This week brings us the last Friday of the month again ...gosh they come around quick !
So, that means it's Barefooters meeting time , so lets get set to be creative.
The evening session will be 3 hours this month.
6 - 7pm - time for tea and introduce the programme of Standstill and what will be happening.
7 - 9pm will be two practical hands-on workshops
- " Shadow Stories "
- " Things Are Not What They Seem "
All elements are devised to help us make lots of exciting stuff towards the final December event.....these are just 2 of the 12 interventions of Winter involved in Standstill.
Note there will be a full programme of Standstill announced for activity within the next few weeks, all artforms, all levels of artistic abilities welcomed to join in, even if you've not been before its never too late to get involved.
- 19 Barracks Square (upstairs ....just come in the door will be open)
- Barracks Road
- Newcastle under Lyme
- Staffordshire
Hope you can come along ...see you there.
3 comments:
Hi, pretty short notice this--but it's supposed to be more of a companion piece--pre-history-type thing to accompany, rather than 'alter' aspects of Standstill (plus i misplaced my notes and --spent a week trying to relocate them before deciding to reconstruct the jist from meme)
The piece itself is half-writing, half, i suppose, exposition--so a half-built edifice. I took the 'sun departure' thing and introduced another element into the mix and looked at one or two of the abstract-ish implications of 'seeing' across time, with a view to leading into the 're-seeing'-historical and phenomenal--of Standstill.
If anything here's useful in of itself, please utilise
'Once upon a time, when the modern world was still phosphoric light glinting out from the dark ages, every season had its fill of sunlight. In the castles and monasteries were corridors filled with liquid shadow and hallways illuminated by small jewelled machines in bulbs like bonbons, and they looked up to the painted guilded archways or down to their feast.
But in the villages and in the city-states, farmers and guilders alike, the people believed in the sky and seasons, in the rhythm of growth and entropy, and in the spirits held in the woods, fields and in the Sun’s inimitable power.
This natural faith became and grew at once in their observation of phenomena—the wheatsheaf, the prism of colours through a cunning blown glass a sorcery of causes and effects shared by telepathy , not a language but a series of gestures like mass memory, like the heart, and at its heart the sun which exposed the dying earth which still filled them with peace.
But from the earth came a Princess, who had spread her myth about with whispers as Persephone, the story of the seasons. In reality, for centuries she had been filled with a painful squell of melancholy about her condition, doomed to be seen all the ever-long days from the first harvest as dusty and wizened. Time had not given her philosophy’s consolation; no making virtue of necessity but ever-sharpening pangs to draw a veil over herself in myth and dimmed light.
Now, mankind’s heart was set on conquering the seasons and conquering themselves, filled with a splendid aspiration of logic that left them beholden to no mystery, whether illness or the elements. Time was spent in the theology of progress, except for the lame and the mystic, and into this chatter of technology and techno-teleology came the voice of the Princess and her familiars, stirring on the blind irradiance. Whilst once she and they had been seen and recognised, now from the woods, those hurrying through large-forgetting sight of eyes of knowledge barely glimpsed at those things amidst the trees and then with a dim wonder, excavating with microscopes from rather than old knowledge and spades.
Man’s hidden wish came true—tied no longer to the seasons the sun had retreated, and for a while he was free to make religions of Forms, or to strive for dreams of self-betterment—all that kept open the old ways of seeing with leaps of imagination, which turned the sun into a deity , metaphor and constellation alike. Indeed the constellations were mapped out from without rather than being lunar-patterns of celestial bodies with their own intelligence to be marvelled at and appeased.
In the Yuletide darkness, one transfigured by the new bulbs which seemed to replace their sunlit eyes, families became replaced by shadows and serialisation mythologies which would soon become the stuff of greetings cards. Jollity was given a name, a set of illustrative diagrams, and existed in the future-vision, the longing-vision and the money-vision variously of philanthropists, entertainer snad the burgeoning new businesses who kept the springing city’s lights on and who pressed out the penny dreadfuls which sketched out darkly the iridescent sense of ‘something else’ out amongst teh frost, pretty and terrible alike.
