community-led planning, regeneration and economic
development with a
creative and cultural twist
Compass Symposium
Compass Symposium took place on the weekend of 25-27 Nov 2011, in Leeds. It was built around a series of engaging and stimulating discursive Workshop-Discussions on the core themes of: live in the public realm, and live art as socially-engaged practice, and was directed and managed by Sarah Spanton.
The Symposium ran alongside the Compass Festival of Live Art, with interlinked schedules. Symposium events were hosted by 2 partner venues: Carriageworks Theatre and Patrick Studios (East Street Arts).
It drew around 100 participants from across a range of disciplines together from across the UK; from fine art, performance, architecture and geography backgrounds. The delegates were practitioners, programmers, curators, producers, academics, arts professionals and postgraduate students.
Delegate Feedback:
'The content was very valuable and it has prompted me to begin asking questions and provoked more action and doing in my practice'.
'The content was very interesting, very social, very politically engaged'.
'The symposium may impact in a number of ways... It prompted me to reassess my assumptions about what working in the public realm means and also why we do it. It encourages me to look at social space from a more activist rather than passive point of view'.