Search results for ""triarchy press""

“Water only knows how to flow. It never ceases. Even glaciers thousands of years old are not a stilling of water. A chilling, but not a stilling. The city is likewise, imposing its own flows of seep and sink and evaporation.” Our man has acquired another man’s skin – André Cadere’s to be exact – and he’s wearing it. It’s uncomfortable. It is February 23rd – Terminalia – the day when Osaka’s pharmaceutical manufacturers distribute their excess stock free to the city population. Our man scoops some up. Then stuff happens. He starts to walk, sometimes seeking, other times avoiding, “Moving by signs, scents and surmising pointers, I might as well have been just going lost or grasping after wayward angels.” Along the way he encounters a sculpture that offers empty human husks that viewers can slip themselves into (and thereby fulfill their expected or assigned roles), a blind urban navigator with a sextant, a motivated lover, two blonds and a city block over-flown with sheep. With its roots in drift, dérive, psychogeography and mythogeography, this is a defining novel for city walkers of every stripe.

Read more less

A collection of essays on movement, migration, relationships, trauma, aging and change.

Read more less

Rock Songs starts as a walk of a few miles between the valley of the river Tywi/Towy and the heights of Y Mynydd Du/Black Mountain in Wales. It takes millions of years, meeting along the way the rocks and water that have formed the land, together with the trees, red kites and otters who pass through. Humans crowd in as well – saints, drovers, Romans, bikers and tourists. The great zen monk, Dōgen, is also walking and learns that mountains themselves walk, if you know how to look. Rock Songs began as a one-man movement performance of a river by Nick Sales and has become a book of poetry, reflection, ecology and zen reflection. It's illustrated with extensive photography by Steve Hopkins and beautifully designed by Christopher Binding.

Read more less

Regenerative design and architecture What will it take to restore balance to our world, repair past injustices, and support future generations' survival? Reaching beyond 'sustainability', 'regenerative' practice is increasingly named as a new goal, but what does this emerging term really mean? And which key mindset shifts might enable truly regenerative transformation? Looking deeply into the web of life that created and supports us, and drawing inspiration from diverse cultural traditions and perspectives, spirited thinkers Michael Pawlyn and Sarah Ichioka propose a bold set of regenerative principles with potential to transform how we design, make and manage our buildings, infrastructure and communities. Whether you're a built environment professional or client, an activist or a policymaker, Flourish offers an urgent invitation to inhabit a new array of possibilities, through which we can build a thriving future, together.

Read more less

Our growing understanding of embodied awareness is one of the less known and most extraordinary areas of contemporary research and practice. On one side (the left brain, as it were), neuroscience in all its forms is constantly shedding new light on subjects like embodied cognition, the distributed brain (brain-in-the-gut, brain-in the-heart), the workings of the left and right hemisphere of the brain (McGilchrist and others) and the processing of sensory and emotional data. On the other side (the right hemisphere, as it were) our study and awareness of the experience of being in our bodies, moving, feeling pain, dreaming, meditating, growing, becoming ill and healing, is becoming increasingly nuanced. Academic research is approaching the experience of consciousness and awareness 'from the inside' and making remarkable discoveries. The emerging field of 'body and awareness' is transdisciplinary and multifaceted - it has no subject listing in libraries and academia or in booksellers' metadata. But it is of central importance to those interested in understanding art, dance, the psychology of health, child learning and development, trauma, the psycho-ecology of extinction, loss and climate change, proprioception and enteroception, ecological awareness, meditation, and the need for societal transformation in an age of multiple convergent crises.

Read more less

This is a 'Whole Earth Catalog' for the 21st century: an impressive and wide-ranging analysis of what's wrong with our societies, organizations, ideologies, worldviews and cultures - and how to put them right. The book covers the finance system, agriculture, design, ecology, economy, sustainability, organizations and society at large. In it, Daniel Wahl explores ways in which we can reframe and understand the crises that we currently face and explores how we can live our way into the future. Moving from patterns of thinking and believing to our practice of education, design and community living, he systematically shows how we can stop chasing the mirage of certainty and control in a complex and unpredictable world. The book asks how can we collaborate in the creation of diverse regenerative cultures adapted to the unique biocultural conditions of place? How can we create conditions conducive to life? "This book is a valuable contribution to the important discussion of the worldview and value system we need to redesign our businesses, economies, and technologies - in fact, our entire culture - so as to make them regenerative rather than destructive." Fritjof Capra, author of The Web of Life, coauthor of The Systems View of Life: A Unifying Vision. "This is an excellent addition to the literature on ecological design and it will certainly form a keystone in the foundations of the new MA in Ecological Design Thinking at Schumacher College, Devon. It not only contains a wealth of ideas on what Dr Wahl has termed 'Designing Regenerative Cultures' but what is probably more important, it provides some stimulating new ways of looking at persistent problems in our contemporary culture and hence opens up new ways of thinking and acting in the future." Seaton Baxter OBE, Professor in Ecological Design Thinking, Schumacher College, UK

