Blog | Pioneering community cultural engagement in Liverpool
Liverpool City Council’s Culture Liverpool team have joined forces with the arts organisation Metal to push the boundaries of mass, cultural participation events. Metal’s Director Jenny Porter tells us more.
Picton Play is a programme of resident engagement that focuses on communities in Toxteth, Wavertree, the Smithdown Road area, Edge Hill and Kensington.
The programme organised by the arts organisation – Metal – starts by looking at what’s already in the community and then develops different ways to encourage participation.
One strand was with Josh Coates, a performance-based artist, who held a listening residency at the ASDA car park on Smithdown Road. Next, came two further residencies, one on the 86 bus route with Nicki McCubbing and one in Wavertree Botanic Park with Andrea Ku.
The residencies afforded artists the freedom to explore spaces in our neighbourhoods not usually associated with creativity and to connect with local businesses and community groups such as Arriva and the Friends of Botanic Park.
The next phase of the project will be a co-production with a community decision-making board of local residents, affectionately known as The Mystery Dreamers. The group is named after Wavertree Park, which is known locally as The Mystery as it was donated to the City by an anonymous city well-wisher.
The plan is to produce an ambitious mass-participatory artwork, which will engage local residents. It’s an experiment in cultural democracy that pushes boundaries and forges new relationships between artists, arts organisations and communities at a neighbourhood level.
The project puts the creative decisions into the hands of the residents. The outcome will celebrate the creativity of Picton’s residents in a playful way, using the theme of mysteries and mythologies that lie beneath the surface.
The outcome will be a model for inclusive and innovative mass-participatory performance practice, that will go beyond artistic expression, with the potential to shape and enhance the social fabric of this community.
For Metal, as a national organisation, Picton Play acts as a testing platform for our sites in Southend and Peterborough. We have a fantastic relationship with Liverpool City Council who give us the freedom to experiment, and the people of Liverpool are so warm and generous with their time, as well as being wonderfully creative with their ideas.