Cultural mediation
What is cultural mediation?
The term "cultural mediation", translated from the German "Kulturvermittlung" and the French "médiation culturelle", while fairly open in meaning, generally refers to the process of acquiring and negotiating knowledge about the arts and about social or scientific phenomena through exchange, reaction and creative response.
Moving away from the concept of "arts education", the term "cultural mediation" evokes aspects tied to negotiation, which sits at the heart of the relationship between artistic objects, cultural institutions, their social contexts and the people who come into contact with them.
The audience is the central element of the cultural mediation component. Cultural mediation actions seek to complete the spectator's experience of receiving an artistic work along two axes:
through relevant information, answering the question What information does the spectator need, or find relevant, to deepen their understanding?
through a complementary experience, as an answer to the question What experiences can contribute to a richer understanding?
This implicitly raises the question of participation by the audience in these dedicated actions, along with two of the essential methodological questions of cultural mediation regarding participation: how much participation does a given format involve? and what forms of participation are expected from people?
Around these questions and coordinates, we seek to create surfaces of contact and exchange, between audiences, artists and their practices, projects, institutions, organisations, cultural spaces and the world, in a diversity of forms, rhythms and intensities, in order to raise questions and dialogues around art, about art, the self, the other and the world.
Cultural mediation at Reactor
While cultural mediation as a practice integrated into a theatre's activity is the norm in various countries, in Romania this component of cultural work is still only slightly present or directly embraced. For this reason, the concept of cultural mediation, or the role of cultural mediator, still needs to become more familiar to audiences.
Attention to cultural mediation actions emerged at Reactor as a natural continuation of our work, out of a desire to follow and mediate the meeting between our shows and our audience, and out of interest in the impact our work has on spectators and how it's received. This is how our main cultural mediation format came about - Framework Reactor, through which we wanted to create a space for dialogue between spectators and shows. Over time, cultural mediation actions have taken forms that go beyond our shows, opening up towards artistic practices, themes that concern us, or simply new ways of meeting our audience.
What forms does cultural mediation take at Reactor?
Over time, we've tried out different cultural mediation formats. Some were designed specifically as mediation tools that test new ways of communicating with audiences (e.g. Framework Reactor, Noi și orașul). Others are part of the recurring, extra-repertoire activities that accompany our shows and round out certain artistic projects (debates, workshops, tours).
What they all have in common is a desire to raise questions about how we choose to be and relate to the contexts we live in, and about how we use theatre as a means of dialogue and reflection.
Framework Reactor
Framework Reactor began in 2017, at the initiative of director and cultural mediator Raul Coldea, who created this platform out of a need to bring audiences closer to our practice, to share from inside the working process, and to understand how the work made at Reactor reaches its audience. The platform's concept has evolved over time, alongside a constant choice to focus on current themes strongly anchored in the socio-political context, while keeping the need to explore diverse performative forms. The activities offered to spectators have included watching shows and discussing them, sometimes with the artists involved present, thematic focus sessions with guests of varied cultural expertise, small-group mediation of practices used in Reactor's shows (devised theatre, documentary theatre, etc.), and visits to other cultural spaces around the city, to give participants an overview of the independent scene.
Often, our artistic explorations, the subjects we address, and the way we choose to bring them to the stage need more than one channel of communication. One of the roles of the framework is to discuss individual experiences of a show in a collective space, to rediscover one's own encounter with an artistic event within a multitude of diverse, sometimes paradoxical, experiences. We also consider each show we bring before an audience a pretext for generating broader discussions on the themes it raises. So, framework conversations also use the show's content as a starting point for exploring these themes beyond the staged context viewed. Finally, certain sessions may include exercises specific to the artistic process, complementing the dialogue framework and tied to the group's dynamic, aimed at deepening and diversifying engagement with the theme discussed.
In these sessions, we start from each spectator's subjective experience and build a collective, overall vision of a subject and of the experience of watching a show. Cultural mediation sessions can take place either before a show, as a kind of mental and emotional preparation for what's to come, or after it, a somewhat more frequent practice, to process our experience together as a group and, in doing so, enrich it.
Conferences, debates, public discussions about our practice
On a recurring basis and in various settings, we discuss and debate the topics that concern us alongside invited specialists — topics found in our productions or that inspire the space's artistic direction. We constantly return to an analysis of the contexts we work in.
Ethical vulnerabilities of the university. Where do we stand? (debate)
Workshops
Workshops are a constant practice of the space, allowing us a more settled encounter with the audience, in which to get to know each other better.
In various settings, we offer workshops led by artists from the Reactor team, across different specialisations, to bring audiences closer to our methods and tools. We also organise workshops led by invited artists or cultural workers, who bring practices and experiences that inspire us.
Performance-forum Noi și orașul
Noi și orașul is a performance in which the Reactor stage becomes a forum. We start from being curious about one another and practice mutual openness and recognition. We meet for an hour to answer together the questions that unite us, artists and audience, residents of a complex Cluj, which we love and which gives us food for thought every day.
Cine-teatru
This format features screenings of shows by established international companies, whose artistic approaches have left their mark and continue to inspire how we think about and make theatre, accompanied by discussions with the audience and a member of the artistic team
The SONAR: Reactor de reinventare a memoriei podcast
Through this podcast, we set out to trace the marks left by contact with the Reactor space, both in the people who make up our audience and in the artists who have worked here, building, in this way, an affective archive that tells the story of this independent theatre space and of the community that has formed around it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XzKe-iXmV6I&list=PLmv8mjBHNtF-Gg_YQf30U5DUU6M-Ak80S
Other community initiatives
We're interested in mediation formats that indirectly carry the themes or values we build Reactor's artistic program on, such as solidarity and sustainability, values that help forge community and create different ways of relating to our environment. This category includes the community dinners that open our show seasons and bring people together around a table, the Reactor garden, which activates the community of artists and spectators to tend and grow a garden among the concrete slabs of the Reactor courtyard, and Timp cu fetele - a workshop on solidarity among women.
Who are the mediators?
Why does cultural mediation matter?
In an age of consumption, art needs to be more than just another product. Cultural mediation helps build an active, engaged community that doesn't just consume cultural products but takes part in local artistic life. For an independent theatre, this relationship matters all the more, both for growing and getting to know its audience, and for the institution's long-term sustainability.
How can I stay up to date with cultural mediation activities?
Follow our communication channels - the site and our social media.
Send us a message if you'd like more details about taking part in a particular initiative.
What are the upcoming cultural mediation activities?
In search of a shared divergent vocabulary: https://reactor-cluj.com/9445-2/
