It started like this: I was in London for a coupe of weeks, sometime just before Spring…. sprung. It was tipping it down, quite late at night, I was walking under one of the arches near London Bridge, on Bermondsey Street. It must have been a Friday night, because there were a lot of people dressed up going places. I saw a girl, she was shivering and wet and doing her level best to shelter her  hair and makeup from the rain. I wished I had a second umbrella to give her. I wished I had given her mine.

It now looks like this: from the 7th of October ’til the 12th of November umbrellas will be appearing all over York. In certain places. You may also see me, at certain times, on certain days, standing in front of a big inflatable thingy, ready to offer you a biscuit, a cup of tea. The umbrellas that you might find, or that I might give you are free to take, to use, to pass on, and then to drop off, so other people can use them. Think of it like a Boris Bike system for umbrellas, except that it’s free. I’m giving hundreds of umbrellas to the city of York, all I want in exchange is their stories. The umbrellas each have a number on, if you call that number, you’ll be asked a question. Leave a story, any story, in response, and over the 5 weeks I will be producing 3 x 20-30 minute sound pieces to be listened to in certain parts of the city. Free to download, or to pick up a ready-loaded mp3 player from York Theatre Royal or the Central Library.

I’m being helped to do this with the magnificent music of Simon Ralph Goff (who’s been collecting and manipulating found sounds from around the city, and turning them into instruments), the production of the brilliant Pilot Theatre, who as well as offering an incredibly generous amount of support-in-kind, also brought Arts Council money on board, and the germ of the idea itself was developed under the mentoring of the FutureEverything accelerator program, and forms part of my PhD-as-practice with (and where I am also supported by) Loughborough University.

So many hands. Helping me make this thing, which I hope will be an experiment in connecting people, small kindnesses, and voicing a city. Get excited. I am. (I’m also equal parts nervous, but I don’t think you need to share that too.)

The main site for the project is up now: umbrellaproject.co.uk, and you can also follow @umbrellaproject on Twitter and ‘like’ it over on Facebook. At the moment there’s basic info, but as soon as downloads are released, and event dates for the walks, and my visits to the streets of York are announced, you will find details about them in all of those places.

And for now? pass it on…

It’s a picture. Of a cake. That I made. For my friend Andy’s 21st Birthday.

In unrelated matters it’s the last day of the month and I have only filed 3 of my 4 monthly quota’d blog posts.

Chapter two went well, will post it up here, maybe in sections, maybe when it resembles something akin to the English language. The Umbrella Project looking more and more exciting, with an upcoming test of the message system which will play with some collected stories –  more on that soon, too. I’ll probably be talking about related matters at Ted X York in a few weeks (eep!)

Oh, and if you’re in the East Midlands this Thursday, I shall be chairing a really exciting event being run by Broadway Media Centre – as part of their Making Future Work project they’re hosting several ‘Future Work’ events. I shall be introducing the Making Future Narrative event at LPAC in Lincoln, expect 10 minutes of blistering hyperbole followed by a couple of hours of overly complex ‘you’re running out of time’ gestures. I want them to look like the baseball code they use as a comic vignette in American TV shows.

And finally, here’s a cryptic clue to something I’m going to be doing avec the insanely talented Steve Kilpatrick in London at the end of July. It may or may not involve 22 performers.

I’m a bit ill this week, so am instead posting a conversation I had on Twitter that if I’d had the energy for anything extra, would probably have turned into a blog post. I’ve also put the definition of Theatre that I’m working on for the PhD above. It’s in progress, what do you think?

Me mid-June, with my freshly broken arm and super-attractive cast protector.

Mandatory end-of-year reflective blog post ENGAGE.

So, yep, here we are. And what the heck could you want more than my reflections on My Life in Art 2010 Edition? Exactly. This is going to be meandering and will probably miss things out, but is a rough account of art wot I have done, and art wot I enjoyed this 2010…

So, apparently I’ve actually done quite a bit of art stuff this year, despite the full-time PhD (and I managed to deliver two papers this year without having anything thrown at me, or getting thrown out) plus a broken arm in June… which still hurts actually. Half a year more and it should stop. Anyway, art!

In March I had my first full proper-play production at Theatre503 with Box of Tricks Theatre’s Word:Play – Awake was a short 15 minute conversation between a dying gamer and her avatar. It was an interesting experience, but I don’t really rate it as a piece of writing, I think I’d found a story but not really the right form; so I next moved from the stage to the street… In May I released my first experiment in sound-based pervasive work – Walk With Me, a 10 minute soundwalk for one to be done anywhere in the rain. I got some lovely feedback, handwritten notes, posted found items, and twitpics and photo albums from people who went on the walk. I then got to develop to 30 minutes worth of sound-walking for The Smell of Rain Reminds Me of You in July, which although admittedly breathed it’s first breath out of Walk With Me, was this time built out of memories collected from people online. It was commissioned by the Green Room as part of the Hazard Festival, and I fell slightly in love with Manchester as well as learning a lot about working with a group audience, not just a single person. APPARENTLY YOU CAN’T HERD THEM. Who knew. Then Fierce‘s Interrobang allowed me to push my practice beyond the soundwalk (which I didn’t want to get stuck in as a form) into a 4 minute piece of live art called ‘Home’… OK it still used recorded sound. And was pretty damn authored. But it was a step, and I learnt a lot more about live art as a form. A brief art/academia mashup occurred for the TaPRA conference with A Soundwalk without Organs - a soundwalk done as part of a paper delivered which described the contemporary academic conference as completely useless in representing either academic thought or arts practice. FUN. Then it got to Autumn, and I got to make a soundwalk with a piece of entirely new music from the brilliant Lantern Music, Nightwalk York happened as part of the Take Over and Illuminating York Festivals in October/November. Finally towards the end of November Hibernate! a game for Larkin’ About took to the streets of Manchester, and I was at least able to push my practice a little bit further in terms of pervasive stuff…

