Workshop: The Art of Creative Inquiry

This book explores tools and techniques for creating the arts with groups. It provides insights into why workshops are such an effective and relevant form of creative practice. Throughout, two experienced practitioners share successful principles and qualities. They also include examples of workshops that explore ways of facilitating creative exploration.

The authors believe that underpinning any good workshop practice is an understanding of what constitutes a workshop. This is a process in which the relationship between artist/researcher and participant/audience, maker, and witness is fluid. It extends each individual’s abilities and connects doing to learning to inquiring in a single process. The book itself is a dialogue on, and an investigation into, this practice. It fully explores the specificities of workshop practice in relation to how it engages others in arts-based research.

Readers learn how workshops involve inquiry into six areas:inquiry into subjects, artistic processes, skills, self, the world, and relationships with others. In the end, this informed investigation helps practitioners to better reflect on their own approaches to arts-based inquiry and research. This, in turn, leads to a better understanding of how readers can use workshops for the maximum benefit of all participants, both individuals and groups.

Tony Gee (M.A.in Applied Drama) is Artistic Director of Creation Myth Puppets. He has founded and led several companies including The Moveable Feast Workshop Co. His area of expertise is applying puppet theatre and cross art form techniques to creating original participatory workshop events in diverse settings including professional development for participatory artists. Tony has toured his work nationally in the UK and internationally working with many thousands of young people and countless educational settings since 1984. He is a playwright and author. His publications include Workshop – A Moveable Feast (Dartington College of Arts 2003). He contributed an afterword for Playing in a House of Mirrors: Applied Theatre as Reflective Process (Sense Publishers, 2015). Tony taught Workshop Skills at Dartington College of Arts and has been a guest lecturer on Workshop at Exeter University, Concordia University, Birmingham University and The Royal College of Arts.