UEL – Hannah Nicklin

An image of me talking at Videobrains, hannah nicklin, videobrains, games, performance, writing

It’s been a while! It was 3 months ago I last posted an update on here, largely due to a lot of the work I’ve been doing having it’s own dedicated online presences.

Since last writing, I’ve finished the community storytelling project Your Home From Here in Lincolnshire, which resulted in a gently interactive sound piece for the village green in North Hykeham. Accompanied by some lovely sound work by Daniel J. Harvey, you can have a bit of a listen, and read some workshop participant’s stories and poems over at yourhomefromhere.com

I’m now 3 months into my residency at Videobrains, which is taking up a lot of my time and money, but is also super great and challenging in all the right ways. Helpfully, Rock Paper Shotgun picked up the talks for a series of features, the first 3 of 6 you can read below, and also, if you’re interested in anything to do with psychogeography and games, there’s still plenty of time to help support the work over on my Patreon. In the meantime:

Read about Jake Elliott, the scale of the US, and the landscape of our late capitalist lives: here.
Read about Holly Gramazio, being an incomer an play in the city: here.
Read about Kerry Turner, the European and American Gothic, Disneyland Paris, and Malham Cove in Yorkshire: here.

I’ve also almost finished work on Equations for a Moving Body. And I COMPLETED A FULL or ‘IRON’ DISTANCE TRIATHLON. It was hard, but I was equal to it. That’s a cool feeling. You can see a lot of the process/thinking/writing/research for that show on the subdomain ironman.hannahnicklin.com — and there’ll be a premiere in Leeds/Sheffield end of October – look out for me announcing it on Twitter. Hopefully we’ll get an Autumn 2016 tour together out of that.

I’m continuing to work with UEL on socially engaged performance and interactive practices, this Autumn running a series of 4 sessions working on a new piece of community participative art with the Applied Theatre BA. I’ve also done a bit of guest lecturing/mentoring for the Game Design course at UAL, and for performance/theatre MAs over at the university in Chichester.

Oh! And there’s a book out on DIY theatre with a contribution from me on what we mean when we talk about interaction, you can buy that right now for £15 on Unbound – there are some great contributors.

I’ve performed/spoken at the V&A radical games Late Pushing Buttons, and in 2 days will present as part of Now Play This a new piece of writing born out of the Games We Have Known and Loved story collecting game (tickets still available!).

And really excitingly, I’ve just begun a brand new commission working with the Social Housing Arts Network working alongside Poplar HARCA on a new piece of community storytelling that will hopefully result in a brand new game-type-thing. Initial thoughts are to use Twine to map the stories of the estate, but of course the work will respond to the community, so I’m looking forward to finding out what they have to tell me.

Finally, I’ve release a limited run of 50 of a brand new little zine collecting some of my poetry, following Songs For Breaking Britain I’ve been writing a lot more, you can buy it over here for only £3 +p&p, with a bit of cover art from a life drawing class I went to.

Phew!

I don’t have much money or time, but boy when I write it all down like that I don’t think I could describe a better way of going through life. Cool. Onwards!

For 6 days over the past 3 weeks I’ve been working with Applied Theatre undergrads at the UEL Stratford Campus on a piece of story collection-driven participative art making (that’s a mouthful, I know, but my work with them encompassed participative practices in performance and games, hence; art). I worked with them to devise a series of questions they had about living in and around Stratford, to build their ability to coax stories out of unconfident strangers, to design and build a space we put in Newham Library, and to go out in and around the library asking people to talk to us about how they feel about where they live. With those collected stories I and each of the students have 4 days to make a piece of participative art using those stories as a starting point. This is my offering. A 1-day first iteration of a storytelling game for two people.

A Different Postcode.

Duration: 15-45 minutes
Players: 2
Age rating: 12A – some adult themes.
Equipment: 2 character decks, consisting of 1 Character Card, 20 Action Cards and 20 Story Cards, your imaginations, these instructions.

It’s also possible to play with 2 decks of 52 cards, Jokers discarded, and all J, Q, K discarded apart from the J, Q, K of CLUBS. You will need to print these instructions, and the character cards, and to have a copy of the translator.

About

A Different Postcode is a game about rising living costs, insecure employment, social cleansing, and living somewhere “necessary but tough”. While the characters are fictional, their names, details and the content of the game is all drawn from conversations with strangers in the street around Stratford City, and in Newham Public Library. The name is drawn from a phrase used by several people to describe the effect of the Olympics on the area: “it’s another postcode over there”. There was a new postcode, E20, invented for the Olympic Park and new housing developments, E15, Stratford City, is increasingly being affected by rising house prices and living costs. “In 50 years time” people told me “there will just be rich people living here”.

You can download the full instructions and character cards here:

A Different Postcode (PDF)

And for playing with regular cards, you can access the translator here.

I’m going to be making simple decks out of sticky labels and blank playing cards. If you want to do that too let me know and I’ll send the templates.

Tag: UEL

Recent games, writing, performing.

A Different Postcode