Read more less

This edited collection draws on the conference, Attending to Movement: Somatic Perspectives on Living in this World, run at C-DaRE, the Centre for Dance Research, Coventry University, 12 - 14 July, 2013. Somatic practitioners, dance artists and scholars from a wide range of subject domains cross discipline borders and investigate the approaches that embodied thinking and action can offer to philosophical and socio-cultural inquiry. The book celebrates and builds upon the work of visionary dance artist, teacher and scholar Gill Clarke (1954 -2011), who championed the value of somatic approaches within and beyond dance education and creative practice. This collection of papers covers the themes of: Somatics in the wider social context Pedagogy/Education Intercultural Dialogues Lived lineages Interplay of practice and writing Partial Contents As my attention is wandering: A score for somatic enquiry - Carolyn Roy Not Without My Body: The Struggle of Dancers and Choreographers in the Middle East - Nadra Assaf Disorganising Principles: Corporeal Fragmentation and the Possibilities for Repair - Jennifer Roche Attending to ethics and aesthetics in dance - Fiona Bannon & Duncan Holt At dusk, the collaborative spills and cycles of L219 - Cath Cullinane, Natalie Garrett Brown, Christian Kipp & Amy Voris The Art of Making Choices: The Feldenkrais Method as a soma-critique - Thomas Kampe Motion Capture and The Dancer: Visuality, Temporality and the Dancing Image - Sarah Whatley The fool's journey and poisonous mushrooms - Adam Benjamin 'The daily round the common task': Embodied Practice and the Dance of the Everyday - Hilary Kneale Re-sourcing the body: embodied presence and self-care in working with others - Penny Collinson Thinking, Reflecting and Contemplating With the Body - Lalitaraja (Joachim Chandler) Mythbusting: Using the Alexander Technique to free yourself from detrimental misconceptions in the performing arts - Jennifer Mackerras & Jane Toms A Moving and Touching Career in Dance and Chiropractic - Duncan Holt Attending to movement: the need to make dance that was different to that which went before - Sara Reed Towards a constructive interaction between somatic education and introspective verbalization - Nicole Harbonnier-Topin & Helen Simard Choreographic Mobilities: Embodied Migratory Acts Across the US-Mexico Border - Juan Manuel Aldape Munoz Readership Designed as a guide and stimulus for: teachers, students and practitioners of dance and somatic practices researchers and academics in these fields.

Read more less

Policing is at a crossroads. At a time of unprecedented cuts and increasing levels of demand, the British police service (like many others) faces enormous challenges. Under the most radical reforms the service has ever experienced, its leadership is looking for new approaches that can maintain levels of service delivery and secure efficiency, accountability and public confidence. Recent history shows that applying private sector business models to the public sector often generates hidden costs and unintended consequences that damage productivity and morale. In spite of this evidence, reform programmes and prevailing management practices still seek to enforce approaches that have demonstrably failed. In Intelligent Policing, Simon Guilfoyle proposes a simple and elegant solution that refocuses organisational activity on the service user. Drawing on his own experience as a police officer, he uses a range of evidence to explore the possibilities that systems thinking offers. He clearly outlines how a systems-based approach can bring greater efficiency, improved service delivery, enhanced morale and reduced cost. He shows that the practices and models proposed in the book can be implemented immediately and insists that senior police leaders and policy makers have an ideal opportunity to make lasting improvements today that will resonate throughout policing and leave a positive legacy for the future.. Intelligent Policing is a rich resource for those - in the UK and around the world - who care about delivering an effective policing service in the 21st Century. It will also interest systems theorists for its practical approach to policing and inform academic debate in the fields of management and human behaviour.

Read more less

Three authors with decades of experience have teamed up to provide an up-to-date, state-of-the art field guide to the emerging movement of regional currencies. People Money describes a global movement of people creating their own currencies to support regional business and strengthen their communities. These currencies operate legally alongside Bank Money and Government Money, giving people new choices in an age of transition from outworn financial structures to an era of sustainable abundance. Part One explains the characteristics and purpose of the various models of commercial- and community-oriented currencies, the administration and governance of the currencies, how to cooperate with other financial institutions, clearing systems and the issue of taxation. Part Two focuses on the 'how to' of developing a regional currency, outlining the key principles and design processes, and the benefits that have accrued as a result of their implementation. Finally, the book profiles and interviews some of the leading organisers of regional currencies around the world, explaining their driving passion and the nuances of each of the models - how the currency started, how it developed, the difficulties encountered on the journey, and how these were overcome. The currencies profiles include: Brixton Pound in London; The Business Exchange in Scotland; Blaengarw Time Centre in South Wales; Community Exchange System in South Africa; Chiemgauer in Germany; BerkShares, Equal Dollars, Ithaca HOURS and Dane County Time Bank in the USA; and many others.

Read more less

A report from the Club of Rome - EU Chapter to Finance Watch and the World Business Academy. Foreword by Dennis Meadows, co-author of the 1972 Club of Rome report The Limits to Growth. Pioneering new research from the Club of Rome: In 1972, the first Report for the Club of Rome - The Limits to Growth - famously spelled out the unsustainable consequences of an economic system that demands infinite growth in a finite world. Just as The Limits to Growth exposed the catastrophic flaws in our economic system, this new Report from the Club of Rome exposes the systemic flaws in our money system and the wrong thinking that underpins it. It describes the ongoing currency and banking crises we must expect if we continue with the current monopoly system - and the vicious impact of these crises on our communities, our society as a whole and our environment. It finishes by setting out clear, practical proposals for creating a money 'ecosystem' with complementary currencies to support and stabilize the current money system.

Read more less

When it was first published in 1990, 'Body Space Image' was acclaimed as the first book of its kind - a remarkable guide to improvisation, using a narrative of discovery that "set the mind loose from the rut of everyday perception". It was groundbreaking in the way it addressed improvised movement, experimental performance and how to create performance settings. Thirty years later, 'Body, Space, Image' still stands out from anything published in the interim - largely because of the way it combines a unique collection of images (from dance, theatre and painting) and statements by working artists. The authors start with the individual's movement itself as the basis of improvisation, then broaden their perspective to include groups working together and the physical setting of performance - space, light, sound and objects. 'Body Space Image' explores ways of working and ways of thinking about performance that have inspired beginners and experienced artists alike. It is a manual intended to stimulate rather than a comprehensive system of working and, in it, word and image combine to celebrate and record one of the most exacting art forms. Previously published by Dance Books, this is a very slightly revised new edition from Triarchy Press

Read more less

From a first-hand account of working with Jerzy Grotowski to an analysis of the art of writing for the stage; from the hazards of touring in the Emirates to the dramas of touring behind the Iron Curtain in the 1980s; from an analysis of the role of the set and stage music to the story of taking Shakespeare to China... this is an extraordinary, wide-ranging, funny, clever account of 40 years in the life of TNT The New Theatre: the most successful touring theatre company of all time. This long-awaited new book is an extraordinary, wide-ranging, funny, clever account of 40 years in the life of the most successful touring theatre company of all time. The authors dance between magical storytelling... offering a masterclass on the skills and practice of acting, directing and writing for theatre... considering the role of theatre in different countries and continents... and offering a eye-opening history of TNT.

