Let’s Create - Responsibilities - To know an appropriate amount about who you are working with

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To know an appropriate amount about who you are working with

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Context is key for this responsibility in which some artists felt that it is important to know an appropriate amount about who you are working with.

Many co-created projects are open access, others are working with a discreet community of people.

All will have differing levels of ability and needs that the artist needs to sensitively accommodate without shaming or exposing anyone.

Quotes from the research

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“There is a responsibility to understand something about the people that you're working with. And again, there are layers to that. Like sometimes there are things that you don't need to know because knowing it wouldn’t make a difference to the co-creative process. But you might need to know how somebody's ability to process things visually might impact on their ability to take and play a small percussion instrument or their ability to process sound.”

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“I think it's about immediately being able to know your room. To know who's in the space, and very quickly work out what makes people tick, and the kind of energy that they've got and how you're going to harness everybody's energy and make something really exciting and enable everybody to feel really comfortable and safe and inspired and then use that. Use all of that to enable everybody to be their most creative selves. Most musical selves, most connected with everybody else in the room and then fully see where it goes.”

“Something that really annoys me about how lots of supposed community organisations operate is that they don't know the names and faces of the people that they're working with. And they use the word community when they don't mean community they mean ‘other’.”

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with Dan Thompson

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Dan Thompson is a writer and artist, making work with ordinary people, about everyday life, and in overlooked places. His work starts by asking people to help him explore a place, and what he makes is guided by that process. His career started in theatre, and he now makes festivals, exhibitions, books, and posters.

mrdanthompson.wordpress.com

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