Have you ever gasped in amazement at a work of art, smiled at the memory of an old favorite tune, or felt melancholy from a story that truly touched you? What if you could leverage these shared experiences for your organization? Collaborative Arts engagements offer the emotional experience of a challenge or opportunity. When you are looking to move from having to create ‘buy-in’ to having shared ownership, the Collaborative Arts have ‘built-in’ emotional connection that support your initiative, program, or change effort.

 

The Collaborative Arts Family

The collaborative arts are methods and approaches used to create emotional connection and lasting impact. The value-add is in the way the art-based approaches offer an intersection for the rational and emotional group experience of a conflict, tension, challenge, or celebration. Whatever a person or group brings to the table or stage using the Collaborative Arts – can create a force that enables transformation. The Collaborative Arts shift observers into collaborators, audiences into improvisers, spectators into co-creators, and witnesses into co-conspirators.

They can be divided into six domains based in their artistic modalities:  

Visual:  Creating a visual representation of content or dialogue that shows the conversations through paintings, drawings, charts, photographs or videos. Often a visual artifact is created to represent the change.

Music:  Listening to or co-creating music to build a team, take the 'temperature' of a room; or to show what can happen when everyone is working together as one. Musical experiences arranged, composed, or performed collaboratively with or without instruments often representing a desired change and creating an experience of synergy through music. 

Theatre:  Acting out organizational insights, issues, or problems through role playing or improvisation, to spotlight experiences that show the impact on a group or an organization. 

Tactile:  Creating art that has dimension and can be moved and viewed, a prototype, sculpture, or textile experience created to represent a change.

Dance:  The movement of the body to a rhythm often originating from the group that connects or provides dialogue around a change. 

Storytelling:  Telling your story to provide insight and establish common ground or connection to bring diverse voices together.

Why use art-based collaborative processes and methods?

They offer a shared participative experience that creates an emotional connection in a way only shared experiences can. Have your teams create: graphic recording, composition, theatrical sketch etc. These can often be used as an artifact for conversation, decoration, or even as a way of providing entertainment. 

We offer:

Collaborative Arts Event Design & Supports

Seeing your processes ‘play out’ in front of you through Playback Theatre, for example, provides a level change-planning field for C-suite and maintenance staff that is powerful in creating conversation and engagement. Make your client engagement, team-building, or strategic planning both memorable and impactful by weaving together visual, musical, theatre-based, and tactile arts experiences that unleash synergy and creative potential unique to the Collaborative Arts.

Enlivened trainings and events, and empower your participants by leveraging approaches from Graphic Facilitation, Drum Café, and CircleSong, to Power of Imagination Studio. Make your people the co-creators of improvisations, models, and compositions that create community and move your organization to action.

Graphic Recording & Facilitation

Onsite and online graphic recording and facilitation services capture your key points and ideas in imagery and words that provide a visual representation of the important conversations that have taken place. Graphic recording/ facilitation services can be provided on site or remotely in digital formats.  

Musical Engagement Servcies

Using CircleSong, Drum Cafe, and related approaches, we facilitate your organization in sharing a tangible experience of synergy as they create, compose, and improvise to uncover new connections and collaborations.

The following lists some resources from websites and publications that describe examples of the various Collaborative Arts. Please note that this listing is not by any means complete. It is merely a sampling to provide context and give you a place to start your inquiry.

Visual

Graphic Recording and Facilitation
Visual Explorer
Drawing Together
Charrettes
Lakota Winter Count
Navajo Sandpainting
Art Therapies
VISA

Music

Drum Café
The Music Paradigm
Circle Song - www.circlesong.info 
Jazz Lab
Benjamin Zander  
Barbara McAfee’s Full Voice and Community Singing

Theatre

Playback Theatre
Forum Theatre
Theatre of the Oppressed
Applied Improvisation
Improv Prototyping

Tactile

LEGO Serious Play
Power of Imagination Studio

Dance

Trance Dance
Journeydance
Sun Dance

Storytelling

Story Bridge
VISA - visual Storytelling
Participatory Narrative Inquiry
Storycorps
Project Voice