Elemental

By Helga Henry, General Manager of Fierce Earth Ltd, Producer of Elemental and Chair of Creative Republic.

Inspired by elemental and the exploration of outdoor work, Helga Henry - General Manager of Fierce Earth and Producer of Elemental, produced this article for the Birmingham Post published on the 7th June 2009 - you can find it here!

Ever since 1998, the month of May finds me on the sunny streets of Birmingham, sampling the weird and wonderful delights of the annual Fierce! Festival. And although there is no festival this year, last Friday was no exception.

As part of the 2009 “for one year only” programme, Fierce! and our partners at Ikon Gallery presented the iconoclastic performer, Reverend Billy. Self-styled anti capitalist preacher (he exorcises the tills at Tescos containing “Wall Street funny money”) he gave a blistering free performance in Oozells Square with his funky backing singers, the Gospel Choir of Life After Shopping. Opposite the headquarters of the RBS, his giant quiff quivered to the message that what we spend our money on has an effect on the climate, our jobs and homes, in fact on the whole world.

Hundreds of people gathered to hear the word of the Reverend. Still more happened upon him by chance. From the clapping, cheering, whooping and dancing of the crowd, everyone had a good time.

Art in the streets is uplifting and democratic. There’s the chance that people will stumble upon something to make them laugh, cry or gasp. As an audience gathers, they share reactions, jokes and vantage points. They connect. The critic Lyn Gardner said of The Sultan’s Elephant that this work “turns a million strangers into a community.”

Same in Liverpool’s capital of culture, where grandmothers, toddlers and all ages in between waited for half a day for a good view of La Machine’s giant mechanical Spider as it paraded the streets with its live orchestra perched atop cherry-picker cranes.

Grand artistic gestures funded by public money may seem unnecessarily splashy in the current climate. But everything is relative.

Given the community cohesion this work promotes (it’s been proven that crime reduces during events rather than proliferates) and City promoting media attention it generates, they constitute good value for money. Some previous Fierce! highlights such as the Great Swallow (Benjamin Verdonck’s giant nest on the side of the Rotunda) or the much acclaimed Street pianos (15 pianos in community settings emblazoned with “Play Me, I’m Yours”) were produced for the public money equivalent of two duck houses, a moat and some manure. Or a fraction of 1% of what we’ve spent to bail out a bank like the RBS.

Play Me I’m Yours has, from its Birmingham beginning, has taken place in Sydney, Australia, Sao Paolo, Brazil and is now hogging media attention in London. But the city, and Fierce! had it first. The region has some great unusual spaces to see great performance – check out Soweto Kinch’s Flyover show under the Soho Road on June 13 if you want to discover it for yourself. Great music in a stunning location.

And bring on Birmingham’s spiders and elephants: they do more good than MP’s manure.

Taking Risks Successfully - a presentation by Ali Williams from No Fit State Circus at Elemental in the West Midlands.

(Here are some edited snippets from Ali’s notes for the presentation)

NoFit State circus is 23 years old this year. It was started by a group of students with a common interest in juggling, getting stoned, and avoiding having to get grown up jobs when we graduated.

when we started we were not very good! But the important thing was we believed we could be, and as we had never seen contemporary circus we had no reference as to just how truly awful our first shows were! Fortunately neither did our public who appeared to enjoy our work.

In the late eighties we managed to see some companies like Ra Ra Zoo, Mummerandada and Circus Oz and began to have a vision of what new circus could be like!

By 1990, by living off a government training scheme called enterprise allowance that paid us £40 a week to run our own business and by saving everything we earned we had bought our first little big top which we toured in for five years, performing across the UK for local authorities and festivals.

Our motto was if we can’t get bigger and better each year then we will give up and go and get normal jobs.

NoFit State is now a registered charity with an annual turnover of 1.2 million last year. The title of this section is Taking Risks (successfully) which is good because that means its not about taking risks (without having a clue what you’re doing and dealing with dire if not catastrophic consequences . We have quite a lot of experience of that too).

Key risks (No Fit State have taken) can be summarised as:

There are some big challenges for us now:

We want to create new work both for the silver tent and for other environments and contexts. We want to do this with the same creative integrity and freedom with which we created Immortal but we want to do it in less than 10 years and we want to do it at the same time as touring Immortal.

We want to continue to inspire, nurture, develop and support circus peformers at all levels of experience and we want to build a thriving circus community around our new training space in Cardiff.

The risks are now different but no less alarming to manage: Reputation, Profile, Artistic development and innovation, Company well-being as well as Financial. If we’re still here in 10 years time, we’ll let you know how we get on…

And if we’re not we will surely go out with a bang!

