Journalist Tracy E Gilchrist only had four minutes with Wicked actors Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande – and she had to make them count. She just didn’t bargain to be a part of one of the year’s most used memes because of saying the phrase “keep space”. “I just went in and did my job, which was to try to get an authentic answer to a question in a very short amount of time,” she says. “It felt like the right term for what I was trying to convey to Cynthia, which is the idea that you can interact with a work of art like Defying gravity and feel something in yourself.”
In the interview – a standard rubbish affair from rotating film journalists – Gilchrist introduces her question and informs Erivo that “people take the lyrics of Defying Gravity and really hold space with them and feel power in them”.
If the comment itself was slightly left-field, Erivo’s tearful reaction was even more so. “It’s really powerful,” says the British actor, who plays the lead role, Elphaba, in the screen adaptation of the stage musical. “This is what I wanted,” she added, gripping co-star Grande’s index finger.
It was the latest stop on an overly serious press tour that included the actors revealing matching lyric tattoos on Kelly Clarkson’s talk show. Gilchrist’s question reflects the rise in popularity of the phrase “holding space”, a companion term to popular self-help concepts such as “emotional bandwidth” and “drawing boundaries”. But what does that actually mean? And how do you hold it to the lyrics of a 20-year-old Stephen Schwartz musical number?
“For me it means being in the moment,” says Gilchrist, who has worked for Out magazine. “To be fully open to something and not to be cynical. Hearing something – maybe a song like Defying Gravity that you’ve heard hundreds of times – and having it hit you in a new way.” So just kind of… being there? “If it had been a few years ago, I might have said ‘people feel seen’,” she says. “You can feel like you’re being seen by a piece of art, or a song, or another person, so I think it can be very similar.”
Heather Plett, a Canadian author and coach who holds a workshop on holding space on Vancouver Island, says it’s a concept she’s been running workshops on for 15 years. “The way I define it is that it’s a practice we do when we show up for another person in support of whatever they’re going through. We do this without judgment, or without trying to superimpose our own story on theirs, and we offer them compassion and support while allowing them to have their own sovereignty.”
The etymology of the term is vague, but it may have something to do with Donald Winnicott’s writing about the maternal attitude environment in the 1950s and 1960s – or what would probably be called a safe space in 2024 parlance.
Lesley Caldwell, a psychoanalyst and emeritus professor at University College London, says: “Holding relates to the question of what happens in an analytic session and what the analyst provides [for a patient]. It is also derived from the idea of what a mother does with a baby – although we can now extend this to the caregiver. The question is: what are the conditions in which a safe space is established and how can it still be established internally by someone as a result of the early infant care they experience?”
This is hardly the first case of therapy-speak bleeding into everyday conversation – “inner child” and “repression” refer to Freud. “There are quite a lot of phrases like this, for example: ‘It’s triggering’,” says Peter Kinderman, a professor of clinical psychology at the University of Liverpool. “It is the use of psychological jargon in everyday life to confuse.”
“I think we feel that if we have a specialist term for something, it legitimizes it,” says Hazel Price, a lecturer in English at the University of Salford, who first came across the term in a neonatal group. have. “We tend to use expert language because it somehow legitimizes something that really isn’t rooted in any kind of rigorous evidence.”
But Benjy Kusi, a 29-year-old inclusion and wellness consultant, insists some in the LGBTQ+ community have been using it for years. “I would say in the strange spaces I’m in that it’s used quite often. I facilitate workshops on topics such as anti-racism and LGBTQ+ inclusion, and in such sessions I hold space for people to share their lived experiences.”
Is any phrase bad – even if it’s jargon – if it encourages compassion? “I’m just happy that we have some joy and that most people come together as a community and have fun with it,” says Gilchrist. She doesn’t regret asking the question.
