The Community Arts Workshop

The Drift

Taught by Patrick Melroy

“Dérive: It is an unplanned journey through a landscape, usually urban, in which participants drop their everyday relations and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there". — Guy Debord

The workshop will meet weekly and conduct a drift. A drift for our purposes will be a long meandering walk around the streets of Santa Barbara hunting for new perspectives and points of historic and contemporary importance. Participants will begin with the methods of Guy Debord, later evolving individual techniques responding to personal strengths to accommodate Santa Barbara specifically. The drift is a walk by small groups through urban landscapes in which the participants engage, observe, and reflect on the experience of the built environment. The gesture emerges as part investigation, part documentation, part psychogeographical exercise and part defiant act of self-possession. We are forced to reevaluate our surroundings inside this current era of pandemic and civil unrest. We are learning more about freedom and authority, this workshop will strive to draw a new map of citizenry through the action of possessing the most basic of locations, the outside.

The concept of the dérive has its origins in the Letterist International, an avant-garde collective based in Paris. The dérive was a critical tool for understanding and developing the theory of psychogeography, defined as the "specific effects of the geographical environment (whether consciously organized or not) on the emotions and behavior of individuals." Guy Debord

a flâneur's active participation in and fascination with street life while displaying a critical attitude towards the uniformity, speed, and anonymity of modern life in the city.

Flânerie - someone committing the physical act of a peripatetic stroll

Time: Wednesdays 12pm-1:30pm First Class Oct. 7th (6 classes at this time)

$120 (class fees discounted for all, scholarships available)

Location: Outdoors (socially-distanced, in small numbers.) Please e-mail the instructor with further questions.

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For more information e-mail Patrick Melroy patrickmelroy@gmail.com.

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Teacher Bios

RICK BENJAMIN currently teaches at UCSB, the Goleta Boys & Girls Club, at an assisted living center, and in many schools and community centers, taking seriously the idea that the obligation of working in a wisdom medium involves circulating it as widely as possible &, always, while building relationships in community with others while doing so. He is the former state poet laureate of Rhode Island, a small state with a long lineage.

PATRICK MELROY holds an MFA from UCSB where he taught for several years as a lecturer. He has taught classes and workshops at SBCC, College of Creative Studies, Marymount, Laverne University, Stanford, and UCLA. His work most often manifests as idea based interactive sculpture. He utilizes any material that best serves the project. He draws influence from tactile daily experiences and manifests a creative vocabulary that utilizes familiar sentimental interactions. His work was recently seen in the State of the Art Gallery and during special events at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. He grew up with a carpenter father and teacher librarian mother.

JUDY NILSEN earned a masters degree in American Folk art and is a long time public school teacher of students kindergarten through adult education in both Los Angeles and Santa Barbara. She has taught for Art From Scrap, United Way Fun in the Sun and Westside Boys and Girls Club. She is active in the Santa Barbara art community.  Her artwork known for being playful and a bit quirky has been shown in local galleries in both solo and group shows.

BARBARA PARMET: With a masters degree in photojournalism from the Missouri School of Journalism, Barbara Parmet worked for newspapers and magazines for the first 15 years of her career. As her camerawork became more experimental, Parmet began exhibiting her work in France, Mexico and throughout the United States. She has taught digital photography in the SB Unified School District and presented her images to classes at SBCC and UCSB. Most recently, Barbara splits her time between creating large-scale cyanotypes on fabric while supporting community programming such as Escuelita at El Centro and workshops at CAW.

SIO TEPPER: With Extensive formal training in classical piano and substantial experience in various genres, Sio is an active professional musician, multi-instrumentalist, composer, performer and educator in Santa Barbara. She graduated from Santa Barbara High in 2010, and from UCSB in 2014 with a degree in Ethnomusicology. Sio is continuously inspired to give back to the community that shaped her as an artist by being involved in music and arts education. Currently, she teaches piano, guitar, and songwriting privately to students of various ages through her own studio, SB Musicology, and the Music and Arts Conservatory. She is also an educator in the Santa Barbara High School Theatre Department, having worked on over a dozen productions as music director, vocal director, and conductor. She is currently a specialist teacher for the Advanced Theatre Class at SBHS. She has also worked with other local theatre companies such as Out of the Box Theatre Co. and Stage Left Productions. She has worked as a facilitator for the Sing it Out program at AHA, and co-founded the arts mentorship program, TOTEM, in 2016. Sio is involved in several local performance groups such as the Santa Barbara Folk Orchestra, Fratelli, and Ojai O’Daiko, and also performs in smaller bands and solo in local venues. She has also composed music for films in the Santa Barbara Film Festival.

​JOSEPH VELASCO is a graduate of UC Santa Barbara and began his career with the renowned Chicano theater company, El Teatro Campesino as a resident director. He went on to study physical theater at the international Estudio Busqueda de Pantomima Teatro in Guanjuato, Mexico and later joined James Donlon & Company in creating original movement theatre works including the award-winning WRENCH. A co-founder of BOXTALES Theatre Company, Joseph has worked in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco as well as with various local theatre groups including the Lobero Theater, Access Theatre, Speaking of Stories, and the Ensemble Theatre Company. He currently teaches English at Santa Barbara High School and continues to be a storyteller as a solo artist. He is also the former Artistic Director for City at Peace Santa Barbara which uses the performing arts to empower youth through creating original theater.