Leadership insights from performing arts in and of exile, a live in the in-between

The exact direction this critique took was not what I initially expected. It emerged out of my own experiences both professional and personal of creating a large public work called I CAN MOVE under my organisation Yante in Vienna. It follows - through an autoethnographical lens - my, at times, crisscrossing paths and at times paths down rabbit holes, to both personal and professional discoveries in notions of leadership. I CAN MOVE was what I brought with me when I returned to the area of conflict where I was born. It was a four years training of trainers programme in dance and performance in traumatised communities. A programme I wanted to make sustainable and endure in some form. The autoethnographic lens recognises the importance of agency and how that agency shapes environments as well as actual and symbolic objects with which we populate those and how those in turn shape the direction of our agency.
What I came back to Vienna with was the idea of a leadership of self which I now use in my role as a leadership trainer in an Austrian organisation. I critique all aspects of my work to explore mutual impacting and the consequences of a lack of insight into socio/political/personal and professional dynamics when one is having to firefight on a daily basis with internal and external demons not least of those of exile and the returning exile. In many ways I wanted to give to those young people what I did not have when I was them, but now, I can go and they must stay.
There is no great revelation about how to fund and set up community arts projects; each individual has their own motivations and drive and the published reports contain the many performance dimensions that may be useful to others working in this area. The insights through this autoethnographic lens were about my own leadership or lack of it and the struggle to bring that programme to fruition in which I needed to face the obstacles to my own learning and the obstacles others had to theirs. Projects work not because of one individual but because of successful teams, partnerships and committed participants, not just to the programme but to each other. The question arises for all organisations of how that is to be achieved. I think I understand better now that it is not a process of listing steps to take but providing the conditions so that it can emerge.