I haven’t really talked about comics much here, before – though I have music, games, dance and, obviously, theatre – but as comics are more and more a part of my life these days (film and TV; meh), it was pretty inevitable that one would drive my fingers to the keyboard at some point.

Ready yourself for some minor spoilers (nowt more than you’d get from the blurb on the back, and no major later ones, I hope).

I just finished reading a comic called ‘Aaron and Ahmed‘. It was recommended to me by my mate Andy whose judgement in comics (except for the men in tights kind) I trust implicitly. But, unusually, I struggled with this one. Andy said it had him in tears, and so I fully expected to be in pieces afterwards, but instead I just felt kind of… silent.

I think I want to talk about a flaw in the work, though I’m not sure. Like I said, I really struggled to read the comic; I just didn’t move past the first few pages.

The writer offers you a once-broken man; an army psychiatrist saved by the love of a good woman, only then to lose her in the attack on the Twin Towers; seeks out employment in Guantanamao Bay. That’s the opening premise, Aaron before we meet Ahmed. We watch him walk into the Guantanamo.

And that’s when I leave. Because my disbelief refused to be suspended the moment we traipse the halls and dusty grounds of that detention camp. Detention. Those little neat words like hospital corners. Place of torture; that’s what we see in Aaron and Ahmed. Aaron sleepwalking around rooms where different horrific tortures are inflicted on detainees. Victims? They’re certainly portrayed like that. Right then I’m lost to the main character, right then I can’t possibly walk by his side.

What stopped me at that first page I saw a man being tortured was like the feeling of a seeing punch to the stomach of someone I love further away than I could reach them. I wouldn’t walk by it, not even as narrative companion.

This story doesn’t fit in my head. My mind said. But it fits in my world, it’s one of the pieces; it fits together with the piece I am a part of. These acts or ones like them are committed by a culture I buy into. My government is implicit in tortures like these.

Here is what interests me about the work; it’s close, recent stuff, this. How could I possibly be asked to suspend myself? It doesn’t have the historical/generational distance of Maus or Ethel and Ernest, the ‘not-here-but-somewhere-like-here’ of something like Habibi, or the personal ‘true story’ nature of works like Fun Home or Persepolis. I felt rudely present throughout the whole. And maybe that’s right; that I feel my body – my mind – present. That I see how they might or might not be implicit in a story; this story. That I see both me, and story, and the places they both vanish, because that’s where things sometimes get dangerous. Like the kinds of stories, the memes which the story goes on to talk about (still, I felt, pretty heavy-handedly). The stories we (cultures, societies, religions) tell ourselves about the world. The stories which always have to rearrange the world to fit into our heads. Sometimes these stories should bear unfolding. Sometimes we should trace the creases.

It is the first few pages which cause me to trace the creases. I didn’t really rate the stuff in the middle, but then at the end, the main character’s final conclusions ring true; there, Aaron finds me again. It’s an idea (meme) often repeated, by many people. Here’s one from 403 years ago:

Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.

Yeah, horrifically well known Shakespeare, I know. It’s been running through my mind, that, recently, though. No one is ever lost to the night sky; it is only ever obscured from view.

Sometimes love burns with disappointment, or regret, or too much weight, or it is obscured, lost. Sometimes you might fly on it, it might suddenly be in the face of a stranger, or stoop with you to pick someone up when they least expect. I couldn’t walk with Aaron past those people being tortured. And when I realised what this meant to me, several hours after finishing the comic, my eyes were wet.

If you want to buy the book, at all, I recommend getting it from the lovely guys at Page45, you can reserve stuff via Twitter and everything.

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.”

No, these people don’t know what they want, but they’ve grown used to virtual spaces where that can be discovered; where a manifesto is on a wiki, and where consensus building allows populism, complexity and ambiguity to coexist. They are trying to forge these spaces in the city; simply come by the occupation, talk to some people, be Kanye West and stride silently through, be a banker who cannot help but face the perception of bankers, or be a police officer who is genuinely torn about what to do. The Occupy movement forces us to question the city in, weirdly, almost the same way that a facebook redesign manages to cause so much dissatisfaction; it throws a space we take for granted in our face and demands to know if this is what you expected. (read more)

Skateboarding, networks and the occupy movement. A brief flit through some ace thinking from Felix Cohen

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/other-projects/ http://www.hannahnicklin.com/2011/10/other-projects/#comments Sun, 30 Oct 2011 17:08:17 +0000 Hannah Nicklin http://www.hannahnicklin.com/?p=2468 Deep in the middle of Umbrella Project goings on at the moment (small reflections and links to follow) but just wanted to post about a couple of very exciting things I’m doing (almost straight) after (gulp).

