Of all the editions of The Arts Show we’ve done so far, this week’s was far and away the one that left me feeling most like a listener rather than the presenter. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not as though previous guests have been hard work or anything – quite the reverse, but when a show comes along in which the conversation flows, the guests are lovely, warm people who read poems to you, and the musical acts are of the sort of high calibre they were this week – well, it’s a treat.
Julia Bird
The thing that impressed me most about Julia Bird, apart from her beautifully observed and very funny poetry, was her sheer endurance. This is a director whose work is taking her to all points of the compass, I think I remember that Newcastle followed Exeter on her list of gigs, and in between putting in the miles she is also responsible for getting the shows up and running each time at a new venue with its own quirks and challenges. Julia’s a believer in high production values too, an outlook which no doubt does nothing to ease her workload. When I asked Julia whether she does the driving too she said she does not – did I detect a flicker of guilt there? I fancy so. Julia’s career has been almost entirely about promoting poetry, her present UK wide tour aims to introduce new audiences to poetry, a goal which I am sure will be realised. If it isn’t, it won’t be for want of trying.
Kate Rowles
I have to confess when I first came across Kate Rowles I was somewhat sceptical about her artistic choices. From the descriptions I’d read it sounded rather like an artist passing home movies off as something of a higher order, but perhaps that’s the philistine in me reacting.
Why shouldn’t the genre of the home film have aspirations of its own? Perhaps a drip feed of You’ve Been Framed style blunders has convinced us that home film is the medium of the buffoon or the sloshed wedding guest and no more. Kate Rowles aims to change all that and is nine films into a project that, as soon as she started to explain it, convinced me that there is hope after all. Her projects are carefully structured in advance, are full of clever conceits and stem from a love for her family that is simple and sound. Dad has even made his directorial debut recently. The home movies – historical documents on the personal level – as Kate sees them are best described in her own words. Well worth a listen, but then I would say that, wouldn’t I?
Jasmine Cooray
There was more poetry from my final guest Jasmine Cooray whom I recently ran into at The Book Club Boutique, Soho. At that gig she was reading How The Tiger Got Its Stripes, and that poem, like the ones she shared on this week’s show drew heavily from some of the darker parts of personal experience, weaving pain and hope together with the outlook of children to great effect. It would be strange not to remark that at the age of 23 Jasmine has already trained as an actor, established a series of London writing workshops, founded a popular poetry night in Brighton and is now channelling her artistic work into becoming an art therapist – there’s nothing like keeping busy. Jasmine’s poetry is brilliant, and so too is her telling of it – she really understands how to engage an audience and does so without the use of a script. The way her eye language connects with her listeners adds a whole extra layer to an already layered piece of writing. If you get a chance to see Jasmine live, perhaps at her Brighton gig, Floetics, do jump on it.
So I was basically entranced, as you may be able to tell, by the guests this week and then came the musical offerings from World Service Project and Ola Eysymontt. Each piece mature and sophisticated, the product of talent, graft and inspiration – but music is never well served by being reduced to words – do give it a listen.
Posted 5 months ago at 3:53 PM.
Children of Comoros
Whilst it’s not unusual to welcome onto the show guests whose artistic practice extends across several platforms, it’s less commonplace to meet artists whose work is unaffected and commercially viable, however this was exactly the deal this week on The Arts Show as I met Paul Skawinski and Mick Frangou. Paul, or Paulski, as he prefers to be known, has arrived here on these shores from Poland and his journey to London has been Whittington-esque: he’s been homeless and penniless (at one point he had to sell his guitar for food money) but has unswervingly followed his ideals and is now establishing quite a fan base for his fusion music (I use the term fusion here not in the jazz sense but literally, for it is a fusion of influences as diverse as grunge, jazz and electronica, defying any ready-made description). Paulski himself is a likeable enough cove, rocking up to the studios in attire that was one part romany to two parts buccaneer.
