When Failure Means Success: Music, movement, ritual and facilitation with Middle East youth and UCLA students: A Dialogue between John Wesley Days, Jr. & Sonja Arsham Kuftinec

Abstract

In their dialogue, Wesley Days and Sonja Arsham Kuftinec discuss their work as arts-informed facilitators working with Arab and Israeli youth at a camp in Maine and with Days’ students at the University of California, Los Angeles. The article focuses on Days's model of facilitation, which is informed by the Afro-Brazilian spiritual practice of Candomble and the ritual of Capoeira. Days proposes that music, movement, and ritual creates a container in which the energies of conflict find new forms and understandings. Within this framework, the facilitator-as-teacher operates more as a disorienting guide than source of expertise, dramaturging the experience of the participants through the energies of the Afro-Brazilian Orixa–the abstract energies of nature and ancestry that protect, heal and inspire.

At Seeds of Peace camp in Maine, Arab and Israeli youth learn that they must “fail” at more conventional models of conflict resolution in order to reencounter themselves and redirect the conflict scenario. In contrast, students at UCLA failed to fully challenge and resist attitudes forged by the neoliberal institution—attitudes that restrict the emergence of an engaged participatory community. There was no final resolution to the conflicts in either site, only the possibilities and failures of ongoing transformation.