The first is my first more traditional performance piece in a good few years. A small work in progress for an audience of 8-10 (due to venue size, I’m sure it will scale eventually) at the Flanagan Collective’s ‘Little Festival of Everything’. #Littlefest (all donation based ticketing) will be taking over the Fauconberg Arms in Coxwold, North Yorks, and a lot of the villagers’ homes, too, and filling the pub and surrounds with around 100 pieces of art&performance. Ace. I’ll be joining people like Rash Dash, Belt Up, Pilot, Chris Thorpe and loads others to present a piece I’ll be working in for about 4 days prior. A Conversation with my Father.

Here’s the copy (I suck at copy)

An early work in progress born out of a conversation between an ex-policeman and his protestor daughter. A conversation about fear, grey areas, them and us, duty, and standing up to protect what you think matters. An intimate piece for a small audience at a very early stage of development, please come, watch, and offer feedback.

It’s on 6 times over 2 days, and will probably involve video or projection of some kind. Maybe just sound. I’m not sure. I’m filming a conversation with my father on the 7^th, and basically working something up from there. Hopefully it’s going to be pretty interesting, and is kind of addressed at both sides of the fence, protestors and non protesting public/police officers. More of a question about the fence in the first place, really. WATCH THIS SPACE. And come to Yorkshire for the weekend to see it.

The other super exciting and slightly unnerving (that’s how I like my life) thing I’m doing is a collaboration with the BRILLIANT Nikki Pugh. Who is the person who’s going to teach me to hack and solder properly. One of these days. You may or may not have noted that we’ve been working on a Splacist manifesto – well MADE have invited Nikki to lead (I think I’m helping) a workshop on the manifesto, and commissioned us both to work on our first practice-as-response to it, which is free to come and see/do (though ticketed, head here for more info)

Copy wot I did not write, and is therefore far superior:

Who are the Splacists? Will introduce the context for, and development of, the Splacist manifesto as well as reporting findings from the What are the Splacists? activities conducted earlier in the day. There will also be an opportunity to experience work developed in collaboration between artists Nikki Pugh and Hannah Nicklin. This work has been commissioned by MADE as part of Learning Spaces Living Places 2 and represents the first in direct response to the manifesto. The evening event is your chance to experience it first-hand and be a part of it.

Splacism is a contemporary mode of practice proposed by Paul Conneally. A new set of ideologies defined by Hannah Nicklin and Nikki Pugh. A hop, skip and a jump away from phsychogeography and the works of the situationist international. Think space, place and splice. Developed empirically by whoever’s interested.

Both really exciting things to lead up to Christmas, which I fear may have to be the point at which things settle down a bit and I spend 7 months or so actually finishing my PhD. Hm.

First up, a 7 minute taster of the WHOLE DAY

And for the more dedicated or mix&match viewer, a playlist of videos of each provocateur:

August 2004

The Tl;dr version of this post is this link. But please do just read it.

Edinburgh is a fucking beautiful place. Despite my inner-midlander that wept at the sight of every incline, I felt remarkably at home there.

Feeling at home is something it’s been hard to cultivate since turning 18, really. I’ve lived in 14 different houses in the 8 years since I made my first home away from home. In a tent. In the Ardeche region of France. It became home when I tied several old crates together on their side and built a makeshift bookcase. That and the Marmite my mum sent in shoebox-wrapped packages.

My books used to mean home for me, but my relationship to my books has changed since they became part of my living (PhD), and now the familiar wallpaper of my desktop feels like home. The small idiosyncrasies I’ve set up as short cuts, the things I keep on each ‘space’, right hand top for emails, bottom right for calendar, top left for internet, bottom left the exotic realms of ‘miscellaneous’.

Home is always when me, my brother and our mum find ourselves together. Home is Christmas-time jokes about stockings that still appear (but this time before we get up, not after we go to bed, which tends to be via the local pub these xmas eves). Home is the slightly stilted conversation of more extended family trying not to bring up global warming or gender equality in our company.

Home has also been mashed potato and toad-in-the-hole. The smell of Jean Paul-Gautier on someone’s neck. Smokey hair. The very slightly different texture of a tattoo shaped like a star.

Home is Big Skies. Lincolnshire sausages. And horizons that go on forever.

Edinburgh is a fucking beautiful place. I felt remarkably at home there. Despite the hills.

And that, of course, has a lot to do with the people. The wonderful amazing constantly confounding people that make up my small corner of the theatre industry. But it also has a lot to do with a place. A single place that while I was there was like an oasis. The Forest Cafe.

The Forest Cafe is a “volunteer-run, collectively-owned, free arts and events space masquerading as a vegetarian café.” And MAN do they do good burritos. They host the Forest Fringe, which was the home of all but 3 of my most favourite shows that I saw this year. They also hosted Edgelands. And besides that hold poetry nights, screen films, have amazing space-art painted on the walls, have a hairdressers who serve vodka, free wifi, a darkroom, screenprinting, music gigs, hip hop and djs and dance and massage and knitting and language lessons and basically if you go up to them with a cool idea and they have the space they will let you have it. For free. Most of the people who work there do so for free (and burritos). The proceeds from the cafe go right back into running the building. And the second I got there people who announced that they knew me from the internet took my soggy bag from me and bought me a drink and showed me where I could eat for under a fiver a day as friends passed by and stopped to say ‘hi’, and every step I took as I left that night led me to another familiar smile, and a bracing hug.

