This week’s Creative Process lecture addressed collaborative creativity in community settings. Lecturer (and Creative Process course tutor) Molly Mullen from the University’s Critical Research Unit in Applied Theatre led the class.
Dr. Mullen began by asking the students about their understandings of community, and the communities they belonged to. She illustrated how the notion of community could foster positive creative processes that worked to create loyalty and social cohesion, or operate in a more negative way, resulting in divisiveness and an “us or them” mentality.
Dr. Mullen outlined three types of community: communities of location (such as neighbourhoods or nations); communities of identity (such as ethnicity or faith); and communities of interest (such as sports and hobby clubs). She gave examples of how creative processes worked within each context, drawing on her own experience as a social theatre practitioner.
A community project in Hong Kong engaged the population of a poor neighbourhood, using performance as a tool to bring people together. A similar process was used in Auckland’s “Romeo and Juliet project”, which gave the residents of a youth justice facility the chance to explore the theme of love through developing stories based on Shakespeare’s famous tragedy. Both projects used the creative processes of drama to build a positive community within the difficult context of the participants’ shared location.
Creative processes were used to form positive communities of identity in the London project “Rewrite”, which brings together young people from different backgrounds through the power of drama and creative writing. In New Zealand, Interacting Theatre gives people with disabilities the chance to contribute to their communities through performance. Also in New Zealand, the Kauri Project provided an example of how people come together to work creatively on solving practical problems: in this case, combatting the spread of kauri die-back disease.
Dr. Mullen summed up by describing the creative process within a community context as being both collaborative and critical, and responding to the needs of everyday life. To offer more examples of this in action, she introduced guest Tamati Patuwai, who leads collaborative creative projects in Auckland’s Glen Innes.
Mr. Patuwai’s organisation, Mad Ave (which was named for the famous Glen Innes street, Madeleine Avenue), is “all about cultural and community arts development, story-telling and working with organisations to create community engagement”. Suiting the action to the word, Mr. Patuwai got the students in the Creative Process lecture working together through clapping sequences round a circle. By breaking the conventional configuration of the lecture room, he demonstrated how creative engagement brings people together and injects fresh energy into a group dynamic.
Mr. Patuwai then outlined two key Mad Ave projects: Face to Face and The River Talks. The Face to Face project used creative outlets like music, dance and korero to help the community come to terms with the frustration and sadness of having to leave their family homes to make way for high density housing. The River Talks took a multidisciplinary approach to efforts to clean up a local river. It engaged artists, scientists and local school-children to contribute to solving the problem of pollution.
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