New Socially Engaged Practice Speaker Series!

The Socially Engaged Practice Initiative at the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts introduces a monthly speaker series showcasing exemplary practice by nationally recognized visiting artists and members of our ASU and regional community.

Socially Engaged Practice is an evolving area of art and design that uses participation, reciprocal relationships and collaborations in community contexts to promote civic dialogue and investigate pressing issues of our time.

The events are supported by the ASU Art Museum, The School of Dance, The School of Theatre and Film, the School of Art and the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts. Individual events are also supported by various other partners.

The first event in the series takes place tomorrow, Tuesday, at the ASU Art Museum, at 6 p.m., when the Socially Engaged Practice Initiative, ASU Gammage, and the ASU Art Museum invite you to listen, discuss and even try out a participatory performance event called City Council Meeting. Artists Aaron Landsman and Mallory Catlett will be on hand to explain the process and thinking behind their work, the way the piece interacts with the Tempe community and the ways you can be a part of the February 16^th performance at ASU Gammage. (More about City Council Meeting below.)

And mark your calendars for Oct. 9 from 6-8 p.m., when Arizona State University contributes to the Town Hall Nation project with an unscripted, participatory Evening of Community Engagement & Civil Dialogue.The event, which will take place at the ASU Art Museum, is free and open to the public, and is sponsored by the Herberger Institute’s Socially Engaged Practice Initiative and co-sponsored by the ASU Art Museum and the schools of Theatre and Film and Public Affairs, and the Hugh Downs School of Human Communication.

More about City Council Meeting:

The Project

City Council Meeting is a participatory performance of empathy and democracy and power, created by New York artists Aaron Landsman, Mallory Catlett and Jim Findlay, in collaboration with local artists Elizabeth Johnson and Gregory Sale. The piece is co-commissioned and presented by ASU Gammage. Our hope is that Tempe council members and their staff will be able to join other community members in our process over the next several months, and participate in our performances in February.

City Council Meeting is being developed in four cities – Houston, Tempe, New York and San Francisco. In each, the goal of the piece is to get a diverse range of people – from elected representatives, to their constituents, to those that often get left out of the conversation – into the room so that they can speak together. We want to give everyone the chance to understand how others see themselves and each other, and see what we can learn in the process. We also want to make a beautiful piece of art.

Over the last year Landsman and Catlett have done informal research and interviews with a broad range of Tempe residents, from elected officials to homeless young adults, from the Chamber of Commerce to college students.

How It Works

The performance is divided into three parts: an orientation video, similar to what you’d see before doing jury duty; a reading of transcripts from government meetings in several U.S. cities; and a final section created locally in each place where it’s presented, through collaborations with local artists, non-artists, elected officials and other populations.

When viewers arrive at the theater, they have a choice as to whether and how to participate: be a Councilor and read the meeting; be a Speaker and say a piece of testimony; be a Supporter, and you don’t have to say anything, but you’ll get a set of instructions (stand up at certain points, text message to a specified phone number, etc); or be a Bystander, and simply watch the performance as you would a normal play. Once that’s done, the “meeting” starts. Together with our local group of performers (whom we call “staffers”), everyone in the room enacts the transcripts we’ve assembled from our research in over 10 cities. You’ll read council members in Bismarck, students in San Antonio, activists in Oakland and engineers in Houston, among others.

For each city’s ending section, we attempt to bring together parties on various sides of an issue we see played out in local council meetings. Often these issues seem mundane on the surface but underlying them are more profound questions: What makes us civilized? How do we perform ourselves? What can we do for each other? How can we know each other better?

City Council Meeting in Tempe is commissioned by ASU Gammage. The project has been made possible with funding by the New England Foundation for the Arts’ National Theater Pilot, The MAP Fund, a program of Creative Capital, the Puffin Foundation and Jerome Foundation. City Council Meeting is a National Performance Network (NPN) Creation Fund Project.