Azan in Dresden

Azan: a call to prayer is programmed in the Dresden International Short Film Festival this week. And, if you can bear their clunky site design (it seems to be rubbish if you have a Mac!) you can also watch it online at London's new ITV Local channel.

Weather report

Hot from the very, very wet general praxis weather service, here are some pictures of this afternoon's torrential downpour (continuing as I type) in New York. The streets were almost deserted down in SoHo...

Taste the Creativity

Briefly in Chicago for the American Educational Research Association conference and sundry other meetings. As a distraction from the interminable and ponderous conference I snapped a few signs. Here they are, including the indescribable 'taste the creativity' sandwich from the Corner Bakery Cafe.












You can't quite make it out, but G.R.E.A.T. on the side of that cop's car stands for "Gang Resistance Education and Training". How subtle to use a gun as a logo for such a programme.





Springtime has come to Scotland but it hasn't quite yet made it to Chicago.

On caves, cities (and cava)

Another slightly frantic couple of weeks in general praxis land - travelling up and down the country, via London, Glasgow and Dundee, from Smoo Cave in Durness to another sort of cave entirely - the lecture theatre in the basement of La Pedrera in Barcelona. I spent three days in the far north of Scotland preparing for the summer residency with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, visiting the site and talking with visual artists who live and work in and around the Balnakiel Craft Village. Then, with Jackie and other colleagues from London and Chicago, I travelled to Barcelona for the much-anticipated "present as future" event.

Interestingly a philosophical thread emerged that connects the work in the almost primordial - and relatively untouched and underinscribed - environment of the remote Scottish cave with the conference (Present as Future: education, heritage and the arts) in Barcelona - technopole, hub of modernism and urban innovation. "La Pedrera" translates from Catalan as 'the quarry' - it's a slightly derogatory nickname coined by the folk of Barcelona because the building looks almost as if it is carved from the landcape. Gaudi's building is a landmark site which is a rich source of metaphor, visual jokes and a totally groundbreaking form of building design inspired by organic forms.

The opening lecture of the symposium, the whole of which was superbly curated (one could even say 'orchestrated') by our friend Eulalia Bosch of Gao Lettres, came from Juan Navarro Baldeweg, the distinguished architect who designed the building and museum that houses the replica of the Altamira caves in Cantabria, northern Spain. He spoke about the metaphor of the cave as the most primordial form of human shelter and used this as a point of departure for a meditation on the relationship between painting and architecture (the altamira caves house some of the earliest examples of painting), between geologic sedimentation (the gradual build-up of vertical structures by way of the horizontal layering and compression of fragments) and the ways in which horizontal forces disrupt, excavate and enlarge the internal spaces of cave (usually it's water working its way into the faultlines and cavities of the rocks, and its so easy to see how this has happened at Smoo).

As humans we have a strong urge to make marks on the landscape, to construct buildings, to act out our presence in the world, partly in response to our basic needs, and partly because we have culture - we want to decorate our caves; we want to communicate our world-views; we want to express our values and beliefs; we live in brief timespans and we make monuments to our own mortality. And successive generations of humans leave their own sediment on the landscape, reminding me of another small fragment of my life, the Current 93 song Earth covers Earth.

In the simplest sense we can see construction as the interplay between lines, horizontals and verticals, straight lines and organic curved lines, as a play between design on paper in 2D, and how mark-making, plans, and designs translate into 3 dimensional forms. Building is a form of inscription on, and interaction with, the landscape. It is a performance - a play between materials, physics, geography, economics and - as Navarro pointed out - the forces of gravity, the elements and the social purposes of making buildings. So architecture itself is always a kind of gestamstkunstwerk, and a metaphor for processes of creation in general. Juan Navarro talked about how the human hand acts on the landscape, how the body occupies and interacts with geological, geographical and architectural space, and how architecture is a form of 'artificial geology'. As we construct the world - literally through the manipulation of materials, and metaphorically through language and symbols - we make and remake ourselves in relationship to the spaces and territories that we occupy.

