Creativity Is Agency: A Workshop

Workshop Description

Creativity is Agency is a workshop that empowers participants to articulate visions of the future through artistic and design-based practices. In an era challenged by rapid change and uncertainty run wild, creative expression is a powerful antidote for anxiety and welcomes each of us to participate in shaping the future. Drawing inspiration from 1970s approaches to learning—particularly the experimental methods described in Beatriz Colomina’s Radical Pedagogies and Phyllis Birkby’s fantasy drawing workshops—Creativity is Agency provides a space to resist scare and silence tactics by fostering imaginative, future-oriented creativity and creative acts.

With entry points for participants based on level of creative experience, the workshop begins with foundational exercises that activate creative thinking and fantasy-based exploration before progressing to identifying messages, selecting mediums, and, for advanced participants, developing and disseminating speculative works. With the option to work across performance, dance, photography, installation, drawing, painting, and digital design, participants will develop creative skills and strategies that not only bolster hope and con but also ensure various voices contribute to collective future-making.

This workshop gives participants to call themselves to action—an opportunity to challenge current dominant narratives, reimagine what is possible, and share visions that inspire change. Through the creative act, we claim agency in shaping the world to come.

Learning Objectives

Upon completion, workshop participants will be able to:

• Implement creativity techniques grounded in 1970s practices (Tier 1, 2, 3)

• Integrat fantasy techniques grounded in 1970s practices (Tier 1, 2, 3)

• Identify a message within and medium for creative output (Tier 2, 3)

• Describe what you will share and how. Name your co-creators and articulate the target audience of work(s) you will disseminate (Tier 3)

• Challenge cherished beliefs, focus on what our lives touch and we can change, Incorporate the notion that the future is shared into the work (Tier 3)

Target Audience

• Tier 1 - Community members seeking a step they can take to be be active in turbulence and uncertainty 

• Tier 2 - Arts and design oriented groups, associations, college or museum students, etc. Ages can vary.

• Tier 3 - Creative practitioners or educators

Workshop Format and Methodology

The format of Creativity is Agency consists of concise instructor directives and information sharing followed by participant hands-on and interactive activities. These two primary components are punctuated by reflection (self and group), discussion, and feedback. 

The methodology is described below according to the three workshop target audience tiers.

• Tier 1

• Warm up. Reflect. Share.

• Repeat with multiple mediums - Teach them to use what is handy, affordable, Children’s art supplies

• Make Good. Fail Good. Something In Between. (MFS)

• What am I on about? May dig into this a little or just put it out there.

• Tier 2

• All that is above but condensed

• What am I on about? (expanded)

• How to access? Participants articulate their own methods, crowd source/share among each other.

• Instructor suggestions - Artist way (popular), Practice as Research, practice steeped in research

• Guest artist moment

• Get to work

• Style. Medium. Message. - Participants articulate their own methods, crowd source/share among each other.

• Remaining time to apply MFS method

• Articulate an actionable plan to wrap.

  Tier 3

• All that is above. Tier 1 could have omissions, Tier 2 could be condensed

• Style. Medium. Message. - Participants articulate their own methods, crowd source/share among each other. (cont.)

• Political vs. Apolitical 

• Variety of input in the world doesn’t need to be political to be impactful. Future is shared and a chorus of voices is needed.

• How do you work with something that is newly meaningful

• Does it challenge and can you challenge cherished beliefs?

• Are you willing to turn towards what your life touches and not let what doesn’t touch you directly become the subject? 

Duration 

The workshop can be easily be scaled up or down from:

• Shortest - 3 hours contact time (three 1-hour sessions, two 1.5 hour sessions, one 3-hour session) , Tier 1 only

• Longest 12 hours contact time (multiple divisions possible) Tier 1, 2, and  3 

Required Materials 

• Children’s supplies: Construction paper, paper rolls, pencils, crayons, watercolor, oil pastel, paint brushes, scissors, and smart phones - photos + video

• Look to hosts to see what collage or sculptural materials are available - handy materials to explore and learn to communicate

• Potential costs - Self drying clay, heavier paper

• Paper mini-journals, how to utilize their phone for creative use (Notes, photo and video albums), other apps

Venue & Logistics

• Can accommodate a hybrid of in-person and virtual - in-person preferable 

• In-person location requirements 

• Participants need to be able to wander around at or near the site and take photos and video

• Work surfaces/tables (all materials are washable)

• Technical requirements - projector, Wi-Fi

Budget & Funding 

• Materials fee - minimal

• Instructor fee - sliding scale

• Can explore possible funding sources or sponsorship opportunities.

Organizer  

Dr. Henthorn is a performance artist and the Director of Academic Innovation Programs at the University of Colorado. She has taught architectural photography and sketching and the Figures in Spaces workshop at colleges and universities and was a K-8 educator in Colorado and New Mexico. She holds a PhD in Creative Practice as Research from University College London and an MFA from the University of Edinburgh. A performance artist and scholar, Jaimie’s artworks explore iconic architecture through the moving human body. She has set site-specific performances at sites including the U.S. Air Force Academy Cadet Chapel, the Salk Institute, the Bauhaus Haus am Horn. 

