Amplify & Ignite: Creative Practice in and with Communities

As we face an uncertain world with stark divisions and ruptures, what is our role as artists, educators, and scholars working with and across our multiple communities? How can and do the performing arts amplify community concerns, connections, and celebrations? What wisdom can be gleaned from the cultural brilliance at work and at play in our kitchens and backyards, subways and street corners, community centers and dance parties, classrooms and schoolyards? How can we center arts and culture in movements for local and global change? And what can we learn from sharing our questions, practices, and strategies while reflecting on our beautiful failures and inspiring successes? Join us at Emerson College in Boston for three days of workshops, panel discussions, presentations, working groups, and (most importantly!) dialogue about our questions, curiosities, and work at the intersection of performance, community building, education and justice. This intimate gathering of approximately 65 people will afford us the unique opportunity to foster long-term relationships while building our community of practice together.

Symposium participants will include:

• Artists, performers, dancers, directors and musicians using arts practices for community building and social change;
  
  
• Educators, facilitators, and cultural organizers; 
  
  
• Students and emerging artists, practitioners, educators, and scholars;

• Seekers, meaning-makers, adventurers, world-changers.

Call for Proposals (Deadline: Monday, December 16, 2024)

Click Here to Submit

This Symposium will center inquiry and process and seeks to build spaces in which we can share, explore, and struggle together. We therefore welcome proposals around work in all stages of development–from early ideas to post-project analyses–as well as conversation and/or workshop structures designed to support groups to gather and grapple with core questions, key ideas, and/or persistent frustrations. We hope to hold spaces for sharing work and receiving feedback as well as for ideation, collective dialogue, and/or other ways of being in process and practice together.

Participants are invited to share their curiosities and work via one of the following modes: inquiry and visioning, workshops, performances, audio and/or visual media, papers and narratives, or a framework of your own design. All sessions are 75 minutes although there may be more flexibility for proposals within the final category. We invite you to propose a session either on your own or as a collaboration with others linked by theme, content and/or practice. Your proposal should be under 300 words and written as you would want it to appear in the program, as an invitation for Symposium attendees to participate in or witness or your session. 

Inquiry and Visioning
Proposals for Inquiry and Visioning should outline a burning curiosity or prompt for collective imagining related to the themes and content of this Symposium. We welcome you to propose structures for engaging with key questions around core values, ethics, futuring, challenges or other areas of creative inquiry. We imagine these sessions to include more open-ended and collective grappling with themes and theories and less presenting about past work or accomplishments.

Workshops
Proposed workshops should offer unique strategies, activities, games, processes, devising structures or other creative forms that bring participants together to engage “on their feet”. A workshop might include a brief performance offering or written prompt and then a guided tour through the process that led to its creation. Workshop proposals should include your guiding questions and a session description.

Performances
Proposals for performances should describe the piece, including the length and number of performers, your goals, guiding questions and curiosities, intended audience and hoped-for impact. Please note if it has been performed before. Presentations can include a scene, scenes or the whole performance. Performances will be staged in a workshop space and we are unable to provide full theater lighting or resources. Performances should be no more than 45-minutes and include time for discussion.

Audio and/or Visual Media Sharings
Artists/scholars interested in sharing their work through an audio or visual medium are invited to submit proposals explaining the work and how it speaks to and offers insights into your practice, research and/or scholarship. We encourage innovative audio and/or visual media including music, podcasts, audio tours, immersive sound, posters, chapbooks, digital media, sculpture, paintings or dioramas. Accepted proposals will be grouped as much as possible with other presenters sharing on a similar theme. Each presenter will have approximately 10 minutes to speak about their work/ project with allotted time for questions from and dialogue with participants. .

Papers and Narratives
Proposals should include an abstract and, if helpful, a fuller description of the paper or narrative presentation which might include storytelling or personal reflections. Papers and narratives can be grounded in research, artistry, and/or practice and abstracts should outline anchoring approaches and methods used. A narrative can incorporate both presentational and experiential elements. Accepted papers and narratives will be grouped as much as possible with other presenters sharing on a similar theme. Approximately 25 minutes will be designated to these presentations: 20 minutes to present and 5 minutes for Q&A.

Other
In this section, we invite ideas for engagement that do not fit in the categories above. Perhaps you propose to lead participants through an 8-hour devising process that culminates in an original performance at the end of the day. Perhaps you propose a workshop space for participants to share and respond to works-in-progress. Maybe you propose a speed-dating style encounter for participants to find new collaborators. Propose what you hope to do, who you would invite to participate and what space and resources you might need.

Click HERE to Submit

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 SYMPOSIUM SPONSORS: