Surely not another re-union? Why re-gathering is good for the soul.

We’ve probably had the dubious pleasures of being invited to or attending a school reunion in the time since we left those august institutions at least once in our adult lives.  Whilst they promise so much (reviving old friendships, rekindling old memories and fondly reimagining what we actually did at school) thinking about taking the necessary steps towards those acts of remembrance and re-unification with our past to look into the faces of our peers,  can sober us up quite quickly.

Much like ‘Facebook Friends’ who aren’t actual friends at all but just people you share a bit of cyberspace with for a fraction of the time you spend on the internet,  we might quickly remember that those old school friendships fell by the wayside for a very good reason: those ‘friends’ weren’t friends at all but just acquaintances you had to share your physical day with by virtue of the fact that you were born in the same academic year and happened to live in roughly the same geographic region for no more reason than that’s where your parents decided to pitch up in the long cold winter of 1963.

The promise of unearthing memories from our minds and muscles can be both potentially intriguing and alarming.  Just when we thought we had all our memories safely packed away in a box labelled ‘Treasures’, the reunion risks that box relabelling itself ‘Pandora’s’. This might be a cause for both more pleasure or even more pain: but if we have even half a gambling streak woven into our DNA, then the promise hinted at by the reunion in opening that memory box is one that’s difficult to resist.  Given about 70% of the UK play the national lottery on a regular basis, it’s a fair bet to assume that our gambling instincts are never far away when it comes to justifying our attendance at the forthcoming school reunion.

The cliché of school ‘being the best days of your life’ is never far away when it comes to musing about school reunions and our tendency to completely whitewash the bullying, the frustration and the sheer fear of navigating the hostile terrain that was the school playground frequently gets transmuted into the golden days of jumpers for goal posts, love letters scratched onto the bike sheds and the first illicit ciggie at the bus stop.  We conveniently forget the cuts, the scrapes, the bruises, the rejections and the first cough in our desire to reconstruct  how the experience really wasn’t. The promise of the school reunion is a great catalyst for that act of shaping the base metal of our lived experiences into the gold of the reimagined school life.

So, the false friendships, the alarming memories and the potential failure of transmutation are all good reasons not to attend any school reunion ever.  We can, after all, meet who we like any time we choose on line these days through the plethora of social media channels which have sprung up in the last 30 years.  We can drink ourselves into a stupor with strangers any weekend anywhere we choose and nothing is stopping us from taking a bus, train or plane to spend time back at that little piece of the world which was so formative for us all those years ago: nothing that is, apart from the school security system, surveillance cameras and the suspicion from the gangs who now run the school that you’re somehow up to no good in your desire to visit your old biology lab and check out whether your name is still engraved on those bike shed walls.

With all the unpromising baggage gathering in our homes as we toy with the idea of a LIPA reunion, we might answer the question of why here, why now by accepting that the imminent Community Arts LIPA reunion in August 2025  isn’t just a matter of meeting old friends for a few drinks and swopping a few beaten up old memory cards late into the night which we might leave behind in the hotel on the way back home afterwards.  The Not-the-30^th Reunion-Reunion  gives all of us who were involved in that educational ambition the opportunity to reassess together what that work meant to us back then and perhaps more importantly regroup what it might mean for us and our wider society and its futures.

A Community Arts infused reunion can be more than just about sharing food and gossip and participating in the occasional brawl over the weekend; it can be about making new friends from the company of strangers; it can be about seeing people in the flesh for the very first time in many years rather than through the shiny electronic veneer the social media platforms dress us up in.  It can even be about re-minding and re-membering how arts and culture need to continue to play a role in improving all our lives, all the time, everywhere.  Whitewashed memories are one thing: helping construct whole new futures for those who follow in our footsteps is quite another and something worth regathering for.