R&R Readiness & Resilience

Training Seminar

Readiness & Resilience Training Seminar; for creative practitioners and arts and cultural professionals Led by Sarah Spanton, director of Waymarking – www.waymarking.org.uk Concrete approaches to developing your practice/arts career to higher levels of resilience, readiness, adaptability and strength. The seminar is contextualised by Waymarking’s assertion that artists / creative professionals are part of the society they inhabit, and that they have invaluable skills to offer society – especially in today’s turbulent economic times. This will be a highly engaging day, where training will take place through active contemplation and discussion using innovative practical exercises and exclusive visual tools and resources. We will work as a group and individually to value your skills differently, develop a deeper understanding of successful partnership working, re-contextualise your practice and boost confidence. You will develop new techniques and competencies to help you become more resilient, able to adapt and be at the ready. Readiness and Resilience will be a friendly, inclusive and engaging training session, where participants will be stretched and constructively supported to achieve their goals by experienced trainer / facilitator and artist Sarah Spanton.

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Readiness & Resilience Training Seminar Objectives Participants will develop: • Understanding of what is needed to be agile and prepared for today’s economic and

social climate • An appreciation of the potential relationship between artistic practice and activism • Awareness, clarity and understanding of the value of your own practice, skill set and

transferable skills • Comprehension of the value and skills needed for successful partnership working

across disciplines and sectors • Knowledge around positioning, contextualising and re-contextualising your own practice • Boosted confidence as an artist / creative professional The training seminar format • Engaging opening presentation to stimulate the day • Bringing diverse participants together to actively contemplate, consider and think

through as individuals and as a group ideas and issues • Learning through discussion and interactive activity • Demonstrations of ideas and thinking through action and participatory activity • Listening and sharing of experience between participants

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www.waymarking.org.uk Waymarking acts as a catalyst and engine for: • Making connections and enabling dialogue and collabora-

tion between disciplines • Facilitating communities to explore their urban living

needs through creative thinking and arts/cultural practice • Exploring performance/the performative in place-making

and place-shaping • Creating the context and conditions for innovative and

experimental contemporary practice • Researching the relationship between artistic practice and

social activism 4

Sarah Spanton—Brief Biography Sarah Spanton is an experienced consultant, trainer, facilitator and artist, with a practice of over 25 years. Spanton’s practice is cross-disciplinary, embracing performance, video, photography, dance, sculpture and text. Her work with Waymarking is collaborative, sited within the public realm, rather than dedicated arts spaces and strongly focused on audience participation. Spanton has been involved in developing artist development activities including setting up and running networks, symposia, seminars and conferences, she’s particularly interested in facilitating dialogue around artistic practice. She’s experienced at working in partnership outside of the arts such as with the health and wellbeing sectors and the fields of community development, education and urban development. Spanton has also been a leader in developing arts infrastructures, for example through her role in Compass Live Art Consortium and helping to set up and run Leeds Creative Timebank.

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