Background to the Moveable Feast Workshop Company

Over the last fifty years, many artists have plied their trade along two parallel paths. The first, is to follow the traditional course of their art form – the painter paints, the performer performs and so on. The second path has been to distil essences from their practice and disseminate those essences to groups of people in the wider community in events that are commonly known as workshops. This way of delivering the arts has proved so effective and transformative that it has blossomed into a practice in its own right – sometimes called community arts or participatory arts.

The distinctive features of this practice is its engagement with collective imagination, its harnessing of first-hand experience of creativity, the inclusivity of art (art for all but also, as a quality of focus that can be brought to all spheres of human activity), the merging of traditional art forms in cross-art form projects and, above all, the transference of ownership. The aim of Workshop is to guide a journey of artistic discovery that is undertaken by the participants on their own terms so that the discoveries, creations and objects made are theirs.

Moveable Feast was set up as the result of several years of research to support artists for whom running workshops was central to their practice.