Caturday: A Co-Creation

As this is the first article from the Caturday Blog, its fitting that it is about co-creation, as Caturday is a co-created entity, thriving off the artistic endeavors of those who contribute to it. As we first discussed the idea of a blog for Caturday, we knew that it would not be a sole individual who would blog for Caturday, but a group of individuals, once again working together, to share information on a variety of topics.

“But, what would they write about?” we thought… and the obvious came to mind, we could do reviews of other amazing events, we could blog about Caturday happenings. Initially we left it at that, but I started thinking bigger. What if the blog could cover a wide variety of topics that would be of interest to the Caturday community? We already have the Caturday College, which offers free workshops, what if we allowed those knowledgeable people within Caturday to share their voices on issues that would appeal to and inform our community? Now, I was excited and the Caturday Blog was born.

In the spirit of co-creation and reaching out and finding some talented writers, I made a post to our Caturday Crew group calling out for writers on a variety of subjects I thought you all might be interested in. The community responded and now, after a couple conversations, I’m working with a couple exceptionally talented writers from within our community to get this thing off the ground.

The beautiful concept of this blog is that it is not about one person, or entity, its about whatever we (and I say we meaning all of us collectively) want to make it be about. We wanted this initiative to be an example of co-creation, where we work together to create a mutually appreciated value for both the artist and the community. The artist gets to express their creativity for the community, and the community gets to appreciate the work of the artist. It’s a win-win situation.

One of the first big co-created projects I worked on within Caturday was the Caturday theatrical department. It all started with myself and Joel Taylor and the idea of a small little choreographed fight scene between Ken and Ryu at our 8 bit Adventure party. Even that small little venture was fun to collaborate on, but little did I know that the adventure had just begun. Later that year, Joel and I got back together along with Mike Art and Zoe Collins to try and create a theatrical production to intertwine with our first party with a storyline, Journey to Eden Prime.

It was at this point that the real magic started and we all started contributing our own ideas and thoughts towards how we could make it better. Since the project was a product of collaborative work, all opinions were valid and the final product was the culmination of all of our collective artistic imaginations. It was a solid artistic endeavour for all of us and those involved all felt our creativity being nurtured, while those who witnessed the production got to see the birth of something that has become quite unique to Caturday events… theatrical performances & parties with a storyline. It was a beautiful project to start off with, but the constantly evolving Caturday Theatrics continues to be a source of artistic expression for various members of Caturday.

Now, we face another opportunity to co-create as a community and I am excited to see what comes of our collective effort. After talking with a couple of the other writers, we have decided that the goal for the time being is to help create & spread information and thoughts that will be of value to the community. We hope you will find this blog to be filled with useful content which may help educate, guide, inform and impact our community…. as stories tend to have the habit of doing.

Creating as a community gives you a wonderful feeling of accomplishment, and I encourage you all to give it a shot and get involved. I look forward to working with all of you at some point in the future.