Art by Jasmine Devlin
Photo by the artist.

As a student studying, working and living within the art world, Creative Industries are a very important place to be involved. As part of my second year course at York St John University, we are required to find placement somewhere within the ‘Creative Industries’, particularly a place where we feel our career aspirations may lead.

My practice is very much Fine Art based, concentrating on installation work which provokes thoughts and experiences within the viewer. I straight away saw a connection between working with different artists and creative groups to support their projects and my own ideas and work. This placement and connection with Caroline and Luxi will, I think, be a very beneficial long lasting and important one.

I was introduced to Caroline Pearce through a mutual friend, Artist Francesca Hudson, and was met with great enthusiasm and exciting ideas for placement opportunities.

Being a manager and producer working across many art forms and projects, with a specialism in business and marketing, is an area which is completely new to me, but something I think will be very important for me to farmilliarise myself with for the future.

One of the main benefits of this placement was absolutely seeing the many different types of art practice which Luxi works with, and the huge amount of possibilities and opportunities art and culture can have within the community and within the world beyond education.

The types of tasks involved included, press, marketing, social and traditional media, market research, sourcing new customers, sourcing competitions and potential galleries, attending arts and understanding the pros, cons and general realities of making a living in the arts.

There was a lot of discussion on creative theories, different artists and the audience of art. It was so refreshing and motivating speaking to someone outside the Fine Art boundaries and seeing the different ideas and interests of someone so in-the-know within the Creative Industries platform. Caroline took me under her wing and along to meet the Head of Arts for Newcastle, which was a privilege and a very interesting experience listening to the converstaion between them discussing past projects and possible future ones. We then collaborated on some decision making and chose some of the art work for Nicole Vivien Watson’s performance scheduled for the project ‘Auricular’ scheduled  at BALTIC 39 at the end of June

Research and Marketing was a large part of the week, and I learnt how to research adverts for projects and performances, and research press opportunities, as well as learning how to write limited blurbs for documents such as leaflets, posters and press releases. These processes gave me an interesting insight into something which I would love to learn.

We took a trip to the Theatre Royal where I was able to see how Caroline has helped develop a dance project for the Salamander event, which will happen as part of Festival of the North East in June. It was then very apparent that people approach Luxi and Caroline to help support their ideas and help manage their time, contacts, budget and ideas, which is a very important role to play and needs to be done in each any creative project.

One day we were cutting out paper shapes, the next day we met with heads of cultural organisations and had lunch out, another day it was all writing reports at the computer.  I am really looking forward to seeing Gillie Kleiman’s show A Lyrical Dance Concert and learning more about performance at GIFT Festival.

From working with Caroline and having done other different placements previously it is very clear to me the different routes working in the Creative Industries can take. I will absolutely be attending any of the projects Luxi take on when I can, and I intend to broaden my Creative Industries knowledge and experiences. I am ecstatically happy with how my placement has gone and have a lot of inspiration to take with me wherever my career may lead. To any student or person with an interest in art, I would highly recommend contacting places you are interested in to see how they work and what you can learn. I think that Caroline’s job and Luxi as a whole is a very beneficial company, and there is a huge opportunity for it to become something very popular and really special. Thank you Caroline and thank you Luxi.

If you, like us, are interested in pushing the boundaries of collaboration, keep an eye out for Happy Accidents, our project working with makers of different artforms to explore collaborative processes and especially how different people consider their audiences.

If you want to see a play in an amazing warehouse, you should book tickets for Alice in Bed which we are producing with Tender Buttons.  Tess Denman-Cleaver is a brilliant, young director who has been working with artists and community groups for two years to prepare for the production.  Rehearsals start later this month and performances are from Wednesday 27th February to Sunday 3rd march.  Tickets are really scarce so if you are interested, I suggest you book now.

Later this year we are planning a host of projects in Darlington, not least The Jabberwocky Market.  2013 marks the 150th birthday of the town’s Indoor Market so it’s overdue a bit of theatre, not that daily happenings there aren’t performance enough.

Dancers are still really close to our hearts and we are finding ways to support professional development opportunities for the excellent artists we work with, making links with some of the best international training and performance spaces and helping shows made here to travel.

