Participatory arts – an introduction to some of the histories & issues

Graham Jeffery

BA(Hons) Performance – Level 9 Community Theatre Project 1 Week 3

What is ‘participation’?

• In what different ways do people ‘participate’ in the arts?

• How is participation developed and valued?• Why does participation matter? • Participatory arts – a term developed to refer to

specific approaches/techniques/methods of engaging people in arts practice – but also part of a broader philosophical movement in arts practice

• Has its roots in participatory politics – what might that mean?

Rituals

• Different ways in which people enact community

• What do we mean by ‘enacting’ community?Or performing community?

Custom, tradition, celebration

Human behaviour as “symbolic action”

• once human behaviour is seen as…symbolic action which, like phonation in speech, pigment in painting, line in writing, or sonance in music, signifies - the question as to whether culture is patterned conduct or a frame of mind, or even the two somehow mixed together, loses sense…Behaviour must be attended to, and with some exactness, because it is through the flow of behaviour - or more precisely, social action - that cultural forms find articulation. They find it as well, of course, in various forms of artefacts, and various states of consciousness, but these draw their meaning from the role they play…in an ongoing pattern of life..

Clifford Geertz : the interpretation of cultures, 1973

Culture as communication• As core part of human activity• Origins of theatre?

Myth, ceremony, celebration, storytelling?

And everyday performance – how we communicate

Forms of popular assembly: rituals, events

The ‘efficacy-entertainment’ dyad(adapted from Schechner, 2002, p 71)

• EFFICACY/RITUALResultsTimeless time – the eternal presentTranceTraditional scripts/behavioursTransformation of self possibleAudience participatesAudience believesCriticism discouragedCollective creativity

• ENTERTAINMENT/PERFORMING ARTS

For funPerformer self-aware/in controlVirtuosity highly valuedTransformation of self unlikelyAudience observesAudience appreciates, evaluatesCriticism flourishesIndividual creativity

The participatory and community arts movement

• Origins in critique of mass culture as producing passive, placated individuals (Theodor Adorno)

• Stressing active participation/production above ‘passive’ consumption

• Critique of strict divide between ‘amateur’ and ‘professional’ art-making and hierarchies of status i

• Concerned with reconstructing, regenerating notions of ‘community’

• Access to tools, resources, spaces for everyone to make art • “Everyone is an artist” (Joseph Beuys)

Community• Complex concept• Multiple definitions• ‘bringing a community into

being’ rather than just reflecting bounded, geographical or ethnic entity

• We all belong to multiple communities

• Processes of ‘inclusion and exclusion’

• Questions of power and agency

Participatory arts – recent origins

Everyday participation in cultural practiceInterest in popular culture not just ‘high art’ 1960s and 1970s – critique of elitismPolitics and engagementAmateur and ‘voluntary’ arts – long traditions eg brass bands, dance schools etcInterest in the ‘benefits’ of cultural participation and notions of cultural democracy

Example: Welfare State International(1968 – 2006)

• Experimental in form – interdisciplinary collective of writers, performers, musicians, visual artists, pyrotechnians etc

• Co-operative forms of organisation

• Concerned with celebration and participation

• Making use of popular stories, myths and forms

• Nomadic, drawing on circus, outdoor street theatre traditions

Longline – final WSI project, 2006

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?gl=GB&v=YepZ-X1l-aQ

Influential ideas• “Welfare State” and

politics of culture – making links to what people value

• “engineers of the imagination”

• Concern with ordinary, vernacular (everyday) culture

• Evolution into world-renowned company

Lanternhouse, Ulverston

…wider developments• Artists in residence• (eg John Latham/Barbara

Steveni’s Artist Placement Group)

• Artists in “non-arts” spaces (hospitals, businesses, prisons)

• Drawing attention to cultural dimensions of all human activity

• Holistic, integrated, utopian?• Pedagogy of participation

1970s: the establishment of ‘community arts’ as a category of practice

• Contested definitions

• Later work substituted ‘participatory’ for ‘community’ given the problematic status of the word ‘community’

• Debates still rage over questions of product vs process, ‘access’ vs ‘quality’ etc

(from Su Braden, “Artists and People”, 1978)

Later developments

• The arts and health movement

• Arts and community development

• Public art practices• Urban and rural regeneration• Community music,

Community dance etc• All have their own

traditions/frameworks/approaches

• Participatory/community arts as major undercurrent in contemporary performance practice, especially given concern for new audiences, new spaces, new ways of doing performance

The field of participatory arts

• access and participation

• learning and pathways

• “social inclusion” strategies

• arts and cultural regeneration

• the value of cultural participation

• Health, wellbeing, identity, place

Futures? Challenges and preoccupations

• the participatory turn in culture and cultural policy

• digital engagement/web: Clay Shirky: “Here Comes Everybody”

• mass media is changing - peer to peer, network society

• performance into action – performance as action – performance as protest

• “Occupy” movement as a form of community theatre/re-enactment

• activist perspectives - changing communities - radical theatre - work on the edge in interesting locations

• ‘austerity’ and the decline of state support for the arts – debates about funding and organisation

• Urban design. Community design. Place. Sustainability issues

• www.generalpraxis.org.uk

• Graham.Jeffery@uws.ac.uk

• www.twitter.com/grahamjeffery