Staging the deadlock
A deadlock played out, and an audience allowed to interrupt. What the spect-actors try, and above all what nobody tries, produces a new framing of the problem.
Designed · looking for a host
The starting point
Frame Creation begins by writing down what jams the problem: we need X, but X prevents Y. That sentence is the raw material of the workshop, and it only works when the two countries arrive at the deadlock by different routes and neither arrives as the one who teaches. If one side had the answer, there would be no scene.
The concrete subject is agreed with the Consulate before each cycle. The mechanics below do not change with it.
The mechanics
Each subgroup builds a short scene from a concrete deadlock, with a protagonist, an antagonist and an opening line. The scene runs once, whole. Then it runs again, and anyone can interrupt, take the protagonist's place and try a different route.
Every intervention becomes a capture line, always in the same grammar: tried [action] by appealing to [value, actor or lever]. By the end the group has a list of what was tried.
The reframe
Then comes the question that does the work: which lever did nobody reach for? The absences say more than the presences. That is the pivot of Frame Creation, step 6, and the test is simple: rewrite the scene's opening line under the new frame. If the scene now needs different characters, the frame changed. If only the vocabulary changed, nothing did.
Format and host
This is the workshop that puts both sides in the same room, which makes it the most demanding of the three to organise. It works with mixed groups of people who deal with the subject professionally, together with those who live with the consequences of other people's decisions.
There are conversations underway about fitting it into institutional agendas that already exist, rather than creating one more event. If you have a group and a real deadlock, that is the combination we are looking for.