Artfulness works from Kochi and runs on your own site anywhere in Kerala.
A session comes to your room, for eight people or more, from ninety minutes to a three day residential. Elsewhere in India we travel for a full day or more. This page is for the Kerala HR head, principal, placement officer or funder who wants to know what we run locally, who it is for, and how to see it before booking it.
Artfulness Pedagogy is an arts-based experiential learning framework developed by the Kerala musician and facilitator Saji Oorali. It uses the practices of working artists, primarily music, movement, and ensemble performance, as the medium through which groups learn non-artistic skills: collaboration, attention, improvisation under uncertainty, and psychological safety.
It is not art appreciation, art therapy, or a creativity workshop. Participants are not taught to make art. They are placed inside the conditions artists work in, and the learning comes from what those conditions require of them.
- Based in
- Kochi, Kerala, India. Founded and led by Saji Oorali, a Kerala performing artist with more than twenty years on stage. Delivered by working artists trained into facilitation.
- Where sessions run
- On the client's own site, anywhere in Kerala. A room with space to move is all that is needed. Residential programmes run at a venue with a hall, and we help you find one.
- Who asks for it here
- IT services firms, hospitals, manufacturers, CBSE and state board schools, engineering, management, architecture and design colleges, and funders of artist livelihood programmes.
The problems we answer.
Each is one page, headed by the question in the buyer's own words, with the mechanism, the measurement and what we do not claim.
- Why does nobody on my team speak up, disagree or admit a mistake?
- We promoted our best people into management and now they cannot hold a room. What helps?
- Why do our ideation sessions produce a wall of sticky notes and nothing else?
- Hybrid work has left us in silos. How do we get people across functions talking again?
- Everyone can recite our values and nobody feels them. How do you activate values?
- Our people are exhausted by continuous change. What does recovery actually look like?
- We bought a wellbeing app nobody opens. What sits between that and clinical care?
- Why does training evaporate by Monday, and how would we know if anything changed?
- Our teachers have been asked to teach through art with no training in it. What does that CPD look like?
- Our students cannot present, collaborate or improvise. What does placement readiness actually need?
- We fund skilled artists who have no livelihood. What does an artist skilling programme look like?
- Is Artfulness a team building activity?
Meet us before you book.
Nobody can predict how this will feel by reading about it, and neither can your team. Three ways to see it first.
A ninety minute taster in your own room.
Eight people, no preparation, on your site. It is the fastest way to know whether this is for you, and it is how most clients in Kerala begin.
A room somebody else has assembled.
We speak at the meetings of Kerala's HR, training and management associations when invited. Ask us where we are speaking next and come and watch.
A conversation.
Tell us what is going on in the room, in whatever words you would use to a colleague. You will hear from Saji within two working days, and if a session does not fit the problem we will say so.
Find us elsewhere.
A staff room, a floor or a department in Kerala is the fastest place to see whether this works.
Eight people, one room, no preparation.