At a time when creativity is in ever more demand but opportunities to explore and experiment with it can be difficult to find, we invite you to bring (or uncover) the creative, risk-taking and curious parts of yourself.

Deepening Creative Practice is a learning experience where you can explore your whole self in relation to organisational leadership, consultancy and change. The programme will support you to (re-)awaken, nurture and cherish those aspects of yourself which may be more hidden, to be explored within the work setting. 

What is Deepening Creative Practice? 

A trans-disciplinary, non-linear programme where the arts and social sciences weave together as participants explore their whole selves in relation to their organisation or eco-system, through: 

• Explicit and sensitive crafting of a suitable container for the work to unfold into;
• Challenging oneself and each other to find alternative perspectives and try out new approaches that free yourselves or the organisations you work with from feeling or being stuck and from ways of being and identities that may no longer be of service;
• Experimentation with and development of an aesthetic sensibility in design and change in organisations; 
• Reflecting on and exploring new modes of expression for the difficult and sometimes intractable problems that relate to organisations and wider society;
• Space for thinking differently, breaking moulded habits and petrified behaviours of seeing and working with organisations.

Who is it for?

Deepening Creative Practice is for organisational leaders and consultants, artist-academics, artistic practitioners, working artists, concerned and creative citizens, freedom fighters, passionate learners, curious ecologists or bored out-of-the-box agents of life and wellbeing on and of our at-risk planet. 

What will it look like?

Deepening Creative Practice has ambitious aims to take a curatorial (caring for and contextual) and working out loud approach to learning. With the Tavistock Institute’s purposely designed office and technology as its holding space programme faculty (comprising Tavistock arts based practitioners and artists) and participants will co-curate and create their own learning experience which will manifest in the fifth and final exhibiting season.  Core elements offered as resources will include:

• Five immersive seasons working with multi-disciplinary faculty of arts based organisational practitioners and artists including a final co-created and curated ‘exhibiting’ season.
• A day each season field working with artist practitioners from the visual arts; dance & choreography; theatre & performance;
• Embodiment and integrating the psychophysical into your practice;
• A supportive environment for working with unconscious processes and yielding to creative resistance in particular the relationship between the dynamics of the group and the creative process;
• Social Dreaming matrices as a mode of softening to the group and accessing the wider ecology and connectedness of human systems; 
• Relocating curatorial and archival processes into organisational sites and unpacking what this means;
• Sharing and developing from your own creative practice as a dialogue with the unfolding programme;
• ‘Ways of Knowing and Being’ sessions that reevaluate the sources and knowledge systems that inform our various practices.

Towards the end of the programme, participants will collaborate in making an exhibition, show, event, festival, manifestation, document (or potentially some new way of describing) of their unfolding findings.

Why now?

This inherently complex and non-linear programme follows a seasonal and social context opening itself up to the shattering and fragmentation of our present times and how we can help ourselves and our organisations in letting go of long-held ideologies as they are experienced at the individual, group, organisational and societal levels and how this manifests in objects and artefacts.   We are in a time that requires people and organisations to learn from the past and embrace new ways of translating history into what is needed for the future. 

Having worked in a trans-disciplinary way since its inception, creative and artistic practice is ever more embedded within the Institute’s work and practices.   With DCP constantly evolving at the heart of its Arts and Organisation stream, the Tavistock Institute is in the right place to lead this unique programme and support you in your deep exploration. Come and play (seriously) with us, in order to be better able to work with and navigate the challenges of the 21st century.

The Journey

The vision for Deepening Creative Practice has always been to situate it as a dynamic container for the wider socially oriented arts practices at the Institute and to resist the pull to linearity of learning programmes where certain inputs are expected to lead to certain outputs. We tend to approach our own learning as causal when we know this is far from the reality of organisational life. 

Rather than outcomes we might suggest delving into and getting lost in the richness and complexity of all it offers — some of which will be challenging. 

Instead of prescribing what you will get out of the programme inviting your imagination to flow about what could possibly emerge over the five seasons and their societal, global and organisational context.   

You will be the architect of your learning and we will challenge you in finding a mind of your own in this regard. What might emerge from the space is an increase in your ability to address complex organisational and societal issues inventively, ethically and imaginatively. A new repertoire and language of aesthetic working — curating/caring; archiving; choreographing; conserving; exhibiting; presencing; embodying. A new relationship with the performative and theatrical side of yourselves to enable you in sharing and embedding your practice in the public domain. 

And in doing this contributing to the development of new practices in organisational change.

Venue

The programme will be held in the Institute’s office. Situated between Farringdon, Barbican and Old Street, we moved into our office at Gee Street in mid-2021. Our office is a bright and flexible space, with a state-of-the-art video conference system set up to accommodate both in-person and online learning, and in hybrid. We have a fully stocked kitchen, board room, consulting rooms and studio space for larger groups and movement. For those joining online, we use Zoom. 

Programme Director

Programme faculty

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Next Steps

Our current Deepening Creative Practice cohort is in progress running April 2023 to May 2024. Applications are now open for our 2024/25 cohort, beginning in June 2024 (with modules in June 2024, October 2024, January 2025, April 2025 and an exhibiting season no later than July 2025). If you have questions or would like to speak to one of the programme faculty, please contact Emily Kyte. We welcome conversations and your ideas, thoughts and dreams about the programme.