I also attended and liveblogged Mayfest for Forest Fringe and Inbetween Time for New Work Network, did my first 2 guest lectures in January, and followed with a few speaking events, culminating in Shift Happens in July. I’ve got a lot better at speaking/teaching since the shaky beginning of this year, and hope I get the opportunity to do more of it in 2011.

This year coming I’d also like the opportunity to collaborate more with OTHER PEOPLE. I really don’t see enough of them other people types. Although I suppose it’s harder to fit in if there’s more than just me to cater for, I do often wish I had a collaborator to bounce ideas off, too often end up bouncing my head off a wall instead. Sometimes I think I’d like to be a part of some kind of company. But it’s all a long while off. 2012 (all going to plan) is when I’ll be PhD-ed up and looking for some kind of game-plan.

And what about other people’s work? Well here are some of my favourite things, where possible in twos (for no real reason at all).

Music – This year was tinged with a Scottish rockish feel, Frightened Rabbit captured me for the Summer, and We Were Promised Jetpacks came in time for Winter to ease me into the darker days. I got to see Frightened Rabbit live, but WWPJ haven’t ventured south yet from what I can see. Hope they will soon, because Scotland is expensive to get to.

Film – I saw Moon in January – seriously amazed this didn’t get ALL OF THE OSCARS. And the exquisite Bright Star is well worth a watch – I don’t care if you ‘don’t like films with bonnets and dresses in’, watch it. It’s a wonderful piece of writing/acting/direction.

Theatre – Although not a personal favourite, it was an absolute joy to introduce someone to theatre with Kneehigh’s Red Shoes – a friend who I discovered had never even seen a panto had their MIND BLOWN by what theatre could be. Highlights (more than two) otherwise divided between Yorkshire’s Unlimited, Third Angel and Red Ladder stage shows, and Bristol’s Duncan Speakman, Mayfest, and Inbetween Time festivals which woke me up to what more theatre and performance could be. London gets a look in for the one piece I could afford to get to (it was free and on a Sunday) – Hide and Seek’s adventures in and around the National. And then to Birmingham for The Author, which resulted in my FIRST PROPER QUOTE IN THE GUARDIAN. It made my parents forgive me for getting quoted in the Telegraph.

Apps/Games I finally forked out for World of Goo – and there’s an Android app called Spaghetti and Marshmallows which channels it a little bit which is worth a go if you can’t access iOS4 – I like them physical puzzlers. Papa Sangre OMG buy it now, and the Board Game Remix Kit, which is going to form the basis of basically the COOLEST DINNER PARTY YOU EVER HEARD OF early next year, are all worth the small amount of money you’ll pay for them.

Comics I woke up to comics care of the iPad my mum kindly bought me with some inheritance money – I could cart whole series across the many train journeys I take monthly; bliss. I kill Giants and Preacher are the two I’d pick out if I had to.

Book Serious? I haven’t read anything without pictures for pleasure for… since the PhD started. I try, and then I fall asleep. Incidentally I’m currently encountering the same problem with PhD books so it’s nothing personal (or genre-ific?)

And a resolution? Well last year’s to eat less meat got turned into 360 day a year vegetarianism, so I have high hopes for 2011′s SORT OUT YOUR MONEY.

Have a lovely 2011 all, thanks for reading the blog. Here’s to exciting new projects *raises glass*

]]> http://www.hannahnicklin.com/2010/12/2011-a-year-in-art-mine-and-other-peoples/feed/ 0 http://www.hannahnicklin.com/2010/11/that-in-between-time/ http://www.hannahnicklin.com/2010/11/that-in-between-time/#comments Sun, 28 Nov 2010 21:13:22 +0000 Hannah Nicklin http://www.hannahnicklin.com/?p=1984

Search Party – photo by me at the Forest Fringe Microfest in Mayfest 2010, links to flickr.

I am finally able to let you all know proper details about the very exciting piece of work I heard I got last Monday. I’m going to be working this week, from Wednesday through to Sunday with the New Work Network as a ‘creative correspondent’ at In Between Time. In Between Time is a festival of live art – contemporary art and performance, often intimate or focussed on the audience/body* – happening in venues all over the city of Bristol. Artists involved that I’ve blogged about on here before are Search Party, Duncan Speakman, Action Hero, Tim Etchells, Blast Theory and there’s a raft of other exciting artists and new work that I’ve not yet had a chance to see, so basically this job is somewhere around Best Thing Ever.

