Creative Talk: Scott Thurston

This event is part of our Creative Talks series that feature practitioners/makers/artists who work in a variety of disciplines, media and forms across the creative arts, including: the visual arts, design, performance, craft-work, creative writing and more. The series aims to address questions about the nature of ‘creativity’ and ‘practice as research’, featuring speakers who will share their work, the processes they use, their influences, and their own experiences of professional practice. Sessions will reflect the disciplinary range of speakers and may feature presentations, performances, workshops etc. The aim is to create an open, multi-disciplinary space in which to introduce audiences (students and the public alike) to a wide range of creative practices that inspire new ideas about how to make new work.

For this Creative Talk we welcome Scott Thurston to share his practice. He will explore his key creative and theoretical influences, discuss major projects and illustrate his ideas with short performances.

Scott Thurston's kinepoetic practice (literally movement making) is a mode of integrating poetry and dance in performance, developed over the last twenty years out of, amongst other things, Thurston's engagement with Gabrielle Roth's Five Rhythms movement meditation practice. This work overlaps with his research in creative psychotherapy with the Arts for the Blues project (www.artsfortheblues.com), and recent training as a person-centred counsellor.

Scott Thurston first began writing on the London experimental poetry scene in the late 1980s. He joined the University of Salford in 1994, setting up a degree in English and Creative Writing, followed by the Masters in Creative Writing: Innovation and Experiment and a PhD pathway in Creative Writing. Scott co-organised The Other Room – an experimental poetry reading series in Manchester – for ten years and is founding editor-in-chief of the Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry. Since 2004, he has been developing a creative practice integrating dance and poetry which he calls kinepoetics. Following this interest into a collaboration with Dance Movement Psychotherapist Vicky Karkou and Counselling Psychologist (and partner of twenty-six years) Joanna Omylinska-Thurston, led to the founding of Arts for the Blues, a new creative group psychotherapy model. Scott's selected poems, Turning, was published by Shearsman in 2023.

Chair: Prof. Anthony Caleshu, Creative Writing, University of Plymouth

Scott Thurston further reading:

• Scott Thurston - Turning — Selected Poems 1995-2020

Image credit: Roger Bygott

Host or Publisher The Arts Institute