Three Case Studies of Youth Arts Projects
Different classes of people have long sorted themselves into neighborhoods within a city or region. But now we find a large-scale re-sorting of people among cities and regions nationwide, with some regions becoming centers of the creative class while others are composed of larger shares of working-class or service-class people. … Places are … valued for authenticity and uniqueness. Authenticity comes from several aspects of a community ---historic buildings, established neighborhoods, a unique music scene, or specific cultural attributes. It comes from the mix --- from urban grit alongside renovated buildings, from the commingling of young and old, long-time neighborhood characters and yuppies, fashion models and "bag ladies." An authentic place … offers unique and original experiences.[1]
… [The creative class is] a completely consumerist theory, this notion that people choose to live somewhere, this whole notion of locational choice, well hang on a minute, any geographer will say that’s really complex. It’s not a matter of ‘I’m an elite worker and I can choose to live anywhere in the world’… if you are the wrong race or the wrong colour and got the wrong passport or the wrong qualifications, you can’t choose to go anywhere. You’re completely boxed in where you are, you can’t leave … there are two sorts of highly mobile people in the world; there’s the very affluent and very educated and the very rich in global terms, and then there is the very poor and very dispossessed and very marginalised. And everyone in the middle, broadly, stays where they are.[2]
American economist Richard Florida has offered arguably the most popular and controversial writing on creativity and place of the 1990s. This chapter acknowledges a critical re-consideration of Florida’s idea of the creative class[3] as a dominant discourse within which contemporary discussions of place and creativity take place. I question the role that place plays in the production of the creative class. Perhaps obtusely, this departure is inspired by the lack of attention to the education of young people in Florida’s work. I am concerned with the way in which Florida offers very little indication of how young people might learn how to become part of the creative class. He implies that if one gathers a bunch of young people in a ‘creative place’, namely: a location with old buildings, a diverse population and enough I.T experts[4], that young people will acquire the skills to become members of his ‘Super-Creative Core’[5]. Such a wager places much stake in a seemingly osmotic process of place-based knowledge exchange, rather than offering imperatives for praxis. In critique of these broad theoretical brush strokes, I explore ways in which youth arts projects might be considered practical and sustainable ways of making creative places. Youth arts projects do not offer a utopian site of creative education, however, through the examination of three case studies, different practical ways in which education, place and creativity are linked in each of the respective projects are considered.
I examine two U.K projects and an Australian project. Each of these is unique and I do not adopt a comparative approach to considering the ways each site articulates education, place and creativity. I draw on research interviews conducted as part of a larger research project, ‘Making creative places: Geographical places in North America, Australia and the UK that foster creativity in young people’. This is a collaboration between the Faculty of Education, Monash and the Faculty of Education at the University of Wollongong. Team members include Mary Louise Rasmussen and Valerie Harwood. The project considers interdisciplinary places of learning that cross boundaries between informal educational sites, communities and creative industries.
Florida designed his notion of the creative class to evaluate the relationship between ‘creative capital’ and economically successful places. This concept of ‘creative capital’ is the capacity for people to ‘have ideas and find a better way of doing things’[6]. Florida further explains this through arguing:
Often it is largely the design and marketing that determines why someone will buy a Dodge Neon or a Hyundai, a Dell computer or a Sony. Emphasis on design and creativity is what pushed Target ahead of K-mart. … As an economy, [America is] … moving inexorably toward earning our keep by adding creative value. Thus creative work, no matter how it is measured in dollars and cents, is what we all rely on.[7]
He argues that places with a high percentage of ‘creative capital’ are the most economically successful. To my mind, what is more interesting here is that these places are also inhabited by communities with the highest levels of social and economic inequality. While Florida’s ‘creativity’ brings wealth, it does so at the expense of ideas of social justice.
There are many extant critiques of Florida’s concept of creativity. I briefly canvass some of these, as they provide apposite points of reference for the critical and strategic manner in which I position his ideas as a dominant discourse framing current enterprises of making creative places. Gibson and Klocker[8], argue that Florida’s work: ‘subsum[es] … creativity within a neoliberal regional economic development discourse. … [in which] creativity is linked to the primacy of global markets, and is a factor in place competition, attracting … 'creative class' migrants to struggling regions. Creativity is positioned as a central determinant of regional 'success' and forms a remedy for those places, and subjects, that currently 'lack' innovation.’ They critique Florida’s work by arguing ‘that neoliberal discourses [in which creativity is subsumed by market value] ignore the varied ways in which 'alternative creativities' might underpin … articulations of the future of Australia's regions.’[9] - Florida’s creativity is read here as being too tightly coded to be of use. Terry Flew[10], argues that the creative class thesis is:
… perpetuating two myths, which are the mirror-image of each other. The first myth is the classic sociological conception of the services sector as the repository of low-paid, unskilled ‘McJobs’ (Ritzer, 2002), whose proliferation is symptomatic of an unbalanced and unsustainable economy. ... The second myth is that jobs in creative sectors necessarily have high degrees of autonomy and are well paid. Florida defines the ‘Super-Creative Core’ of the US economy as involving “scientists and engineers, university professors, poets and novelists, artists, entertainers, actors, designers and architects, as well as the thought leader-ship of modern society: nonfiction writers, editors, cultural figures, think-tank researchers, analysts and other opinion-makers” (p. 69). If we examine the list of occupations in Florida’s Super-Creative Core more carefully, we … find highly variable degrees of autonomy, stability, and likely income. [There is] danger [in] … conflating growth in these ‘creative’ sectors with greater individual autonomy and cultural openness.
For Flew, Florida draws too long a bow in arguing that engineers and artists should be considered in the same economic milieu. It is here that the importance of perspective is made plain. For Florida, engineers and artists are both members of the ‘Super-Creative Core’ of the US economy, because they both perform creative labor, which is the powerhouse of financial growth. Service industry employees, such as KFC workers, do not perform intellectually creative labor in Florida’s eyes, and as such cannot be considered part of an economic ‘Creative Core’. For Flew, who writes from a less romanticized position, the relationship between engineer and artist is not so plain, and not so far removed from the service industry. Artists are, perhaps, more beholden to market demands and funding body policies than are some engineers. In collaboration with their advertising teams, motor vehicle engineers can arguably make a market for a new car. Often, an artists’ work is limited by its market before it is created. This is not to say the artist is any less creative than the engineer, but rather that their positions are too far apart to be equitably compared. And, while some KFC workers may not by creative, many of them may well be. Again, social context needs to be considered. Young men in Morwell (Victoria), for example, who reject their father’s trade, who don’t (or can’t) work in the power industry or the mines; look to move into the service industries. Working in KFC, sporting a visor hat and colored uniform, smiling sweetly at your customers and telling them to ‘have a nice day’, when your Dad, granddad and all their mates, think that real men should be out in the mines getting dirty, is surely a labor of creative gender development. Questions of social scale are lost in Florida’s broad-brush strokes.
The much-vaunted freedoms associated with work in the creative industries[11] are, then, too idealistically construed by Florida’s suggestion of recognizing that we live in an ‘Eminem economy’[12], where workers will sacrifice security for creative reward. While cities with rock bands and rappers do fare well in economic terms, this regional success does not necessarily inform the labour of those creative workers who live in the shadows of a possibility of financial reward. I concur with these critiques of Florida’s ideas, along with the polemic advanced by Stevenson[13], who has highlighted the tensions implicit in contemporary cultural policies that perceive creative social and economic development as being synonymous with ‘social inclusion’. - While Eminem might be an inspirational figure for Aboriginal Australian boys who are learning to rap, the places in which these boys live, the social systems that articulate their educational contexts and the Australian music market, are not necessarily equipped to support their rise to global superstardom. They may well make creative capital and not be afforded the basic right of social inclusion. The work of many traditional Aboriginal dot painters can be taken as a case in point.
Nevertheless, Florida’s notion of the ‘creative class’ continues to hold wide reaching appeal for cultural development, urban and regional renewal. In Australia, cities such as Melbourne and Sydney and regional areas such as Shepparton (Victoria); the Northern Rivers district (Qld); and the Illawarra (NSW) have explicitly taken up the ‘creative class’ discourse. Although increasing attention is being paid to the ‘creative class’ and how to encourage it in terms of the economic growth of places, there has been less attention paid to how young people’s entry into this ‘Creative Class’ might be facilitated. The one significant exception to this silence is the work of Erica McWilliam and her colleagues in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation. McWilliam is the program leader for a creative workforce research and development program run through the Centre. Her work on changing education to respond to the ‘creative’ turn stands out as a critical intervention into the area of education and studies of creative economy. McWilliam states:
The clear message from creative economy research is that we can no longer afford to think of play, symphony, design, story, empathy and meaning as optional ‘extras’. We need to bring them into the centre of the education of all students. This does not mean throwing out traditional subjects, but allowing for new combinations of curriculum (maths and music, digital and print literacy, design and economics) to take the traditional disciplines out of their silos. It means valuing opportunities for adapting and recombining cultural forms in unanticipated ways to serve different purposes[14]
Working alongside McWilliam, Stewart Cunningham and his colleagues[15] have argued the importance of redesigning the tertiary sector in order to respond to the demands of the Creative Industries. Florida[16] has also highlighted this issue in his critique of the current US education system, arguing that a reliance on ‘post-industrial education’ and its associated lack of creativity leave little space for the production of creative workers. Florida goes on to argue that: ‘as society diversifies and specializes, more and more different kinds of education and teaching styles must be made available’[17]. Such sentiments are a far cry from Julia Gillard’s[18] recent call for a common national curriculum.
More in line with Florida’s call to begin ‘training’ a creative class is the Queensland’s Ministerial Advisory Committee for Educational Renewal’s[19] focus on the importance of teachers and policy makers in thinking through the pedagogical implications for producing a creative class. However, theoretical work of this nature, while often lauded as significant by Florida and those who follow his lead --including the Ministerial Advisory Committee for Educational Renewal --has yet to be undertaken in relation to young people under 18 by theorists other than McWilliam. I see this project as having utility, in the respect that it takes up discourses that carry weight in political and policy-making frameworks.