Read more less

25 intriguing ideas for different ways to walk in and beyond an art gallery - for gallery-goers, walkers, performance artists, students and academics. The book asks you to reconsider your walked relationship with art through the concept of the Wander Score. How playful and embodied can our wandering be in spaces that often make our feet ache?

Read more less

Challenges our preconceived notionsof how our body should move. Uses a series ofpractices and reflections to disrupt our usual shape and movement and our beliefsabout our place in the natural world.91 movement practices that any reader can use to question and come to understand our conditioning and our biases.

Read more less

A handbook for people who find that life is being hollowed out by digital media, populist politics, hyper-capitalism, AI and so on.

Read more less

Many of our significant relationships are based not on trust, respect and growth but on an unconscious compulsion to deny our own problems, flaws and fears. We see the consequences at home and at work, where we repeat the same mistakes and act out familiar patterns of behaviour with our partners, friends and colleagues in ways that leave us stressed and unhappy. In 'Being with Others', psychotherapist and business psychologist Nelisha Wickremasinghe explores how it is impossible to build relationships based on openness, trust and respect when our brains and bodies are in threat. Following on from her acclaimed book Beyond Threat she unravels why so many of us are often in threat, and how we can overcome these feelings to find freedom, authenticity and forgiveness in our relationships. In Being with Others we learn how: * We are cursed by our ability to think and remember, and by the dictates of culture, family and own conflicted characters. ​* Unconsciously, we cast ‘spells’ – in the form of psychological defences – to try to rid ourselves of these curses.​ * Our most trusted spell is the belief that magical ‘Others’ – partners, children, celebrities, gurus or gods – can heal, protect and save us ​* Spells don’t work… and how we can free ourselves from our curses. 'Being with Others' shows us how to recognise our curses, cast off the spells and use four different Perception Practices to wake up to the scintillations of insight that can deepen our relationships. It is an invitation to reclaim our imagination, intuition and bodies from the grip of the powerful emotions of our threat brain. It is a book for all of us who want to grow richer relationships with others and our own selves. ​

Read more less

Dr. May East here explores the set of symbiotic relationships between women and the cities they live and work in. She considers how cities would look if they were designed by women, and how that design (or redesign) could help to achieve the dream of regenerative urban neighbourhoods. What if Women Designed the City? offers a fresh perspective on urban development by giving voice to local women from many different countries and backgrounds and it reveals multiple untapped potentials rooted in the uniqueness of their neighbourhoods. The book builds on the core assumption that women can contribute significantly more to urban planning decisions and implementation, and in doing so enrich and add value to urban environments and specifically to their own neighbourhoods. Drawing on in-depth walking interviews with 274 women, May East identifies 33 leverage points that can enable urban planners, policy-makers, practitioners, and communities to intervene in urban planning systems so that cities can be greener, more inclusive, more liveable, and even poetic!

Read more less

As our relationship with the world around us becomes more fragile and unpredictable, more paraded and more desperate, the role of ecogothic literature is to give voice to some of the growing fears and deepest feelings we have about our environment and climate change. The three ecogothic novellas in this collection show us individuals and societies coming apart at the seams in the face of an eerieness that is often hiding from us in plain sight. The toolkit at the end proposes walking, hypnagogic and ‘new ritual’ practices that draw on the novellas and invite refl ection and reconnection. The whole book was written and devised as part of Phil Smith’s groundbreaking research as a member of the School of Society & Culture at the University of Plymouth (UK).

Read more less

This book is about psychotherapy. Written as a collection of tales about encounters between a therapist and his clients, it reveals why many people would turn to therapy for help, what they might look for and what they might actually find. For Bob Chisholm, a therapist who draws on Buddhist psychology in dealing with his clients, helping someone find self-insight has less to do with understanding their life diagnostically than it does with appreciating their experience existentially – that is to say, in all its inherent mystery. The idea that uncovering mystery could be a way of freeing someone from their psychological misery may seem almost magical: like consulting a ouija board or gazing into tea leaves. But it is in the details and happenstance of a person’s life – in the suspense of the everyday world – that the actual mystery of a person’s life is sure to be found. Finding that mystery, and helping people come to terms with it, is what this book is all about. Written for anyone training or practising as a psychotherapist, or considering taking up therapy as a client, 'Uncovering Mystery in Everyday Life' is also for anyone interested in the existential wonder of being human.

Read more less

The experience and variety of walking practices have never been so broad, relevant or unpredictable. Walking Bodies charts some of their very latest developments. Editors Helen Billinghurst, Claire Hind and Phil Smith put out a call for artists, activists, academics, radical walkers and psychogeographers to discuss, perform and share their experiences of current walking cultures. In these essays, provocations, artworks and documentations, new terrains emerge and diverse energies and thinkings reflect the huge response to the initial call and the demand for tickets to the conference. 'Walking Bodies' evidences anxieties, exclusions and gradual but major changes of direction for walking arts, towards more considered and embodied practices that re-navigate their terrains and challenge assumptions about trajectories through the unhuman world. Here are the beginnings of differently negotiated, shared, provoked and provocative ambulations.

