This blog is an online sketchbook – a series of Waymarking musings, ideas, proposals and research in the form of diagrams, drawings, photos, found images and text. It aims to engage those interested in the context and development of the cityscape / the urban environment, such as artists, architects, community activists, performers, urban designers & planners - in UK based international arts organisation Waymarking’s development and activities.

Activism and social change workshop #1

On the 3^rd of May I attended a workshop on Activism and Social Change, set up by Together4Peace (www.t4p.org.uk) and led by Chris Erskine.

The workshop brought around 30 people together to hear Chris outline his research on activism and social change, with an emphasis on how individuals become activists and how they might think about what they do in order to sustain their activism.

This workshop was an invaluable thinking space for me, as well as an opportunity to meet people from around Leeds and across the rest of the country, because in the last year I’ve become more interested in the blurring of boundaries between activism and artistic practice.

Chris’ drew a diagram like this (hopefully I copied this down correctly) to outline his thinking about the characteristics of social activists.

A framework for experimentation

I told the audience at ‘Live Art Meets Choreography’, that I’m interested in the idea that we should all seek to challenge ourselves, to take a risk every now and then – that’s both as audience and as artists. I asked the 5 artists to embrace the definition of choreography I’d set out (in March Blog 1) – to use it as a creative framework within which to experiment.

The 5 performances variously:

• Had a sense of immediacy, of live-ness, of being in the moment
• Were committed to the visceral
• Fully inhabited the space
• Responded directly to, and with the audience
• Worked into the repetitive
• Made ‘action’ paramount

Image: Victoria Firth

Live art; a series of processes and practices

As curator of ‘Live Art Meets Choreography’ (see Enabling dialogues between disciplines – March 12), I defined choreography thus:

‘Choreography is when moving things (could be people) are arranged in space and time – with the dynamic qualities and the pacing of the movement considered throughout the whole’.

In my introduction to the evening, I described live art as less of a thing in itself, than a series of processes and practices. More of a how than a what. Attempts to pin down both the term live art are numerous (as are attempts to define choreography).

The definition I do use when asked, is:

‘Whether challenging orthodoxies of fine art practice, exploring the limits of theatricality, appropriating the idioms of mass culture, pushing at the boundaries of choreographic conventions, or exploring the performativity of cyberspaces, Live Art practices copy all kinds of mediums in a volatile state’.

From Fluid Landscapes in Live Culture at Tate Modern Catalogue, Live Art Development Agency 2003.

I like its fluidity, how it glides over the edges of various discipline boundaries and merely fixes itself as unfixed. It describes what live art does in different contexts, rather than what live art is.

Image 1: Duncan Marwick

Image 2: Adam Young

Title: Enabling dialogue between disciplines

I recently curated an evening of live art at Yorkshire Dance (www.yorkshiredance.com) in their Friday Firsts programme (3.3.12), entitled ‘Live Art Meets Choreography’. This was an opportunity for me to enable dialogue between two performance disciplines dance and live art; two contexts I show my work in. The event successfully brought in an audience with live art and dance interests.

I was excited to see what happened when you ask 5 performance practitioners; Gillian Dyson, Victoria Firth, Sohail Khan, Duncan Marwick and Adam Young – to shine a light on a very subjective definition of choreography (from a discipline which they don’t come from). Each of them presented a newly developed work for the first time, perhaps it will have been the only time.

Image 1: Gillian Dyson

Image 2: Sohail Khan

Precarious-ness #2

Whilst continuing to think about precarity, I’ve been wondering about making a link to some of the qualities that some creative people show; being prepared to take risks, enjoying a challenge, being versatile and flexible in times of change. It might be that people with these personal qualities might handle states of precarity well, that the state of precarious-ness doesn’t only have negative value (see Precarious-ness #2).

In some ways I see the state of precarity as on one end of a continuum, with stability (fixed-ness or concrete-ness) at the other end. In my practice I’ve tended to make work that inhabits the place in between fixed binary opposites, being interested in the territory that shifts and vibrates between the two. (See www.axisweb.org/artist/sarahspanton). I wonder whether a state of precarity sometimes has positive values and sometimes negative depending on the context. Could thinking about and re-understanding this term on an individual and simultaneously a societal level be part of a new way of addressing how we need to live our lives?

Precarious-ness #1

I’ve recently attended a discussion group ran by the ‘Really Open University’, held at Space Project (spaceproject.org.uk) on Mabgate Green Leeds (16.2.12). The discussion was around ‘Debt, austerity and precarity’, exploring what these terms mean.

I was very interested in the term precarity, being used here in terms of labour precarity, which describes how much work is now temporary, part-time, short term – where people can loose a job over a weekend, where workers rights are very limited – causing extreme insecurity.

I’ve started to think about the meaning of precarity/precariousness. One definition of the word precarious in Longmans Dictionary of the English Language (1984) is ‘characterised by a lack of security or stability’. I’m interested in the obvious sense of negativity that precarious-ness has in this context of work, yet how it has positive values from a creative perspective.

New map

I made this map for the Compass Symposium Delegate Pack (see December entries). I aimed for a map that links 2 specific points in the city of Leeds, so that the reader can walk between them. It can be read from either end of the page by turning it upside down. I like the physicality of this.