Field Notes #2: Discovering Together
One of our hopes for the Discovery Cards has always been that they could open discovery both in solitude and in community.
This July, we gathered for our third Discovery Potluck with the newly forming Discovery Troupe to continue exploring that possibility. Guests arrived throughout the evening, shared the dishes they had brought, and quietly settled into their own first encounter with the cards.
To begin, we introduced a simple invitation that I have been prototyping with Adhi Jusuf in the Bay Area for his café and other public spaces. We wanted to create a way for someone to begin a Discovery Card experience without needing a facilitator—something that could offer just enough structure to invite curiosity while leaving room for personal exploration.
Each person selected one of two cards and chose their own way of entering. Some befriended a card and sat or walked quietly alongside it. Others allowed a question to emerge from the image. Others followed the card into movement, discovering relationships with their bodies and the room. We all concluded at a shared dining table, taking time to journal about anything that emerged for us in our experience.
At that point, everyone had begun forming a relationship with a card of their own.
Then the Discovery Troupe entered. (Today it was Christian A and me- Andrew Suseno.)
Rather than performing for the audience, two troupe members continued the same inquiry in public. We began by simply playing with the pillows alone and with one another. After a sufficient amount of time, an audience member introduced a card of their choice into the space. This card invited us to root. The pillows became the nourishing earth beneath our feet. Bodies leaned away from one another in counterbalance while arms reached outward like branches, discovering strength through our relationship as our balance became the essence of the trunk itself. Later, that same audience member was invited to reveal the other card through their own entrance into the improvisation. The quality of the room shifted. The movement became lighter, more playful. The pillows that had once been earth suddenly became something that could be tossed, caught, and shared through the air.
As the troupe improvised, elements of each card came alive in unexpected ways. The movements stretched the stories people saw emerging from the images and stirred layers of memory, imagination, and wondering. Because everyone had already formed a relationship with a card of their own, the performance did not remain separate from them. What unfolded in the room began to mingle with and expand their own discoveries.
The Gestures card
When we returned to our journals afterward, none of us were writing from quite the same place we had begun. Our reflections had been layered by everything we had witnessed: another person's movement, a surprising gesture, a moment of play, a pillow transformed from earth into flight. Other people's discoveries had quietly become part of our own.
Only then did we gather around the table and share the questions that emerged from this collective experience.
When we gathered around the table, the questions that had emerged through the cards continued to unfold. We talked about the importance of play and how easily it can be stripped from adult life. We wondered how to stay present with discomfort rather than immediately turning away, and how we might find our way back toward culture when parts of it have been lost or interrupted. As we ate, the conversation moved through language, sound, and onomatopoeia—how words can carry culture not only through definition, but through rhythm, imitation, and play. The meal became another part of the discovery: play returning through language, laughter, and the ways we responded to one another.
A Discovery Card can absolutely become a quiet companion in your own home. But when discoveries are witnessed, challenged, and expanded by other people, something else becomes possible. We begin to realize that meaning isn't something we arrive at alone. It is something we keep making together.
If you're in New York, Discovery Potluck happens the third Friday of each month at Prime Produce. Bring a dish if you'd like. We'll bring the cards, and together we'll continue discovering what becomes possible when our questions are held by a community. (Please message me if you are interested in joining the Troupe!)