Read more less

"Hooray for clay! Projects that put clay and ceramics centre stage are invaluable - be it in architecture, public sculpture, cups and saucers on your breakfast table, passing on an understanding of the material is invaluable. Clayground Collective are true clay ambassadors. Their extraordinary work is exemplary."--Kate Malone, Ceramic Artist; Judge, BBCTV Great Pottery Throw Down *** "This is not a "how to" book but a "Can you?" book. There is a real passion to discover though materials. This book challenges those with specialist skills to engage the public in that discovery and provides a route to get started."--Amanda Bright, Head of School of Art, U. of Brighton *** "If you're a practitioner setting out to work with schools and the public where do you go for advice? Clay in Common is a great starting point."--Steve Moffitt, Chief Executive, A New Direction *** As clay and ceramic courses decline in schools, craft and hand skills risk being lost. Clay in Common makes a strong case for the vital role of clay in schools and wider society. For teachers, parents, school governors, artist-facilitators and education policy-makers, the book has detailed case studies with ideas for projects and activities that can bridge school and community life. [Subject: Art Studies, Education]

Read more less

"A sensitive walk up any High Street is a Pilgrim's Progress" Phil Smith - playwright, walk-performance artist and author (Mythogeography and Counter-Tourism) - recently retraced W.G. Sebald's famous 'Rings of Saturn' walk round East Anglia. At one level On Walking describes this blistered walk from one incongruous B&B to the next, taking in places like Dunwich, Bungay, Covehithe, Orford Ness, Sutton Hoo and Rendlesham Forest - with their lost villages, Cold War testing sites, black dogs, white deer and alien trails. Phil Smith's walk soon becomes every bit as remarkable as Sebald's and he matches Sebald's erudition, originality and humour swathe for swathe. At a second level, the book sets out a unique kind of 'hyper-sensitised' walking for which the author is quietly famous. It burrows beneath the guidebook and the map, looks beyond the shopfront and Tudor facade and feels beneath the blisters and aches of the everyday. The Suffolk walk described here is an exemplary walk that goes beyond 'wandering around looking at stuff' and shows how every walk can be art, revolution and pilgrimage. At a third level, On Walking is an intellectual tour de force, encompassing Situationism, alchemy, dancing, jouissance, geology, psychogeography, 20th century cinema and old TV, architecture, grief, pilgrimage, WWII, the Cold War, Uzumaki, pub conversations, somatics and synchronicity.

Read more less

This subversive little book contains 13 of Russell Ackoff's "Management f-Laws". They give you a taste of his ironic take on how organizations really work, not how they think that they work. These epigrams are unspoken laws and unconventional wisdoms of management exposed to full daylight as the management flaws they actually are. Some f-Laws are downright funny; others bemuse; all provoke in one way or another. At worst, they elicit denial or anger. At best, they evince recognition followed by a desire to think profoundly about the inevitability of change. And thus, the need to know how to change. The book will touch a nerve with any manager and offers important lessons for the better running of any organization - as well as being a good read and a delightful present. Dip into it, and on any of its pages you will find something to laugh or argue about but, above all, to take on board. Making us laugh is its most obvious strength. But it is bound to be a lot more than funny, for Russell Ackoff has been around for a long time and, when it comes to organizations, he knows what he is talking about. At the grand age of 87, he is known internationally for his pioneering work on Systems Thinking. He continues to rank highly in the list of the Top 50 Business Brains and is affectionately known to many in the Systems Thinking community as the 'Dean'. Ackoff's work in research, consulting and education has involved hundreds of corporations and many governmental agencies in the US and abroad. He has authored or co-authored 20 books and published over 150 articles. He has taught hundreds of leaders, aspiring managers and Systems Thinkers the meaning of learning.

Read more less

The free market has become the accepted model for the public sector. Politicians on all sides compete to spread the gospel. And so, in the UK and elsewhere, there's been massive investment in public sector 'improvement', 'customer choice' has been increased and new targets have been set and refined. But our experience is that things haven't changed much. This is because governments have invested in the wrong things. Belief in targets, incentives and inspection; belief in economies of scale and shared back-office services; belief in 'deliverology... these are all wrong-headed ideas and yet they have underpinned this government's attempts to reform the public sector. John Seddon here dissects the changes that have been made in a range of services, including housing benefits, social care and policing. His descriptions beggar belief, though they would be funnier if it wasn't our money that was being wasted. In place of the current mess, he advocates a Systems Thinking approach where individuals come first, waste is reduced and responsibility replaces blame. It's an approach that is proven, successful and relatively cheap - and one that governments around the world, and their advisers, need to adopt urgently. "A refreshing deconstruction of the control freakery of the current performance regime. It could do for thinking on business improvement what An Inconvenient Truth has done for climate change." Andrew Grant, Chief Executive, Aylesbury Vale District Council "This is the must-have book. It correctly identifies why the present regime is failing our citizens and customers, but more importantly it gives the reader a proven method by which to bring about real improvement in service performance and cost." Dr Carlton Brand, Director of Resources, Wiltshire County Council "This book is uncomfortable, challenging and very direct. It offers huge learning and insight... A superb read." David McQuade, Deputy Chief Executive, Flagship Housing Group "If ministers, local authority leaders and chief executives only read one book this year this is it. A true beacon of sanity in an increasingly insane regime; ministers should read this and recognise the error of their ways." Mark Radford, Director of Corporate Services, Swale District Council

Read more less

How can we dance here - so the aliveness of everything past and present can surface and shimmer? Paula Kramer's beautiful, evocative and touching 'contemplations' take us on a double journey that starts with Site (one in Helsinki, one in Berlin), moves to Practice and concludes in Performance. Based on a 3-year site-based research project (a post-doc at Uniarts Helsinki's Centre for Artistic Research) the book explores her embodied research into intermateriality. It addresses the question that guided her research: how does movement and choreography emerge in collaboration with site? More specifically: how do bodies, materials, sites, organisms, history, tuning, training, phenomena, events and the weather intermingle and speak, bringing forth what we later might call movement, dance or choreography? The two sites are Lanskari - the wildest and least populated of Helsinki's Suomenlinna islands - and Martin-Gropius-Bau on Berlin's Sudplatz, a neighbour of the Berlin Wall, of Berlin's House of Representatives and former home of the first Stasi, and of the former SS and Gestapo headquarters. The book explores narration, poetry and theory born out of specific experiences of moving-dancing, being, eating, choreographing, performing, in and with the two sites. The author speaks alongside others - experts in history, geology, performance - and invites us to see and experience sites, dance and movement differently.

