keynotes and pathways

I spent another day outdoors today at Stave Hill Ecological Park. This after a whole day yesterday spent indoors at The Albany, when I attended a symposium organised by Entelechy Arts on ‘Older People, Isolation and Civic Engagement’. The key issues raised by the speakers, all relevant to Meet me at the Albany and other projects I’ve been working on with the organisation, were still very much on my mind today as I walked through the park.  Here are some of these…

How can the arts, museums and library spaces be more fully used as places where isolated people can become valued, contributing and visible members of their neighbourhoods and communities? – Entelechy Arts

Is it possible to construct a new vision of ageing? – Alan Walker

On shared vulnerability between artists and older participants: how can we allow for falling (and failure) and make a space for this in our practice? - Vicky Amedume

Telling stories is a means of survival – David Slater

The best part of a relationship (personal and professional) is the fantasy of what might be – Jai Channa

What makes life worth living (when we are old and frail and unable to care for ourselves)? – Danny Ruta

The older participant challenge: How can we individually make change? If not now, when? What we do now is our inheritance, let’s not waste it! – Lillian Bartholomew

now picture this...

Pictured here are a few props and materials used at Entelechy Arts movement workshop in October at Siobhan Davies Dance Studios. The event was part of Human-Nature, a program of exhibitions and events exploring the interdependent relationship between people and plants.

The score for the workshop was inspired Christian Kerrigan’s exhibition at the studios which considered how a work might reflect, develop and respond to the passing of time and the seasons.  You’ll notice there are a few usual suspect as far as materials and instruments go from previous posts on this blog, but the leaves on this occasion were very much  to do with Christian’s installation throughout the building.

I’ve included 'before' and 'after' shots, resisting to use Ros Chesher’s photos taken during the workshop itself. You’ll just have to picture this dance studio with some 50 participants in it, all interacting with these props as sounds and music are being played. It's up to you to imagine how that bundle of ripped paper came to be...

As it happens, another one of these movement workshops is planned for the Museum of Garden History next Monday.  Read up here on a previous Entelechy Arts event at the museum for more info.

the Matisse model

Seeing the Matisse cut-outs at Tate Modern was such an inspiration! I instantly got over stimulated and could hardly look at the works for wanting to get back to my studio and make my own collages. As a  result I now have a very sketchy memory of the show!

As it happens, I didn't get back to my studio that day to make a start on my own collages, but instead considered using the collage technique as an activity for one of the Meet me at the Albany Tuesday sessions. I knew that my friend, collaborator and colleague at Entelechy Arts, Zoe Gilmour had tried and tested collage with painted paper cut-outs at one of her own workshops, which encouraged me to pursue this for the planned activity.

My plan was to work large scale. With brushes and rollers attached to wooden sticks, participants painted paper on the floor while listening to live music, courtesy of pianist Arthur Lea and double bass player Ben Hazelton (Spitz Jazz Collective).  This worked a treat! Accompanied by the musicians, people danced and sang around the paper as they painted. Others cut the painted paper and, under their direction, I pinned them to a hanging fabric screen creating a large temporary mural.  A photographer from Arts Council England came to record the activity and if I get hold of some of these shots, I'll upload them on post here later. Too busy as usual to take any pictures myself.

What I enjoyed the most (apart from splashing paint around freely, which is always such a joy!) was to see how the act of painting became dance and movement, solo or in some kind of group formation. The idea of choreographing making is something I have been thinking a lot about recently, as I have been involved in choreographing dances for David Littler’s YanTan Tethera project and exhibition. I am now currently developing a fourth and final dance for the show to be performed on September 25^th at Cecil Sharp House. More about this later. Meanwhile, merci Matisse!

all of this has changed!

I missed one trick with the last post on Ambient Jam - all pictures of materials but no action shots! So here are some more to fill in the gap, this time with people in them.

Facilitators pictured above include Barbara Kane, Gill Moore, Hannah James, Lee Phillips, Mickel Smithen, Peri Mackintosh, Rainer Knupp and myself.

Top photo is by Barbara Kane, others by Rebecca Swift.

all of this can change...

Ambient Jam at West Greenwich House

London Bridge

Sometimes a plan goes completely out the window, and there’s no avoiding it. No matter how prepared you are, things crop up and all you can do is let go and do your best to steer the change of course. Take weeklyweaves for instance, it’s hardly a weekly post is it? And it is not for lack of work being produced... Ideas for posts come and go and might be revisited at some point, meanwhile the production of dailymades, always a priority, has merged with current projects and proposals. One of these is a series of objects created for Entelechy Arts’ Ambient Jam sessions and well as a project at Oakleigh School in North London, part of the Little Boxes of Memories touring programme.

Ambient Jam at The Albany

String, tape, plastic and paper

I’m writing this fresh out of an Ambient Jam session, more of a training session on this occasion,  designed for all of us facilitators to try out new things, push ideas forward and feed back to each other.  The latter is always a challenge; the sessions are profound experiences with all communication and activity relying on touch, movement and sound. Words always fail me afterwards... 