What actually is a ‘creative correspondent’? Well mostly that was up to me, the New Work Network had a very open proposal system, the proposal I got accepted under (and the one that I’ve since fleshed out) placed a lot of emphasis on acknowledging my presence in covering the material through social media – and as thus the importance of the other voices that I might report or enable through my coverage. Because of this I will also be sharing as much as the content (audio/video/images/text) as possible (allowing for artists to opt out) via a CC remix license – meaning that anyone can use the content in their own creative and critical reactions. Likewise I’ll be making sure the interviews I grab are with festival goers as much as organisers and artists – reflecting all the conversations around the festival, trying to level the playing field in terms of critical response (there will be no star ratings, horrible reductive things that they are).

If you want to follow the material I’m going to be pushing highlights to my personal account, but to keep people from feeling overloaded I’m going to be sticking to the New Work Network Twitter account for the majority of material – so if you think you’re definitely interested, follow @NewWorkNetwork, or if you want to get a taste for things first, follow @hannahnicklin or check out the site (when it’s up) to see if anything catches your eye. And please, do play with the material I put out there – whether it’s data (I’m going to try and geo-tag pretty much everything I can) or media – any creative or critical reactions are not just welcome, but vital to complete the voice of the correspondence. There will be a submission page on the site when it’s ready, and I’ll remind y’all about it when the site is up.

For people not at the festival, the site will be where most of the content goes up, so you can follow there, and I’m going to be putting it together tomorrow. All going well with domain pointing (the one bit I don’t have control over, so hoping it’s been sorted) it should be found at www.IBTlive.newworknetwork.info

For those who are going – contact me @hannahnicklin if you want to talk to me at any point, follow me on the map (I’ll hopefully have up), and keep an eye out for QR codes and pull off short urls which may guide you to little pieces of material across the city, tweet streams and video and images projected on cafe and venue walls, or bus stops and darkened streets…

The hashtag to follow is #IBTlive10, so I’ll hopefully see you there, online or IRL.

*actually, most artists I speak to don’t even really define live art in the same way, and most people not in the live art community that I speak to have never heard of it, so one of the questions throughout the coverage is likely to be ‘what is live art?’

Greetings all, hope you’re enjoying the cooling down of the weather and the reddening of the trees. Autumn always gets me excited, not just because I can make crumbles and gravy dinners with more than usual impunity, or because it means the approach of my birthday, but also because it feels like the beginning of new endeavours. School years, university; Autumn makes me want to purchase stationary. And in the spirit of new endeavours, I have three very exciting things to tell you about…

One: I will this Saturday (25^th September) be performing a piece of Live Art in Stoke Newington Airport’s Live Art Speedating as part of Fierce, Birmingham’s Interrobang. Lots of words there that might not make sense to everyone. Go look at the poster, and check out this video, for more on what it’s all about…

Two: I shall also be talking at the Coventry Pecha Kucha on the 12^th of October on Theatre in the Age of the First Person. 20 slides of 20 seconds each. See here for more info. Other talks, too, I’m particularly intrigued by the ‘safe sex with robots’ one.

And three: I’m very excited to announce a new soundwalk! Nightwalk; a guided walk through the light and dark of York will be happening on Wednesday 27th & Friday 30th October at 7pm. The event will be free, and is happening as part of the Take Over and Illuminating York festivals. I’m especially thrilled because this will be my first collaboration with real music-making people, the brilliant Lantern Music. Hopefully it will mark the beginning of a beautiful collaborative relationship. The site for the piece is http://nightwalkyork.tumblr.com – do share it, and join/invite people to the Facebook Event. And follow me and @umbrellaproject on Twitter for whisperings from the writing process.

So there you go, lots of exciting things to lead me up to the beginning of November, and the prospect of launching a very exciting country-wide project come next Spring… but you’ll have to wait to hear about that.

Image shared by delgaudm on flickr via a creative commons license.

I’ve just returned from the TaPRA (Theatre and Performance Research Association) annual conference in Cardiff. I was there part of the Theatre and Philosophy Working Group, and delivered a joint paper with my supervisor Dan Watt. The first half of the session was a soundwalk I made which can be heard over here and the second half two papers that converged. This was my half of the paper. We wanted to provoke discussion on the growing irrelevancies of the ‘broadcasting’ conference form, in age that is more like a network, as well as its ability to interrogate performance. We didn’t aim to provide solutions, but offer a provocation. Following the main part of the conference the working group began to plan an interim event more like a symposium crashed together with game play, both performative and academic… Read on for more on the provocation

A Paper without Organs, or, Detours in Theatre and Thinking

‘We are in the era of the simultaneous, of juxtaposition, of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the scattered. We exist in a moment when the world is experiencing, I believe, something less like a great life that would develop through time than like a network that connects points and weaves its skin’ (Foucoult, The Essential Works II, 175) (West-Pavlov 2009, 18)

Christopher Sandberg (2004) […] calls for a different audience theory […] He asserts that in order to fully understand and appreciate a larp [live action role playing game], one must participate in it. This creates a sort of first person audience” (Montola, Stenros and Waern 2009, 54)

Subtlemobs, Hide and Seek, and the urban environment

The performance event is changing, is melding, is mashing up with the new narrative strategies emerging from contemporary digital culture. It is moving into the urban environment, and through an embodied audience. The age of the first person is coming; gaming culture, and the ludic heritage of our childhoods are merging with performative, pedagogical practices and forming the pervasive game.

