Young Arnolfini Zine - Sequential by Arnolfini

YOUNG ARNOLFI N I

YO UNG AR NO L F I NI

introduction

contents

Young Arnolfini is a collective of local art enthusiasts aged from 16-25; working, learning, and living in Bristol. We work in close collaboration with Arnolfini, one of Europe’s leading centres for the contemporary arts; exploring visual arts, performance, dance, film, music, and educational activities. We aim to provide a cultural forum through our zine, workshops, blogging, and events to bridge the gap between young people and Bristol’s bustling art scene. We want to make contemporary art, and the spaces that exhibit it, more accessible. This time we’re exploring the word Sequential, the definition being ‘to form or follow in a logical order or sequence’. It might seem that logic doesn’t belong in a zine exploring the arts, but sequences, logical or otherwise, are just as much a part of art as it is our daily lives; whether it is the ritual of eating your lunch in a certain order or the way we view a body of work. There’s the interpretation that the artist intended or expected and then there’s the actual experience of viewing the work for yourself - where the eye is drawn, what thread of sound catches your attention, which shots linger with you after watching a film. We have no control over the way our work is perceived, and in this we are giving the control of that sequence to the viewer - to break as they see fit. In this issue we break sequences down in order to reconstruct them, explore the concept of a sequential society, and discuss the impact that digital archives have on the way we interact with historical art works.

MEMBERS:

CONTENT:

Fiona Clabon

Response - 04 Decorating Time - 06

Becky Mead

Connections - 08

Cai Burton

Sequential Expectations - 10

Darcey Beau

Siobhan Davies - 12

Hannah K Chapman

Fall 1&2 - 20

Grace Cohen

May Park School - 22

Cai Burton

Dispersion - 24

Charlie Crosley-Thorne

“You can’t get lost in Berlin”- 26

Ross Williams Young Arnolfini

Manifesto - 28

Young Arnolfini

Anticipated Events - 29

COVER IMAGE CREDITS Cover image top left: Table of Contents, by Siobhan Davies Dance, performer Matthias Sperling. Photo Pari Naderi. Cover image bottom right: Table of Contents, by Siobhan Davies Dance, performer Rachel Krische. Photo Pari Naderi.

FIONA CLABO N

RESPONSE

BECKY MEAD

D E C O R AT I N G T I M E

Just about every single little thing is sequential. Whether it is simple or complex, logical or mysterious, there is nothing which lacks a beginning and an end. One example of this, something we deal with on an everyday basis, is life. We are born. And then some time later, we die. That is our beginning and end. However, unlike other components of the world (both living and inanimate), we have choice. We can choose what to do between our births and irrefutable endings. This part of life, as an unceasing cycle, is ours.

Of course within the unknown, people will question. In this void that we find ourselves in, with no instructions or guarantee of what’s next in life, we attempt to find meaning and failing that, we attempt to create it. But nobody knows what satisfaction they are looking for!

Life is just decorating time; enriching our environments and exhibiting existence. We all have a part in living. As will each of us play our part in death. We are all but living sequences, assigned to ‘live’ only against time.

C A I B U RTO N

CONNECTIONS

DA RC E Y B E AU

S E Q U E N T I A L E X P E C TAT I O N S

sequential expectations by darcey beau With this zine’s theme being ’sequential’ it took me a while to think of a graphical approach to the subject. After attending the Class and Education debate hosted by Young Peoples Festival of Ideas (#YPFoI) it hit me like an 1940‘s Looney Tunes anvil. I looked at the foundation of our educational system and realised EA

it is, in essence, a sequential process in which every person is farmed through D

the first twenty years of their lives. My graphical contribution represents three levels of education portrayed through stereotypical symbology. After creating this piece I have since realised how our lives follow a subconscious sequence that goes, in my mind, something like this: Nursery, Primary School, Secondary School, Sixth Form/College, University, Graduate Employment, Marriage, First House, Children, with your children following a similar process. I’m always intrigued as to why this is sold to us as the ‘correct’ order/process/ sequence of life and it’s a subject I have discussed with a variety of people of

Ab c

different ages and from different backgrounds. It surprises me as to how many of these people still see this as the ‘correct’ order of things. I mean, in modern society, Is this still the case?

