Navigating Sentient Performativities Symposium Dartington Hall June 2022 (Part Two).
In Part One I wrote mainly covered Sunday and Monday of the Symposium with an extension into the rest of the period to account for the Amerta thread of work running through from the Animate-in-Animate Collective.
Tuesday morning was focused on getting through my Disrupted Meadow presentation in Studio 6. I was presenting to both live and online participants. I had worked out the timing for both allowing for a period of questions at the end which I always feel unnecessary after an intense experience.
The live presentation was formed with a 10-minute film with which I interacted vocally and physically. This transitioned through a short walk to a meadow where I created a prepared improvisation from the contents of my haversack: two dresses, five stones, a list of male ancestors, their jobs and the naming of their places, a list of my performances since 1989, my mum’s book – A Suffolk Punch, a photograph of me aged 14 and our dog Sid and my diary from 1971.
The online presentation included my performance filmed by the organisers and streamed alongside the 10-minute film and then a specially prepared film demonstrating what I thought might happen on the walk to the meadow and in the meadow itself.
I was happy with how it was received and encouraged to continue with the journey of this work. You can read more about its inception here
Relieved I had done it, the rest of Tuesday was delightful for me. I attended Sam Hodge’s Coal Tides intriguing works made from colour derived from place and actual natural materials – in this case, coal washed up in the Thames Estuary. I learned about mudlarking.
In the afternoon I found myself in familiar territory harking back to the mid-nineties when Triangle was involved in the research of the role of artists in Initial Teacher Training at the University of Warwick’s Institute of Education. Paula Murphy’s presentation on Eco-Somatics and teacher education demonstrated the importance of awareness and somatic knowledge in teacher training and I considered how far we have travelled in arts education in over twenty years…not that far really, especially in terms of curriculum time and focus but at least the work acknowledged the importance of body awareness… only pertinent to dance classes all those years ago. Movement (indeed, somatics) was a relatively new area in 1995.
After lunch, on Tuesday I was back in the company of the Amerta tribe with Hugh Kelly’s fascinating presentation: Growing Community, a presentation and group sharing on programmes that promote community development. This was sharply followed by Wolf Flow by Helen Billinghurst and Dr Laura Denning – a reframing of Red Riding Hood and a whole lot more.
Then it chucked it down with rain. I’ll tell you about what happened next in Part Three.