You are currently browsing the monthly archive for February, 2007.
Today the Arvon Blog visits the British Library via YouTube - we bring you a video recording of a special event held at the UK’s great national library in 2005. Click on the play button to watch the “human gramophones” revel in language…
Eight actors aged 12 to 70 were transformed into ‘human gramophones’ who performed pieces inspired by recordings of ‘nonsense’ in the English language from the Drama and Literature collection of the Sound Archive. The source material ranged from historical recordings of experimental literature read by their authors (James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Edith Sitwell, etc) or interpreted by acclaimed voice actors (Peter Pears, David Davis, etc) to recordings of ’sound poetry’ from the 70s and recordings by British comedians (Spike Milligan, etc).
The ‘human gramophones’ hissed, skipped, slowed down or got caught in a groove. It was up to the audience to keep winding up the ‘human gramophones’ and to place their fingers on the records to play them. A sonic ‘garden’ was thus created in the centre of the British Library, with different voices coming from all directions intoning, muttering, singing, proclaiming…
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The picture was taken by photographer Matthew Anderson at Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. The installation is Rachel Whiteread’s EMBANKMENT - an enormous art piece that comprises 14,000 casts of different sized boxes.
Imagine you are in an white open space so endless that it unrolls like a blank page, as far as the eye can see. Would you have the words to fill this wilderness? You’re at the place where the global climate is born and where 900,000 years of history lies beneath your feet as you cross the snow.
This is precisely how landscape artist Chris Drury describes Antarctica where he’s living and working for 3 months in his daily blog. Go to his blog and you can see how he’s recording in words and photographs, literally his impressions on the landscape: that’s how Chris describes his work - as making marks in the snow and ice. You can see a fingerprint whorl made by dusting snow off the blue ice with a dustpan and brush. Or a wind vortex made by the blades of the skidoo in fresh snow. This white wilderness offers an endless landscape of creative possibilities.
As I sit reading his blog, it seems a million miles from what we do at Arvon. But is it? In a way, what Antarctica is offering is the ultimate extreme of the Arvon dream: the space and time to create and write. Without space and time – you can’t write, let alone explore your imagination and creativity with the freeplay they deserve and demand. Creativity is dependent on these twin dimensions: Einstein must have realised this when he inspired physics to take a creative leap into new ways of scientifically describing the world.
But creativity is also inspired by constraints and adversity too. Chris’s time at Antarctica will have to end. You will have to finish your course. The day will end. We all have no choice but to accept our limits and then find freedom within them. Every morning for the past 2 weeks I have been waking up and the first thing I do before coming to work here at Arvon HQ is read a chapter from a book by Robert Harbison called Eccentric Spaces.
It’s inspiring, extraordinary and challenging – crossing all the boundaries between poetry, philosophy, architecture and fiction. I am trying to make an art piece inspired by it – I won’t divulge what just yet. The book sets my imagination racing, as I cycle to work, blown by Robert Harbison’s words and thoughts which I then have to push aside when I get down to work here. At weekends, I squirrel time to think about his writing more and see where it leads me.
But Robert’s book, like Chris’s work, or my musings, are limited and driven as much by constraints as well as by freedom too. Eccentric Spaces was written when Robert was alone in America, friendless, without a publisher or a job and money. He was told his book was unpublishable. In the end, it is the dream of freedom, which we can never attain, which drives us all to stretch our wings creatively. That’s what brings us real freedom.
With my best wishes to you - Ariane Koek, Director/Arvon
Ariane is reading/listening to/watching…
Non Fiction Eccentric Spaces by Robert Harbison
Poetry Decreation by Anne Carson
Theatre Faust by Punchdrunk Theatre
Film Babel
Music Ys – Joanna Newsom
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Once upon a time, way back in September 2005, we ran a Writers Retreat at Totleigh Barton. The participants got so much from the experience and also made such good friends that they asked whether they could hire Totleigh Barton for a week to get together again and carry on writing. So they came back the next January, then again in June and recently in January this year. The group is ever-changing: when some writers can’t make the dates, other writers – people met on other Arvon courses and contacts made through writing networks – are invited to make up a full house.
The DIY Group has gone from strength to strength and Totleigh Barton is a place where they all love to meet up and work, play and cook up fantastic food in the Totleigh kitchen! This is so much what Arvon is about: likeminded people getting together and having an audience for their work and benefiting from peer feedback during the week.
Time to write, talk, read and walk.
DIY folk are an eclectic bunch and their writing encompasses Poetry, Prose, Writing for Children, Theatre, Radio and Screen. One of the members of the group, Anne Greer, was pleased to announce that a short story she had written had been accepted and was to be broadcast on Woman’s Hour the very week that DIY were with us, and so we were all privileged to tune in to Radio 4 with our friend, the author! Can’t get much better than that!
With best wishes from Arvon’s pre-Domesday thatched cottage in Devon, Totleigh Barton
Huib and Esther (Centre Directors) and Julia (senior administrator)