The Altamira caves, Smoo and even La Pedrera could be seen almost as a kind of geological memory, as markers of generations of human interactions with the natural environment laid out and carved out from very different kinds of landscapes. They are rich reference points for thinking about the relationships between nature, culture and society, not only in very particular localities but also in a universal sense. Navarro's was one of several absolutely astonishing presentations - a kind of virtuoso interplay between speech, text, image, story, memory and identity - and has set off some interesting lines of thought for the project in the summer.

The metaphor of sedimentation came through very strongly - layer upon layer of memory, history, objects and narrative, settling one upon the other, with occasional sudden lines of disruption and fissure cutting in. Geology works on million-year timescales. As humans we exist in the blink of an eye in 'long now' time. Our conversations in the quiet, northerly, eternally changeable Smoo also touched on the notion of the cave as the primordial 'interior' space - a kind of dark interior place of the mind, and as a place which might trigger self-reflection and exploration of those dark recesses of the mind that fuel creativity and doubt. Jung, in The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, refers to the story of the young men who slept in the cave in the 18th Sura of the Koran: "the cave is a place of rebirth, that secret cavity in which one is shut up in order to be incubated and renewed...Anyone who gets into...the cave which everyone has in himself, or into the darkness that lies behind consciousness, will find himself involved in an - at first - unconscious process of transformation..." The mind is like a cave too, that we carry around with us - as Jean-Claude Carriere pointed out in another bravura speech, wherever we go, we carry our imaginarium with us.

Another strong metaphor which came as we emerged from the dimly-lit, basement lecture theatre into the sunlit streets of Barcelona was that of light and dark in learning - my main reflection was that for educators there is often a tendency to want to shine light into those dark recesses in a kind of 'will to reveal', when sometimes it's more important to think about light and shade, perhaps leaving some dark spaces of the unknown, opening up some spaces for exploration, questioning and doubt, rather than seeking to circumscribe and specify and know everything.

The other major ingredient in the Smoo collaboration will be music - and that, as a form of sonic architecture, will be very interesting to add to the cast of players in the theatre of the cave.

See high definition

Stratford, 10.30pm, 11 December 2006.

The growth of higher education programmes in community and participatory arts

A quick web trawl reveals that there has been a proliferation of higher education programmes dealing with community and participatory arts practice in the UK. When we set up the Performing Arts: community development programme at UEL and NewVIc in 1999, there were hardly any available, apart from longstanding work at Strathclyde, to some extent at LIPA, and through artform-specific work such as the work in community music at York University and Goldsmiths, community dance at Middlesex and community and applied theatre at Winchester, Bristol, Manchester or Central School of Speech and Drama. There's also been a major growth in postgraduate courses. And a lot of mainstream undergraduate arts programmes now include modules and units in community or participatory arts.

However, to my knowledge most of these courses are not very well networked together. Perhaps there's a need for some sort of research/academic practice/professional practice network/association? I'm not volunteering to set this up, but it would be good to find a way of building momentum around this important field of knowledge. Step forward PALATINE or Mailout to sort this out? Some mapping/directory-building/networking needed, I think. One of the complications is that the fences built by departments, RAE and general academic jockeying doesn't lead to sufficient interdisciplinary dialogue amongst arts practitioners and researchers around participatory, open, democratic and generally progressive arts practice (acknowledging of course that all such labels are not without their problems). As I've argued elsewhere, the theory and practice of participatory arts is emergent, contingent and contested - so coherence isn't likely to be a strong feature of the field right now.

