Uncategorized » Nimble Fish

Why Sittingbourne?

Aug 162010

Well, it’s done now. Twelve short weeks of planning, devising and creating and the weekend event called re:bourne is now history. Or not…plenty of the installations and performances elicited creative, tangible feedback from audiences that is being collated and kept and may appear again in not too long, whether through exhibitions or otherwise (watch this space…) And keep an eye on the re:bourne website plus our site and that of our partners, Workers of Art, for plenty of photos and videos of the event.

Days before re:bourne happened someone asked the question, ‘Why Sittingbourne?’ As in, ‘Why put all of this energy and creativity into an event here, rather than somewhere else?’ A simple question on its surface, but there’s a subtext, isn’t there? The question is really, ‘Why put all of this energy and creativity into a community with no experience of this kind of arts experience…and which is unlikely to understand it, let alone appreciate it?’

The answer to both questions is the same: Why not Sittingbourne? Why always London or Brighton or Canterbury? What intrinsic cultural advantages do audiences in those communities have over people in and around Sittingbourne, other than more regular exposure to interesting, engaging creative work? In which case, a vicious circle ensues: if one assumes that folks in the sticks won’t ever ‘get’ ambitious arts-led events, no one will bother to offer them. If they’re never offered…

But if nothing else, we think re:bourne has proven our case, not that of the cynics. We were told again and again that re:bourne should be taken as an experiment and that we shouldn’t be disheartened if our largely local audience didn’t get it, or were even hostile to what was on offer. Kind words meant here, but for us, missing the point. As demonstrated by the following sentiment, scrawled by a re:bourne audience member as part of an interactive installation, our re:bourne audiences did ‘get it’. They engaged fully in re:bourne, whether through something wonderfully simple like underwater UV body-painting (wait for the photos!) or through more abstract film and audio installations. Did everyone get it? Probably not. But not everyone gets what they experience at the Edinburgh Fringe or other high-profile, like-themed happenings (it’s just that fewer are ready to admit it).

Thanks to everyone who helped us make re:bourne happen. There’s a huge list of people involved so we won’t bang on here, but suffice to say that along with artists, officials, funders, and production crew, the people of Sittingbourne deserve our thanks as much as anyone. They gave shape to re:bourne. It’s their triumph as much as ours.

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Drat!

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Jul 232010

Bonus shopfront space not available after all. Time to go with Plan D (Plans B and C having long since been rendered obsolete). Still, we’ve a healthy roster of unused and unusual spaces to work with so can’t complain. Well, maybe a little…

Sent from my iPhone

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Taking the ’slack’ out of slack spaces

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Jul 202010

The re:bourne event will happen on Sittingbourne High Street, but it’s where on the high street that makes it interesting. Yes, there will be activities on the pavement and even in the streets; there will be nooks and crannies to explore, interesting things happening under carriageways, in churchyards. This is one of our goals with re:bourne–to find innovative and intriguing ways to bring alive places that, on a day to day basis, never get a second look.

But perhaps the most exciting type of space we’re working with is even further off the proverbial beaten path. Due to the hard work of some friends at Swale Borough Council and the generosity of some private landlords, several re:bourne events will take place inside unused commercial spaces. You’ll have to come along to find out which ones (and what will be happening), but we can guarantee that no one who enters these spaces will ever seem them again in quite the same way, regardless of their future as commercial units.

Loosely, this aspect of re:bourne connects with something called the slack space movement. Calling it a movement, though, is perhaps a bit grand. Rather, it is a fairly recent recognition by artists and civic and commercial leaders that something more interesting than boarding and hoarding can be done with commercial properties that remain unoccupied over long periods of time, an unfortunately frequent phenomenon in these recessionary times. A Guardian article late last year estimated that as many as 70,000 commercial units were to have become vacant last year. That’s an awful lot of empty space. And when that space is smack in the middle of a high street, it tends to cast a pall over those businesses that are making a go of it.

Some slack space activities, like the Brixton Market, have become viable commercial activities in their own right. But more often, the creative or artistic use of these unused spaces is a temporary affair of mutual convenience: landlords like the positive attention, artists like the opportunity to have an interesting (and of course very public) space to work in. Is it an affair to remember? Come along to re:bourne next month and decide for yourself.

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Hay Hay, my my

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May 272010

The venerable Hay Literary Festival kicked off today, drawing the great and good of the planet’s literati to the sylvan banks of the River Wye. Along with de rigueur writerly star power, the setting is gorgeous and the prices, despite our credit-crunchy times, remain reasonable. If you’re a literary groupie, what’s not to like?

Despite these temptations, I’ve not been the least bit moved to sling a sack of signable books into the Vauxhall and drive several pleasant hours from London to join the well-heeled throng. Why? In a word, I think Hay is boring. And worse: Hay may be the ne plus ultra of high-class literary love-ins, but it also encapsulates much that is wrong with the world of writing and publishing at the moment.

Whenever I consider Hay and all that it contains (I’ve attended twice in recent years), my mind inevitably free-associates its way to my music collection. The ever mysterious ‘they’ say that most of us will, at some point, find that our musical tastes have lodged firmly in whatever era most closely attends our youth or young adulthood. I am no exception to this rule: a shuffle through my iTunes library would reveal a disproportionate number of offerings from the late ‘80s and early ‘90s.

And yet, in that collection, along with the entire output of The Sundays and Matthew Sweet, can be found Andrew Bird, CSS, Ozomatli and any number of other artists most definitely not of ‘my’ era, or even necessarily widely known. Now, I’m no John Peel: when it comes to music I don’t have a particular nose for the edgy, the now. But it takes relatively little effort for me, in my mainstream-ish mode, to find current, often unusual stuff, some of which I actually like.

You’re not likely to find the literary equivalent of CSS presenting to the chardonnay-sipping crowds at Hay (now that would sell me a ticket: I’d pay to see Lovefoxx read the phone book, let alone sing.) Competent, prolific, even elegant writers…absolutely. The raw, the edgy, the downright odd? Not likely.

The problem with events like Hay is that they define, for many, the ultimate idea of a literary experience while doing very little to expose their audiences to writers or work that aren’t already attached to big-league agents and/or publishers. True, there are a few sessions with worthy/patronising labels like ‘work by local writers’ and ‘work by older writers’. But these are generally off the Hay radar, meaning nowhere near prime time. By and large, Hay is like a warm bath on a rainy night. It may soothe your sensibilities, but it won’t challenge them.

Perhaps the most insidious effect of Hay is that, for a couple of weeks each spring, a bygone bubble world pops to life on the banks of the Wye, in which adoring, literature-loving crowds a-slosh with money revel in a micro-society free of recycled histories and celebrity biogs. But in our heart of hearts, we know that world is long dead. When Hay decides to take its audiences out of their bubble and towards the future, who knows what else might follow?

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The Creativity Quotient?

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May 092010

http://tinyurl.com/376v9vp

Top suggestion of the research described: “…creativity prefers to take a slower, more meandering path than intelligence.” But we knew that, didn’t we?

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