurodiversity as a normal thing which is in itself quite paradoxical maybe i find it very paradoxical and perhaps problematic so but interestingly this sort of more affirmative way of looking at things is increasingly fed back to the brain and mind sciences so that's quite interesting this kind of movement because people are now studying how traits relate to creativity so several features of adhd for example like risk taking divergent thinking and creative giftedness and also those in dyslexia like complex problem solving and synthesizing dissimilar concepts they happen to overlap with those identified as key for effective leadership and this is where leadership and neurodiversity kind of collide and so my question to us is okay is it neurodiversity or neurodivergence so there is an unagreed consensus i would say but if you ask me i like to go for divergence because i like how it's associated with divergent thinking i also like the idea of expansiveness how things are going wider rather than going in when you talk about divergence i love that kind of um expansiveness because rather like this talk is you can think about montage of different elements and maybe quite disparate quite different elements there isn't a need to unify or simplify or reduce anything so i really like that um sort of idea because i really like the idea of clashing collision juxtaposition um and i like to think of those kind of um juxtapositions as positively um as possibly positive and productive so i'll go with divergence and also divergence looks like and sounds like diversion i don't know if the roots are shared i didn't check but as a dyslexic woman i like that they look similar they sound which is the title of today's talk highlighting the pivotal role in highlighting the pivotal role of being ill disciplined in artful agitation and i like to also think about becoming ill disciplined because it could be an aspiration maybe and i like to think about it as using or drawing on abnormality so-called abnormality to disrupt norms and um the question so so if we kind of look at ill discipline i'll break it break it down a little bit um so i like to think about how we can use the idea of ill discipline to question normative approaches and assumptions and interrogate the constructs of normality so ill is very important illness in the first part of this term is important because it i like to think about how we can subvert affirm but also subvert ideas of illness and therefore also interrogate what health means so the not necessary binary um and also when you say ill discipline we're talking about someone being naughty mischievous and that's always described that's always used when you're talking about people with ADHD they're still naughty they're misbehaving um and i like that little hyphen i think it's a hyphen not a dash i know it's a bit straight but i like the curly one but um i don't know what that's called but i like the hyphen because it suggests a kind of a um it's like a bridge in some way and it suggests a kind of a movement or it suggests that you can step it step on it and for me it suggests a kind of a trespassing of boundaries and and i want for me discipline is important because it is about disciplines bodies of knowledges for me i'm in art so other knowledges bodies of knowledge might be i don't know history or science or whatever broadly speaking and i like this idea of trespassing discipline so you're not just staying in all i'm an artist i have to only do this no i can go anywhere so i quite like the hyphen to suggest that but for me i the disciplinarity is also really important because i think in order to do this you need to actually know your stuff you need to know what you are coming from but also equally if you want to rebel against that you need to have a reference point to rebel against and um it's highly disciplined because the the idea of being ill disciplined was developed um a year a year two years ago now um between myself and professor of psychiatry philip etchison so i gatecrashed his world because i was thinking oh i i don't know why oh i want to know i said i want to know why my brain is considered as abnormal by people like you so we talked and we talked through art so you can see a tapestry behind um there's a lot of um coverage elsewhere so if you're interested go look up but i would just say that um this was a conversation which is highly disciplined in that it is a conversation not between a patient and a psychiatrist but people from two bodies of knowledges who have quite at that point um i would say quite distinct um perspectives but we were talking because um that was that's also where the philips are and and i think that's that's absolutely where where the joy is and elisandra cennetti uh was the producer of this project and i like to think that the idea of being ill disciplined isn't just coming up for my project because i see people around me that seem to embody that idea um and i think they are doing a fairly good job at guiding other people for instance jess tom otherwise known as tyrette's hero who was central in making better see art center in london the first the world's first relaxed venue there's also joshia wong who whom friends describe as being full of unlimited energy and he always makes other people helpful joshua is severely dyslexic trilingual and a fierce orator the hong kong pro democracy democracy leader has led hundreds of thousands of protests against the mainland chinese government since he was 14 and by 18 he was named the world's top 10 greatest leaders and