Basket Beat have established experience in the fields of particularly arts (educationally, artistically, and socially) as participants, mentors and professionals. For Basket Beat community arts, critical pedagogies, new methodologies, and cultural policies are not per se transformative. Their impact critically depends on the persons and teams embodying these practices, theories, strategies, and programs. This is why they pay attention to actions, attitudes, and personal and political positions both as workers within the Basket Beat team and, more widely, as artists, educators, and activists.
Conducting musical group dynamics and exercises with basketball balls creates a particular space that allows them to open questions and generate situations, dialogues, teachings, and political demands around three main topics:
-The role of the professionals within the field
-Culture as a political and a socially transformative tool
-How to facilitate group processes
The personal, professional, and collective development during Basket Beat’s residency for ICAF 2023 has been built from the participants’ embodied experience. The experience is based on generating an ambiguous, contradictory, and uncertain space where the learnings are articulated through the events that happen in the here and now. For this follow-up workshop Josep Maria Aragay (founder of Basket Beat), together with his colleagues will share the vision, mission, and methodology of Basket Beat and place it within this larger context.
About
The Basket Beat Association is a collective that, since 2009, accompanies persons through socio-educational, communitarian, and political group processes. The organization makes use of music (in groups and with basketball balls) to mobilize and promote critical reflection around the personal and collective actions of the participants but also around the functioning of the educational, artistic, and social systems and the professionals involved.
Basket Beat aim to build connections between different persons, organizations, and their respective knowledges and epistemologies, to open new possibilities, as well as to create tension and discomfort within the institutions they often work in and with. To complement their interventions, they also lead training processes for professionals, academic research as well as the organization of events aiming to promote and strengthen the community arts networks (FAACCC – Catalonia Community Arts Festival).
The raison d’être of Basket Beat is to carry out socio-educational workshops in schools, high schools, prisons, public facilities, etc. The content generated during the group processes allows for the publication of academic articles as well as providing teaching material for the training of students and professionals on the social use of the arts and the Basket Beat methodology.