Leo
Kees
SOCIALIZING LAB
A lab for creating instant communities
A Lab for socializing? Is that even possible??
Well, experience will tell: Yes! We need spaces like this!
The idea for Socializing Lab grew particularly through the last years of visiting festivals, conferences and international gatherings. I kept noticing how difficult it can be to really meet people beyond the surface, even in the arts. We have brief encounters, say hello, exchange a few professional words — and then tend to return to the people we already know. There can be a strange hesitation around simply approaching someone, perhaps because we are afraid of appearing awkward, too direct, too enthusiastic or somehow “too something”.
But we need to train this! And not just when we are meeting people in conferences, we need to train this on a daily basis for the people we encounter on the streets. We have to learn how to talk to strangers. And we have to lose these awkward fears of looking weird and just accept that we ARE all kind of werid and akward in our own ways and maybe just... own it.
For this Lab I bring together three areas of experience that have become handy over the last years to deal with this topic: my background as a systemic coach, more than twenty years of teaching creative processes in the performing arts, and a few elements of my studies in cultural management.
Many of the workshops I gave in the past involved bringing people together who do not necessarily share the same language, discipline, or way of working. Over time, I became increasingly interested in exploring this: what makes contact between people easier?
Crossing the Circle
The workshop starts from the idea that meeting people is something we can practise. Not networking, not presenting ourselves, and not learning how to make more contacts — but becoming a little more comfortable with the uncertainty of approaching someone we do not know.
Participants are repeatedly placed in situations where they have to encounter different people, rather than staying with the person they arrived with or the group they already feel comfortable in.
Conversation as an Experiment
Some exercises are very simple: talk to someone you have never met. Others introduce a particular question, a restriction, a change of partner or a surprising situation.
The point is not to produce clever conversations. It is to notice what happens when we become genuinely curious about another person and allow a conversation to develop without immediately knowing where it should go.
Different Ways of Meeting
Not every exercise looks like a conversation. Participants might have to move through a room, find someone through a particular instruction, solve a small problem together or create something spontaneously.
At other moments, the situation may look almost exactly like socializing: a group of strangers standing together, talking, laughing and figuring out what to do next.
Shaping Something Together
A shared task can sometimes make contact easier than an introduction. Participants might have to solve something, make a decision, improvise a situation or create a small structure together.
These situations reveal how quickly we begin to organise ourselves: who speaks, who listens, who takes initiative, who follows, who observes. And because the groups keep changing, we experience these dynamics with different people.
A Space for Lightness
I am interested in creating a space where people can try things without feeling that they are being assessed. Some exercises may be playful, some slightly absurd, some unexpectedly intimate, and some simply funny.
The aim is to lower the threshold for contact — to make it easier to approach, to be approached, to ask a question, to do something unexpected and to discover that a small moment of awkwardness is usually not a catastrophe.
For whom?
Socializing Lab is conceived for groups who are meeting for the first time. Some examples are festivals, conferences, cultural gatherings, residencies, workshops, or simply a need to meet new people.
It can bring together artists and cultural workers from different disciplines, but the format can also be adapted to students, interdisciplinary professionals or other groups.
Especially in international and interdisciplinary contexts, where people often arrive with very different backgrounds, creating opportunities to meet beyond the familiar circles can become an important bridge for future collaborations.
From Group to Community
A community does not appear simply because we put people together. Even groups of like-minded people often remain divided into smaller circles of familiarity.
Socializing Lab experiments with what happens when we actively interrupt that pattern — and give people the opportunity to meet the people they would otherwise never have met.