nominated for the no bell no bell peace prize by 20 he's been to jail twice and now he's 23 and he's playing a cat and mouse game with the authorities oops suggestion jess and joshua for me um they both highlight how normal approaches of leadership haven't quite worked and standard approaches have been sub-standard and failed us and i think that outlier ways that unusual approaches have directed us to new possibilities new orders of things and new imaginations i think that's really powerful and both have been operating in and they are operating in worlds that are built by and custom made for people who are not neurodivergent but i like to think that it is because of this it is because of the fact that they we and they um jess and joshua and and those of us were neurodivergent because we have been actively excluded from the so-called mainstream the structures of mainstream that many of us aren't going to be fully subscribed to everything and also and therefore we're going to hold everything as suspect we're going to be like hmm not sure about this this or that even though we are fully paid members of humanity but what is given to us doesn't quite fit us because it has never been kind of accommodated for us um so in fact a lot of us have been paying much more and being punished for that and and the most vulnerable are in the front line of the greatest hits especially in this volatile world of ours and given this volatile world in the face of technological revolution and so on the global elite at the world economic forum and so on they have been talking a lot about creativity the importance of human skills with buzzwords like creativity innovation agility disruption but hang on a minute i thought disruption was a bad thing you're naughty no but these guys are appropriating these terms now and it's not just world economic forum these words are everywhere corporate cultural academic sectors creative disrupt um which is interesting so at the same time or around from the 90s um you have bestsellers um that are populate that are um that were very popular on autism for example as a factor for silicon valley's success and another book on adhd as key for human being survival as a nomadic species so these these various um kind of elements in the landscape has now today made neurodiversity like really sexy like really marketable in fact in fact um neurodiversity has been described as the next talent opportunity method so we're not people we're methods for fostering innovation we are competitive advantage and we are a strong business case to bring about better financial outcomes it's great i make money i can make money that's great the rhetoric extends to the elites claiming to co-opt weirdos and misfits so we're terribly trendy now or we're getting terribly trendy so in a world that is in flux so my question to us is how does your practice oh i think i'm supposed to have an image yeah so in a world that is in flux how does your arts practice respond to change and or or mainstream ideas on change and also how does your arts practice catalyze change does it catalyze change do you want it to catalyze change and this photo of course is of a boat funded by the artist Banksy and is named after a french anarchist and what you can see is that it's rescuing and transferring migrants from the sea and you and i would say that someone like Banksy had to step in because those in charge aren't doing the job and also i did say in the beginning of this talk that there would be a shit okay it's a boat but um what's the difference um and then but then what Banksy is doing isn't new at all there's a deep profound tradition in the arts where artists use art to educate norms and to catalyze conversations um Duchamp he was questioning the norms of the art world 1920s we had edged films we had people we had the avant-garde writing many festivals about society about art in my work i like to think i like to mobilize the body specifically the restless body as a site of protest s i g h t and also site as a as a s i t e site of protest so in this picture you can see kids they are age 7 to 14 and they are running a master class for adults top age 85 so in this project i was trying to kind of play shift things around or upside down a little bit so i like to also think that each kid was giving two fingers up to Confucius Confucius' definition of leadership because Confucius was the guy who loves paternalism who was promoting ideas about leadership being around being a parent governing others in a authoritarian way so i like to think that each of this kid was actually putting up two fingers to Confucius and also 10 toes each so we had 14 kids there's 140 toes so 140 toes up to Confucius so some of this body of work of mind draws on performance art life art and also the art intervention social practice and so on um and also you have um other artists who are looking at the notions of useful art for example which are also closely related to some of these that i've pointed out um like Tanya Bruguera and the idea is that art can change the way we act and can transform people's lives and essentially art as activism activism as art and of course in um from the um extinction rebellion and so on you can see the kind of leakage um in in terms of the ideas and and also how the streets are your stage um where these ideas are performed and clearly i think the point is that clearly artists have always been creative and innovative and disruptive um and i also like to point out something about um how yes we often have clear artistic outcomes but also