A few interesting ones listed below, and I'm open to suggestions for expanding the list:

All the work we are doing at UEL's Institute for Performing Arts Development, of course

MA Applied Theatre, University of Manchester
MA Applied Drama, University of Exeter
MA in Applied Drama: Theatre in Educational Community and Social Contexts, Goldsmiths College, University of London
MA Community and Participatory Arts, faculty of art and design, University of Staffordshire
MA Community Arts, Cumbria Insitute of the Arts
MA Community Music, York University
MA Cross-Sectorial and Community Arts, Goldsmiths College, University of London
BA Drama, Applied Theatre and Education, Central School of Speech and Drama
MA Social Sculpture, Oxford Bookes University
MA Theatre and Media for Development, University of Winchester
MMus Leadership, Guildhall School of Music and Drama
MA Cultural Performance, University of Bristol
MSc in Music in the Community, University of Edinburgh
Postgraduate Diploma in Arts for Development and Social Justice, Queen Margaret University College, Edinburgh

Communityarts.net, that excellent portal for knowledge and understanding in the US, keeps a directory of training programmes in community arts, but it relies on contributors to keep it up to date, and right now its coverage of UK opportunities is pretty patchy. The British Council has a useful portal on arts for youth and community development here.

What's so fascinating to me is that the growth of these programmes, not to mention all the infomal training and professional development happening outside universities, means that there must be thousands and thousands of people in the British Isles now training, researching, reflecting on and even earning a reasonable living from socially engaged, participatory and critical arts practice.

FORTE final report

The final report from the EU-funded FORTE (Fostering Participation through Education and Cultural Exchange) project is now available.

Here's the information from the project website:

"FORTE was a project funded under the Joint Actions strand of the European Commission’s Socrates, Leonardo and Youth programmes between January 2005 and October 2006. It focused on the common ground among youth, education, and culture, as a basis for youth participation and development.

This website wants to inform you on FORTE, its activities, partners and results, as well as providing you with wide-ranging information on the youth arts and education sector. These include links to networks, EU programmes and research papers, an extensive searchable database of relevant organisations and good practice case studies, and other useful material for all those active or interested in the youth, arts and education sector. The portal will remain online until at least December 2007.

Coordinated by the Interarts Foundation in Barcelona, FORTE brought together four pioneering partner organisations from Germany, Lithuania, Spain and the UK, which work with cultural tradition, experimentation and exchange to make learning attractive for young people and allow them to develop new skills and participate actively in society."

The report can be downloaded here.

Smoo

This summer Graham is going to be working with musicians from the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and artists who live and work in the locality, as part of an experimental residency in and around Smoo Caves, Durness, right at the top of Scotland. It's going to be an exciting project and the generalpraxis blog will keep track of what happens.

More screenings in March and April

Azan: a call to prayer is screening at the following festivals in March and April:

New York Arab & South Asian Film Festival
March 2nd

Videotivoli Festival, Tampere, Finland, March 6th

British Creative Exchange: Cesar Charlone retrospective, Cineworld, Haymarket, London, March 18th

Tongues on Fire 9th Asian Womans Film Festival, London, ICA, March 20th

Jana International Film Festival for Children & Youth, Beirut, Lebanon, April 16th - 21st

And the British Council has included the film in its Britfilms.com catalogue.


Journeys across my City, Buenos Aires is also screening at the Tampere Videotivoli festival. And it's back in Birmingham, this week, on the BBC Big Screen by the Town Hall in Chamberlain Square.

Current projects

Current projects occupying Graham's mind, wearing out his body and generally keeping him awake at night:

- the music for a new short film funded by Film London and the Newham Film Fund, directed by Kerry McLeod called
"For all the tea in England"

Continuing work on the Teacher-Artist Partnership Programme and associated research on the dynamics of artist-teacher partnerships called "Mediated Conversations at a Cultural Trading Post..."