Read more less

This is a handbook for working in the creative arts, with an emphasis on imagination and receptivity: to our bodies, surroundings, materials, and to what we create. It puts particular emphasis upon the sensing, feeling, moving body as a basis for any imaginative activity. It describes sources and strategies for working in and between various forms of expression, including: moving, making things with materials and writing. It stresses the importance of intuitive, instinctive ways of knowing, perceiving and creating. It is a useful resource for anyone studying or teaching in the arts, or working creatively with others: therapeutically, educationally, or in a community context. It is written to inspire rather than to instruct, to be used in small amounts to stimulate a working process, rather than to be read through from cover to cover. The authors' previous book, 'Body Space Image', was about improvised movement, experimental performance and creating performance settings. This book turns to the question of imagination in our lives and how this is awakened and nourished through attention to the present, feeling world of the body and to whatever appears as we make. In this way we enter into the poetics of our experience.

Read more less

Celebrated dance artist and body therapist Miranda Tufnell takes us on a moving and inspiring exploration of the field of dance and health. For 14 years she worked in a GP surgery in Cumbria and the book opens with a vivid account of an arts project that she and her collaborators ran there for people with long-term health conditions. This is a book about the body and movement, about imagination and health. It gathers many stories, voices and activities from artists, patients and health practitioners. The arts have long played a role in medicine and there is a substantial body of evidence for the potency of arts practice in strengthening our resources and capacity for wellbeing. While the work is sourced in the body and movement, it is not only written for people with a dance background. Listening creatively to the body strengthens our body intelligence and ability to look after ourselves effectively. Practitioners from many backgrounds come into this field and will find something of interest. This book sets out to inspire rather than to teach, to offer windows into practice, and to convey something of what it is like to work in this field.

Read more less

Now back in print... This groundbreaking handbook (first published in 2015 by Oberon and now needed more than ever in the face of multiple unfolding crises) is a resource for artists, community activists and anyone wishing to harness their creativity to make change in the world. Playing for Time explores the pivotal role artists play in re-thinking the future; re-inventing and re-imagining our world at a time of systemic change and uncertainty. Playing for Time identifies collaborative arts practices emerging in response to planetary challenges, reclaiming a traditional role for artists in the community as truth-tellers and agents of change. Fifty experienced artists and activists give voice to a new narrative – shifting society’s rules and values away from consumerism and commodity towards community and collaboration with imagination, humour, ingenuity, empathy and skill. Inspired by the grass-roots Transition movement, modelling change in communities worldwide, Playing for Time joins the dots between key drivers of change – in energy, finance, climate change, food and community resilience – and ‘recipes for action’ for readers to take and try.

Read more less

Skinner Releasing Technique (SRT), created by Joan Skinner, is a somatic movement, dance and creative practice with a core underlying principle of releasing blocked energy, held tension and habitual patterns in body mind. It enables us to move with greater freedom and ease whilst awakening creativity and spontaneity. The 21 contributors to this book describe how SRT informs their own movement and/or dance practice and influences wider fields of practice including meditation, architecture, poetic listening, visual art, writing, technology and choreography. For them SRT is a transformative and lifelong practice that deepens connections with self, other, more than human life forms and with natural and urban landscapes. This is a book for anyone drawn to explore body mind, somatic, movement and dance practices, and for those who are exploring ways of living in the world creatively, empathically and with more ease and natural grace.

Read more less

How can we imagine a technologized life that deviates from globalized norms and standardization and from our collective obsession with endless growth? ​In 'Deserted Devices and Wasted Fences', artist and cultural critic Dani Ploeger examines everyday technologies found in places and circumstances that are usually unforeseen by their designers, manufacturers and marketers. He travels through second-hand markets in sub-Saharan Africa, the frontline in the Russo-Ukrainian War, desert landscapes in the Middle East, anti-immigration fences on the EU border and many other sites of turmoil, disruption and surprising convergences. Examining the ways in which technologies that were intended for use in everyday consumer culture start to (mal)function, gain new meanings and are appropriated in these liminal spaces can give us hints at what alternative techno-cultures could look like. This collection of essays provokes unusual perspectives on how technologies might be developed, used and reappropriated in support of people’s personal, local and regional lifeworlds and lifestyles.

Read more less

Much has been written by and about Satish Kumar - peace pilgrim, co-founder of Schumacher College, and longtime editor of Resurgence magazine. A monk at the age of nine, and now a world-renowned environmental activist with Honorary Doctorates from five UK universities, Satish Kumar has been working to realise Mahatma Gandhi's vision of a peaceful, sustainable world for much of his life. This new volume gives readers the chance to listen in on a 30-hour 'longform conversation' with Satish - a conversation where his interviewers draw out his experiences, reflections and insights. They question his political and philosophical thinking, invite him to revisit strongly held positions and, through the conversation, seek to cast new light on the man and his multiple perspectives on the world. Forewords by Charles Eisenstein and Arun Maira place his life and work in context and the conversation challenges him on many aspects of: * the purpose of our life * reverential ecology * soil, soul and society * the spiritual path and daily life * education, sustainability and economic growth * implementing Gandhian ideals * selfishness and acceptance * caste-politics * centralisation and the economy of tomorrow * Sarvodaya (living in harmony with all existence) * health and technology * capitalism * aesthetics and beauty

