Create Ikebana As A Team: A Collective Sense of Beauty

Photo from Co-Cre! Project

IKERU has two types of programs, one for individuals and one for a group. While one person creates their own ikebana at IKERU for individuals, four or five people create one ikebana as a team at IKERU group workshop. In the team, each member has his or her own role - a member is assigned either with branches, or main flowers, or other flowers - and they take turns to arrange their assigned flowers.

Whether you create ikebana on your own or as a team, the essence is the same: let flowers live by listening to the voice of flowers. Having said that, there are of course some differences between the two. At the individual ikebana, you are the only one who would listen to the voice of flowers, while there are five people at the team ikebana.

The voice of flowers is not something fixed or unchanged. It changes according to a person who listens to. It goes through a filter, each person's sensibility, before reaching us. Therefore, if there are five people, there are five different voices of flowers. In other words, people would have different perspectives on what is beautiful, as each person has his or her sense of beauty.

When the team members cannot decide what they think is beautiful as a team, tension may rise among them. I have noticed there are two common patterns on this tension.

First, the tension is always somewhat peaceful. Even when the members have some disagreements, they never become hostile to each other. I guess it is because they talk about how they can "let flowers live", not about "how they want to arrange flowers". There is a certain distance between the object (flowers) and themselves (their ego). The distance allows them to stay calm and fair. If it is about "how you want to arrange flowers", people may start trying to convince others that their way of arranging flowers is better, which might lead to not-so-peaceful confrontation.

Second, despite the tension, the team somehow manages to create one beautiful ikebana in the end. And they love their work. In the course of creating one ikebana as a team, they come to understand and learn how other members try to let flowers live. Then, sometime along the way, they start developing a 'collective' sense of beauty which would guide them to the end. It is always amazing and even mystical to see the collective sense of beauty emerge and shared among the members. This is as if those who have never paddled a canoe are put in a canoe in the ocean. They manage to learn together how to paddle even though there is no teacher or the experienced and start paddling and synchronizing their breathing.

The sense of beauty about an object is something totally subjective and is different from person to person. However, by focusing on how we let the object look most beautiful, not on what we think is beautiful, we can separate ourselves, our egos, from the object. This separation between the object and our egos allows us to fully appreciate the beauty of the object as well as how others see its beauty. With this empathy to the object and each other, we eventually develop a collective sense of beauty. This collective sense is not exclusive to the individual sense, meaning that we can share a collective sense of beauty while keeping our own sense of beauty. The collective and the individual coexist.

As a result, a team would end up saying: "We were able to create beautiful ikebana which would not have been possible if it was done by each." This remark, which I hear at any group ikebana workshop, reminds me of the reason why humans work together.