21Common (Formerly known as 21CC) is Gary Gardiner, Lucy Gaizely, Louise Irwin and Ian Johnston. We are an arts and social action organisation dedicated to using radical arts, dance and multiform practice for the benefit of personal and social change. We actively seek to embrace the notion of art as a deep dialogical process of exploration between artists, participants and audiences that is relevant to our daily lives, our communities, our personal, social and cultural growth, and the bigger questions that we face as a contemporary global community. We create socially-engaged experimental art (spanning theatre, performance art, environmental art, video, installation, multi-disciplinary practices, multi-media work and arts-activism) through collaborating with young people, adult communities and other artists. We engage in processes that provoke, excite, concern and delight us, and seek to understand the world better through the work we make. We work with people from diverse backgrounds, who may offer different skills, perspectives and world-views; it is with this collaborative structure in mind that we see art as an experiential process of “research in action”. We present work in theatre spaces, non-theatre spaces, shop windows, the street, car parks and in old pubs. We collaborate with young people, older people, artists, scientists, researchers, teachers, therapists…in fact anyone who is up for the challenge!
