My name is Rubi Jansen a youth worker, scenographer and creative disrupter based
wherever the next project takes me. I graduated from the Maastricht Academy of
Interdisciplinary Arts in 2020 where I received a Distinction in my Bachelor Research into 'Designing Utopia', a research project that how I could take ideas from stage design, theatre and other performing arts practices and apply them to the collective imagining of 3 rd spaces that facilitate community interaction. I developed and used collective spatial co-creation to envision space and how we interact with it.

Since graduating I have been a part of a great number of projects and training courses in the field of youth work performing arts and youth led creative practice, this led me to develop a strong set of workshop leader and faciliatory skills to deliver to a wide range of audiences, from high schools and universities to professional extracurricular development courses.

I am currently developing a series of workshops that encourage young people to reconsider the spaces around them and how the subliminal effects of our immediate surrounding have substantial impact on the systemic discrimination present in our society. After a period of awareness training, I encourage the group to move to developing and analysing how we can change elements in the space to reach different target groups, eventually culminating on defining what values that we want in space and how we could actualise this within our lives.

I use approaches from physical theatre and theatre of the oppressed to deliver the
workshops with a particular focus on image theatre and impulse and body awareness
training.

I always back up my workshops with a strong theoretical and pedagogical background,
grounding a new approach in already existing approaches. As an interdisciplinary creator Iview that there is a huge strength in using and combining thinkers and practitioners from a range of different backgrounds and disciplines to develop a holistic approach to our practice.

WORKSHOP GUIDE
4-week course (4 X 90 min sessions)

Wk 1 – Dreamers in space: What is Utopia?
This first week is to align our dictionaries and collective understanding of the
utopian concept. We explore what it means to each of us and discuss
amongst the group. We will also explore the space seeing if we can achieve
group harmony amongst each other using non-verbal communication.
During the first session we will cover:
Introduction to content, approaches, and thoughts
Introduce the concept of utopia

Wk 2 – Seeing the other: Can we create Utopia in an Unequal World?
This week is dedicated to understanding the power dynamics of everyday life,
how every interaction has many layers of meaning. We will deconstruct
themes that come up in group discussion through dramaturgical
methodologies developed by Augusto Boal.
Games, Image theatre and statues
Moving towards scenes of oppression in our daily lives
Create a cohesive image

Wk 3 – Building the Spaceship: What worlds already exist and how do they make us feel?
Three weeks in and we will apply textual and spatial analysis to key utopian
texts, to embody the written word, and transform our thought process into a
real-world situation, we will then use techniques from last lesson to analyse
our creations.
Utopian Fiction and worldbuilding
Exploring what the new world could look like.

Wk 4 – Our space, Our Reality: Building a group vision
In our last session we will move from imagining to playing with our daily lives
and how we build utopian ideals into them. We will create a scene that is our
common vision of what we want our world to look like. We will apply all the
things we learnt in the previous sessions to analyse and change the scene
until we reach a group consensus. We will then evaluate how we can use this
exercise to activate change in our contexts. Creation of our collective utopia
Can we build a world where we all feel accepted?

Competency Framework EU+ (young people)
Non formal education l lifelong learning
Function 1. Address the needs and aspirations of young people
Function 2. Provide learning opportunities for young people
Function 3. Support and empower young people in making sense of the society they live in
and in engaging with it
Function 4. Support young people in actively and constructively addressing intercultural
relations
Function 5. Actively practise evaluation to improve the quality of the youth work
conducted
Function 6. Support collective learning in teams
Function 7. Contribute to the development of their organisation and to making policies /programmes work better for young people
Function 8. Develop, conduct and evaluate projects