Chapter 5: How Relationships Are Made
Relationships Between Two Parties
Chapter 4 ended with a practical question: How are relationships made? To answer this question and understand the larger relational ecosystem of a festival, this chapter begins with its smallest unit of analysis: a continuing relationship between two parties. In its most immediate form, this is a relationship between two people. It may also be a relationship between a person and an organisation, or between organisations such as a festival and a funder, partner or public authority. Organisations, however, do not perceive, communicate, value, decide or take responsibility independently of people. They enter relationships through particular representatives, while roles, policies, resources and institutional conditions shape what those representatives can promise, decide and provide.
Beginning with two parties does not mean treating a relationship as an isolated unit. Every relationship is connected to other relationships and takes place within wider social, organisational, cultural and material conditions. The two-party perspective is a temporary analytical lens: it allows us to see relational dynamics clearly before examining how many such relationships interact within organisations, festival ecosystems and communities.
Beginning with people also does not confine the analysis to private or interpersonal skill. Organisational messages, curatorial texts, campaigns, meetings and programmes are conceived and enacted by people, while roles, timelines, budgets, channels, policies and working conditions shape what those people can communicate and what others can perceive. Each relational element will therefore be followed from its operation between people into festival practice. The later examination of relationships within organisations will not repeat these applications; it will ask how their underlying principles can become reliable organisational conditions rather than remaining dependent upon the skill, goodwill or availability of particular individuals.
For the purposes of this Reader, a continuing relationship is formed through three interacting elements:
THE THREE ELEMENTS OF RELATIONSHIP
- Relationship = Communication + Cost Exchange + Expectations Across Time.
Communication concerns how messages from one person’s inner world become available to another, how they are perceived and interpreted, and how different mental maps enter into contact.
Cost exchange concerns what each party gives, carries, risks, postpones or relinquishes; what return each receives; and how this exchange affects capacity, value, attachment, dependency and power.
Expectations across time concern what the parties learn to anticipate from one another through promises, roles, previous experience and repeated behaviour.
These elements do not operate separately. Communication creates, clarifies or distorts expectations. Expectations influence which costs each party is prepared or required to carry. Cost exchange affects capacity, value, trust, attachment, dependency and power. These consequences then change how later messages are transmitted and perceived. A relationship is therefore not a fixed connection between two parties but a continuing cycle through which responses become consequences, consequences become patterns and patterns shape the conditions of future responses.
The chapter begins with communication—not because communication is the whole relationship, but because it is one of the principal ways through which the inner worlds, intentions, perceptions and differences of the parties become available within the relational field.