Hunting the ‘play’: A leadership suite in 12 movements

Abstract

This article has been crafted to evoke the sound of leadership. It represents the hum and sigh and pounding of leadership as it appeared, disappeared and reappeared each time looking and sounding different in an extraordinary undertaking where senior citizens, many with no acting experience performed T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. The metaphor of a hunt and an episodic form represents our experience and we have sought to suggest sound by using principles of montage, Gestalt theory, and the poetic devise of enjambment that leave one reaching after meaning rather than being comforted by end points. This article represents research that we very nearly abandoned, because it simply did not ring true when we wrote in conventional ways. As a result, we advocate different ways of writing not only because we love good writing but because for us, different writing was the only way that we could do justice to this story.