Writing & Society Research Centre Seminar Series

Beyond Artistic Borders And Into The Future: Cross-artform collaboration and its potential to foster new audiences and innovative practices for writers and storytellers with Felicity Castagna, Marian Abboud, Sheila Ngoc Pham, & Emma Saunders In artistic disciplines such as the visual and performing arts collaborations between artists working in different modes are commonplace, unlike the field of writing where the general attitude towards collaboration is much more conservative and practitioners have traditionally chosen to stick to their own discipline. The competition for audience and the increasingly limited funding and platforms in the current climate of crisis for the arts means that writers need to be looking at artistic partners and new contexts for making work. This seminar will put forward the argument that collaboration opens up a whole new territory, where artists are challenged and inspired to find new societal contexts to present their art and engage with new audiences in new spaces. Being curious about the work of others and working collaboratively is a powerful tool for writers and artists who want to make powerful art. In this seminar Dr Felicity Castagna will be in conversation with some of the most dynamic and interesting multi-disciplinary artists working across the fields of writing, dance, documentary-making, sound installation and science. Cross-artform collaboration happens in an unpredictable way. It challenges our experience of making art and shifts our focus away from our individual skills, to our capacity to engage in creative dialogue within a new territory. This seminar will explore this new territory by asking the questions: How can we understand each other’s artistic work? How do we communicate to be able to work together? What skills from our individual fields can be supportive to this collaboration? How do we rethink how we work in environments where the emphasis is often on presenting process and exploration rather than working to a predesignated result from the start? How do we create new settings to present such work and build on existing and new audiences?