I had a great afternoon on Monday at the Liverpool Institute for the Performing Arts (LIPA), where I gave a Masterclass hosted by Maria Barrett, a Lecturer at LIPA. It was the first time I had visited the Institute, which is, as many of you will be aware, Paul McCartney’s old school. One of the highlights of my stay was a tour round the building that included the 400-odd seater auditorium where Dickens once read, now very much a live working environment for production and performance. LIPA has some great spaces and it’s good to see the students making so much active use of them.
The purpose of my visit was to deliver a Masterclass entitled
“Making mixed teams work: A very practical approach to creating value in arts-based projects”
As I state in the strapline, that’s easy if you say it real fast! The students attending began with an interactive session discussing the nature of value in arts-based projects and the different kinds of value that could be realised in projects for both self and society. We also recognised that values clashes could occur that could result in projects falling apart, particularly when different groups with different expertises are involved in one-off projects – technical specialists, performing artists and theatre managers for example.
It is important to recognise conflict or difference at an early stage in project discussions and deal with it in a constructive manner. To take our thinking forward, the students then engaged enthusiastically with a role play scenario where the production of ‘rich pictures’ was used to surface tensions, issues, different vocabularies and perspectives in the scenario: with a view of course, to overcoming the concerns and developing value-creating ways forward. The development of some of the rich pictures produced is shown below.
It’s tempting of course, when new projects are under discussion, to try and bury issues that might be problematic, because people can be very reluctant to deal with the resulting conflict. But if we don’t, then we may be storing up trouble for later. That is why it is so important to have tools and methods to both analyse existing situations and develop new visions where we can to develop visions that maximise value creation.
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