François Matarasso

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  • 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…

  • Older artists working with older people

    The Baring Foundation (of which I’m a trustee) has prioritised arts work with older people since 2009, supporting the a huge range of work in the UK and Northern Ireland. It has all been participatory, though that word has covered an equally broad range of practice, much of described in a rich library of free…

  • Inspiring change – the arts and older people in Ireland

    Bealtaine must be one of the happiest arts festivals I know. Founded in 1995, it involves thousands of older people from all over Ireland in arts workshops, performances and events. It’s organised by Age & Opportunity, with some Arts Council funding, a network of hundreds of local groups and an incalculable amount of volunteer effort and goodwill…