27 July 2007

Arts in Health and Well-being Strategy

Arts in Health and Well-being Strategy

The Arts Council of Wales has published for public consultation a draft strategy on Arts in Health and Well-being

The strategy has been developed in partnership with a steering group of representatives from health, education, local government, the arts and Welsh Assembly Government, and chaired by Professor Stephen Tomlinson CBE (Provost, Cardiff University). Comments are invited on the direction and content of the strategy, which has been recognised as a significant step forward in valuing the impact of the arts within the health sector and the excellent work already being delivered across Wales. The deadline for comments is 20 September 2007. The document is available from www.artswales.org/viewnews.asp?id=621.

deadline: 20 September

26 July 2007

Jude Kelly, telling it as it might be... 2012 Olympics

“I’m the Joan of Arc of the Southbank”

Here’s a taster from the Guardian online click here for the original.

“As artistic head of the resurgent Southbank Centre, Jude Kelly has confounded her critics - and there were many. She tells Lyn Gardner how they had her all wrong.‘Do I think that having the Olympics here in 2012 is damaging the arts? No, I don’t,” says Jude Kelly, so firmly that I feel like a heretic summoned before the thought police for having allowed such a dangerous notion to enter my head. The former artistic director of West Yorkshire Playhouse, Kelly is one of the most powerful people in the arts. Not only is she chair of culture, ceremonies and education at the London organising committee for the Olympic games, she is also the artistic director of the recently reopened Southbank Centre, the 21-acre site which encompasses the Royal Festival Hall, Queen Elizabeth Hall, Purcell Room and Hayward Gallery. She is a woman who has always had a finger in many pies and whose mantra of access and diversity has chimed well with New Labour’s agenda over the past decade as it has increasingly seized upon the arts as a vehicle for delivering social policy. (At one point it looked as if Kelly might be the first woman to run the National Theatre. Instead, she has had to settle for the Southbank, potentially the more far-reaching empire.) …

…”Do I think that doing the Olympics is easy? No - it’s messy, chaotic and difficult. I don’t underestimate how people whose grants have been affected must feel. But am I personally responsible? No. Should we not have bid for the Olympics? No. Is it a paradox one has to live with? Yes,” says Kelly…

20 July 2007

"Space&Place" and "LAND2" get it on

Look what took place in June! Summer studio about art, geography and re-placement... right up my alley.

Space&Place is hosting a summer studio with LAND2, a U.K. visual arts network, to begin a dialogue about creative/research practice and to explore the possibilities of an international partnership.

Space&Place (click here for bibliographies etc) is an interdisciplinary, intellectual and creative collaborative begun in 1999 by Drs. Sonja Kuftinec (Theatre Arts and Dance), Jani Scandura (English) and Karen Till (Geography), and, since 2004, co-directed with Dr. Margaret Werry (Theatre Arts and Dance). We have become a vital interdisciplinary and experimental forum that bridges the methods, concerns, theories and practices of the Humanities, Performing Arts and Social Sciences, bringing faculty and postgraduates in conversation across the University.

LAND2 (wow, very cool group!) is a creative practice-led national research network of faculty, artists, and research students started in 2002 by Dr. Iain Biggs (Reader in Visual Art Practice, Bristol School of Art Media and Design, University of West England (UWE)) and Dr. Judith Tucker (Lecturer in the School of Design, University of Leeds); currently, artist Dr. Ruth Jones is an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Fellow (Appendices II and III). Members share a common interest in how art can engage with the possibilities and problems associated with landscape, place, and space, as they are understood today.

"The main focus of the studio will be presentations of works in progress that will refer to participants’ self-understanding of their location, positionality and social situation, and of how their various geographies may have framed their theoretical understandings and practice-based deployments of place, matter and memory..."

"To begin the summer studio, we reframe questions both groups have explored in recent years: Why, how and when does memory matter? What is the matter of memory? How do people negotiate the temporal and spatial landscapes of becoming and being subjects in and through memory and forgetting? How do we think about, represent and respond to a modernity seeped in the oldness of its newness? Although intellectuals and artists have interrogated these questions in recent years, few institutional spaces foster translocal intellectual and creative projects that interrogate the very terms that divide them: place, space and memory. The main focus of the studio will be presentations of works in progress that will also refer to participants’ self-understanding of their location, positionality and social situation, and of how their various geographies may have framed their theoretical understandings and practice-based deployments of place, matter and memory. By initiating, articulating and discussing the similarities and differences related to participants’ current practice, work and locations, the studio will also seek to create “re-placements” as a basis for further work in an international context."

