 The Full StoryRecent news and still interesting
Sideways through Belgium
Not Waving but Drowning (LIFT event)
Ackroyd & Harvey in conversation
Choreographing Capital (Isaac Julien & David Harvey)
PSi#18 - a lot of ecology
and more ...
Here are our stories about events that have happened, but still have interest, rather like a back issue of a magazine.
Recent events
Sideways Festival
walking across Belgium
17 August - 17 September
The Sideways Festival is an interdisciplinary art festival in the open and on the move. Sideways takes as a starting point what in Belgium has become called 'slow ways' or 'slow paths': a meshwork of footpaths, alleys, tracks, backroads and 'desire lines' to be discovered and walked by artists and audiences from 17 August to 17 September.
There are 33 projects in open space, a journey of 334 kilometres, 16 days of walking, 5 festival weekends and 2 symposia.
The backbone of the Sideways festival is a 4 week expedition through Belgium, from west to east. During the five festival weekends, the mobile laboratory stops at Menen (18-19 Aug), Herzele (25-26 Aug), Brussels (1-2 Sept), Turnhout (8-9 Sept) and Zutendaal (15-16 Sept). These locations host the actual festival programme: a series of performances, walks, live art, workshops, site-specific interventions. The two symposia are: 'Setting Out' in Menen, 19 August and 'Moving On' in Zutendaal, 15 September.
'Setting Out' investigates 'slow ways'. Speakers and participating artists introduce a series of topics and questions to guide the artistic journey. 'Moving On' confronts the experiences of the Sideways laboratory with stories and practices emerging in other contexts. Both symposia focus on the socio-cultural and ecological aspects of being on the go. The symposia participants include: Tim Ingold (GB, University of Aberdeen), Giulia Fiocca & Lorenzo Romito (IT, Stalker), Sacha Kagan (Cultura21), Wilfried Houjebek (NL, Cryptoforestry), Baptiste Lanaspeze (FR, GR 2013 - Marseille-Provence, European Capital of Culture 2013), Martin Kohler (DE, HafenCity University Hamburg), Judith Rugg (GB, University College for the Creative Arts).
Artists include Benjamin Verdonck (BE), Bram Thomas Arnold and Eleanor Wynne Davis (GB), Brandon Labelle (US/DE), Christine Mackey (IE), Daniël Dewaele (BE), Jeremy Wood (GB), Joe Baele (BE) & Hugh Lupton (GB), Misha Myers & Deirdre Heddon (GB), Susanne Kudielka & Kaspar Wimberley (DE/UK), Wrights & Sites (GB).
www.tragewegen.be
Not Waving But Drowning. Has theatre risen to the challenge of climate change?
London International Festival of Theatre (LIFT)
ICA, London
12 July 2012
Not Waving But Drowning brings together artists and producers from across Europe to examine some of the most ground-breaking theatre and climate change projects recently produced. Chaired by Judith Knight (Artsadmin), contributors will include artists Patricia Portela (Portugal) and Anna Mendelssohn (Austria), Lucy Neal (Co-Founder of LIFT and co-chair of Transition Town Tooting) and Ben Todd (Executive Director of The Arcola Theatre).
www.liftfestival.com
Ackroyd & Harvey in conversation
The Front Room
Queen Elizabeth Hall, Southbank Centre, London
8 July 2012
Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey will be joined by writers Robert Holtom, Oliver Morton and Edward Parker for an afternoon of conversation and debate. Placing a tree grown from an acorn from Joseph Beuys' artwork 7000 Oaks at the centre of their conversations, Ackroyd & Harvey and guests discuss the cultural, biological and climatic significance of trees and how art can act as a transformative agent. Beuys saw 7000 Oaks as a catalyst for change, a symbolic start to bring about a new social order for the future where a healthy biosphere would be consistent with human and species needs.
Ackroyd & Dan Harvey's artwork Beuys' Acorns is displayed at Southbank Centre this summer as part of the Festival of the World. The project is dedicated to growing oak saplings in parallel with open public discussions into whether the transformation Beuys called for has been activated at the beginning of the 21st century.