I had never been to Edinburgh in my life before last week. It felt like home.

The Forest is home for hundreds of people who would not have one otherwise. Hundreds of artists and misfits and alternatives and locals and people just starting out with ideas that change people’s lives.

The Forest is under threat.

They were able to exist on a low rent arrangement with Edinburgh University Settlement who owned the building. Then EUS went into administration, and PricewaterhouseCoopers became administrators. PwC intended to sell the venue that the Forest inhabits, and found a buyer. As far as the Forest knew they would all have to vacate the premises by the end of this month. But then the buyer fell through. And the Forest offered to pay the rent on the building in the meantime. Only to be told that they were more trouble than they were worth.

PwC would rather have the building empty than full of the home that Forest have created.

This makes me fucking angry. Really fucking angry. There’s lots that makes me angry about the world and quite often it can feel like the ills it contains are insurmountable. But this time, there’s something I can do. But I need you, too. Because just as hundreds and thousands of hands made and keep the Forest home that it is, it needs just as many, plus a few more to save it. Forest intend to raise the money to buy the premises. That means finding £100,000

Here’s what you can do.

1) You can pledge money. If just half of my Twitter followers donated a tenner each THEY’D BE NEARLY QUARTER OF THE WAY THERE.

2) Sign this petition http://www.gopetition.com/petition/43255.html

3) come up with a way to help with your time, sell artworks and donate the money, come up with some amazing thing to be sponsored for, cajole rich loved ones.

4) tell @PwC what you think of their actions (politely)

5) tell all of the people. Spread the word.

And help preserve a small but important place: a home. A place made up of people and smells and chances and shelter from rainy skies and love and passion and the smell of food and the touch of people you recognise. Somewhere not built to turn a profit, but to nurture. Please, help.

I can understand them.

I shouldn’t have to couch this in apologies about not condoning of course. But I will.

Because there is a difference. I wouldn’t do it. But I can understand it.

Because actually I think the most important thing is trying to understand it, and the reason this is happening is because people don’t or can’t try to understand people; they’re just ‘mindless’ ‘scum’ ‘youths’ ‘black’ ‘pigs’ ‘anarchists’ ‘protestors’ ‘chavs’ ‘lazy’ ‘stupid’ ‘fuzz’ or one of any number of words that means ‘them not us’.

Every day in many ways you are told about what you should have. What you should wear, the kind of phone, the brand of trainers, the size of TV. But not you. You don’t have the money. We’ll give you the aspiration. The one for the stuff, mind, not skills or education, we don’t want you thinking about it. And we don’t tell you that it’s an empty addiction, that it’s never enough. And every now and then we flash a golden ticket in front of your eyes, a game show, a talent contest, a lottery. Take a chance, they say, life is just a game of snakes and ladders and you may just hit the ladder that takes you all the way to the top.

Brands aren’t people. They’re massive. There are no real people behind that.

And there are whispers of people getting something for nothing

And then it’s a corner shop, not a chain, it’s someone’s livelihood. But after you’ve broken one window, why not another, what’s stopping you? And it feels so good, it makes you feel strong, you’re having an effect. Mostly people look down on you, you can see it in their eyes. Now they’re afraid of you. Scared. You’re on the news. On TV, it’s reality tv where you dictate the camera angles.

You don’t hear or feel the fear of the people in the houses, not out on the streets.

You just feel the pounding of the blood and ringing of the alarms in your ears and your body feels like it’s vibrating. You feel strong. You feel like you could do anything. So you do.

‘you’re just trashing your own community’, so what? No one else gives a fuck about it, why should you. (Ever heard of self harm?)

Looting is an act of aggression against the rules of capitalism. A rejection of the label ‘have not’.

You might not phrase it like that

“I’m hungry, I come and I ask for food, I say please. Every day. I come and I see you’ve got lots of it, more than you need. Days, years, decades I come by. Keep on saying please. Year’s we’ve been asking the government. One day I’m just going to take it.” (paraphrasing an interview from the streets of Hackney http://boo.fm/b433800)

People will get hurt. Houses and goods and livelihoods will be broken. People will be jailed, mothers will lose their sons and police officers’ families won’t sleep, wondering if they’ll take another brick or bottle to the face.

And a thousand more horrible things I couldn’t possibly really understand.

But that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t try.

A broken society is built on the failure of imagination of both government and people.

Stay safe.

Edit, this has got a bit of attention, glad it struck a nerve, even if it was just my half murmured thoughts about a small aspect of it (the looting). If you want to do something (and in general for a good ‘there is such thing as community’ feeling) check out the #riotcleanup hashtag on Twitter. @Artistsmakers is trying to organise community led cleanups.