the processes are artistic outcomes themselves so the art um or another way to look at it is that the art is slipping in in a in a in a very um surreptitious way so you don't have an output at the end you know the painting or or even document photographs or whatever um but the whole process that you design that you choreograph that you curate that is your artistic work because you're asking new questions and you're re you're enacting a different system of doing things and you are doing you're inverting things and you're imagining a different order of things so for me these are clear distinct examples of leadership in thought and in action and they are novel frameworks of organizing being and creating that critique norms of power and i think this is bloody artful um and i think we need to be artful because the coronavirus um isn't just described as novel but is said to be really clever it's really smart because it's like a ninja it hijacks your body to jump literally to transport it's after other bodies you don't even know you're like oh i need to go for a test because i don't even know if i have it it's really really sneaky it's clever so what do we need to do we also need to be clever so more than ever i think we need to be crafty and artful like the virus but don't worry the virus won't be the last virus there'll be other there'll be other novel and crafty and artful challenges to come so could we could we look into neurodivergent creative practitioners and researchers for insights and that's 30 percent of us in the arts and culture sector and um the kind of archetypal creative practitioner who is neurodivergent would be someone like Leonardo da Vinci he had ADHD and dyslexia which meant which meant that he was quite an insatiable and fearless explorer i mean boundaries he didn't quite care so he did a famous painting of a smiley woman we know that he also did a whole bunch of other stuff um he invented the revolving bridge he did diving equipment he did some parachutes it made me wonder where's he trying to escape to because they are all modes of transportation but i think it also points very much to the fact that he was very very ill disciplined he didn't stick to his turf um he was trespassing oh another way to see it is that his art was spreading like he was having his tentacles everywhere yeah that's also art yeah that's also science whatever contemporary examples are bound and which is why which is where we can turn to the neurodiversity in and forward slash and creative research network and for example a colleague Ebi Watson she's based in Glasgow she uses her dyspraxia to dis-order dance practice two weeks ago we held the world's the universe's first ever disco dy-s-co obviously another member is Judy Singer so i had a zoom conversation with Judy two weeks ago and she tells me about how she was inventing that term neurodiversity i mean that in itself is having invented a term to have sparked an entire cultural movement and more is already pretty artful but she was also talking about how she sees neurodiversity as part of as aligned with the notion of biodiversity and i thought that's a really clever move it's clever because you are then looking at things in a quite holistic way you're looking at the interrelations again so this relational dynamics of bodies to other bodies including non-human bodies and also including to nature and just as every organism has its place in a bio-diverse environment or ecosystem every person has their meaning for place in a neurodiverse world so shall we think a little bit about systems and ecosystems and also the health of such systems and with that i wanted to maybe think about the behaviors and cultures within these systems and which is why i wanted to call upon through the word through the preposition through and i think it's quite an underrated word i mean i i'm very bad with prepositions but i was looking it out so prepositions are words that govern a noun and when you put it like that it sounds really important because it is governing what comes afterwards and so i was talking about catalyzing change through artful education so actually the through is pretty important if you look at it that way so i thought oh maybe we should spend a little bit of time talking about through how are you doing that um so think about your how you do things or your organizations um the culture that you are building does it have zero tolerance for racism for example does it um does it use power to reinvent the wheel or does it just kind of use the existing system or does it reinvent the wheel for instance like Jacinda Ardern of New Zealand so she is a prime minister of New Zealand but she didn't just go with the flow she has now in fact said that well-being not profit is the measure of GDP in New Zealand and also if you think about culture um maybe we can think about um culture cultures that you create do they give permission for or do they normalize quite problematic but let's go with that do they problematize or do they normalize play do they normalize things like failure so the picture you can see on the left is um of the south london gallery and this was a speed date a speed dating event i did at the south london gallery and people were having fun and speed dates are the best because there's no there's no need for commitment you just have some fun and then you move on that's nice i like that so a lot of my work are really short and sweet don't know about sweet but short and then next the picture the other side um maybe we can think about failure as so this is