Tag: Politics

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A Conversation With… post-Sampled

So here’s some of the reviews and tweets from this weekend’s premier of the current version of A Conversation With My Father. Sampled was ace, and I was performing amongst some pretty humblingly awesome company; I particularly loved see Laura Mugridge and Tom Adam’s Watery Journey… after it’s Performance in the Pub work in progress sharing, and also loved Molly Naylor’s My Robot Heart with music from the Middle Ones (totally in mind for a future PitP), Andy Field’s fizzling writing about the city in Zilla!, and Chris Thorpe doing his astonishing and gripping thing with There Has Possibly Been an Incident. Gutted to miss Melanie Wilson, Curious Directive, and Ross Sutherland due to having to do my own show. But on that – I was incredibly pleasantly surprised, and learnt a lot. Ridiculously low on time right now (hence no linking up the above, you can google, right?), but here’s some of the stuff I learnt/found interesting about performing ACW:

  • goodness me audiences are different
  • either that or I need to get more consistent in performance
  • apparently I can remember words, which is good.
  • sometimes the sort-of-funny things I write turn out to be VERY funny, and I need to structure the performance to balance that
  • This is an important story, that appears to be reasonably approachable
  • It makes people cry.
  • I don’t like making people cry. I want to find a way of (metaphorically) telling people ‘it’ll all be ok’ afterwards, but don’t think it will unless I also make people want to Do Something
  • I don’t think it’s up to me to tell people what that Something is.
  • people are really interested in all of the stuff I pack for a protest, and want it explaining. No one ever works out that the number for GBC LEGAL that I write on my arm (with the label) is for a lawyer, and why you do that.
  • I think there’s something in comparing the ritual of readying for protest for both protestor and police office
  • the sound recording I have of me and my dad is not very good at higher volumes. This is rubbish and I need to get someone who knows more than me to fix it.
  • I think I’ve found a ‘TED’ version of this story – performance lecture, but would like to explore how it possibly becomes more performance, or maybe more story.

As for the future of it, I’m hoping to get a producer or director on board somehow, and spend a week on it in a rehearsal room somewhen and somehow to work it up into a 50-60 minute solo show. And I might even have some photos to show you soon.

In the meantime I’ll leave you with some some self-congratulatory highlighting of positive reviews/tweets:

Continue reading A Conversation With… post-Sampled

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Coming soon to an academic conference near you…

Well, what image would you use to illustrate the monstrous in the city? Shared via CC, click through for originator

For those limited number of people interested in this kind of thing, pleased to announce I’ve had the following paper (and accompanying playful experience) accepted in a conference/symposium called “Performing the Monstrous in the City” at QMU in September. Interestingly they seem to have invited 2.8 Hours Later lot to feature, too, which is interesting. Not least because I think they actually offer a pretty poor experience (at least in terms of what they promise; i.e. a gaming/interactive experience, which it mostly isn’t. Read a bit on what I think interaction is over here. It’s definitely not ‘hot’ interaction in those terms, and extremely linear and much closer to film than games or performance. What it is extremely interesting as is an exercise in pre-marketing. Anyway, this is a LONG bracket. Stopping now)

What I shall be talking about:

Playing with the monstrous; restructuring the ‘other’ through loveliness, adventure, and curiosity.

The city makes us all monsters; it channels us and distracts us, and fills our lives and heads with monstrous noise.  It casts all others as potential monsters; it provides no ‘safe place’ or ‘home’. As media, message and surveillance culture become more pervasive, new tactics of resistance are required. Games and play are a growing and powerful route to reconstructing the monstrous on and of our streets.

This paper will consider the playful practices of the Agency of Coney, looking at the power of first-person performative experience in breaking down the monstrous of the city, and the ‘other’.  The paper will use the lens of Coney’s three main principles of  ‘making good play’; adventure, curiosity, and loveliness; and look at the Agency, it’s training, and activity, to consider new strategies for re-connecting individuals with the monstrous other – in the people and the city space they move through every day.

A 20 minute paper with accompanying playful experience.

The playful experience will be a practical example of the application of playfulness, delivered as small adventurous, curious and lovely tasks that can be discovered and completed by anybody at the conference, at any time during the day.