In contexts such as Australia’s current political climate, audible strategies for promoting creative curriculum development and for considering the cultural implications (and complications) of moves for regional renewal are greatly needed. Of interest is the relationship between place and creativity that lies at the heart of Florida’s work. I agree that places and the cultures that inhabit them cannot be considered mutually exclusive. While policy makers have taken up Florida’s argument for an economic relationship between creative cultures and financially successful places, his ‘creativity index’ and associated scholarship on creativity and place, only argues an economic case for the production of creativity. Florida does not provide any tools with which one might consider the located-ness and the micro-politics of making creative places and –as a contributing factor to this project- of fostering aesthetic sensibilities in young people.
I focus on interdisciplinary places of learning that cross boundaries between informal educational sites, communities and creative industries. Such a cross- disciplinary focus is intended to contribute to understanding the educational, social and economic benefits associated with different places. I advance this project via theoretical means that allow a more nuanced consideration of the politics of place-making and fostering creativity in youth than those afforded in Florida’s work. Specifically, I take up Deleuzian concepts of creativity and spatiality to explore two exemplary UK arts companies and one Australian youth arts company, each of which seek to foster creativity in young people through particular place-making projects.
Creativity as the Differential Becoming of the World
Deleuze argues that the context in which creation takes place is problematic, or difficult to ‘define’ in located terms. However, his philosophy is highly responsive to environment. For Deleuze, society grows through affirming the fact that the slippery nature of creativity -and life- can leave us ‘blind’ to understanding the central features of environments in which creativity is produced. We know that environments impact on creativity, but our set, or ‘striated’, conscious means of understanding creativity and the world, obscures our chance to see environments as creative triggers. Deleuze and Guattari describe striation as a process: ‘… which inter-twines fixed and variable elements, [and] produces an order and succession of distinct forms[20]’. For the most part, our consciousness occupies a striated space-time relation. In order to counter the capitalist model in which fixed modes of financial value are bound to the becoming of creativity, social formations must grasp the creatively significant aspects of our environments, by expressing them in new ways. Expression will also inevitably change these aspects of our environments[21].
Deleuze adopts becoming as a way to affirm the processes of differentiation, or constant change, which are misapprehended in our perception of apparently static things. He puts forward an ontology of becoming, in which ‘reality’ is in a permanent state of flux, or continual differentiation. This true ‘flux’, or the differential becoming of the world, is obscured by the illusions of fixity and identity that become key features of our subjectivity. The aspects of our environment that are necessary to creativity are an inseparable part of these processes of becoming.
A creative endeavor combines an unconscious registering of the reality of flux and change with a conscious recognition of this process. Because reality is primarily in flux, a creative affirmation of this becoming is a resistance to our acceptance of a determined world around us. This positive resistance is activated, when, for example, an architect expresses the becomings at play in an actual site through the design of a new building[22]. Or when an artist actualizes possibilities for new aesthetic vocabularies by painting an image that evades the clichés embedded in a blank canvass. This creative engagement with potentiality, and resistance to unconscious clichéd perceptions, is also referred to by Deleuze as a ‘resistance to the present’[23]. The ontology of becoming turns against ‘progress’ as development towards an ideal. Instead of progress, there is an expression of pure movements, defined as variations, or differentiations. Reality is a flow of variations that need no relation to different identities or fixed reference points. It is the constructed human subject that needs reference to identities or fixed points.
Deleuze’s ontology -and affirmation- of becoming is justified on the basis of relations between actual movements or processes. He would contend that we are overly occupied with proving our imaginings of ‘the way things are’ and that because of this we lose the capacity to pay attention to what things are becoming. If we perceive our identity as embedded in place, we take away from our capacity to understand place and self as actualizing individual potentials. People and places are folded into one another at different points of their constitution, yet they are also part of assemblages in which they are not connected and, rather, become quite separate things. While we need to acknowledge and understand the points at which places fold in to constitute our subjectivity, we should not lose sight of the potentials held within places and ourselves, outside these points of connection.
For example, Australia is a sovereign nation. Yet if one was to believe that Uluru was only a tourist attraction, generations of Aboriginal knowledge and connection to country, and the force of these connections, would be discounted. Uluru is a multiplicity. In some social assemblages it is a tourist attraction, where it is connected to ideas of ‘authentic Australia’ and is positioned as an attractive gem in the crown of our ruling monarch. In other social assemblages, Uluru articulates knowledges that cannot be understood by whitefellas, let alone the Sovereign head of State, to whom they claim allegiance.
If creativity is seen, as Deleuze[24] presents it, to be an active engagement with the differential becoming of the world and resistance to cliché, then it is this awareness, this resistance to the present that we must nurture through social formations. New distinctions and new connections must be made between artistic technique, innovation, cultural capital, and social and economic value. In order to begin such a venture, I look to open up conceptualizations of the work of youth arts projects as forms of making creative places.
I begin this trajectory with the work of Creative Partnerships; an initiative that brokers placements for arts practitioners in socially and economically disadvantaged schools. I focus on a site in Margate, a coastal town in Kent; which is a place with an ethnically diverse population. The neighboring town of Dover is a primary entry point for asylum seekers and illegal immigrants to the UK. Creative Partnerships explore issues of identity, tolerance and equality as articulated in the social fabric of Margate. The project I examine is one in which the public art organization Artangel collaborated with filmmaker Penny Woolcock in staging ‘The Margate Exodus’. As a contemporary re-working of the Biblical tale, this film explores a community’s search for a ‘Promised Land’ and the social pressures that such journeys can produce. The work offers a mediation of macro and micro social movements, as biographies, landscape, culture and traditions are pleated into one text through filming live performance. ‘The Margate Exodus’ was made in conjunction with the display of a photography project called ‘Towards a Promised Land’, in which banner photographs hung across the centre of Margate. This involved twenty-two young people who migrated to the UK from places affected by war, poverty or political unrest. With photographer Wendy Ewald, the children re-conceptualized their diverse experiences of moving. The photographs produced were shown on the walls of buildings in public spaces across the city, re-territorializing the de-industrializing architectural space of the town. Buildings became canvasses, and the faces of minoritarian children were accorded new levels of visibility.
Folding this re-inscription of town space into the social politics surrounding migration in Margate, ‘The Margate Exodus’ is a now a major feature film screening in cinemas across England, that has been created with, and features, the people of Margate. Across the film text, the contention that social policy on immigration needs to be rethought is articulated through the moving image and through community involvement.
I interviewed Anna Cutler in late 2006, when she was the (then) Artistic Director of Creative Partnerships. I began our conversation by asking her about how social context had been taken up as an inspiration for the ‘Exodus’ project. Cutler responded that:
When I came here (and I had come from Belfast) what I knew to do was to … just absorb for a bit and go around and talk to people and find out what was going on, so I could … see what kind of social situation was going on here and what kind of deprivations there were. And probably one of the worst ones here is lack of aspiration and hope. -And that is across the whole East Kent coast which, because it is next to the very wealthy rest of Kent, it makes it even worse somehow. … so the language that people use to talk about … [Margate] has lack of hope and aspiration associated with it. … I thought my whole program should be about place and identity because my feeling is that the place, it's geography, helps to shape and what has happened economically, shape the identities of those who live there - and the identities of those who live there will shape will the place …. And this is key to what we are doing in Creative Partnerships, … So we're working with young people … in a geographic place that is run down, things are boarded up, it's physically miserable, there are spikes on the pavement, there is a lot of wiring around, [outsiders] … know that they are not invited.[25]
Cutler is aware of the ways in which the suffering, de-industrializing economy of coastal Margate folds in to constitute a sense of isolation in its residents, many of whom are immigrants. She notes how this isolation is re-articulated geographically by ‘things being boarded up … spikes on the pavement … a lot of wiring around’. It was because Cutler was separate enough from these connections between economy, geography and community, having just arrived in Margate from Belfast, that she was able to see these connections so plainly, and to follow the trajectories they form; to inquire as to what it is that these connections produce, and what other assemblages they could become part of. As a way of resisting the inertia of the present, the re-telling of ‘The Exodus’ was taken up by Creative Partnerships to connect people and places in Margate with the Global market of media consumption and to argue that the politics of Immigration (and located feelings of disenfranchisement) have never been more meaningful than they are today.
Cutler continues, explaining that:
You have to inspire the imaginations of people, if you can't imagine an alternative, I don't know how you will ever get there. … If you can't see it, if you can't imagine it, … you won't ever do it. And people have lost that sense that anything is possible here. In Auston, they have been offered things and they haven't happened, so that is the history of Margate in particular, that offers have been made and they haven't turned out, … so there is a lot of frustration here and people feel that they don't deserve anything because it gets reiterated through people's practice.
As for the architecture of the place, it signals terrible poverty, there is rubbish in the streets; sometimes we don't get our rubbish picked up for … week[s] ….