Web: www.darceybeau.co.uk Twitter: @DarceyBeauu

HANNAH K CHAPMAN

Siobhan Davies - interview Interview: hannah K chapman photography: Pari Naderi

S I O B H A N DAV I E S Siobhan Davies (CBE) is a renowned British choreographer, having created over 60 works to critical acclaim: twice-winning an Olivier Award, and others including Digital Dance Awards and a South Bank Show Award.

Does the concept of ‘sequence’ appear in or motivate your work in any way? I don’t think I’ve ever thought about it in those terms. I suppose the nature of making dance in the theatre, which is what I was doing until roughly ten years ago, means that each work stands alone. However, when making Trespass and Affection I asked a composer to write a piece of music and then choose a second piece of music as the companion work. I used the same design concepts with both pieces so they needed to be seen side by side. I was intrigued by how two very different pieces could employ similar objects and yet have a very different perspective. I also have a digital archive, which gives people the chance to see work, after work, after work even though they were not made to be sequential. They are available digitally in a way that was never possible when they were made. I don’t suggest anyone watches them chronologically; although I have as part of a learning process to see how ideas or themes are excavated, altered, and edited out over a period of time. There’s a sort of personal evolution that is available for me now, but I am also able to witness development of different dance artists. Quite unusually, over the course of a day, I am able to see how Deborah Saxon moved and changed between 1990 and 2010. The making of an archive has allowed us to see work in a different way. Performers Andrea Buckley & Charlie Morrissey

Dance, performer Charlie Morrissey.

HANNAH K CHAPMAN

S I O B H A N DAV I E S

Your new work, Table of Contents, explores the idea of archives even further. How did you go about the process of choosing what to include?

Do you think that dance gives artists and choreographers the chance to learn about themselves? Does the audience have the same opportunity?

There are five other artists working on this project, all dance makers, dance performers, and choreographers who are highly thoughtful of what they want to do. To begin with looking at the archives felt like a hurdle over which none of us could jump. There’s an oddity about looking at an archive; to a certain extent you go into an archive and you find something. You find an object; a film, a notebook, or a clip of audio; something that you bring out of its original context to look at more closely. None of us really liked the idea of treating each individual find or whole work as an untouchable object because now I don’t make work as I did then and the artists I work with now don’t dance like that anymore; even though we can appreciate that what we are looking at was part of a process, it’s not where we are at the present. We tried to imagine that the works had turned into compost. They became a collective gathering of works out of which certain nutrients could be absorbed and we could grow out of and somehow learn from, then bring what we had learnt forward into a performance made for the present without dismissing the past. We were trying not to objectify the archive but turn it into material for now, with people who were going to make it live in the present for now, in front of an audience who are present now.

I’m not quite sure if I’ve managed to settle what the audience experience is yet, but the feedback we’re getting is that while dance archives are an important part of their experience it also addresses the way that you and I, our bodies, are an archive of experience. Whether you’re a dancer or not each of us has an archive of experience and knowledge that our body holds. I think people have been quite immersed with that as an idea as well as ideas around memory and how memory isn’t a fixed thing, and therefore an archive involving performance can’t be fixed.

That said, Matthias Sperling looked at scratch tapes, or rehearsal tapes, from the archive and quite consciously tried to learn the information that each artist (these included Gill Clarke, Deborah Saxon, Henry Montes, and Lauren Potter) was exploring at that moment. In that sense there is a sequence to this because it was not about him copying but about allowing material to move on. Both the artist and audience can burrow into the archive taking something both relevant to the archive and to them. The tension is in how to nurture the original choreographic concept, while recognising the impact of the performer who has grown out of their own contemporary practice. In Table of Contents (2014) two specific pieces were made in relation to my archive. One is the recording of a talk Gill Clarke gave just before she died which dance artist Rachel Krische listens to on headphones while moving. The audio tape is part of the archive but she is bringing it into the present by thinking of her movement as listening. Other audience members can share what she is listening to and respond by wearing headphones themselves, while others watch in silence.

