Live Performance

New Ideas Need Old Buildings: Adaptive Reuse and the Performing Arts at WSD2013

old-bldgs_PBH-lobby1Tues 10 Sept 16.30 – 18.00

The Willow Theatre

The appropriation of old buildings for the arts has produced some of the most inspiring and dynamic spaces for live performance in the world.  From Bochum to Brooklyn, old buildings have proven that they make ideal spaces for theatrical innovation. Adaptive reuse has also been recognized as a key component of sustainable development and green building. In this session, we’ll bring together three of the world’s foremost practitioners in adaptive reuse for live performance for a far-reaching discussion about this complex phenomenon.

Who should attend?

Open to all: especially directors, designers and architects.

Price: £6

BUY TICKETS

Key contributors

Katie Oman Moderator –Senior Consultant, Arts Consulting Group.

Jean-Guy Lecat - Director, Studio JGLecat.

Andy Hayles – Managing Partner, Charcoalblue

Jean Nicholson – General Manager, Birmingham Opera Company

New Ideas Need Old Buildings: Adaptive Reuse and the Performing Arts « World Stage Design 2013 World Stage Design 2013.

CSPA Supports has launched!

The Center for Sustainable Practice in the Arts is pleased to announce a new initiative: CSPA Supports.

“The CSPA Supports grant program is designed to support the projects of our members as they consider issues of sustainability (ecological, economic, or cultural) in their professional work,” comments Miranda Wright, co-founder of the CSPA.

“Since founding the CSPA, it has been our goal to offer grants or commissions by re-investing a large percentage of any profit we earn back into the arts.   We hope this initiative will enable artists to work on projects that are meaningful to them, and projects that could impact the public’s perception of what sustainability means.”

Artists from all genres (and cross genres) are encouraged to apply, including those working in public art, installation, live performance, or digital work. Applicants must be current members of the CSPA.  Members of the CSPA receive a variety of other benefits, including an annual book selection, subscriptions to the CSPA Quarterly and Mammut Magazine, monthly e-newsletters, and opportunities to submit articles, essays, and information to the CSPA’s multi-faceted knowledge network.

Grants will support materials, creative fees, documentation, travel, and communications related to a proposed project.  International applications are accepted, and projects may take place anywhere in the world.  The application consists of an online form, short essay questions, and a proposed budget. The deadline for round one of CSPA Supports is March 1, 2011.

To join the CSPA, visit www.sustainablepractice.org/join-the-cspa

To apply for a CSPA Supports grant, and for grant guidelines, visit www.sustainablepractice.org/cspasupports

3rd Ring Out: Rehearsing the Future By Zoe Svendsen and Simon Daw

The temperature is rising, the Earth is changing and your city is threatened. How will you respond? This is a story in which YOU decide what happens next.

Imagining a world in which nature takes revenge on industrial humanity, 3rd Ring Out takes you forward in time to an emergency planning rehearsal set on your doorstep.

Metis uses live performance, video simulation and interactive computer systems to produce work which responds to contemporary concerns. The result has the immediacy of theatre combined with the thrill of a disaster movie; a fiction rooted in fact.

Check out the Booking section to find out where 3rd Ring Out takes place and for responses to the performances …

via About.

Joe McElderry not No 1: how to stop a juggernaut


In a fitting end to Simon Cowell’s four year dominance of the Xmas number ones, this year’s festive pop pick is an expletive-filled polemic against the American military-industrial complex “Killing in the Name”. A man who has always stood with admirable consistency on the law of pop – that sales mean what the public want, and the public knows better than the critics -  was last night skewered on his own petard, significantly outsold by a campaign which in a few weeks gathered almost a million followers.

And what do we learn from this?

Two things.

One: Social media can do extraordinary things. To get a number one hit after appearing on national television every Saturday for three months is really not hard. Yet that old media juggernaut careering down on us was stopped a Facebook campaign started by a couple from Essex and a single live performance on Radio 5.

Two: Ultimately we British are best motivated against things, rather than forthings. The best way to increase democratic participation in the UK would be to ask people to vote against candidates, rather than for them. Can you imagine it? There would be queues around the block, come polling day. (Of course there’s the small problem that the political landscape would be poisoned forever, but you would have participation.)

This, of course, provides tricky lesson for those of us interested in the enviroment – and those of us here at the RSA who prefer an optimistic, positive  approach.

But it does go some way explain why it is so hard to motivate people to action when it comes to issues like climate. Which particular machine are we supposed to be raging against? Try as we might to divide society into the environmentally good and bad, there is no covenient Cowell figure to blame everything on. As Paul Kingsnorth suggests in a comment on a blog post earlier, there is no clear enemy other than ourselves. Though we can rage against our leaders for failing at Copenhagen – and the scale of the failure was immense – few leaders wanted to stick their neck out without a clear mandate from their people – and let’s face it – that clear mandate just isn’t there yet.

Point one though provides at least one clue to how to change that. Social media is not the answer to everything. Maybe the gains it can make in terms of the environmental agenda are only small ones, but if social media campaigns are witty, smart and well-directed they can still do remarkable things.

Thanks to Anne Helmond for the RATM photo.

Go to RSA Arts & Ecology

Events: ‘Anthem’ – Beth Derbyshire at Eden Project – 14 No

Anthem

Beth Derbyshire
with Ulrike Haage
opening performance: 14 November
exhibition continues to 9 December
Mediterranean Biome at the Eden Project, Cornwall

The Eden Project and Cape Farewell present the premiere of Beth Derbyshire’s live performance and film work, Anthem, with music by composer Ulrike Haage. Anthem is a trilogy of films with a choral component, exploring notions of land, place and nation.

Anthem assembles ideas around nationality, identity and language using the symbols of landscape and song to explore our cultural relationship to landscape. Song and landscape have long been associated with expressions on nation. Derbyshire borrows from sources such as national anthems, ancient land names and etymology to capture cultural and natural settings, to explore the connections between people and landscape through balancing components of voice, music, word and image.

The opening events will feature the early music ensemble Stile Antico. Beth Derbyshire will be in conversation with Ulrike Haage and Dr. James Ryan, Associate Professor of Historical and Cultural Geography, Exeter University.

Anthem was filmed in Newfoundland, the UK and in the Arctic during the Cape Farewell research expedition of 2007.

www.bethderbyshire.com
www.youtube.com
www.edenproject.come/visiting-eden/whats-on
www.capefarewell.com/art/exhibitions