On the edges of the city, burning bright kinesic carousels began to spring over the twigs to fill the murky-green spaces where once had lain bogs and peats and skeletal leaves. The frost painted on their sides is all pink and effervescent; the colours are exemplified by a blooming red tint, just outside nature’s pallete. The Princess, who has whispered up these things like the conjurers around the stalls in a sleigh sleight of hand to distract from the sky, cannot abide the mirror-sight of leaf-crumbles and wintry earth-tones.
But now sun’s retreat-faces that don’t scrutinise her, she’s free to wear a veil-to be hidden behind sweet-lights and theatrics. The moon culture had arrived.
Whilst ‘hope’ remained of progress-in ceramic mixers and fin de siècle tomes alike--, imagination became more and more static, tied into the transforming of the next device rather than that first unsteady moment of wishing in which the world suddenly became dark and man stood at the threshold—only the faint glimmers of urban gothics set around festivals and the mauzy curvature of faces in baubles with only the green and blue will-o-wisp fiarylights for illumination in the evening time, the world muffled away behind far-doors recall what is, whilst around tables when speeches have ended and festivals are erased in favour of closeness itself , the soundless folk-music in contrast to the piped fairground dizziness, did the past become recalled as Living.
Summer brings crops, whilst Winter a sleepy darkness which breeds imaginary pieces.
Frost and mist evenings lead to insularity-lead to projections onto the dark whilst summer you can hold in hand the ripeness right before the first curdling. Summer brings melatonin, Winter melancholia offset by egg-nog— those creatures in the fields and rams are alive and also hidden-a fine position for them and this new Persephone and her party dress mirages. The Princess she is frail as impressions themselves.
Observing the thinning snow-clouds torn by the invisible fumes, like those invisible eyes in the lanes, and the fading stories told by those snow freezes across the sky like paper-trails or Icelandic springs, only the dreamers on their backs were able to decipher them—only the suspended.
Fake snow sprung from montages to disguise the soil underfoot, the bare earth, whilst in the Tv light by the fifties the made-up Persephone could appear glamorous at 24 lies a second. Underneath the archways from the pebble-stone and concrete sprung plastic flowers and carpets of dotted wrapping paper. The busker, from flat-cap whistle to i-pod synch, over the 20th C, with his timbre of need, the grain of frozen winter , just rubs against the jingle song with the echo-chamber smashed cheap jewels-box piped muzak. Haunted.
Along the lanes just outside the city, we pass in cars designed to turn time into blurs, even as dreamers press themselves against the fogged membrane screens to the snow-ball accumulating time gathered in the rocks and through the mist and watch the lanterns and cats eyes turn into the mysterious why for which we lost any direct sign, inchoate as—love, and desolate too as the pinch of ice-- caught in-between the deep-hearted skyline tributes to modernity always pushing forth –which magnified in tenements and basements like old hut habitations. Those artistic sympathies of brief frozen patches which bring us to the universe and noticing the coiled air-droplets brief taste of the Real
We are caught in Memoryless memories of tunes, political movements, and night-time shivers all alike, together with a limbic impulse to reach out, at the risk of chilling fingers, unshaping the day’s statutory obligations of form and Present-type giving. Rather than returning to the equilibrium which would bring the sun back, plastic issues become dense-weighted, imaginatively stuffed, with information, and around us shadows are like puppets, not mocking but mournful extensions of ourselves as hearth-deities.
The Princess is surface level, lower-world easiness, eyes evaded, the thing which is hidden behind cliché and kitsch and the voice which lies to slicken the day to say that ‘art doesn’t matter’ and ‘you’re already connecting’ and which is pained by its own untruth... is us too.
Her traces leave the season in monochrome, baubles opened up to reveal black purses and anarchy signs as decorations, are always betraying back their roots in fairytales and fairytales in us, in our scepticism and our unquestioning casual faith in routine.
The solution; not pleading, invoking, but ‘being’; the settling before the picture, the energy of the picture that is multiple descriptions, that is itself, is the means—the means at that moment we need to want, fully Stood-still before the polyvocal-telling that is the imagination. The roving-Standstill psychic imagining, conjured up by the new Heliocentra, who is the pre-condition element in us crystallised '
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