A team from the Alley Theatre, Houston, USA (https://www.alleytheatre.org/) visited CASIC on April 26-27th. The team composed of the Director of Education and Community Engagement, the Executive Manager of Education and Community Engagement and the Associate General Manager received a travel grant to research best international practices with regards to theatre-university-community partnerships.

During their first day, the team visited Keele University's digital MakerSpace (https://www.keele.ac.uk/make/) where Dr. Dimitra Blana run a workshop on how technology could be used creatively for community engagement purposes. Following this, Professor Rajmil Fischman demonstrated the Manual Actions Expressive System - MAES, https://cycling74.com/tools/maes-manual-actions-expressive-system-3/) and PhD student William Brearley (Music) presented ongoing work on music expression through body tracking in the Moser Motion Capture Suite. The team also visited the KAVE in the School of Pharmacy where the visitors immersed themselves virtually in the food and health research carried out by CASIC researchers for the 2015 Connected Communities festival. The second day consisted of a visit to the New Vic Theatre where they were hosted by New Vic Borderlines Director Sue Moffat and to various communities groups in Stoke on Trent. Cathy Bencivenga, Shayna Schlosberg and Mary Sutton said about their visit to CASIC:

“ Besides the getting to observe the exemplary cultural animation techniques, what made our visit to CASIC special was the idea of measuring “legacy,” rather than impact. So often, when trying to animate a group through art-making, the assessment is difficult to capture. It seems so evident now that we think about it, that when dealing with populations living at the margins of society, measuring impact doesn’t adequately define the work. The CASIC folks are really onto something! We do this work to deeply effect our community in a way that reverberates beyond that one intervention or project, i.e. to create a lasting “legacy.” Our visit with the dedicated professionals at CASIC helped us reframe and refresh our desire to work within our community in Houston.”