Paulski
Paul is very much the sort of person with whom one might while away the odd hour or three enjoying good music, looking at abstract art and sticking it to The Man. These things can go either way of course, but I don’t think there’s much affectation with Paulski.
There does seem to be, however, a need to knock down walls, whether the barriers between musical styles, hierarchical structures (“I always seem to say the wrong thing” Paul confesses) or the line between found items and art. Happily he also seems to have stumbled upon a way to turn his work into something commercial. In the interview we discussed the, at first surprising, but with a moment’s thought, obvious application for Paulski’s slide work, one that could be a nice little earner.
Sugardrum
Mick too has, by luck it would seem, discovered a relatively lucrative outlet for his natural artistic compulsion. The combination of silent film and live music holds wide appeal as it turns out, and whilst I am sure that Mick would be putting music to Nosferatu irrespective of financial considerations, it seems there’s a quid or two in it as well. We talked plenty about the musical side of things in the show and indeed this week seemed to be an almost entirely musical event, with great contributions from Children of Comoros and Sugardrum thrown into the mix. But I was especially interested in what Mick had to say about his approach towards visual art.
Ballpoint
He’s long been a biro artist and the more I thought about what that means, the more I realised how many of us instinctually take the first step in that career path without thinking about it while we’re on the phone or in a meeting, not that I’m suggesting Mick’s art, with its cruciform theme, is doodling – far from it – but in the same way that many of us like to hum a tune, but only a few go on to training our voices and learning to fully express ourselves in song, so even fewer develop this particular art form using these particular materials. I wonder why that should be – maybe the implement in question, the ball point pen, is so strongly associated with the prosaicness of work and study and shopping lists that it seems silly to make art from it.
Mick Frangou
So in fact maybe a connection between these two artists which is stronger that their having happened upon commercial viability, is their ability to make beautiful art from the most commonplace of items, bits of sellotape, ball point pens, and their willingness to fuse musical styles in an exciting and fresh way that celebrates, rather than swallows, up the constituent influences – and is mighty easy on the ears to boot.
Listen to this edition of the Arts Show
Posted 5 months, 1 week ago at 2:01 PM.
Sarah Ruff
As any fool knows, a system is only as strong as its weakest part. Combine that with the inherent weakness of any system in which one part is of exponentially greater value to the process than all the others – the P.A. who knows where to find everything; the specialist part; the secret ingredient that gives the dish its tang – and you have a functional formula for disaster to which the radio station would have done well this week to pay heed. We’re very much in the territory of eggs and baskets, here. In short, the station’s computer broke. Yes, I know what you’re thinking. One computer for all that output? Well no, not exactly. The bedroom of the average child of five has at least fourteen computers in it of one sort or another; clearing out any domestic closet is, in my experience, a lesson in the evolution of technology (the further into the darkness one delves, the increasingly bulky, and simpler, the instruments become, until, somewhere towards the back, you start running into 18th Century loom computers driven by holes punched in bits of card, piled up underneath half-empty tins of Dulux and that bit of carpet you’ve been saving for a rainy day). But the station has computers. It has them in abundance, and yet for some reason a sort of informational drift had occurred and everything that was of any importance to the broadcasting of radio programs had wound up on this one particular machine, a fragile old-timer from the mid-nineties: an object more closely related to Turing’s code-breaking hardware than Jobs’ I-pad.
Three Colours
Such technologies become diva-ish as they age. I’m minded of certain of my relatives who were perpetually convinced of the imminence of their own demise and would refuse to make plans beyond the Wednesday after next, on the basis that they probably wouldn’t live that far into the future, despite there being nothing actually wrong with them. So it was that The Computer had an extravagant fit of the vapors as we got ready to start recording on Monday morning; and so it was that we ignored it. Turns out we should have listened. As if to spite us, The Computer, most indecently, dropped dead on the spot. With it went the software we used to record the Arts Show, all the station idents, the music for the start and end of the show, the components used to make the weekly events listing, my notes for the interviews and our connection to the World Wide Web. I stood with several station techs, immobilized and horror-struck by the realisation of what had happened. As we stood there, a knock came on the studio door. ”Hello,” said Sarah Ruff. “I’m your first guest.”