Three years ago I was having a conversation with ArtAngel, about starting a project, I'd worked with Michael West from Art Angel before, … So Michael came down to have a look at the place to begin with, and I knew he would love it because it is a poor place with lots of boarded-up buildings, but it is also [eerily] beautiful. It has the most beautiful Georgian architecture and fabulous Victorian buildings … and the beaches are staggeringly gorgeous. And he really saw that juxtaposition between the mess and the arcades and the flashing lights, and these other … beautiful things. And it makes it a[n] … interesting place to be and it also has lots of natural theatre space to it … he came back and said that what he really wanted to do was to get this filmmaker … to come and make a film, and it was about the whole community, and because a lot of refugees and asylum seekers [are here]… it seemed like a point of entry and a point of exit …
… what we have been doing is planning it since then, and gradually bringing in the community and we've been working … in schools with 20 local artists … on the concept of ‘what a plague is’. The kids have been doing plagues of apathy, plagues of exclusion, plagues of cabbage locusts (because we grow cabbages around here), but it has been extraordinary because … we've got … professional gallery spaces to exhibit the children's work ... We are looking at bands who are going to join in, … we are going to have plagues songs that famous writers have written … we've got a layer of the international artists … working with the community to produce a broadcast film that will be shown ... [in cinemas and on BBC TV]. So it's … high profile, I think that … one of the important things is [having] high-stakes, because everybody moves up to them.[26]
After the broken promises, and the disillusionment that comes once opportunities have been lost, such a large invitation, and such a brave act of saying ‘stand up now because the nation is looking’ has certainly proved reason to rise to an occasion. ‘The Margate Exodus’ has been a critically acclaimed success and it has brought the community of Margate into the Public sphere in a range of ways. Margate, as a community, has been pushed to grasp the defining features of its environment – the juxtaposition between the mess and the arcades, the flashing lights and the boarded-up buildings, the Georgian architecture and the beaches. Paradox between possibility and historicity has become the creatively significant aspect of this community’s context. Expressing these paradoxes in new ways, folding virtual futures into the space of the present, the landscape of Margate has been modulated. It is becoming. The features of Margate’s environment that are necessary to creativity are an inseparable part of these processes.
Articulating the importance of links between place, community and creative industries is what Creative Partnerships does well. The exploration of such connections is socially significant because it generates broader understandings of interdisciplinary places of learning that cross boundaries between informal educational sites, communities and creative industries. However, it has been, and remains, a source of concern to me that the sustainability of the creative cultures generated by Creative Partnerships is limited. The programs they initiate do involve communities and certainly effect change in communities, yet they are not community driven and do not have the capacity to run without expertise brought in from outside the community. A similar critique of the lack of sustainability of the Creative Partnerships programs have been advanced by Hall and Thomson[27]. Certainly, this difficulty with sustainability is an enduring shortcoming of such specialist- run programs.
Now I would like to move on to discuss an institutionalized example of macro and micro scales of social value being re-imagined through a place-based aesthetic. I turn to the ‘NewVIc’, which is the Newham Sixth Form Arts College at Stratford Circus. The Circus is a centre for the performing arts and moving image, managed by NewVIc in collaboration with five professional arts organizations[28].
The Circus is a thoughtfully designed, well-equipped building in East London. It has a large, circular structure with three floors that circle around an open, central community space. One enters the well-lit community space in the foyer, to see that the ceiling goes up three levels, and one is automatically part of an open cafe space in the middle. The stairs to different levels run along the outside of this open space. The architecture pays attention to the importance of flexibility - in the respect that many of the regular studio rooms can also be rehearsal and audition rooms, meeting places, small exhibition spaces, but there are also large performance areas, Theatre stages, a capacity to cater for big scale events. So proximity and spectacle are both possible.
The Circus is run by an education provider (NewVIc) as a site of arts education, yet it also houses professional dance, music, theatre and new media studios, and facilitates a range of adult education programs. The companies that NewVIc leases the building facilities to are: East London Dance, a design and urban music firm called Urban Development, Theatre Venture, NewCEYS (which is the performing arts bloc of Newham’s community education and youth service), and the ‘Circus Media’ Centre. The Circus Media Centre is also affiliated with NewVIc and it supports emerging freelance artists and production companies in delivering broadcast media. Through the Circus, local community members, artists and educators are brought together.
In 2006, in a café on Canary Wharf in London’s East End, I spoke to Graham Jeffrey, a lecturer in Creative Industries at the University of East London, about the role that he played in establishing the Circus. Our conversation examined how social policy and political climate informed, and was also affected by, the Arts Centre at Stratford. The project at Stratford has taken on social context in a comprehensive way, in the respect that it is part of a broader push to creatively redesign London’s East End and Docklands. The local student community do not have a history of performing well academically, and the practical training offered by the performing arts and new media programs at The Circus, alongside the links to industry that are part of these programs and a part of the building itself, provide its students with a creative model of education which has been developed in response to their needs. I asked Graham to comment on this responsiveness to context, and he suggested that such reflexivity is:
… Absolutely critical. The idea was always … that every aspect of our work ought to have a really clearly articulated relationship to the communities that we were working in, … [and] that’s partly out of necessity, because we work in a borough like Newham, [so in terms of] the social context, you can’t take [any student engagement] as a given because
a) the levels of deprivation are really high, [and]
b) the level of diversity is … amazing,
so you can’t make any assumptions about the young people that you have to work with ... Some of them may have arrived in the UK in the last six weeks, others might come from families who have lived in the East End of London for generations, others might be second generation immigrants, [who are] profoundly religious, some of them might be profoundly … disadvantaged in all sorts of ways … that sort of … diversity leads you to be much more conscious of … social context than you would be if you just worked in a suburb, where … there is … a relatively “mono-culture”. … [C]ommunity education and around engagement, and certainly further education and UK further education has always been the sector in education that’s … done more than schools or universities to engage with learners that don’t fit the traditional mould.[29]
Here, Graham envisages the politics of community as inseparable from his art education practice. Furthermore, it seems that there are certain ideas of creativity associated with working in such a diverse student demographic. I am reminded that for Deleuze, the point of creativity is to break out of the everyday, the ‘familiar’. The question of producing creativity is the same question as ‘how difference is possible’? How can we go beyond the coordinates of our constitution? Graham takes up the political utility of creativity in a (perhaps unintentionally) similar manner, musing that:
…The other thing I’m interested in is that creativity, … inevitably, implies deviance, implies breaking the rules, implies criticism, and it implies challenge. It’s not about working within the framework of ‘what if [this actually]’ exists, except to say ‘what if’?. So, creativity to me is essentially bound up with the notion of social change, with the notion of trying to alter things, and of course that brings it inevitably into conflict with institutions, because that’s not what institutions are in the business of doing. On the whole, institutions … are in the business of regimenting, of disciplining, of ordering, of cataloguing and creating taxonomies and systems which bind people to certain ways of being. … you’ve got to understand how it works in order to subvert, you can’t hack an organization if you don’t really get [into] the politics of it …[30]
Decades before this statement is made, Deleuze quotes Nietzsche in Difference and Repetition[31] as an impetus for his definition of creativity, as a situation in which new values and the recognition of established values are both affirmed as having different utilities. In a Deleuzian model of creativity, relationships between the new and the old are redesigned while they are being affirmed. In terms of accommodating this fractured and expanding experience of spatiality and folding it into the design of the Circus, Graham says:
We wanted to have an awareness of … [a fractured experience of spatiality] in the work that we were doing, and not hold up school or college as the centre of the universe, but to understand that in fact people have multiple places they identify with, and multiple kind of selves almost in relation to those places, so they’ve put on one face to do this thing and perform in a different way [and then another face for another thing] ... with somewhere like Stratford Circus, the idea was to create a … flexible sort of place, but it could be lots of different things, so that for example, Friday evenings are grind night, and it’s like the East London masses, … everybody comes down and it’s pretty … noisy and most people are between 16 and 22, … it’s really hardcore grind music, and at an earlier time that day, there might have been a tea dance in the same space, so it’s a hybrid space. … it becomes a place where it’s possible to bring groups of people together who otherwise would have sod all to do with each other.[32]
Intergenerational contact is difficult to facilitate outside families, hospitals and educational institutions. It seems to me that this is one of the ways in which the Arts Centre at Stratford Circus is exploring what a notion of creative place making might be. In the respect that the Arts Centre fosters exemplary teaching and learning practices that enable diverse groups of people, including young people, to become more innovative in the ways they think about their relationships to community, and supports them in producing creative capital, there seems to be a point of connection to Florida’s work.
I asked Graham to consider how the Stratford Circus might sustain and develop London’s Creative Economy through the support they provide young people in joining the ‘Creative Class’. This question prompted insights into the interface between industry and Florida’s research, more than it actualised any connections between Stratford Circus and theories of the Creative Class. Richard Florida’s capitalist striation of creativity holds little appeal for those at Stratford Circus. Graham explains that: ‘one of the more uncomfortable things … [about] Richard Florida, …[and] the universalisation of creativity discourse, [is] that creativity is just accepted as being a good thing, and it’s tied up with capitalist business innovation, creativity-innovation-knowledge society, and then if you are not careful, you’re not actually critiquing that whole.[33]’ I agree with Graham that, in Florida’s work, capitalist modes of production and consumption become inscribed onto all creative practices, and this robs creativity of its power for political alterity. Deleuze and Guattari describe the relationship between capitalism and striation as a process that is facilitated by State power. They say:
The physico-social model of Work pertains to the State Apparatus, it is one of its inventions, … two reasons. First, because labour only appears with the constitution of a surplus, there is no labour that is not devoted to stockpiling; in fact, labour (in the strict sense) begins only with what is called surplus labour. Second, labour performs a generalized operation of striation of space-time, a subjection of free action, a nullification of smooth spaces, the origin and means of which is in the essential enterprise of the State.[34]
Taking up this definition of labour as a State striation of space-time, in Florida’s theory of Creative Capital, fixed modes of financial value are bound to the becoming of creativity, by means that produce an order, in which creativity is accorded a set worth. Thus, the notion of ‘Creative Capital’ is the ‘distinct form’ in which Richard Florida’s work articulates the paradox of creativity. As a process of striation, the production of ‘Creative Capital’ necessarily constructs a particular spatiality. ‘Creative Capital’ is composed:‘… In [a] space, [where] lines or trajectories tend to be subordinated to points.[35]’Only certain kinds of movements are possible here: ‘one goes from one point to another’[36]. Material flows, the continual becoming of the present, is overcoded by set meanings. In Florida’s eyes, ‘Cities without gays and rock bands are losing the economic development race’[37] while the experience and political significance of being gay, or being in a rock band becomes striated in terms of economic value and place development[38]. It seems to me that here the tension between established formations of power and emerging knowledge becomes central. The janus head of historicity and the future is set at the heart of working creatively. A similar paradox between industry and academy is articulated in the research of Stewart Cunningham and colleagues, who argue that higher education focused on the creative industries suffers from ‘splits and silos’ which make planning for practical skill development in tertiary institutions a difficult feat[39]. Places of learning such as the Stratford Circus can be seen as responding to this problem of ‘splits and silos in skill development’, through the creation of pedagogical strategies that are specifically attuned to the relationship between creativity and diverse places of learning.