Love it.

R

18 July 2007

Diversity in Canada

Culturescope.ca continues to do a great job of providing accessible and weighty research.

Here you can find Diversity in Canada, an independent research study. It quite comprehensively explores consumer behaviours, social attitudes and demographics of Canadians in six target groups: Chinese, South Asian, West Asian/Arab, Black, Hispanic, Italian in Vancouver, Montreal and Toronto. It was created by Solutions Research Group for the Department of Canadian Heritage.

Click here to check out their work.

12 July 2007

Call for artists to participate in mediatised sites

CALL FOR ARTISTS TO PARTICIPATE IN MEDIATISED SITES

Artists with an interest in exploring relationships
between mediatised performance and site-responsive
work are invited to participate in a research and
development project that investigates notions of
place, performance and mediatisation

The project will involve participating in a curated
making process from November 2007 to April 2008. The
curation and performance process will take place
through new media, such as free online social
technologies, wikis, blogs, streaming video etc.

The project will culminate in online and live
performances on April 18th 2008. Performance
participation can be live or through online
technologies. Geographical presence at or proximity
to the live performance is not a requisite of
participation.

Each selected project/participant will receive £100.

To apply to participate send:

• A short biography

• A rationale for your participation, including what
you think you might bring to the project and what you
hope to gain from taking part

• Contact information

Send the above, or any questions that you might have,
to Kate and Tamara mediatisedsites@yahoo.co.uk

Final year undergraduate students, post-graduate
students, emerging and established artists are all
encouraged to apply.

Deadline for submission: Friday 28th September 2007

Kate Craddock is currently a graduate teaching
assistant at Northumbria University, where she is
engaged in PhD research on notions of cross-cultural
interdisciplinary collaboration. With Lynnette Moran,
she is co-artistic director of mouth to mouth: a
globally dispersed performance collective.

Tamara Ashley is currently undertaking PhD research
into improvisational practices in mediatised
performance sites at Texas Woman’s University. She
also co-directs Brief Magnetics, with Simone Kenyon
and is a senior lecturer in choreography at
Northumbria University.

The project is supported by Northumbria University.

05 July 2007

Risk and relief

Talking about risk...

"There are times that break apart and the indefinite comes to light: the grey time of the inbetween. lt is a time without definition, rare and precious, when all seems to be possible, and that after all passes most swiftly. There are moments in which one feels inevitably to be on an inclined plane, and as there is no short-term release in sight, there is no escape. Only one thing is helpful here: to look precisely, to listen, to become all pervious and sensitive. In these in-between-times dreams can change into spaces which it is worthwhile to occupy and then to defend."

Talking about artist residencies, check out this article - Artists' Residency: A Model
There are opportunities to escape, look precisely and dream: www.resartis.org

R

Community art or finding the way home?

The Canada Council's website has some great 2-pagers (or in this unusual case, five) about their workshops in 2003-04 about critical practice in art. My favourite to date (still working through all of them) is 'Community art or finding the way home?' - looking at the ethical issues fundamental to community art practices.

Find the whole paper here.

A quote to whet your whistle:

It is all about relationships and responsibilities.
What kind of relationships are you coming from,

and what kind are you
developing in the work you are doing?
What are your responsibilities?

This assumes that we are never operating as
individuals, but rather within a community or

multiple communities. We carry
responsibilities in all our relationships,
human and other.

How does our work as artists play into all of this?
- Kim Anderson


Necessary kudos and details:

Saturday, March 13, 2004, La Caserne, Montreal, Quebec
A day of discussion organized by Engrenage Noir on the ethical issues fundamental to community art
practices.
Joanne Gormely (yoga instructor)
Kim Anderson and Pam Hall (speakers)
Louise Lachapelle and Devora Neumark (facilitators)