In the years 2006 and 2007 activities of the Community Art Lab (CAL) were mostly of an exploratory nature with only occasional in-depth research, such as in the community theatre productions ‘Maxima Comes’ and ‘In the Name of the Fathers’ and the YO Opera productions ‘Kuil’ and ‘Opera Flat 2′. In this period, we organized two festivals and two working conferences. In 2008 CAL shifted its attention more towards documentation, research and exchanging experiences among community artists and researchers. We continue to investigate community art with an eye to social effect, artistic quality and the ethics of collaboration between professional artists and community participants. We have also launched an online community art database, which for the time being is still in Dutch, but should give foreign visitors a global idea of the quantity and diversity of projects currently in progress in the Netherlands.
In the course of 2008 we began monitoring the Story Kitchen, a new project of 5th Quarter, a community art organization based in Haarlem. We also became involved in Expedition New West, a project of Public Amusement in the urban renewal area of Amsterdam Geuzenveld. We continued our research work with the Living With Differences project in and around Utrecht, which is now entering its final year. In this context, Güner Güven, a young Turkish director is working with non-Turkish youngsters in the rural village of Maartensdijk; Anouk de Bruijn is working with migrant women in the area of Lombok; Tessa van Gent is preparing a film project in the neighbourhood of Zuilen; and Suzanne Reindersma is working on a play and a visual arts project in Kanaleneiland en Lunetten. Finally, in January 2009 we started our coverage of a third edition of the Opera Flat, which will be performed on 7 November. Also, our research associate Margreet Zwart completed an in-depth evaluation of two projects, one in Eindhoven and one in Newcastle (UK). Her report will be made available both in Dutch and English on this site.

In order to do this work as efficiently and effectively as possible we are currently preparing to set up and maintain a continually updated data base of all community art projects in the Netherlands. We have hired Margreet Bouwman to coordinate this work. She just finished her M.A. in Arts Education from Fontys in Tilburg with a thesis in which she compared a community theatre project with a community-based visual arts project. She will start working in August and hopes to launch the data base before the end of 2008.

In addition, we are closely monitoring seven community art projects in Utrecht, Haarlem, Amsterdam, and Eindhoven.

- preparations for YO Opera’s ‘Opera Flat 3′ (which will start in the fall of 2008)
- the second year of Living With Differences, in which Anouk de Bruijn is preparing a new project with women in Lombok , Güner Güven is developing a play with youngsters in the village of Maartensdijk (under the smoke of Overvecht), Tessa van Gent will continue her multimedia performance experiments in Zuilen (Utrecht), and new addition Suzanne Reindersma who is developing a play with migrant women in the neighborhood of Lunetten, where she lives herself.

- multidisciplinary youth festival ‘Radical? Act Normal’ (scheduled for 13-17 December 2008)
- ‘Expedition New-West’, a community-multidisciplinary art project of Public Amusement, a long-term initiative in the western neighborhoods of Amsterdam directed by Fenneke Wekker and Femke Janssen

- the Story Kitchen of Titia Bouwmeester and Ted van Leeuwen of Fifth Quarter in the Slaughterhouse neighborhood of Haarlem.

After the summer of 2008 you can expect to find periodic updates (in words and images) on the Dutch-language version of this site, which is under construction.

Seminars
At least once a year, CAL wants to bring together the artists and researchers involved in the projects that we are monitoring in order to frankly exchange experiences and provide feedback on each other’s work, using the CAL research data as a starting point. The first of these seminars is scheduled for 17 and 18 December 2008. In this collaborative way CAL seeks to continually finetune its instruments and research methods.