Please join us in Porto, on Wednesday, May 7th, 2025. Please see the SIG schedule and online repository.
SAR 16 Conference 2025: Resonance
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The Working Group Performance & Pedagogy offers a forum for sharpening questions, sharing resources, and workshopping models that arise from the PSi membership across multiple dimensions of pedagogy, such as embodied teaching and learning, classroom management, course and curriculum development, and institutional contexts of research and delivery. In advance PSi #30 in Fortaleza, Brazil, 11-15 December 2025, the Working Group invites you to four summer meetings as part of PSi Constellate, offering opportunities for a Teaching Practice Exchange. Follow the QR code, or sign in here. PSi membership is required.
Organized by Adelheid Mers, Leigh Anne Howard
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Call for Proposals SIG 8: Facilitating as Creative Practice
SAR 16 Porto, May 7 – 9, 2025
In 2006, I drew The Artist as a Ceiling Fan for an SAIC symposium on artists' roles and identies. In 2025, it was included in the introduction to "Drawing Analogies - Diagrams in Art, Theory and Practice", a book by David Burrows, John Cussans, Dean Kenning, and Mary Yacoob. In 2015, Burrows, Cussans and Kenning had also invited me to be part of their symposium and exhibition, Plague of Diagrams, at the ICA, London. Available Open Access
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In its second iteration in September 2024, the workshop for Longform takes place on the first full day of the residency and engages small groups in articulating their practices using the Braid model of Making, Mediating and Managing.
The Longform residency is organized by kg Gnatowski.
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Facilitating now. Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, London, UK
Friday, June 21, 2024. 10:00 – 11:30. Birkbeck Central. A workshop by Adelheid Mers
Using collaborative mapping exercises, this workshop provides a site to compare notes, share approaches and build new vocabularies around facilitating as creative practice.
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Saturday, June 22, 2024. Hoxton Hall – Main Stage, Schedule.
A Conversation about Institutional Imagination: The convening of the working group Performance and Pedagogy is structured through three segments – Short Stories, Long Table and Extensions.
Organized by Adelheid Mers, Leigh Anne Howard, Vanessa Macaulay
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"On Facilitating: Micro-Practices for a New Gentleness" in: Mend, Blend, Attend: Advancing Artistic Research. Proceedings of SAR 13, International Conference on Artistic Research. Weimar 2022. Following its introduction through a workshop at the conference, my text discusses the making and uses of the Diagrammatic Instrument, Micro-Practices for a New Gentleness. PDF
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SAR forum 2024, April 2024
The Society for Artistic Research (SAR) supports Special Interst Groups (SIGs). SIG 8 Faciltating as Creative Practice was initially envisioned in 2022, approved by the SAR board in fall 2023, and meets for the first time at the SAR forum Tilburg. SAR forum is a new, biannual format that alternates with SAR conferences. The Forum format is organized by and around Special Interest Groups.
Announcement + Schedule SIG 8: Facilitating
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Generating text with The Braid: A workshop by Adelheid Mers
October 3-6, 2023, Convocation II, Zentrum Fokus Forschung, University of Applied Arts Vienna
Convocation II is organized by the SIG: Language-based Artistic Research, organized by Emma Cocker, Alexander Damianisch, Cordula Daus, Lena Séraphin.
The Braid is a diagrammatic facilitation instrument that emphasizes thinking in space, through an adjacency of embodied and propositional knowing. It was derived from conversations with experimental musicians and other artists about how they work and is often deployed to facilitate conversations about artistic and other practices. Outcomes may be new thinking about practice, and an impetus toward new work, as used for example with Steve Dutton, in the “Articulating Solitudes” pairing reported on during Affinities and Urgencies in Language-based Artistic Research, 2022. Recently, the facilitation process expanded to also yield entries into new writing. The workshop further explores this capacity for collaboratively generating texts from within considerations of the topologies of practice.
My essay, On Diagrams & the Diagrammatic, in: Andrej Mirčev, ed. Performance Research Volume 27, 2022 – Issue 8: https://doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2022.2224193. Available online and in print 2023.
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The pandemic’s new found facility with technology, as well as an expansion of available platforms, gave rise to a practice of walking and talking remotely among a group of artists and scholars across continents, informally exploring modalities of learning about each other’s ways of sense making while in motion and connected only through sound. What does walking, talking and listening remotely draw from existing pedagogies? How can it inform their expansion? Did questions form you would like to explore when attending Uhambo Luyazilawula in August 2023?
