Post Note – a script for school assembly

Mr Oakley:

The artists in Residence programme is a programme for Professional artists to come and work in a school environment. These could have been visual artists, Musicians or sculptors or performing artists. Kingston High was successful in its application for an artist in residence and we were offered the services of a pair of performing artists.

Kelly and Julie were in the school for a total of ten weeks and in that time they worked with groups of students as well as pursuing their own arts practice. I was excited to have this programme in the school, particularly so that students could see how professional pathways in the arts might work – to find out how people make a living being creative. And to offer an experience that we wouldn’t have otherwise been able to offer in the classroom.  Twelve students had the opportunity to work directly with Kelly and Julie and I have asked Tamara and Ben to tell you a little about their experiences.

Tamara:

You will probably know about the lady with the pink headphones and rainbow shoes and her friend who wore scarves who would sometimes be doing really strange things in the learning street. We had the opportunity to work closely with Kelly and Julie and find out more about the ways that they create their work and the meaning behind it.

It was great being a part of something that was outside of Drama – As well as being part of Drama. It was a great Experience for not only myself and ben but the rest of the group as well.

Throughout this course we learnt a lot about ourselves as individuals and about each other. As the course went on over weeks we went from a group of students who didn’t realy know each other to being great friends.

Working with Kelly and Julie has been a great experience and I have learned a lot not just from them but also from the whole group that I was working with.

Ben:

For 6 weeks we worked with Kelly and Julie training and playing in performance as a part of a community.  We learnt how to really see the environments that we work and learn in every day. We then used performance to engage with and see the environment with new eyes.

One of the great opportunities that came out of working with the artists in residence was that we got to perform at the Salamanca arts Centre on a Saturday night as a part of their 35^th birthday party. It was great to be doing something out in public with a whole group from school.

We really enjoyed working with Kelly and Julie and in the time we had together we became great friends.

Thanks.

Late notice of our final farwell

There was cake (of course), swords, antics, and very lovely cards

Thank you KHS, Mr Oakley, Ms Suskia and our fabulous Space Activators, Maddie, Tamara, Ben, Zac, Davis, Kyle, Jack, Jacob, Chloe, Cassidy, Elizabeth, Megan, Liv and Georgia.

It has been a gift.

 

 

 

 

 

a little bit famous?

So we’ve done the doco, the radio interview and we we also the feature story on the latest arts@work newsletter.

http://www.arts.tas.gov.au/news_articles/space_invaders

a student review…

The first thing I ever did with you involved tribal chanting with ancient wombat burial grounds. So I knew it was going to be so different from anything I’d done before, but I had no idea what I was getting in to. You and Julie taught me so much and you guys have made me so much more confident!

work

Main Entry: work
Pronunciation: \ˈwərk\
Function: noun
Date: before 12^th Century
An activity in which one exerts strength or faculties to do or perform something
(Webster’s Dictionary)

And so the blog of reflections comes full circle, and we spend our last day at Kingston High School.  Julie and I applied to the AIR residency to create the time and space to reevaluate how we might work together. That question evolved to where to work as our eyes were opened to the school architecture around us and we stumbled upon a performative space right outside our school office door.

After weeks of workshops, space activations and lunch time interventions I find myself  now in the midst of continuing to question why we work. How can our work matter? What is the agency of art? What can it do and what is it being asked to do?

           Culturally,

            Socially,

            Politically,

            Personally.

In the Space Activator Projects  visual intervention, performance, community and play collided and conversed to spark and engage space, performers and their audience in new ways. The work challenged and encouraged performers and audiences alike to see. It worked to broaden the eye and the imagination to consider the full canvas. And that is the heart of why I continue to work.

To foster a new breed of radical reciprocity.

To reorient. To experience. To discover. To contribute.

I work. I persevere. I create. I question. I return to the beginning of this reflective post- to the resonating succession of thought: how to work, where to work, why to work. And this is both where I’ll end and perhaps where we all need to begin – not with an answer, but with a question, a series of questions that center on the belief that the arts can and have a responsibility to create change- in individuals, in communities and the way that they form, evolve, communicate, and learn- Change that requires risk, creativity, and work.

