Picture Show At The End of The World 06/11/20
Screening and filmmaker conversation as part of this first Dark Mountain film event.
Dark Mountain - a journal, a manifesto, a gathering place and labour of love - curated their first film event and How The Earth Must See Itself (A Thirling) was one of seven films selected. Conceived as a collection of ‘uncivilised films’ originally planned for a cinema event in April 2020, the salon was reconfigured via Vimeo and Zoom with a group screening and then a gathering of filmmakers and audience in an online conversation.
From the Dark Mountain website: Welcome in the beginning of winter with a Dark Mountain-slanted light show. Hosted by filmmaker Jonny Randall a selection of short films will be screened over the course of an hour, featuring: visual poetry; a cinematic meditation on the Cairngorms; surreal eco-horror animation; a collaborative ritual between artist and tree; voices on what it means to re-indigenise and a multispecies ethnographic collaboration between humans and donkeys.
The films will be followed by a post-screening conversation with some of the filmmakers, as well as a chance for you to ask questions and offer reflections around our cinematic hearth.
To celebrate the films, we invite you to join us for this online screening event on Friday 6th November, from 19:00 to 21:00 GMT. While it’s a shame that we can’t gather physically in a cinema, we’re excited to welcome filmmakers and viewers from around the world.
Salves for Future Selves…
In the week that would have followed Edinburgh Fringe 2020 we were going to be hosting a free International Artist’s Lab – Thinking Through Practice, at Dance Base. The Covid-complicated world meant that this wasn’t possible. So, instead we came together for the first time – since lockdown - to explore what it was to gently be alongside each other again…”
So nurtured and enlivened by the invitation from Luke Pell to be part of this week-long, ‘thinking through practice’.
The week took place at Dance Base, Edinburgh and was the first time since March any of us had been back in a public work space. A collection of ‘salves' for other artists and folk using the Dance Base building over the next months were produced between 31st August and 5th September by Luke Pell, Biff & Cooper, Lucy Suggate, Farah Saleh, Claricia Parinussa, Ruairí Ó’Donnabháin and Valerie Reid. The ‘salves’ are now available for others to use / be with. Together with Luke I made, a preparation - for a physically distanced love seat and created the visual poem, ‘distance of far a not week far ‘
From Luke’s website: “Salves for Future Selves have been imagined to be with - either on your own or alongside a companion – in the Dance Base garden. Pick up a free sheet from reception or the upper landing and scan the QR code to listen to the welcome note - which gives you information about the work, objects in the garden – and access to all of the Salves. Or, you can pick up an MP3 player from reception and return it afterwards.
In the week that would have followed Edinburgh Fringe 2020 we were going to be hosting a free International Artist’s Lab – Thinking Through Practice, at Dance Base. The Covid-complicated world meant that this wasn’t possible. So, instead we came together for the first time – since lockdown - to explore what it was to gently be alongside each other again. Working in the garden here – and from respective studios in Scotland, Ireland and England – we were in conversation, through practice, across time and space. Drawing on choreographic and dramaturgical thinking to tend to a return to care-full touch. Arriving at a small collection of choreographic propositions for other artists and folx – intended as salves for future selves – to soothe, stay, speak and move with what happens in the wakes of the past months.
We hope that this collection of choreographic propositions – scores, salves to play with, poems and considered conversations – can be companions to artists and folk working in the building over the next months. Offering some time together – even when we need to be apart – with words and movement, from some of the other artists in our community, in the haven of this outdoor space."
Edwin Morgan Second Life commission
Yellow Touching Blue with Luke Pell
A commission with Luke Pell to create a new work in response to the legacy of the first Scottish poet Laureate - Edwin Morgan (1920-2010) - in his centenary year. https://edwinmorgantrust.com/2020/08/27/the-second-life-grants-stage-2-announcement/
The new work we’re making is: Yellow Touching Blue.
In Morgan’s body of work we find resonance in his way of moving across forms and as artists who approach the world choreographically we crave for the ways in which poetry and dance are ‘languages’ that push at the limits of their forms. We’re curious about a radical poetics to be found by working with and between poetry and dance.
A poetics that refuses any singular position embracing playfulness to cultivate greater spaces of compassion for complex conversation, for thinking deeply-and-lightly, for caring harder, through - what we describe as – a practice of quiet queerings.
Yellow – a contrary colour, of: piss & cowardice, nicotine hair; sunlight, gorse & hope.
Brightest colour in the spectrum - for which the eye has no receptors.