a family they are outside the corridor of the one bedroom flat and this is obviously from um the last century a photograph from the last century at least two of the kids here have formal diagnosis of um neurodiversity uh neurodiverse conditions but the adults um so one of them you can see here he left school by the age of 16 with few qualifications and he had to do three jobs to to feed the family the famous example was that he walked out of a math exam because he couldn't answer one single thing and where's my mom you asked she might be taking a photo but i think and then when you study the photo you think actually um i mean look at me i look really bewildered i suspect my father was actually taking a stealthy look at his extended but it's the wrong century so i'm not actually sure is this failure then ask ourselves what is our criteria for failure what is our criteria for success Leonardo da Vinci um actually none of what he invented was realized was he a failure Joshua Wong he is on the run and it looks like he's on a losing battle is he a failure um or maybe could we think about success in other ways maybe Leonardo da Vinci teaches us how we can take on use our imagination to take us somewhere else to give us the permission to think of something else so think about the culture that you are within or that you want to create what is your mission statement so i'm showing mission statements and value statements by two of our collaborators today and what what's yours and what's your manifesto does it allow or nurture productive antagonisms and divergences or no everyone has to say this sing the same sing from the same song sheet as they say what about the architecture architectural features do you do you have doors that open up to others or do you have windows of opportunities for others is there fresh air are they or are you creating labyrinths and walls without realizing that um and also i want to just point out very quickly um i think often we forget the need to to disrupt the notion of neurodiversity so if you are creating these systems think about how um how you need to diverse diversify neurodiversity because sometimes we have blind spots and we think we're doing enough already we're white feminists we're in disability yeah we're already covering well we have already covered minority interests we're done no you're not done so think about um think about what you might be setting up subconsciously and also within this think about care self and others so maybe if we have time we can talk about this um because often people who are neurodivergent has behaviors that are not usual people tell me i'm really intense and i'm like what do you mean my intense i'm not intense and then they walk is then they escape so maybe we can talk about that um so so we live in times of crisis and health mental health climate change um democracy human rights you name it so we need to top up top our game and as we contemplate the great reset building back inking and making informant challenge dominant modes of leadership and the new normal so i wanted to think about um other approaches abnormal approaches so today what i've done is to lay out the foundation for what i think would be working to us a kind of a creative neurodivergent model of leadership and we with creativity firmly anchored in the arts and with a distinct so i want to try to weave a distinct case for creativity creativity because often it's very woolly it's not quite defined but rather than fat or financial bates i like to think of us i like to for me neurodivergence is the governing adjective and the noun and the action verb so art for education isn't about neurodivergent artists being fit for purpose or being fixed at one place or being fixed i.e treated or begging for reasonable adjustments instead it is a paradigm shift and that's why i want to take on leadership toxic or whatever the term might be because i want to suggest no let's try to reclaim that let's invert things and put neurodiversity before leadership and i just think that it addresses some gaps and knowledges out there and i think it is so important to have vision it's a conceptual model but i like to i like to see how i like us i like i hope that it can also inspire us towards other models and in the long run i'm calling a full more inclusive socio-cultural political system and i would argue that it's precisely when resources are tight that we need art we need art to take us somewhere and this can be a win-win given how terrible things are in the cultural industry to put it lightly so clearly i also don't want to talk about art for education as a purely instrument as a model that instrumentalizes art only because i think it is by making it a conceptual model i am trying to mark out a territory to say that it is to protect the ability for us to dream and also to deal with the abstracts and and to also celebrate how non-standard artful agile atypical approaches can disrupt neuro-normative assumptions i think i'll end here and um catch the sequel next year so thank you very much let me just escape my stop share thank you and shall we have Ashok come on thank you to um how much time we've got six minutes hi can i see you yeah so Ashok your um it's all yours oh thank you thank you very much kai um i'd like to thank you kai for this mind-blowing mind-map performance lecture it's been fantastic listening listening to it um i'd like people to please share your questions either by raising your hand or by posting your questions in the chat but um while the lecture percolates into questions