Exciting thing! Andy Field and I are up to stuff again, returning to the Arts Council England’s (ACE) State of the Arts Conference this year, much more integrally than how we were part of last year’s; this time we’ve been able to help shape the way, where, and with whom the conversations happen. Live blog! Artists bursaries! Actual conversations on themes! Some very exciting and challenging live bloggers feeding in and back everything said by everyone! All in all it looks like a massive leap for ACE, in a brilliant and totally important direction. A bit below from mine and Andy’s statement of intent:

“Before, during and after State of the Arts 2012, we will be hosting this online space as an important new facet of the conference.

We want this to be a place for anyone with an interest in the arts to share their thoughts and ideas. A carnival of voices discussing anything and everything about the state of the arts in 2012. In particular we hope that this site might allow people who can’t make it to Manchester for the day of the conference to have a really meaningful impact upon the event.”

Read more on our intent over here, see who all our livebloggers are here, and start submitting your thoughts on the main themes of the conference (along the top of the page) on the submit page.

To get you all started we’d love to start a little ‘art is’ meme – I found a really lovely mine of ‘art is’ images on flickr which I’ve been using to title each opening blog post that’s up there now, and we’d love to know what your answer is to that question is (positive, negative, or indifferent), so, how to join in:

• Find an image that for you says something about what art is and why it is important.
• It can be a picture, or a picture of an event, or a diagram. It could be something you find on the net (though preferably creative commons), something you take a photograph of, or even something you draw yourself. It doesn’t really matter.
• Send it to us as an image post on the submit page
• Tell other people to do the same.*

*plagiarising Andy a bit with these instructions. Sorry Andy, it’s late and I’ve been staring at the website way too long.

THAT’S INTERACTION, THAT IS.

I’m stupidly excited to be able to announce a thing I’ve been working on since just before Christmas, the first in a series of DIY performance shows in Leicester, called ‘Performance in the Pub’.

if something isn’t happening where you are, make it happen wherever.

Performance in the Pub began as an idea in my head as I was writing this article for my mate’s punk webzine about what DIY theatre and music can learn from one another. I realised that I’d been complaining about the lack of innovative programming in Leicester’s theatres, but doing nothing about it – and also while sort of knowing that the kind of stuff I thought it was missing don’t really suit massive venues like Curve etc. So, money/mouth is; here I am. Putting on small-scale, DIY and storytelling performance on in a pub.

The first event will be taking place in The Cookie Jar, The Crumblin’ Cookie’s brand new venue in the centre of Leicester. It will be a double bill of solo performance; Tassos Stevens with Jimmy Stewart, and Ira Brand with Keine Angst. BOTH OF WHICH ARE AMAZING. You can find lots more about this first show and the two performances on the Eventbrite where coincidentally, you can also get tickets.

WHY A PUB?

Because I’m so bored of all these divisions between art forms. And big shiny buildings that act like cathedrals to art/theatre/etc. They have their place, but the problem is it’s not a place that’s a part of most people’s lives. The pub, on the other hand, is. That’s why a pub. Single-form buildings only work heavily subsidised by either government (arts council) or large-scale commercialism (cinemas, large music venues), or alcohol (small venues). The latter is way more fun, so let’s fill nooks and crannies of these buildings with theatre, performance, dance, exhibitions, craft, music and more. Make our cities exciting, varied places to be. This is my contribution.

WHAT KIND OF PERFORMANCE?

Just stories really. I mean, that’s what most theatre and performance is. I’m saying ‘performance’ here, because most of it won’t be like a ‘proper play’. It’ll be stuff people made with their actual bodies in a room – trying ideas and stuff out until they found something that worked. Think of how bands put music together compared to how composers do – that’s the difference between ‘performance’ and ‘theatre’ for me. The performance I put on will be small-scale, DIY, and/or storytelling theatre. By turns loud, funny, heart racing, lovely, musical, spectacular, touching, and transporting. I can promise you it will be from some of the most exciting, innovative and brilliant acts in the UK, and as the UK is well good at performance, PROBABLY THE WORLD. Totes.

HOW MUCH DOES THIS COST?

