Arts – Page 38 – Hannah Nicklin

Image from Nikki Pugh’s CC images of her Colony testing…

The title’s a Pratchett joke. It’s the name of the mountain where all the gods hang out in his sort-of-comedy-fantasy Discworld. Not that I’m casting myself as a god in this reference, you understand. More I needed a title, and this kind of worked, whilst hopefully making those of you out there of equal dork status feel a warm ‘one-of-us’ glow in your collective bellies. Mmm. Glowy.

Manifest(o)in’ am I? Well, yes, collectively, with that there Nikki Pugh (and provoked by Paul Conneally); who I had the great pleasure to finally meet in the flesh last Tuesday. I’m rushing around like a very busy person at the moment – heading off to Belfast this weekend is knocking out a lot of my ‘doing stuff’ time – so I haven’t had time to talk about the Fierce evening of testing new work/ideas that I attended. It was really brilliant, though; I particularly spent the night with a vibrating gps creature, you can read more on that here. Anyway, as Nikki highlights over on her blog post, we were both struck, whilst being in each other’s physical presence, how lonely our practice can sometimes make us feel. Naturally our response was to write a SPLACIST/TECHNOSPLACIST MANIFESTO over googledocs a couple of nights later. Now all we need is to pretend that the next big revolution is all our doing, spend the rest of our days spilling wine over our faces, and we’ll already have outdone the Situationists by dint of actually having done some stuff.* **

Anyway, head on over to Nikki’s piece and read her context to the manifesto. Or look a whole paragraph down to read the thing itself. Also: JOIN US.

In other news, you can see my face on this website, and I’ve been reading Eats, Shoots and Leaves in a vain effort to, as my supervisor put it, ‘learn how to punctuate’. Look! I put semi colons in this! I’ve moved into the over-confident sprinkle-it-liberally-and-some-will-hit-the-mark phase, I’m sure it can’t be long before I start actually writing Proper English.

Manifesto-in’:

WE ARE THE SPLACISTS

We will own this city.
We will take it back.
We will link and shift.
We will affect and be affected.
We will look, and be seen.
We will expose and re-see.
We will glory in the moment, the collage, the marking and then passing on.
We reject the beginning, middle and end.
We reject your shopping centre, your pavement, your cultural quarter.
We will build our own constructs.
We will build our own bridges.
We will find the edges and push them.
We will fail spectacularly, vitally, elegantly.
We will span.
We will look up, down, under and behind.
We will leap.
We will invite others to do these things too.
We will make exchanges.
We will make adventures.
We will make beautiful moments.
We will reveal the ugly.
We will hold your hand.
We will whisper in your ear ‘let go’.
We will run, skip and jump.
We will be motionless.
We might dance.
We will dream.
We will be generous, but we may subtle about it, too.
We will reclaim the city, not for you, but with you.
We are you.

WE ARE ALSO THE TECHNOLSPLACISTS

We will learn how to use the tools that make the things we want to happen happen.
We will help others learn wherever we can.
We will construct our manifesto – collaboratively – online, because the Internet is also a space :)
We will shift between space, online and off, taking on the form and the arena that suits us best.
We will bodily augment the layers of virtual space, story, marketing, capitalism, that exist in the city, with our own stories.
We will hold the data-harvesting done in the city in the name of ‘games’ (foursquare, loyalty cards) accountable.
We will find our own energy sources.
We will learn how to flex the central nervous system of the city – the data streams in its weather detectors, CCTV, red light cameras – for our own aims.
We will release all that we can via creative commons, so that they can be reclaimed, remixed, re-purposed.
We will cut, and we will paste.
“Plagiarism is necessary, progress demands it.”
We will pervade.
We will not be technosplacist when being splacist will suffice.
We will never underestimate the power of gaffa/electrical/masking tape
We will be artful. We will be skillful. We will fail usefully.

fin

*and having females involved.

**I’m taking the piss, lots of my PhD is on the SI, please don’t come out of the woodwork now, Situationist sticklers.

I’m cross-posting this to my blog, a week after it originally appeared on The Good Review

Image shared via CC license on Flickr by gato-gato-gato

There’s something endlessly fascinating in not knowing the rules. Trad-theatre’s ability to signify meaning is all tied up in knowing the language of it. If at the beginning of a play a person is buried, under the rules of traditional storytelling you are most likely to think ‘that person is dead’. When, however, in The Woods by the Jane Packman Company, the audience are invited to lay leaves over a person lying still on the woody earth, you (or I, at least) experience the moment of covering, not the immediate meaning. You explore, rather than consume, the storytelling, here.

This piece is a piece about grief, and at the same time about winter, and wondering if you’ll ever see spring again. It took place in a gallery space in MAC, Birmingham, almost all the floor covered in woodchips, leaves, and shrouded in tall green rectangular sheets that felt easily like trees. The space lit by large low burning bulbs, cradled in twigs, you find yourself both in a bedroom of the urban flat of a young couple, and deep in chilly woodland permeated by the scent and crunch of leaves; scored by the murmurs of rooks in the distance. It reminded me of those dream moments in Michel Gondry’s films – where a toy patchwork horse is suddenly big enough to ride, or when a couple wake up in a bed in the middle of the beach where they first met. And indeed, The Woods had the same complex language of a dream.

The storytelling here has to move differently around its audience; immersion foregrounds the body of the audience, it is not the vanishing act done by placing the body in darkness (a la trad theatre). This was very gentle immersion, though, with a mix of direct address that didn’t require verbal responses, and careful invitations to feel the wholeness of the experience (touch the bark beneath your feet, partake in a warming, spicy punch on entering the space). The Woods’ physical language addresses the body, and in doing so, our bodily mortality; while the setting reminds us that whilst we die, the world continues, the leaves fall, mulch, and feed the coming spring.

The sense of watching the piece from spring was perhaps important to how the piece felt; the abject despair of grief, seen framed from a land where the snowdrops are starting to flower. This distance doubled with that of childhood – a story about the games a little girl played to make sense of the world moves into the ‘bets’ made by a grieving partner:

‘I’ll give up a limb, a leg, an arm, 5 years of my life, 15, if I could just see her again, for a moment’.

There was a strong feeling of folklore and fairy-tale – from the opening song to the often thick, and slightly obtuse language. Movements were repeated, footsteps shadowed. This was a Story. The woods are one of those liminal spaces in literature, where characters meet, fall in love, lose themselves. We once lived among them, from them, and had to tell stories to warn each other of the dangers there.

When my grandmother died we spread her ashes at the feet of 5 large beech trees we planted in memory of her second husband. There is much of death in the woods, but each year I visit that place and see the beech trees grow. You come out of The Woods feeling like I do when I leave their side; sad, but somehow, taller.

The Woods ran at MAC, Birmingham from Friday 18^th until Sunday 27^th of Feb. Next time I’ll try and actually get to see something a little more usefully earlier in the run.