Dear Colleagues,

 

I would like to draw your attention to the forthcoming festival celebrating 70 years of the Tavistock Institute, and marking the launch of our historical archive with Wellcome Library. There are many events taking place, but those which specifically engage the arts with social sciences are described below. Hyperlinks to the relevant website and booking page are embedded in the text (all events are free, but to secure a place you need to book).

The festival will take place from Tuesday 17th October to Friday 20th October 2017: Visit the festival website

 

Crossing boundaries: immerse yourself in the arts during the Tavistock Institute’s 70th anniversary festival

 

Opportunities for creativity, play and curiosity are available throughout the festival, whether in the Social Dreaming Matrices, the Group Relations Event for the silver generation or the War Officer Selection Event, to name a few. However, alongside these are activities sitting more consciously within the artistic realm. The Tavistock Institute became more explicit about its engagement with the arts when Juliet Scott became its first artist-in-residence in 2015, creating new work in response to object relations cards found in the archive. These pieces will be exhibited every day of the festival in the Swiss Church, alongside items from the archive itself and complemented by a range of artistic interventions. Also exhibited is Crossing Borders, a film made by Jinette de Gooijer, Nuala Dent and Suzie Bourne, which powerfully visualises the journeys of people experiencing forced migration. For those wanting to actively participate, there is also plenty on offer.

 

Jinette de Gooijer, Nuala Dent, Suzie Bourne, Crossing Borders, video stills, 2017

 

If you head to the Garden Museum on Tuesday afternoon, James Holcome and Rosalind Fowler will be leading two drop-in workshops (please book ahead on the festival website – follow the hyperlink), titled Uncanny Pleasure: All the colour nature possesses. This is a chance to help create film using dyes from organic plant material and contribute to the festival’s online archive. If you wanted to make a day of immersing yourself in the arts, it’s possible to move between the Garden Museum and Swiss Church in order to catch a performance of Bed by Entelechy Arts. This was originally created as a piece of street theatre, exploring stories of loneliness and isolation and devised with Entelechy’s older people’s drama group.

 

Entelechy Arts, Bed, photography: Emily Valentine

 

Upstairs in the Swiss Church, Joe Cullen and Karen Izod  will be reading poetry influenced by their Tavistock identities, before the whole building becomes a performance space for Shadows and Light. This site-specific piece is currently being created by Ainslie Masterton with third year students from East-15 Acting School’s Community Theatre Degree. It takes inspiration from the archive and re-imagines some of the Tavistock Institute’s history and key figures who pioneered approaches to the understanding of groups, communities and societies over the past 70 years. However, if you can’t see this on Tuesday, it is also being performed on Wednesday, with the evening performance aptly followed by the Tavistock Clinic/Tavistock Institute Panel discussion which considers the past as well as the future for both organisations. The arts continues to feature in a number of events during the festival, including the Interacting with Young People event on Tuesday afternoon, sharing work inspired by the adaptation of group relations in the Peruvian Amazon. Dreadlockalien will be performing poetry at Conway Hall, inspired by the festival’s themes at Thursday’s symposium. Then on Friday afternoon in the Garden Museum, Jessica Burlingame and Kevin G. Coleman invite you to Acting in the Here and Then, where participants will play with and explore the experience of status and role. At the same time in the Swiss Church, Entelechy Arts returns to the festival to offer the experiential Ambient Jam Collective, which you are welcome to take part in, observe or both.  It seems fitting that the festival ends on an interactive and embodied note, embracing the non-verbal as much as the written and spoken word.

 

Entelechy Arts, Ambient Jam Photography: Roswitha Chesher

 

We would like to take this opportunity to acknowledge and thank our partners in this work: Canterbury Christ Church University Business School and Wellcome Library. We are also grateful for the generous sponsorship of SAGE and Wedlake Bell, and a contribution to the festival from the legacy of Group Relations in the Netherlands.

 

Dr Elizabeth Cory-Pearce

Researcher & Consultant

Tavistock Institute of Human Relations

30 Tabernacle Street, London EC2A 4UE

Tel: 020 7417 0407 (Switchboard)

E: [log in to unmask]

W: www.tavinstitute.org

 

 

 

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