ARETE: Ricky’s Synergy for Change
In 2017 Ricky Abad became Artistic Director of Arete, the creativity and innovation hub of Ateneo. He found in Arete a new platform for initiating dialogue and exchange among experts with different persuasions to address a social concern.
Ricky’s (and Fr Jett’s) vision of Arete was to use science, technology and the arts to solve what Fr Jett called “wicked” problems. Ricky pictured this project of merging sciences and the arts as one of “synergy” and the key to this synergy was collaboration.
Thus, he encouraged collaborative projects by initiating dialogue and exchange among different disciplines. He co-created the Sandbox Residency to give life to the merging of technology, science and the arts. He believed that while you need science to design, you need art to produce. In the meantime, within his own space he found ways to stimulate the body, the mind, and the heart to think creatively and collaboratively through plays, of course, but also through concerts, the philharmonic, ballet, a planned restaging of Sintang Dalisay and a planned opera.
When the pandemic shut down theater productions and in-person workshops, Ricky retooled the Arete. He and his team went online and collaborated with, among others, Ateneo Basic Education to launch and direct Sandaang Salaysay, a podcast of Filipino children’s stories as tools for learning. He co-produced The Magisterial Lectures for Ateneo teachers to give a class lecture on video which students can listen to as supplementary classroom materials. He earlier co-designed “Risk to Resilience Journey”, an artistic exhibition of an action research project generated by Coastal Cities at Risk in the Philippines: Investing in Climate and Disaster Resilience (CCARPH). That project led to a video, “Risk and Resilience in the City” (2023) which he wrote, narrated and co-produced. The video represented the creative narration of five years of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary scientific research findings and public actions initiated by the physical and social scientists working with CCARPH.
Ricky Abad’s stage at the Arete had broadened to meet the times, making his theater work represent a transdisciplinary effort to foster social transformation.