i'd like to talk to kai very briefly so being ill disciplined this play on words um has so many layers um in terms of your work and in terms of this lecture as well um the words energize and activate change your words feel to me like drawings um can you tell us a little bit about your um what you mean about your relationship with words uh what a simple question my relationship with words is very very entangled and complex it's complicated um i love words so all my life i didn't know i was dyslexic i've used words all my life in filmmaking in a lyrical way just running with it and then i was told quite late that um oh it's actually a different way of using words so that's quite interesting but i've always been using word engaging in word play because i like that's part of my process of unpacking words and english is my first language because um i we were colonized and civilized um by the great britain and so but i love just kind of because yeah so like you i'm dyslexic and i know how you love just playing with words there's great joy kind of pure joy in that as well it's also about subversion deturning the what the situation is um say about kind of overturning things so it is what people understand and you play around with it the words really feel like drawings though um and it feels like you're kind of weaving words together so it's not just a very dry kind of you know forming sentences but you're kind of taking people two places two new dimensions almost through your work but um in in the arts we have a lot of rhetoric around risk and risk taking but at times it feels as though um that thought of risk uh is being smothered by a need for some sort of kind of pseudo professionalism um even the memories of people in history who've been ill-disciplined as you'd call them um how what would you say about um how they have been um you know that their ill-disciplined nature has been kind of almost sanitized when we look at i mean a great example you give is Leonardo da Vinci and his you know thoughts were going off in all sorts of directions and yet it's framed in such a kind of in such a kind of rectangular almost way but then um you know maybe it's to make it more palatable how can we better understand the value of being ill-disciplined yeah and you expect me to answer it in what one minute it's a great question um i don't know how to answer it but um which is why i was calling upon because that's the sort of material i'm kind of dealing with now what how the mainstream dominant powerful leadership industry and the guys who have money basically how they think about risk oh it's good to it's good to it's good to be risky nonsense nonsense nonsense especially now institutions have more excuses to say no you're not allowed to take risks not recognizable not allowed but then the rhetoric is just at the opposite end and there is that oh yeah oh we celebrate disruptive oh no nonsense it's so it's interesting so that's my answer yeah fantastic we have a question here how can the ill-disciplined attitude be used for co-leadership as a new model for divergence and artful agitation hmm that's a good question um i think it lends itself to co-leadership because it was a co-creator model to begin with i may so the the notion of ill-leadership yeah why not actually ill-leadership ill-disciplined came out from the creative process two-year process conversation that i had with philip eschison the psychiatrist i work the professor of psychiatry that i worked with i think it already lends itself to that and it is also it's already saying yeah you need to kind of have this element of play vulnerability um because it takes two to tango and more not just not just one person so it is already saying no you need to kind of like you know like take risk a little bit so look at the children um running around and with the adults so the adults have to say yeah okay i'm up for it right so there is that self-selection process in a way like yeah okay i'm up for it um so so there is already that kind of um i would say propensity maybe that's the right word for for co-creation yeah yeah it's it's kind of um you call it a distributed model rather than yeah i like to think that i don't yeah um yeah it can't be like yeah it's mine um because that wasn't how it was founded in the first place i wouldn't have come up with that on my own um it was so loud about taking on philip's ideas philip ideas from his world psychiatry illness you know so i i think that's really critical so so i guess the the so it's pre pre so maybe another way to say it is that if you want to take on those ideas it is already inviting you to um allow co-creation yeah how are we for time are we do we have to go or we've gotten around nine minutes okay yeah so um we'll kind of we'll plow on i'll let you yeah um so we've got a comment stroke question um so so much to delve into what would your top three desired actions for us who are listening be for us who are listening top three desired actions in the list it's like it's like the audience and you are conspiring against me it's like yeah top three kai top one did you give me all the really loaded questions and you're like yeah kai come on on the spot no i can't we're energized we're all here we we're kind of oh well okay well because i've talked for many years and the trick the trick is to say why don't well what do you think what do i think yeah part this is about co-creation hand hand the question to other people it's a great question what's your top three takeaway i mean i outline ideas and i think within those