Some notes from a talk at Casa Simon Bolivar, Old Havana
I shared a platform with Teresa Rotemberg from Argentina/Switzerland. We had different disciplines, Teresa - dance/movement, myself - stories/theatre. I spoke about co-creation as a producer and as an artist in terms of work with and for children.
As a producer, this involves collaborating with other non-artistic sectors, like council, health and education. The benefit of this is to be able to create work with other sector budgets, and to be able to expand the influence of the work so more children are listened to by more people.
Education has a different function to art, but it is useful to quote Paulo Freire to demonstrate education's qualities of transformation.
“Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity OR it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.”
In producing work with non-artistic partners, it was important to set the best artistic context for the children to create with the key artistic impulse being story. Children are given the opportunity to write their own story, because if they don't someone else will. It is important for children to feel the power and agency to imagine something different... and with the possibility for imagining comes the possibility of change.
No comments:
Post a Comment