What is a workshop?

Abstract

Today, we might describe almost any activity of training, rehearsal, learning or play as a ‘workshop’ but, historically speaking a ‘workshop’ is a medieval building housing apprentices and their master, and producing craft objects. Perhaps our use of the word workshop is only metaphorical or perhaps the contemporary and the historical are, in certain respects, the same phenomenon. This article asks whether ‘workshop’ is a dead metaphor; that is a metaphor which has lost the meaning of its original imagery, or whether it is, as Max Black would have it, a separate vocabulary term whose meaning is not dependent upon foreknowledge of any metaphorical context. Put more simply, is there a more literal way to think about the experience of ‘workshop’? This article draws from experiences in workshop with the contact-dancer Kirstie Simson and the choreographer Adam Benjamin. Utilising Hannah Arendt's concept of ‘action’, it proposes an understanding of ‘workshop’ as a time and space for the undertaking of a particular kind of work, together. This species of work opens a space for what Arendt calls ‘natality’: an irreversible eruption of ‘newness’, without precedent and independent to human willing, and this natal space may be definitive of workshop practice. The line of questioning in the article proposes future research into other ‘metaphorical’ terms, such as, for example, ‘laboratory’, and discusses the political significance of the emergence of the term ‘workshop’ in theatrical practice in the mid-to-late twentieth century.