Poh's approach
I’d like to share with you some practices that I have been co-creating in the spaces between narrative therapy and film. These invitational practices have emerged through my experience of responding to trauma and displacement in many contexts including family and domestic violence, state sanctioned violence and forced migration and working on a hybrid documentary film, Island of the Hungry Ghosts; accompanying people in their film and creative processes and co-designing relevant and expansive questions and exercises to support the many facets of creative and collaborative processes.
Questions are my craft and my passion - I deeply enjoy the practice of shaping questions that are response based, deconstructive, invitational, political and relational with the intention to accompany people in the many endeavours to articulate and share experience. I witness the profound effects daily of what happens when someone has articulated an experience in ways that they haven’t before and the momentum that emerges from this and pours into the medium(s) they choose.
By stepping into a number of different positions in the film, Island of the Hungry Ghosts, my practice was significantly shaped. On one hand, I was engaged by the director, Gabrielle Brady, as a narrative therapy consultant to specifically accompany her in the creative process and in navigating the political landscape as a young, first time, female film maker, determined to make a film that was refusing to be what was expected of in an Australian context. For example, through offering an exercise where I interviewed Gabrielle as the Island, human-protagonist-dominance was resisted and the Island was invited in as a meaningful participant of the project.
I also participated in the film alongside people seeking asylum in my ‘real life role’ as a trauma therapist and together we designed a way of filming the therapeutic sessions that both continued the possibilities of therapy as well as being actively discerning and choosing participants in the multiple stories unfolding in the film.
Through the process of the film I came to understand more clearly how my particular location of privilege as therapist was in operation and in response to this Gabrielle and I also took up a director - non-actor relationship where I shared parts of my (and my family’s) life outside of my professional role as a therapist - stretching me personally to find ways to articulate experience that wasn’t coated in learned (therapeutic) language. Through Gabrielle’s designed exercises I had the opportunity to come into relationship with different parts of my voice that enabled me to also speak on my own terms and in my own words. Gabrielle and I continue to collaborate to this day on film, workshop and writing projects.
I want to be part of practices that honour and make visible the ethics and intentionality of process in relation to image-and community-making.
I come to the practice by developing consultation and workshop spaces responding to the experiences of film making process drawing from my knowledge of post-structuralist therapy (narrative and sandplay) in order to support artists and film makers in articulating their visions, engaging with the things that get in the way of relationships with creative process, exploring what artistic stretch/risk might look like in the person’s context and growing creative practices in non extractive ways.
What I offer in workshops is an opportunity for film makers at all points along their journey to explore their projects in a way that both accompanies and counterbalances the more well known industry aspects such as pitching, script development and technical skills. This compliments and provides a holistic development context for emerging and established film makers as I offer a cross pollination of narrative therapy, centering body knowledge and collaboration, socio-political engagement and creative deconstruction.
I both develop workshops according to themes that are relevant to film makers and artists or according to the needs and interests of mentoring/development programs, film collectives, film schools and film festivals. I have been designing and facilitating variations on different topics and workshop lengths (and individual sessions) to people at specific points in their journey with film since 2015.
For example, recently I designed and shared a workshop on Departures with staff and fellows in DocX Archive Lab. By bringing a multi-storied collection of questions we found together the space to attend to the multiplicity of departing - loss, reconnecting with what we hold precious, articulating what we might be saying no to in departures, bringing the idea of departures into relationship with agency and many other rich, nuanced realms of experience with implications for timescapes across past, present and future. Participants of this workshop spoke about how this offered an intentional relational space and ritual that offered safe passage in finishing the fellowship but continuing treasured relationships.
To see more previous workshops
In recent individual consultations some ideas explored include:
including the experience of the body during process of filming/preparing for shooting
For further information or to request a consultation or workshop
Questions are my craft and my passion - I deeply enjoy the practice of shaping questions that are response based, deconstructive, invitational, political and relational with the intention to accompany people in the many endeavours to articulate and share experience. I witness the profound effects daily of what happens when someone has articulated an experience in ways that they haven’t before and the momentum that emerges from this and pours into the medium(s) they choose.
