A Moveable Feast

The first Moveable Feast was a four-day workshop for workshop artists run from 2nd to 5th April at Dartington College of Arts under the auspices of the World of Work Unit.

A Moveable Feast is a project established to provide creative nourishment to workshop artists. It is the result of three years research and the first event received RALP Funding through South West Arts. The next phase involves more Feasts in the South West region. The aim is to value, support, connect,develop and extend workshop practice. Below is an article written for SWA about the first Feast.

You can visit the official Moveable Feast website at: http://www.themoveablefeast.co.uk

How and Why?

For twenty years my trade has been puppeteer, storyteller and workshop leader. The first show I performed was a modern myth about the old people in the shanty towns of Santiago called 'The Tomato and Condor'. It told the tale of young Juan's quest to find the fabulous tomato plant. It started with Juan asking himself, "…the question that starts all great adventures: why not?". Similarly, A Moveable Feast began with a simple question: What is Workshop?

When one embarks into the unknown, it is a good idea to gather a few reliable things. Workshop is a contemporary form. In fact, its development and ubiquity is synchronistic to the spread of the computer. If you told someone in 1950 that you were busy working on your computer and then that you were going to participate in a workshop, both phrases would be equally resistant to making sense to the listening party. In 1950 Workshop was not a popular form in which you could readily engage. It was a place where you might work. So, we know that Workshop, as a form, is in its infancy. We also know that it is an immensely successful form that permeates our lives at numerous junctions. It is now understood across the globe as a group process. However, is it a term of convenience that describes many different loosely related events or is it a term that is informed by a single strong idea?

In 1999, the Arts Council of England gave me a grant to fund a research project that was based around interviews with 17 workshop practitioners. The aim of this research was to gather material to inform a workshop event that addressed the concerns expressed in the interviews. The practitioners interviewed covered the full range of arts practice from The Royal National Theatre to a Scrapstore: from dance, theatre, music, puppetry, visual arts to poetry. The Workshop Interviews provided an overwhelming and unanimous mandate. Workshop is based on the simple but profound idea that it is a collective, experiential, creative form - a journey of discovery that aims to enable a transient community of participants to make something new for themselves. The interviewees also made it crystal clear that, despite the collective nature of a workshop, leading workshops is often an isolating activity. A Moveable Feast was set up as a gathering of a clan - workshop artists. Its aims were to acknowledge our strength of vision and purpose; to affirm our individual creativity; and to act as a catalyst to inspire new practice - a platform to shape this young form into new manifest stations.

What?

In December 2001, the World of Work Unit was awarded a Regional Arts Lottery Programme to set up, run and document A Moveable Feast. In January, with the help of DAISI and other key development agencies, we notified artists across the South West that they could apply for a four-day intensive workshop entitled, The Origins of Learning - an Undiscovered Creation Myth. An essential feature of The Feast was that a bursary would be available for experienced practitioners to compensate for potential loss of earnings and to acknowledge that each of them was adding to the available ingredients through their expertise. Within days of the information going out we had close to a hundred requests for further information and a few weeks later there were two applications for each available place on my desk. The difficult task of selection was based on many criteria: experience, having a spread of art forms and a commitment: to workshop, to development of practice and to an art form. Thirty-seven participants were selected; there was a team of three running the workshop and two documenters. In total forty-two.

Universal experiences in life - a kiss, a bruise or a smile, are most resistant to definition. Particularly, if we try to understand such everyday wonders in terms of measurement; then they exhibit a bewildering complexity. In The Feast the potential combination for all the various groupings, from one to forty-two, was just under 4 billion. This statistic describes the group at a most basic level. When a group of this size works, experiments and plays across six spaces with multi-art forms, then their encounters and experiences are irreducible to statistical analysis.

In setting up the workshop we attempted to create an authentic challenge; to provide good food and refreshment; residential places for those who needed them; reflective spaces; highly active periods and a variety of interactive and collaborative possibilities. The first morning was about presenting. Presenting the rationale, the content, the space, the materials (we had asked people to send us their 'wish list'), and to present ourselves to the group and the group to each other. We had four substantial and well equipped studio spaces plus a seminar room. We set up each of the space, through music, lighting and layout, to reflect different aspects of the workshop. I led everyone on a journey across these spaces and eventually out into the gardens, which bloomed spring resplendent. In the last studio a task was set for four groups of nine or ten to undertake before everyone was asked to walk in the grounds alone. The aim of the beginning was to open up the group's motivations and bring motivations towards meeting - to find common purpose. On returning from their walk, and a hot drink, the whole group made puppets together. From this congealing moment of making something for and of ourselves The Feast became a bubbling cauldron of inspired invention.

