Eavesdropping: a triple drop-in session with FABRIC and the Work Room

CROWD is a busy programme: 10 participating artists based across northern Europe paired for four weeks each of research residency, split between two different countries – and all that activity packed into just four months. September saw three residencies happen simultaneously, at FABRIC’s two sites in Nottingham and Birmingham, and at the Work Room in Glasgow, with a single zoom call dropping in to all three studios at once. It made for an unusual moment of connection, recognising the shared endeavour of CROWD, but also how individual it is to the participants and the context in which they live and work.

Drop-in 6.1: Bakani Pick-Up and Shaq George at FABRIC Nottingham 

Bakani and Shaq were the last of the pairs to begin their residencies, making visible again a key component of CROWD: how the work of the first residency is as much as anything a task of getting to know each other. For Bakani, the process raises a question: ‘Are we residencing in the right way?’ But it also offers reassurance: releasing some stress through a sense of permission that ‘it’s OK to follow the natural flow’.

What the natural flow revealed:

Shaq: We have a lot of similarities, in our practice but also as human beings, and we could poke and prod at those to figure out how to make our practices more accessible.

Bakani: We have such different cultural backgrounds that we have ways of being and ways of holding space that are also quite different. We also have ways that we relate to the same things differently, whether it be our blackness, our queerness, our choreographic practice. So it’s been a cultural exchange, diving a little bit deeper to really understand why we have a different perspective on certain things, and how we can expand some of that information into our own practice towards a more inclusive way of working.

Drop-in 6.2: Hubert Mielke and Chelsea Gordon at FABRIC Birmingham

This was Hubert and Chelsea’s second residency: ‘the period of discovery has already happened,’ says Hubert, so now they could be ‘more precise, more specific in the research’.

Places for precision:

Chelsea: What happens before we even get into the studio? Before we connect with people? How can we create a space where we aren’t just assuming what people need, but taking time to ask people? 

Hubert: Questioning who we are as artists, why are we doing things, what are the tools we are using? What exercises are we using with specific groups, how are you using your voice and way of speaking to include people and invite them into a space?

Chelsea: How important it is to have a sense of what you’re doing and who you intend to work with before you enter the process, so people are treated how they need to be and feel safe. Thinking about an inclusive practice being the default of our practice.

The influence of facilitator Adam Carver in shaping this residency becomes clear in an encounter with this list of ‘questions for people, persons, organisations, and things who do participation to ask of themselves’, emerging from Adam’s own work of self-reflection during the early pandemic period and published in November 2020.

Drop-in 6.3: Anni Puuperä and Natalia Barua at the Work Room, Glasgow

For Anni and Natalia, a change of scene from the rural isolation of Varjakka to the more complex city landscapes of Glasgow and Edinburgh provided an opportunity to explore a specific question alive in their residencies: how to sustain a restful practice?

Emergent strategies:

Anni:

Getting to know a place you’re working if it’s not your home: it allows the practice to go a bit deeper.

Working with different materials, different processes; for instance, working with wood.

Natalia:

The importance of asking for more time for different processes before meeting the community.

Assessing all the time: how am I responding to this environment? Usually I think about how a community is responding: but what feels good to me?

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It interests me that these drop-ins are open not only to participating artists and organisations but also CROWD’s funders, who can hear directly the positive effects of asking for more time and reflect on their role in making that possible. Towards the end of this triple session, Sabine Kim, cultural programs coordinator in Goethe-Institut’s Glasgow office, noted how much she had appreciated the focus on slowness and care, and how all of these residency conversations might have a single central question: what is dance, and how can we expand the idea of who can be a dancer? Which raises for me a new question: what is the ‘work’ that is acknowledged by funders, what is the labour made invisible or ignored? How can we expand the idea of what dance is doing to include making relationships, making meaning, making possibility, and see in new ways the work, and the funding, required to achieve that?