How much does it cost me, or how much does it cost you? Well, basically I, and everyone involved in putting on PitP shows are working for free, I pay for the travel, food and accommodation of the performers, I give myself a pat on the back if I’m lucky. All the promotion, printing, deposit for the venue, website building, and everything is upfronted by me, and hopefully paid back by the money people donate for tickets. That leads us to:

How much does it cost you? Well actually that’s another important thing to me, that you can ‘trial’ this stuff, that if you really don’t want to spend a 5ver or whatever on it, that you can just walk in, and sit down, and see what you think, and maybe pay afterwards if you liked it. Or pay next time. That’s why it’s ‘donation based’ ticketing. If you’re looking for a guide price, though, it costs me roughly £350-£400 to put on each show. If I sell out the venue at £5 each ticket then I break even. More is more to roll forward into more print/acts/etc. So if you want to help more happen £5 or over is ACE, you’re effectively only paying £2.50 per nationally or internationally known performance at that price ;) also; buy drinks. More drinks bought = I get the venue deposit back.

And while you’re still reading, why not follow @performancepub on Twitter, Like it on Facebook, and invite EVERYONE IN THE WORLD to the Facebook event. You can also go onto performanceinthepub.co.uk and check out where I’m horrifically self-plagiarising. Oh yes, and Tickets. Go forth!

Digital hat is an experiment in revolutionising how we discover and pay for theatre.

I am a punk fan. Other stuff too, but mostly punk, hardcore, screamo. Guitars, shouting, that kind of thing. I was 14 when Napster was released. My musical maturity was shaped by sharing; it was also shaped by the staring at of progress bars, and never needing to pay.

I was 25 when I started always paying for music.

Because over 2 years or so my whole relationship to music and its worth has changed. For one thing it has become a relationship, social media has, in a big way, connected me to musicians and the work that they do much more fully. For another, the ability to trial music, listen to it on spotify or youtube, means I know what I’m buying, and that friends also share what they like, in podcasts, blog posts, tweets, and playlists. And a final thing; pay what you think it’s worth. Not ‘pay what you want’, I think it’s an important distinction, because I probably (leaving aside the relationship with an artist) want to pay as little as I can, but as soon as it’s framed with the notion of ‘worth’, suddenly I want to pay as much as I can. Bandcamp and social media changed my relationship to musicians, and the music they produce. The trust that ‘pay what you think it’s worth’ puts in me, makes me want to respond favourably. And actually, how artificial is a price point anyway? An album may only be worth £4 to me, it might be worth £20. Don’t you want my money either way? Often I’ll buy an album for a fiver and go and give back more afterwards. How much is the song you danced to at your wedding worth? How about the album that saved your life?

I feel part of a community, one that the web helps me find, and support. And I want to support it.

Over the past two years my relationship to how I discover and pay for new music has been revolutionised. I may not pay much more on average, but I know that it’s going directly to an artist, and I also know that I’m buying an awful lot more. Plus, more awesome music! WINNING.

In the checkout area, how often do we see theatres linking to similar work in other venues?

And while we’re at it, when have you ever used an e-checkout system on a venue’s site that was even slightly bearable?

How often have non-theatre going friends expressed a general interest, but just not known a) where to start or b) if it wasn’t just a bit too expensive?

How often have you carried a piece with you for weeks, months afterwards? How much do you think that’s worth?

I think that there is a bandcamp for theatre. Not bandcamp exactly. Not Spotify, or Amazon, not twitter, not just a recommendation site, a place to buy stuff, not a review site. Though it may look a little like all these things, it may not necessarily be just an online or web based system, it could borrow a lot from physical things like Oyster cards or loyalty systems. But a way of regulating, sharing, exchanging, standardising, offering, equalising, and making easy the act of finding, going to, and paying for theatre.

Seth Honnor and I are going to r+d this. We want to look at the data generated from ticket sales – the sharing of that data in a way that the theatre-goer is completely in control of, and benefits from (rather than just the ‘untick mailing list’ box). We want to look at changing the experience of paying for theatre, work on a scalable model that could be used by any size venue, that had room for recommendations, sharing, simple video or audio trails, and that are used by many venues. Imagine only needing to remember one password for every theatre checkout system in the UK. Imagine syncing tickets with your smartphone, so you don’t need to have it delivered, or pick it up. Imagine subscribing to the arts events calendars of friends, or certain venues. Imagine a system that allows you to put a deposit on a ticket, but doesn’t take the money until after you pay, after which you are able to pay what you think it was worth. Throw your money in the hat; that’s why ‘digital hat’.