Alongside that un-fixedness is an element of ‘what is at the heart of this’ and ‘what is there in the past that I can deal with right now’, so you are trying to hold onto something and let go all the same time. The artists are trying to hold on to something that’s meaningful to them, that they want to share with the audience, but at the same time trying not to fix it. The audience are a very important part of this work so we needed to keep imagining that idea all the way through our preparation period. We didn’t really get a true audience until we started the durational performances at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London but what’s lovely is that the response is that they feel very much part of it. Every so often we gather around a table and talk with the audience, who bring either a question or something they’ve noticed to the situation and the artists are very much amongst the audience during the performances, and can move wherever they want in the space and be close to one thing and further away from another. Some works are concurrent, they happen at the same time, while other works are the only event happening. The audience can choose when to enter or leave as well as negotiate what to look at or interact with.

In the past you have worked with a variety of mediums; stage, screen, and now gallery spaces themselves. Do you find one particularly more rewarding than the others? The short answer is that I can’t prefer one to the other. Each stage has been a process I felt ready to do and one which could keep me and the artists I work with challenged. I am enthralled by human movement more than I am by a particular technique. I have learnt through a long practice and that learning can now employ other mediums and locations. I need to be clear about what I...

HANNAH K CHAPMAN ...should be doing, where I should be doing it and who I should be doing it with. When I started to dance I knew nothing. I was choreographing within two or three years and that opportunity was on stage. I was incredibly lucky and I learnt as much as I possibly could. When I was making that early work it was labelled as abstract and in hindsight I could talk about that label. I was fascinated with movement itself and what information people moving could convey. I just find movement an extraordinary resource for understanding. I wanted to work with people who were really interested in this idea so I formed a company that would allow me to do that. I stayed within the theatre but over time realised that there were many elements of narrative within theatre that I felt I was either being branded with, or told I was pushing against and I didn’t want to take on that role. I realised that when I see movement close up I am benefitting from it in a way I cannot when I am in the auditorium, being so far away. So I grew into investigating movement, where it comes from, how it is performed, which allowed me to imagine that a gallery space would be a better space for that. Knowing that I then had to understand what a gallery space brings with it in terms of knowledge, history, and discourse; it’s different to the theatre. It was important for me to try to understand the area I was entering into even though I believed it was the right place for me to be.

Matthias Sperling in Table of Contents by Siobhan Davies Dance,

Photo by Pari Naderi, taken at Jerwood Space.

S I O B H A N DAV I E S

I was really interested to read that, in 1987, you dropped everything and moved to America. You were described as returning with a ‘renewed vitality’. Did your time overseas cause you to approach your work differently? I was given the Fulbright Award to go to America but the practical human reason is that I’d just had two children and I was exhausted. It was incredible to have over a year in which I wasn’t responsible for making anything or responsible for being particular about myself; I could be with my two children and my partner. I went to see things and studied as much as I could afford to because they were all private teachers, which allowed me to make some kind of assessment of what was important to me and what I could leave behind now. You can’t hold it all. We then travelled around America for four months with a camper van and a tent. I was able to see how long it took for landscape to change, how long it takes for things to happen, because you can go across the Rockies or the prairies and it can take days. There’s not much change and I loved the idea that there was such a large amount of space to take time in. It was completely the opposite of anything I’d experienced before. When I came back reality hit. I was living back in London and the idea of more rapid change returned to my system, but the idea of noticing detail, trying to take time over what I learnt, trying to gather information and store it in places where I could handle it at leisure, became quite important. It taught me, even if there wasn’t any more time in the day, to take time, to notice, to go into detail, to look at things over a longer period of time. Not everybody has the luck to have this time and I keep encouraging myself to not cram everything in. I’ve fought for lengthening reflection and rehearsal times when making work, for paying artists better so they have time to reassess and alter. It’s trying, in a way, to professionalise the whole of our work by making sure that if you want to do something you really try to do it well. Work that alters us needs time to research, experiment, edit, prepare and reflect. I have worked for over 40 years and I can now see how repetition can be useful and harmful. Redrawing something freshly every time teaches me something but, repeating because we are tired, cramped or trapped I find lowering.

