Focus and rationale
One of the goals of Scenekunstbruket’s workshops is to carry out international research on the theatre house as a physical space and place. In this workshop, we chose to focus on the Third Place – Physical theme, which was particularly relevant at the time, as Kloden theatre was in the middle of its architectural planning phase. This made it possible to discuss and explore concrete adaptations. Both the Artistic Director and the Producer of Kloden participated in the workshop.
Building on our previous digital workshop (#2), we wanted this session to take the work a step further by imagining a complete theatre house. As the structure of the last workshop had worked well — both in terms of technical platforms and the decision to focus on one main task — we chose to build on the same format for this workshop.
Structure and task
A large group was attending this digital workshop, and a mix of familiar and new faces, both young and adultsAfter a brief ice-breaking session, participants were divided into six departments, each responsible for a different aspect of creating a fictional theatre house:
- Architecture
- Brand development
- Interior design
- Artistic programming
- Social events
- Ethics, inclusion and social responsibility
Each group developed proposals for their area, resulting in a collectively imagined theatre house. The task was intentionally open-ended, allowing humour, ambition and critique to coexist. This enabled participants to articulate expectations, needs and values connected to cultural spaces. The group engaged into the tasks, and with a lot of laughter and afterthought, we found several good tips in how to think at our institutions’ programming.
Outcomes
The workshop provided insight into how young people from different countries imagine welcoming, inclusive cultural institutions. It also demonstrated how digital formats can support complex collaborative thinking, even with larger and more diverse groups.
One of the findings was that the digital workshops function well as a way to stay in contact with young people who naturally move on with their lives in different cities, at universities, and in other contexts. It was encouraging to see that several participants experience the 3Place project itself as a third place — a space where they meet both familiar and new national and international peers they are not otherwise in contact with outside the project framework.