Lovescandal
If somehow the Arts Show does reach you this week, you can rest assured that this product has been worked for. Every noteof music you hear will have been the result of jerry-rigging and making-do. The words you hear will have been transferred from system to system, program to program, and divided by the number first thought of. It was thought best not to photograph our guests in the studio this week, on account of all the boogle-eyed perspiring technicians who would be clearly visible in the background, clutching spanners and bits of circuitry, so the photos you see here will be from the guests’ personal collections instead. If you want to capture the true spirit of this week’s Arts Show, dear Listener, rush out and bag yourself a wind-up transistor radio, hole up in your coal-shed and listen by candlelight. Our systems are down! Long live the system!
In the midst of all this, some guests came and talked about their art. What a lovely bunch of people they were. Sarah Ruff had plenty to say about being a clown and I was sorry we didn’t have more time to unpack the art form. Some of what she’s doing sounds distinctly un-clownish, and whilst it doesn’t bear reduction sufficiently to discuss it here, it is conceptually intriguing – perhaps even a little demented – and growing in stature over time. Her show, called Hairy Mary, for reasons we did not establish, does not sound like easy entertainment, but that’s the whole point of Ruff’s work: it sits between genres and doesn’t allow one to be complacent – like a dark Bobby Baker (and Bobby Baker can be dark enough).
Lee Berwick
Lee Berwick (who I realise, bears more than a fleeting resemblance to John Locke from Lost) is an audiophile. Not an .mp3 or a .wav, you understand: he likes listening to things make noises – bridges, oil storage tanks, rivers – the bigger the better. His eyes light up when he gets to talking about listening to engineers taking angle grinders to the doors of a tank in Sweden which seemed to be his auditory Mecca – he makes regular pilgrimages there. Have a listen if you want to hear how to turn a bridge into a piece of music. Lee’s Damascene moment came when he realized the uses of computers in making music. He hasn’t looked back. As we talked, I found myself unable to resist reflecting that we appeared to have come full circle on the ability-to-make-music-with-computers front. Our own PC was now producing a plume of smoke.
Carmina Masoliver-Marlow
It was a pleasure to meet Carmina Masoliver-Marlow. We don’t often invite people onto the show who are at the very beginning of their artistic careers, for obvious reasons. But the integrity of Carmina’s poetry persuaded me to make an exception. I’m hoping to get at least one of her pieces loaded onto this blog so that you can check it for yourself, and so that in the event of our technological ship going down there’ll some fitting tribute by which to remember this edition of the Arts Show. So, fingers crossed. With a pinch of luck we might get the show out to you. Our show this week made about people, by people, using their ingenuity to work around computers. Who would have thought? Humans: The strongest element of the system.
Listen to this edition of The Arts Show
Posted 5 months, 1 week ago at 2:21 PM.
Elephant Foot
I went for a wander around the Olympic site in Stratford before this week’s show. It was a sunny day, a glorious taste of spring, and rather than scurry to the studio, running a neck-and-neck race with the second hand of my watch, I instead left home an hour early and strolled. If you haven’t been over that way yet, it’s well worth a look. The main structures are in place; it seems like they’re putting on the finishing touches already (although with two years still to go, there must be plenty more to do). General consensus seems to be that the works are ahead of schedule, much to everyone’s surprise. As it is, you can wander around a pedestrian track and get a close-to view of the giant cranes, the peculiar industrial beasts, and the army of workers dressed in fluorescent clothes who remind me of the Dozers from Fraggle Rock. We’ve been off-air for six weeks and I fear that this jaunt is the sort of thing one only does when one is coming fresh to the work routine; it’s frightening how repetition makes you blind. So one of my resolutions for this new season of The Arts Show has nothing to do with the show itself at all, rather that my tos and froms won’t be conducted in the tie-over-the-shoulder fashion of season one.
