We experiment with culture-making &
relationship-altering possibilities of art through improvisational games, devising techniques, free-form practice, collective conversations, and novel settings for developing works.
Adventures in Collaborative Creativity
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Adventures in Collaborative Creativity ✴︎
When art is serving its original purpose, it generates space for people to recover a sense of fluid identity and expansive selfhood. We can embody and responsibly liberate what we otherwise would exile or hide. We can pleasurably disrupt and reorganize personal and collective patterns. The vast network of animacy that often disappears in the objectified consumer landscape, becomes tangible and immediate. Our imaginations are no longer isolated, and we enter a space of shared dreaming,
Participatory Arts Deep Steeps
-Workshops, Play to Find Out Salons & Culturemaking-
This summer, a group of facilitator artists join forces to create never-before-seen stage-lab-playgrounds where people of all creative backgrounds (or none at all) converge in purposeful play. Eclectic characters host myriad practices, games, and scores that may touch into theater, dance, music, poetry, visual art, and crafts. With costumes for all, secret assignments, and surprise visitors, these are whimsical anti-professional artistic potlucks. Bring your creative ingredients, your cravings, your sumptuous artistic recipes, or your empty plates.
In addition to fully facilitated workshop space during the day and curated activities in the evenings, there will be space during Salon for attendees to share WIP or lead games/practices they want to facilitate. Each Workshop day and Salon evening will have a unique line up of host/facilitators and themes.
Play to Find Out Experience is complete for Summer 2023. Stay tuned for upcoming events.
Soul Revival BIPOC Dance
Facilitated by Andrea Thompson with rotating DJ’s
Soul Revival Ecstatic Dance for BIPOC is a sweet community event for, by and centering BIPOC. Twice a month we gather together to explore movement and embodiment through the lens of dance. This is NOT a class, and all levels of dance experience are welcome. All of the music is featuring or by BIPOC artists from various genres around the globe. This is YOUR space to dance, play, meditate, draw, nap, connect and nourish your body, heart and soul within a grounded container amongst your peers.
See Dates and Times
Participatory Art dissolves constructs of who is artist/audience. We engage creative practice as a way to tend our group bodies, alter relational possibilities, and restore access to a type of collective artistic relating that is at the root of culture. We create playful settings where we can diversify skills and craft as artists of life on stage, in studio, and beyond.
facilitated by Juma DeJesus
facilitated by Niema Lightseed
July 10, 6:30 - 8pm at 133 SE Madison.
Sip tea, write, and share words about transformation. Exquisite corpses welcome. No existential crisis is too small. Liberation is a verb.
Collaborative Physical Playshop in the Park
facilitated by Antje Schafer
Twirl, tumble, sync, flow… be curious, be lively, go slow… Basic physical co-movement technique to dance and play dynamically and safely. Borrowing skills from social partner dance and contact improv, expanding to include the ground and all directions without compromising structural integrity. Facilitated skill-building to start, open play time to close.
@ NE lawn in Laurelhurst Park, look for the mobile dance floor. 5:30-8pm
Physical Theater trainings & workshops
Nagoggy facilitated by Heather BeGaetz
Naggogy grows from the ritual roots of theater as a community relationship practice with human and beyond human kin. We engage theatrical, physical and vocal play to digest lived experience, renew sensory presence in the constant currents of phenomenon, and cultivate craft in group composition AKA devising. Structurally, we play in solo, duet/trio and whole group improvs. The practice culminates with multiple players enacting 'scenes' or 'group dreams' in multiple iterations where the group casts, stages, and seeds how the improvisations play and replay.
Nagoggy is a silly word drawn from Hypnagogia, the earliest stage of of sleep in which we often have vivid light, sound, and tactile sensations; we literally rehearse new things we have learned that day over and over again; and sometimes, we have creative breakthroughs. Though for many, hypnagogic recall is rare, these daily dreams help us to consolidate memories and learn from new or challenging experience. In this theatrical improv play, we're investigating ways we can collaboratively create a space where we 'group dream' in ways that might imitate aspects of Hypnagogic and other sleep/day dream processes, in a collective setting.
Non-Dual Theater Jams facilitated by Animist Arts
A theater lab format. You can expect versions of Devising, Viewpoints, Moment Work, Rhizomatic Choir, Meisner technique, Deathclown, Bouffon, Improv & more. For further details, watch this space.
Here is our general flow (Each session will have a different flow, different exercises and games/scores. Elements and sequence are subject to change depending on real time feedback.)
Warm up/work your kinks out through gibberish, vocals, and movement
A Deep Listening Exercise in rounds of actor/witness (2 person groups take turns sounding and listening, kind of like authentic movement but focusing more on sound, sometimes elements of meisner work)
small intro to session themes
Introductory practices based on session themes
Group Scores & Games
Reflection
What is Culturemaking?
We regard culture as a form of collective memory and imagination that organizes interactions of all kinds. When we come together to make culture, we are playing on purpose with how we story, symbolize & synthesize shared experience in relationship with the land, ancestors, and myriad beings. It is a conversation sustained in many languages, and art is the vivid translator. Much like the weird process of art-making, we can make up new bits of micro culture and try them on, eventually making bolder and more nuanced choices. Culturemaking is a term for the active participation in this socio-creative process.
When processes that require collective digestion are restored to a healthy enough, creative enough group body, co-regulation and redistribution allow us to unfold possibilities for how we relate to unique and universal aspects of living and dying. When this occurs through rhythm, sound, motion, image, story, poetry, and food—all in one space—complex conscious and unconscious interactions which speak directly to our limbic systems allow us to initiate changes that we cannot make on our own.
Culturemaking is inherently iterative, and occurs, not through a single event, but through many events that become related through many beings circulating energy through them in unique contexts over time. Because art in a commercial landscape tends to lack a container or context that facilitates participatory culturemaking, we need these fertile spaces where creative movements and emergent ideas can grow.
We are playing with how to collaborate and curate in ways that consistently generate the kind of collective feedback that allows us to attend to what is co-occurring, while also being fully immersed in the experience. To make culture, we need containers that can simultaneously organize significant social and artistic complexity, while also being flexible enough to respond to in-the-moment revelations, needs, rule-changes, and subversions.
Bridgespace Commons Residency
Participatory Arts Co-op is currently in residency at Bridgespace Commons PDX. This is our primary venue for 2023, where we are hosted as part of an experiment in placemaking. To learn more about Bridgespace Commons, or to find out co-working opportunities or hosting your event/class/happening there, please contact ioan@sellerengine.com
Thank you Bridgespace for generously allowing us to experiment and grow in a setting where alternative forms of reciprocity are central to the vision.
Donations to Bridgespace Commons help to maintain collective resources like cleaning supplies, TP, etc. This is also a way to help Participatory Arts Co-op show up in reciprocity to our generous host and support a project that is benefitting many local organizations doing good stuff.
https://opencollective.com/bridgespacecommonspdx