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Empathy and care for others

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Almost all of the artists talked about the need for care and empathy with the non-professional artists in the creative process as fundamental qualities that artistic leaders need to embody.

Particularly for artists leading group processes in the performing arts there was a sense of taking great care of everyone in the room and being aware of connecting with them in a careful way. 

Quotes from the research

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“I'm running an internal dialogue constantly. And part of my brain is doing a constant scan of the room, to the best of my ability, travelling through the heads of everyone in the room constantly. I'm like, ‘You okay, how are you? What's that? What's going on? What's happening for you? Are you alright?’ That's obviously the biggest thing. Doing empathy. For me its constantly like a generator running.”

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“You've got you make an effort to connect with every single person. You have to make everybody feel seen and everybody feel heard very quickly. You have to make everybody feel seen which is about using your physicality, your eyes, your voice in the way that you're talking to everybody. So it's about the physicality. It's about eye contact. It's about vocalisation all of those things in terms of how you connect with every single individual in the room.”

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Podcast

with Tashi Gore

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Tashi Gore is an artist and producer who works predominantly in socially engaged contexts making original performance. Currently she is Associate Director at Dundee Rep and Scottish Dance Theatre and co-artistic director of Glass Performance, where she makes biographical performance work inspired by the people she meets and the question they have about the world. With Glass she co-founded young people’s performance collective Junction 25 at Tramway in Glasgow, and Polmont Youth Theatre at HMYOI Polmont, the first youth theatre in a Scottish prison. She has co-authored A Beginners Guide to Devising Theatre with long term collaborator Jess Thorpe this was published by Bloomsbury in September 2019. Tashi is a partnering artist with American company Dance Exchange and is a trainer and facilitator for the Liz Lerman Critical Response Process.

x @tashigore | Instagram @tashahahgordon

x @GlassPerform | Instagram @glassperformance

Buy a copy of Tashi’s book 'A Beginners Guide to Devising Theatre' here

www.glassperformance.co.uk

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