ENCOUNTERS WORKSHOP PROGRAMME: WINTER/SPRING 2012
Encounters are delighted to be offering a series of public workshops from October 2011 – July 2012. Our workshop programme focusing on young people, artists and facilitators, and parents will take place in the purpose built studios and the gardens, woods, and riverbanks of The Dartington Hall Estate in South Devon.
The Encounters Transition Youth Theatre
This new professionally led Youth Theatre will create performances that respond to the joys and challenges of being human today.
This is an opportunity to express through drama, writing, music and movement your inner-most ideas about our world in these times. We will be using a variety of theatre approaches including clowning, physical theatre, improvisation, live art, forum theatre and verbatim theatre to do this.
What is it like to live now? What are your hopes for the future? What makes you smile? What do you fear? What would you change? What will the world be like in 2030?
If you are 13-18 years old, interested in performance, and believe that telling stories through theatre can be an effective way to bring about change in the world then this Youth Theatre is for you.
From November 2011, the Youth Theatre will work weekly with highly experienced theatre director Ben Yeger to create a public performance in July 2012. Between us we will build a Youth Theatre where all of its members have a say and make a contribution to the performance. This promises to be an exciting, fun and hugely rewarding experience for all involved.
Please click here to see a pdf flier for this workshop
Dates – Wednesday evenings from November 9th – July plus 2 Saturdays (tbc)
Cost – £5.50 per session (£3.50 concessions) including snacks
Time – 6-8:30pm
Venue – Dartington Space, Totnes
Youth Theatre Director - Ben Yeger who will be joined by a range of other artists and musicians
"Encounters artists reach (people) simply by listening. They create art by allowing people a place to come to, a place to talk about our lives and our world" Dahlia, (local resident)
This Youth Theatre is part of Transition Town Totnes Heart and Soul and Arts groups
<< Back to top
Encounters Lab
Encounters labs are for creative practitioners, facilitators, educators, and activists.
Meeting the messy moments and fertile edges of socially and ecological engaged practice.
We are interested in 'those moments': where the deepest dreaming meets the profoundly ordinary, where conflict glimmers with potential for insight, where something faint is noticed and deserves some good attention. All this towards radical (deeply rooted) culture change for a more interconnected and sustainable world. This is a space to go a little deeper, progress a little further in our practice. Please join us.
What work are you making right now that you want to experiment with? What are the sticky questions you want to share with others: about your own work, the world or the nature of change?
The Encounters Lab series is being offered as a practical, safe, creative space to explore creative and facilitation work that often goes straight to participants / audience / clients. It’s a chance to experiment, meet other practitioners, and share the edgier or delicate aspects of our practice.
Ideas half formed, or that need a safe airing... New forms of work that you can't quite grasp yet but want to share... Activities just about ready to go public...
Sessions will weave the practical building of work alongside experimental emergent time.
Dates: September 16, October 14, November 18, December 9, January 20, February 24, March 16, April 27, May 25, June 29
Facilitators: Ruth Ben-Tovim and Toni Spencer
Cost: From 50p to £500, pay what you can!
If you’re drawn to this and you’re based in the South West please do get in touch for more details.
<< Back to top
The Art of Shared Parenting
When we have children how do we make choices about what sort of parents we want to be? How much do we share the job with our partners? What assumptions do we make about parenting and what narratives do we follow? How much are our choices influenced by how we ourselves were parented? Where do we get inspiration to really explore how we might want to do it differently? Do we give these questions the time they really need before and during the parenting journey?
The Art of Shared Parenting is a five-day workshop spread out over five monthly Sundays to enable a process of reflection and real life application of learning. During the workshop we will use a range of creative and relational activities to take a deep look at how we can share more deeply the joys and challenges of parenting our children together. This will be a journey that will support you to accept your healthy natural tendencies as parents, become aware of unhelpful patterns, go deeper into all the questions that arise, and shine light on all that is possible.
Being a parent is one of our greatest teachers. Please come and join us for a journey to explore this complex and exhilarating human experience.
We welcome anyone in a parenting role. The workshop is open to couples, parents who have separated, individual parents, or carers. You are welcome to join us if you are already a parent, or embarking on the parenting path.
Dates – Postponed until further notice
Facilitators - Ruth Ben-Tovim and Ben Yeger (parents of three children who they have raised through their own form of shared and step-parenting since 1991)
<< Back to top
For more information and bookings
Email: info@encounters-arts.org.uk
Phone: Ben Yeger 07977 449901
Post: Encounters Arts, Dartington Space, Dartington Hall, Totnes, TQ9 6EN
<< Back to top
Encounters Workshop Facilitators
Ruth Ben-Tovim
Founder and creative director of Encounters
Ruth has worked as a professional artist and consultant for 20 years, using the transformational power of the arts to work creatively with thousands of people in the arts, public, private, education and voluntary sectors. She was the founder and Artistic Director of Louder than Words, creating award-winning, multi-media performances, touring nationally. She now specialises in participation; devising, delivering and managing site-specific participatory arts projects and programmes across the country. Since 2004 she has been the Creative Director of Encounters, co-authoring artworks with people and places, mapping and collecting urban histories and other evidence of everyday life. Working with different communities across the country she has delivered over 30 projects for Encounters, including representing the UK at the Venice Biennale of Architecture and creative projects for Liverpool Capital of Culture and the Royal Society of Arts in Peterborough. She also works as a freelance lecturer and Dramaturg and is a trustee of the Transition Network.
Ben Yeger
Associate Director of Encounters
Ben is a physical performer, theatre director and drama therapist. As well as his 20 years experience as a professional theatre practitioner he also draws upon Joanna Macy’s ‘Work that Reconnects’ and his training in Movement Medicine, Action Learning and Drama Therapy and other therapy practices as well as a deeply embodied relational arts practice. Ben has been specialising in working with fathers, boys, and men since 2000 running a voluntary sector fathers project for five years and working in prison, young offenders institutions and pupil referral units. Ben is the UK representative of Combatants for Peace working in Israel and Palestine and hosting Cfp in the UK.
Toni Spencer
Associate of Encounters
Toni works as a facilitator, educator and artist. She works with process (personal and collective), food (wild, tame, feral and neglected) and landscape. All this serves to explore how we might meet the world more fully, in order to live within the world more sustainably. She is a freelance practitioner with Schumacher College, Embercombe and others.
<< Back to top