We’re excited to announce “The Uninvited Guest,” an innovative theatre performance that brings the lived experience of persistent pain into focus. Through a vibrant blend of comedy and storytelling, the production invites audiences to reflect on the realities of chronic pain – often invisible, always impactful.
Co-created by Theatre Space North East with Flippin’ Pain, Teesside University’s research team, and community members, and supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Impact Acceleration Account at Teesside University, “The Uninvited Guest” exemplifies how the arts and research can come together to deepen public understanding of health. By weaving together personal stories, academic research, and creative interpretation, this performance sheds new light on the personal, social, and emotional effects of chronic pain, challenging myths and opening up space for empathy and dialogue.
The video recording of my talk part of ‘The Art of Cultural Fluency’ event hosted by The 7th Bridge – a network of cultural heritage professionals based in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia – is now available on LinkedIn (from 6’10”) via the link below:
I am delighted to join the Healthcare Project and Change Association – HPCA for the november webinar with a talk on “The benefits of the story-telling/story-listening loop within participatory research: exploring diverse experiences and methods for the co-production of knowledge”.
Please read the abstract below and register to this event via this link.
Storytelling has been defined as ‘the artform of social interaction’ (Wilson, 2021), not only for its inner dynamics, but also for its power to unlock grass-roots knowledge, explore dilemmas, develop community resilience, and engender change. In a time when academia and cultural institutions are being challenged to encourage broader engagement with diverse knowledges, practices that support shared knowledge and co-creation become important. Stories can generate empathy and trust among diverse communities and audiences and at the same time demonstrate their usefulness due to their power to give meaning to human behaviours and to trigger emotions (Bourbonnais and Michaud, 2018).
In this talk we acknowledge the existence of multiple truths when we recognise, as the Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie observes, ‘the danger of a single story’ (2009). As she describes, ‘because our lives and our cultures are composed of a series of overlapping stories, if we hear only a single story about another person, culture, or country, we risk a critical misunderstanding’. In a time of worrying ‘critical misunderstandings’ worldwide, this talk – linked to the soon to be published by Smithsonian Scholarly Press open access book ‘Story Work for A Just Future’ edited by Antonia Liguori, Philippa Rappoport, Daniela Gachago – explores the value of co-created “Story work”.
In particular, we will focus on how different storytelling approaches could blur boundaries and expand opportunities for collaborative research, while proposing mutual learning and co-creation of knowledge as a way forward to improve our society.
Key questions prompted by this talk are:
How do we make the digital storytelling practice further expand globally in a way that is both locally-tailored-led-owned, but also coherent with the original ethos? Is co-creation an infallible antidote to exclusion and marginalization? Can we determine when digital storytelling ends and a new practice starts, if they are based on the same ethos?
Thursday 26th September Mike McGrother, Sally Blackburn-Daniels, Natasha Vall and I facilitated our first session to reflect on the emerging concept of ‘community engineering’ exploring musicking as an approach for community dialogue.
Our workshop was part of the very successful Everyday Creativity Conference, hosted by the AHRC Everyday Creativity Research Network and Creative Lives.
[In the photo of the Pre-conference dinner at the ‘Engineer’ from the left: Sally Blackburn-Daniels, Antonia Liguori, Mike McGrother, Natasha Vall]
This performative presentation has introduced Mike McGrother’s musicking practice as a co-created approach to enhance everyday creativity while exploring community’s sense of place in the Tees Valley. Starting with the premise that ‘the meaning of musicking lies in the relationships that are established between the participants by the performance’ (Small 1999), in this presentation we have explore ‘embodied listening’ (Giomi 2019) and the transition from personal to collective within the telling-listening loop (Liguori 2023) as a manifestation of everyday creativity and as a trigger for community-led placemaking.
We have also offered a platform for the audience to reflect on how to identify skills, approaches and tools that could support emergent ‘community engineers’ to replicate, adapt and expand existing practices.
Three songs were performed by McGrother – a song about, a song for and a song with – as stimuli to discuss the following three community projects, that offer new and nuanced understandings of community’s perspectives on placemaking and collective resilience:
• The Speakeasy – a (generally) pub based open gathering of older people who, through sociable and musical intervention, reminisce and share their stories – reconnecting with their community and enjoying company.
• Trailblazers, narrative focused walks with a musical edge that are co-created by people and enable stories to be shared.
• Infant Hercules and The Haverton Hillbillies. Musical, sociable, and empowering ensembles that underpin and provide a collective voice for a community.
Across the three initiatives, over 1,500 community members were involved in the three Boroughs of Middlesbrough, Stockton-on-Tees, and Redcar & Cleveland.
This performative presentation has ended with a collaborative mapping exercise (see padlet below) to explore the potential impact of these musicking initiatives beyond their current regional reach and to challenge existing barriers for their replicability and longevity.
The University of Otago, New Zealand, just published on their YouTube channel the video recording of one of the seminars I gave during my visit in April.
Seminar hosted by the University of Otago, Wellington, New Zealand, April 2024
You can read the abstract of the presentation here:
The benefits of the story-telling/story-listening loop within participatory research
Participatory storytelling is an enriching and powerful research approach that enables the researcher and the participant to shift power dynamics and establish new ways of working to achieve (together!) more meaningful and long-lasting results. Storytelling is an effective way for people to connect, share knowledge, and generate change. Even more when the story-telling/story-listening loop is prioritised during this creative process. As our world becomes more diverse, it is crucial for academia and cultural institutions to promote engagement with different perspectives. Stories have a unique power to build empathy, trust, and understanding among communities. However, it is important to recognise that there isn’t just one truth or perspective. Like Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie says, “relying on a single story can risk a critical misunderstanding”.
In this seminar, we’ll explore the concept of co-created “Story Work” and how it involves collaborating to create stories that reflect diverse experiences and truths. We’ll also look at how storytelling can be used in research to foster engagement and inform practice and policy.
This seminar aims to address these questions:
How can digital storytelling be adapted globally while staying true to local values?
Is collaborative storytelling a solution to exclusion and marginalisation?
How do we differentiate between different storytelling practices while maintaining their ethos and core principles?
Antonia Liguori / Participatory Storytelling 