Verbatim, straight from the transcription of the conversation I had with my father for the scratch performance of the same name I’m working up this weekend and 2 days next week for the Little Festival of Everything. Slightly more info on this previous blog post.
“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.”
So just over the 3 week point in the Umbrella Project (it’s 5 weeks long) and things are just about starting to get to the point where I’ve enough time to blog. Biggest realisation from this experiment was how more than slightly ridiculous collecting the material for, transcribing, editing, recording, collaborating on, testing, mixing and releasing 3 soundwalks actually is. Including running events and trying to run a bit of digital awareness raising, too. Phew. Think a concerted amount of the ‘you can download and do these things’ work is going to have to happen afterwards. We’ve another day out with our big inflatable dome thingy on the 12th (the last day) so I think that’ll be a good point to do that.
So yes, all the story collecting trips are done, although you can still leave your stories of journeys via the number on the umbrellas up until the end of this week (when writing happens).
The first soundwalk – Evening – is done and available for download (designed to be done after dark outside the bigger of the two Betty’s Tea Rooms) the download link and full instructions (do grab those too) can be found over here.
The second soundwalk – Daytime – will be released on Tuesday (designed to be done sitting down somewhere in the pedestrian bit of Parliament Street, at a busy time of day, lunchtime, or a Saturday). That will be up on the same download page.
And the final soundwalk ‘Commute’ will be released on the 10th, with event days for Daytime on the 5th, and Commute on the 11th. Join us on those days if you’d like to get the chance to talk to me or Tom (artistic producer on the project) about it.
Also, worth me putting down in pixels, how absolutely positively brilliant everyone at Pilot have and are being on this, to take the risk on what is still being termed an experiment (learning an awful lot creatively as well as logistically, which would make a re-mount/developed version quite drastically different, I think) in the first place, as well the incredible support in kind, and actual bodies-on-the-ground support etc. Would probably be curled up in a ball weeping if it wasn’t for them. So THANKS, PILOT.
And here’s some pictures (facebook link) of story collection days to amuse you, and a trailer for the first soundwalk (making the second trailer tomorrow).
*collapses*
Oh, and if you don’t know what any of this is going on about, head over to this video, or the site.
