Creative Process » Nimble Fish

Space To Dream

Creative Process, Festivals No Responses »

Sep 272010

We had a marvelous time at the 2010 Village Green in Southend last weekend. Organised by Metal Culture and now in its third year, Village Green is an incredibly lively and diverse festival that celebrates the arts, culture and community. We don’t know what the body count was this year, but last year’s VG drew a whopping 20,000 people to its one-day extravaganza.

For this year’s VG, we devised a new interactive installation titled Space To Dream. The idea is simple: we invited passers-by into our 3x3m marquee and asked them to leave us a piece of a dream they’d had, whether the night before or from years ago. It might be only a fragment–a word, an image, an idea–or it might be an entire story. We provided some very simple kit for our dreamers to write, draw, make, stick and create any version of their dream piece they saw fit.

Our aim was collect as many dream fragments as possible during our day-long stint and we collected hundreds, from children and adults, residents and visitors. The result was a marvelously messy collage of ideas and images that was by turns uplifting, haunting, cryptic, funny and contemplative. We were thrilled that many of our morning dream leavers came back in the afternoon to see how it’d all turned out. Check out this Flickr link for a flavour of what transpired on the day.

Space To Dream was a riff on our most recent project in Southend, Space To Learn, which explored non-traditional teaching and learning spaces in the community. Ideas about how we can re-see spaces and places link both projects, but they’re also about how new vistas open up when we give ourselves the freedom to try something new, whether in a classroom or at a festival. A simple idea, and yet like all simple ideas sometimes requiring a bit of bravery to put into practice. We thank all of our Space to Dreamers for taking the leap last weekend.

All good things

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Sep 142010

And so, it’s semi-official. A Guardian article today provides the backdrop for news that the Creative Partnerships programme, which has changed the UK arts and education landscape in uncounted ways, will cease to be funded after the current fiscal year. This is no surprise to those us who do a fair bit of CP work: the rumour mill has been so active where CP’s demise is concerned that it has felt like a fait accompli for nearly a year now. Ironically, the Guardian piece is built around a new report citing the societal and economic impact of the CP programme, which is considerable. Read the article; then go to the Culture Creativity and Education (CCE) website and download the report. Both tell a tale of government money well-spent.

Expected though it may be, confirmation of CP’s imminent demise is bittersweet for us. Nimble Fish is a child of Creative Partnerships: the company’s founders met doing a CP project and our operating ethos–cross-arts, collaborative, never taking our clients or audiences for granted (CP has always been big on coming into schools with an open mind)–has always reflected that initial work. Many of our regular collaborators, not to say good friends, were met through CP connections. We’ve done a lot of CP work over the years, most of it very exciting and rewarding, both artistically and in the context of the kind of societal advancement that is at our core as a company.

Given all this, it may sound strange to say that perhaps it is indeed time for CP, as a programme, to end. This is not to say that we look forward to an end to the work that CP has fostered; that of arts-led collaboration between teachers, students and creative practitioners for the purpose of enriching and improving teaching and learning. If anything, CP-style work is obviously the way of the future in a world economy that is increasingly about flexible thinking, portfolio careers and creative collaboration.The UK is truly a remarkably rich place where creative people are concerned, and whatever the LibTories do in coming years they’d do well to keep in mind that breaking the back of the country’s creative industries (as their more alarming proposals appear to suggest) effectively breaks the back of the UK’s ability to operate as a real player in the world. We don’t build many great machines from fire and steel anymore, but we do continue to produce world-class ideas. This is a resource that must be nurtured, not neutered.

But as government-sponsored programmes go, CP has had a pretty long and rich run of it: about a decade from inception to what appears to be conclusion, with a truly nation-spanning reach. All programmes become moribund after awhile, their original swagger and daring inevitably stiffening with paperwork and boxes to tick. Artists, too, can grow torpid if they feed too long at any programmatic trough. Sometimes, things need to end in order for innovation to begin again. This may sound ungrateful, but many CP veterans would tell you much the same.

And far from fading into nothing, CP and its work have so fundamentally changed the educational and cultural landscape that we hope, and believe, there is no going back to pure reliance on test scores and rote learning. As artists and cultural producers who are also passionate about education, it’s our job to find meaningful ways to build upon the CP legacy in a changing and challenging world. We are well up for it, whatever comes next.

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The Space in the Middle

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Aug 122010

As respite from the Re:bourne ‘machine’, I have been doing some research into Landscape and Environment Art; think Christo, Dennis Oppenheim and Andy Goldsmith. I stumbled across this;

(Environmental Art)…is a “spatialisation of cultural politics”, a radical rethinking of the intersection between social relations, space and the community. This rethinking can lead to a kind of IN-BETWEEN or THIRD SPACE, a lived space of radical openness and unlimited scope, where all histories and geographies, all times and places, are immanently presented and represented. Edward Soja

My thoughts exactly!

I hope on some level Re:bourne is able to achieve some of these things. At its best it will be a ‘creative disruption’ or ‘interruption’ that enables the community to inhabit a transgressive space between bricks and mortar and day to day life; it will a critique of what is already there , an invitation to change literally and emotionally. At worst, it will simply enrich shoppers experience as they collect their frozen peas from Iceland.

