Social Art Studio Residency 2020



About
 Process
 Residency team
 Participants
 Partners
         


The second Social Art Studio Residency took place in the Yucatán Peninsula, Mexico, in early 2020, building directly upon the inquiry initiated the previous year. While the first residency explored multiple collaborative prototypes simultaneously, this second edition introduced a new challenge: Could we create one collective work of social art together, situated within a community?

Hosted once again by the Presencing Institute and TAE, the residency brought together artists, educators, designers, performers, and social change practitioners to investigate collaborative theatre as a medium for awareness-based social change. Rather than dividing into separate groups, all participants worked together throughout the residency to create a single theatre performance that would eventually be presented publicly alongside young people from the local Mayan community.
Process                   Learning journeys         Moment work         Final performance         Impact

The first days focused on developing a shared embodied language through Social Presencing Theater practices, awareness exercises, and continued immersion within the cultural landscape of Yucatán. As in the previous residency, relationships with local communities remained central to the process. Participants facilitated workshops with Mayan youth, exploring embodied experiences of everyday life, listening to their concerns, aspirations, and stories, and inviting these perspectives into the artistic process.
The central methodology guiding the creation of the performance was a theatre-making process inspired by Moment Work, developed by the Tectonic Theater Project. Drawing on this methodology, Arawana Hayashi and Ricardo Dutra developed a loose adaptation for collaborative artistic prototyping, inviting participants to collectively generate, rehearse, refine, and assemble performative "moments" into a shared work of social art. Rather than beginning with a complete script, participants continuously generated small performative fragments—called "moments"—through movement, poetry, gesture, images, sound, dialogue, film, and spatial compositions. Each participant periodically assumed the role of director, inviting others to embody and experiment with their proposed moment.
Over several days, the residency evolved through an iterative rhythm of making, rehearsing, receiving feedback, editing, recombining, and rehearsing again. Ideas were rarely discussed in abstraction; instead, they were immediately tested through performance. Individual moments gradually revealed connections with one another until a collective narrative began to emerge. The resulting performance was not designed beforehand but discovered through the process of making together.
The final performance brought together adults and Mayan youth in a shared theatrical experience presented publicly in Izamal. Following the performance, performers and audience members gathered in small dialogue circles to reflect on the experience, extending the artwork beyond the stage into collective conversation. In this sense, both the making of the performance and the dialogue it generated became part of the artistic work itself.
Duration

10 days

Format

in-person

Participants

20 residents (local and international) and 70 local Mayan youth
Outcome

1 performance in a public space


Residency Team

Arawana Hayashi
Claudia Madrazo
Ricardo Dutra
Participants
Multidisciplinary artists, educators, designers, dancers, Mayan youth and social change practitioners from Mexico and around the world for a ten-day exploration of an emerging question: Could we create one collective work of social art together, situated within a community?
Partners


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