Presentation of cultural animation at Vytautas Magnus University Art Institute

On the 10th of May Iwona Kurz and Małgorzata Litwinowicz from Instytut Kultury Polskiej (WU) gave a public lecture on cultural animation at Vytautas Magnus University (VMU) Art Institute. Students and lecturers of the Art Institute were invited to participate in the meeting and to find out more about the cultural animation. Guests from Warsaw gave a comprehensive lecture on the teaching of cultural animation, which was presented as a synthesis of academic education, workshops, probation and implementation of actual project. The guiding principles of the work of cultural animator and its aims were discussed during the meeting as well. We’d like to share at least the part of the knowledge we gained by attaching the slide show, which was shown during the lecture.

Cultural animation: education, work, aims 

creative consultations…

I’m posting an essay as a resource for you to download. (It’s only about 12000 words.) The essay – Reflections on creative practice – Artists working in the context of community consultation – formed one part of a substantial report (‘Do You Know What You’re Asking?’) produced at the beginning of this year for Nirex as part of an ongoing discussion about stakeholder involvement in decision-making.

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Curriculum in culture animation

 

 

Finally the book presenting curriculum of postgraduate studies for high school teachers of study of culture and for practitioners is ready.

The project of an newly-formulated program of postgraduate studies for teachers is associated with the idea of postgraduate studies for practitioners of culture. Of course, the specific goals for these two kinds of participant – teachers and culture animators – will differ somewhat. Teachers will still be taught to teach cultural science in the course of their studies whereas for culture animators, activity is their profession and their priority . The program’s aim is to ‘animate animators’, provide them with anthropologically grounded animation skills, update their knowledge, encourage them to go beyond the institutionally consolidated image of the world, in which culture happens in a local council cultural centre, most likely on a stage. Despite these differences in specific goals, however, we assume the program will remain an integrated whole. After all, teachers play a role as a practitioners of activity in the culture and culture animators are also teachers.

Book includes  curriculum itself, commentary to it and detailed programmes of classes and workshops. Its available in Polish. We attach also introduction to the book (curriculum and commentary) and the programme of media workshop in English.

Curriculum in Polish                  

Introduction in English

Media workshop in English

 

Local Activity. Inspirations.

That were two very busy days of workshops. First day we were getting to know each other and looking for as many inspirations as it possible. We started with presentation of Laundry and ę. Then we have 3 meeting on different subjects: Marta Wójcicka form Studio Teatralne Koło was presenting her experience with organizing animation events in post industrial space like PZO on Praga. Her speech was very energetic and one of most interesting message was the question of personal imperative. “You have to believe that your project is good otherwise you would not find partners and sponsors”. Beata Jaszczak from Farbiarnia ( Płock) presented the methods of work with young kids from the backyard. She gave many examples of how  to keep children interested in our work and how to make them authors of their own activities. Last but not least Beata Tokarz from Akademia Rozwoju Filantropii w Polsce make a presentation on seniors problems in Poland. She gave a bunch of information on seniors: what are their main problems and needs. She also shown us examples of polish and European good practice in this issue. We finish first day on the film show in Skład Butelek. Completely tired but (I guess) full of ideas.

The second day started with active workshop “first contact” run by Pamela Wells and Brendan Jackson form the Laundry. Everybody had a chance to do “1 euroJ” project and start the interaction with strangers on the streets. We had 5 interesting ideas of how to make a first contact and what can come out of it….

The very last part “generator of ideas” run by Marta Białek and Piotr Stasik from ę showed up the creativity of all participants. More then 30 ideas for project has appeared! And slowly, slowly there were changing into project…It seems there is a lot of work in front of us and a lot of fun I hope. Pleas feel free to leave any comments on our workshop………  Continue reading

SMALL INVENTORY IN PRAGUE

In the last week of February (20 – 25 / 2 / 2007), five Prague theatres hosted the fifth annual Small Inventory festival. Under the motto “The cream of this year’s theatre crop” , the festival presented the most interesting authorial physical, dance, visual, interactive, non verbal and cross–over theatre projects to have premiered in the last year. Continue reading

the background of ANIMATOR

ANIMATOR project is born out of our previous project ANIMUS that included 9 partners from 5 European countries. The idea was to create a network of cooperation and exchange – both in education and in practice – in cultural animation. Together we made several projects in which we all learnt a lot – and we prepared some publications to show the results to others. They may be found at ANIMUS website.