François Matarasso

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  • None of this is easy

    A couple of days ago, I gave a lecture about art in criminal justice contexts. It’s not a field in which I have deep expertise. My experience of running art workshops in prison dates from the 1980s and early 1990s, and took place in relatively good conditions. Since then I’ve been inside only to see…

  • Anne Peaker Memorial Lecture

    Tomorrow evening at the Young Vic Theatre in London, I will give the 10th Annual Anne Peaker Memorial lecture, on behalf of the National Criminal Justice Arts Alliance. It’s an honour to be asked to do this but it’s also an opportunity to pay public tribute to Anne Peaker, a friend and mentor (though I’d…

  • Contemporary European dance and the Commons

    Originally posted on ramsayburt: I made this video for my keynote panel paper for Plenary I, Reservoirs of Movement: Common Flows and Circulation at Dance Studies Association Annual Conference ‘Dancing in Common’ at Northwestern University, 8th-11th August 2019 https://vimeo.com/352257906

  • It’s Fun Palaces weekend

    When I was a young and earnest community artist, I bridled at the word fun. The art we made wasn’t supposed to be fun, even when it did involve face painting. It was radical, world changing and very, very serious. I was so much older then, but I’ve since learned that you can have fun…

  • Who are you writing for?

    Reading yet another account of a community outreach project undertaken by an arts organisation, I could feel my heart sinking before I’d reached the end of the first paragraph. It was a good idea, and it seemed to have been well-executed by gifted people. In that respect, it was much like a lot of projects…

  • ‘Trans nature is diverse’ – a theatre project in Uruguay

    Jussi Lehtonen, whose community work at the National Theatre of Finland features in A Restless Art, got in touch to tell me about a visit he made recently to Uruguay. He met PROAC, an NGO that works for human development through art, culture and education, and observed the creation of theatre performance about trans stories.…