[…] pervasive games are not new human activities. […] Play becomes pervasive only in a modern society that erects boundaries to be pervaded by such games. (Montola, Stenros and Waern 2009, 257)

Pervasive games can be defined as play expanded out of traditional performative or ludic space in one or all of three ways; spatially (it moves through everyday space), temporally (it is interacted with throughout everyday time) or socially (it is played with/around the public).

Contemporary life has brought us “the proliferation of spaces whose function seems only to be to facilitate our ‘passing through’” (Buchanan and Lambert 2005, 3-4). Pervasive games oppose this by moving into the streets, inhabiting them

“The act of walking is to the urban system what the speech act is to language”  (McDonough 2004, 290)

Hide&Seek is the foremost pervasive gaming company in the UK. Their processes are collective, anyone can design a game, anyone can edit, their events are free to attend, touring ‘Sandpits’ are used to trial – ‘beta-test’ – and improve games, and regular large events and festivals are held where a diverse range of game designers run the most successful.

These games are playful explorations of constructing and re-constructing our selves, powerfully détourn-ing our relationships with the spaces and people around us. They do so in a ubiquitous fashion that the Situationists, those hackers of urban space, would have recognised as revolutionary.

Alex Fleetwood of Hide&Seek describes their works as:

A way of getting people to break that unwritten social law of don’t interact with your fellow man, just walk along the city, and be an automaton in your own space (Hide&seek 2007)

The game Scoop! arranges three teams into ‘genres’ of journalists; tabloid, broadsheet, and gossip magazine. Armed with small video cameras, each team heads out to film several stories. They get points for stories, certain props, and bonus points if they are able to film other teams. This simple ludic structure belies a thicker connection with the media as narrative construct, and genre outlook.

Vampires is a game to be played at night. There are 3 secret vampires with an array of ‘bite’ cards, 20 villagers, and ‘stake’ and ‘holy water’ cards hidden around a city area. The villagers’ task is to find 15 stake cards, and return them to a ‘safe place’ before the time is up. Villagers who are bitten are handed ‘bite’ cards, and if a villager suspects someone they can throw a torn up holy water card in a participant’s face. The game is frightening to play, you suspect everyone, it re-reveals the fear of walking around city space at night.

These games “transform the way we understand space.” (Montola, Stenros and Waern 2009, 78), but also allow us to recognise the construct of what has gone before, participants – and the spaces in which they play – are unbalanced.

[…] a deliberate act of unbalancing, an unworkable conjunction that ‘forges alliances… according to the circumstances’ (Deleuze 1997b: 256). (Watt 2009, 94)

This is alos the lived-play that the situationsts called for, no longer holed up in sanctioned ‘art space’; this is art, lived.

The role of the “public”, if not passive at least a walk-on, must ever diminish, while the share of those who cannot be called actors but, in a new meaning of the term, “livers,” will increase. (Debord 2004, 47)

Pervasive gaming de-territorialises being by placing the subject in immersive or ludic situations and inhabiting our urban unspace. Pervasive games are the realm in which Deleuze’s

[…] machine of minor literature can give way to a playful environment where thought and words become movement (Watt 2009, 100)

The Subtlemob is another, more traditionally narrative-driven pervasive form. Developed by Duncan Speakman, the Subtlemob takes the mass congregation and playful reclamation of the flashmob[1] and turns into a kind of first person performance; inhabiting story.

[…] the new space, like new machines, can only be represented in motion (Buchanan, Space in the Age of Non-Place 2005, 19)

As if it Were the Last Time is a Subtlemob for two. Participants congregate in a designated street, and at specified time play an mp3. Instructions, sounds, and stories inhabit them as they drift around the space. The narrative is not Aristotlean, rather more like a collage. You are asked to find places that feel natural to you, where you feel safe or uncomfortable, to look at the tops of building and in the faces of passersby; to change direction in return for eye contact, and to enact a small moment of intimacy. The piece ends with a dance, suddenly a street that was seemingly contained just two conspirators is full of laughing, dancing people.

Speakman’s first-person audience presents a deterritorialisation of the self.

[…] the process whereby the very basis of one’s identity, […] is eroded, washed away like the bank of a river swollen by floodwater – immersion. (Buchanan, Space in the Age of Non-Place 2005, 23)

At the same time as video games are becoming a dominant entertainment form, social media sees brand, identity, and play becoming re-constructed, integral; a kind of digital prosthesis. The Subtlemob uses immersion to construct a piece of performance out of the shards of our selves. Briefly, you are wholly in a place you would normally pass through, fragmented.

Audience Centrism and Coney

These processes are happening in more conventional theatre-spaces too. As in A Small Town Anywhere by The Agency of Coney.

