Encounters Lab

Encounters Lab No. 6

Meeting the messy moments and fertile edges of socially and ecological engaged practice.

This month's Lab will tip a nod to Tipping Point, the annual conference of artists and sustainability experts whose conference will be happening in Newcastle while we meet*. We can't be at Tipping Point this year so like them we've decided to focus our Lab on the role artists and creative practitioners can play in "exploring and pointing the way towards the cultural, societal and behavioural shifts needed in a world subject to a rapidly changing climate".

We're curious to find out if you are already responding to Climate Change in your work? We've been asking ourselves how much we see it as our role to facilitate behaviour change or simply to raise questions? We're curious about how to keep people engaged and learning with a news items that seems to have lost its shine but not its urgency. We're grappling with how to engage people at all in something so abstract and so potentially terrifying. And within all this we wonder how do we ourselves meet the messy edges of control and surrender as change agents aware of how complex change really is on this scale.

During the lab we will combine facilitated creative process with whatever's alive in the room that day. We'll make and share and explore the fertile edges of our practices.

Do bring any recent news articles, data, images related to Climate Change. By the way, even if your work isn't related to this theme, we trust that the creative process that will unfurl during the day will allow room for your interests and enhance and inform your practice around other themes.

* http://www.tippingpoint.org.uk/tippingpoint-newcastle/

Please RSVP.

Thanks

Ruth Ben-Tovim and Toni Spencer

Encounters labs are for creative practitioners, facilitators, educators, and activists. For those of you new to the labs: Welcome! Please read carefully to see if this is for you.

Come and explore your creative practice with others practitioners: get gritty, follow your curiosity, hone ideas... We are interested in 'those moments': where the deepest dreaming meets the profoundly ordinary, where conflict glimmers with potential for insight, where something faint is noticed and deserves some good attention. All this towards radical (deeply rooted) culture change towards a more sustainable world. This is a space to go a little deeper, progress a little further in our practice. Please join us.

What work are you making right now that you want to experiment with? What are the sticky questions you want to share with others: about your own work, the world or the nature of change?

The Encounters Lab series is being offered as a practical, safe creative space to explore creative and facilitation work that often goes straight to participants / audience/clients. It’s a chance to experiment, meet other practitioners, and share the edgier or delicate aspects of our practice.

Ideas half formed, or that need a safe airing... New forms of work that you can't quite grasp yet but want to share... Activities just about ready to go public...

Sessions will weave the practical building of work alongside experimental emergent time.

Details

Please RSVP to info@encounters-arts.org.uk

Or feel free to contact us with questions: Toni on 07980 575 525 tonispencer77@hotmail.com or Ruth on 07870 698 333 ruth@encounters-arts.org.uk

When: 10am – 5pm

Location: Studio 20, Dartington Space, Dartington Hall, Totnes,

Devon TQ9 6EN http://www.dartington.org/visit/directions-and-maps

What to bring: Clothing for indoor and outdoor activities; food to share for lunch

Cost: from 50p to £500, pay what you can!

Accomodation: If you are not local, let us know in advance and we’ll try to arrange somewhere to stay

Who we are: the lab will be held by Ruth Ben-Tovim and Toni Spencer.

Ruth is the founder and Creative Director of Encounters, who offer imaginative spaces and processes for people to explore their relationship with themselves, each other, where they live and the wider natural world. Encounters specialise in designing and delivering participatory arts projects and interventions that inspire creativity, dialogue and exchange between people of all ages and cultures.

Toni is a Creative Associate of Encounters and works as a facilitator, educator, forager and artist. She works with process (personal + collective), food (wild, tame, feral + neglected) and landscape. All this serves to explore how we might meet the world more fully, in order to live within the world more sustainably. She is a freelance practitioner with Schumacher College, Embercombe, Transition and others.

For more information visit http://www.encounters-arts.org.uk/workshop-programme.htm