Lecture for week 3 of Community Theatre Project 1 at UWS (BA (Hons) Performance). Quick introduction to some of the key debates in participatory arts

1. Participatory arts – an introduction
to some of the histories & issues
Graham Jeffery
BA(Hons) Performance – Level 9
Community Theatre Project 1 Week 3

2. 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?

4. Rituals
• Different ways in which people enact
community
• What do we mean by ‘enacting’ community?
Or performing community?
Custom, tradition, celebration

6. 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

7. Culture as communication
• As core part of human activity
• Origins of theatre?
Myth, ceremony, celebration, storytelling?
And everyday performance – how we
communicate

8. Forms of popular assembly: rituals,
events

9. The ‘efficacy-entertainment’ dyad
(adapted from Schechner, 2002, p 71)
• EFFICACY/RITUAL • ENTERTAINMENT/PERFORM
Results ING ARTS
Timeless time – the eternal For fun
present Performer self-aware/in
Trance control
Traditional scripts/behaviours Virtuosity highly valued
Transformation of self possible Transformation of self unlikely
Audience participates Audience observes
Audience believes Audience appreciates,
Criticism discouraged evaluates
Collective creativity Criticism flourishes
Individual creativity

10. 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)

11. 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

12. Participatory arts – recent origins
Everyday participation in
cultural practice
Interest in popular culture not
just ‘high art’
1960s and 1970s – critique of
elitism
Politics and engagement
Amateur and ‘voluntary’ arts –
long traditions eg brass
bands, dance schools etc
Interest in the ‘benefits’ of
cultural participation and
notions of cultural democracy

13. Example: Welfare State International
(1968 – 2006)
• Experimental in form –
interdisciplinary collective
of
writers, performers, musicia
ns, 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

14. Longline – final WSI project, 2006
• http://www.youtube.co
m/watch?gl=GB&v=Yep
Z-X1l-aQ

15. Influential ideas
• “Welfare State”
and politics of
culture – making
links to what
people value
• “engineers of the
imagination”
• Concern with
ordinary, vernacul
ar (everyday)
culture
• Evolution into
world-renowned
company
Lanternhouse, Ulverston

16. …wider developments
• Artists in residence
• (eg John Latham/Barbara
Steveni’s Artist Placement
Group)
• Artists in “non-arts” spaces
(hospitals, businesses, priso
ns)
• Drawing attention to
cultural dimensions of all
human activity
• Holistic, integrated, utopian
?
• Pedagogy of participation

17. 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)

18. Later developments
• The arts and health • Participatory/community
movement arts as major
• Arts and community undercurrent in
development contemporary
• Public art practices performance practice,
especially given concern
• Urban and rural for new audiences, new
regeneration spaces, new ways of
• Community doing performance
music, Community dance
etc
• All have their own
traditions/frameworks/ap
proaches

19. 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

20. 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

21. • www.generalpraxis.org.uk
• Graham.Jeffery@uws.ac.uk
• www.twitter.com/grahamjeffer
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