Coney itself plays like a game of secret society, with members taking codenames in chapters […] all over the world. […] This secret society is led by RABBIT[2]. Anyone who is game can join. (Coney n.d.)

A Small Town Anywhere, performed in 2009, was devised over two years with Battersea Arts Centre as part of their ‘Not for Me, Not for You, but for Us’ festival.

The show has its roots in a French film called Le Corbeau (The Raven) about a mysterious poison-pen writer plaguing a nameless French village. Made by Henri-Georges Clouzot in 1943, it was a covert critique of Nazi-occupied France, in which countless people were denouncing their neighbours to the authorities by letter. (Gardner 2009)

The piece for roughly 30 people is set in a small, ordinary town represented by an space in the BAC theatre. Participants go about their assumed daily lives until the postal service (a series of pigeon holes populated by messages handed to the postman/woman each day) reveals that a suspicious character, ‘Raven’, seems to know too much of the townspeople’s secrets. These secrets, and the townspeople’s characters are worked out in advance. The task of the piece is to discover and cast out the nefarious ‘Raven’. Accusations are made, and at the end, a trial is held; the person found guilty banished.

[…] because there is no audience in a traditional sense, all social anxiety […] quickly evaporates. I play it as if it’s real – and that’s exactly how it feels. For two hours, I lose myself in the show. (ibid)

The placing of the participant at the heart of the world-constituting process embodies the ease with which worlds are created, and crucially, destroyed. This is a profoundly pedagogical and political act, indeed, as Andy Field says:

Politics is as much about form as it is about content. It is a way of doing things. Interpersonal relationships, the structure of our communities, our reading of and relationship to the place we inhabit. How we understand our being in the world. (Field, Playing Games 2010)

Through the disequilibrium produced by the first-person audience, the experience of theatre itself is minorized.

Games and art

‘We are reminding ourselves of what, unexperienced and unthought, underlies our familiar and therefore outworn notion of truth […]’ (PLT: 52) (Clark 2002, 22)

The mashup of play and art found at the heart of pervasive gaming and interactive performance offers the tools with which we can de- and reconstruct our space and selves.

[…] the art work is not just something that comes into the open, next to other things, it changes the Open in which it appears. (Clark 2002, 44)

In a way, the inscription of these stories upon the bodies of their participants are a form of lived philosophy, that which Heidegger’s strained language, and Deleuze’s painful schizo yearnings failed to achieve. It is truly about movement, the playing, and not the final destination. ‘Passage through, not direction towards’ (Watt 2009, 94)

As the ‘postdramatic performance event manifests itself in increasingly diverse and localised forms’[3], one must question the ability of academia, as it is currently constructed, to interrogate, understand, or even represent it.

The process of the academy and the process of making performance

The theatre of the future does not achieve itself. It is a movement. It is a mode of being that is in process. It is characterised most notably as having no place in which to dwell because it no longer finds its home in the theatre. (Watt 2009, 93)

Academia needs to acknowledge the growing irrelevancy of its modes and methods of presentation, both in the context of a hyper-connected, levelling and wiki-culture world, and in the context of performance which is returning to play, to the language of dialogue.

Theatre is live, handmade – reactive, ephemeral, messy. It is at its best when it shows its workings, when it acknowledges the processes that went into making it: the conversations, the long walks, the ideas, the wrong turns, the moments of improbable luck. It’s when this happens that theatre becomes not just art, not just entertainment, but a dialogue (Field, Forest Fringe Diary: Doing Theatre, Bristol Fashion 2009)

This process is also true of academic thought; to acknowledge only the destination is to fail.

But that’s OK.

Each failure is a masterpiece, a branch of the rhizome. (Deleuze and Guattari 1986: 38-39) (Watt 2009, 98)

We simply need to find ourselves another way.

There is a form of conference emerging from the digital world – the unconference. The unconference is about dialogue, there are no speakers, only provocations. Groups of attendees will discuss, share, move to different tables, join different discussions. Attendees become participants; the monologue, a dialogue.

The process has its shortcomings, discussions repeat themselves, and often contain less rigour and depth. They are not necessarily our solution, but they are a recognition that the conference form, as it stands, is not suited to the truth of our processes, or the worlds which they now attempt to explore.

[…] as games continue to grow larger and more important, they will [… force] us to rethink the categories of creator, audience, and work that currently structure our thinking. Instead of becoming a new globally dominant form of message sending and receiving, they will shift our focus away from the idea of broadcasting […] to a new way of thinking about meaning–creation that is more like a network, like a conversation from which meanings emerge. (Montola, Stenros and Waern 2009, 248)

Works Cited

Buchanan, Ian. “Space in the Age of Non-Place.” In Deleuze and Space, by Ian Buchanan and Gregg Lambert. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005.

Buchanan, Ian, and Gregg Lambert. Deleuze and Space. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005.

Clark, Timothy. Martin Heidegger. London: Routledge, 2002.

Coney. The Society. http://youhavefoundconey.net/secretsociety.html (accessed September 3, 2010).

Debord, Guy. “Report in the Construction of Situations.” In Guy Debord and the Situationist Internatinal, edited by Tom McDonough. Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2004.