That’s where we want to start thinking. digitalhat.co.uk/ Let us know if you want in, what you would want from it, or if you think it already exists. We’ll let you know soonish about our next steps. Early days, but exciting ones, I hope.

So I wrote this thing for my mate’s punk and comics webzine. It’s about DIY punk, and DIY theatre. And mostly how we can learn from each other. You should go and read it, it’s over here. Go on. What are you waiting for? It has swear words and lots of semicolons. WHAT MORE COULD YOU WANT. Clicky. Also, when I was writing it, James of ace performance duo Action Hero sent me some of his own thoughts on being ‘DIY’ in theatre. Just after I sent my finished article off, but I’m reposting them here, with his permission, because they say a quite similar but still really useful thing.

“I think a comparison between DIY music and DIY theatre is long overdue. Not least because theatre suffers so much from an identity crisis and I think it could benefit from the association!

I would identify the work that Gemma and I do as Action hero very much as DIY but there’s an important distinction to made between two ways of using that terminology. There is much talk in theatre of a ‘DIY aesthetic’ and its a phrase often used to describe our work (I think we even use it to describe ourselves on our website) but the DIY element of our work is not ‘an aesthetic’ it comes from a genuine do it yourself approach. We sometimes do make decisions to deliberately use things that are lo-fi because of the way it changes the relationship an audience has with the work but more often than not its a genuine response to trying to make something with very few resources. So not an aesthetic choice as such. What interests me more is the punk use of the term DIY which doesn’t mean ‘ooh look their set is made from cardboard’ but is about an approach and a way of working that deliberately avoids mainstream modes of production.

So in the same way punk bands avoid signing to record labels so they can have more of a say over the work they are producing (and consequently have less money and end up doing more of the producing, marketing etc themselves) we too have always wanted to avoid trapping oursleves into conventional modes of production in theatre. i.e a set, lighting, cast and crew that requires significant investment from venues or funders. If we control the means of production ourselves it means we’re more flexible, mobile and responsive with the work we make which is how we like it. It also means we have less money because we don’t get huge marketing budgets of venues etc but we prefer it that way. We’ve always done absolutely everything ourselves and only very recently have we worked with anyone else and only then because we couldn’t physically do it ourselves because of a lack of time and it caused us great distress! I think what is important is that its seen as a deliberate decision that, like punk bands, isn’t to do with a lack of ambition, and its not because we subscribe to Dave’s big society but because we want to maintain control and we want to work in this way.

When we made our first show and we were so inspired by the way the relationship changes between an audience and an artist when there is more for the audience to do to complete the work, when they have to buy into what you’re doing and help make it happen. Seeing what happens when an audeince sees you genuinely trying to make something empowers the artist and the audience in a way that we think is actually quite political and I think similar to the ideologies of DIY music.

All that said, we could never have made anything we’ve made without funding support from the Arts Council and massive amounts of support from subsidised organisations such as IBT [In Between Time], Theatre Bristol etc. So we’re not like DIY music in that way. We can’t just pick up a guitar and start generating our own income because theatre is less commodifiable, less popular and way more expensive to make because it takes so long to make a show that is decent quality.”

#Dust was a first artistic response to the Splacist Manifesto. #Dust was a collaboration between writer/theatre maker Hannah Nicklin and artist Nikki Pugh. #Dust was a commission by MADE. #Dust is a fragment of a city.

There were two main components to #Dust, first the Dust Balls, and secondly the Dust Motes.

The Dust Balls are large fragments of the city. They are formed out of open source electronics, clay, hope and optimism. They begin by introducing themselves to the listeners, and instruct them to point the device in different directions in order to ‘pick up’ stories of individuals in the areas surrounding them. Depending on the timing and direction in which you are facing, different stories will be heard.

They are heavy, and designed to be listened to by two people at once – the weight and bulk of the object meaning that two are required to support it. The two people sharing each experience of overhearing the stories should be strangers.

The Dust Motes are small fragments of the city. Memories, secrets, and moments lost, dropped, found, discovered, gifted, stolen and spread throughout the city. All are from Real People. Be very careful with them. Select ones you like the feel of. Keep them safe.