Across the globe, in a starkly different physical and political environment, I spent some time researching a youth arts hub with parallels to Stratford Circus, yet the Courthouse Youth Arts is a regional youth arts centre, and has been designed specifically to respond to the social and environmental issues that are specific to young people in rural and regional Victoria. I now contextualize my discussion of the two U.K projects described above in relation to this regional Victorian case study. The time I spent at the Courthouse was in late 2004 and 2005 -- the Howard Government had been in power since 1996, arts funding had received unprecedented cuts during this period and rural Victoria was in severe drought. This social context holds in relief the value accorded to, and appreciation of, arts projects that became part of English culture under the late Blair Government. This stark difference was brought to my attention recently when I was speaking at a University Symposium that brought together Industry professionals and Academics. The Symposium was in Australia and one attendee was a British artist who had travelled to Australia on a U.K arts research scholarship. She made the point that the Australian Arts and Disability scene was ten years behind Britain at least four times across the course of two days. I was never sure quite what the utility of making this point was, though I assumed it was her way of expressing frustration and making quite plain the fact that she wasn’t feeling overly stimulated or excited to be there. Australian Arts practices have been remarkably under resourced in comparison to the United Kingdom. Yet, in my opinion, this has not led to a poor quality arts scene, rather, an unlikely arts scene: resilient, interesting and low budget.
The Courthouse Youth Arts Centre operates on the premise that music and movement bring people together. Community is formed through sense: senses of belonging, of being known and recognized. Music and movement are two media through which individual recognition and collective enjoyment are facilitated. Increasingly over the past three decades, street beats: hip-hop, rap, R n’ B and movement styles which have evolved with these sounds have brought together communities from a range of ethnic backgrounds and social classes. Wathaurong Koori people, Sudanese refugees, Lebanese, Greek, Italian and Anglo-Australian Young people in Geelong come together through street beats and dance styles under the umbrella of Courthouse Youth Arts. Here community isn’t about nationality, sexuality or money as much as it is about movement and style.
The Youth Arts Centre occupies a spacious 1950’s style courthouse. – Hence the name. The Centre’s pastel coloured art deco facade is one of the more eye-catching buildings in the heart of Geelong, as the refurbishment of the building celebrates the old with a contemporary flavour. A sense of place and an understanding of social context are critical when looking at the work Courthouse is doing. Local, regional sites are kept in focus through the Centre’s outreach programs and through the multi-disciplinary focal lens of the Centre, which has been designed to embrace a diverse cross section of young people living in and around the rural centre of Geelong. Courthouse runs programs that focus on music, dance, visual arts, film, arts management and theatre making. The Courthouse’s theatre making program currently includes street dance, break dance and MCing; tools of performance making with which young people are particularly keen to engage.
The Courthouse is an exceptional place, the heart of an active arts community in Geelong; a town that has come a long way since it began as a wool distribution port. A successful textiles trade built upon the wool distribution at the financial heart of Geelong and this is still reflected at times in the ways young visual artists approach their work here. However, the old Geelong wool stores are now campus buildings for Deakin University and while Geelong is still an industrial town; the focus of labour has shifted distinctly. Alongside Deakin’s growing contribution to the community here, the Ford engine manufacturing plant and local Shell oil refinery are, and have been, Geelong’s financial sources for decades.
Beyond the smoking refinery pylons, Geelong enfolds pockets of the 1950’s - alive and well in the new millennium - and a broad community demographic. In-between the production buildings there are cottages that sell home made gollywog dolls and potted irises. There are sushi shops, Lebanese restaurants, and schools for Sudanese refugees. Some people take break dance classes a few nights a week. Other people grow their own vegies and have chooks. It’s the country and the city at the same time. It’s an in-between place that feels pretty distinctive in comparison to the grey streets and over-filled trams of Melbourne. There are some pretty funky young people in Geelong. Many of their mums and dads’ work for Ford, and these young people are living on the cutting edge of a very different kind of cultural production – jamming acrobatics, street dancing and rhymes, sourcing new stories of their own and giving them platforms. These folks are making it pretty clear that while some parts of Geelong tell tales of car engines, petrol and gollywogs, there is another level of cultural production going on around here. In a Deleuzian model of creativity, relationships between the new and the old are redesigned while they are being affirmed. Deleuze states:
Nietzsche’s distinction between the creation of new values and the recognition of established values should not be understood in a historically relative manner, as though the established values were new in their time and the new values simply needed time to become established. In fact it concerns a difference which is both formal and in kind. The new, with its power of beginning and beginning again , remains forever new, just as the established was always established from the outset, even if a certain amount of empirical time was necessary for this to be recognized. What becomes established with the new is precisely not the new. For the new –in other words, difference – calls forth forces in thought which are not the forces of recognition, today or tomorrow, but the power of a completely other model, from an unrecognised and unrecognisable terra incognita . What forces does this new bring to bear upon thought, from what central bad nature and ill does it spring, from what central ungrounding which strips thought of its ‘innateness’ and treats it every time as something which has not always existed, but begins, forced and under constraint? By contrast, how derisory are the voluntary struggles for recognition.[40]
Courthouse embraces and produces terra incognita just as much as it re-inscribes dominant discourses of the arts helping youth at risk. The centre publicizes itself as being concerned with engaging marginalised and disenfranchised young people and as offering opportunities for creative types to build their skills and excel. Courthouse is a community-based organisation – the concerns of Geelong’s youth community are reflected in its programs and in turn, the programs produce works that appeal to Geelong’s youth.
My first class at the Courthouse was one of the weekly HeadSpin master classes held for eight young emerging visual artists, writers and theatre makers. The HeadSpin master class program had a focus on theatre making and it applied this focus broadly to encompass all aspects of theatre production. The project invited eight emerging artists to work in teams to devise and stage three short performance works, roughly twenty minutes each in duration. These works were then presented as a triple bill in May 2005. HeadSpin consisted of weekly master classes with the Courthouse coordinator of the theatre making program, Naomi Steinborner. Naomi mentored HeadSpin recipients until December, at which point specialist mentors in different disciplinary areas came on board the project. These additions to the artistic team individually supported the eight individual young HeadSpin artists through the finalisation of their performance concepts, auditions, rehearsals, design, production and presentation.
The HeadSpin class were an interesting and diverse bunch. After completing Drama Studies at Adelaide University, Naomi Steinborner studied animatuering at the VCA. Her background in thinking through space and visual, conceptual design is evident in her approach to fostering new talent. A sculptor, a design student, a visual dramaturge, two writers, a sound designer, a puppeteer and two directors made up the HeadSpin team. While I was on board, the community theatre company Somebody’s Daughter ran a workshop with HeadSpin that looked at working with disenfranchised people and sourcing performance material from community participants’ lived experiences. The HeadSpin team worked in a very welcoming and engaging way with Somebody’s Daughter; a company who offer a model of community theatre which has been slipping out focus a little since the late 80’s. After HeadSpin many of the young artists being mentored in this program wanted to turn their focus to community cultural development work. Indeed, some of the participants were already actively engaged in CCD work with young mums. HeadSpin produced some striking and diverse works: a puppetry fantasy about a young boy’s journey through a gypsy forest, a contemporary satirical perspective on parlour games and an affective atmosphere / soundscape of adolescence. These works appealed to a broad cross-section of Geelong’s community.
One of the most important things about youth arts work is the ways in which it can include, speak to and be modelled around, marginalised community groups, yet theatre work by its very nature is not marginalising. Making theatre is about getting along with people. It’s about working together and getting out there. It’s also about an irreducible humanness. Whatever the specific difficulties of people’s lives, people get along as people and laugh and cry at similar ‘human’ things. While some contemporary social theorists argue we are now living in an age of post-humanism, I think collectives like the Courthouse show us otherwise. We are living in the age of a new humanism, a place where your aesthetics are your ethics; where sense, atmosphere and affect take precedence over the binary ruts of identity politics.
* * * * * *
My consideration analyses of these three place-making projects gestures towards the respective utility and need for a critical reconsideration of Florida’s work. While the connections drawn together here span a broad range of discourses, I want to outline some of the force, complexity and cultural significance that lies at the intersection of youth arts work and place-making projects. Deleuzian theories of creativity and place show us that the intersection of youth arts work and place-making projects can be taken up in order to redefine -and speak back to- Floridian theories of place and creativity. As sites of public pedagogy, such youth arts projects promote diverse conceptions of creativity and place. They show up the instability of our everyday uses of these concepts. Perhaps most saliently, they involve many young people who can become imaginatively captured, skilled and inspired.
Notes
[1] Florida, ‘The Rise of the Creative Class: Why cities without gays and rock bands are losing the economic development race.’ Online.
[2] Graham Jeffrey Interview.
[3] Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class.
[4] In ‘The Rise of the Creative Class: Why cities without gays and rock bands are losing the economic development race’, Online, Florida states:
‘The key to economic growth lies not just in the ability to attract the creative class, but to translate that underlying advantage into creative economic outcomes in the form of new ideas, new high-tech businesses and regional growth.’
[5] Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class, p 69.
[6] Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class, p. 1.
[7] Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class, p. 4.
[8] Gibson and Klocker, ‘The ‘Cultural Turn’ in Australian Regional Economic Development Discourse: Neoliberalizing Creativity?’ pp. 93-102.
