Semester:
Offered:
Date: Saturday, June 3rd, 2023 WAITLISTED
Time: 10 am - 5 pm
Instructors: John Borstel and Catherine Stewart
Location: Harvard Ed Portal (next door to Ceramics Program)
Registration for this workshop will open on April 26 to anyone age 18+
The Ceramics Program supports the creative efforts of a wide array of artists in the Boston area - potters, sculptors, painters, etc. We pride ourselves on our community and we understand that many times, students wish to engage in thoughtful dialogue and critique on work outside of the classroom. In a hopes to promote further engagement between our community members, we have asked John Borstel and Catherine Stewart to introduce us to the Critical Response Process (CRP).
If you are doing creative work, you are experiencing feedback: invited or unsolicited, formal or casual, in dialogue with others or in your own head. Handling and applying feedback can be decisive in how we value our work, how we grow, and how we sustain a sense of community in artistic contexts. The Critical Response Process (CRP) devised by choreographer Liz Lerman in 1990, is a four-step process and toolkit of principles for guiding actionable feedback on creative works in progress. CRP emphasizes the power of questions and the potential of informed dialogue between an artist and a group of responders. It offers principles to animate generative conversations between creative collaborators and peers.
Participants in this workshop will learn CRP as a structured feedback method that leaves the maker eagerly motivated to get back to work. We’ll explore CRP’s principles of meaning, inquiry, and engaged/suspended judgment, and experience applications to enhance personal and collective learning, support peer dialogue and artistic conversations, and bring clarity and abundance to creative process. While this workshop centers craft and visual artwork, it welcomes people from all creative disciplines.
Schedule:
10 am – 12 pm: Foundations for CRP
12 pm – 1 pm: Lunch Break
1 pm – 5 pm: Understanding and Using CRP
Biographies:
John Borstel is a maker, writer, and facilitator of experiences in critique and learning whose award-winning artistic work combines elements of imagery, performance, and text. In his capacities as Project Advisor and Director of Certification, he collaborates with MacArthur “Genius Grant” Fellow Liz Lerman on online, education, and writing projects focused on creative process and generative critique. Co-author of Critique Is Creative: The Critical Response Process in Theory and Action, John has traveled widely to teach and facilitate this unique feedback system, which emphasizes the values of dialogue and active involvement by the artist. John’s writing on the arts has appeared in books, periodicals, and multiple projects for Animating Democracy. He has served on arts/culture grant panels and advisory groups at the local, state, regional, and national levels. John co-facilitates Drawing Zone, a monthly laboratory in accessible drawing, and has been a teacher and curator with Photoworks Glen Echo, whose annual Photo Slam he founded in 2010. He holds a B.A. in English from Georgetown University and an MFA in interdisciplinary arts from Goddard College.
Catherine Stewart is an applied theatre artist, making performance work created through participatory processes. Specifically, as a writer, director, media designer, and facilitator working in theatre and film, she has developed her practice as part of the Lincoln Center Directors’ Lab, as a Creative Community Fellow at National Arts Strategies, and as a certified facilitator of Liz Lerman’s Critical Response Process. She is a recent alum of Company One’s PlayLab Unit where she developed her latest play, You, Me, and the Woodsmoke, which was named a finalist for Bloomington Play Project's 2022 Woodward/Newman Award. She has a BA Honours in Theatre and Performance from the University of Leeds, where she was awarded the White Rose Scholarship for Enterprise for her work in developing sustainable creative economies, and an MFA in Dramatic Writing from Goddard College.
Workshop Fee: $150.00 for Adult Community and Harvard Graduate students; FREE for Harvard Undergraduates
***Those enrolled in Summer 2023 classes will receive a 25% discount code prior to registration!***
Photo: Meleanna Aluli Meyer