The performative presentation used the project’s purpose-built online interface to connect the symposium venue (where Paula was) and with APO33‘s Platforme Intermedia in Nantes, France (where Helen was) in real time. Fragments of performance materials were contextualised by a discussion of the co-authorship systems at play within the work. We focused particularly on the multiplicitous use of domestic space, and how this collision of public/private is used to enable new experiences of participation, collaboration and embodied experience of remote interaction that leave lingering questions around the nature and consequences of connectivity. The presentation was available to online participants to join, and included provocations for audience interaction in both the on-site and online space to demonstrate how the interactivity and live co-authorship of make-shift works.

Dave’s Quiz (part 2) was an interactive extension of make-shift’s provocation to discuss and appreciate relationships between personal, state and corporate responsibility around issues of consumption and disposal in late-capitalism. Visitors to the gallery completed the quiz on paper then used their score to select one of Dave’s video responses.

The exhibition is now over, but you can still participate in Dave’s Quiz (part 2) online by clicking here.

]]> http://www.beaford-arts.org.uk/index.php?id=250/feed/ 0 http://make-shift.net/next-live-event/ http://make-shift.net/next-live-event/#comments Wed, 30 May 2012 20:47:23 +0000 olliepearson http://79.170.44.96/make-shift.net/?p=1 On Friday 12 April at 12.10pm UK time, Paula and Helen will give a make-shift presentation at the Remote Encounters conference in Cardiff.

Click here to find your local time here; and click here to enter the live stage at the time of the presentation.

The performative presentation will use the project’s purpose-built online interface to connect the symposium venue (with Paula Crutchlow) and a location in Nantes, France (with Helen Varley Jamieson) in real time. Fragments of performance materials will be contextualised by a discussion of the co-authorship systems at play within the work. We will focus particularly on the multiplicitous use of domestic space, and how this collision of public/private is used to enable new experiences of participation, collaboration and embodied experience of remote interaction that leave lingering questions around the nature and consequences of connectivity. The presentation will be made freely available to online participants to join, and we would include provocations for audience interaction in both the on-site and online space to demonstrate how the interactivity and live co-authorship of make-shift works.

Click here to read the rest of this post on the Furtherfield site.

Organised by Brown University, the Brown International Advanced Research Institutes (BIARI) bring together academics, artists and thinkers from around the world for two weeks of presentations, speakers, performances and exchange around topics of current global interest. This year there was a total of 140 participants, of which 24 were in Theatre and Civil Society; our cohort hailed from the USA, Chile, Mexico, Argentina, Brasil, China, India, New Zealand, Spain, Kosovo, Romania, Iraq, Ethiopia, Nigeria and Kenya. All of the participants except me made presentations about their particular research or work, and we had a number of invited speakers and artists who spoke about and presented their work as well. My contribution was a make-shift event on the morning of Thursday June 20th; eight of the cohort joined me in the house while the others watched a screening at the university. For this event Paula was at the Home and the World Summit at Dartington in the UK, where a screening was also taking place for the conference attendees.

There was a lot of interest in and curiousity about make-shift, not just from the Theatre and Civil Society participants but also many others who were participating in BIARI’s institutes on climate change, population and development, and global health and HIV. I jokingly encouraged them to join online if their own programmes were boring on Thursday morning, but I aso handed out lots of leaflets and cards with the web address and explained that they could join future shows online.

Because the event was taking place from two conferences in different time zones, quite a bit of negotiation took place beforehand via email; Paula and I had stipulated that the event needed three hours (including getting to and from the houses, and discussion), so this meant a morning performance in the USA and afternoon in the UK. Unfortunately, our very full programme at BIARI squeezed my three hours down to about two and half, including 45 minutes of morning tea-time. Instead of having some discussion time with the house participants after the performance, both Paula and I needed to go immediately after the show back to our respective conferences. Although the houses weren’t far away, there would be a bit of a gap so we had arranged for the organisers at both screenings to connect with Skype and have some discussion while they waited for us. Practical difficulties at Brown – not least of all the incredible heat that day in Providence – made this challenging for the organisers, but it was still a useful connection.

The performance itself went pretty well from my perspective – I managed to remember to turn off my mic at the appropriate times and I don’t think I missed any cues. The eight house participants were very enthusiastic and entered into the spirit of a house party, as we had already spent a week and a half together and formed a bond. We didn’t have time for the usual refreshments as part of the show, but everyone had dutifully brought their plastic with them and some great kites were created. Afterwards the participants hurried back to BIARI while I packed up; by the time I got back the next presentation was about to start so it was unfortunate not to have the usual discussion. But that evening all of the house participants, plus a few others who had watched the screening, joined me for dinner and we had a great conversation with a lot of questions about the form and technology, as well as sharing of thoughts around the issues of disposability, obsolesence and consumerism.

The other presentations within the Theatre and Civil Society insitute included street theatre in India, songs of the Ethiopian revolution in 1974, the Chilean students protests last year and the ongoing border violence in Mexico. There were also performances and talks by Ana Correa and Violeta Luna, providing concrete examples of the political use of theatre – as a tool to remember, make visible and raise awareness. I have blogged in more detail about these performances and BIARI in general on the Magdalena web site.

The day after BIARI ended, we had another make-shift event in Providence, this time at the home of Ellen, a friend of my friend and colleague, theatre director Vanessa Gilbert. It was a Sunday morning – a difficult time to gather an audience, but quality is always more important than quantity and the event went very well; I found myself able to relax and take time in the work. One of the unique aspects of this event was the host’s request that no-one wear any scented cosmetics, or bring any plastic that had had such products in it, since she has high sensitivity to such chemicals; this made me think about how these chemicals in the environment must affect us all to some degree, even if we aren’t aware of it. Packaging from cosmetics is often amongst the plastic that participants bring with them – and it’s something that’s very hard to avoid; even if you’re buying chemical-free, organic hair and body products, they are nearly always packaged in plastic. And how did we package such products before plastic? Well, we didn’t have such products – or not nearly so many; most of it we made ourselves.

