Collectivity is a concept that has received renewed attention within the arts. What does collectivity mean? How do you give form to it? What does it mean for the process of researching and realising a collective artistic expression? Can collective organisation cause a cumulative effect in a process?

Within the 'collectivity' programme, students explore these questions in different programmes: 'Collective creativity' and 'Collective Research'. By shaping ways of working together in their own chosen way, students explore the challenge and potential of (alternative) non-hierarchical organisational forms and decision-making structures.

Keywords in this research are collective imagination and polyphony. Collective research

September 2023 saw the start of the Collective Research programme - in which students in a temporary collective explored ways in which joint research can be done, what forms are possible and what the added value of this is. For each collective, the outlines of a research project were developed around the theme: Climate change - sea level rise. The focus of the research was on the process of collecting, exchanging the material collected and making connections. Each collective decided on its own form to archive and communicate the process.

In this process, the students were guided by Elke Uitentuis and Juha van 't Zelfde. The research programme was linked to the broader programme 'Climate imaginaries at Sea' (ATD, Gerrit Rietveld Academy and HvA) and in this way contributed to making the climate issue transparent.

The results were presented in the Academy of Theatre and Dance's 'Research Month'.

Sharing lessons learned

To make the experiences and knowledge on collective working and collective assessment transferable and applicable to other contexts, we developed an 'inspiration & condition document collective working'. In it, the findings were translated into building blocks for a collective programme in different contexts.