That’s all for now, but before I go, I’d like to publicly thank some of the people who have been extremely supportive during our first year…  Peter Flynn and Katherine Banner our amazing board, Stephen Wiper, Lynda Winstanley and Lyndsey Middleton, everyone involved in If These Walls Could Dance, Amanda Drago and Arts Council England, Jeanne Hale for her unerring support, Natalie Querol and Caroline Routh, Hannah Clarke-Stamp, Sarah Hearn and all the dancers from Dance Nest, Heather Knight and Teresa Threadgall, James Froment and Alison Rigby for variously picking up the technicalities and some wonderful artists, in no particular order, Emma Beach, Lynn Campbell, Peter Groom, Gillie Kleiman, Michael Spenceley, Nicole Vivien Watson.  As ever in these things this list could go on and hopefully it will, this year.

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Other playwrights (last year and this) include Dennis Kelly, Mark Ravenhill and Neil LaBute. It’s a hell of a roll-call. And what unifies them is anger: at the Government’s response to the economic crisis, at their punishment of the poor and the vulnerable for the crimes of the super-rich, at their ignoring of a growing environmental catastrophe and the many lessons of history, at their sheer maddening stupid venality. They – we – are bloody furious. Fury makes for phenomenal, galvanising art. Think Guernica. Think Mother Courage and Her Children. Think Cathy Come Home.

The onstage role in Fragile was played in last year’s Edinburgh Theatre Uncut by Kieran Hurley, who wrote the piece I’m directing for this year’s event, London 2012: Glasgow. You may not of heard of Kieran, but he’s a bit of an emerging megastar north of the border. His show Beats was named Best Play at this year’s Critics Awards for Theatre in Scotland, and when his Theatre Uncut play was first read at the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh, Phill Jupitus played one of the parts. His show Hitch is one of the most beautiful, heartfelt and downright enjoyable things I’ve ever seen in a theatre – made all the more meaningful by its subject-matter, Kieran’s own hitch-hike to the G8 summit in L’Aquila, Italy.

His Theatre Uncut play London 2012: Glasgow is a brilliant, scabrous satirical romp through some of the politics of national self-presentation (and self-preservation) that made this year’s Olympics, however thrilling the sporting spectacle, a nauseating exercise in the manufacture of corporatist ideology. It superbly nails the puerile metropolitan pomposity behind that massive branding project. Sure, London had a lot to be proud of (although I don’t know that Kieran necessarily agrees). But it also had loads to be ashamed of. That pomposity, that shame, are balloons delightfully popped by Kieran’s wicked satirical play.

What Fragile, London 2012: Glasgow and many of the other Theatre Uncut plays from both years share is a remarkable ability to distill their justified anger into something that gives tremendous artistic pleasure. And it does so while absolutely communicating that anger. You have to go along to your nearest Theatre Uncut event. You might even want to get involved. This situation is all fucked up, and it has to change. So be part of that change.” - Daniel Bye

Theatre Uncut events are taking place across the world from 12-18 November 2012

“Living Postcards began in the summer of 2012. I wanted to create short pieces that could be filmed at locations around the region. I was keen to make something that was boldly expressive and could allow whatever it was that we wanted to say, to become possible. At the start of the process often, if not always, we don’t know what it is we are making and it’s really the meeting of people in the studio that kicks off the process.

We worked on this project with a collection of different types of performers, dancer Beth Loughran, actor Jen Carss, film maker Joe Youngman and myself.

We started with nothing, just ourselves and the idea of making something. I come with very small ideas; perhaps ‘bits of things’ that I think are useful. With Living Postcards it was pictures of places. I came across photographs of Berlin in 1945, just after the war had ended and I was struck by these. One in particular, of a woman outside her shell of an apartment block, in a swimming costume, hair fixed, watering her plants. This was charming to me; the care she takes with the plants in light of her home behind her was such an intriguing contrast and seemed to say something.

The photographs become starting points for us; I asked the performers to create responses to these photographs. These can lead to anything, movements, stories or performed images and I wanted to eventually combine all these things to create pieces where dancers spoke and actors moved and could express themselves however they want.

We spent a lot of the rehearsal time just exploring, I ask a lot of questions and we make a lot of material. Invariably most of this ends up not being used in the piece but it does give us a huge collection from which to pick things we like which are then worked to create the piece. The locations were a huge part in the making of these films. We had to find places that would allow the things we had made to happen. We were lucky to be able to film in some fantastic locations from all around the region and the settings were so beautiful, we were thrilled.

We enjoyed making these short films very much and the freedom given to us by everyone involved to make what we wanted was so generous and kind, and I’d like to thank everybody.

So thankyou, and here’s to more.”

*To clarify, If These Walls Could Dance has been created by a wonderful team, led by Director, Gary Kitching with Dance and Choreography by Emma Beach and Debbie Waistell.