BIARI was a great opportunity to meet and exchange with researchers from around the world, and to present make-shift to new audiences. It was an important learning experience in terms of negotiating between two conference situations, and understanding the importance of the discussion part of the event. Many thanks to the organisers at both BIARI and the Home and the World for the opportunity and their support in the project.

Dress made from plastic bottles in the costume exhibition at the 2011 Prague Quadrennial

Most yoga pants are made of a combination of cotton and elastane (aka spandex, lycra, etc); elastane is important as it enables the fabric to stretch without losing its shape – but what exactly is it? After a bit of online research, I learned that elastane is a “polyurethane-polyurea copolymer”, first synthesised in 1937 but not used until the 1950s; it’s one of a number of synthetic fibres which are made from raw materials such as petroleum-based chemicals or petrochemicals, and its properties include abrasion resistance, washability, and resistance to perspiration and oils, making it an appealing fibre for sportswear. Since I really don’t want to buy or wear clothes made from petrochemicals, I went on a mission for elastane-free yoga pants; but after an extensive search, the only ones I could find that were really free of elastane or other synthetic fibres were the very loose, baggy style – which I don’t like and which are not so practical for yoga.

What about yoga pants made from recycled plastic bottles – surely that’s a good thing, environmentally at least? (What effect the plastic might have on our skin is a whole other question). In one shop I saw garments with large lables boasting about how many PET bottles they have kept out of landfills and oceans. Outdoor clothing company Patagonia have been using this kind of material for years, and now most of the major brands of sports clothing have jumped on the band wagon. Being ahead of the wagon, Patagonia are already touting the “reduce, repair, reuse, recycle” mantra and offering repair services and tips on how to care for your garments so that they last longer, but most other companies are still at the “buy this and feel better about discarding your plastic bottles!” stage.

On the surface, it looks like a win-win situation – keep the plastic out of the environment and get high-performing cheap clothes. However, every time these recycled plastic clothes are washed, around 2000 tiny plastic microfibres are released into the washing water and end up … in the ocean, mostly; nicely pre-broken-down to a size that can directly enter the food chain. So rather than keeping plastic out of the environment, it’s effectively removing some of the degradation steps and speeding up the increase of microplastics (less than 5mm long) in oceans and landfills. If you need more convincing science, here are some links:

• Accumulation of Microplastic on Shorelines Woldwide: Sources and Sinks
• Accumulating ‘microplastic’ threat to shores – BBC
• What’s Going Down your Plughole? The Unregulated Industry of Microplastics

It’s all fairly depressing. In situations like this I think, “what did we do in the old days?” We didn’t have nice, comfortable, sexy, stretchy sports clothes, and we didn’t even know we were missing out. As late as 1980, in phys-ed classes at my school the girls wore cotton “rompers” which had been sewn up at home by our highly-skilled mothers – red shorts with yellow stripes at the side and elastic in the leg to create the bloomer effect (and ensure no glimpse of underwear would be afforded!); there was no stretch at all in these garments and, from memory, they were quite functional (though hardly fashionable, at that time). The other thing we didn’t have back then was an excess of disposable plastic bottles. You refilled the same drink bottle every day for years and did your best not to lose it, because replacement was not done lightly. On picnics and car trips, the grown-ups had a thermos of hot water for their tea or coffee, and the kids had cordial or raro in our school drink bottles. Soft drinks were a rare treat and came in glass bottles, which when you took back to the shop earned you a whole 5 cents! Today in Germany, many glass bottles and jars can be returned with a “pfand” (refund), even some plastic bottles; but globally, plastic bottles constitute a large and growing percentage of the waste stream. Recycling them into clothing may reduce the visible polution, but it doesn’t solve the problem – it’s just another rearrangement.

The root of the problem is the production of the bottles themselves; as bottled drink companies seek to increase their profits by selling more and more product, they invent new drinks – from high-energy sports drinks to flavoured water for the “au naturel” consumer – and all of these drinks need new bottle shapes and designs. And as the bottles pile up around us, savvy entrepreneurs invent new products – such as fabric and garmets – that generate more profit for corporations from this plastic rubbish. But at the end of the day, the plastic still ends up in the environment, in one form or another. Plastic that in most cases (such as excessive packaging) we didn’t even need in the first place, and now we can’t get rid of it; all to increase corporate profits.

So: it seems impossible to find yoga pants that I like with NO elastane in them. I have t-shirts that are 100% cotton, so somewhere there must be yoga pants that are also 100% cotton – but will they sag in the bottom and the knees after a short time? And what about the environmental cost of cotton? It requires so much water … ok, can I find 100% organic bamboo yoga pants then? Except bamboo fabric often comes from Asian countries that have less stringent laws about chemical pesticides … and so on. When it comes down to it, we consumers don’t really have the choices that we want. Finally, I’ve settled for 95% cotton, 5% elastane, and I’ll wash them as infrequently as possible.

It will take 5-10 minutes to fill in and we need to complete this by Monday 30th July. Thanks very much for taking the time to do this and for everyone who has already sent us your thoughts. It’s really helping us to develop the project.

Click here to go to the survey.

Read the rest of this post on the Furtherfield site …

Read the full article here on the Theatre Bristol web site, 26 April 2012.