even though i said yeah well i think within within those nine points there were quite a few things i said um if if in a roundabout way i think raise um anti-racism is quite key in this um a lot of us kind of slide it like well it's done it's not done it's not done it's not done it's not done for the record um there's a lot more to do and it's not about it's not an oppression olympics it's not about um a hierarchy of oppression we need to do it together so that's that's one um yeah that's enough i think that's that's a lot any more questions coming through um anything i i'd like to kind of go back to this idea of kind of maybe say a little bit more about this idea of um sight of protest so sight is in kind of that really kind of hooked me in you know you real real me in at that point yes so yeah yeah um so yeah of course there's wordplay and i was like yeah great idea um but it's very much anchored in the fact that you know the whole life art performance art tradition the body is your material your tool um the primary tool and of course also the feminist idea the the personal is political etc so this is your this is your weapon etc um and this is also and i my intellectual home might be visual arts so it's about the visuality yeah so the sightedness how you see things when you move for instance how you see things when your body is moving through a space with speed or no speed or whatever and what how you are seen also so it's both ways so when i move so when i move um quick so just very quickly so when i move through so the when i move when i run in the city suddenly i i'm not just a foreign body or a female foreign body people start asking me for directions like yeah i'm dyspraxic too i don't know directions but suddenly i'm seen to have some ownership because i'm running my body i take up more space so so so i love that whole kind of um kind of nuance around the whole thing about how you're seeing how and how you see also because you are moving at speed you see the world differently yeah i mean i was transfixed at that point because to me it was talking about all sorts of things in terms of um this idea of when you're protesting you want to be seen and yet today when people protest it's usually online and they're not seen yeah it's that idea of courage when you're protesting as well the the courage as as in some of the people that you were talking about you know during the hong kong protests it was so dangerous for them to actually be seen you know it could have been so much easier and safer to be behind a um a screen but you know no that's a great point and i have done recently i i did a talk on performative allyship which is the whole critique of the whole is so easy black lives method click um other people have talked in much more eloquent ways around that obviously and but this thing about optics this thing about seeing being seen um is very very interesting also with such a visual culture today um we use emojis so we're very very visual visually literate um so so that that's really powerful so we also we have platforms like instagram and so on so that's that's really really powerful um so this idea of seeing being seen and also the tools the visual tools are much easier now in that you don't need to go to an art school nobody needs to go no come to my art school but you don't need to go to an art school to learn how to do this and that you don't need to go to a film school to pick up a film camera um because these you are your own distributor your own maker you are your own um yeah every your you own you can own every single part of that process we have uh one final quick question um yeah i found i found your point about hands being such a great way of visualizing different models and ideas around leadership and the body do you have a hand metaphor from neurodivergent hope that makes sense can you help me there's me reading the bit in brackets as well yeah i know hand it makes perfect sense yeah i think i have a few um did i say them no was obviously i didn't say enough hand no i love no this is a great one i love to work on it ashok do you have any suggestion a hand metaphor um i i mean yeah a lot of hand gestures i'm thinking about they're not really broad castable but um i don't know i'd probably have to work that one out with the kids yeah no that's not more i love that yeah there are a lot more kind of eloquent when it comes to kind of playing with hands and playing with this idea of of sign and movement and stuff so yeah i'll get back to you on that um no i there's a great question i'll i'll cut and paste everything here because i there's a lot so i'm really i'm really grateful to be given the opportunity to share and try out some of these ideas today it's the first time i um i was gonna say releasing um what's the word so they are ideas i'm toying with so today's the first time so i wasn't sure if it was going to be too much or too i never know tonality so it's really good to get some feedback and there's a lot to kind of play with and unpack so thank you for that um the opportunity so thank you very much Kai for your insightful words and thoughts on art for that art for agitation and i'd like to thank Performing Boarders and Contact Theatre also for hosting this event but a big thank you to everyone watching and joining us today thank you very much no thank you everyone thank you so much all right i'm someone from Melbourne Australia oh that's nice oh it must be like early morning i wonder what time Melbourne is now let's have a look oh 12 40 in the morning it's not too bad