Chris Dobrowloski, conceptual artist and one of Menagerie’s corporate training workshop facilitators, has a great new website all about his daring adventures and creative concepts. Have a look at his amazing work here.

The Reach for the Skies workshop series is now complete with the story of Chris Dobrowolski’s work as a conceptual artist featuring as a centrepiece of the presentation on creativity, innovation and enterprise.

The workshop was part of Menagerie’s corporate training programme using artists from various fields. Here is a picture of Chris’s work in-situ at the Ruskin Gallery at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge.

For more information about the workshop and other creative business workshops featuring the talents of writers, actors, musicians and other artists visit our corporate training section of the website.

See how we challenge and inspire different businesses to adopt new and more profitable ways of thinking and interacting…

Paul and colleague Chris Dobrowoiski, a conceptual artist, have teamed up with Ashcroft International Business School at Anglia Ruskin University to present a series of workshops and an exhibition designed to encourage local businesses and individuals to adopt a new culture of enterprise, involving art and creativity, risk-taking and innovation.

The collaborative arts-meets-business project is inspired by Chris’s extraordinary journeys in boats, cars, sledges, tanks [see the video below] and planes that he has all made himself and have taken him to far flung parts of the world on voyages of self discovery. The exhibition ‘Reach for the Skies’ focuses on his latest adventure dreamt up in a second hand book shop after a chance encounter with a very dusty copy of 19^th Century book on how to build your own plane, entitled “The Flying Flea“.

The exhibition - which runs from 16^th to 25^th of March at Anglia Ruskin University’s Ruskin Gallery -will feature a full sized ‘knocked up in my garden shed’ flying flea aeroplane made from old tea chests, newspaper and an old car engine [and actually flown by Chris] on display.

Chris’s rich tales of self discovery, along with the world lead

ing expertise of Business Trainer and Menagerie’s Artistic Director, Paul Bourne, will help to teach both individuals and business-thinkers the art of creating success by using hidden talents - encouraging decision makers to be original, thinking way beyond the obvious, in order to achieve a variety of goals.

The road to uncovering his ‘inner need’, in vehicles of various construction, has not been smooth for Chris and the profound and at times hilarious journey will be articulated with original footage and photographs showing an awe-inspiring journey that translates powerfully to the challenges we have in risk taking, particularly in these uncertain times. Chris & Paul will challenge how we view success and failure, innovation and personal development, as well as offering ideas on goal-setting, motivation, enterprise and entrepreneurship.

When Chris is not making bizarre modes of transport and risking death, he lectures at Art Colleges throughout the world and is a visiting lecturer at Colchester Institute of Art. He has recently returned from the Antarctic where he was the ‘Official Artist in Residence’ of The British Antarctic Survey.

To learn how to get the best out of ourselves and our colleagues BOOK NOW! by contacting Stacey at Anglia Ruskin University on 0845 196 2845. The workshop will run from 2.00pm - 4.00pm on Thursday 25^th March at Anglia Ruskin University’s Ruskin Gallery, and is open to businesses interested seeing our work in action. To ensure a place please book early.

Paul and colleague Lester Lloyd-Reason (Professor at Anglia Ruskin University and Chairman of Menagerie) recently headed to America to the United States Association of Small Businesses and Enterprise conference in Nashville where they won best workshop on creative engagement and teaching practices. To find out more contact Paul.

Investment playfully examines the serious issues of consumerism, culture, politics and the environment from the point of view of the ‘Investor’. As governments attempt to kick-start the global economy, Investment looks at the moral maze of our created culture and invites the audience to question their values and directly compare the urgency of the issues facing us today.

It¹s subversive political theatre and quite possibly an advertisement for the lottery itself.

Friday 3 July - 9pm
£5/£4 (includes a lottery ticket) | 75 mins

Tomorrow we’ll be moving onto some of the other plays in the festival, splitting the actors between rehearsals for Richard Fredman’s play Four For Jericho and Clare Bayley’s piece At Sea.

We’ve also just opened submission for the One-Page-Play-Competition-athon!  Click here to find out how you could see your writing up on stage at Hotbed Festival.

Preparations for Hotbed 2009 are now moving at quite a pace!  The full Hotbed line-up has been announced and you can download the festival brochure as a pdf from this page here.

The Hotbed creative team are working hard to make sure that every play in Hotbed achieves its maximum potential.  Over the next few weeks, the directors will be working closely with all the writers taking part, as scripts are developed and finalised.

I had a wonderful meeting last week with Jennifer Tuckett, whose new play There’s No Need To Panic will receive its first ever public airing at Hotbed.  Jennifer’s play was one of my personal favourite submissions for the festival.  And it was fantastic to meet her for the first time and to discover that we’d been thinking along exactly the same lines, in terms of the development of the script and our ambitions for it.

Roll on Hotbed 2009!  25 June to 4 July at The Junction, Cambridge.

DR