Read more less

Phil Smith (Crabman/Mythogeography) and Tony Whitehead join forces with master photographer John Schott to lead readers on a `virtual’ journey to explore difference and change on their way to an unknown destination. “What is most real is what you have still to discover.” “Relax in your seat. Allow the train to take you along the water’s edge to the beginning point of your walking pilgrimage… When the train pulls into the platform, step off. Hidden behind the platform is a broken machine; a mechanised fortune teller – the `voice of truth’ – discarded from the nearby arcade of slot machines. Propped against the side of a building, its mouth is silent, its pronouncements have ceased; any truths you find today will be your own.” Pilgrimages – real and imagined - are always popular, sometimes compulsory. Bodh Gaya, Santiago, Mecca, Jerusalem, Puri: a few of the sites that beckon. The pilgrimage to the authentic self takes a similar path in an interior landscape. In the 15th century, Felix Fabri combined the two, using his visits to Jerusalem to write a handbook for nuns wanting to make a pilgrimage in the imagination, whilst confined to their religious houses. For Guidebook for an Armchair Pilgrimage, the authors followed Fabri’s example: first walking together over many weeks – not to reach a destination but simply to find one – then, in startling words and images, conjuring an armchair pilgrimage for the reader… along lanes and around hills, into caves and down to the coast. “We arrived again and again at what we assumed would be a final `shrine’, only to be drawn onwards and inwards towards another kind of finality… rather than reaching a destination, the pilgrimage was repeatedly reborn inside us, until its most recent rebirth in this book.” Over the course of the 19-day Armchair Pilgrimage, they invite us to experience the world around us just as they did as they walked. So, over the first three days, they suggest that we contemplate, among other things: • Our habit of generalising – acquired 40-50,000 years ago, when our `chapel’ mind of specialisms became a `cathedral’ mind • Our tendency to let one thing remind us of another thing • What it might be like to be an ocean where fish swim through us • How the world experiences us just as we experience it: `gently feel for the feelers feeling for you’ • A world where we tend to `add’ meaning and intensity • A world where we let go (without the aid of dementia) of memory, imagination, desire and wild fancy. And, as the pilgrimage concludes: “Returning is never going back to the same place.” “A brilliant idea, inviting us to `be present’ to a reality that is imagined and recorded, mediated by words and images. The feelings and emotions are no less `real’ than if we were actually standing in and experiencing that reality. I love the genius of words and images displayed here -- no less than the reality itself.” Carol Donelan, Professor of Cinema and Media Studies, Carleton College, Minnesota

Read more less

This is the pilgrimage of a knitted-together Piltdown Man from the South Downs to Cornwall and Brittany. Mike O’Leary is a professional storyteller and his post-fairy tale knits together the knuckers, hags and wisht hounds of folklore with contemporary concerns of roadkill, hitch-hiking, migration and abuse.

Read more less

You may be: - trying to fix the healthcare system in your country... - dealing with family break-up... - exploring change - and making it happen - in your organisation... - worrying about how to look after your elderly parents... In any case, you'll know that with some problems it's hard to know where to start - we can't define them, we get in a muddle thinking about them, we may try to ignore some aspect/s of them and - when we finally do something - they usually get worse. These problems are so entangled they become 'messy situations' and our first mistake is to try and fix them as we would fix a simple problem. But Systems Thinking offers a range of good ways of approaching these situations and unravelling them. Rosalind Armson is one of the world's foremost teachers and practitioners of Systems Thinking, and her remarkable book explains how these messes happen and what to do about them. Specifically, she sets out a series of sophisticated and challenging - but practical and easily learned - skills and techniques for thinking better when you're'in a mess'. Whether you're new to Systems Thinking or have long experience, the book invites you to develop your skills through working with your own messy situations. It's written for managers, project managers, team leaders, 'change leaders', strategists, policy makers and concerned citizens as well as university students from a broad set of disciplines. Organisations and readers in education, healthcare, environmental management, IT planning and social care are just a few of those likely to find it helpful.

Read more less

This gem of a book introduces the extraordinary world of Systems Thinking and its 'Dean', Russell Ackoff, to curious and enquiring managers, teachers, business people - anyone, anywhere who works in an organisation. Finished just before Professor Ackoff's death late in 2009, "Systems Thinking for Curious Managers" opens the door to a joined up way of thinking about things that has profoundly influenced thinkers and doers in the fields of business, politics, economics, biology, psychology. Although Systems Thinking was 'invented' early in the 20th century, even Peter Senge's best-selling "The Fifth Discipline" (Systems Thinking is the fifth discipline) failed to popularise the term. But now, in business and academia, in the public sector and in the search for solutions to the environmental problems we face, Systems Thinking is being talked about everywhere. In the same way, it's only since his death in 2009 that management thinker, writer and guru Russell Ackoff has achieved the reputation he deserves. This timely book presents 40 more of Russ Ackoff's famously witty and incisive f-Laws (or flaws) of business - following on from his 2007 collection "Management f-Laws". All those in this collection are new and previously unpublished. Andrew Carey's extended introduction ties these f-Laws into the rest of Ackoff's work and gives the reader new to Systems Thinking a practical guide to the implications of Systems Thinking for organisations and managers. The Foreword by Jamshid Gharajedaghi is a moving tribute from Ackoff's friend and business partner of many years.

Read more less

Russell Ackoff is one of the world's top business brains. Herbert Addison has worked for years in business book publishing. Sally Bibb is a pioneer of organizational change. Who better to zero in on organizations, take them apart and then suggest ways of putting them back together - but better! We have all heard of Sod's Law. Most of us know about Parkinson's Law. But what about "Management f-Laws"? "Management f-Laws: How Organizations Really Work" is a collection of subversive epigrams by Ackoff and his co-author Addison. The f-Laws, an expression coined by Ackoff, expose the commonly established laws of management - the hierarchies and power struggles, the ineptitudes and time-wasting, the prejudices and careless thinking - as flaws of management, all of which hinder successful strategies of change. With wit and wisdom, the authors set out the uncomforable truths about the way organizations really work to help sort out good management ways from bad, to get us thinking about how to change our own practices for the better. But can Ackoff and Addison, despite their life-long careers in Organizational Change and Systems Design really claim to speak for present-day management practice? Sally Bibb has a fine reputation as a writer and journalist, is ebullient, witty and an enthusiastic pioneer of change. To test them out, she picks up the gauntlet thrown down by Ackoff and Addison and rises to the challenge by giving some feisty responses to their ironic and provocative claims. The conversation crosses cultural, status, gender and age divides and results in a book that will appeal to readers from the lowest to the highest ranks of the organizational hierarchy as well as to those who have resisted being part of it altogether.