Ambient Jam at The Albany

Between Worlds at The Barbican

As briefed, I planned to present something to the group. This would take the form of a question about the use of specific materials and props during sessions. I filled my bag with a few essentials: cellotape, string, fabric, balloons, paper roll, elastic rope and plastic bags. This is my Ambient Jam toolkit, though a reduced version of it on this occasion. I aimed for less be more and not a bore. To answer my question I’d set a simple task: pick a material, play with it, pass it on. Charles would stop playing his instruments for 5 minutes also so we could hear sounds generated by the materials. For once I’d take the opportunity to sit out I’d sit out and observe and reflect.

Fashion project at Camberwell college of Arts

Sock rope

Did this happen? No! We all got stuck in straight away… The elastic came out, we wrapped ourselves in it, balloons were blown, yoga mats were used as blankets and thrown around, bodies moved in all directions in and around the space in different groupings, and parts of the moveable stage were stacked up together in seemingly precarious ways to create slides and a high plinth (and there I am worrying about the health and safety impact of using elastic!). 

plastic bags

Plastic bags and balloon

Though my question was never stated as such, it was answered – I tried new ways of working with materials and saw others do the same.  As with any research, one question leads to many others… A whole set was created by the end of the session, and though the memory of this will stay with us, objects won’t, in this configuration at least. The next Ambient Jam session will start again with a clear space. Might there an alternative to this? Can an end not be our next beginning? Can the transformation and change of all these physical elements in space not be about building down as much as building up, and thinking creatively about undoing as well as doing? What about the ecology of all this: can the salvaged materials left behind from one session not be transformed into a new set of objects used in the next? Or has this happened already? Over to you Ambient Jammers…

Ambient Jam at The Albany

Rehearsal space and prop at Cecil Sharp House

Rubbish in my studio

don't tell me, show me!

Words are false friends when introducing a creative activity. You can easily fall into the trap of being too prescriptive and as a result 'end-gaming' the outcomes that should be about discovery and giving participants a chance of finding their own voice and means of expression. There is always a desire when leading an activity to constantly provide, to fill every minute with things to do, stuff to handle. This sometimes gets in the way of participants generating material themselves with autonomy, authorship and agency.

Meet me at the Albany is a program I am involved with organised by the Albany Centre in partnership with Entelechy Arts, providing creative activities from singing to sewing and from circus to photography for the over 60s.  My desire is to put creative collaboration (see also previous post) at the core of these sessions. I also think making art here should not simply be a means to enhance well-being, a sense of self and the building of a community, but be an end in itself.

The strategy I’m adopting is to rely heavily on visual resources, such as these illustrated, so to curb the reliance on words to initiate the activity. I also aim to have the work displayed as it is produced, negotiating this with the participants and working with them as curators as much as artists.

One month into the program there is already talk of hosting a Meet me at the Albany exhibition in 2014 (I’m also secretly holding out for a publication!). Thinking of these sessions not as workshops but events, one might think of the exhibition next year as a retrospective, showcasing moments of the Meet me at the Albany program.

Objects in the images above are the resources brought in at the start of the last session at the Albany on October 29th.

collaborating with myself

‘The real issue is not how do you find your voice, but how to get rid of it’ – Phillip Glass

Can this be the benefit of creative collaboration?  Not according to Sally Potter. It’s ok to relinquish your voice if you have one, but some of us don’t have had that privilege. If you’re lucky enough to have a voice, own it and celebrate it! Collaboration is all too often an excuse to mask the embarrassment of claiming authorship for something she argues.  Mmm, now there's something to argue about…

This and other ideas on creative collaboration were shared in a panel discussion at Central St Martins, an event part of Dance Umbrella 2013 held earlier this month, where a number of speakers working across film, theatre and dance talked about the subject from directed collaboration to shared authorship. Working as I do in participatory settings, this was of interest to me and not least because of my recent involvement in a couple of projects with Entelechy Arts.

One of these is Ambient Jam, a unique programme of movement and sensory-based work with adults and young people who have profound and multiple disabilities. Many company members have physical disabilities combined with learning disabilities preventing them from expressing in words their experiences, interests and needs. In these sessions, the body and its senses provide the ways and means for expression and communication through improvisation, social dance and live movement. The multi-sensory workshops and short term projects that arise from them lead to a creative dialogue between all involved.

Contributing to these workshops, primarily as a visual artist, has challenged my understanding of what participation and creative collaboration is.  In a situation where verbal communication cannot be relied on, who facilitates what, who leads who, and whose creativity is explored isn’t so clear anymore. You have to forget what you know, loose your ‘voice’ as it were, and be completely in the ‘moment’ for the creative exchange to be meaningful. The outcome is you do find your voice in unexpected places. As the dancer and choreographer Akram Khan put it in the talk referred to above, to hear music we sometime need to stop playing and simply hold the flute to the wind.

What have these pictures got to do with any of the above you may ask? Well, images of Ambient Jam can be seen on this link, meanwhile I've illustrated here images taken while dismantling my installation at Nottingham Castle. Even when working alone, we are collaborating with our memory and our acquired knowledge. The dismantling of the work led to the production of objects that were the result not only of a collaboration between myself, but also the material I worked with, the site and the weather.  The process was planned and methodical, but they were also happy accidents that were embraced and lead to what you see pictured here.