Last week we hosted a Passover Seder at our apartment and I was reminded once again of the transformative power of small groups, not only for audiences, but as generative, co-creative spaces. Whether we are a small group intentionally engaged in art-making of one kind or another, or whether we are engaged in some other endeavor, there is something uniquely powerful about small groups.

Over the past five essays I’ve explored a variety of live, in-person, small group experiences: seeing Kristen Kosmas’ solo show in the storefront gallery Room 608 in Seattle in 1992, missing the Nirvana show at the OK Hotel but seeing them at the Paramount in 1991, the changes in Daniel Fish’s staging of Oklahoma! as it moved from St. Ann’s Warehouse to Broadway to touring show, the WYSIWYG Talent show that gathered a dispersed online community together in real life, and what it looks like when we view the world through the lens of small groups.

Looking back at these essays, and my experiences, I have identified a few components that make up the Alchemy of Small Groups:

• Can the person/people onstage make eye contact with the audience?
• Can the audience make eye contact with each other?
• Do any of the audience members know each other?
• Do any of the audience members know the person/people onstage?
• Does the subject matter engage a shared experience, interest or perspective?
• Does the audience trust the person/people onstage?
• Does the person/people onstage trust the audience?
• Does the audience trust each other?

Ultimately it is about being able to feel the presence of, and be viscerally connected to, other people in multiple directions.  If the space is intimate enough that the person onstage can get your attention just by staring at you, maybe share a wink and a nod, a moment of connection and understanding, then we are not merely passive spectators, we are participants. We are, in some way, influencing the energy and attitude of everyone in the room.

We know a little bit about the neuroscience behind it – mirror neurons, etc. – but I feel that we are still only at the beginning of apprehending the complex dynamics of group experience. I’ve often hypothesized that there is this space in between the performer and the audience, this space of “deep intersubjectivity” where we project our imaginations outward into a shared space, where we collectively co-create the energy and possibility of the physical space we inhabit.

And this intimate co-imagination engenders a feeling that where you are is special and significant, more than just the regular every day. It is that feeling that everyone in the room is meant to be in the room, that this specific group of people, in this place, at this time, is somehow extraordinary.

One of the things that artists do – and great live performances do – is create that sense of the extraordinary. In reality, we could experience this sense of the awesome and extraordinary at any moment, at any time and in any place. It is the mark of the really brilliant artist to create the conditions for us to experience awe and wonder, however briefly, and to feel connected to each other and to the vast, interdependent web of Being of which we all are a part.

So, while the Alchemy of Small Groups can operate in many ways and with many different dynamics, I think the following qualities (to name a very few) are important for collaborative creation:

• Trust
• Familiarity
• Curiosity
• Attention
• Generosity

These qualities can be cultivated, and even incorporated into the design and dramaturgy of a performance. I think back to 600 Highwaymen’s A Thousand Ways, Part 3: An Assembly (read my write-up of it here) where sixteen strangers were brought together in a room to follow instructions on index cards. The index cards structured the time, the encounter, our experience of the space and our engagement with each other in such a way that by the conclusion of the “performance” we had been on a journey together, we had been through something together, we had formed a temporary, transitory community. The Alchemy of Small Groups.

And, of course, it is not just live performances where this happens – the Alchemy of Small Groups suffuses every aspect of our lives.

Not too long ago I hopped on a Zoom call with two of my high school friends, Steve Gimbel and Gwydion Suilebhan. It had been a long time since we had spoken but it felt like picking up a conversation we’d been having only the day before. We were part of a small group of nerdy kids who sat at the same lunch table every day for four years of high school. Over all that time we unconsciously developed ways of conversing, debating, thinking and joking that have become like muscle memory. I don’t remember every conversation we ever had, or even many of them, but I remember the experience of being in conversation and community, of learning to think and discuss and create together. This small group of high school kids sharing a lunch table, in some ways, influenced the way I would think, act and relate to others for the rest of my life. And the habits of conversation and collaboration we developed together decades ago, persist.

More recently, over the past 2+ years, ever since my mom, and then my father, died a little over a year apart, I’ve made a habit of saying kaddish – the Jewish mourner’s prayer – every Saturday. At the beginning I tried to say it every day. Until I started saying kaddish for my parents, I never really understood why Jewish tradition requires a minyan – at least 10 people – for daily prayers, because you’re not supposed to say kaddish by yourself, you’re supposed to be part of a minyan. I have come to realize that it is a meaningfully different experience of being present with other people and being seen as a mourner by them. Not necessarily making a big deal out of it, not even interacting directly with other people in the room, but just being present with each other, focusing on something both inside and outside of yourself, part of a collective project of intentionality and attention. Maybe it is because of the fixed structure of the service, the repetition and rhythms of personal and collective prayer, the murmuring and focusing and spacing out and refocusing, in real time, being present but facing inward, together.

The Alchemy of Small Groups in these contexts is about affinity, trust, experimentation, openness, tolerance of failure and generative dialogue. When small groups of people engage in cultural, creative, formal and social experimentation together, over time, they develop shared understandings, conversational shorthand and familiarity. They learn how to talk to each other, ask questions and think together. They help lead each other into new knowledge and ideas. Sometimes they argue and disagree but generative conflict is part of the process of discovery.

Watching Peter Jackson’s Beatles documentary Get Back is an amazing opportunity to see this dynamic in action. There is one scene in particular where the titular song starts to really come together, where Paul starts with some fragments of a song, George and Ringo start filling it in and, eventually, John shows up and fills it in some more. Over the course of the film we watch this small group negotiate some really difficult artistic and personal disagreements, but we also see them come together to co-create something exceptional.

(Even when it comes to cultural production of mass media, the building block of so much of “television” is the writer’s room! Small groups!)

When we think about the larger ecosystems of culture and society, and we start to look at our world through the lens of small groups, it becomes glaringly clear that small groups are the organizing principle, the bedrock and building blocks of the whole thing: the root system. Society focuses on the fruit of the tree because it is visible above ground, but the root system is infinitely more vast, complex and necessary. We’ve learned that root systems are interconnected and communicate over vast distances and times. (H/T to the book The Overstory and the movie Strange World, where I first heard about Pando).

What would the world look like, and how would we organize ourselves differently, if we centered small groups in the way we think about cultural production and social organization? What would we do differently, what types of different solutions, ideas, models and innovation would we devise if we resisted the lure of scale and size and short-termism to invest in human-size small groups to create transformative change over longer arcs of time?

Human beings operate best in small groups. It is slow, it is messy, it is inefficient. But it feels right. It builds connections, fends off loneliness and isolation, and nourishes us. It makes us more creative and resilient. Adjusting our gaze to appreciate the Alchemy of Small Groups – and organize accordingly – will make our experience of being human in the world better. Isn’t that something worth working towards?