Journal of Arts & Communities - Volume 7, Issue 1-2, 2015

Forms of participatory practice have become ever more widely employed across the arts in recent years, operating across various institutional settings and social contexts. It is misleading, however, to assume that a single agenda binds these developments or that they serve the same social values and interests. Veils of common terminology can conceal important differences of political intent and ethical integrity. Conceptions of art, artists, culture and community vary widely, while terms such as participation, engagement and co-creation are rarely well defined. This article draws on current research into UK cultural and artistic leadership, as well as established theories of participation and action, to explore the complex power relations that underpin participatory discourse. It critiques policies and practices that claim ‘participation’ as an automatic methodological virtue, questioning the positive connotations of participatory language, particularly in relation to shaping assumptions of shared interest. It argues that there is a need for improved critical selfawareness on the part of artists involved in participatory projects and processes, discussing possible frameworks for analysis of the relevant power relationships.

This article will describe Collective Encounters’ participatory practice and situate it within the field of Theatre for Social Change (TFSC). It will argue that in the current political climate TFSC can be a useful tool of opposition. The article will chart the company’s radicalization and call for a repoliticization of the participatory arts sector. It will explore how theatre can contribute to social justice in the context of austerity, how it can challenge the ubiquitous neo-liberal narrative, and what kinds of participatory arts practices might aid the global movement for radical change.

Collective Encounters is a professional arts organization specializing in TFSC. The company is based in north Liverpool, an area of extreme disadvantage, ranked among the top ten in England’s Indices of Multiple Deprivation (DCMS 2011). It works with diverse marginalized communities both here and in the wider North West: many participants are casualties of the prevailing system and feel the direct impact of benefit cuts and the shrinking of the state. Collective Encounters is a small charity employing seven staff members and additional freelance artists as required. It is governed by a board of directors and has a formal legal company structure. The company provides all its work free at the point of use, and thus is dependent on public funding as well as on grants from trusts and foundations. Since 2004, Collective Encounters has maintained three strands to its work: a participatory programme, a professional theatre programme and a research lab. The company is driven by a research imperative to explore ways in which theatre can contribute to the world-wide ‘multitude of opposition’1, working towards greater social justice and against global corporate capitalism’ (Thornton 2015: 2). Over the past five years it has shifted from a liberal to a radical change agenda, and has conducted academic, practical and sectoral research in order to understand and define its field. It has thus identified TFSC as a discernable set of practices by drawing out five key characteristics: intentionality, community, hyphenation, conscientization and aesthetics. While individually they are not unique to TFSC, taken together they frame the field; they are the driving forces behind Collective Encounters thinking and provoke the ethical dilemmas with which the company grapples. They provide an interesting lens through which to view participatory arts practice within the current social and political climate.

This article presents a project that applies a collaborative design and an integrated evaluation approach to the bottom-up development of an immersive installation. In the inception of the set-up, user-related concerns for artistic technology-based applications were addressed in order to identify creative opportunities for the implemented multimodal technologies. For this purpose, an interdisciplinary collaboration between researchers from the arts, computer science and systematic musicology was established. Throughout a six-month project, a participatory and iterative design methodology was applied to the development of an augmented reality-based artistic installation. The project aimed at testing the flexibility of the technological platform, the artistic opportunities latent in the immersive installation domain, how users’ cultural aspirations could be accommodated within the installation, how subjects with a standard media literacy were to engage with the technology at hand, and whether the quality of the experience could be improved by meeting the stated aesthetic requirements. The employed design strategy resulted in a user-inspired and use case-driven development process, in which gesturally controlled audio-visual features were tested, evaluated and improved for the entire duration of the project. Results include the delivery of 22 operational use cases in six different artistic application domains and the assessment of the applied methodology by means of the user-centred evaluation. In summary, SoundField’s strategy of in-situ stakeholder involvement within the creative process allowed for following three: (1) successful implementations in a variety of cultural practices to be distilled, (2) limitations of the platform’s interactive nature to be identified and (3) the rendition of guidelines for establishing user acceptance towards multimediated embodied interactive technologies.

This study contributes to the field of films for social change by exploring the production process of participatory film-making for social change, whereby explicit claims of community empowerment, participation and social change are the very justification of the production. To do so, it investigates the definitions and production processes of community art, participatory video and mediated participation. Using ‘practice as research’ as a key method of enquiry, we examine three film practices to explore aspects of professionalism. The objective of this examination is to elucidate the process of community member participation in collaboration with film-makers, facilitators and action researchers. People participate in film production processes by contributing to the script, acting, location scouting or any other activity at any stage of the film production. In examining this collaborative process, we focus on dilemmas encountered in relation to integrating participatory qualities and artistic qualities in a work of overall interdisciplinary and professional quality. The material used for the enquiry consists of participatory observations, scripts, films, course materials, audience observations, evaluation forms and in-depth interviews collected over the years in different projects. The analysis of the material indicates that the film-makers deal with dilemmas regarding the balance of the film’s participatory and artistic qualities and the production process. The expectations of the film-making community regarding the process, the resulting film and the related audience influence the balance between the participatory quality of the process and the artistic quality of the film. Finding a balance between participatory quality and artistic quality is a challenge, and in practice the stakeholders involved experience tensions in a continuous process of negotiation. This article demonstrates the tensions and illustrates the continuous process of negotiation between the (roles of) film-makers, facilitators, action researchers and community members.

The article is a case study of three different applied research projects analysing and discussing the relationship between practice and research. The three projects are all arts projects occupied with participation in different forms: ‘Theatre Talk’ is an audience development project conducted at professional theatres focusing on new audiences’ experience of performances. ‘Art on the Fringe’ is a project in which seven theatres cooperating on the development of local festive weeks with a strong participatory element within a theatrical framing. ‘Stepping Stones’ is a project aiming at developing new frameworks for the way in which children and youngsters engage in creative practices emphasizing collective co-creation. Theoretically, the article is based on the concept of engaged scholarship, practice as research and types of partnership all of which contribute to the analysis of the relationship, purpose, and outcomes of the cooperation between practice and research.

This article is the product of a one-year AHRC experimental pilot project to understand Knowledge Exchange (KE) relationships around the arts in rural Northumberland. There were three strands to the work; Art, Music and Rural Economy with a Research Associate leading on each strand. There were multiple fields in this project; the actual fields of Northumberland and the landscapes in which art and music were practised, the disciplinary fields of the researchers, and the invisible, intangible fields of KE practice. This article reflects on our ‘field’ work – those interactions in fields of landscape, fields of discipline, and fields of social relations, which provided the context for our interventions. Specifically, this article reflects an experimental and experiential relationship with our ‘fields’ most potently around the process of entering and leaving those fields and the multiple interaction between ourselves as researchers and our material and cultural landscape. The article concludes with some of the implications of our ‘field’ practices for future experimental research and the co-production and elaboration of new fields of intervention.

International Perspectives on Particip ation and Engagement in the Arts, Utrecht University, 20–21 June 2014