Journal of Arts & Communities - Volume 15, Issue 1, 2024

This article explores leadership and theories around the engagement of diverse communities in community-based theatre concluding with the proposal of a series of prevocational interrogative questions. Articulating these questions and the reasoning for them through documented UK-based participatory community-centric projects, with requisite theoretical frameworks, suggestions are made with regard to leadership and planning strategies in order to engage participants in projects that have meaning and purpose. In thinking about process over product it is argued that the strategic thinking needed for successful engagement must be interrogative and reflexive and take account of all stakeholders and the wider context of the project itself.

In this article, I take up the educational turn in curating and recontextualize it in my current curatorial practice that seeks to cultivate ecological awareness in its participants, defined as developing relationships between human and other-than-human beings through a process of sensuous pedagogy. With a post-qualitative approach, I analyse my own working process of curating the exhibition Habitat at Agder Kunstsenter in Kristiansand, Norway, in 2022. Partly taking place in the nature park Lista and in the city of Kristiansand, I made a framework for the exhibition that questions and explores our notions of inhabitation for both human and more-than-human beings. As one of the specific projects in the Habitat programme, I further explore the process of curating the participatory performance work CITY MATTERS with artist Tora Balslev. It is a personal account of how we experienced and created sensuous pedagogy between human and more-than-human beings in Kristiansand.

Given the increased frequency and severity of extreme climate events such as bushfires, innovative approaches to support community resilience are urgently needed. Amongst the variety of ways that communities and service providers are responding to natural disasters, creative arts interventions represent an inclusive and effective approach to supporting community resilience. Analysing a case study from rural Queensland, Australia, this article delineates the features of arts and creativity that support resilience-building in communities. It identifies three transferrable principles and arts-based processes which may be embedded into future projects to support disaster-affected communities to creatively nurture and articulate resilience.