St. Michael's church Byker. Photograph taken by helen schell

Galata exchange meeting

Meeting up at the house with artists david foggo, ilana mitchell, ginny reed, paul grimmer and sally madge.
We are making connections through dialog, feating and drinking. Our aims are to make a collaboration and a solo piece each for the Galataperform Festival in late march in istanbul.

So far we've talked a lot but today we started making something more concrete with a digital camera and a sound recorder .

Its good to be with a group of artists in a relaxed and friendly venue with endless possibilities of how we might take our work forward. I like to improvise so Im hoping we can devise something where we let ourselves be led by the NOW.

On tuesday 20th february we will know if our funding application to Arts Council has been okeyed.
Fingers crossed.

Galataperform Exchange

We had our second meeting at 25 Stratford Grove yesterday (5 01 08) with Ginny Reed, Paul Grimmer, Ilana Mitchell, John MacLean and David Foggo.
After setting out the parameters of the Event to perform as a group and solo for Galataperform an artist-led community based organisation in Istanbul Turkey we held a discussion about our work and collaboration in general.
We started by looking at a Black Market International Video of a durational performance they made in Germany in 2006. The discussion ranged over topics which included language and its use or non use in the performance sphere; what barriers there might be to the use of English in Turkey; roles we may wish to inhabit for our performances or ways in which we deny roles in the delivery of performances; how we might go about using space and the social space in interventionist ways. There were anecdotal evidences of previous work and questions about how we might overcome translating ideas into a new space and context.
The video prompted lots of discussion and we want to start by using a large space, possibly Star and Shadow to try out some ideas for ways in which to collaborate.
Next Meeting: 2nd february. following meeting 11th February. We will all bring something to show the group to push the discussions further.