[9] Gibson and Klocker, ‘The ‘Cultural Turn’ in Australian Regional Economic Development Discourse: Neoliberalizing Creativity?’ p. 93.
[10] Flew, ‘Creative Industries: From the Chicken Cheer to the Culture of Services’ pp. 89-95.
[11] Mc Robbie, ‘Clubs to Companies: Notes on the Decline of Political Culture in Speeded up Creative Worlds’ pp. 516-531. & ‘From Holloway to Hollywood: Happiness at work in the new cultural economy? pp. 97-114.
[12] Florida, The New American Dream, online.
[13] Stevenson, “Civic Gold” Rush: Cultural Planning and the politics of the Third Way.’ pp. 121-130.
[14] McWilliam, Erica. ‘From ‘Made in China’ to ‘Created in China’: changing our education systems for the 21st century’. Online.
[15] Cunningham et al. ‘An Innovation Agenda for the Creative Industries: Where is the R & D?’ pp. 112, 174-185.
[16] Florida, The Flight of the Creative Class: The new global competition for talent.
[17] Florida, The Flight of the Creative Class: The new global competition for talent. p. 255
[18] Julia Gillard in The Australian, Higher Education Section, December 05, 2007, Online.
[19] Queensland’s Ministerial Advisory Committee for Educational Renewal, A Creative Workforce for a Smart State: Professional Development for Teachers in an Era of Innovation.
[20] Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus - Capitalism and Schizophrenia, p. 478
[21] Williams, James. 'Deleuze's ontology and creativity: becoming in architecture', p. 202
[22] Ibid, p. 203
[23] Deleuze and Guattari, ‘What is Philosophy?’ p. 108
[24] Deleuze, Difference and Repetition p. 130-8, 158-61, 167.
[25] Anna Cutler Interview.
[26] Anna Cutler Interview.
[27] Hall and Thomson, 2007
[29] Graham Jeffrey Interview.
[30] Graham Jeffrey Interview.
[31] Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 136
[32] Graham Jeffrey Interview.
[33] Graham Jeffrey Interview.
[34] Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus - Capitalism and Schizophrenia p. 490-1.
[35] Deleuze and Guattari A Thousand Plateaus - Capitalism and Schizophrenia, p. 478.
[36] Ibid.
[37] Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class. p. 1.
[39] Cunningham, et al. ‘An Innovation Agenda for the Creative Industries: Where is the R & D?’ p. 184.
[40] Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 136
Select Bibliography:
Here, Graham envisages the politics of community as inseparable from his art education practice. Furthermore, it seems that there are certain ideas of creativity associated with working in such a diverse student demographic. I am reminded that for Deleuze, the point of creativity is to break out of the everyday, the ‘familiar’. The question of producing creativity is the same question as ‘how difference is possible’? How can we go beyond the coordinates of our constitution? Graham takes up the political utility of creativity in a (perhaps unintentionally) similar manner, musing that:
…The other thing I’m interested in is that creativity, … inevitably, implies deviance, implies breaking the rules, implies criticism, and it implies challenge. It’s not about working within the framework of ‘what if [this actually]’ exists, except to say ‘what if’?. So, creativity to me is essentially bound up with the notion of social change, with the notion of trying to alter things, and of course that brings it inevitably into conflict with institutions, because that’s not what institutions are in the business of doing. On the whole, institutions … are in the business of regimenting, of disciplining, of ordering, of cataloguing and creating taxonomies and systems which bind people to certain ways of being. … you’ve got to understand how it works in order to subvert, you can’t hack an organization if you don’t really get [into] the politics of it …[30]
Decades before this statement is made, Deleuze quotes Nietzsche in Difference and Repetition[31] as an impetus for his definition of creativity, as a situation in which new values and the recognition of established values are both affirmed as having different utilities. In a Deleuzian model of creativity, relationships between the new and the old are redesigned while they are being affirmed. In terms of accommodating this fractured and expanding experience of spatiality and folding it into the design of the Circus, Graham says:
We wanted to have an awareness of … [a fractured experience of spatiality] in the work that we were doing, and not hold up school or college as the centre of the universe, but to understand that in fact people have multiple places they identify with, and multiple kind of selves almost in relation to those places, so they’ve put on one face to do this thing and perform in a different way [and then another face for another thing] ... with somewhere like Stratford Circus, the idea was to create a … flexible sort of place, but it could be lots of different things, so that for example, Friday evenings are grind night, and it’s like the East London masses, … everybody comes down and it’s pretty … noisy and most people are between 16 and 22, … it’s really hardcore grind music, and at an earlier time that day, there might have been a tea dance in the same space, so it’s a hybrid space. … it becomes a place where it’s possible to bring groups of people together who otherwise would have sod all to do with each other.[32]
Intergenerational contact is difficult to facilitate outside families, hospitals and educational institutions. It seems to me that this is one of the ways in which the Arts Centre at Stratford Circus is exploring what a notion of creative place making might be. In the respect that the Arts Centre fosters exemplary teaching and learning practices that enable diverse groups of people, including young people, to become more innovative in the ways they think about their relationships to community, and supports them in producing creative capital, there seems to be a point of connection to Florida’s work.
I asked Graham to consider how the Stratford Circus might sustain and develop London’s Creative Economy through the support they provide young people in joining the ‘Creative Class’. This question prompted insights into the interface between industry and Florida’s research, more than it actualised any connections between Stratford Circus and theories of the Creative Class. Richard Florida’s capitalist striation of creativity holds little appeal for those at Stratford Circus. Graham explains that: ‘one of the more uncomfortable things … [about] Richard Florida, …[and] the universalisation of creativity discourse, [is] that creativity is just accepted as being a good thing, and it’s tied up with capitalist business innovation, creativity-innovation-knowledge society, and then if you are not careful, you’re not actually critiquing that whole.[33]’ I agree with Graham that, in Florida’s work, capitalist modes of production and consumption become inscribed onto all creative practices, and this robs creativity of its power for political alterity. Deleuze and Guattari describe the relationship between capitalism and striation as a process that is facilitated by State power. They say:
The physico-social model of Work pertains to the State Apparatus, it is one of its inventions, … two reasons. First, because labour only appears with the constitution of a surplus, there is no labour that is not devoted to stockpiling; in fact, labour (in the strict sense) begins only with what is called surplus labour. Second, labour performs a generalized operation of striation of space-time, a subjection of free action, a nullification of smooth spaces, the origin and means of which is in the essential enterprise of the State.[34]
Taking up this definition of labour as a State striation of space-time, in Florida’s theory of Creative Capital, fixed modes of financial value are bound to the becoming of creativity, by means that produce an order, in which creativity is accorded a set worth. Thus, the notion of ‘Creative Capital’ is the ‘distinct form’ in which Richard Florida’s work articulates the paradox of creativity. As a process of striation, the production of ‘Creative Capital’ necessarily constructs a particular spatiality. ‘Creative Capital’ is composed:‘… In [a] space, [where] lines or trajectories tend to be subordinated to points.[35]’Only certain kinds of movements are possible here: ‘one goes from one point to another’[36]. Material flows, the continual becoming of the present, is overcoded by set meanings. In Florida’s eyes, ‘Cities without gays and rock bands are losing the economic development race’[37] while the experience and political significance of being gay, or being in a rock band becomes striated in terms of economic value and place development[38]. It seems to me that here the tension between established formations of power and emerging knowledge becomes central. The janus head of historicity and the future is set at the heart of working creatively. A similar paradox between industry and academy is articulated in the research of Stewart Cunningham and colleagues, who argue that higher education focused on the creative industries suffers from ‘splits and silos’ which make planning for practical skill development in tertiary institutions a difficult feat[39]. Places of learning such as the Stratford Circus can be seen as responding to this problem of ‘splits and silos in skill development’, through the creation of pedagogical strategies that are specifically attuned to the relationship between creativity and diverse places of learning.
Across the globe, in a starkly different physical and political environment, I spent some time researching a youth arts hub with parallels to Stratford Circus, yet the Courthouse Youth Arts is a regional youth arts centre, and has been designed specifically to respond to the social and environmental issues that are specific to young people in rural and regional Victoria. I now contextualize my discussion of the two U.K projects described above in relation to this regional Victorian case study. The time I spent at the Courthouse was in late 2004 and 2005 -- the Howard Government had been in power since 1996, arts funding had received unprecedented cuts during this period and rural Victoria was in severe drought. This social context holds in relief the value accorded to, and appreciation of, arts projects that became part of English culture under the late Blair Government. This stark difference was brought to my attention recently when I was speaking at a University Symposium that brought together Industry professionals and Academics. The Symposium was in Australia and one attendee was a British artist who had travelled to Australia on a U.K arts research scholarship. She made the point that the Australian Arts and Disability scene was ten years behind Britain at least four times across the course of two days. I was never sure quite what the utility of making this point was, though I assumed it was her way of expressing frustration and making quite plain the fact that she wasn’t feeling overly stimulated or excited to be there. Australian Arts practices have been remarkably under resourced in comparison to the United Kingdom. Yet, in my opinion, this has not led to a poor quality arts scene, rather, an unlikely arts scene: resilient, interesting and low budget.
The Courthouse Youth Arts Centre operates on the premise that music and movement bring people together. Community is formed through sense: senses of belonging, of being known and recognized. Music and movement are two media through which individual recognition and collective enjoyment are facilitated. Increasingly over the past three decades, street beats: hip-hop, rap, R n’ B and movement styles which have evolved with these sounds have brought together communities from a range of ethnic backgrounds and social classes. Wathaurong Koori people, Sudanese refugees, Lebanese, Greek, Italian and Anglo-Australian Young people in Geelong come together through street beats and dance styles under the umbrella of Courthouse Youth Arts. Here community isn’t about nationality, sexuality or money as much as it is about movement and style.