Read more less

In 'The Pattern' artists Helen Billinghurst and Phil Smith, in their multi-layered personae of Crab & Bee and Smoke & Mirrors, offer a handbook for exploration, embodiment and art making in strange times. Uncovering a tattoo in the landscape, they describe the secrets of ‘web-walking’ and a journey of remarkable encounters. Setting out to walk the margins of Plymouth (UK), using a labyrinth as a mental map, they found themselves exposed to a weird and ailing world of buried rivers, needle-strewn woodlands and heritage sites repurposed as smack dens. In response, as both survival-strategy and poiesis, the authors reinvented themselves and their journey as a ‘fictioning’, generating multiple identities and joining in with numerous long-running stories. Rather than just walking the path, in their new personae they could become entangled with it and found themselves spun out in an ever widening series of quests that took in the Scilly Isles, South Wales, Yorkshire and East Anglia. ​In the face of looming division and climate catastrophe, the terrain itself seemed to be knitting together its own responses and Crab, Bee, Smoke & Mirrors followed the threads. On dragon hills and in white springs, along red paths and at the ‘edge of the known world’, they intuited signposts in the landscape to a way of making art and being in the world; this is the route map they left behind.

Read more less

Mystics of all traditions speak of the unity that lies behind all things. Scientists seek to define the laws that govern matter and energy. But neither approach accounts satisfactorily for the world of imagination, ritual and creativity, for the inexplicable connections found in precognition, for the uncanny accuracy of oracles like the I Ching, or for the effectiveness of healing modalities like homeopathy. In One Earth | Three Worlds, Julian Carlyon draws on quantum theory, Carl Jung’s theory of synchronicity, the work of scientists Rupert Sheldrake and David Bohm, and ancient Chinese wisdom, to better understand how the unity lying behind all life might manifest itself in the daily-life world of our experience. Through his schema of ‘oneness world’, ‘twoness world’ and ‘intermediary world’ the author draws together such diverse threads as quantum entanglement, synchronicity, similarity and analogy, homeopathy, healing, dreams, creativity, free choice and destiny, spiritual unity, movement practice and the body. In doing so, he offers a way to appreciate how spiritual and scientific perspectives can exist alongside one another – a way to see how the unity behind everything can show up and work its magic in the physical reality of our lives. This is a book for anyone – scientist, therapist, creative artist, healer, eco-activist or enquirer – curious about how our world works and how to reconcile our apparently conflicting approaches to reality.

Read more less

'Covert' responds to three converging afflictions in society: our growing fixation with spending time looking at a screen the proportion of our lives we spend sitting/lying down, as a result the invasion of our privacy in the digital age To address these challenges (amplified in the Covid-19 pandemic) this handbook compiles 30 'movement meditations' that encourage readers to put down their phones and tablets to reclaim both an active and contemplative lifestyle, one that is highly integrated with, and inspired by, our surroundings. 'Covert' joins-up inner reflection, subtle physical play and public space to suggest ways of resisting invasion and activating the self in an era of sedentary screen time and surveillance. Using 30 carefully crafted 'movement meditations' - each with an accompanying photo to explain it - Covert outlines a straightforward, embodied practice that we can use to defend and preserve ourselves in the everyday world against the intrusion of digital media and the surveillance state. The 'Covert' practice is a way to diminish the lure of the screens, sidestep invasive scrutiny, and nurture the dialogue between our conscious and unconscious selves. By prioritizing introspective interactions with the quirky and complex world around us, 'Covert' shows that we have the means to cultivate our interior and imaginative selves through a dynamic, physical engagement with the wider world.

Read more less

Forest gardens are much in the news as an exemplary form of resilient, sustainable, small-scale agriculture and plenty has been written about them already. But little has been written about the role of those who 'look after' them. A forest garden is edible, fertile, abundant and beautiful because it functions as an ecosystem. The forest gardener is an integral part of this ecosystem - which raises the question of what exactly the forest gardener should be trying to do. This book answers that question. At the heart of a forest garden is the unique relationship between the garden and the gardener. The 'garden of equal delights' after which this book is named is Anni Kelsey's forest garden high on a wet and windy Welsh hillside. Rejecting control and a regimen of planned interventions in favour of a more intimate, knowing and connected relationship with her garden, Anni describes how she learned to garden as an intrinsic - and equal - part of the ecosystem. She uses her years of experience to formulate and explain in very practical terms a set of principles that other forest gardeners can follow in their own preferred way. So this is a challenging and inspiring story for experienced, new and would-be forest gardeners and for anyone with a love of nature and a longing to engage with it on a deeper level. A forest garden is a different garden which needs to be gardened differently by a different gardener.

Read more less

The Javanese movement artist Suprapto Suryodarmo (universally known as Prapto) died in 2019. He had devoted his life to developing, embodying, teaching and sharing his practice of Amerta Movement / Joged Amerta, which, in his own words, is not only a language for communication but also an expression of being. In the course of his life, Prapto worked with students and colleagues (people from all walks of life, including internationally-known artists, performers, practitioners and teachers, all of whom he treated equally as ‘friends’) in sacred, ancient and mundane sites around the world. He never attempted to write down his practice, although he encouraged many ‘friends’ to spread the word and the practice, sharing their own understandings of his work widely. ​ This book, covering the early years of Prapto’s teaching, is the closest there is to a record of that period of his work in English. It is a radically revised, updated and edited version of Lise Lavelle’s doctoral thesis and draws on her unrivalled knowledge of the culture, language, art, religion and traditions of Java – the pot in which Prapto’s life, work and practice were cooked. ​ While Amerta Movement continued to evolve during this century, 'The Roots of Amerta Movement' offers a clear and many-layered introduction. For anyone wanting to know more about Prapto and his work, it is a very good place to start.