 

All real living is meeting…A little performance theory

I and Thou, Martin Buber’s best-known work, presents us with two fundamental orientations – relation and irrelation. We can either take our place, as Pamela Vermes (1988) puts it, alongside whatever confronts us and address it as “thou”; or we can hold ourselves apart from it and view it as an object, an “it”‘. So it is we engage in I- Thou and I-It relationships. We can only grow and develop, according to Buber, once we have learned to live in relation to others, to recognize the possibilities of the space between us.

The Space Invader Interventions enabled an embodied investigation of these relationships and spaces. As we struggled to traverse the school environment as traceurs or simply remember each other’s names and cross the circle we plunged into the depths of relation and confrontation. Reaching for the Thou by meeting each other through our play.

For Buber, the meeting was most important.

 All real living is meeting (Buber, 1958)

That doesn’t necessarily mean that he believed that everything in life is meeting, but real in the sense of that which fulfills the humanity that is possible for you, in your unique way, resides in the meeting. What is important is the manner in which we meet others; the quality of each relationship was vital to Buber. In Buber’s own words:

“I think no human being can give more than this. Making life possible for the other, if only for a moment.”

According to Buber the meeting involved in genuine dialogue is rare, and is, in a real sense, a meeting of souls. (‘The primary word I-Thou can be spoken only with the whole being”, Buber 1958). The life of dialogue involves “the turning towards the other” (Buber 1947). It is not found by seeking, but by grace. In a very real sense he believed that we are called to genuine dialogue, rather than actively searching for it.

So how do we practice meeting? How do environments, communities and practices such as the Name Game encourage and grow such a state of grace in which we can turn towards each other in genuine dialogue?

Buber believed that,

“the relation in [genuine] education is one of pure dialogue” (Buber 1947). “In order to help the realization of the best potentialities in the student’s life, the teacher must really meet him as the definite person he is in his potentiality and his actuality; more precisely, he must not know him as a mere sum of qualities, strivings and inhibitions, he must be aware of him as a whole being and affirm him in this wholeness. But he can only do this if he meets him again and again as his partner in a bipolar situation. And in order that this effect upon him may be a unified and significant one he must also live this situation, again and again, in all its moments not merely from his own end but also from that of his partner: he must practice the kind of realization which I call inclusion.”(Buber 1958)

Buber uses the analogy of the chrysalis and the butterfly. He teaches us to meet others and to hold our ground when we meet them. And I think the important, the essential, word there is ‘teaches’.

“It takes a lifetime to learn how to be able to hold your own ground, to go out to the others, to be open to them without losing your ground. And to hold your ground without shutting others out.” (Buber, 1947)

According to Buber “Such educators need to find and guard ‘the narrow ridge’.  The narrow ridge is the meeting place of the We. This is where man can meet man in community. Any only men who are capable of truly saying ‘Thou’ to one another can truly say ‘We’ with one another. If each guards the narrow ridge within himself and keeps it intact, this meeting can take place. Through encountering each other as truly human we can both place ourselves in the world” (Buber quoted in Hodes)

Projects such as the Space Activator Interventions provide a ground to practice meeting, a structure to experience relation, and teaches the importance of cultivating a passion and hunger to reach across the spaces between us. The community created in the Space Activator Projects has been strengthened, challenged and amplified through the work we have shared on the narrow ridge of our meetings.

Popped Up

On Thursday May 10 the slow motion notion had started to take hold as the student space activator pop-up performance took place at lunch.  Earlier in the day Kelly was thanked by a teacher who had been followed by a group of students walking in slow motion just that morning on the way into school – bringing curious joy to the start of the day.  Of course, as is always the case, there were last minute adjustments to the performance due to missing some performers, but our hardy troupe are now experienced improvisors – ready to respond to the moment.  And so we began.

ABC local radio came into the school to interview us and witness the performance.  You can get a bit of a feel of being there with us by listening in.

ABC Hobart, Thursday May 10 – Part One:

ABC Hobart, Thursday May 10 – Part Two:

The camera on us…..

Today Wendy Morrow from Arts Tasmania and Mark and Sean from Blue Hat came to make a mini doco (documentary) about Kelly and my residency at Kingston High. Being chosen for this was in itself an interesting feeling.  It was like another endorsement of my work as an artist, that what i want to explore and experiment with, is valid and valuable.  You would think that my now I wouldn’t need that but us artists can be insecure creatures at the best of times.