Ongoing work on an AHRC-funded study on young people, performing arts and social inclusion based at the University of East London

Work with the School of Arts, City University on new foundation degrees in creative industries at the Roundhouse

Evaluation for the Theatre Royal, Stratford East of a project working with young people called "Hear My Voice"

Work with CAPE UK on a study for the Community Media Association, Arts Council England and the DCMS on the arts in community radio

New Year Tricks

In One Year and Out the Other

On New Year's Eve, make a telephone call from one time zone to
another to conduct a conversation between people located in two
years. After midnight, call the other way.

Ken Friedman

1975

I was also delighted to notice that some imaginative activists in France staged a demo against the new year - calling on the French government and the UN to call off 2007: time is moving too quickly, 2006 is fine as it is, let's have a 'moratorium on the future' etc. Perhaps this will spread into a global movement for Slow Time? The clock of the long now, in another guise?

The Creative College goes to LA

Another excellent review for "The Creative College" in the Routledge journal Research in Dance Education (Vol. 7, No. 2, December 2006) by Morgan P. Appel from the University of California. Some extracts below:

"The term 'page turner' is typically reserved for best-selling novels like The da Vinci Code or the latest Harry Potter instalment. It is not frequently applied to academically flavoured works, but in fact 'page turner' is the best way to characterise Graham Jeffery's "The Creative College"...
For those of us in postsecondary education struggling with the development, maintenance and somewhat controlled growth of student-centred arts partnerships that cross organizational and curricular boundaries, "The Creative College" is a must-read. The reader is offered an insider's perspective on NewVIc's grand vision and subsequent revisions, the muddling through, managing the dearth of precious resources (time being the most precious), and fragility of partnership - pehemomena that, whilst unique to Newham, can be effectively understood and scaffolded upon in urban Los Angeles, California...

Jeffery's insights into research on creative leadership are well-placed and concise...As is the case with most good works on organizational dynamics and processes, "The Creative College" generates more questions than it provides answers...Although it is highly unlikely that Tom Hanks will be starring in a version of "The Creative College" adapted for the big screen anytime soon, it is an indispensable work for those engaged in the nitty-gritty and complex business of arts-education partnerships."

Well, if anyone wants to discuss the film version, just get in touch...I'm developing vague ideas for a new book which will be more international in scope than the required format for the last one allowed - focussing on innovation in arts partnerships, pedagogy and networked learning across the world...

And there is also an enthusiastic review by Tim Brighouse in the Times Educational Supplement here.

reading and listening at the turn of the year

Very happy to be taking a couple of weeks off from the frenzy that seems to have engulfed the general praxis world over the last few months. So here's a chance to provide a randomised list of holiday reading and listening in the general praxis household:

The Economist's special Christmas double issue, which, in amongst the usual neoliberal tosh, has got some nice articles about conversation, rural America and Russian airports, amongst other things...as well as some scarier stuff about the resource conflicts of the future...conserve, conserve, conserve!

The Yellow Album by the Simpsons: great, witty arrangments which beautifully encapsulate late 20th C popular americana

Surveillance by Jonathan Raban: a novel rooted in 2006 although set, perhaps, in the slightly further future - really sympathetic characterisations - people who you care deeply about by the end of the book - economical, vivid, spare writing which conjures a world driven by the paranoid delusions of the neo-cons in charge, and which documents the varied attempts of the protagonists to make sense of them - all set on the cultural, political and geological faultlines of America's north-west coast

Ys by Joanna Newsom - more ambitious than the last album, but I'm not quite sure that it's so successful - not sure if the structures really hold together

The Wealth of Networks by Yochai Benkler - a tough read but hopefully it'll be worth it in the end - seems to be a useful work which explores the dynamics of the new social production through networks...

93 til Infinity by Souls of Mischief: reminds me of why hip-hop can do so much for young people, and conjures up something of the atmosphere in E Block back at NewVIc in the mid to late 90s (nostalgia for inner-city music teaching!), even though it hails from the other side of the planet...see the next post about the creative college review and LA!

(hmmm...a strong USA theme so far in this list...)