Read more less

Stone Talks brings together poems and four talks/essays by noted poet Alyson Hallett on the subject of stones, rocks, somatics and our relationship with our environment. The book invites us to listen again to the world around us - the world of rocks and trees and sky and stars and sea that we participate in and that participates in us. It reawakens a childlike curiosity in us, makes connections that we had forgotten, and gives us permission to experience the world in an embodied and vibrant way that was drummed out of the rest of us long ago. The book starts with an essay on KInship inspired by Donna Haraway's ideas about how we must make relationships of kin with all things, including what she refers to as `critters’. In it, Alyson explores the twin ideas of embodied reading and embodied walking. How, exactly, can we embody the ideas in a book? Here, the author "dives into kinship with the decomposed bodies of plankton, plants and animals whose liquidation created that beautiful, black viscous gold we call oil". In the title essay, Stone Talks, Alyson revisits the keynote lecture she gave at the `In Other Tongues’ symposium at Dartington. In it she explores her lived experience of being talked to and guided in her life by stones. She examines the ideas of obedience and yielding, the body as a wilderness, and unfolds a walked artwork with stones that she undertook soon after her father died. In Haunted Landscapes, Alyson explores the marks and traces of our own and others' lives that inhabit our bodies and experience. Wandering into quantum physics, she asks questions that "set me afloat on a fathomless sea". Finally, in The Stone Monologues, Alyson embarks on a quest to "understand myself not as a single thing, a single point, but rather a constellation, a layered interruption in time comprising everyone and everything I encounter". Alyson Hallett has received Arts Council awards for her work. She is a Hawthornden Fellow, works part-time for the Royal Literary Fund and loves collaborating with other artists and scientists. She has a doctorate in poetry with research into geographical intimacy. In Stone Talks, she shares some of what she is learning from stones. She talks “from the mud. From the earth. From the place we haunt and are haunted by.” The talking is exquisite.

Read more less

'Ways to Wander' is your invitation to experiment with a whole range of different ways to 'go for a walk'. Rather than picking up a map and following a footpath, the book offers 54 intriguingly different suggestions, tactics and recollections, all submitted by artists (most of them involved with the Walking Artists Network). There are plenty of ideas you can just go out and try, but others are more performative or explore the psychological, cultural and philosophical aspects of walking Pop the book in your back pocket, leave it in your rucksack, share it with friends and take them on a walk, use it in creative workshops, read it as if each instruction were poetry, engage with each page as visual art or as a performance activity, let it remind you of places you've been or walks you'd like to do. When the moment takes you, be inspired by the variety of inventive and reflective ideas mapped out here and then simply...wander.

Read more less

Healthcare systems across the developed world are in trouble. Changing patterns of disease, an ageing population and advances in drugs and technology feed an inexorable rise in costs outrunning our best efforts to contain them. At a human level the system is coming under intolerable strain. Demands for cost savings squeeze out the time and humanity needed for good care and quality relationships. Safety suffers. Staff become demoralised, stressed and burned out. In the first two parts of Humanising Healthcare and focusing on the UK's National Health Service, Dr Hannah explores the fundamental assumptions which have brought us to this point and which likewise inform our current inadequate responses. She dissects the burgeoning regime of regulation and inspection that tries to impose ever tighter controls on a healthcare system that needs to be freed to serve its citizen patients. In the final part of the book, 'Another Way Is Possible', Dr Margaret Hannah offers a practical alternative strategy based on numerous examples of transformative practice from the UK and around the world. It promises a sustainable culture of healthcare that will enable us all to live healthy, fulfilled lives at a fraction of the current cost. Nuka Chief among Dr Hannah's case studies is the 'Nuka' model of care in Alaska. Healthcare in the Nuka system is based on reconnecting people into the web of life. Don Berwick, a former health adviser to President Obama and a founder of the highly respected Institute for Healthcare Improvement, has declared that Nuka "is probably the leading example of healthcare redesign in the world. US healthcare suffers from high costs and low quality. This system has reversed that: the quality of care is the highest I have seen anywhere in the world, and the costs are highly sustainable. It's extraordinary. It is surely leading healthcare to its new and proper destination."

Read more less

Since the mid-80s, Prapto's moving/dancing has delighted and inspired thousands of people in the West (as well as many more in his native Java) who have witnessed, worked with or been otherwise influenced by his Amerta Movement practice. But what is this non-stylised Amerta Movement practice? And what is it about Prapto's work that so touches the lives of therapists, artists, musicians, dancers, teachers, performers, monastics and laypeople from all walks of life? To answer these questions, this new book collects the experiences of 30 movement practitioners from Indonesia, Europe, North and South America and Australasia. All of them have trained and studied extensively with him and most are recognised by Prapto as movement teachers. Some themes and areas covered: Moving with babies Amerta Movement and Buddhism Using movement to work with autistic children Movement as a way to loosen the habit of critique and criticism Movement and film...and the law...and archaeology...and music Movement mantra Somatic costumes and movement performance Different chapters look at contemplative, vocational, daily life, therapeutic, dance and performative applications of Amerta Movement. Readership: As well as all those familiar with Prapto's work, the book will also be an inspiration and resource for: dance, movement and performance artists, teachers and trainers therapists of all sorts, especially those working with somatics, embodiment, dance and movement anyone wanting to learn more about the nature and application of Prapto's movement practice anyone interested in the value of an embodied approach to life and work - current thinking about the brain and body point to the crucial importance of nonverbal, embodied perception and communication, and Amerta Movement offers an important path toward growth in this area.

Read more less

12 contemporary approaches to the human body that are being used by performers or in the context of performance training. The second in a series of books entitled: Ways of Being a Body. Following on from Sandra Reeve's Nine Ways of Seeing a Body (which offered a historical perspective on different key approaches to the body over time), this new edited collection brings together a wide range of contemporary approaches to the body that are being used by performers or in the context of performance training. The intention is for students, dancers, performers, singers, musicians, directors and choreographers to locate their own preferred approach(es) to the body-in-performance amongst the lenses described here. The collection is also designed to facilitate further research in that direction as well as to signpost alternatives that might enrich their current vocabulary. All 12 approaches represent the praxis and research of their authors. The chapters reveal a wide variety of different interests but they share the common framework of the notion of 'body as flux', of 'no fixed or determined sense of self' and of supporting the performer's being-becoming-being as a skilful creative entity, emphasising the intelligence of the body at work.

Read more less