Ackroyd & Harvey are artists-in-residence at University College London's Environment Institute. They won the Mapping the Park commission for London 2012, a series of individual sculptures entitled 'History Trees' at ten of the major entrances into the Olympic Park. Three of the sculptures will be present for the Games with the remaining seven to be installed for the Queen Elizabeth II public park.
Robert Holtom is a writer, philosopher and ambassador for the Eradicating Ecocide campaign, established by international lawyer Polly Higgins and author of Earth is Our Business and Eradicating Ecocide.
Oliver Morton is The Economist's briefings editor and author of Eating the Sun: How Plants Power the Planet, and Mapping Mars: Science, Imagination and the Birth of a World.
Edward Parker is co-author and photographer of Ancient Trees - Trees That Live For Thousand Years. image: History Trees by Ackroyd & Harvey southbankcentre.co.uk...beuys-acorns-in-conversation
Handspring Puppet Company and Jane Taylor in conversation with Nadia Davids
Film and Drama Studio, ArtsTwo Building
Queen Mary, University of London
Mile End Road, London E1 4NS
5 July 2012
For this Leverhulme Talk, Nadia Davids discusses adaptation for puppetry performance with the founders of Handspring Puppet Company, Adrian Kohler and Basil Jones, the Artistic Director of Handspring Puppet Company UK, Mervyn Millar, and the dramaturg and scholar Jane Taylor.
Projects to be discussed include Woyzeck on the Highveldt (1993) Faustus in Africa! (1996), Ubu and the Truth Commission (1997) War Horse (2007) and Crow (2012), a collaborative production inspired by poems by Ted Hughes and directed by Millar.
www.drama.qmul.ac.uk/news/leverhulmetalks
Choreographing Capital
conversation with Isaac Julien and David Harvey
Hayward Gallery, London
4 July
Artist and filmmaker Isaac Julien discusses the representation of capital in film, performance art, the media and popular culture.
Julien puts his questions on the depiction of the current financial crisis to David Harvey, author of The Enigma of Capital. Julien and Harvey consider the part these images play in attempting to depict what has for decades been considered notoriously impossible to represent.
Isaac Julien's film installations create a visual language, fusing dance, photography, music, theatre and sculpture. Many of his installations, like TEN THOUSAND WAVES (2010), deal with themes of migration and cultural displacement on both a local and global scale, presenting an indictment of globalisation and economic inequalities.
For over 40 years, the 'dialectical materialist' geographer David Harvey has been one of the world's most trenchant and critical analysts of capitalist development. He is a Distinguished Professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY), Director of The Center for Place, Culture and Politics, and author of numerous books, including Enigma of Capital and the crises of capitalism. Capitalism, he has said, 'never solves its crises. It simply moves them from one place to another. From Brazil to Russia to Argentina to America to Britain to Greece.' image: TEN THOUSAND WAVES, Yishan Island Dreaming, by Isaac Julien
ticketing.southbankcentre.co.uk
PSi#18 (Performance Studies International Conference): a lot of ecology
University of Leeds
27 June - 1 July 2012
This year's PSi#18, Performance Studies International conference, an academic event for performance studies post-graduates, researchers and lecturers, has a striking number of panel sessions with ecological themes:
dwelling and walking
eco-critical landscapes
environmental aesthetics
performance, corporations and capitalism
performing fluidity in watery places
performing environmental risk
performance, place and economics
protest and resistance
resistance, disturbance and negotiation
participation, activism and resistance
place, process, protest
revitalising urban place and community
sex, meat and ecology
theorising eco-performance
Each panel session has 2 - 3 paper presentations. The conference synchronises with the Ludus Festival, Leeds, a festival of performance, street art and dance. Two works in the programme have ecological themes: Lo Monstre, in which a large animatronic creature moves through the streets of Leeds (29 June - 1 July); and A Meadow Meander (28 June - 1 July). image: from Lo Mostre, Efímer (Spain)
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