We Think - perhaps I'll get round to sending some comments to Charlie Leadbeater about his latest work in progress, but perhaps not - I'm not sure if that would mean I would be working for him for nothing...

Games People Play by Eric Berne

Endless Wire by the Who: the recording of the band live on the special edition is preferable to the new material, in my opinion. They can still rock out!

Christmas with the Tallis Scholars - Victoria, Desprez, medieval carols and plainsong in a wonderful double CD.

The Dalston Shroud by Sand - my brother Hilary and his band's latest album.

Present as Future: Education, Heritage and the Arts

I've been doing a bit of work helping to sort out the 'virtual exhibition' that will accompany this very interesting conference, which will take place at La Pedrera in Barcelona from March 15th - 17th 2007. It features an unusual and distinguished selection of speakers and I am hopeful that it will enable some useful and reflective conversations to take place. It offers an interesting interdisciplinary space for reflecting on the arts, heritage, urbanism and learning.

Review of "The Creative College"

There's a review of "The Creative College" in Volume 2 of the online journal Thinking Skills and Creativity (see link above). You'd have to be a subscriber to read the full review, but a few extracts are below:

"This is a stimulating text for all educators and practitioners regardless of educational or geographic contexts. The core principles promoted here...work across geographic and cultural boundaries and I urge those interested in cautious or more radical educational change to examine and discuss the issues that are raised...With only 165 pages The Creative College may appear deceptively narrow but this book is extremely rich in detail, both theoretical and practical....Graham Jeffery and his colleagues paint a vibrant and rich picture of their creative approaches to education. This book is definitely of valuable interest to its intended and international audiences despite some important but quite deep contextually informed discussion. The work provides a fascinating and rare insight, sharing professional experiences and views from many angles, whilst displaying a passion for education and inclusion with serious academic rigour."

BookMooch

A quick note to sing the praises of BookMooch. You're unlikely to find any books for free on there that are intensely rare or valuable, but if you don't mind the odd trip to the post office it's a really satisfying experience to send books you don't want to others around the world who want them more. And it's fun to obtain titles from others that you would otherwise have had to pay for. It could evolve into a big global library service, and is a nice example of green economics/freecycling in action.

Wonderful World

Just back from the screening of The Seafront as part of the Document 4 International Human Rights Film Festival in Glasgow. It was very intelligently programmed, screened alongside two great documentaries: Giovanni and the Myth of Visual Arts, directed by Gabriele Gismondi and the really intelligent, thoughtful and thought-provoking Wonderful World by Coco Schrijber. Wonderful World (2004) provides a beautifully shot and edited portrait of a number of characters living their lives literally on the edge of Amsterdam, homeless philosopher kings and queens just about surviving in the face of the barrage of development, demolition and the forces of the elements. This film really deserves a much wider audience than it's got so far.

And The Seafront stood up pretty well on the big screen too.

Creative rhetorics

Graham is doing a seminar at the Open University on the 30th November. If you're interested in attending get in touch and a place can be probably be found for you...For those people that like academic writing, here's what he will be talking about:

In the last decade there has been a remarkable growth in the number of ‘creative experiments’ involving artists, teachers and students in both secondary and post-compulsory education. Whilst they have not been restricted to the arts curriculum, they draw heavily on methodologies and approaches from the community and participatory arts movement. Such experiments foreground student participation and authorship, often occupying time and space in new ways. They sometimes challenge orthodoxies and encourage participants to rethink relationships between curriculum subjects, artform practices and established institutional frameworks for learning. They tend to bring to the surface problems in the dynamics of collaboration, often making bold claims for their effectiveness in reaching learners, featuring strong rhetorics of participation, empowerment and curriculum change.