Speculative Fiction as Performance

Speculative fiction has long been my sweetheart genre. I willingly dive all the way into worlds that I recognize, but in which snakes talk, or emotions are cooking ingredients, and receive mandates from the Ministry of Love (Murikami, Esquivel, and Orwell respectively). I only recently realized that I could regard  my own performances as speculative fictions and me their author. Or wait, is that what I’ve been doing all along??

Briefly defined, speculative fiction is a subgenre of science fiction that explores human responses to the changes of science or technology or to certain capabilities or behaviors that differ from the reader’s lived reality (Oziewicz, M., 2017, March 29). Speculative Fiction. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature. Retrieved Jan. 2025). According to Oziewicz, speculative fiction is “a global reaction of human creative imagination struggling to envision a possible future at the time of a major transition from local to global humanity.” My revelation started when I understood speculative fiction could take the form of something other than words on a page. It has the capacity to span various media - a photograph, a drawing, a poem, or in my case, a performance. Understanding my own works can be these embodied fictions give me license to approach each project as imagined worlds. I can use narrative and world building techniques to interrogate the relationships between moving bodies, spaces, and belonging.

A specific connection between my artistic practice and this genre is the power of speculative fiction to empower the marginalized voice. In Emergent Strategy, Adrienne Marie Brown encourages her readership to, “Cultivate fiction(art) that explores change as a collective bottom-up process, fiction(art) that centers those that are currently marginalized. Not to be nice but because those who survive on the margins tend to be the most experientially innovative, practicing survival-based efficiency, doing the most with the least—an important skill to have in a world whose resources are under assault by less marginalized people.”(Brown, Adrienne Maree. Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds, AK Press, 2017., pg 113-14) Brown’s words resonate deeply and help me evolve my artist’s voice as someone with a disabled and female body. My creative practice is now better understood to me as a form of fiction, interrogating these identities through performance. I look to make work that questions how we create and communicate a sense of belonging to spaces, whether they are domestic, public, recognizable or obscure.

Initial movement sketch, ‘Vegas’, Taos, New Mexico, USA, 2024

Currently, my explorations in Taos, New Mexico, and the One River North building in Denver reflect this deepening research into belonging and space. These are sites where I experiment with embodied fictions, asking how a performance—rooted in speculative possibilities—might reveal new ways of inhabiting, designing, or understanding space. Speculative fiction, particularly as practiced from a minority perspective, is uniquely equipped to address these questions. As Oziewicz notes, speculative fiction “affirms not merely the existence of ethnic traditions of science and spirituality but the cognitive value of speculative visions of the world formulated from a postcolonial or minority perspective.” It is not just about envisioning futures but about reframing the present through the perspectives of those who have been excluded from dominant narratives. Marginalized voices can offer not just critique but also the seeds of solutions. My work strives to embody these solutions in real, physical locations, to demonstrate the power we have to expand what it means to live in our spaces. 

One River North, MAD Architects, 2024

Start with identity - your identity. What spaces or places can you think of that accommodate your identity? Are you a part of shaping that space in ways big or small? What about a place that inhibits or disregards your personal identity - can you envision changes to the space, physical or social, that would improve your experience of being there? One example to consider here is the disabled body. Maybe you have a disability now. If not, you are likely to at some point in your life. Sara Hendren’s book What Can a Body Do? How We Meet the Build World explores the idea that disability might be “the fundamental aspect of human embodiment.” She writes, “What a notion that the universalizing experience of disability, states of dimensional dependence from our infancy through the end of life, might be the central fact of having a body, or rather, being a body.” (Hendren, Sara, What Can a Body Do? Penguin Publishing Group, 2020) What if we realized that we have more in common in our embodiment than difference and that embodiment is an ever-fluctuating state? Art can be a way to provoke such thoughts, through a speculative fiction, an alternative world to enter and to contemplate. As I look back on my earlier work, such as Salk Institute (view here), I see this impulse, yet undefined. 

“What a notion that the universalizing experience of disability, states of dimensional dependence from our infancy through the end of life, might be the central fact of having a body, or rather, being a body.”

- Sara Hendren

These same lines of thought and inquiry motivate me to seek ways to support other creatives in cultivating their approach to making. I am inspired by the workshops led by Phyllis Birkby during the feminist architecture movement of the 1970s, and the way she encouraged women to imagine spaces that met their unique needs and desires. The act of fantasizing design—speculating about what might be—feels as urgent now as it did then. This is a time to hold tight to these notions, these speculations, and keep shaping the future through the production and proliferation of embodied fictions.

Speculative fiction offers me an entry point to my work on the relationships between bodies and spaces, and between belonging and exclusion. I will continue building these speculative worlds and am ready to bring this approach to my work with others and their creative practices.