Abstract:
What’s Theatre Got To Do With It? Performance, Everyday Life and Futures
This paper was given at the final conference of the Future laboratories for professional and personal development – FUTURES (2020-2023) project. This is a European project which emphasizes the importance of high-quality adaptation skills as the means to support individuals in acquiring and developing key competences. A major part of these transversal competences and “soft skills” is the development of integrated and innovative ways of supporting personal development, resilience, adaptation, and critical thinking. As Futures Literacy (FL) increases individuals’ capacity to ‘use the future(s)’ to explore the present, the project aims to adopt such methodology also to foster professional development. In particular, the project underlines the need to develop skills of young people, for anticipating and promptly reacting to scenario changes, and imagining professional career paths.
This project is an international one, where Middlesex worked with universities in Greece, The Netherlands and Poland. The European partners came from a range of disciplines. Middlesex has been working through the discipline of Theatre Arts alongside colleagues in CAPE and MDX Works, as well as myself from Education.
I encountered the project in its later stages. This talk was given at Bialystok University in Poland on 22nd June 2023 to undergraduate students from a range of disciplines, and aimed to introduce them to the value of theatre for exploring Futures issues as well as informing them about the workshops that they might take part in subsequently.
Bio:
Nic Fryer is currently programme leader of the FdA in Learning and Teaching at Middlesex. He also teaches on the BA Top Up in Learning and Teaching and the PG Cert in Higher Education. He has taught in a range of educational settings, including working in drama departments in universities for fifteen years and secondary schools for thirteen years, where he led one of the largest Drama cohorts in the UK. Nic has won various awards for his teaching and is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. He founded Small Change Theatre, whose productions Long Wave, Red Velvet and Making the Difference amongst others toured nationally to a range of venues including BAC, Latitude Festival and Birmingham Repertory Theatre. Nic also has Group Work Practitioner status with the Institute of Group Analysis, with whom he has completed a Diploma in Group Work.
