The Beginning

The Beginning, by Michael Pinchbeck

They are professionals.
They have learned their lines.
They are waiting to make their entrance.
They are ready to begin.

Part theatrical memoir, part safety announcement, The Beginning is the second in a trilogy of works taking Shakespearean stage directions as starting points for performance and looks at what it means to begin. Because he has promised never to perform again, Michael Pinchbeck has invited Nicki Hobday and Ollie Smith to join him in remembering how it feels to perform for the first time.

Supported by the National Lottery through Arts Council England. Developed at Lakeside Arts Centre (Nottingham), The Junction (Cambridge), Leeds Met Gallery and Studio Theatre and Loughborough University.

http://makingthebeginning.tumblr.com/

Photography by Julian Hughes

Revital Cohen, Butterflies Flying

I had an delight full experience working along side Revital Cohen as Lighting assistant and documentor for this project.

HUMAN CONDITION/ING - Autumn 2011

Radar presented two commissions with Jacqueline Donachie and Revital Cohen that involved a dialogue between the artists and academics based within the Department of Sport and Exercise Science. Both of the works responded in very different ways to research around improving human performance.

Butterflies Flying in Formation investigates the psychology of the elite athlete mindset, the body-mind connection, and how phobias of high level competing, which can be equally as paralysing as a physical injury, can be overcome. The work asks what kind of training equipment could make an athlete stronger, not by hardening the muscles, but through conditioning their mental state?

Researching the practices of mental toughness building and sport psychology techniques, a hypothetical training tool was designed to choreograph the body into conditioning the mind. Loosely based on the principles of samurai armour, protective and impenetrable, the object, in conjunction with the ‘scorpion’, a yoga pose which clears the mind and controls the nerves in the stomach, is put into action, triggering mirror neurons* in the brain which mentally rehearse the next moves to be made.

Revital Cohen is a designer who develops critical objects and provocative scenarios exploring the juxtaposition of the natural with the artificial. Her work spans across various mediums and includes collaborations with scientists, bioethicists and animal breeders. Recent exhibitions have included Talk To Me which is now showing at the MoMA in New York, Alter Nature: The Unnatural Animal, Z33, Belgium and BIOTOPIA: Art in the Wet Zone, Urzon Center, Aalborg, Denmark. This year Revital has been given an award from the Welcome Trust.

http://arts.lboro.ac.uk/radar/programme_archive/human_conditioning/

JACQUELINE DONACHIE
TEMPLE OF JACKIE (TESTING TIMES)
RADAR Loughborogh University

HUMAN CONDITION/ING
Autumn 2011

Radar is currently working on two new commissions with Jacqueline Donachie and Revital Cohen that have involved a dialogue between the artists and academics based within the Department of Sport and Exercise Science. Each of the new works will respond, in very different ways to research around improving human performance.

Jacqueline became interested in the testing and monitoring of athletes and decided to put herself through a rigorous testing programme. She made notes and documented the process and has subsequently spent a period in the studio undertaking a series of drawings. The outcomes of this period of research and development will be presented in November within a temporary mobile structure which documents her process. The structure will be dedicated to the cult of the ordinary in a place where excellence is paramount.

Photography by Julian Hughes

HATCH - FRESH

Hatch, one of the East Midlands’ leading performance platforms, returns to Leicester after a successful first outing at Embrace Arts last year.

A never-to-be-repeated night of innovative live art across three city locations where you can expect the weird and the wonderful in spoken word, theatre, music, one-to-one performance and more. Frankly, anything goes.

Arboretum by Frank Abbott

GETINTHEBACKOFTHEVAN, 'Oral'

Sylvia Rimat, 'Imagine me to be There'

Olwen Davies, 'Fridge Logic'

Action Hero, 'Frontman'

The Alternative village fete, Tattershall Castle

Matthew Cowan

Matthew Cowan has been working with the Company of Ringers of the Blessed Virgin Mary of Lincoln, and has produced a new film of their meeting and practice which will accompany a performance. The ringers operate the 13 bells of the Cathedral in the Bell Ringer's Chamber high in the West Tower of the Cathedral. The film is a record of the ritual of the practice of the ringing of the cathedral bells, in space that has been dedicated to such activity for nearly four hundred years.

