Facilitating now. A workshop.
Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, London, UK
Friday, June 21, 2024. 10:00 – 11:30. Birkbeck Central
Is facilitating part of your work? Using collaborative mapping exercises, this workshop will provide a site to compare notes, share approaches and build new vocabularies.
While the discourse around artistic facilitating originates in the field of Applied Theater with Augusto Boal's Theater of the Oppressed, it is becoming increasingly clear that facilitating is widely present across the arts. A broader focus on facilitating as creative practice has formed or is currently emerging in performance philosophy, artistic research, social practice art, and in cultural policy, including a re-evaluation of roles artists inhabit.
Unlike outcome-driven professional and workplace facilitation, facilitating as creative practice cultivates agency by remaining open ended and exploratory, invigorating community, gauging ways of making sense, and sparking new imaginaries. In doing so, artist-facilitators continue to draw on performance modalities, while also engaging with design, installation, music, language, gaming, and social practices.
Facilitating as creative practice has emerged as artists increasingly occupy multiple roles, serving as arts educators and mediators, arts administrators, and counselors, in roles that already include working through co-operative, communicative systems. Facilitating decenters artists, artistic events, and art objects, while foregrounding co-creation towards shared insights and experiences, and the agency those afford. Such a shift raises many questions around expertise, status, compensation, available sites, and more.
Facilitating as creative practice draws on cognitive, social, and political theory, modeling ways of instituting, mitigating economic and epistemic violence, reframing research methodology, engaging with ritual, enacting participatory sense-making, complicating translation, and more.