Field, Andy. Forest Fringe Diary: Doing Theatre, Bristol Fashion. 27 August 2009. http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2009/aug/27/forest-fringe-diary-bristol (accessed September 3, 2010).

Field, Andy. Playing Games. 20 February 2010. http://www.connected-uk.org/join-the-conversation/playing-games/ (accessed March 16, 2010).

Gardner, Lyn. Join in the Murder Game and Battersea Arts Centre. 19 October 2009. http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2009/oct/19/murder-game-battersea-arts-centre (accessed September 3, 2010).

Hide&seek. “Hide and Seek documentary.” YouTube. Edited by Mike Tamman. Alex Fleetwood. 25 11 2007. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FMz7WA01aC4&feature=player_embedded (accessed 5 3, 2010).

McDonough, Tom. “Situationist Space.” In Guy Debord and the Situationist International, edited by Tom McDonough. Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2004.

Montola, Markus, Kaakko Stenros, and Annika Waern. Pervasive Games. Massachusetts: Morgan Kaufmann, 2009.

Trueman, Matt. Review: A Small Town Anywhere, Battersea Arts Centre. 27 October 2009. http://carouseloffantasies.blogspot.com/2009/10/review-small-town-anywhere-battersea.html (accessed September 3, 2010).

Watt, Daniel. “Performing, Strolling, Thinking: From Minor Literature to Theatre of the Future .” In Deleuze and Performance, edited by Laura Cull, 91-101. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009.

West-Pavlov, Russell. Space in Theory, Kristeva, Foucault, Deleuze. New York: Rodopi, 2009.

Creative commons tracks used and works cited in the soundwalk:

‘once a living sea’ by cellodreams, shared via a creative commons license at http://soundcloud.com/cellodreams/once-a-living-sea

‘bell tolls’ by cellodreams, shared via a creative commons license at http://soundcloud.com/cellodreams/bell-tolls

‘It Felt Weird’ by Valiska, shared via a creative commons license at http://soundcloud.com/valiska/it-felt-weird

Artaud, Antonin (1975) To Have Done with the Judgement of God, trans. Clayton Eshleman and Norman Glass, Sparrow 34, July 1975, (no pagination).

Bataille, Georges (1985) Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939, ed. Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press)

Beckett, Samuel (1979) The Beckett Trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, Picador: London.

Deleuze, Gilles (1997a) Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton, Athlone Press: London.

Deleuze, Gilles (1997b) ‘One Less Manifesto’ in Mimesis, Masochism, and Mime. The Politics of Theatricality in Contemporary French Thought. Ed. Timothy Murray. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, pp. 239-258.

Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix (1994) What is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell, Columbia University Press: New York.

Heidegger, Martin (1993) ‘Building, Dwelling, Thinking’ in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrel Krell, London: Routledge, pp. 347-363.

[1] The mass congregation of people without warning, united in some form of action. The roots of it as political device can be traced back to the absurd actions of the Orange Alternative Happenings in 1980s Communist Poland, the form is typically now more mundane, and is being heavily colonised by the commercial world.

[2] Rabbit here could be seen as a direct nod to the term coined by game designers describing the beginning of a game as an invitation to fall down Alice’s rabbit hole Markus Montola, Kaakko Stenros and Annika Waern, Pervasive Games (Massachusetts: Morgan Kaufmann, 2009)..

[3] As per the abstract for this paper.

These are three short pieces which appear in the half hour soundwalk I’m working on for the joint paper I’m currently working on. There’s a bit more information on the intent of the piece here. The sound work is currently finding itself structured around little snippets of story, all with the idea of looking at things as they are, without the way that expectation dulls them. As some philosophers might say, ‘un-covering’.

A story about thinking

You sit for days getting angrier and angrier at yourself. You speak sharply to your loved ones over the phone, you rearrange days with more and more unlikely workloads and cancel days off. You stop replying to emails, you fall asleep reading books and dream fitfully of not being able to speak. You feel like your eyes are swimming in vinegar and sand. And then, suddenly, you crack. You pull on you shoes, and a battered old coat, and you go for a walk.

A story about walking

You realise that you have not breathed fresh air for days. The air feels cool in your lungs. Reminds you of the first scent of winter on cold Autumn dawns. A fine mist of rain falls on your forehead, like the spray of the sea. You walk, and you realise that you have had your jaw clenched. You drift, and you notice the leaves beginning to litter the ground. You walk, and it is the movement that is important, the being-there, in context. Your forehead unwrinkles, and you close your eyes. Your mind is blissfully clear, no longer scrunched up as if un-vigilant, an important piece of knowledge could fall out your ears. You find yourself at home, walk through the door, you turn off the internet, and write 3000 words. It took a week, but also, half a day. Time skitters by. You call your loved ones and apologise.

A story about thought

There are people we send out, like scouts, into the darkness. They cannot see where they are going, they stub their toes, and walk into walls, but eventually, they know enough to construct a map. These people sometimes meet up, to discuss what they have found, and hopefully make the maps fuller; but instead of talking of the mistakes they made, and thet hings they felt on their way, they talk of the strength of their lines, and the certainty of the lettering on their drawings.

