Name: The Tavistock Institute of Human Relations
Price range: $

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.

I find it intangible to describe the changes DCP has made to my work, as it doesn’t offer ‘plug and play’ tools- however I feel I have changed as a person and grown in confidence in my perspective, which has changed the way I do my work. More about a way of being than a way of doing.

Claire Finch, Kets de Vries Institute.

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.

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What might 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.

DCP has made me delve into my own creative practice and discover new facets of it; it made me consciously engage with the roles I take within a group and organisation; it made me struggle and it made me take risks.

Academic Researcher, Writer, The Netherlands

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.

DCP has given me new perspectives, thoughts, inspirations. Not only for my artistic interests but also a fresh perspective for my professional work.

Emin Birsel, European Director, Pladis Global.

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.

Since doing DCP I stepped back into my role as a Head of Community Service in the NHS with a commitment to embrace the DCP awakened version of myself and apply my learning. Over the past year the most significant work that has impacted on my teams and the delivery of services has involved collage and textiles, music, dance and movement, singing, spoken and written word — at the core of all of these activities has been the shared connection of breathing exercises — ‘we breath the same air’ .

It feels as if this ‘stripped back connection of humans’ has unleashed something very powerful in a mechanized system....

Bernadette Kennedy, artist and creative facilitator and former NHS Clinician

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

Juliet Scott

I am an artist in social practice. Through drawing, paint and print, I study groups of people and objects and their ecological relationships within a wider landscape. I elaborate this into interactions, interventions, installations with individuals, groups and organisations creating challenging and complex settings for meaningful learning and social change. I call this ‘sentient excavation’ – deriving from leading the Institute’s archive, and which is an...

Programme faculty

Dr Annja Neumann

Glistening and grounding. The moment when participants realise that they are part of a performance that demands them to change roles inspires my work; the reality-effects and impact of role-changes. This shift of attention, radical and beautiful, sometimes transformative but always embodied, marks the beginning of something new. I seek to empower people and organisations to see how things can be different, and to make this difference...

Dr Gayle Chong Kwan

Dr Gayle Chong Kwan is an award-winning British artist who explores the contested nature of museum collections, colonialism, and ecological degradation to bring the past in dialogue with the present and future thinking through art, research, teaching, participatory practice, and work in the public realm. She works at the intersection of historical, material, and archival research and fine art practice centred on an expanded and embodied notion...

Henrietta Hale

I am a PhD researcher exploring embodied methods of inquiry in the archives of the Tavistock Institute, in partnership with Coventry University and Midland4Cities Doctoral Training. I am particularly interested in the relationship between moving, thinking and the perception and valuing of time, and have often framed this thinking under the title ‘lessons of the nervous system.’ This framework uses specific practices of sensory attention to...

Rebecca Swift

Rebecca is an artist-researcher, mentor, and Creative Director of Entelechy Arts, with over 33 years’ experience developing interdisciplinary arts in grassroots settings. Trained in Theatre BA Dartington, Performing Arts MA Middlesex, Working with Groups Diploma Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust. Her work spans spoken word, dance, theatre, and visual art. Experienced in inclusion and culture within complex environments such as care homes, SEND schools, hospital wards...

Shane Waltener

Shane Waltener’s practice is rooted in ideas about ecology, sustainability and reuse. Sculpture, installation and performance work draw inspiration from craft practice as well as and dance and movement. Often working in participatory settings, Waltener uses making processes to facilitate personal, social and cultural histories to be exchanged and through making, create new experience, knowledge and imaginaries. Waltener recently set up the Flax Exchange, a project championing...

Entelechy Arts

Entelechy Arts is a South-East London based charity working to enable marginalised groups and individuals to contribute to the creative lives of their local communities. They work particularly with isolated older people, those living with profound and multiple disabilities, and those living in care home environments. Their work is multidisciplinary and collaborative and focuses on the power of storytelling and human connection in their different forms. Some...

Deborah Williams OBE

With over 30 years’ experience working above and below the line in television, film and theatre, as well as policy development across the wider creative and cultural industries. She is the architect and designer of the BFI Diversity standards that were adopted by The Oscars and BAFTA in 2020. As well as sitting on panels and steering groups for many organisations, Deborah is known in her own...

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Next Steps

We are redeveloping this programme for 2025 and we welcome expressions of interest. Please contact Juliet Scott: j.scott@tavinstitute.org

If you have questions or would like to speak to one of the programme faculty, please contact Juliet Scott. We welcome conversations and your ideas, thoughts and dreams about the programme. Discounts and bursaries are available.

Get in touch

If you have any questions and/or would like a conversation with one of the directors about this programme, please fill in the form below and Meg Davies will get back to you.

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Deepening Creative Practice with organisations