To download the presentation above please click here, and for the full notes document, please click here.

For more about the West Midlands event and theme please click here.

By Stewart McGill, Director, Playbox Theatre, Warwick.

(The following post is the first part of the presentation Stewart made at Elemental WM as part of the break out session and his work with Playbox Theatre.)

To consider the work of Circus and multi-disciplinary arts with young people here at Playbox Theatre is to also reflect and consider where Circus as both entertainment and art form has emerged in last 20-30 years. Maybe the ‘Little Seedlings’ are more than young people aspiring to gain confidence, skills and talent – maybe the image can be applied to a movement that swept across the world backed by Government visionaries and motivators in places like France and Quebec.

To put it into a context one has to go back some time. In the post-war years Circus was big entertainment business – here in the UK Circus directors divided the country into three segments - West Country/Mid and South/North and Scotland – the big three circuses, Chipperfield, Bertram Mills and Billy Smart’s rotated in 3 yearly cycles with massive tenting shows – animal based but certainly in the case of Smarts heavily influenced by the now gigantic US Road shows, The Three Rings of Ringling Bros and Barnum and Bailey, Cole Brothers, Clydel Beatty etc. With Smarts the focus shifted to ‘The Spec’, large arena fantasies based on Wild West, Fairyland and Arabian Nights themes involving the whole company on ground, in air, on floats – this was dynamic, interactive, passionate, visual and aural circus for the new age … until TV came along and audiences deserted many forms of live entertainment for the miracle Box (see Greatest Show on Earth – Circus of Horrors – preserved on film for the live visuals).

When Playbox Theatre began its mission with young people in 1986, Circus was off most agendas in the UK … certainly it was not considered an art form at all. In the UK Circus was all but dead – killed off by more sophisticated forms of leisure.

I had always cherished a love of circus as entertainment art, and its possibilities – Degas, Picasso, Lautrec – and not lost on ballet creators – Diagalev, Stravinsky. As means of communication – the language of circus being universal, the body as communicator of emotion, fear, anxiety, love, jealousy …. Who could forget the classic circus movie ‘Trapeze’ playing out a love triangle high above the ring of Cirque D’Hiver in Paris?

As part of Playbox Development we started looking at an emerging new form … we lovingly called it ‘New Circus’ and it was a step away from street entertainment – busking with attitude, juggling, acrobatics and often poor attempts at narrative. Traditional circus hated it – condemned as having ‘no skill at all’ – ‘the great unwashed’ – anarchists – rubbish. Yet here was something that seemed to capture the imagination once more, in theatre and dance – we sensed a potential to steal from the new form for Playbox – we met and were inspired by young rebels forging new identities – Archaos – living the Mad Max existence. Plume – in Paris – creating poetry in circus and a bunch of hippies inspired by Peter Schumauus Bread and Puppet theatre – called Cirque Du Soleil. In UK don’t ignore work of Brian Dewhurst – Andro who inspired Guy Laliberte and Gilles Ste-Croix with his human circus!

For his full personal perspective following on from this introduction please click here for your downloadable pdf.

To see all about the region, please click here.

On Tuesday 19th May we kicked off the West Midlands event at Playbox Theatre in Warwick with the keynote speaker, Ali Williams from No Fit State and break out sessions with Bill Ferguson and Stewart McGill (find out about them here) and not forgetting Ros Robins from the Arts Council England WM as MC.

Starting with setting the scene exercise, interesting and thoughtful ideas and thinking came from the section and leading nicely into the keynote address from Ali Williams. The address was suitably informal looking at the progression route that No Fit State has taken from “little acorns” to becoming the internationally acclaimed company we see today. Starting with today – and the Tabu video:

Interestingly the development from little acorns to what we see today came from little investment from ACE in the beginning, and a lot of risk as a company! Full presentation and notes will soon be available.

Following a lovely lunch and some fabulous brownies courtesy of Playbox, breakout sessions with Bill Ferguson and Stewart McGill gave examples of how Street and Circus work on ground level and indeed the Playbox’s work nurturing the “Oak Trees” of the future.

Stewart’s presentation included an aerial demonstration by Christina Newman.

At the West Midlands ‘elemental’ we are pleased to be joined by the Guest Speaker Ali Williams from No Fit State Circus, and discover emerging talent with Stewart McGill (Playbox Theatre) and Bill Ferguson (Shrewsbury Festival)

Who is Ali Williams?

