A broader perspective on participation – 5 things I’ve picked up outside of museums
Posted: August 26th, 2010 | Author: Jasper Visser | Filed under: People | Tags: community, inclusion, Interaction, lessons, participation, perspectives, projects, theatre | 4 Comments »Tweet
Photo by kagey_b on Flickr.
In a few weeks my girlfriend Suzan will move to London to do a masters in Applied Drama. Applied drama is, amongst others, theatre aimed at social empowerment and often participatory by nature. When Suzan discovered Nina Simon’s book The Participatory Museum, she quite correctly observed that if you search and replace “museum” by “theatre” in the book, the lessons in it are still true.
In fact, many of the participatory theatre book lingering around address the same issues, give the same solutions and occasionally go beyond what we in museums know about participation.
Lessons about participation and community work are not unique to one sector, I believe. They’re universal. A broader perspective to other sectors might help us to get further, sooner. Therefore I’m quite happy Suzan will be blogging about Applied Drama, so I can learn from what she learns. Maybe you’ll learn from it too. (This is shameless publicity, I agree.)
In the mean time, I’d like to share with you these 5 things I’ve picked up about participation along the way. I’ve learned them far from museums, but somehow they’re still useful (and probably utterly cliché).