We kicked off in our new slot (6-7 on a Tuesday evening since you ask) with a selection of guests each of whom is contributing something important to our understanding of our fellow wo/man. The directors of Elephant Foot, Ben Charland and Laura Burdon–Manley, are opening their new show “Wealth” in the coming days: it’s a show about nothing less than the end of money and about the effects of wealth and indeed greed (which recent economic events may have allowed us to forget are in fact very different things). They take, as one of their characters, someone who’s been directly affected by the Rwandan genocide, a topic which must be handled skilfully and with great sensitivity if one is to avoid accusations of exploitation and sensationalism. Having spoken to the Elephant Foot guys, I’ve no doubt that there’s an intellectual rigour behind their use of this event and that they don’t select their themes fancifully. It seems odd then, to remark that we had a lot of fun making the interview – which had more to do with my inability to deliver an introduction line (oh boy, how fast one gets rusty) than the subject matter of the interview itself. Laura and Ben are both well able and keen to articulate their art form (handy for a radio show) nor have I seen two people better able to provide a selection of dramatic tableau when asked to pose for a picture. If you’ve half a mind to go and see “Wealth”, give it a go and expect to be challenged.
Roisin Murray
We’d tried to get Roisin Murray onto the show last year, and had booked her in just moments before learning that the station needed some revamp time. She made her belated appearance this week, and it was well worth the wait. All of this week’s guests had uncomfortable truths to discuss and all of them emphasised the connection between the large scale of the topics they were examining – from the Rwandan genocide to Downs Syndrome to the Palestine-Israeli conflict, and the personal aspects of these various challenges and tragedies. Roisin talked about the immediacy of the act of telling a story, the importance of being able to look your audience in the eye; her words resonated with the observations of the others – Ben Charland’s that a theatre actor is playing his part just a few feet from the audience, Fiona Yaron-Field that healing can come from looking in the eyes of your supposed foe and seeing that he is indistinguishable from you. I was struck by the way that irrespective of the age of the art form, from new-fangled photography to the age old oral story form, these people are using art to engender understanding where other modes of communication have broken down.
Fiona Yaron-Field
I guess I’m predisposed to finding an earnestness for one’s art charming. Roisin, I found, had something of the worldly, quirky charm of Pam Ayres, although she looks and sounds nothing like her; Fiona Yaron-Field’s charm works in a very different way. Unlike Roisin, Ben and Laura, who are forever in the lime light, Fiona shudders at the thought of being in front of the lens rather than behind it – she just about tolerated me taking a publicity shot for this page. Fiona has, for me, the air of someone with a mission to accomplish from which she will not be deterred, but there is none of the steeliness that that observation could imply, nor do I think she conceptualizes herself in that way – she is much humbler than that. Fiona’s photography is stunning. I would definitely recommend you get hold of a copy of Uncertain States - you will be impressed. The pictures from the Shifting Perspectives exhibition, too, are captivating. I recall that one of Fiona’s influences is Nan Goldin; a leaf through the images here shows that influence at play in one of two of the portraits, to exciting effect. Fiona’s current show is on the South Bank, which would make it an easy diversion the next time I’m wandering back from giving a class near Waterloo; indeed, it could form part of my new project of being a little more alive to what’s around me. As this week’s show reminded me, what’s around us is at times truly remarkable.
Listen to this edition of The Arts Show
Posted 5 months, 3 weeks ago at 3:39 PM.
The Arts Show with Nikk Quentin Woolf on Xstream East
Tuesdays 3-4pm and via Listen Again
An eclectic weekly mix of interviews and performances from musicians, artists, writers and performers, as well as those behind the London arts scene.
to go to the showpage, click here
Posted 12 months ago at 10:55 AM.
