Politics – Page 21 – Hannah Nicklin

This is a very quick post on thoughts bubbling around my mind following the amazing #thepassion last weekend – a three day secular reconstructed tale of the Passion, told by over 2000 performers/participants, that wove its way through the community and spaces of Port Talbot in Wales. I didn’t set out to – I didn’t even know about it before that weekend, but it seeped into my twitter feed not through agressive ‘amplification’ driven by any kind of ‘strategy’ (scare quotes ‘r’ us), but by the sheer force of people desperate to share. Desperate to share what, by all reports, was a life-changing and affirming piece of theatre. People tweeting, or posting on the Guardian’s review of it talked about the healing of a community, the putting to rest of bad dreams and memories, that it was ‘spectacular’, ‘breath-taking’, that it re-connected them with ‘the awe of humanity’ (comments here).

Truly radical theatre, I might term it.

If I had the time, this would be a proper blog post. As it is, it’s the fragments, images, quotes, ideas, that might have gone into something I could have spent some thought on. Maybe I’ll come back and fill in the gaps at some point.

“We live at a time when people increasingly express the feeling that the world outside our windows is a dangerous and fragmented place. Once upon a time people walked through the city and it gave them a chance to name places and make contact with each other. […] humans need to mark their lives against real space and other people. When they cease to walk, the real spaces become less plausible then than the centralized reality of the media and are increasingly witnessed as a passing blur from a car window.” – Graeme Miller quoted in a piece by Carl Lavery on Linked

three hands, all helping him
(image posted with the kind permission of @angsy)

“Playfulness, disruption, gifts left for strangers, the sharing of visions, intelligent flash-mobbing, provocations at the tipping points of cities, making a scene so the city performs itself, misguided tours, wireless on-line technology – combining phone, movie, digital design, camera, editing desk and ipod – sending routes, signs and stories in waves across spreading networks of uncontrollable walking, maps of atmospheres and basins of attraction, and festivals celebrating the reflections in windows and the glints in pedestrians’ eyes – […] extraordinary changes will begin with disruptions in the ordinary.” – A Manifesto for a New Walking Culture Wrights and Sites

Continue reading Disruptions in the Ordinary

Another fantastically busy week has been and gone, I’m saving one half of it to talk to you about next week, but I think if you follow me down any particular path of the interwebz, you will have noticed that on Thursday I helped convene the ‘Flash Conference‘ at the heart of the ACE/RSA State of the Arts Conference. The Flash Conference was conceived of by myself, Andy Field, and Laura McDermott out of a reaction our awareness of the general dissatisfaction with last year’s format, with some of the problems of scale often faced by such a large event (i.e., missing any address to the smaller scale), and finally, from my point of view at least, with the language and the questions that the conference was shaped around. That last point is perhaps a little impolitic to say (nor very clearly said, my brain is mush this weekend) but the shift into, for example (what turned out to be entirely rudderless) conversations about art and the Big Society rang rather uncomfortable with me, personally. Partly because of my own politics, but also because it felt like a program that pandered to government, not one that brought all to the same table for what could have been a more valuable conversation.

I’m being a little careful with my language here (‘careful’ for me, anyway), and that’s because, entirely to the conference organisers’ credit, when we approached them with our idea to run a companion conference in a nearby pub they actually invited us into the conference itself. Though, as Lyn Gardner put it we were slightly “banished upstairs” – the fact that we were there at all was brilliant, not because we ourselves wanted to talk to the top table types, but because it enabled us to bring so many other voices to that top table – people who couldn’t afford the travel or the ticket price; artists, students, performers and makers for whom the conference really did not feel like a welcome place; or single parents without childcare. I hope that the great deal of interaction that we enabled showed the organisers, and indeed any organisers of any event, quite how much people are dying to have a two-way conversation rather than a one-way panel-driven selection of monologues.

Over 4 days the flashconference.co.uk site had 1273 individual visits from 27 countries, 52 videos, images, texts and sounds were submitted to the blog, 1827 tweets were exchanged, with the majority of that activity falling on the day of the conference. We were inundated not just with contributions, but also thanks, for allowing people who had felt excluded to sound in on the debate. Certainly this was not a perfect format, but it was hopefully a spark, a small static shock. Our industry deserves such large-scale spaces for discussion, but they will only begin to be truly discursive when they speak to the whole of the arts ecosystem, and from a place in not above the world that we all live in. Continue reading So, that was #SOTAflash