Each evening we met in the seminar room for a reflective session. These were the most problematic sessions for a number of reasons. The most obvious of which were tiredness and that there was just too much to try to fit in. For example, should we reflect upon the day or should we talk about our experiences outside this workshop or should we examine the theoretical foundations of our practice? The seminar room was a wild place that became The Manifesto Room. Quotations and thoughts were hung on the walls, string was woven from corner to corner, recycled receptacles were made to put more thoughts into and dreams were requested and shared. It is impossible to write about our experiences over the four days without mentioning the dreams.

One of the tasks set on the first day was to look at "…the resources buried in the dreamworld of our unconscious shadow-side." This theme embedded itself in all the explorations that went on so that the workshops, the conversations and eating together, personal dreams and reflections, the leaps of faith, the stories born and narratives explored seem somehow to have become one big dream. Learning can be said to occur when something in the unconscious becomes conscious. That which is unconscious is unknown. Someone wrote in The Manifesto Room, "Because I love the unknown." An outcome of The Feast, evident from feedback, is that it lodged in the unconscious and created a deep experience that is unfolding meaning for all of us involved.

On day two, the four groups with the tasks prepared their presentation for each other and in the afternoon we watched and participated in each other's dreamscape offerings. Day three, and different workshop leaders ran warm-ups and workshops for each other; some collaborative, some solo. To give an idea of the range in the group, there were workshops on text and superheroes, felt making, plastic bag sculpture, projected slides, masks and movement, and spontaneous painting to name a few. Later in the day I led a Jaques Le Coq exercise about standing up for the first time. Then everyone went out into the gardens for another solo exploration. On returning the final task was set.

The final day was to end with a public event entitled The Great Workshop Adventure. This was to involve workshops, a paying audience of various ages and a presentation. The last part of day three and all of day four was spent organising this event. 'Going public' in such a way was always a risk. The objectives were to undertake a real challenge, to expose our play over our time together to the scrutiny of those who it is for and to solidify our experience. There was also an onus from the RALP funding for a tangible product. In the end, although the final event polarised the leaders into those who thought it was great and those who thought it was confusing, there were several truly innovative collaborative workshops: books of spells were concocted and made; grandmothers in masks danced to African music in front of installation art; humanettes - human heads on tiny puppet bodies poked through a massive black sheet; and children made a Cornish serpent from felt and danced it through a Southern Indian Rangoli sculpture they had created. The Workshop Adventure ended with a tower of dreams - balloons with our wishes written on, tied together in a chain that stretched way over yonder above the courtyard at the heart of the old Dartington Estate. The Feast itself ended with us decorating and eating a chocolate cake together proving that the only way to have your cake is to eat it. Workshop is our cake.

Where to?

This Moveable Feast is not over yet. The four days generated so much material, expertly caught by our two imaginative documenters, that the first step is collating it all. After this we will produce a book and a video. We are also taking steps to sustain and nurture the network initiated by The Feast. There have been several enquiries for similar events to be run for other groups. Each Feast will be different so we will have to start investigating and discussing other formats. Many of those who took part have reassessed their work and are looking at expanding their practice; some have renewed confidence to pursue directions that they were tentative about; new collaborations have been born; and work has been generated.

Perhaps most importantly a marker has been put down. A marker that says that:
There is an art and craft to being a workshopper
This art deserves recognition and support

This art is a contemporary form born out of a popular need for community and creativity

There is a need for inspirational collective time and space outside the economic imperative of the next gig so workshoppers
can develop their work together
Workshop is a developing form

Life is lived through immeasurable time units that we call moments. A participant wrote about A Moveable Feast, "Can't think of how to say thank you in words which would really convey it. Think of all the stars in the night, imagine if they all shone like the sun: all that heat is the warmth of the memory." It was a momentous occasion.