The Youth Arts Centre occupies a spacious 1950’s style courthouse. – Hence the name. The Centre’s pastel coloured art deco facade is one of the more eye-catching buildings in the heart of Geelong, as the refurbishment of the building celebrates the old with a contemporary flavour. A sense of place and an understanding of social context are critical when looking at the work Courthouse is doing. Local, regional sites are kept in focus through the Centre’s outreach programs and through the multi-disciplinary focal lens of the Centre, which has been designed to embrace a diverse cross section of young people living in and around the rural centre of Geelong. Courthouse runs programs that focus on music, dance, visual arts, film, arts management and theatre making. The Courthouse’s theatre making program currently includes street dance, break dance and MCing; tools of performance making with which young people are particularly keen to engage.
The Courthouse is an exceptional place, the heart of an active arts community in Geelong; a town that has come a long way since it began as a wool distribution port. A successful textiles trade built upon the wool distribution at the financial heart of Geelong and this is still reflected at times in the ways young visual artists approach their work here. However, the old Geelong wool stores are now campus buildings for Deakin University and while Geelong is still an industrial town; the focus of labour has shifted distinctly. Alongside Deakin’s growing contribution to the community here, the Ford engine manufacturing plant and local Shell oil refinery are, and have been, Geelong’s financial sources for decades.
Beyond the smoking refinery pylons, Geelong enfolds pockets of the 1950’s - alive and well in the new millennium - and a broad community demographic. In-between the production buildings there are cottages that sell home made gollywog dolls and potted irises. There are sushi shops, Lebanese restaurants, and schools for Sudanese refugees. Some people take break dance classes a few nights a week. Other people grow their own vegies and have chooks. It’s the country and the city at the same time. It’s an in-between place that feels pretty distinctive in comparison to the grey streets and over-filled trams of Melbourne. There are some pretty funky young people in Geelong. Many of their mums and dads’ work for Ford, and these young people are living on the cutting edge of a very different kind of cultural production – jamming acrobatics, street dancing and rhymes, sourcing new stories of their own and giving them platforms. These folks are making it pretty clear that while some parts of Geelong tell tales of car engines, petrol and gollywogs, there is another level of cultural production going on around here. In a Deleuzian model of creativity, relationships between the new and the old are redesigned while they are being affirmed. Deleuze states:
Nietzsche’s distinction between the creation of new values and the recognition of established values should not be understood in a historically relative manner, as though the established values were new in their time and the new values simply needed time to become established. In fact it concerns a difference which is both formal and in kind. The new, with its power of beginning and beginning again , remains forever new, just as the established was always established from the outset, even if a certain amount of empirical time was necessary for this to be recognized. What becomes established with the new is precisely not the new. For the new –in other words, difference – calls forth forces in thought which are not the forces of recognition, today or tomorrow, but the power of a completely other model, from an unrecognised and unrecognisable terra incognita . What forces does this new bring to bear upon thought, from what central bad nature and ill does it spring, from what central ungrounding which strips thought of its ‘innateness’ and treats it every time as something which has not always existed, but begins, forced and under constraint? By contrast, how derisory are the voluntary struggles for recognition.[40]
Courthouse embraces and produces terra incognita just as much as it re-inscribes dominant discourses of the arts helping youth at risk. The centre publicizes itself as being concerned with engaging marginalised and disenfranchised young people and as offering opportunities for creative types to build their skills and excel. Courthouse is a community-based organisation – the concerns of Geelong’s youth community are reflected in its programs and in turn, the programs produce works that appeal to Geelong’s youth.
My first class at the Courthouse was one of the weekly HeadSpin master classes held for eight young emerging visual artists, writers and theatre makers. The HeadSpin master class program had a focus on theatre making and it applied this focus broadly to encompass all aspects of theatre production. The project invited eight emerging artists to work in teams to devise and stage three short performance works, roughly twenty minutes each in duration. These works were then presented as a triple bill in May 2005. HeadSpin consisted of weekly master classes with the Courthouse coordinator of the theatre making program, Naomi Steinborner. Naomi mentored HeadSpin recipients until December, at which point specialist mentors in different disciplinary areas came on board the project. These additions to the artistic team individually supported the eight individual young HeadSpin artists through the finalisation of their performance concepts, auditions, rehearsals, design, production and presentation.
The HeadSpin class were an interesting and diverse bunch. After completing Drama Studies at Adelaide University, Naomi Steinborner studied animatuering at the VCA. Her background in thinking through space and visual, conceptual design is evident in her approach to fostering new talent. A sculptor, a design student, a visual dramaturge, two writers, a sound designer, a puppeteer and two directors made up the HeadSpin team. While I was on board, the community theatre company Somebody’s Daughter ran a workshop with HeadSpin that looked at working with disenfranchised people and sourcing performance material from community participants’ lived experiences. The HeadSpin team worked in a very welcoming and engaging way with Somebody’s Daughter; a company who offer a model of community theatre which has been slipping out focus a little since the late 80’s. After HeadSpin many of the young artists being mentored in this program wanted to turn their focus to community cultural development work. Indeed, some of the participants were already actively engaged in CCD work with young mums. HeadSpin produced some striking and diverse works: a puppetry fantasy about a young boy’s journey through a gypsy forest, a contemporary satirical perspective on parlour games and an affective atmosphere / soundscape of adolescence. These works appealed to a broad cross-section of Geelong’s community.
One of the most important things about youth arts work is the ways in which it can include, speak to and be modelled around, marginalised community groups, yet theatre work by its very nature is not marginalising. Making theatre is about getting along with people. It’s about working together and getting out there. It’s also about an irreducible humanness. Whatever the specific difficulties of people’s lives, people get along as people and laugh and cry at similar ‘human’ things. While some contemporary social theorists argue we are now living in an age of post-humanism, I think collectives like the Courthouse show us otherwise. We are living in the age of a new humanism, a place where your aesthetics are your ethics; where sense, atmosphere and affect take precedence over the binary ruts of identity politics.
* * * * * *
My consideration analyses of these three place-making projects gestures towards the respective utility and need for a critical reconsideration of Florida’s work. While the connections drawn together here span a broad range of discourses, I want to outline some of the force, complexity and cultural significance that lies at the intersection of youth arts work and place-making projects. Deleuzian theories of creativity and place show us that the intersection of youth arts work and place-making projects can be taken up in order to redefine -and speak back to- Floridian theories of place and creativity. As sites of public pedagogy, such youth arts projects promote diverse conceptions of creativity and place. They show up the instability of our everyday uses of these concepts. Perhaps most saliently, they involve many young people who can become imaginatively captured, skilled and inspired.
Notes
[1] Florida, ‘The Rise of the Creative Class: Why cities without gays and rock bands are losing the economic development race.’ Online.
[2] Graham Jeffrey Interview.
[3] Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class.
[4] In ‘The Rise of the Creative Class: Why cities without gays and rock bands are losing the economic development race’, Online, Florida states:
‘The key to economic growth lies not just in the ability to attract the creative class, but to translate that underlying advantage into creative economic outcomes in the form of new ideas, new high-tech businesses and regional growth.’
[5] Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class, p 69.
[6] Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class, p. 1.
[7] Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class, p. 4.
[8] Gibson and Klocker, ‘The ‘Cultural Turn’ in Australian Regional Economic Development Discourse: Neoliberalizing Creativity?’ pp. 93-102.
[9] Gibson and Klocker, ‘The ‘Cultural Turn’ in Australian Regional Economic Development Discourse: Neoliberalizing Creativity?’ p. 93.
[10] Flew, ‘Creative Industries: From the Chicken Cheer to the Culture of Services’ pp. 89-95.
[11] Mc Robbie, ‘Clubs to Companies: Notes on the Decline of Political Culture in Speeded up Creative Worlds’ pp. 516-531. & ‘From Holloway to Hollywood: Happiness at work in the new cultural economy? pp. 97-114.
[12] Florida, The New American Dream, online.
[13] Stevenson, “Civic Gold” Rush: Cultural Planning and the politics of the Third Way.’ pp. 121-130.
[14] McWilliam, Erica. ‘From ‘Made in China’ to ‘Created in China’: changing our education systems for the 21st century’. Online.
[15] Cunningham et al. ‘An Innovation Agenda for the Creative Industries: Where is the R & D?’ pp. 112, 174-185.
[16] Florida, The Flight of the Creative Class: The new global competition for talent.
[17] Florida, The Flight of the Creative Class: The new global competition for talent. p. 255
[18] Julia Gillard in The Australian, Higher Education Section, December 05, 2007, Online.
[19] Queensland’s Ministerial Advisory Committee for Educational Renewal, A Creative Workforce for a Smart State: Professional Development for Teachers in an Era of Innovation.
[20] Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus - Capitalism and Schizophrenia, p. 478
[21] Williams, James. 'Deleuze's ontology and creativity: becoming in architecture', p. 202
[22] Ibid, p. 203
[23] Deleuze and Guattari, ‘What is Philosophy?’ p. 108
[24] Deleuze, Difference and Repetition p. 130-8, 158-61, 167.
[25] Anna Cutler Interview.
[26] Anna Cutler Interview.
[27] Hall and Thomson, 2007
[29] Graham Jeffrey Interview.
[30] Graham Jeffrey Interview.
[31] Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 136
[32] Graham Jeffrey Interview.
[33] Graham Jeffrey Interview.
[34] Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus - Capitalism and Schizophrenia p. 490-1.
[35] Deleuze and Guattari A Thousand Plateaus - Capitalism and Schizophrenia, p. 478.
[36] Ibid.
[37] Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class. p. 1.
[39] Cunningham, et al. ‘An Innovation Agenda for the Creative Industries: Where is the R & D?’ p. 184.