By stepping into a number of different positions in the film, Island of the Hungry Ghosts, my practice was significantly shaped. On one hand, I was engaged by the director, Gabrielle Brady, as a narrative therapy consultant to specifically accompany her in the creative process and in navigating the political landscape as a young, first time, female film maker, determined to make a film that was refusing to be what was expected of in an Australian context. For example, through offering an exercise where I interviewed Gabrielle as the Island, human-protagonist-dominance was resisted and the Island was invited in as a meaningful participant of the project.
I also participated in the film alongside people seeking asylum in my ‘real life role’ as a trauma therapist and together we designed a way of filming the therapeutic sessions that both continued the possibilities of therapy as well as being actively discerning and choosing participants in the multiple stories unfolding in the film.
Through the process of the film I came to understand more clearly how my particular location of privilege as therapist was in operation and in response to this Gabrielle and I also took up a director - non-actor relationship where I shared parts of my (and my family’s) life outside of my professional role as a therapist - stretching me personally to find ways to articulate experience that wasn’t coated in learned (therapeutic) language. Through Gabrielle’s designed exercises I had the opportunity to come into relationship with different parts of my voice that enabled me to also speak on my own terms and in my own words. Gabrielle and I continue to collaborate to this day on film, workshop and writing projects.
I want to be part of practices that honour and make visible the ethics and intentionality of process in relation to image-and community-making.
I come to the practice by developing consultation and workshop spaces responding to the experiences of film making process drawing from my knowledge of post-structuralist therapy (narrative and sandplay) in order to support artists and film makers in articulating their visions, engaging with the things that get in the way of relationships with creative process, exploring what artistic stretch/risk might look like in the person’s context and growing creative practices in non extractive ways.
What I offer in workshops is an opportunity for film makers at all points along their journey to explore their projects in a way that both accompanies and counterbalances the more well known industry aspects such as pitching, script development and technical skills. This compliments and provides a holistic development context for emerging and established film makers as I offer a cross pollination of narrative therapy, centering body knowledge and collaboration, socio-political engagement and creative deconstruction.
I both develop workshops according to themes that are relevant to film makers and artists or according to the needs and interests of mentoring/development programs, film collectives, film schools and film festivals. I have been designing and facilitating variations on different topics and workshop lengths (and individual sessions) to people at specific points in their journey with film since 2015.
For example, recently I designed and shared a workshop on Departures with staff and fellows in DocX Archive Lab. By bringing a multi-storied collection of questions we found together the space to attend to the multiplicity of departing - loss, reconnecting with what we hold precious, articulating what we might be saying no to in departures, bringing the idea of departures into relationship with agency and many other rich, nuanced realms of experience with implications for timescapes across past, present and future. Participants of this workshop spoke about how this offered an intentional relational space and ritual that offered safe passage in finishing the fellowship but continuing treasured relationships.
To see more previous workshops
In recent individual consultations some ideas explored include:
including the experience of the body during process of filming/preparing for shooting
- Attending to our body as an active member of a film process and to include body knowledge and experience in preparing for filming - through a conversational practice I’ve developed called ‘Our multi-storied body’
- Attending to the more-than-technical aspects between a director and a cinematographer - preferred rhythms and relationship with time/pace, responding to difference and/or potential conflict, approach to labour, naming ideas or discourses that might have a lot to say about the upcoming filming process and considering together what position they might like to take in response to these ideas/discourses
- In this specific example we explored how the idea of a formal casting process was disrupting the film maker's preferred approach with coming into relationship with non-actors. In this conversation we designed a process that was in resistance to traditional casting practices according to what this film maker valued and was committed to (relational ethics)
- Moving from competitive and hierarchical demands to hold space for multiple projects and shape rituals and practices for the transitions between each film
- Moving from accepting to be in a film to actively shaping the parameters of one’s own participation
For further information or to request a consultation or workshop