In Episode 28 of A Culture of Possibility, François Matarasso and Arlene Goldbard talk with Ben Fink and Kate Fowler about the new two-volume publication from Roadside Theater in Appalachia, Art in A Democracy, comprising play scripts and commentary from this stellar community-based theater’s history in Appalachian coal country and beyond, 1975-2000.
We touch on the need for sharing learning, generation-to-generation; the impact of changes in public funding that impose scarcity and competition; the obstacles capitalism places in the path of cultural democracy; and more.

Russell Southwood worked as a journalist before becoming one of the three founders of Comedia. He later founded the consultancy and research practice, Balancing Act, which has focused on telecoms, internet and media in sub-Saharan Africa over the last 20 years. He has previously written Less Walk, More Talk - How Celtel and the Mobile Phone Changed Africa, and with Kelly Wong, Building a Data Ecosystem for Food Security and Sustainability, Agtech V3.0.
In this episode he talks with Owen Kelly about his recent book Africa 2.0 which, its publisher says, “provides an important history of how two technologies - mobile calling and internet - were made available to millions of sub-Saharan Africans, and the impact they have had on their lives. … It analyses how the mobile phone fundamentally changed communications in sub-Saharan Africa and the ways Africans have made these technologies part of their lives, opening up a very different future”.

In 2016 five cultural workers felt frustrated by collaborative working. They wanted a tool to openly and critically talk about process. From an initial spark of inspiration they created Cards on the Table, a card game designed to help people have potentially awkward conversations about a collaborative process they had just been through.
Sophie Hope was one of those cultural workers and she went on to develop the game with Henry Mulhall. Owen Kelly talks to them about how it works, whether it works, and what plans they have for it in the future.

The website of the WHEAT Institute in Manitoba, Canada, describes Bonface Beti like this. “Bonface Njeresa Beti is an international artist-peacebuilder and educator who applies theatre-based interventions with individuals and communities to create a story of peace. He integrates and applies embodied expressive tools into larger social justice issues as a language for social justice, decolonization, and structural transformation.
He completed his undergraduate psychological counseling and theatre studies in Kenya and holds a MA degree in Peace and Conflict Studies from the University of Manitoba, Canada, and is currently working on his PhD at the same University. He is currently admitted to the European Graduate School in Switzerland where he’s pursuing an advanced certificate to join PhD studies in Expressive Arts and Conflict Transformation.
Bonface is also currently serving as WHEAT's Expressive Arts for Social Change and Peacebuilding Director.”
In this episode Owen Kelly talks to Bonface Beti on aspects of the workshop that he led at ICAF called “Music is at the heart of African creativity”. They discuss its form, its outcomes, the surprises within it, theatre of the oppressed, forum theatre and the workshop’s relationship to its title.

In the third special report on topics addressed at the ICAF Festival in Rotterdam in March and April 2023, Sophie Hope and Owen Kelly talk to Kerrie Schaeffer, who gave two presentations on documenting community performance processes.
According to the festival programme Kerrie set out to “examine the documentary form itself, its history, the relevance of new technologies from film and radio to documentary theatre, as well as political and ethical debates relevant to documentary theatre, film and digital media. Whilst paying close attention to practical examples, questions such as how video and film documentaries narrate aesthetic and social processes, whose voices are or aren’t presented, and how power relations between social actors involved in collaborative making practices are or aren’t presented, will arise”.
In this discussion Kerrie, Owen and Sophie examine some of issues that arose in the presentations and question the nature of documenting as an activity and the many ways in which the act of documenting can interact with, and interfere with, the process of creating community art.
Check out the copious show notes at https://miaaw.net for links to some of the events, films and ideas discussed in this episode.

In the second special report from ICAF, the international community arts festival in Rotterdam, Owen Kelly talks with Ed Carroll and Vita Gelūnienė about The Cabbage Field community opera, developed by Zemuju Sanciu Bendruomene, a community association working to develop a sustainable urban vision of a neighbourhood in Kaunas in Lithuania, that will protect the unique cultural heritage and identity of the Shančiai neighbourhood against extractive capitalism.
The libretto for The Cabbage Field was created by community members. The professional and non-professional artists of the troupe are all related to Shančiai in various ways, and all events and characters are inspired by local people and their stories.
The music was composed by Vidmantas Bartulis, winner of the Lithuanian National Prize, although he died during the process of creating the opera, leaving the musical part of the opera unfinished. All of the participating actors come directly from the community.

According to the ICAF website, "ICAF is a multi-trajectory, international program. We are at once a digital platform, a global network, and, every three years, an international festival that emerges in Rotterdam, showcasing community arts organisations, professionals, and practices from across the world. ICAF’s main goal is to offer space for reflection and development of the community arts movement, locally, nationally, and internationally.
Everything ICAF produces is built around the idea that community art is a worldwide, cutting edge and urgent arts movement – the only one of its kind. Furthermore, for ICAF, understanding the context behind each community arts practice is central to all that we do, to ensure we actively build bridges to communicate between differences in knowledge and experiences across social, economic, geographic, and political boundaries."
Sophie Hope and Owen Kelly attended this year’s festival - ICAF 9 - with a view to meeting people and producing a series of podcasts to help capture the energy of the festival and help spread some of the ideas. In this first special ICAF edition of our podcast, Sophie and Owen meet in a room at one of the festival sites, on the last full day of the festival, to look back over what they have experienced.

We have arrived at the first month of 2023 with five Fridays, and so we start another set of Friday Number Five. This year, as Miaaw gets ready to celebrate its fifth anniversary, we look back at some memorable episodes from our short history. We begin with the very first episode in which Sophie Hope and Owen Kelly look at a report by 64 Million Artists, and the responses it has drawn; and wonder what they thought they were up to.
Although they don't quote from it directly, they start their discussion from a perspective similar to that proposed by Steven Hadley and Elionora Belfiore in Cultural Democracy & Cultural Policy, an article they wrote in issue 221 of Cultural Trends. They wrote that:
Contemporary articulations of, and engagements with, the ideas of cultural democracy must both reconcile themselves with the nuanced and semi-documented history of cultural democracy and the significant macro-level shifts in economic, technological and social fields which have made an imperative of the need to reassess these arguments… Historical research may provide the foundation for the development of a theory of cultural democracy in relation to the issues of cultural authority and normative allocation of cultural value. This would require the theoretical development of a renewed concept of cultural democracy that acknowledges and addresses the social, cultural and economic changes that have taken place since its first formulation in the 1970s.
The issues that Sophie Hope and Owen Kelly have with Cultural Democracy in Practice lie not in its intentions, which seem good-hearted if naive, but in its lack of any historical perspective, or any suggestion that more sorts of art for more people may not mean the same as cultural democracy.