François Matarasso

Life is for living: artistry in old age

Here is the text of my talk at Talk at Independent Creative Living Conference, Baltic, Gateshead (UK) on 28 June 2016; you can download a PDF of the talk by clicking this link; to download a copy of Winter Fires, click here. Three Great Human Episodes Towards the end of his own life, the critic and philosopher Edward…

A letter to my friends in the European Union (including, for now, the British)

ACTA Community Theatre Festival

The acta community theatre festival was held in Bristol last week, and featured performances by acta’s own Malcolm X Elders, CAN, Collective Encounters, Entelechy Arts, Glasgow Citizens and London Bubble, among others, with workshops and discussions. I was asked to give some concluding thoughts; here is (more or less) what I said. • Thank you all for…

Artistic quality and participatory performing arts

Yesterday I facilitated a learning event at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in London as part of its Sharing the Stage initiative. The theme of the session was quality, and about 50 people from some of the UK’s leading performing arts companies came to share their experience of participatory work. There were inspiring and thoughtful presentations…

Hands across the dangerous sea

One of the best things about a restless art has been seeing just how much great community art is happening across and beyond Europe. I’d no idea of the quality and variety of work in Greece, Spain, Portugal and Egypt and it’s not hard to see a link between this energy and the multiple challenges people now face there. That sense of…

Murals, craft and community art in the 1980s

My early steps in community art In 1982, I got a job as a community arts worker on a council estate in Newark-on-Trent. My only qualification was a year’s apprenticeship at Greenwich Mural Workshop (thank you, Gulbenkian Foundation, for that investment). At Greenwich, I’d been trained in running a community printshop and painting murals, as…