Hannah Nicklin

That In Between Time

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?’

Nightwalks, Talks and 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.

TaPRA Murmurings…

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. Continue reading…

Three Shorts.

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.