These motes were spread around the area surrounding the carpark where the first section happened. Groups of 3 went out to collect Motes, which they were then asked to look after carefully. At the end of the walk back to MADE’s office, they were asked to make a decision. Keep it, or crush it and see if anything was inside.

Why Oh Why: This collaboration started with a number of aims; challenging Nikki and Hannah as artists (Hannah to work with more fragmentary narrative directly augmenting a city, Nikki to work with narrative and examine interfaces), challenging the perception of how space is inhabited, considering Birmingham as inhabited architecture, picking up the fragments that you often walk by, to consider our ways of getting at the world; a consideration of the map view and the street view. As well as responding to the Splacist Manifesto, which is concerned with these things and more.

The Brief: After starting with the manifesto and the aims above, we wrote ourselves the following brief. Out of this the idea for #Dust emerged. “Make something that examines interfaces and how to create resonance in space and place. Looking at fabric pre-woven and overlaid; of narrative/moments, that heats and lights and races hearts.”

Fragments and the city. Cities are made up of the people who move through them; without them they are like crab shells. In this metaphor, we are the crab meat. And to confuse it. Crab meat made up like that bar of soap your grandma used to make out of all the ends of other different coloured soaps. Maybe we should dispense with the crab soap. What I’m trying to say is that we are everything that a city is. That cannot be reduced to a map or a single path through the place. #Dust aims to bring to life (in a very small way) a very small part of the patchwork of experiences, moments, breath, that is being-in-the-city.

Read more: We are also dedicated to being open about our processes, so to follow the blog posts that accompanied the making process, head over onto npugh.co.uk/tag/dust/ and hannahnicklin.com/tag/splacist

I am making something with Nikki Pugh called ‘Dust’. It is a response to a manifesto that claims we will make things with you, not for you. This is one of the ways it’s with. You can read about where the project is at right now over here. If you can offer me a story, it will be made into a Dust Mote. Things that people will find and keep. The stories will also feed into and inform the longer-form narrative fragments in the work. Head over here for full context.

And because this is a two way thing, here’s a couple I will submit:

Object 1: A porcelain badge, square with rounded corners, the transfer of a rabbit with a balloon on the front.

This object broke. It was the last thing in my daily life that came from the boy whose hair smelled like raku firings. It fell off my bag in St. Pancras about 3 years ago and shattered. I still have the largest fragment.

Object 2: A small plush rat.

[no picture]

Bought because it looked lonely. Bought just before something went completely, bafflingly wrong. Now hidden.

…

I need some less emo objects, huh?

So, here we are, 1/3 of the way into work for the MADE splacist commission (1 out of 3 days). In case you don’t read my blog RELIGIOUSLY (RSS, yo), Splacism is manifesto’d over here, and it’s that manifesto that MADE have challenged me and Nikki Pugh to respond to in an actual piece of actual art/experience/whatever. The manifesto also includes the notion of being open about process, so here we are.

Post its. Lots of them. That’s the main gist of it. We did some looking and walking and poking outside as well. But the ideas were post-itted. It’s a method I learnt from Alexander Kelly, and is brilliant for streamlining an idea. Like a portable brainstorm where as relevancies and relationships shift, you can re-place ideas. Move them onto a next stage. There are 3 here:

1) what are we doing and why

we summarised the manifesto points (yellow)
we summarised what MADE had asked us to do (green)
we summarised what we wanted to do (pink)

2) write this as a brief

We then took this and turned it into a brief, here you can see things that moved forwards from the manifesto points and self-challenges; Interfaces, resonance and fragments/particles. Heat and lights, the fabric of a city, and racing hearts. Space, and catalysts for narrative. And a story I told about an Edgelands speaker describing the storming of a stage (“an act I had only previously seen on a football field … they needed to feel the resonance there”)

2.1) The Brief

Does what it says on the post it.

3) Respond to the brief.

This is our main thinking space directly to the brief, the thing in the middle is what we settled on making. Another thing, too, but that would spoil a bit of it, so we’ll tell you afterwards. We wanted to push the idea of stories you walk by, of moments and fragments forgotten, floating around a city (Motes…). We’re going to make a device for you to listen to them. But it will also challenge the interface of the headphone piece, it will be tactile and awkward and breakable and intimate. There will be some things never found. You will scan the city from above, and then search its streets below. Also we will provide hot drinks.

And then we named it: Dust.

