Maynard Festival 3: Family Dances
Abercych Village Hall & 2 Penrhiw, Abercych
15 – 16 May 2015
Festival Pass: £30/£20
To Book: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/maynard-3-family-dances-tickets-16402872433
Here in the village of Abercych, west Wales, we are developing and curating a body of Dance dialogues that promote and explore different ideas and interpretations of place and identity. This two-day Festival asks how artists engage with communities and people across the generations – including different ideas of ‘family’ – in the agency of making art, and specifically dance.
We hope the festival will seed a long term participatory Dance project with people from the lower Teifi valley.
Featuring the work of Cai Tomos, Jane Mason, Joanna Young, Siriol Joyner, Elspeth Owen, Alex Reuben, Mammalian Diving Reflex, Lone Twin and Simon Whitehead.
Programme
Friday 15 May, 7.30pm
Film screening (Admission £4, included in Festival Pass)
Routes: Dancing to New Orleans (48′) + Q&A with director Alex Reuben
“Top 20 Films of the Decade – Geoff Andrew (BFI/Time Out)
Top 5 Cinematic Moments of the Year – Jason Wood (Little White Lies/Curzon)
Special Mention Top 5 Movies of the Year – Sight Sound
‘As a DJ, people asked me where I learned to dance? I didn’t know so I went to find out’ – Alex Reuben
‘Commissioned by Arts Council England, Alex Reuben’s debut feature Routes, is a road movie through the dance and music of the American Deep South. Inspired by Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music (and evocative of Maya Deren’s seminal Meshes Of The Afternoon), Reuben’s film offers an idiosyncratic documentation of lesser-known forms of American culture, and the extraordinary dancing Americans of the Deep South. From North Carolina to the Holy Grail of his childhood hero, Fats Domino, and the Jazz of New Orleans, Reuben captured on the road Appalachian Bluegrass, Clogging, Mississippi Fife and Drum Blues, Krumping, Memphis Hip-Hop, Indian Smoke Dance, Louisiana Cajun, Zydeco and Swamp Pop, all in a vivid stream of sound and vision.’ – Picturehouse Cinemas
‘Sexy, funny, socio-politically spot-on, and thrillingly alert and alive in its presentation of popular American music and dance.’ – Geoff Andrew, Time Out”
Saturday 16 May from 10am
Workshop:
Led by Siriol Joyner with Stirling Steward and Elspeth Owen
Open to Festival Pass-holders and free to local families.
This is a workshop for individuals of all ages and for families: we will gather together in the village hall to move, play and create together. This will be a space to explore through dancing, drawing, experimenting with objects, building dens and spaces that we can move within. There will be freedom to explore individually and in small groups as well as whole group activities: experimenting through moving together, following our curiosities, creating environments.
Please bring an object with you that you are happy to share with the group and to be used as part of the workshop, this might be a blanket, a stone, a book, a hat, shells from the beach….
We will begin and end the session with a group activity, please arrive with plenty of time to get settled in.
This is an open and informal space where rest, reading, tea and even sleeping is encouraged alongside dancing, making sounds, drawing and building.
With the support of ‘What’s Welsh for ‘Performance”?
Elspeth Owen – a Conversation Elspeth Owen is an artist who lives and work in Grantchester near Cambridge – her workshop is the former village cricket pavilion and her most familiar material is clay. Inspired in part by the Women’s Peace Camp at Greenham, she has increasingly moved aside from making finished objects and into work where the passage of time, the live process, is a key element.
“Tender, direct, resilient, with a thin skin: that is how I think my work may touch you. To sustain working in this way means my remaining open to the emotions and sensations of an ordinary life. I keep slipping between categories – life, art, therapy, play, ritual – and find that I’m usually in more than one at a time, and with something up my sleeve!”
Between 10th of August 2014 and 31st of July 2015 there are 13 full moons. During this time, Elspeth is living and making a work entitled ON the OFF-CHANCE. She is living ‘as if’ on the road, unhitched from all push button & on-off devices at home and at the pavilion, greenly delivering moon dishes around the country, returning to mark each full moon beside the river Cam in Grantchester. Honing old skills, dropping-by, scavenging, dreaming, making fire, keeping in touch only in person or by post.
Siriol and Elspeth met in 2014 while on a workshop about chance, since then they have been exchanging letters and phone calls about walking, intergenerational arts practices, the seasons, the nature of light, electricity, “breakfast foxtrots” and the meeting of rivers. We are pleased to welcome Elspeth to Abercych and Maynard to share her practice.
Performance:
Gwrando tu hwnt i Wrando’/ Listening beyond the listening’ by Cai Tomos
Cai and Buddug met 5 years ago at the beginning of a regular movement and improvisation class that Cai began facilitating. Over the last year they have exchanged stories, movements and personal histories with the intention of sharing and finding a choreographic voice for Buddug’s solo. This solo explores the revealing of lived experience, expression and narrative. Past and present. The starting point was Buddug’s experience of light, and Buddug’s experience of listening as her sight deteriorated, both in moving around in the world, and in her life.
Installation at 2 Penrhiw:
Under Dark Skies by Joanna Young
The piece explores ideas of scale and time and what it means for people to look up at the night sky. Under Dark Skies was originally Commissioned by Foundation for Community Dance and produced by Powys Dance for the People Dancing Festival in Cardiff. Reconfigured for a domestic space in Abercych.
Talk: Jane Mason
Jane reflects on her recent project ‘a dance at home’ commissioned by Dance4.
The project explored different attitudes and relationships to ‘home’ and involved three live performances by homeowners in four homes using movement, story-telling and personal objects to connect themes of identity, memory and responsibility.
Films:
Mammalian Diving Reflex – Haircuts for Children
Simon Whitehead
Lone Twin – Street Dance
Jessica Lerner – me-andmyson
Made between oct 2011 – may 2012 as a multi screen installation and re-worked for Maynard 3:The Family Dances as a short film
Featuring Jessica Lerner and her son, Isaac Sucha Thomas
“This work presents a kinaesthetic relationship between mother and son, as he grows from baby to toddler. It presents intimate and detailed performances of their sensing of reality through movement. The dynamic of presence moves from everyday interactions to abstract movement. The mother is holding the performance space and her child within it and through this deconstructing the dimensions of conscious performance.
I have inhabited a shared creative space with Isaac from age twenty one months for six months. I am exploring my performance process with Isaac, and use my experience of being in film to set up situations for filmic language. In the experience of filming, just setting up a camera myself and pressing on, duration has become an important part of the work. For example in the Sleeping Footage I have made, I filmed myself holding Isaac asleep, rocking him, moving from standing to sitting, to attempting to lay him down and him waking. Merleau-Ponty talked of a “consciousness reverberating in movement” I aim to develop an aesthetic that is ‘situation specific’. So using the presence of the body and movement, I present a situation that marks my present life relationships.” JL
Circle Discussion
Evening Twmpath / Village Social Dance, 7.30pm
with The Gower Allstars and Julie Murphy (Admission £6, included in Festival Pass)
Cafe by Wild Pickings
It really helps us with administration if you can register and pay using Eventbrite, but if this is difficult for you, please e-mail Rhowan rhoalleyne@gmail.com
For an accommodation list, please see: http://www.may-nard.org/accommodation-list