Marc Reck points to photos of yesterday’s final setup for Project X Presents.
If you’ve got your Gigbeth wristband you can get into the dress rehersal tonight and some tickets are still available on the door tomorrow for the show proper. A year in the making, by all accounts. Should be good.
If you’re not sure, the Rainbow Warehouse is just along from the Rainbow pub itself on Adderley St. Should be fairly obvious.
Reality Estate took place last night at Five Ways. It was, well, I found it rather indescribable. I think the highlight for me was standing in the middle of the estate while the singers moved around me. But I’m at a loss to put the experience into words. They don’t seem worthy enough.
Well done to Lee and Sandra and the huge team involved. A magnificent achievement on so many levels. Birmingham should be proud.
Those three photos are by myself. More are trickling onto Flickr and given the number of cameras around I’m sure videos will be appearing on the Reality Estate site once everyone’s recovered.
Most importantly I understand this is just the start of a whole year of work with the Five Ways estate. The organizers are keen that this isn’t just a blink and you miss it community arts project. They’re in the for the long haul.
As part of Project X Presents m’chum Matt Murtagh will be accompanying Einstellung‘s set with a series of photos based on Wim Wender’s Wings of Desire. He’s posted three of them on Flickr.
Project X Presents takes place on Saturday 3rd November and tickets are £15/20 from here.
A couple of items about the La Traviata opera have appeared online. John Mostyn writes about his experience being part of the chorus and then one of the actors and there’s another video on YouTube, this time about the rehearsals.
Terry Grimley interviews Michael Chase, director of the very intriguing International Mask Festival.
Project X explain what they mean by “An Omnimedia Experience” for their highly anticipated (by me at least) six hour performance on November 3rd.
What we mean by the word omnimedia, is that there is no type of media, or creative endeavour that we leave out of our thinking when planning our events. Music has so far been the principal ingredient (in a wide variety of styles), along with spoken word, physical theatre, visual projections, dance, set design and even aroma.
What we aim to do is take all these many disparate and diverse strands and weave them together into one seamless, holistic whole, so the many effectively become one. Hence omnimedia seems the best fit.
Project X blog about not getting funding from the Arts Council:
“It is simply an unfortunate situation that out of the 9 applications from organisations recommended, only 2 made it through to receiving funding.” And there’s the rub – only two out of recommended 9 applications are to get any money – 22%. The Olympics are apparently playing a role in this having diverted a great deal of lottery money – in the past the Arts Council has been able to grant 40 – 50% of the successful applications they receive.
Project X Presents, which brings together a while swathe of performing arts people from Birmingham in one six hour show, will still take place on November 3rd despite the likelihood of the participants being suitable renumerated so if you’re umming and ahing about going this should tip you towards a yes. And if you can afford to, go for the £20 ticket.
(Disclaimer – I like Project X)
Do you remember KR-36, the “urban adventure game” that took place as part of The Event back in April? It’s good to learn it wasn’t just a one-off and has been fed into an exhibition titled DY-66 at the Five Years gallery in that London.
There’s also a report on the game, from which the above notebook is taken, and I think I recognise a few faces in there.
Artstalking Ana is involved and writes about it on her blog.
Audiences Central has news of the International Mask Festival taking place in Stourbridge from October 19th-27th along with some fantastic images of people in masks. Here’s my favourite:
Woo!
You can get a copy of the festival brochure from Audiences Central and download a PDF version.
by Nikki Pugh.
Blast is quite possibly the best piece of performance art in any medium to have taken place in Birmingham in recent years. Certainly it was a great spectacle with heaps of pyrotechnics and bangs but it was also an incredibly considered and, in places, quietly meditative piece, simultaneously draining and inspiring.
It was a performance of a standard that any city could have been proud of but it could only have taken place in Birmingham. The whole thing oozed with an understanding and love of the city from its industrial past to its unknown future. This was Birmingham art, ticking all the boxes and towering above all else. Its almost unfair to the rest of Artsfest that this is taking place at the same time – they cannot hope to compete on so many levels.
The audience, while substantial, could have been larger. I hope the word of mouth network will do the job over the next 18 hours but I do feel slightly perturbed that this event wasn’t pushed harder to the public. If it were a Tate production there would have been national press and features on Radio 4. (I’m happy to stand corrected if there was). This is the sort of public art event that Birmingham deserves, being inclusive and fun but not afraid to aesthetically and intellectually challenge. It’s a shining example of what city-specific art can be and I cannot thank and congratulate all those involved, from the performers to the organisers who pushed this project forward, enough.
Thankfully it’s on again tonight and, as you can gather, I highly recommend you go. You won’t regret it.
The above photos are mine and are part of the Birmingham Artsfest 2007 Flickr group, members of which will be covering the whole weekend. If you just want photos of Blast they’re here with many more to come.
I had a good chat with Sandra Hall of Friction Arts about a variety of things recently, one of which is the ambitious and unique Reality Estate project that starts in the Five Ways Estate on October 28th. Beyond the basic numbers (“300 participants, 3 venues, 3 professional, 3 community and 3 estate-led choirs, an audience of 3,000, 1 aim: to sing Birmingham’s truths”) it’s quite hard to properly articulate what it’s all about and why they’re doing it, so thankfully she and her partner Lee Griffiths are using their blog and YouTube to put it all in some context.
How the project came about is the best place to start, telling the story of the projects genesis and then these two videos explain how they’re putting it into practice.
What struck me from talking to Sandra is how they’re desperate to avoid the trap of parachuting a community arts projects into an area without any consultation and then vanishing after a week. This is a long term scheme with some solid and in places quite old fashioned ideas behind it. It deserves to succeed I reckon.
Here’s a video:
It was found on the MySpace of Cloud Cuckoo Land who describe it as a “psychedelic robot musical” which ran at the Edinburgh Fringe for two weeks last year.
It was filmed and edited by Scott Johnson aka filmficciones70 and the music was by Matt Eaton of Pram and Micronormous.
There appear to be some interestingly odd people involved in this outfit. One to keep an eye on methinks…