Using examples from my work at Newham Sixth Form College and from the Teacher Artist Partnership professional development programme, I will argue that the conditions under which these creative experiments are undertaken – both policy discourses and the social and institutional frameworks within which such projects take place – may limit the democratic potential of the learning that they seek to provide. (Whether ‘democratic’ aims and purposes are even discussed in many education institutions is debatable). Elsewhere, I have argued that learning institutions need to learn to adopt an ‘intermediary’ position in which teachers and those that work with them are encouraged to improve their skills in negotiation, inclusivity, brokerage and dialogue, if democratic arts pedagogies based on equitable partnerships are to be reproduced or developed on a wider scale.

In the context of wider discourses of school reform and ‘workforce remodelling’ such creative partnerships are likely to have limited impact, unless there is serious examination of creative pedagogy and serious attention to institutional change. This has implications for educator training and professional development, curriculum and assessment, learner empowerment and the models of leadership and professionalism that are required in order to grow and develop these approaches.

I will briefly compare the situation in England with some examples from other nations. Democratic pedagogies seek to empower arts education professionals and learners to make change, adapt their own surroundings, and engage in forms of emergent reflective professionalism. These play out differently in different contexts, depending on social and cultural discourses of the function and purpose of school and post-compulsory education, different institutional cultures, the particular social dynamics of projects and partnerships, and the status of arts education and cultural learning within the official curriculum.

Democratic arts pedagogies offer transformational potential, but without proper engagement with the challenges that they raise to policy and practice, there is a risk that they will be reduced either to ‘special treats’ within a diet of relentless testing and surveillance or annexed to an uncritical functionalist rhetoric of developing ‘skills for the creative economy,’ both of which are likely to undermine the transformational claims that are made for them. Meanwhile, a powerful do-it-yourself ethic is developing in young peoples’ out of school learning, in virtual communities, and in the youth arts movement which offers some alternative approaches from which arts educators working in schools and post-compulsory education institutions might learn.

Festival screenings for "Azan: a call to prayer"

Four screenings scheduled so far this autumn for Azan: a call to prayer, a film directed by Heena Bukhari and produced by Redcurrent Films, for which Graham composed the music:

Chili Film Festival, Brick Lane Festival, London, September 10th

Bird's Eye View Festival, ICA, London, September 17th

London Film Festival, National Film Theatre, October 30th

Roshd International Film Festival, Tehran, Iran, November 10th - 16th

culture and nation

This post from US-based arts management lecturer Andrew Taylor has some smart things to say about the "obsessive focus on 'nation states' as the appropriate scale of intervention and resolution", and the proper response of the cultural sector to the dilemmas raised by an increasingly polarised and nationalistic political rhetoric. The arts enable connection across fences and boundaries and they also enable interesting conversations to take place - in a sense, borrowing from Christopher Small, they can be pre-figurative of other potential societies - and creativity and participation provide people with the tools to imagine other kinds of futures. Whilst idly surfing this evening, we came up against a couple of interesting developments that point the way to more imaginative futures, against the grain of the paranoid and insular nationalism that seems so prevalent in political discourse at the moment - this exhibition at Pier 40 in New York, and our friends at LIFT's work with the New Parliament.

Thinking about Scotland and how it - might - be forging a different sort of nationalism, it'll be really important for the country not to retreat into conservative ways of understanding the idea of 'nation' but to adopt the more open and cosmpolitan stance that is somewhat evident in other small countries - perhaps Finland, perhaps New Zealand...Demos is running a set of discussions this autumn in Glasgow exploring what Scottish cities might learn from 'the Nordic model' of social policy - details to be found by emailing here. Anything that brings down the barriers to insularity, xenophobia and nationalist fundamentalism seems pretty important right now. Nowhere seems to be immune.

Just as a quick follow-up (as of Sept 12th) this blog entry suggests that global problems might be better solved at the city and region level - by cities and regions working together and bypassing the intransigent politics of the nation-state. Sounds convincing to me - Livingstone and Chavez's oil deal might be one eye-catching, if ultimately a bit pointless, example. Chavez is one world leader who seems to understand the emergent network society's politics better than some...