Komunikativa Group
Mission
With its motto "Life is art and art is life", the group's main goal is to use the potential of creativity through theatre experience. They seek to enhance the healthy development and functioning of society which is enabled by unimpeded, genuine, authentic communication of the individual. The Komunikativa Group supports and trains educators to give other people support or to lead, to inspire, and to motivate them for working and living. They work as well with those who work with children and adults with special needs such as people with serious health problems or developmental mental disorders or physical disabilities. Their practice is exercised in the field of prevention with an improvement of skills of integral expression and communication, and is important both for individuals and their working environment.
Education
The Komunikativa Group believes that the performing creativity of the individual or group supports development and psychosocial health. Therefore the group uses theatre-therapy, or in particular the Performative method AV (Ars Vitae) where a group of individuals through the drama process deals with current life or professional situations. The AV Method was developed by Alenka Vidrih and is a holistic way of gaining new knowledge where experiences are gained spontaneously and cognisance remains deep and for a very long time. The method can be used as an applicative method for working with people, by balancing and creating the creative atmosphere, by the professionalisation of relations and as an empirical method of treatment of educational and life contents.
Komunikativa runs several educational programmes: an acting school, activities for the creative neutralisation of stress, theatre groups, personal public presentations, team tuning, AV coaching, rhetorics, etc. The team tuning training balances and neutralises relationships within a specific group, particularly useful for groups who work together.
Komunikativa organises workshops for all generations, such as the "Teen Theatre Lab" in Šentjur Youth Centre and the creative theatre workshops for seniors "Images of my World", held in the Slovene Ethnographic Museum in 2011.
Cooperation
The G.G.A.V. Institute – Komunikativa Group cooperates with public, government, corporate, and private organisational structures and organises activities all over Slovenia and abroad. It creates and supports cooperation with other European institutions to share experiences about art therapy. It has cooperated with the Association Theatrales (France); the Middlesbrough Council, Department of Social Care (Great Britain); the Home of Social Services, Bratislava (Slovakia); and many others.
The organisation wants to share the AV Method with other similar organisations working on this common problem in different environments and countries. It seeks partnerships as opportunities to offer, meet, and share different experiences and approaches.
International projects
The Komunikativa Group is a partner of ISIO, a network of counselling centres that offer free information and advice about education for adults. They participated in the CMEPIUS's Grundtvig project: "Train in the Trainer!" (2004–2007) and "Lets Act!" (2007–2010). The latter consisted of a festival with the participation of various groups with special needs in Ljubljana and workshops and round table discussions on the methodology of theatre-therapy in Pordenone (Italy) and Bratislava (Slovakia).