Following PSi 2023 Uhambo Luyazilawula – embodied wandering practices, and also as part of it, the Working Group Performance and Pedagogy is inviting participants across the globe to meet for paired walks, runs, or rides, traversing any terrain at any length, for any duration, using available sound-based remote communication technologies you are comfortable with. Possible longer term outcomes are a collection of recordings if you chooses to create any, excerpts from transcripts, poetic and other responses to the experience. Our hope is that we will be able to germinate new thinking about communication and learning amidst many ways of meaning making.
Virtual Event Series, organized by Adelheid Mers and Rumen Rachev
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Conference of the Association of Arts Administration Educators (AAAE). Hosted by Baruch College / CUNY, New York. Workshop: The Braid – Facilitating the Facilitators by Adelheid Mers
This session will introduce an arts-based facilitation practice, The Braid, by sharing its artistic and theoretical context along with an example of its application, followed by a 45 minute, hands-on workshop, and feedback conversation. The Braid’s organizing principle is reflected in its three areas: Power, Publics, Poiesis, or in another alliteration, Managing, Mediating, Making. Unlike solution-centered facilitation methods, the Braid focuses on developing an ecological, institutional imagination from within workshop participants’ intersectional, lived experiences. Institutional imagination is a core component of leadership. The Braid facilitation practice can promote and root participatory leadership approaches. It can be useful for arts organizations, groups of administrators, educators, artists, and arts administration students.
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Conference Program
SAR 14 Conference, "Too Early/Too Late", hosted by thr Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim
"Just right: Performing facilitation as artistic research", by Adelheid Mers
The workshop at New York Arts Program was an opportunity to use The Braid to initate co-writing. After students validated their experiences with their practices in conversation, they detached the note tiles and in their groups ordered them into a shared narrative. That served as an opportunity for reflection, and as a step towards personal writing.
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My text, Zetetic Manoevers - Stalking the Continuum, in: Aaron Jaffe, Rodrigo Martini and Michael F. Miller (eds). "Understanding Flusser, Understanding Modernism", Bloomsbury Academic 2022. Updated from initial publication as, "Stalking the Continuum" in: Georgia Kotretsos, ed. Bootprint Vol. 1, No. 1, March 2009
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Respectful, detailed, ethical engagements: Facilitating ‘Micro-practices for a New Gentleness’
In The Three Ecologies Guattari asked to “organize new micropolitical and microsocial practices, new solidarities, a new gentleness, together with new aesthetic and new analytic practices.” I invited conference attendees to join me in a facilitated conversation, as part of my recent project, ‘Micro-practices for a New Gentleness’. The project was developed by probing conventions of studio critique and conversational improvisation for constructive patterns. We used a set of 18, largely participant-administrated prompts, supported by associated 3-d printed figurines. Centering epistemic diversity makes series of patterns visible by which, as Karen Barad states “differences that make a difference” appear, as part of “respectful, detailed, ethical engagements.”
Additionally, I gave a brief introduction to work jointly done with Steve Dutton, at the Gathering for the Special Interest Group, Language-based Artistic Research.
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Since 2016, Stanzi Vaubel has directed the annual Indeterminacy Festival, offering curated, arts-based laboratories that challenge participants to connect across disciplinary expertise. The 2022 iteration of the Indeterminacy Festival: Re-Disciplining in the 21st Century is being created in collaboration with Adelheid Mers, using The Braid, a multi-dimensional facilitation instrument Mers has developed, as a point of departure. Our goal was to support a line-up of facilitated workshops, each developed from within our contributor’s artistic practices. The Indeterminacy Festival was invited by the School of Performing Arts at the University of Malta. It is taking place there, and at satellite locations in the US and Canada, in April 2022.
"From 25 to 30 April 2022, the School of Performing Arts of the University of Malta co-hosted the Indeterminacy Festival, alongside connections in Montreal, Chicago, and Buffalo, NY. The Indeterminacy Festival is an international festival aimed at re-disciplining and enlarging our understanding of artistic practice and creativity in the world around us.
Students at the School participated in workshops focused on an enormous array of topics in artistic practice, from sound mapping and acoustic ecology to movement studies, improvisation, and choreography. As part of the Festival, the School also collaborated with the Opening Doors Association and Step Up For Parkinsons to host workshops for participants led by leading international artists and pedagogues aimed at fostering greater inclusivity and involvement in arts education.