How much has the landscape of dance changed through the length of your career? Massively. There was contemporary dance in the country when I started but it was very under-nourished by everything - finance, recognition, the lot. Robin Howard started the London Contemporary Dance Theatre and within a couple...

HANNAH K CHAPMAN

S I O B H A N DAV I E S

...of years we began performing in front of remarkably few people, who were very excited but not understanding the properties of what contemporary dance could hold. Within a very short time we were touring many weeks of the year in front of full houses and it was exhausting. I was with an organisation in which I was learning to be both a dancer and a choreographer at the same time and it was an incredible learning experience that nobody could have now. I was there when there was this burgeoning interest in one area of contemporary dance, so the trajectory we were on was really quite pointed – just one organisation thrusting forward. Then reasonably rapidly, and quite properly, more organisations started to come on the field and so attention became divided. People become more specific about the sorts of things they’d like to attend to, and the audience became divided, and although it became larger it is spread across more dance groups and dance artists.

We look at my most recent working method to see what threads would be useful for different people and I am there to talk my current method through with them. When we were teaching primary school level we were still using the same research methods that we used in our work, though obviously we would adapt it to fit ability and attention span where necessary. I’ve always been particularly interested in the way one set of excavations, if you break them down in different ways, can be useful for as many people as possible.

What interests me the most now is that it was obviously necessary for us to bring dance to different people’s attention, but also their attention would temper what we wanted to do. To begin with there was an element of shock and surprise about what dance is capable of, then that audience grew and recognised us and we became comfortable, not lazy with each other. Each new organisation challenged this recognition by introducing new elements and then they grew because they became recognised and established. We had to introduce the shock of a new art form into our culture and sustain its growth at the same time. I love that it began with this burst of energy and I have been carried along, still trying to create different waves within that, which have altered dance’s perception of itself, the public’s perception of it, and the other art form’s perception of it. It’s an explosion of activity and assessment and reassessment and it’s amazing.

Would that be advice you would pass on to aspiring dance artists? People should be very clear about what it is they’re learning. You need to be receptive and gather information, but scrutinise what you are learning and why. Each dance artist can now be the author of their own learning process; it is a lifelong one and needs thought.

Do you collaborate much with young makers and does your work differ depending on the age of the person you are working with? Yes and no. I personally don’t but my organisation, Siobhan Davies Dance, does.

Siobhan Davies Dance: Table of Contents Wednesday 23 – Sunday 27 April, 11 am – 6 pm (Thursday 1 pm – 8 pm ), free arnolfini.org.uk/whatson/siobhan-davies 19

G R AC E C O H E N

FA L L 1 & 2

C A I B U RTO N

M AY PA R K S C H O O L

My visit to May Park School

Drawing examples from the gherkin in London, they showed the kids the different shapes they used to make The Hide, and introduced the idea of nets. They gave the class some sheets of paper with a net of the structure on. The children then got to make their own miniature paper version of it, and I was lucky enough to get to join in!

by cai burton Arnolfini has been appointed by Bristol City Council to curate and manage a programme of artist commissions for Bristol primary schools as part of the Primary Capital Programme; a Bristol City Council and LEP,(Local Educational Partnership) initiative designed to transform aging primary schools across England into state-of-the-art learning environments over the next 15 years.