The actual experience was fascinating and a great added bonus to the residency.  We got to listen to the students and Patrick talk about us and we had another opportunity to drill down into what we have been doing here and what has happened because of that.

What They Said:  it was fun, really fun, not what I expected, different, hard to describe, impulse work, grid, grid, grid, working on impulse, tempo,getting out of class, challenging, working together, becoming friends with people I didn’t know, really different to ‘normal’ drama, confidence, blocking people, not really blocking then, playing with them, following, repeating, asking questions about what is appropriate ways to behave, challenging the way we see things…….

The students interviewed found it difficult to describe what we actually did with them, which is something that I sympathise with as I often find it difficult to describe my practice in any more than vague terms.  I suppose this is not so surprising as in my practice words come second to the physical movement exploration and that itself is based on impulse, intuition, and improvisation.  There is a spoken language, terms and phrases that interweaves with the physical, a language that is often new or unfamiliar, a new way of speaking to strengthen and support a new way of seeing and responding and creating. But spoken (and written) language always takes longer and lots more repetition to stick than physical and sometimes that can’t be the priority.

When we performed at lunch we decided to test some elements of the coming student pop-up and to incorporate the performance elements and style of our previous public experiments. The audience were more subdued, curious, laughing, still questioning, but watching, engaged for sustained periods.  Some joined in for moments but there was no crowding, mobbing, or intimidation. It is hard to tell if it was the presence of the doco camera man (another adult stranger watching), if they had come to accept the strangeness of our presence, if it was a different crowd or the more open architecture of the learning corridor that effected this change. Regardless it felt good to be out there, connected to Kelly, always visible, playing in this space that we have been gifted with.  Maybe I enjoyed ‘performing’ the different me, unfazed by the reaction, the final overcoming of any left over high school angst…….? It was great when a few students joined in, watched and learned the rules and then played with us for a little on their journey. A few new connections and introductions.  Not much time for many more.

A day on the learning street

Lowly, unpurposeful and random as they may appear, sidewalk contacts are the small change from which a city’s wealth of public life may grow.

(Jane Jacobs:The Death and Life of Great American Cities, p. 72)

Getting to the basics of community

In this weeks Student Activator 2.0 workshop we spent more time investing in our ensemble community and contemplated the bigger KHS community.

I reflected before class how important playing the circle name game has been for building our little groups. Even with the Space Activators 1.0 who all came from the same year 9/10 drama class the group didn’t really know each other and learning names made a huge difference in their confidence to collaborate and play with each other – resulting in the gorgeous public art performance on the stairs at SAC35.

The circle name game is one of my favourites.  I play it with every group I work with, even if it is a one off workshop.  When I know people’s names, or at least am seen to be seriously trying, they are more willing trust me and take risks, to step outside their comfort zone, to try something new or share an idea.  The more people that know each others names, the bigger the multiplication of that effect.

Our new Space Activators 2.0 ask for it each week.  They want to know and confirm they know this group.  They are super keen to play, are not scared of eye contact, teaming up trying something new.

THE GAME

• Stand in a circle with a bit of space between each person.
• Go around the circle with each person saying their own name.  Do this twice and ask everyone to see if they can start by learning one or two new names.
• The leader starts by saying someones name across the circle and then walking to take their place.
• That person says the name of someone else and walks across the circle to their place
• and so on.
• If / when you decide to start getting people out, have then stay as part of the circle – but sitting down.
• Adding the ‘getting out’ element immediately sharpens every ones focus – we are a competitive species even in play….

RULES include:

• Say a name before you start walking away from your place – TALK then WALK
• Say a name and get out of your place before the person coming towards you arrives at your spot.
• Don’t say the name of someone on either side of you.

Post game we had a great discussion about how many people each of us knew (and knew the name of) in each grade – throughout the school.  This flowed into how big each grade was, how they are kept very separate now in the pod system, how we can meet / get to know know people – through siblings, friends siblings, mixed activity groups like ours, and combined classes in year 9/10.  How else??

A school is a unique community.  Communities are more productive and harmonious when individuals feel connected and valued.  Shared pride can be a powerful force. It does feel like we are sending out a few strands of connecting web into this community – these stands may look fragile, or not be seen at all…  I wonder what they will catch during our last days at KHS.