I need you, Cardiff dwellers, I need pictures, videos, floor plans, hand drawn maps, timings and/or descriptions of ATRium at the Cardiff School of Creative and Cultural Industries, ideally beginning in or around the room ‘CA312′ in the ATRium. I don’t need all of them from the same person, whatever you can offer. If you can help, or know someone who can, please read on.

I have returned from my first holiday in several years, refreshed, cheerful, and with a lovely big deadline looping in the beginning of September. From the 8-10th of September I will be at the TaPRA annual conference, where on the final day I will be delivering an hour-long joint paper with my supervisor, currently called ‘A Paper Without Organs’. To cut the academic explanations short, basically it aims to investigate how useful (or not useful, as we suggest) the current tools of the academy and academic thought are in examining performance, particularly as it becomes more interactive and integral… Some hints and quotes:

“it is experienced – and learned – upon the body. Its message is illegible; it is inscribed upon [the] flesh” (from a piece on Deleuze by Dan) Plato said “you learn more from somebody in an hour of play than from a year of conversation” (Coney) “new space, like new machines, can only be represented in motion” (p.19 in Deleuze and Space)

The majority of my half of the paper will take the academics on a soundwalk around the conference building, intersecting with the paper, academic questions, conference/academic space, and as my supervisor Dan Watt puts it, hopefully bring people out of the ‘academic ghetto’ from which conferences are typically received. I’ll be drawing on the work of the Agency of Coney, Hide and Seek, and Duncan Speakman.

That’s the idea, anyway.

So why am I calling all Cardiff-ians? Well, my department can’t afford to send me to Cardiff twice. I usually need to explore an area first, before writing for it, but this time I can’t do so physically. Although it fits in with the theory of the paper that I am in some ways, doing it ‘blind’ – using the re-presentation of maps in the same way as much academic thought re-presents performance – I still need something to go on.

So I need you, Cardiff dwellers, I need pictures, videos, hand drawn maps, timings and descriptions of ATRium at the Cardiff School of Creative and Cultural Industries, ideally beginning in or around the room ‘CA312′. The venue is walking distance from Cardiff Central rail station, so won’t be too far out the way. If you can help me, please get in contact, either leave a comment, talk to me on Twitter @hannahnicklin, or email me at h.k.nicklin [at] lboro.ac.uk.

And please share this far and wide, with anyone you know who might be able to help.

Thank you.

How late is this blog post? Somewhere in the region of ‘epically’, or if you like, ‘roughly a month’. I shall continue to use this as an excuse, and in fact, as the fracture clinic doctor told me it won’t really be totally all right (not his exact words) until this time next year, I shall be continuing to use it to excuse tardiness in all hand/arm related things for many more months to come.

The good news, however, is that the cast is off, and after catching up with my life, work, writing, passing my first year PhD progress panel, and getting over all the related hangovers, I return to you, Lo, with tantalising tales of my exploits at the Hide & Seek Weekender at the National Theatre!

The Hide and Seek Weekender ran from Friday the 9^th to Sunday the 11^th of July, and was hosted by the National, in a variety of foyer and outside spaces (I didn’t see any work in the performance spaces, though that doesn’t necessarily mean there wasn’t any, as there was an awful lot going on). I attended the Sunday, but you can see and download the full program here. I didn’t get much of an opportunity to take photos or videos as I was still be-casted at that point, but I used my MIND CAMERA instead. Here are some of the games, sights and sounds it captured:

The big focus of the Sunday seemed to be on the Delhi Games section, most of which I stuck with throughout the day as it wasn’t too precarious-movement-heavy. Also it was a new interesting dimension on the pervasive gaming that I’ve so far done – rather than just reclaiming physical or tech space, the Delhi Games also played across cultural boundaries. These games variously used skype, facebook, and text messages to collaborate on different playful experiences with two groups of artists and players, one in Delhi, and the other in London. Here are the ones I participated in:

Noah’s International Lark (I can’t find info on who this one was by). This was a simple but effective getting-to-know-you type game played over Skype. Two teams made up of both India and Britain-based participants had a limited amount of time to work out several ‘things in common’ shared by the team members. Each ‘thing in common’ had to include participants from both countries, and was scored (eventually) by how rare it was. The ‘rarity’ score was then multiplied by the number of people in the group who shared the ‘thing in common’. The other rule was that everyone in the group needed to be in at least one of the ‘things in common’ groupings. Sound complicated? It wasn’t. Example: We found that 5 people across both countries had met a prime minister or ex-prime minister. This was considered 4-points worth of rare (5 being most rare) so the points scored there were 20. You see? We discovered things like at least 3 people had physically stopped an aeroplane taking off, that 4 people had been arrested, that every single one of us had sent an embarrassing text to the wrong person.

Unknown. The next game I played I can’t seem to find the name of in the programme. Seems like my MIND CAMERA is a bit rubbish. Anyway, this game used webcams, facebook, and our bodies, nothing else. We were handed 5 Indian proverbs, just as a Delhi team were handed 5 English ones. We had a webcam and limited amount of time to bodily illustrate (with as many photos as we wished) each proverb (e.g. ‘what does the monkey know of the taste of ginger’) and upload it to a dedicated facebook album. We then looked through the facebook albums they’d created for us, trying to guess what they’d illustrated. Fun, interesting cultural insights.