We celebrate the space his words make for refuge and resistance; poetry as a place to think – well. To rest, play and dwell. To make space for comfort with complexity whilst saying to a reader, “this work wants to be read, be held and heard, intimately, by you.”
A Part From (A Bande Apart)
Returning to some material from a long while back that feels like it needs re-exploring. How do stillness and movement work in relation to one another? How do we imagine the movement that we don’t see?
Yellow is the brightest colour…
…of sand, mustard, sunlight;
doubtless dandelions, canaries; too
dizzy yellow of pollen-drunk bees, a cloud of
Clouded Yellows…
In June 2020 my poem responding to Scottish Poet Laureate - Edwin Morgan’s - scrapbooks, was published in Speculative Book’s The Centenary Collection (for Edwin Morgan) available here: https://www.speculativebooks.net/shop/em100
Becoming Earthly…
….Revealing the complex, interrelated web of movement, minerals and processes present in both soil and humans, how might we queerly reimagine radical possibilities for a more enlivened, just world?
Selected in collaboration with Luke Pell to take part in The Barn’s ecology and arts series - Becoming Earthly - https://www.thebarnarts.co.uk/article/open-call-for-applications-for-arts-and-ecology-seminar-series
Together with a range of artists from the UK & beyond we explored a series of propositions from making peace with gravity, to the pleasure in doubt, observation as improvisation and an exploration of shame and play. In response to the proposals we generated writing, image-making and conversation!
lying down - a poem in response to gravity:
i.
mulberry leaves fall &
lie down with sycamore
keys, holly berries
& a bright Common Blue
from the beak of a thrush,
tiny twigs fall &
lie down with renegade dead
ants & a damson stone.
up above high
the shadow of a cloud
lies down, darkening
the face of the soil
already lying down
the soil makes no complaint
falling falling
rain lies down &
so does sunlight -
mixing fire & water
already lying down
the soil welcomes them
ii.
inside the house
door stands upright
table
radio
vase of pansies
mantlepiece clock
all stand upright
broom stands upright –
but only just
ready to turn
quarter of a circle
if gravity requests
soft brown shoes lie
down, the heel of one balanced
on the toe of the other
knife & butter lie down
teaspoon
dishcloth
toothbrush
all lie down
crimson wool rug lies down &
the rug, like the soil
makes no complaint
yellow counterpane lies down
stray silver hairs
a cat’s whisker
dust
a thirsty bluebottle
all lie down
falling falling
time lies down &
so does memory -
mixing life together
hip falling down
shoulder falling down
muscles of a hand -
all of a right side
falling falling
down
falling falling
time lies down &
so does memory -
mixing life together
turning turning
ready to turn
quarter of a circle
my mother stands upright
Invitation to Begin (Again)…
“Everything we do is done by invitation. That invitation comes either from oneself or another person.” — John Cage
Originally created as a conversational score with Fiona Wright for Crossing Borders in 2018, Independent Dance have now added this to their collection of works to download during this stay-at-home time we find ourselves in.
Crossing Borders is a recurring series of curated dialogues between artists working with or in connection to choreography, at Siobhan Davies Studios, London.
Invitation to Begin (Again) explores art-making as forms of resistance and resilience; constraint as a creative catalyst.
How to begin? Or begin again? How to work with just the right amount of freedom from what has come before and what may well come after? How to take time and timing as material to work with, how to practice without expectation, to find clarity within uncertainty? Invitation to Begin (Again), roams across these ideas via the form of an improvised conversation in response to a score of words.
“Everything we do is done by invitation. That invitation comes either from oneself or another person.”
— John Cage
Film essay: Where The Inside & The Outside Meet - That’s Where The Film Lies
….This assemblage of notes, written in response to screen dance festival’s invitation and during a time of balancing on the incline of a particularly challenging economic, social and emotional hill is deliberately small in scope, it’s unacademic and is offered up in the spirit of a low-strain angle. It considers, How The Earth Must See Itself -a film which amongst other things attempts to be with things rather than capture them; to value observation and sustained attention to whatever environment we’re in; to see human beings as an intrinsic element of an eco-system, but only as one element amongst many. A film whose choreography is determined by light and time as much as the intended movements of performers, words and sounds. A film recorded on S16mm negative but which currently exists only in a digital form….
Invited by Screen.Dance to write an essay about How The Earth Must See Itself. The essay is now online here: https://vimeo.com/432793864
How The Earth Must See Itself - nominated for Scottish Short Film Award
How The Earth Must See Itself (A Thirling) has been nominated for Scottish Short Film Award at the 2020 edition of Glasgow Short Film Festival!