Collaborative storytelling and performance workshop
The Collaborative storytelling and performance workshop, designed and facilitated by Anthrobombing, took place in Makrinitsa, Pelion, on July 29th, 2023, in the context of the 5th Pelion Summer Lab (PSL) for Cultural Theory and Experimental Humanities.
Workshop participants were members of the 2023 PSL cohort -mainly graduate students/young researchers and artists from Greece, other countries of Europe, North and South America. Inspired by improv theater, this workshop invited participants to co-produce and perform stories related to the critical political and environmental issues that PSL 5 addressed.
Through 3 different performative exercises, the workshop aimed at triggering participants’ imagination and senses, encouraging them to observe their relation to the physical location and with each other. Another goal of the workshop was to bring to the forefront our different positionalities, our preconceptions and existing hierarchies that are at play when we collaborate and interact, but which usually remain implicit. Always in collaboration and at the same time spontaneously, with no time to prepare, therefore building on embodied and affective knowledge, participants were incited to reflect on politics of knowledge production, especially the entanglement of normative discourses and ideas with their own situated knowledge.
After the PSL, we conducted interviews with five of the participants (of both the PSL and our worksop), in order to get more detailed and in depth feedback, based on participants’ retrospective reflection of all of the Lab’s collective processes. This feedback, together with comments made at the end of the workshop and other informal discussions, were extremely helpful for us, not only in terms of understanding the various ways the workshop affected individual perceptions and group dynamics, but also regarding the possibilities and constraints of adopting alternative forms of expression to produce academic knowledge, specifically as means to deconstruct hierarchies and rethink conditions of collaboration in academic environments.
Workshop participants were members of the 2023 PSL cohort -mainly graduate students/young researchers and artists from Greece, other countries of Europe, North and South America. Inspired by improv theater, this workshop invited participants to co-produce and perform stories related to the critical political and environmental issues that PSL 5 addressed.
Through 3 different performative exercises, the workshop aimed at triggering participants’ imagination and senses, encouraging them to observe their relation to the physical location and with each other. Another goal of the workshop was to bring to the forefront our different positionalities, our preconceptions and existing hierarchies that are at play when we collaborate and interact, but which usually remain implicit. Always in collaboration and at the same time spontaneously, with no time to prepare, therefore building on embodied and affective knowledge, participants were incited to reflect on politics of knowledge production, especially the entanglement of normative discourses and ideas with their own situated knowledge.
After the PSL, we conducted interviews with five of the participants (of both the PSL and our worksop), in order to get more detailed and in depth feedback, based on participants’ retrospective reflection of all of the Lab’s collective processes. This feedback, together with comments made at the end of the workshop and other informal discussions, were extremely helpful for us, not only in terms of understanding the various ways the workshop affected individual perceptions and group dynamics, but also regarding the possibilities and constraints of adopting alternative forms of expression to produce academic knowledge, specifically as means to deconstruct hierarchies and rethink conditions of collaboration in academic environments.
