Adolonia and Other Escape Routes: The Not-The-30th-Reunion Reunion Community Arts Anthology

“We’re community artists. We celebrate the seeding rather than the flowering…”

Graham Main, Community Drama, LIPA, 1997

The idea of a reunion surfaced in October 2024, when some of the first Community Arts degree students who attended LIPA and I kicked the idea around on Facebook. We had spotted that 2025 was going to mark 30 years since the degree programme started and thought that now would be as good a time as any to celebrate and reflect on that moment. None of us were getting any younger after all, and the idea of waiting until the 40^thor 50^th anniversary of LIPA’s opening was asking some of us some difficult questions about our health and mortality.

Early signs were encouraging with several alumni welcoming the idea. We established a steering group, we consulted, we laid down tentative plans, we cast the net wide to try and encourage as many people as we could to attend. We even mooted the idea of an anthology which would collect, quiz and celebrate many of the antics we got up to all those 30 years ago; and this book is the culmination of that collection.

However, given there was more than one community artist present in those early discussions, it was never going to be a straightforward venture. Back in the early days at LIPA, one of the many in-jokes we had about the work was that you could never get a group of community artists to agree on anything – least of all a definition of what community arts was all about! Rather fittingly, soon into this process we encountered the counter proposition that as LIPA didn’t start teaching until 1996, the true 30^th anniversary should be celebrated in 2026, not 2025. This caused some soul searching amongst us all but, given that many of us had diaries which were filling up and that expectations were being raised. We decided to stick with 2025 as the year to mark – for us – the 30^th anniversary of the start of the degree programme. Succinctly summarised by Graham Main as: “We’re community artists. We celebrate the seeding rather than the flowering…”

After all, 1995 was the year in which the first intake of students were recruited, and had it not been for a delay in the completion of the building itself, we would have all started together that September. So, we’ve stuck with 2025 being “our” 30^th anniversary and planned for a reunion accordingly. Although because it’s not strictly a 30^th reunion (if you believe that 1996 was the real year when everything started), we called our reunion, the Not-the-30^th-Reunion Reunion, in true Community Arts awkward-as-they-get fashion.

This anthology is intended as a vehicle to collect some of the memories, writings and work of those early years at LIPA. It doesn’t pretend to be a comprehensive or a chronological account of our time together; and it doesn’t provide any insights of what would be understood these days as examples of “best practice”. It’s a very partial account too, drawn my personal experiences, as well as those from the anthology contributors: but there are huge gaps in its chronology and scope. It simply provides snapshots of some of the work we taught, learned and performed together; postcards, if you like, of the voices, ambitions and dreams that we had during those early formative years.

If you weren’t one of those who went through those years together with us, then I hope our anthology provides you with some interesting ideas on how you might develop your own interest and practice in that contested field which calls itself “Community Arts”…