Relational Practices And The Tavistock Institute Archive Embodiment And Social Engagement

The Tavistock Institute's archive is a body of mainly written documents including project reports, fieldnotes, letters, and other records from over 70 years as multi-disciplinary independent research organisation. It contains a history of action research in work cultures, organisational development and consultancy in fields that range from textile industries to children's care homes. As such it offers accounts of some key innovations in management thinking and change-making in organisational culture such as socio-technical systems theories (Trist, 1981) and tracks the development of multi-modal research methods and practices such as systems psychodynamic thinking and Group Relation Practices. (Sher and Lawlor, 2022) As such it contains evidence pointing to ways that the perception, meaning and values of work and care, have been understood, challenged and changed. What critical thinking can emerge about the materiality of labouring bodies, as relationships between work, care, systems of production are revealed through re-reading this archive within a movement and performance practice? This project is informed by my 25 year career as a dance artist and choreographer, and uses artistic processes as an embodied practice-as-research (PaR). The aims of this PaR, are to attend to and apply individual and group participatory performance work through a subjective lens, assuming bodies that have a history and act within a set of conditions. The objective is to uncover new meanings of work and care through the often destabilising affects of an applied artistic practice methodology.