Performances & Talks
Not everyone has the opportunity to take part in a full Shibboleth Programme. But its artistic core — the encounter with the Other through words, music and silence — can also be experienced within an organisation in shorter forms: through a talk, a Shibboleth performance or a fuller form in which art, research and conversation come together.
Common to all three are questions of power, responsibility, judgement and human vulnerability — and of what happens when habitual ways of seeing, thinking and acting no longer suffice.
A Talk on the Shibboleth Effect
Approximately 1 hour, including discussion and Q&A
A talk on the Shibboleth Concept, the scientific study and the changes observed among leaders and their co-workers. Julia Romanowska speaks about the meeting between art, leadership, psychology and biology — and about why responsibility cannot be reduced to knowledge, methods or good intentions.
The talk touches on questions such as:
How does power affect the one who exercises it?
What happens when leaders are confronted with experiences that cannot be mastered?
Can literature and music change the way we see, feel and act?
The talk concludes with a shared conversation.
A Shibboleth performance with conversation
Approximately 2 hours
A Shibboleth performance is a carefully composed weave of literary fragments, music and human testimony. Two voices read. No roles, gestures, costumes or stage action shield the listener from the words. Text, music and silence open a space in which questions of power, guilt, responsibility, love, violence and human dignity can emerge.
The performance is followed by a shared conversation — not to explain what has taken place, but to allow different experiences and interpretations to meet.
A Shibboleth Performance, Conversation and Talk
Approximately 3 hours
The most complete form of an encounter with Shibboleth. A Shibboleth performance is followed by conversation and a talk that places the artistic experience in relation to leadership, power and responsibility.
Julia Romanowska speaks about the emergence of the Shibboleth Concept, the randomised study at Karolinska Institutet and the results observed among both leaders and their co-workers. Here, artistic experience and scientific inquiry meet — without either being used to explain the other away.
A space for experience, reflection and conversation about the seriousness that comes with bearing responsibility for others.