Pause Pairs and the Praxis Lab

I spent a few hours this morning reading about the Oxford Praxis Lab. I know of Rob Poynton who is the director of the Lab, and whose book, Everything’s An Offer was one of the seminal books I read 15-20 years ago as I was exploring improv and embodied exercises and the teaching and hosting practices that I was developing. Praxis Lab is an interesting place where a number of the questions I have recently been in seem to have a good home, where they are watered and fed and well cared for. Each of us are entangled in a series of systems – personal, familial, organisational, professional, societal and ecological – that are themselves interconnected. But the only point of view you have on any of those systems is your own – a point of view which has, built into it, a series of assumptions, values, beliefs, measures and metrics that you take for granted (if you even see them at all). Grappling with such systems, seeking to understand them (so that you can disturb them in an intelligent way)…