Adolonia and Other Escape Routes

A community arts anthology about memory, practice, and the ways out

“We’re community artists. We celebrate the seeding rather than the flowering.” (Graham Main)

What this book is

Adolonia and Other Escape Routes is a community arts anthology: part memoir, part archive, part collective reflection.It brings together voices, memories, fragments, testimonies, and provocations from people connected to the early years of Community Arts at the Liverpool Institute of Performing Arts (LIPA), gathered around what became known as the Not-the-30th-Reunion Reunion.

This is not a definitive history. It is a shared remembering.

Why this book exists

Community Arts has always resisted neat definition. It values process over product, seeding over flowering, participation over polish. That makes it powerful, and also easy to lose from view. This anthology exists to:

  • mark a moment of return without nostalgia
  • honour work that was often unseen or undervalued
  • reconnect people whose lives were shaped by community practice
  • ask what Community Arts was, is, and might still become

As the dedication and opening reflections make clear, this book is also about absence: people who are no longer here, projects that ended, institutions that changed, and ideas that remain unfinished.

What Adolonia means

The word Adolonia operates as both a place and a proposition. It names an imagined territory, a space between education, art, community and escape where people experimented, failed, collaborated, argued, laughed, and learned how to work with others rather than perform at them. The “escape routes” of the title are not about leaving responsibility behind, but about finding:

  • alternative pathways
  • collective agency
  • permission to imagine otherwise

How the book is structured

The anthology moves through a series of snapshots rather than chapters.

These include:

  • reunion reflections and misgivings
  • extracts from student handbooks and teaching materials
  • testimonies from alumni and collaborators
  • accounts of projects, placements, and improbable moments
  • reflections on pedagogy, power, and practice

Some pieces are analytical. Others are anecdotal, poetic, or unfinished. Together they form a patchwork archive rather than a linear story.

Tone and register

The tone of Adolonia is:

  • reflective rather than celebratory
  • honest about difficulty and disagreement
  • alert to power, funding, and institutional pressure
  • generous to people, critical of systems

It is written in the knowledge that Community Arts work is often remembered imperfectly, archived badly, and evaluated too narrowly.

Who this book tends to find

This book is most often found by:

  • community artists and cultural practitioners
  • educators and facilitators
  • alumni reconnecting with formative experiences
  • readers interested in participatory practice
  • anyone sceptical of tidy success stories

It attracts curious, investigative attention rather than casual browsing: readers who are willing to sit with complexity.

A final note

This book does not close a chapter. It leaves doors open. Contributions can be added. Memories corrected. Arguments continued. Definitions resisted. In that sense, Adolonia behaves exactly like Community Arts itself.

Where to go next