The 2012 Play's the Thing conference will take place on 7-9 November at Toynbee Studios in London. Tickets for the event will be on sale soon. Add your name to our mailing list (below) to make sure that you don't miss out. People on our mailing list will be able to pre-book for the conference before tickets go on general sale.
 |
 |
 |
 |
Several significant threats to our collective wellbeing have been gathering strength and loping towards us with increasingly alarming speed. Please welcome The Financial Crisis, Global Warming, Biodiversity Loss, Resource Depletion and Civic Unrest.
At this moment in history we also have a wealth of knowledge about human happiness; some apparently viable alternatives to our current economic and political systems; a technology which allows us to explore such information with ease, and opportunities to connect with each other via this technology.
Yet what we appear to lack are prominent creative responses: powerful, provocative and insightful works and visions which have us recognising our shared prospects and inspired to fulfil a more promising version of the future, with tools that are already at our fingertips.
Play's the Thing is an opportunity and challenge for artists, thinkers, social innovators and interested individuals to absorb and respond to diverse, invigorating perspectives on human wellbeing and its fate in tomorrow's world.
Play's the Thing 2011 was an Edge Project supported by a grant from the European Commission's Education, Audiovisual and Culture Executive Agency.
From TINA: There Is No Alternative to TABITHA: There Are Brilliantly Inspirational Truly Healing Alternatives #playsthething
Videos from the 2011 Play's the Thing conference are starting to come online. The first, a warm-up workshop with Ansuman Biswas, can now be seen in our video archive. Other videos now include Alice Taylor's talk on Makers and Players, Ben Irivine's How Can We Make it Happen and the first part of Professor Felicia Huppert's Keynote Address.
Strapline change. Play's the Thing is in a state of rapid evolution and the change in the strapline reflects this. The original strapline for 2011, 'Creative Approaches to Wellbeing', has been updated and now reads 'for assembling reminders about creative approaches to curing illbeing within the social mind'. While this might be a bit of a mouthful, we hope that, when unpacked, it will provide a greater degree of focus to the Play's the Thing project. More on this, and how we'll be using the strapline to make the Play's the Thing objectives more concrete in future, will be materialising on this website very soon.
Thanks to everyone who contributed to and attended the Play's the Thing at Toynbee Hall on 22/23 November 2011. We've had a great response to the event and we've already started planning for the 2012 conference. If you aren't already on our mailing list, then please sign up today for news about the next conference. Dates and venue for Play's the Thing 2012 have been provisionally agreed and will soon be made public.
SANe / Play's the Thing eBulletin #6 10 April 2012
SANe / Play's the Thing eBulletin #5 26 March 2012
SAne / Play's the Thing eBulletin #4 12 Mar 2012
SANe / Play's the Thing eBulletin #3 27 Feb 2012
SANe / Play's the Thing eBulletin #2 13 Feb 2012
SANe / Play's the Thing eBulletin #1 30 Jan 2012
Wellbeing Campaign 6 Jan 2012
Conference Report and Questionnaire 26 Nov 2011
The SANe / Play's the Thing eBulletin is edited by Frances Richens
"great stuff ... the most coherent & conceptually rigorous event of the year .."
Indy Johar on Twitter
"My mind feels like a bucket of wriggly eels, or perhaps more attractively, a shoal of darting fish, after #playsthething"
Bridget McKenzie on Twitter
The Play's the Thing website is becoming a place where stakeholders in Play, Creativity and Wellbeing can continue the lively debates that began at the conference. We welcome new bloggers to the site (here's how to join) and we invite you to participate in the very active Twitter forum that has formed around the #playsthething hashtag.
NEW: Follow Ludicist @ Play's the Thing
A day or two after the end of Play's The Thing: Creative Approaches to Wellbeing, and the best I can do is to cite one of our wonderful speakers, Bridget McKenzie: "after this, my mind feels a like a bucket of wriggling eels. Or a shoal of fish". Meaning, I guess, that the conference did its job in stimulating thoughts and perspectives on the wellbeing agenda. What follows is my personal list of themes, memes and highlights - I'd be delighted to see some corrective and expansive comments below.
After the first day, it seemed clear what that agenda was, at least from the top-down perspective of government and policy-makers in UK and Europe. Commercial and industrial growth has ceased to be the only reliable indicator of societal progress - our status-driven consumerism inducing anxiety, depression and physical ill-health (as William Davies noted), a dysphoria compounded by our slowly growing awareness of its toxic material impact on a limited planet (as Andrew Simms elaborated).
To complement this, psychology and neurology is discovering the benefits of "flourishing". If you actively pursue the opposite of the "common mental disorders" (in Felicia Huppert's words), there are benefits in recovery from illness, even capacity for creativity. We heard that Gus O'Donnell, the chief civil servant in the current UK Coalition government, has a slogan: "What gets treasured, gets measured".
Yet many of our speakers cautioned against too militant a top-down push towards "positive" wellbeing. Happiness achieved despite a damp flat and low/no-pay might be delusory, noted Libby Brookes - though she admitted that the wellbeing agenda forced us to consider the "subjective" as well as the "objective" conditions of living, A service economy which demands performativity, enthusiasm and ingenuity from its workers, might well be the "competitive production of uncertainty", in Chris Groves words. And where might a joyful anger fit into this picture - or even a "depressive realism", that might found the basis for activism or resistance?
The wellbeing agenda isn't navel-gazing, it's innovation and survival by Pat Kane
Transforming Behaviour Change: Beyond Nudge and Neuromania by Jonathan Rowson
Transforming Behaviour Change: Beyond Nudge and Neuromania by Jonathan Rowson
ArtsProfessional - our media partner at Play's the Thing - is a magazine and an online resource. And it’s a meeting point for people in the arts who share priorities and values.
ArtsProfessional's readers and writers are diverse - from all sectors, specialisms and regions of the arts. They are a big part of what makes ArtsProfessional the highly-valued resource it has become.
When it comes to staying in touch with the arts sector, there's never been a better source of news, features and advice.
www.artsprofessional.co.uk
We are delighted to have a very active community of bloggers on Play's the Thing, exploring wellbeing and illbeing from a wide variety of perspectives and standpoints. If you have something to contribute to the discussions, then please feel free to set up your own blog on this site. Here's How.
Play's the Thing 2011 was an Escape Artists production supported by a grant from the European Commission's Education, Audiovisual and Culture Executive Agency. Escape Artists is a charity that promotes mental wellbeing through the arts. The company works across sectors and art forms with homeless people, mental health service users, young people at risk, prisoners and other disadvantaged groups: providing structured routes into further education, training and employment. Play's the Thing 2012 is being produced in partnership with Seeds for Growth (more information to follow).
Escape Artists | Registered Charity Number 1086004 | Company Limited by Guarantee 4041776 | PlaysTheThing © 2012
