Community
This area is concerned with encouraging, initiating and reflecting on projects in the area of the arts as wellbeing including performances and consultancies.
It is concerned with:
- The arts as empowerment through a dynamic interaction between people, culture and performing, seeing notions of identity forged in this interface by analysing how contextual issues affect the potentially transformative effects of artistic practice
- The exploration of the relationship between performances and the wider society – which means that we are interested in the personal, social and political effects of artistic practice
- The notion of where performance takes place – in the sense that we are interested in how performance is used outside of western traditional venues, such as concert halls and theatres, and through non-traditional dissemination networks into a variety of community settings
- Defining, furthering and expanding the role of the artist, as facilitator of the creativity of others through the exploration of innovative ways that artists can become social interveners, cultural critics and dialectic educators, (in line with the work of Augusto Boal and Paolo Freire) and the role of artistic practice within everyday living
- Exploring the dynamic relationship between Research and Teaching and exploring the notion of pedagogy as empowerment
Specialist areas:
- Performing Arts in Prisons
- Performing arts as social intervention
In addition to arts activities located within communities such as performances and consultancies, members of the Cente are currently concerned with developing practice and theory in the arts as resistance to the neoliberal policies of a government intent upon the destruction of areas of social democracy from which citizens derive their wellbeing.