Concluding the special Miaaw at ICAF series, Owen Kelly talks with Will Weigler, a community-engaged theatre maker, writer and storyteller based in Vancouver Canada.
In 2017, his book, The Alchemy of Astonishment, won the American Alliance for Theatre & Education's Distinguished Book Award for outstanding contribution to the field. The New York City Department of Education adopted The Alchemy of Astonishment, and distributed decks of the staging strategy cards and books to K-12 theatre teachers in all five boroughs of the city.
Will Weigler acted as the official rapporteur for the ICAF Festival and we met him several times while we roamed around Rotterdam. In this conversation he talks about the nature of that role, the purpose of having a rapporteur at an event like ICAF, and the possibilities he sees for further developing the role at future gatherings.

On Culture of Possibility podcast #31, François Matarasso and Arlene Goldbard talk with Maribel Legarda, artistic director, and Beng Cabangon, executive director of the Philippines Educational Theater Association, PETA, founded in 1967!
PETA is an amazing amalgam of in-person performance, streaming, workshops, and festivals, led by a large group of artist-teachers, many of whom began as teenagers. We talk about PETA’s creative strategies to navigate massive political changes, the pandemic, and radical shifts in the support environment.
You will want to know more about this inspiring, resilient, community-based group.

Born in Vienna in 1926, Ivan Illich acted as a Roman Catholic priest, a theologian, a philosopher, and a radical social critic. He died in December 2002.
His 1971 book Deschooling Society criticises modern society's institutional approach to education, an approach that constrains learning to narrow situations in a fairly short period of the human lifespan. His 1975 book Medical Nemesis argues that industrialised society widely impairs quality of life by overmedicalising life, pathologizing normal conditions, creating false dependency, and limiting other more healthful solutions.
Illich called himself "a Wandering Jew and a Christian pilgrim" and we can find the core beliefs that held his intellectual wanderings together discussed in a more general form in his 1973 book Tools for Conviviality.
In this episode Owen Kelly reads excerpts from Tools for Conviviality, a book he has returned to again and again, to make sense of the arguments that Illich proposes - while wondering how we can get there from here, a question that Illich himself dismisses.

Sophie Hope recorded this live report on the final day of the Rural School of Economics summer camp, organised by Kathrin Böhm and Wapke Feenstra of Myvillages, and the Scottish Sculpture Workshop. The camp took place in July 2023 in Lumsden in Aberdeenshire, the home of the Scottish Sculpture Workshop.
She talks with fellow participants about what they got up to during the summer camp and some of the questions that came up during their stay in rural Aberdeenshire. They explore reflections and suggestions on the issue of “Who has the Energy?”, the question set for the summer camp so that they might explore the material and immaterial energies that support cultural work.

Continuing the special Miaaw at ICAF series, Owen Kelly talks with Kim Wide, the founder of Take A Part, based in Plymouth in the UK. He asks about Kim's personal journey, the work of Take A Part, and the unexpected effects that attending ICAF has had on their future practice.

On Culture of Possibility podcast #30, François Matarasso and Arlene Goldbard reflect on topics that are currently burning a hole in their brains:
Topics such as:
us vs. them;
what cultural democracy means and why some people can’t get it;
being a little braver.
Tune in and let us know what you think!

Hannah Kemp-Welch is a sound artist with a social practice. She creates works collaboratively and in community settings, often responding to social issues. Recent projects include ‘The Right to Record’ (2021) - a creative campaign with disabled activists, which successfully lobbied the Government to change a harmful clause within the benefits system; ‘Meet Me on the Radio’ (2020-21) - a weekly Resonance FM programme co-produced with elders isolated during lockdown; and ‘o-o-radio!’ (2023) - a project at Wysing Arts Centre, constructing homemade radios with d/Deaf young people, to better understand how hearing aids operate.
Hannah has a particular interest in transmission arts - she experiments with DIY radios and produces zines to make these technologies accessible. She is a member of feminist radio art group Shortwave Collective and arts cooperative Soundcamp, and has produced works for Radio Art Zone (2022), Movement Radio (2022), and Radiophrenia (2020-22).
In this episode Owen Kelly makes a genuine inquiry into the possible interfaces between feminism and ham radio.

According to the front page of their website, “Collective Encounters is a professional arts organisation specialising in theatre for social change through collaborative practice. We use theatre to engage those on the margins of society, telling untold stories and tackling the local, national and international concerns of our time.”
Sophie Hope talks with Annette Burghes, Aidan Jolly, and Marianne Matusz from Collective Encounters about their work, the provocations that they have organised, and the provocations they created for The World Transformed when it took place in Liverpool in September 2022.