"The ReFresh workshops are conceived to work with, and within, local urban organizations and facilities. They are one to two weeks long resulting in a performance, engaging the community both as participants and audience"

The ReFresh workshops are conceived to work with, and within, local urban organizations and facilities. They are one to two weeks long resulting in a performance, engaging the community both as participants and audience.

The workshops seek to reveal the pleasures and possibilities of built environments otherwise hidden due to habitual use and familiarity, by inhabiting them creatively – through physical games and body-work – emphasizing an active, performative experience of space. In collaborating with theatre-makers, the conditions of play are set up along the lines of site-specific devised theatre, a form of theatre which is collaboratively made over an intense period from scratch, and where the architecture of the building is a creative partner and an instrument of investigation. Through the workshops, the participants become creative performers who create, edit, design and perform short pieces of original site-specific theatre work – urban meditations that help to discover and activate built environments, thereby cultivating a sense of collective inheritance (patrimony) within communities.

The theme of each workshop is chosen to loosely scaffold the content of the devised plays, and is specific to the collaborating organization and the physical site. In the case of the workshop at CEPT, we worked with the theme of “gates and gatekeepers”. Since every story, community or place has its edges (its sense of in and out), the theme creates an opportunity to investigate boundaries and intersections at various scales, physical and perceptual. Participants might select a studio, garden, dining area, a spot in the library, a parking lot, a seminar room; any spot which intrigues, finds a relevance to the theme making the architecture itself an integral character in the plays