Thursday

photo by Ben Thompson

One of the first exercises that we did today was to walk through our path in the garden in our heads. After doing this we wrote down the sorts of things that we experienced and what we noticed.

After this we split up into our pairs and created a short response to yesterdays research task. Henrik and I created a piece exploring the movement of water through the gardens. Other members of the group explored things such as letters from the archives and the history of trees in the gardens.

Next we were split up into groups of 3/4 and given the task of making a piece of work using the ‘system’ task, our research material and our three named places. The group that I was in started working by showing each other our systems. This progressed into a dialogue about old to new and the way in which things on the estate seem to always refresh and renew themselves such as the way that the great hall went from a grand building to a ruin and then back to a grand building again. We also spent some time arguing over which Chekov came to Dartington! We then used this dialogue to feed our performance and began creating.

After we had worked for an hour we spent some time individually working on our performances of our farewell songs, then we went to lunch.

After lunch we performed our farewell songs around the old school building and experimented with the spaces in which the songs were placed and what happens when the songs are sung over each other.

Next we viewed the work that we had created earlier. One group showed a piece where cups of water were fenced off from a person who kept stealing them and pouring them over another person who was walking around the site. Another piece was a sort of sensory soundscape where the audience experienced different sounds and sensations created by the performers. Our piece explored ideas of renewal and finished with us creating a metaphorical link between Dartington and Falmouth, and the final group used mud to create traces of people and then images on the wall within a studio space.
Matthew

Contributions coming soon from Alfred (Alfie), & Adrian

Read Full Post »

The Workshop

A workshop led by Karen Christopher

The Dove, the Ghost, the Handkerchief Tree is a three-part workshop taking place over three years involving students from Dartington College of Arts and interested members of the surrounding community focused on generating performance material through collaborative devising processes. Focus will be concentrated on the ideas around the last days of the Art College’s residence at Dartington. Each of the three parts will involve participation in workshop activities culminating in the presentation of performance material. The first part of the project is a one-week workshop beginning March 9th, 2009. Participation in this week does not necessitate participation in following years nor does non-participation preclude future participation. It is expected that, though a core group will follow through all three years of the project, some people will come and go after each segment.

Goat Island film project, super8 film still--Lucy Cash

The performance-generating activities of this workshop will focus mainly on the body as a site of information and expression. Using research methods from both studio experimentation and field or book study, participants will make short, time-based compositions in collaboration with others. Through writing, moving, and gathering, both solo and group work will combine to provide a textural latticework of interconnected ideas in proximity to our central focus on departure.
During the first year’s week-long workshop participants will focus on generating material in site-specific locations. In the second year we will involve members of the Dartington community who will be asked to make creative responses to public presentations of works-in-progress. Some of these responses will be chosen for inclusion in the next phase of the work. In the final year, the workshop events will culminate to combine material from the past two years’ workshops taking it into a new location and a final presentation. In this way the number of participants changes with each phase of the project.

Goat Island film project, Super8 film still--Lucy Cash

As a member of Goat Island, a collaborative performance group currently in the process of touring our final work together, I am focused on ideas of lastness, ending well, lasting, and legacy. Considering the historical context of the Dartington estate and the changes it is going through at present and Goat Island’s years-long engagement with both Dartington Arts and Dartington College of Arts I am interested in further study of ideas around ending within the context of the final days of the art college’s residence at Dartington and the effect of its relocation on students and the surrounding community. In Goat Island’s work we are finding positive, creative ways to address change, interruption, and finality and I would like to expand on these ideas within the context of Dartington.

We all have a place in our hearts that provides sanctuary. It may be a house we knew as children or a tree or a corner of a street in a particular town. The garden at Dartington is such a place for many people who have been here over the years and especially to those who have studied here and afterward had to move on. As part of this 3-year project various activities will be undertaken in workshops with students drawing consciousness toward how the history of a place influences the present and how we in the present can make a lasting imprint for the future, as well as how one takes a place away with one, or documents it, or finds a way to memorialize it to protect it as a site of personal solace or inspiration. Workshops will focus on generating performance material and writing with a focus on lasting, ending, absence, residue, leaving, and surviving death and change. Performance elements will be focused on the idea of leaving the garden, leaving a part of the self behind in the garden, and keeping the garden with you when you go.

Click on this link to a downloadable PDF of the workshop description:
the-dove-the-ghost-the-hkrchftree-descrp

Read Full Post »