Book tickets (for free) here, and look out for the next bit of open process on Nikki’s blog, which will be all about building and testing the protoype listening device.

Summary/Tl:dr version:

WHO: Made by me and Nikki Pugh, with some other people, commissioned by Made. For anyone to do. At least one aspect of the experience (out of 2) is highly suited to people with hearing and vision impairment. Those with mobility issues should be fine if in a wheelchair, top walking distance is 10 minutes. Top walking around time half an hour.

WHERE: on top of a car park, in the Jewellery Quarter of Birmingham, and for a couple of blocks around.

WHAT: You are invited to listen in to the whispers of strangers. A large dusty device that catches different voices depending on where you point it. Like a satellite dish, but made of clay and big and round. You will also be sent out in search of Motes. #Dust Motes are a mystery. For now.

WHY: To challenge us as artists, to challenge the perception of how space is inhabited, to pick up the fragments that you often walk by, to consider interfaces, ways at getting at the world; the map view and the street view.

HOW: Using clay, memories, arduino, audio, our brains, and the bodies of people.

“But otherwise I think the only way that you can have a big impact if by changing people’s views, by actually getting hold of their heart and squeezing it and saying; look at this. And I think as you say, it’s having the story that triggers the emotion in the individual, which then says ‘yeah, that’s not right, we need to change this’. Because you won’t get, there’s too many pressures on people, and I think this is where capitalism wins through most of the time; there’s too many pressures on people to stand out, to stand up, to say ‘no’, and I think by doing what you’re doing in terms of the stories, you know okay you can only get some people but that can make a big difference, than, you know, you as an individual amongst 200-300,000 people making a lot of noise down the street.”

]]> http://www.hannahnicklin.com/2011/11/my-dad-and-stories/feed/ 0 http://www.hannahnicklin.com/2011/10/this/ http://www.hannahnicklin.com/2011/10/this/#comments Mon, 31 Oct 2011 12:35:29 +0000 Hannah Nicklin http://www.hannahnicklin.com/?p=2478 Andy Field does good words:

It sounds unhelpful and it’s certainly not going to get you any money from DCMS, but at a time of such crisis, art’s real value is in making things worse.
To speak back government and to speak back to society.
To help unpick the unravelling threads.
To stand alongside the dispossessed and the demonised.
The utopian dreamers and the feral underclass.
To imagine new ways that we might live together.
Better ways.

So just over the 3 week point in the Umbrella Project (it’s 5 weeks long) and things are just about starting to get to the point where I’ve enough time to blog. Biggest realisation from this experiment was how more than slightly ridiculous collecting the material for, transcribing, editing, recording, collaborating on, testing, mixing and releasing 3 soundwalks actually is. Including running events and trying to run a bit of digital awareness raising, too. Phew. Think a concerted amount of the ‘you can download and do these things’ work is going to have to happen afterwards. We’ve another day out with our big inflatable dome thingy on the 12^th (the last day) so I think that’ll be a good point to do that.

So yes, all the story collecting trips are done, although you can still leave your stories of journeys via the number on the umbrellas up until the end of this week (when writing happens).

The first soundwalk – Evening – is done and available for download (designed to be done after dark outside the bigger of the two Betty’s Tea Rooms) the download link and full instructions (do grab those too) can be found over here.

The second soundwalk – Daytime – will be released on Tuesday (designed to be done sitting down somewhere in the pedestrian bit of Parliament Street, at a busy time of day, lunchtime, or a Saturday). That will be up on the same download page.

And the final soundwalk ‘Commute’ will be released on the 10^th, with event days for Daytime on the 5^th, and Commute on the 11^th. Join us on those days if you’d like to get the chance to talk to me or Tom (artistic producer on the project) about it.

Also, worth me putting down in pixels, how absolutely positively brilliant everyone at Pilot have and are being on this, to take the risk on what is still being termed an experiment (learning an awful lot creatively as well as logistically, which would make a re-mount/developed version quite drastically different, I think) in the first place, as well the incredible support in kind, and actual bodies-on-the-ground support etc. Would probably be curled up in a ball weeping if it wasn’t for them. So THANKS, PILOT.

And here’s some pictures (facebook link) of story collection days to amuse you, and a trailer for the first soundwalk (making the second trailer tomorrow).

*collapses*

Oh, and if you don’t know what any of this is going on about, head over to this video, or the site.