When a library asked
the question with the body.
Daniele asked the question long before I arrived: How should we receive young people when they walk through the door? Most libraries ask that question professionally, in meetings and in routines. Deichman wanted to ask it with the body. This is what happened.
I danced before I said a word
I have danced on many stages. This time I danced in a library.
Before I began, I asked everyone to bring one thing to mind: Their challenge. The real one, the one they feel in the body at work. Then I danced the journey from now to what you could become.
The room saw a different dance each. Because each of them saw their own challenge in the movement. We built the rest of the day from there, not from my script but from their reality. I have a core I want to reach, but the road there is never straight. Sometimes I start at the core. Sometimes at the edges.
Nobody was handed new capacities. They found their own.
Distance is a tool, not a problem
A room full of librarians. One speaker. Impossible to be close to all of them, you would think.
The principle I showed them: The distance to each individual decides how much contact you actually hold. Not the number of people in the room. Stand close to one, and the rest fall out of contact. Shorten the distance to everyone at once, and suddenly the whole room is with you.
Breadth with closeness, not depth with few. That is a team leadership skill, and it is the same skill that decides the meeting in the doorway: The young person walking in feels the distance before anyone says a word.
One librarian walks differently from the colleague beside her
We did a walking reading. One by one they crossed the floor, and the rest of the room saw their pattern for the first time.
Some go straight in. Some circle. Some stop and sense the temperature of the room before moving on. None of them had thought about it before, and none of them did it the same way.
The insight that landed in the room: The way you move towards a person is the way you meet them. The librarian who circles before she speaks to a young person in the doorway does the same thing in the movement as in the conversation. The one who goes straight in does the same there too.
When you see how uniquely you move, you see how uniquely you meet others.
The courage was theirs, not mine
It is easy to see a day like this as something an outsider comes in and does. That is not right. The day existed because someone inside the organisation asked a question they could not read their way to the answer of.
Deichman gave their team a day where the question was asked with the whole body. Walk, distance, movement in the room, all of it answering the same thing. The librarians who walked out had not been given a correct answer. They had been given a new place to check.
Which other doorways deserve this training?
The staff day is over, but the question it opened is still with me. A library trained bodily communication for one day. What about all the other professions that meet people in a doorway?
The reception at a doctor's office. The shop where the first impression decides the rest of the visit. The emergency room where someone walks in frightened. All of them carry a bodily communication nobody has taught them deliberately. They learned it by standing there, year after year, working it out alone.
Not because the training does not exist. Because nobody thought to give it to them.
Published July 2026. Photo and video: Own material from the engagement.