After a year of working as a Physio for South Glamorgan Health Authority I gave up my career to form NoFit State Circus and from 1986-1997 I was performer and General Manager for them, with responsibilities for tour planning, fundraising, finance, marketing and general administration. During this time I was also a freelance performer, director and arts administrator and worked with other theatre companies such as Travelling Light Theatre (Bristol), The Public (West Bromwich), Desperate Men (Bristol) in various consultancy roles. In 1993 I set up the community wing of NoFit State and created opportunities for our community performers to work with Welsh National Opera on their large-scale community projects. In 1998 I began to direct circus productions and directed three community circus shows for Oddfellows Playhouse (Connecticut), Circus Eruption (Swansea) and Syrcus Circus (Bangor)

Between 1997-2002 NoFit State created three large-scale community circus projects for which I was community director and we involved over 400 adults and 200 young people from the community in these projects. This was and opportunity for experimentation with artform development. In 2001 I returned to college to study Arts Management, and for my business plan module I created in collaboration with a science advisor a new show called Science Circus, which was funded by NESTA and Science Year to tour around the UK in 2002.

In 2004 I became co-producer of the ImMortal project with Tom Rack which is now an internationally recognised, award winning critically acclaimed production. The development and tour of ImMortal took NoFit State to a new level, being recognised for creative excellence and revolutionary apprenticeship scheme to create a career pathway for community performers.

The success of Immortal enabled the company to expand to employ an Administrator, General Manager and Education Assistant enabling the founders to focus on creative development.

In 2006 I also became part time director of the Circus Arts Forum, the UK umbrella organisation for the Circus Arts. My role in this organisation is advocacy and strategy development for UK circus and involves me working closely with stakeholders such as ACE, DCMS and DEFRA.

In 2008 I returned to work full time with NoFit State producing three shows Splott in the first 6 months Splott on the Landscape in January, Tabu in March (Co-producer) and Burn Swindon in June

Who is Stewart McGill?

Director of Playbox Theatre:

‘Playbox Theatre is a unique creative company based at The Dream Factory in the UK.

It exists to provide young people and developing artists a unique environment for training, creation and exploration in theatre and related artistic forms.’

Before this Stewart studied at Dartington College of Arts and Birmingham University. Stewart has previously worked with Cambridge Theatre Company, Haymarket Theatre Company - Leicester, English Shakespeare Company, Bristol Old Vic Theatre Company, Royal National Theatre (assessor for Young Theatre Challenge).
He is also the Course Validator for Central School of Speech and Drama BA Circus (with The Circus Space) and a member of Circus Arts Forum, Drama Advisor for The Arts Council of England. Stewart was also a judge for the European Capital of Culture 2008.

Who is Bill Ferguson?

Bill Ferguson started as a performer from a passion for Street and Circus Arts he obtained as a boy. Bill has performed nationally and internationally at major street, music and art festivals.

Bill is also the Founder of the Shrewsbury Street Festival, now in its fourth year and is called upon for his expertise by others wishing to start festivals in other areas.

Bill is originally from Montreal Canada.

The West Midlands ‘elemental’ event has been postponed and will be rescheduled to a later date! From emails and conversations we had it was clear that there was high levels of interest in attending but scheduling so close to the Easter holiday was inconvenient for all delegates.

We are currently discussing new dates and this will be forwarded as soon as this has been confirmed and we look forward to welcoming you to the event.

If you would like to be added to the invitation list please contact gemma@elementalexchange.org.uk

Keep checking the site for more updates!

By Nell Bailey, Assistant Officer Theatre & Regional Champion.

Outdoor work has grown in stature and importance in the West Midlands over the past few years. Our smaller outdoor festivals have, with Arts Council support and the enthusiasm and skill of the people driving the projects, developed and grown in both artistic quality and audience numbers. Some examples of this are as follows:-

Shrewsbury International Street Festival draws huge crowds by programming some of the top national and international audiences.

Dynamics Bi-annual puppetry festival also draws interesting International companies into the regions to diverse venues with new audiences.

Last year the International Mask festival was for the first time leading the field nationally with a fascinating programme of mask work and workshops again encourage both local and national companies to work together.

Playbox’s planned new outdoor space the big top will bring a different audience a new experience to Warwickshire and enable the company to explore new work in a new setting.

The region continues to grow and be enlivened by new work and new passions. When exciting work is to be seen people will come to watch

All these events have been or still are being funded through Grants for the Arts and are the culmination of years of work and research proving that from little acorns large oaks can grow!

To view the invite to the West Midlands event please click here or visit the West Midlands page.