[40] Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 136
Select Bibliography:
ArtAngel: http://www.artangel.org.uk/ accessed 12/01/08
Arts WA (2003) Creative Connections: An Arts Education Policy Consultation Paper Western Australia: Arts WA
Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER) (2004) Evaluation of School-Based Arts Education Programs in Australian Schools, Vic: ACER
Australia Council for the Arts (ACA) (2004) National Education and the Arts Strategy: Draft for Consultation, Sydney, Australia Council
ACA & NSW Ministry for the Arts (2003) Review of Theatre for Young People New Farm QLD: Positive Solutions
Bamford, A (2004) Education and the Arts Partnership Initiative, Fuel For Arts http://www.fuel$arts.com/ accessed 24/01/06
Cahill H & Smith G (2003) A Pilot Study of Arena Theatre Company’s Audiences conducted during the Melbourne Festival season of Play Dirty, October 2002 Melbourne: University of Melbourne
Creative Partnerships: http://www.creative-partnerships.com/ accessed 19/12/07
Cunningham, S., Cutler, T., Hearn, G., Ryan, M., Keane, M., (2004) An Innovation Agenda for the Creative Industries: Where is the R & D? Media International Australia incorporating Culture and Policy 2004, 112, pp. 174-185
Cutler, T. (2003) Forword. In R. Florida The Rise of the Creative Class. North Melbourne, Australia: Pluto Press, vii-xi
Deleuze, Gilles (1993) The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (French 1988) trans. Tom Conley (English 1993: University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis)
Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix. (1987) A Thousand Plateaus - Capitalism and Schizophrenia (French 1980) trans. Brian Massumi (1987: University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis)
Deleuze, Gilles (1994a) Difference and Repetition (French 1968) trans. Paul Patton (English 1994: Colombia University Press, New York)
Deleuze, G & Guattari, F (1994b) What is Philosophy? London: Verso Publishers.
Department of Culture & the Arts (DCA) (2003) Creative Connections: An arts in education policy consultation paper Perth: DCA
Di Leo, J., Jacobs, W. and Lee, A. (2002) The Sites of Pedagogy, Symploke 10, 1-2, pp. 7-12
Donelan, K. O’Brien, A., Martinac, K., & Coulter, K. (2005) Report on the Risky Business Research Project, Backing Our Creativity, National Education and the Arts Symposium, September, Melbourne
Ellsworth, E. (2005) Places of Learning: Media, Architecture, Pedagogy, New York: Routledge
Flew, T. (2003) ‘Creative Industries: From the Chicken Cheer to the Culture of Services’ Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 17(1) pp. 89-95
Flew, T. (2004) Fashioning an Entrepreneurial Creative Cultural Self, Cultural Studies of Australasia Annual Conference, Fremantle: December.
Florida, R. (2003) The Rise of the Creative Class. North Melbourne, Australia: Pluto Press.
Florida, R. (2005a) Cities and the Creative Class. New York: Routledge.
Florida, R. (2005b) The Flight of the Creative Class: The new global competition for talent. New York: Harper Collins.
Florida, R. (2003) ‘The New American Dream: The economy will prosper again when more Americans can do the work they love. The party that realizes this first wins.’ Washington Monthly March. Online: http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2003/0303.florida.html accessed 4/01/07
Florida, Richard. (2002) ‘The Rise of the Creative Class: Why cities without gays and rock bands are losing the economic development race.’ Washington Monthly. May, online: http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2001/0205.florida.html accessed 4/01/07
Gibson, C. & Klocker N. (2005) “The ‘Cultural Turn’ in Australian Regional Economic Development Discourse: Neoliberalizing Creativity?’ Geographical Research 43(1) pp. 93-102
Gibson, C. & Robinson, D. (2004) Creative Networks in Regional Australia Media International Australia incorporating Culture and Policy 2004, 112, pp. 83-100.
Gillard, Julia (2007) in The Australian, Higher Education Section, December 05, online: http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,22873861-12332,00.html accessed 07/01/08
Green, B (2003) Kids from the Local School…’? Tele-pedagogy and the Rock Eisteddfod, Discourse 24: 205-23
Hall, C., Thomson, P. and Russell, L., (2007). Teaching like an artist: the pedagogic identities and practices of artists in schools. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 28(5), 605-619.
Hall, C.J. and Thomson, P.L., (2007). Creative partnerships?: cultural policy and inclusive arts practice in one primary school. British Educational Research Journal, 33(3), pp. 315-329.
Hawkes, J (2001) The Fourth Pillar of Sustainability: Culture’s essential role in public planning Victoria: Cultural Development Network of Victoria
Hickey-Moody, A., Harwood, V., Wright, J. & Rasmussen, M. (2005). Artful Connections: Social Change and Embodied Affect Risky Business Symposium: The Creative Arts as an Intervention for Young People at Risk, October, Melbourne.
Kretzman, J. and McKnight, J. (1993) Building Community from the Inside Out: A Path Towards Finding and Mobilising a Community’s Assets Chicago: Asset Based Community Development Institute and ACTA Publications.
Hunter, M.A. (2005) Education and the Arts Research Overview. Surry Hills, NSW. Australia Council For The Arts.
McRobbie, A. (2002a) ‘Clubs to Companies: Notes on the Decilne of Political Culture in Speeded up Creative Worlds’ Cultural Studies 16, pp. 516-531
McRobbie, A. (2002b) ‘From Holloway to Hollywood: Happiness at work in the new cultural economy?’ Cultural Economy eds Dugay & Pryke. London: SAGE, pp. 97-114.
Mc William, Erica. (2007) ‘From ‘Made in China’ to ‘Created in China’: changing our education systems for the 21st century’ Speech for the 10thChina Bejing International High-tech Expo, Bejing 25 May 2007. Online: http://www.carrickinstitute.edu.au/carrick/webdav/users/siteadmin/public/fellowships_associatefellow_paper_ericamcwilliam_may07.pdf
Accessed 07/01/08
Margate Exodus: http://www.themargateexodus.org.uk/home.php online, accessed 19/12/07
Mills & Brown (2004) Art and Wellbeing Sydney, Australia: Australia Council for the Arts
Ministerial Advisory Committee for Educational Renewal (2004) A Creative Workforce for a Smart State: Professional Development for Teachers in an Era of Innovation, Queensland: Department of Education and the Arts.
NewVic Sixth Form Arts College: http://www.newvic.ac.uk/sc.htm online, accessed 19/12/07
O’Brien A (2003) Art through pain–the panacea. Art and Pain Four, Winter http://www.doubledialogues.com/issue_four/obrien.htm%2014/2/05
O’Brien, Alder, Donelan et al. (2001-3) Risky Business: The creative arts as an intervention activity for young people at risk ARC Linkage Project, The University of Melbourne
Osmotherly, J (2002) ‘The Highwater Youth Arts Program, Somebody’s Daughter Theatre Company’ Role of Schools in Crime Prevention Conference Aust Institute of Criminology, DEET, Vic & Crime Prevention Vic.
Peck, J. (2005) Struggling with the Creative Class, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 29, 4: pp. 740-770.
PMSEIC (Prime Minister’s Science, Engineering and Innovation Council) Working Group on ‘the role of creativity in the innovation economy (2005) Imagine Australia Report.
Rasmussen, M., Hickey-Moody, A., Harwood, V. & Wright, J.(2005) Artful Connections: Community Youth Arts Projects as pedagogical sites. Risky Business Symposium: The Creative Arts as an Intervention for Young People at Risk, October, Melbourne.
Robinson, Ken (2001), Out of Our Minds: Learning to Be Creative. Oxford: Capstone.
Stevenson, D. (2004) “Civic Gold” Rush: Cultural Planning and the politics of the Third Way. International Journal of Cultural Policy, 10, pp. 121-130.
Thomson, P and Hall, C J, (2008). ‘Dialogues with artists; learning about children’s self portraits’. In: Thomson, P, ed. Doing visual research with children and young people. Routledge.
VicHealth (2002) Creative Connections: Promoting Mental Health and Wellbeing through Community Arts Participation Victoria: Arts for Health
Williams, James. 'Deleuze's ontology and creativity: becoming in architecture' Pli, The Warwick Journal of Philosophy, Volume 9, 2000, pp 200-19.
Young People and the Arts Australia (YPAA) (2004) Young People and the Arts Fact Sheet: Helping Young People at Risk http://www.ypaa.net/ accessed 14/09/04.
Notes
[1] Florida, ‘The Rise of the Creative Class: Why cities without gays and rock bands are losing the economic development race.’ Online.
[1] Graham Jeffrey Interview.
[1] Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class.
[1] In ‘The Rise of the Creative Class: Why cities without gays and rock bands are losing the economic development race’, Online, Florida states:
‘The key to economic growth lies not just in the ability to attract the creative class, but to translate that underlying advantage into creative economic outcomes in the form of new ideas, new high-tech businesses and regional growth.’
[1] Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class, p 69.
[1] Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class, p. 1.
[1] Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class, p. 4.
[1] Gibson and Klocker, ‘The ‘Cultural Turn’ in Australian Regional Economic Development Discourse: Neoliberalizing Creativity?’ pp. 93-102.
[1] Gibson and Klocker, ‘The ‘Cultural Turn’ in Australian Regional Economic Development Discourse: Neoliberalizing Creativity?’ p. 93.
[1] Flew, ‘Creative Industries: From the Chicken Cheer to the Culture of Services’ pp. 89-95.
[1] Mc Robbie, ‘Clubs to Companies: Notes on the Decline of Political Culture in Speeded up Creative Worlds’ pp. 516-531. & ‘From Holloway to Hollywood: Happiness at work in the new cultural economy? pp. 97-114.
[1] Florida, The New American Dream, online.
[1] Stevenson, “Civic Gold” Rush: Cultural Planning and the politics of the Third Way.’ pp. 121-130.
[1] McWilliam, Erica. ‘From ‘Made in China’ to ‘Created in China’: changing our education systems for the 21st century’. Online.
[1] Cunningham et al. ‘An Innovation Agenda for the Creative Industries: Where is the R & D?’ pp. 112, 174-185.
