Performing City Resilience: Addressing real-world challenges through performance research
We collaborate internationally with organisations, policymakers, local government, and particularly with arts and resilience teams to develop responses to complex situations and decisions, drawing on findings, methods, and practices from performance research.
Why Performance Research?
Performance isn’t just what happens on a stage.
It’s how organisations meet, make decisions, communicate, collaborate, plan, and respond.
Performances can comprise extraordinary events, or everyday practices through which we make sense of the world. By researching organisational performances — and facilitating tailored activities and interventions.
The more we understand the performance practices of a team, network, organisation or place, the more we can work with partners to devise, rehearse, and develop those practices. Our methods enable organizations to operate and collaborate with greater clarity, connection, and purpose.
Thinking Together
Understanding and addressing resilience challenges requires more than technical solutions. It demands attention to cultural, social, and experiential dimensions. These are complex, nuanced, and shifting – which performance research is particularly well equipped to address.
Our work contributes new ways of thinking together — at a whole-society level — about the ways we respond to challenges that impact, or threaten to impact, communities.
How We Work
Our work combines distinct strands of research, consultancy, and knowledge exchange. Our methods include conversation, workshops, site-surveys, and structured discussions, together with conventional desk-based research. We work iteratively, sharing emerging findings, responding to emerging situations, before producing summative findings.
Work With Us
If you’re interested in rethinking the familiar — in arts and culture, resilience management, or allied fields — we’d love to hear from you.
Performing City Resilience is ‘re-thinking the way a city system is run’
Sarah Toy, Director, Sarah Toy Consulting, UK