On Monday 25 April, Fulbright Scholar Brian Kavanaugh led a workshop in conjunction with the Opening Doors Association with young adults with intellectual disabilities. After introducing to the participants his ‘Studio Forward Method’, which focuses on facilitating individualised success, Brian gave them an exercise in groups, focused on three main questions: What is someone excited about? How can a person describe what excites them? How long can someone stay focused on what they are excited about? Inevitably, whilst trying to put empathy into practice, the participants discovered something new about themselves too.
On Wednesday 27 April, Michaela Neild of the Ohio State University led a movement workshop in conjunction with Step Up For Parkinson’s for people living with Parkinson's disease. Michaela led a hybrid session from Buffalo, alternating synchronous and asynchronous exercises. Overall, it aimed to practise active listening, self-other relatedness, and building empathetic understanding among the participants. In addition, non-verbal communication, shared leadership, and collaboration, created a relaxed but also fun learning environment in the classroom. This unique experience ended up being emotional and moving for all the participants.
On Friday 29 April, Dr Jesse Stewart (Carleton University, Canada) led an additional workshop in conjunction with the Opening Doors Association for young adults with intellectual disabilities. A constant conversation between music and movement was making the room vibrating. The participants played with their bodies, with their voices, as well as with different instruments. The highlight of the workshop was when the Maltese participants were dancing in front of the screen, and different gongs were triggered by their movement and playing in Canada."
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In February, I’ll be in conversation with artist and curator Steve Dutton, facilitated using The Braid, as part of Affinities + Urgencies in Language-based Artistic Research (PART II).
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I will speak about Performative Diagrammatics at a symposium, Art as Education and Education as Art, organized by performance artist & PhD candidate, Laurence Dubé-Rushby with guest speakers from the fields of Performance & Education, held at Chapel Arts Studio, UK.
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Over two days in August, I facilitated a retreat at Grand Ravines Park in Michigan, for the Visual and Media Arts Department of Grand Valley State University. Faculty, staff and alumni participated. Invited and supported by department chair Paul Wittenbraker, I worked closely with Jenn Schaub, an alum of the program and the Director of Community Building & Engagement at the Dwelling Place of Grand Rapids. Goals were bringing everyone together after the pandemic and following a reorganization, to assess and reconnect, visioning future scenarios. Starting with Braid diagram supported conversations about participants’ own, creative practices, we moved on to using String Braids in reflecting on each area’s curriculum and pedagogy, followed by exploring connecting narratives that can collectively move forward the aeas of Art History, Art Education, Visual Studies, and multiple specialties in Fine Arts, Design and Production. A concluding report was submitted shortly after.
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Co-edited with Daniel Jiménez Quiroz, and stewarded by Meghan Moe Beitiks, CSPA Quarterly – Q33: “For a New Gentleness” is live today, with essays by María Iñigo Clavo and Benvenuto Chavajay Ixtetelá, Alejandro Ponce de León, Işıl Eğrikavuk, Tyanif Rico Rodríguez on Manuela Infante, and Juan Pablo Pacheco Bejarano. Get it here. The title invokes diagram artist and philosopher Félix Guattari, who in The Three Ecologies asked to “organize new micropolitical and microsocial practices, new solidarities, a new gentleness, together with new aesthetic and new analytic practices.”
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My text, Performative Topologies, discusses a Performative Topologies workshop held as part of an exhibition in Berlin. It is part of the Special Issue Flesh Circuits edited by Connor Mcgarrigle and El Putnam for the International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media. Performative Topologies is a diagrammatic instrument, developed with multiple contributers.
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GPS 4.1 is out, the online, peer-reviewed Global Performance Studies journal, including my essay about interacting with the Diagrammatic Instruments, The Braid and Performative Topologies. I am very excited about the ability to include video clips in the body of the text. Above is a video still from the exhibition Membrane, organized by Ursula Damm, in Berlin.
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In June and July 2021, the newly formed PSi Working Group Performance & Pedagogy convened two sets of three online workshops as part of the Constellate events, to investigate permutations of the question how knowing in performing shapes performance pedagogies and the institutions that house and deploy them. You can find out more here.
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On August 13., 14., and 15. 2021, as part of the “Neighbourhoods” stream of PSi Constellate, there were three opportunities to explore an online adaptation of the Diagrammatic Instrument, Micro-Practices for a New Gentleness, through a virtual Performative Diagrammatics Lab. Documentation
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Micro-practices for a New Gentleness is a prototype-stage Diagrammatic Instrument, developed in Chicago by a constellation of international and interdisciplinary co-creators with art, design, music, and mediation backgrounds. Co-facilitated here with co-creator Daniel Jiménez Quiroz, this was our last in-person facilitating opportunity before the pandemic shutdown.
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