Alongside the film will be a new live performance involving the repetitive ritual of bell ringing, the mechanism of the bell ropes, and the artist's own take on the physicality of campanology.
http://www.lincolnartprogramme.co.uk

The Company Mathew Cowan

Nightjar - The Labours

For 2011 Nightjar commissioned US based artists Mark Jeffery and Judd Morrissey to present The Labours: An Astronomical Dance on Summer Solstice. The Labours will involve an extensive cast of volunteer performers who will enact sequences of movement and text in constellations throughout Lincoln, creating a human celestial map across the city.

http://www.nightjar.info/

INVISIBLE DUST

Townley and Bradby

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The Bowthorpe Experiment - Norfolk and Norwich Festival

13th – 15th May 2011

Townley and Brady developed an evening cycle tour designed to see the future of Norwich. The Townley and Bradby bike tour left daily from Chapelfield Gardens, with a portable bike-powered cinema packed into a bike trailer (from Magnificent Revolution). The tour passed through sites where in the past, residents, planners and activists have responded to the challenges of collective urban living. The evening’s outing culminated on the western edge of the city where a short film was projected onto the side of a building, creating both a public event and prophetic vision of the future.

DARK MATERIAL

A stunning six storey red-brick medieval castle build by Ralph Cromwell, Lord Treasurer of England in 1434, will be part of the new 'Dark Materials' Programme – A month-long series of art commissions and events bringing together an unlikely alliance between devotees of the National Trust and the counter cultures of music and biker groups.
Tattershall Castle: 15th & 16th October, 11am-5pm
http://homeliveart.com/current-projects/145-avf

RADAR - This Is Not A Performance or a Lecture

RADAR
THIS IS NOT A PERFORMANCE OR A LECTURE!
17-18 June 2011

Janet Thomas
Frank Abbot
Pil and Galia Kollectiv
Janice Kerbel
Robin Deacon
Neal Swettenahm and Michael Pinchbeck
Jenny Hogarth and Kim Coleman

Radar presents two days of discussion and new commissions that begin a dialogue about the intersection between performance and visual practice.

JENNET THOMAS ECHO VS. GOWN

PHIL AND GALIA KOLLECTIV

EPIC SEA BATTLE AT NIGHT: A REVOLUTIONARY PLAY PERMEATED WITH THE ECONOMIC THINKING OF MILTON FRIEDMAN

NEAL SWETTENHAM AND MICHAEL PINCHBECK HOW TO WRITE A PLAY UNDER THE INFLUENCE OF DEEP TRANCE BEHAVIOR

ROBIN DEACON THE ARGUMENT AGAINST THE BODY

RUTH PROCTOR REPEAT, REHEARSE, REPLAY: A CONVERSATION

FRANK ABBOT MOOSE MEMORY
All photography by Julian Hughes

http://www.arts.lboro.ac.uk/radar/

RADAR - Folk Variations

FOLK VARIATIONS - Spring 2011

Folk Variations was a programme of four new artists’ commissions which explored how histories are both created and disseminated by and through people. Within individual and collective performances, the works told stories, provided behavioural examples and created historical reconstructions as a way of re-imaging our folk history.

OLIVIA PLENDER & PATRICK STAFF
LIFE IN THE WOODS

Olivia Plender and Patrick Staff created a video work which utilises the film making process as collective and social activity. Their initial starting point involved bringing a group of participants to live together at a woodland site, as an exercise in communal living, or free school in the forest, involving group discussion and workshops.

SERENA KORDA
TRAINING THROUGH PRODUCTION

Inspired by Loughborough University’s history of training through production and the Loughborough University archive material depicting images of mass movement; Serena Korda made a new work involving a mass movement choir.
http://arts.lboro.ac.uk/radar/programme_archive/folk_variations1/serena_korda/

The Guardian

One of my photographs for Michael Pinchbeck's The END was featured in the Guardian review.

Histories of the Present

Nottingham Contemporary
Publication

A number of my photographs have been featured in Nottingham Contemporaries recent publication, Histories of the Present.

http://www.nottinghamcontemporary.org/art/disclosures-exhibition