The Art of Invitation

The Art of Invitation - Creative Engagement for Ourselves and Our Communities

with Ruth Ben-Tovim, Anne Marie-Culhane & Lucy Neal

This course is back by popular demand.

Are you looking for effective ways to bring groups of people together and maintain their involvement?

Are you trying to encourage people to respond to the social and ecological challenges of our time and become active in the world?

Would you like to explore more creative ways of engaging communities?

Do you want to find out about inspirational ways to reach and include more diverse groups of people?

Do you want to learn about the craft of making things happen?

Would you like to explore how making art together can accelerate change?

Activating participation is an essential craft, and the course leaders looked at a range of approaches to invite people to Join In. Participants on the course learnt by doing and left having developed their own plans, activities and skills for change for their own projects, organisations and communities.

The course facilitator’s work spans creative projects in formal and informal spaces, working with communities, activists, politicians, policy makers, service providers, educators, seeking to develop and create change.

Join us for a week of creative exploration. Each day will include sessions focusing on inspiring case studies, specialist workshops and presentations from contributors. This will be combined with practical group work, celebration, solo reflection time, and 1:1 mentoring to develop your own practice and process.

Participants are encouraged to bring their own project ideas, plans and experiences as material to develop within the course. At the end of the week you will come away with new creative tools for change that can resource you and the projects, communities and organisations that you are involved with and give you the confidence and skills to create new ones.

Ruth Ben-Tovim

Ruth is the Creative Director of Encounters (link is external). As a professional artist and consultant, she has used the transformational power of the arts to work with thousands of people over the last 20 years. Encounters specialise in designing and delivering tailor made participatory arts projects in arts, education, community, environmental and regeneration contexts.

With Encounters Ruth has produced and co-produced hundreds of intimate and immediate participatory interventions that inspire creativity, dialogue and exchange between people of all ages and cultures. The organisation works with people to unearth their own imaginative and instinctive power to shift how they see the world and their place within it. Encounters associates co-author evolving artworks with people of all ages and cultures, mapping and collecting stories and other evidence of everyday life which are then retold to a wider community through, exhibitions, public art, performance, publications and uniquely tailor made events. Read more about Ruth here (link is external).

Anne-Marie Culhane

Anne-Marie initiates, catalyses, designs and delivers creative and environmental arts projects, education, events and happenings and co-devised Encounters’ Patch of Ground (link is external) strand of work.

Her work includes residencies, commissions, activism, education work and projects across disciplines. It embodies all aspects of project co-ordination, mentoring, advisory and research.

Anne-Marie works with the visual arts,installation, dance/movement, performance, film and words and has exhibited, performed and undertaken residencies in UK, Europe and Asia. I have set up a number of longer term cross-disciplinary projects in the UK. She draw inspiration from the cycles of nature and seasons; permaculture (learning from natural systems); environmental and ecological concerns or questions and listening and responding to people, landscapes and particular sites (urban or rural). Read more about Anne-Marie here (link is external).

Lucy Neal

Is Author of Playing for Time (link is external): Making Art As If The World Mattered, a practical handbook of creative practice to inspire transition to more ecological age which was a collaboration with 60 artists, community activists and writers. Lucy is also a Happiness Associate working on The Happy Museum Project and a core member, initiator of Transition Town Tooting. She co-led C40 Case For Optimism - with Teo Greenstreet and Hilary Jennings. An evolving space for artists responding creatively to global challenges. Lucy is Chair of Phakama and Vice Chair English Folk Dance and Song Society. Read more about Lucy here.

Fee: £ 695.00
Course fees include private accommodation, all meals, field trips, materials and all teaching sessions.

For more information visit https://www.schumachercollege.org.uk/courses/short-courses/the-art-of-invitation