The whole project looks really interesting and talking to the children, they all seem to love it too! The little architect inside of me was really excited about the methods they are using to create it, and the ideas behind it. It’s made me think about how you can use different sequences of shapes to create these engaging structures seem to take on a completely different shape.

Recently, I got the opportunity to take a trip to May Park Primary School in Easton with a member of Arnolfini. The whole school is having a lot of building work done, and as part of it, Arnolfini has commissioned Exzyt to create an Art feature entitled “The Hide” to sit in a woodland clearing on the grounds. The whole project is remarkable. The idea that this primary school had what was basically its own forest was amazing. It was something I never got to experience as a child, and I just wanted to join in with the kids playing in the forest and making dens! But the most exciting thing about this space is the project they are doing with it. Along with Arnolfini, Exyzt has designed a small, timber, sculptural building to sit in a clearing. This structure has been designed to resemble a “boulder” or “hazelnut” that fits perfectly with its surroundings. It’s got a range of features that allow the children to really connect with the wood such as panels where the children can look out onto the wildlife (including an area where a badger has made their home!). It’s a really interesting project that I can’t wait to see completed. During my visit, I got to sit in with a class as they participated in a workshop about the new sculpture. Exyzt explained that the structure is based on a “zome” – the repetition of a geometric form in a double helix pattern. This is a feature that crops up everywhere in nature, ranging from leaves on flowers to the shapes on cauliflower! They showed how the idea of using a sequence of shapes over and over can create different and more complex structures.

arnolfini.org.uk/learning/projects/primary-capital-programme

CHARLIE CRO SLEY-TH O R N E

DISPERSION

RO S S W I L L I A M S

“ YO U C A N ’ T G E T LO S T I N B E R L I N ” I spent February 2014 situated in Berlin. The city’s historical reputation compelled me enough to spend a month surveying it. Using the Mauerweg Trail as a primary reference point, where the Berlin wall once stood, I have been working on a body of work that is a direct response to how the city of Berlin is still trying to reinvent some form of identity 25 years after the fall of the wall. These images from my photo diary will take you on a sequential journey; following the progress along my chosen route through the city.

YO U N G A R N O L F I N I

Young Arnolfini Manifesto

A N T I C I PAT E D E V E N TS

Nocturnal Magazine - Emma Blake Morsi 19th of March 2014 Nocturnal is a digital magazine Emma Blake Morsi has been producing for the last couple of months as part of my gold arts award. With a passion for it being a platform and a voice for people to express interests, obsessions and concepts in the form of contributions from anyone, anywhere, I’ve been lucky to work with some incredible people through this process. Check it out! http://www.joomag.com/magazine/nocturnal/M0631517001391636194

Siobhan Davies Dance: Table of Contents Arnolfini: Wednesday 23 – Sunday 27 April, 11 – 6 (Thursday 1pm – 8pm), free Table of Contents is a live performance and installation co-created by Siobhan Davies, Andrea Buckley, Helka Kaski, Rachel Krische, Charlie Morrissey and Matthias Sperling, each using dance and their own history as choreographers and performers to question how dance is archived. http://www.arnolfini.org.uk/whatson/siobhan-davies

Between Hello and Goodbye, The Secret World of Sarah Records Arnolfini: 2 - 5 May 2014 An exciting weekend of film, exhibition, concerts and activities, celebrating the legacy of Sarah Records, an independent record label formed in Bristol in 1987. http://www.arnolfini.org.uk/whatson/sarah-records

Young people festival of ideas - The Army wants you, but do you want it? Arnolfini: 7 may 2014 A new series of events looking at critical issues affecting young people today. This event will explore the topic of War and the way it is marketed to young people.

ZINE DESIGN TEAM:

ADOBE INDESIGn:

YOUNG ARNOLFINI - April 2014

EMMA BLAKE MORSI

DARCEY BEAU FRASER

CAI BURTON

EDITORial:

www.arnolfini.org.uk #YoungArnolfini

FIONA CLABON

BECKY MEAD

CHARLIE CROSLEY-THORNE

MAZ SHAR