[1] Florida, The Flight of the Creative Class: The new global competition for talent.
[1] Florida, The Flight of the Creative Class: The new global competition for talent. p. 255
[1] Julia Gillard in The Australian, Higher Education Section, December 05, 2007, Online.
[1] Queensland’s Ministerial Advisory Committee for Educational Renewal, A Creative Workforce for a Smart State: Professional Development for Teachers in an Era of Innovation.
[1] Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus - Capitalism and Schizophrenia, p. 478
[1] Williams, James. 'Deleuze's ontology and creativity: becoming in architecture', p. 202
[1] Ibid, p. 203
[1] Deleuze and Guattari, ‘What is Philosophy?’ p. 108
[1] Deleuze, Difference and Repetition p. 130-8, 158-61, 167.
[1] Anna Cutler Interview.
[1] Anna Cutler Interview.
[1] Hall and Thomson, 2007
[1] Graham Jeffrey Interview.
[1] Graham Jeffrey Interview.
[1] Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 136
[1] Graham Jeffrey Interview.
[1] Graham Jeffrey Interview.
[1] Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus - Capitalism and Schizophrenia p. 490-1.
[1] Deleuze and Guattari A Thousand Plateaus - Capitalism and Schizophrenia, p. 478.
[1] Ibid.
[1] Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class. p. 1.
[1] Cunningham, et al. ‘An Innovation Agenda for the Creative Industries: Where is the R & D?’ p. 184.
[1] Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 136
Select Bibliography:
ArtAngel: http://www.artangel.org.uk/ accessed 12/01/08
Arts WA (2003) Creative Connections: An Arts Education Policy Consultation Paper Western Australia: Arts WA
Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER) (2004) Evaluation of School-Based Arts Education Programs in Australian Schools, Vic: ACER
Australia Council for the Arts (ACA) (2004) National Education and the Arts Strategy: Draft for Consultation, Sydney, Australia Council
ACA & NSW Ministry for the Arts (2003) Review of Theatre for Young People New Farm QLD: Positive Solutions
Bamford, A (2004) Education and the Arts Partnership Initiative, Fuel For Arts http://www.fuel$arts.com/ accessed 24/01/06
Cahill H & Smith G (2003) A Pilot Study of Arena Theatre Company’s Audiences conducted during the Melbourne Festival season of Play Dirty, October 2002 Melbourne: University of Melbourne
Creative Partnerships: http://www.creative-partnerships.com/ accessed 19/12/07
Cunningham, S., Cutler, T., Hearn, G., Ryan, M., Keane, M., (2004) An Innovation Agenda for the Creative Industries: Where is the R & D? Media International Australia incorporating Culture and Policy 2004, 112, pp. 174-185
Cutler, T. (2003) Forword. In R. Florida The Rise of the Creative Class. North Melbourne, Australia: Pluto Press, vii-xi
Deleuze, Gilles (1993) The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (French 1988) trans. Tom Conley (English 1993: University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis)
Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix. (1987) A Thousand Plateaus - Capitalism and Schizophrenia (French 1980) trans. Brian Massumi (1987: University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis)
Deleuze, Gilles (1994a) Difference and Repetition (French 1968) trans. Paul Patton (English 1994: Colombia University Press, New York)
Deleuze, G & Guattari, F (1994b) What is Philosophy? London: Verso Publishers.
Department of Culture & the Arts (DCA) (2003) Creative Connections: An arts in education policy consultation paper Perth: DCA
Di Leo, J., Jacobs, W. and Lee, A. (2002) The Sites of Pedagogy, Symploke 10, 1-2, pp. 7-12
Donelan, K. O’Brien, A., Martinac, K., & Coulter, K. (2005) Report on the Risky Business Research Project, Backing Our Creativity, National Education and the Arts Symposium, September, Melbourne
Ellsworth, E. (2005) Places of Learning: Media, Architecture, Pedagogy, New York: Routledge
Flew, T. (2003) ‘Creative Industries: From the Chicken Cheer to the Culture of Services’ Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 17(1) pp. 89-95
Flew, T. (2004) Fashioning an Entrepreneurial Creative Cultural Self, Cultural Studies of Australasia Annual Conference, Fremantle: December.
Florida, R. (2003) The Rise of the Creative Class. North Melbourne, Australia: Pluto Press.
Florida, R. (2005a) Cities and the Creative Class. New York: Routledge.
Florida, R. (2005b) The Flight of the Creative Class: The new global competition for talent. New York: Harper Collins.
Florida, R. (2003) ‘The New American Dream: The economy will prosper again when more Americans can do the work they love. The party that realizes this first wins.’ Washington Monthly March. Online: http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2003/0303.florida.html accessed 4/01/07
Florida, Richard. (2002) ‘The Rise of the Creative Class: Why cities without gays and rock bands are losing the economic development race.’ Washington Monthly. May, online: http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2001/0205.florida.html accessed 4/01/07
Gibson, C. & Klocker N. (2005) “The ‘Cultural Turn’ in Australian Regional Economic Development Discourse: Neoliberalizing Creativity?’ Geographical Research 43(1) pp. 93-102
Gibson, C. & Robinson, D. (2004) Creative Networks in Regional Australia Media International Australia incorporating Culture and Policy 2004, 112, pp. 83-100.
Gillard, Julia (2007) in The Australian, Higher Education Section, December 05, online: http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,22873861-12332,00.html accessed 07/01/08
Green, B (2003) Kids from the Local School…’? Tele-pedagogy and the Rock Eisteddfod, Discourse 24: 205-23
Hall, C., Thomson, P. and Russell, L., (2007). Teaching like an artist: the pedagogic identities and practices of artists in schools. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 28(5), 605-619.
Hall, C.J. and Thomson, P.L., (2007). Creative partnerships?: cultural policy and inclusive arts practice in one primary school. British Educational Research Journal, 33(3), pp. 315-329.
Hawkes, J (2001) The Fourth Pillar of Sustainability: Culture’s essential role in public planning Victoria: Cultural Development Network of Victoria
Hickey-Moody, A., Harwood, V., Wright, J. & Rasmussen, M. (2005). Artful Connections: Social Change and Embodied Affect Risky Business Symposium: The Creative Arts as an Intervention for Young People at Risk, October, Melbourne.
Kretzman, J. and McKnight, J. (1993) Building Community from the Inside Out: A Path Towards Finding and Mobilising a Community’s Assets Chicago: Asset Based Community Development Institute and ACTA Publications.
Hunter, M.A. (2005) Education and the Arts Research Overview. Surry Hills, NSW. Australia Council For The Arts.
McRobbie, A. (2002a) ‘Clubs to Companies: Notes on the Decilne of Political Culture in Speeded up Creative Worlds’ Cultural Studies 16, pp. 516-531
McRobbie, A. (2002b) ‘From Holloway to Hollywood: Happiness at work in the new cultural economy?’ Cultural Economy eds Dugay & Pryke. London: SAGE, pp. 97-114.
Mc William, Erica. (2007) ‘From ‘Made in China’ to ‘Created in China’: changing our education systems for the 21st century’ Speech for the 10thChina Bejing International High-tech Expo, Bejing 25 May 2007. Online: http://www.carrickinstitute.edu.au/carrick/webdav/users/siteadmin/public/fellowships_associatefellow_paper_ericamcwilliam_may07.pdf
Accessed 07/01/08
Margate Exodus: http://www.themargateexodus.org.uk/home.php online, accessed 19/12/07
Mills & Brown (2004) Art and Wellbeing Sydney, Australia: Australia Council for the Arts
Ministerial Advisory Committee for Educational Renewal (2004) A Creative Workforce for a Smart State: Professional Development for Teachers in an Era of Innovation, Queensland: Department of Education and the Arts.
NewVic Sixth Form Arts College: http://www.newvic.ac.uk/sc.htm online, accessed 19/12/07
O’Brien A (2003) Art through pain–the panacea. Art and Pain Four, Winter http://www.doubledialogues.com/issue_four/obrien.htm%2014/2/05
O’Brien, Alder, Donelan et al. (2001-3) Risky Business: The creative arts as an intervention activity for young people at risk ARC Linkage Project, The University of Melbourne
Osmotherly, J (2002) ‘The Highwater Youth Arts Program, Somebody’s Daughter Theatre Company’ Role of Schools in Crime Prevention Conference Aust Institute of Criminology, DEET, Vic & Crime Prevention Vic.
Peck, J. (2005) Struggling with the Creative Class, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 29, 4: pp. 740-770.
PMSEIC (Prime Minister’s Science, Engineering and Innovation Council) Working Group on ‘the role of creativity in the innovation economy (2005) Imagine Australia Report.
Rasmussen, M., Hickey-Moody, A., Harwood, V. & Wright, J.(2005) Artful Connections: Community Youth Arts Projects as pedagogical sites. Risky Business Symposium: The Creative Arts as an Intervention for Young People at Risk, October, Melbourne.
Robinson, Ken (2001), Out of Our Minds: Learning to Be Creative. Oxford: Capstone.
Stevenson, D. (2004) “Civic Gold” Rush: Cultural Planning and the politics of the Third Way. International Journal of Cultural Policy, 10, pp. 121-130.
Thomson, P and Hall, C J, (2008). ‘Dialogues with artists; learning about children’s self portraits’. In: Thomson, P, ed. Doing visual research with children and young people. Routledge.
VicHealth (2002) Creative Connections: Promoting Mental Health and Wellbeing through Community Arts Participation Victoria: Arts for Health
Williams, James. 'Deleuze's ontology and creativity: becoming in architecture' Pli, The Warwick Journal of Philosophy, Volume 9, 2000, pp 200-19.
Young People and the Arts Australia (YPAA) (2004) Young People and the Arts Fact Sheet: Helping Young People at Risk http://www.ypaa.net/ accessed 14/09/04.
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