In Culture of Possibility #38, Arlene Goldbard talks with Sebastian Ruth, Founder & Artistic Director and Resident Musician at Community MusicWorks in Providence, Rhode Island.
CMW describes itself as a “community-based organization that uses music education and performance as a vehicle to build lasting and meaningful relationships between children, families, and professional musicians.” Its resident musicians form a string ensemble that commissions and performs work in concert while students receive free string lessons and take part in an ongoing community of peers.
In this conversation Arlene and Sebastian explore the complex question of how classical music can connect with community arts and cultural democracy.

In the fifth episode of Ways of Listening, artist Jody Wood talks about listening as a practice of care - where to care is not to cure. Jody advocates for participatory ‘opt in’ structures for social practice art rather than co-creation, noting the complexity of human desires and potential for conflicting agendas.
She goes on to question the expectations placed on artists to solve social issues. Using examples from projects taking place with social workers and in homelessness shelters, Jody talks through the need to resist the spectacle, and keep focus on process and the power of a relational practice.
She also highlights the need to listen to yourself, as a spiritual practice of attunement.

This continues a mini-series that looks at whether or not we should feel concerned about the digital tools we use and the effects that they have on us. In this episode Owen Kelly explains three dimensions that we need to consider when thinking about the tools we use and why we use them.

In early February Sophie Hope went to Rome to present Manual Labours’ work at a conference. In this episode She and Fabiola Fiocco tell us about the workshop they did at MACRO - the Municipal Museum of Contemporary Art in Rome.
The workshop was organised by Fabiola Fiocco in collaboration with the Arts Module of the Master in Gender Studies (Roma Tre University) and facilitated by Fabiola and Sophie. They explain the background to the workshop and their research into bodies at work and the politics of exhaustion.
Sophie and Fabiola then reflect on some of the themes and issues that came up during the workshop, such as where people go to both rest and rage; the dependencies and addictions that get people through the day and barriers to collectivising care and rest for freelance workers.

David Francis comes from Dumfries in the south west of Scotland, but cut his musical teeth in the north east, playing for bands like Desperate Danz Band. He moved to Edinburgh in the 1990s and became a central figure in traditional music: performing with Mairi Campbell in the successful duo The Cast while occupying key positions in the Scottish Arts Council traditional music section and the Edinburgh Folk Festival.
In Culture of Possibility #37, Arlene Goldbard talks with David Francis, who currently acts as Director of the Traditional Music Forum in Scotland, about its impressive network of traditional musicians, preservation, reinvention, formal and informal education, Scottish cultural policy and funding, and the whole tapestry of issues, questions, and possibilities it engages.

Lady Kitt is a disabled artist and drag king, describing their work as “Mess Making as Social Glue”. Kitt works on long term, collaborative projects driven by insatiable curiosity about how art can be useful.
Projects are usually punctuated by the creation of large-scale, vibrant installations / sites for exchange made from recycled paper, reused plastics and raw clay, which Kitt calls shrines. They use crafting, performance, joy and research to create objects, interactions and events, with the wild ambition of dismantling and mischievously re-crafting spaces and systems they find discriminatory, obsolete or just quite dull.
In this episode Kitt describes a ‘collaborative sandwich’ activity that helps to build relationships at the start of a community project, and ways they make space for listening throughout this work.

This episode begins a mini-series that looks at whether or not we should feel concerned about the digital tools we use and the effects that they have on us. The tools we use and the uses we make of them have changed since the web began in the early nineties. Twenty years ago people created blogs and surfed the web looking for like-minded people. Today most people create personal pages on social media platforms and search inside Facebook to find new “friends”.
Does this difference matter?
Owen Kelly looks at the history of the web and the ways that these changes happened and suggests that we can find a growing movement to reclaim the sense of discovery that used to pervade the web. He suggests that we revive the idea of the curated blog-roll and the collective web-ring, and promises that Miaaw will introduce modern versions of these on its website soon.

On September 23, 2022, we put out episode 20 of Common Practice, in which we talked with Beverley Harvey and Brendan Jackson about the creation of the online Jubilee Archives. Later, in episode 27, we talked with Steve Trow, one of the founders of Jubilee, about the importance of cultural capital.
In this episode we conclude these discussions with a conversation with Brendan Jackson, triggered by the official finale of the Jubilee Archives programme. We ask what the project has achieved, and what Brendan sees as its future now that the construction phase has finished.
We also return to the question of Laundry Line, the community and social arts collective that might serve as a very useful model for other groups needing a formal structure in order to apply for funds.