Team Hutong (By Coney (here Mel Cook, with Hey Fan, Annette Mees and Tassos Stevens)) As per the programme notes:

“A rectangle is drawn on a map in London. The same rectangle is drawn on a map in Delhi. Teams are matched across countries, and set off together on a real-time transcontinental journey of discovery.”

This game was largely played over text, we were handed a map, some glue, some string, and a transparent umbrella, and sent off into the wider world along the path the map directed us. Along the journey we were asked to spot certain things; uniforms, dogs, babies, and text them to the team in Delhi at certain points on the map. We received a similar count, and each spotted thing translated into various things we had to collect; flowers, words, sweets. There were other tasks, at one point we had to buy some food, and text a description of it without using its name; at another point we were to recall a memory that where we were provoked, and then find something that represented the memory we received in exchange. All of the things we found were stuck or tied to our umbrella. Eventually we returned to a skype chat where we shared our umbrellas and revealed the mysteries (like, for example, the astonishing number of uniforms they had spotted, over 50!).

One of the few images I was able to grab, our umbrella about half way around the Team Hutong route.

Sangre Y Patatas By Coney (here Tassos Stevens with Peter Law) I didn’t actually participate in, as it mainly involved bumping into people on purpose (though at least my death throes would have been realistically painfully voiced). The game consisted of several Patatas (potatoes) and one monster, Sangre (blood), all of whom had their eyes closed. The rules were very simple, you stumbled around in the dark, and when you met someone, you held them and greeted them with your name. If you met a Patatas, you carried merrily on your way, but if you met the Sangre, you met a horrible death with accompanying excruciating death throes. Players who were knocked out moved to the edges and formed a whispering circle to alert players still ‘in’ of the boundaries. There were also hanging bells and scrunchy objects on the floor as aural landmarks which could alert others to your presence.

After the first trial, the players were divided into teams, and smaller versions took place with other teams forming whispering walls. ‘winning’ people were the best deaths, the last Patatas standing, and the quickest Sangre to wipe out all their Patatas. Then a grand finale happened with the cream of the screaming bloody potato crop. This game was hilarious to watch, and drew quite an audience. As I wasn’t able to actually take part, here’s a quote from @MeganFVaughan, one of the friends who I went with, on what participating was like:

“You feel pretty vulnerable to begin with, so when someone nearby falls down it’s tough not to scream yourself.  Maybe I’m just highly strung.  On the other side of things, when I bumped into someone and they weren’t the killer, I was so relieved that my natural reaction was to start giggling, like when you get off a rollercoaster and your body’s so glad its not dead that adrenalin sends you hysterical.  It’s nice that group games like this can be reclaimed for adults.  I’ve not taken part in anything even remotely like it since I was about 12, and I think all licensed venues should have designated Sangres Y Patatas areas from now on.”

And a quick video of a version of the game, played with similar ‘sound hazards’ (crisps and bells)

Sangre Y Patatas – live from Papa Sangre on Vimeo.

The Sangre Y Patatas game is also a seed for a 3-D “video game with no video” that’s currently being developed, and that I’m (possibly extremely) enthusiastic about. For more on that follow @PapaSangre on Twitter, and check out the blog/site at http://www.papasangre.com/ you can listen to a vimeo trailer (make sure you’re wearing headphones) here.

So what did it all feel like?

As an experience the Delhi games were all really uplifting, funny, and while they highlighted in essence how similar we all are, they also gave us a taste of a different culture, and how that culture shapes us, our environment, our language and our daily lives. The games were shaped by a pleasant recognition, directly in Noah’s International Lark, and slowly games like the proverb game. As we were trying to translate Hindi to English to bodies – we also found ourselves searching for the English equivalent – which we almost always found, because (as the game highlighted) the playful images we use in folklore and childhood stories often have universal lessons behind them. The Hutong (the word means a narrow Chinese street or alley – the history/relevance of them is well work a quick wiki-read) was my favourite one; we traversed our two cities, collecting the shrapnel of our environments, creating a ragtag emblem of our trans-national journeys, and then we arrived back to eagerly discuss our trophies and experiences, of which we were all oddly proud.

The simplicity of Sangre Y Patatas is a brilliant lesson in game design, the slight twisting of the language made the action alien enough from games you played as a kid to not make you feel childish, and the fact that you were placed in the dark, that you changed the sense with which you usually perceived the world with, transformed the game-space effortlessly.

Finally, as I said in a tweet shortly following the event, I have never felt so much like I belonged in the National as I did in those few short hours. Events like the Weekender, and like the Forest Fringe’s Microfest, play an incredibly important part in reclaiming sanctioned ‘art space’ as well as street space for new playful experiences. By inhabiting and re-revealing this national institution in an unusual way, it meant you were able to own the space, with others, as part of a genuine community; not just as an audience made up of single units. Hide&Seek’s Weekender was all about unity.