Whose Show Is It Anyway? Community-Engaged Performance and Exhibition Arts In The Small City
Workshops
Saturday, March 28, 2009
1:30 - 4:30 pm
Workshop 1
"Conversation Mapping and Collaborative Live Diagramming as Tools for Community Communication"
Workshop Leader Adelheid Mers
Adelheid Mers is a visual artist skilled in the art of diagramming texts and social processes. She is an Associate Professor in the Arts Administration and Policy program of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she also teaches in the Art History and Criticism, Visual and Critical Studies, and Sculpture Programs. She serves on the editorial board of WhiteWalls and was recently hired by the City of Chicago as an artist/consultant to facilitate effective community discussions.
Workshop Focus: Increasingly, group leaders, community organizers, conference conveners and policy developers employ artists to visualize group conversations on site, both between professional peers and among diverse stakeholders in a community. Metaphor, pictorial language, and diagramming have become exciting tools to visualize issues, map group dynamics and facilitate the flow of conversation.
This workshop will feature a series of examples from the workshop leader ’s own practice and will explore how those same live diagramming techniques can be introduced into community settings to map group relationships and facilitate effective collaborations. Participants are strongly encouraged to bring their own case studies, example scenarios, for immediate experimentation and discussion.
Workshop space is limited; please register early if you wish to participate.
Workshop 2
"Storytelling Our Lives: Including Immigrant Communities in the Performing Arts"
Workshop Leader Lina de Guevara
Lina de Guevara is the artistic director of PUENTE Theatre, in Victoria BC. Their mandate is to use theatre to explore the immigrant experience. The theatre company has been in existence since 1988, and they have a long history producing plays and other events to create bridges between immigrants and the mainstream. In 1996 they produced "Sisters/Strangers," the first community play in BC about immigrant women. Since then they have produced four versions of "Storytelling our lives," another community play that toured different cities in BC. In addition to these specific community play productions PUENTE Theatre has produced over 20 plays dealing with different aspects of the immigrant story.
Workshop Focus: The workshop will work with participants on how to create plays that include the immigrant community in the performing arts. The immigrant community has so much to offer, while at the same time it has many challenges to overcome, such as language and cultural barriers, isolation, culture shock, traumatic experiences, and so on. PUENTE Theatre has dealt with those challenges and found exciting solutions that the workshop will explore through discussion, role playing and the use of workshop videos produced by PUENTE.
Further information about PUENTE Theatre can be found at their website www.puentetheatre.ca, where you'll locate information about the company, photos and video excerpts of their work, and other relevant material.
Workshop space is limited; please register early if you wish to participate.