All hands to the cleaning sponges

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Aug 112010

No, Sam isn’t rehearsing for an upcoming Nimble Fish melodrama; it’s merely her exaggerated exhaustion from bleach-cleaning walls in one of our re:bourne event spaces (the shadows are because there’s no power inside the space so we have to jury-rig power and lighting from elsewhere).

If many of these blog entries seem unduly concerned with the nuts and bolts of process and prep–as opposed to declaiming about the artistic product–it’s probably because re:bourne lives or dies on seemingly small things like whether or not a shop that hasn’t had an occupant in at least 5 years can be made decent enough for art to occur there. The time and energy this can take, and the importance of spending both, is only learned through experience.

When it comes to working like this–that is, the renovation/ preparation of non-traditional art and performance spaces in high- traffic areas (not abandoned warehouses and suchlike)–we must surely be industry leaders by now, if such an industry exists. And disinfecting shops is all into the bargain.

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Rain, rain, go away…

Creative Process, Fish Projects No Responses »

Aug 102010

…at least ’til the end of Saturday (because you see, oh great rain- making mysteries, we re:bourne folks would be rather unhappy were you to come on, say, Friday and decide to stick around. Nothing personal: its not you, its us. Hope you understand, glad to talk it through, we’re still friends, right? Right?)

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Word Walk

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Aug 092010

Writers Gary Studley and Vicky Wilson will offer Word Walk for re:bourne. Here are Vicky’s impressions about the process thus far:

“Our involvement in re:bourne has enabled us to develop our interest in community engagement and in finding ways of encouraging people to delight in words. We have just begun to work with found poetry as a medium, and the idea of creating a found poem for Sittingbourne enables us to use this technique on a more ambitious level. We didn’t know Sittingbourne before this project but are excited about finding out what local residents think of their town to add to our own impressions.”

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A future as rich as the past

Creative Process, Fish Projects No Responses »

Aug 072010

The re:bourne team rounded out a very busy week of pre-event prep with a lively whirl through Sittingbourne history courtesy of Peter Morgan, who surely should be classed as a regional, if not national, treasure for his encyclopaedic knowledge of Sittingbourne and Swale. The former Sittingbourne Mayor and Kent Councillor treated us to an eloquent recitation of the area’s remarkable history at the Heritage Museum, itself a fascinating repository of artifacts and history, some of which date back to the area’s Bronze Age residents. Among the many wonders of the Museum is a recreation of a WWII-era home (that’s Peter on the right).

What was perhaps most inspiring about hearing Peter and visiting the Museum was to know that the building housing the Museum itself was, not so long ago, derelict to the point of near-demolition. Crumbling and mould-wracked, its floors strewn with spent syringes and needles, the former shop (dating back to at least the 18th century) was a hollow shell of itself. Through the efforts of Peter and others, though, it was revived and now plays host to school groups, community events and–when you’re as lucky as we were–the occasional private tour.

Hearing from Peter about the area’s rich past was a great way to look forward into the coming week and give us more motivation to make re:bourne worthy of the history that has come before. We hope you’ll come along and see what the future holds…

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The River

Creative Process, Fish Projects No Responses »

Aug 042010

Across both re:bourne event days, Swale-based visual artist Dean Tweedy will create a temporary public artwork–with the help of re:bourne audiences–that will pay homage to Sittingbourne’s maritime history. His reflections on the project thus far:

“My life as an artist can sometimes be a solitary affair, spending many hours painting away with only my thoughts and Radio 2 for company. Re:bourne gives me an opportunity to not only work with some of the many great local artists that I have met since moving to this area, but also to meet the public when we take art into our neighbourhood and celebrate the good in this town.
“Sittingbourne is rich in history but recently, partly due to the recession, it seems that it is slowly eroding away as shops close down and people go to out-of-town supermarkets or shop online. Many of the locals feel Sittingbourne is starting to be overlooked and forgotten. This will only happen if we let it, and I hope that by making use of empty spaces for events like re:bourne we can raise awareness of the town’s heritage and also the developmental possibilities of this area.”

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A Garden of England

Creative Process, Fish Projects No Responses »

Aug 042010

Teynham-based artist Sioux Peto of Polka Dot Arts, whose work ‘A Garden of England’ features in re:bourne on 13-14 August, offers this perspective on her re:bourne experience thus far:

“Working within a festival concept has opened up more opportunities for local artists than we would normally be given and has also allowed us to work amongst other artists in the comfort of our hometown. We are using this experience to evaluate what the general public thinks of our work, and about the arts in general, something we would not have otherwise been able to achieve.”

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Time-Travelling Sparky

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Aug 022010

Sparky, a lively and very animated character who has been making friends throughout Kent this year, is looking forward to making a special visit to Sittingbourne during re:bourne on 13-14 August. Here, one of Sparky’s friends, artist Ciaran McKay, talks about his re:bourne experience to date:

“Since being part of this project, I have visited Sittingbourne a few times and have noticed a number of shops either boarded up or closing down. However, I noticed that two of the shops that were still doing good business were local butchers and bakers, two trades that i would imagine have been part of the town as it has grown over the centuries. On one of my visits I overheard two people commenting on the downfall of the high street, highlighted by disappointment in their voices. I thought to myself that I hope they are around during re:bourne to witness something special on the high street…maybe a new beginning for the renovation of this historic town.”