“If as the pragmatists say, truth is created and recreated in a matrix of social interactions and interpersonal transactions, if expanded democracy is modelled on social cooperation, why not explicitly use this flow to generate art that is itself a process of discursive meaning creation through cooperative action?

In pragmatism, philosophy has a more modest role; it is no longer the distributer of truth but the active tester of hypotheses.

Just so, the socially cooperative artist is an interactive tester of proportions rather than an individual dispenser of a finished aesthetic product…

Mutual creation has its pleasures. Pragmatist philosophers and cooperative artists share an abiding anti-elitism, a belief that philosophy, art, and pedagogy can and should be created for and with all strata of society.”

- Tom Finkelpearl from What We Made: Conversations on Art and Social Cooperation

In a post-Covid reality, we sit with a massive global divide between the North and the South, growing economic conflict locally and globally, a danger of international human rights law collapsing and the growing threat of extremism aided and abetted by social media. Alienation, isolation and violence have become critical public health and socio-cultural concerns.

In light of the devastating challenges we face, collaboration takes on new meaning. Collaboration has the potential to ignite and restore relationships, partnership building, mutual understanding, and respect. Performing and visual arts have long addressed alienation and isolation through storytelling and the lens of collaboration. Artistic collaboration offers a chance for us to see ourselves in the eyes of the other, it offers a reflection to steer us back to ourselves, to steer us home.

This is a call to explore the role collaboration plays in (re) building a collective home.

We intend to explore what home means to (re) build the table for all artists. How do we find home in our bodies, hearts, and minds, how do we find home in our city Johannesburg, in our country South Africa, in our continent Africa, and in our world? Can collaborative practices help us find our way back to ourselves – separate in our unique expressions, connected in our relationships, and our humanity, simultaneously? And, what are the obstacles to collaboration? Are these perhaps to do with the idea of a fixed home? A home with no belonging, no change in our minds, hearts, and bodies, and our cities, land, continent, and world? How can we use collaboration and collaborative practices to grow our idea of what home is and could become?

The 16th Drama for Life Conference and Festival aims to interrogate “collaboration” as a value principle that engenders home, belonging, and inclusion. In investigating collaboration, the conference and festival aims to shed light on the extensive range of artistic works, approaches, and methods that are available to forge relationships based on sound human rights and social justice principles.

We invite knowledge, critical conversations, creative workshops, and artistic work that speaks to one or more of these questions:

• What will it take for us to (re) build the table for everyone?
• What role can Applied Arts, Arts Education, Arts Therapies, Community Arts, Psychodrama and Sociodrama, and Arts Research play in enhancing collaboration and active inclusion for healing and social transformation?
• As South Africans, Africans, and Global Citizens how do we find each other and collaborate for the sake of human and environmental rights, and social and climate justice for the sake of reversing the local and global crises we face?
• What can we learn from innovative collaborative theatre-making practices, both historically and in contemporary times?
• How can Arts Education methodologies build collaboration concerning the fractured and dysfunctional school systems in South Africa and many other parts of the world?
• Are the Arts Therapies adequately addressing the local, regional, and global mental health pandemic? In what ways can the Arts Therapies better address mental health as a public health issue?
• What modes of research are serving the need to (re) build the table? What can we learn from the research that centres itself on collaboration and partnership building?
• How do indigenous knowledge systems and practices inform our contemporary discourses on collaboration in the arts?

The call is for stories, presentations, performances, experiments, and workshops from artists, arts educators, applied theatre facilitators, art therapists, students, and researchers who have collaboration and interdisciplinary innovation at the core of their praxis.

The 16th Drama for Life Conference and Festival will take place from 8 to 11 October 2024 at the University of the Witwatersrand.