Fury1/FuryZ // Last Yearz Interesting Negro, Rowdy SS and Shelley Parker

Fury1

Standing in a club space with occasional flashes to illuminate the dancing body and the active DJ. Wielded by the audience, beams of torchlight tracing back the gaze and the slow traverse of the space by a single figure on the floor, watched over by the music. Snatches of text singing out of the audio blur. 

FuryZ

Sitting on a dance floor, staring up at the dancer weaving between the crowd and moving on the high podium. A whispered negotiation of support leading to a step up the back of a kneeling man. Furious dance filled with flashes of neon colour. Transitions across the floor to these stages as much a part of its content as what happens up there.

Fury1/FuryZ

In both, the music pounding through my chest as it does through the body of the dancer. Involuntary swaying and nodding around the central defiance of the performer, the audience perhaps unsure of their expected role but staring away. Left in the moment, outside but in.

In both, the intricacies of experience traced across the body by the eyes of those watching. An assertion of experience, of difference and sameness marked by race/gender/sex/ability. Each of the pieces unstable in its liveness and immediate in its impact.

Sound as a partner not accompaniment, responsive to the movement of the crowd as much as the journey of the dancer. Blurring the border between ‘dance’ and ‘Dance’, the questions of form and participation that define and insist on integrity to established forms. 

- Lewis Church

Links relevant to this diagnosis:

Last Yearz Interesting Negro (Jamila Johnson-Small) - Fury1/FuryZ

Rowdy SS (Soundcloud)

Shelley Parker (Soundcloud)

Different Angles - AQNB

In Conversation with Last Yearz Interesting Negro - Skin Deep

Some Thoughts on Capital-D Dance - Movement Research

Mix & Move // GL4 Festival

GL4 are based in the heart of the Matson Estate, bringing theatre and art into the local community and encouraging its development there. Through the support of Strike A Light and other partners, GL4 hosted their first entirely independent event Mix & Move at Robinswood Primary School, as part of their sister festival to Strike A Light 2018. The assembly hall was packed with an audience of proud and engaged parents and supporters, who gathered to be part of a true demonstration of grassroots, locally focused arts provision.

GL4’s arts practice is based around collaboration with artists and investment in the young people of Matson. Gloucester beatboxers 5 Mics and RISE Youth Bristol have been working alongside them in after school clubs and workshops, teaching them skills and techniques to express themselves here in their first public performance. The beatboxers take to the stage as GL4 Beats and are astoundingly good, producing sounds that you’d never know could come from a human body. Not only is the music they’re making a skill that they have learnt fresh for themselves, but by performing it to their parents and other members of the community they show them too. Their fierce little group later form a ‘10 Mics’ super group with their teachers from 5 Mics to hype up the crowd with their skill and confidence.

Similarly, the small children learning their first dance steps and performing for their parents are shown by the performers from RISE where their practicing could lead. They see the kind of movement that these more experienced dancers perform, and the potential of that work to hold the attention of an audience. This fact, that the artists teaching these young people perform alongside them is striking – a primary school hall hosting accomplished dancers and professional musicians. As the proportion of young people with access to arts sessions in schools and colleges falls, events like Mix & Move provide something to aspire to for the young people first starting out in their journey as artists, and shows that exciting performance work can be as at home in Matson as anywhere else.

- Lewis Church

Links relevant to this diagnosis:

Mix & Move - GL4 CIC

ACE Children and Young People

Creative Subjects Being Squeezed - BBC News

Proportion of Students Taking Arts Subjects Falls - Guardian (2017)

6 Key Points from ACE's Youth Consultation - IVE

Strike A Light Charity Fundraising Gala

TSOTF are currently visiting Strike A Light Festival (SALF), an organisation that works 'to make Gloucester a city with a vibrant culture for all’. Their Charity Fundraising Gala (the first event of the 2018 festival) aimed to bring together the communities who participate, facilitate and have enjoyed the impact of their efforts to energise and sustain culture for residents of Gloucester - to generate support to ensure it can continue to build on the successes of its 10-year history. 

In 2017 SALF became the first Gloucester based organisation to become an Arts Council England National Portfolio Organisation, and have also been awarded support from the Esmée Fairbairn and Barnwood Trusts. This event however served as a reminder of the precarious nature of arts funding in the UK, and that a firm following, giving what they can, if they can, is incredibly important to a festivals ability to flourish and sustain its offer. 

Directors Sarah Blowers and Emma-Jane Benning greeted attendees as thought they were being invited into their home, coming in to share their excitement and meet the artists and teams involved. There was also a more serious mission: the chance to bid on auctioned items to supplement their fundraising and directly support their programme. The promise was that every £1 raised was to be match by the Arts Council. 

In introducing their first guest artist Viv Gordon and describing the terrain her work explores, Blowers said, ‘like Children In Need and other charity events we are not afraid to talk about difficult subject tonight’. This is the kind of work that is important to SALF, and artists they champion through their programming, producing and participation strands. Gordon’s work illustrated this as an artist & arts and mental health campaigner whose work discusses her lived experience of mental health, trauma and childhood sexual abuse. 

Gordon presented work-in-progress material from her new piece, MasterShit, currently in development with theatre makers Tom Roden, Alice Roots and Vic Llewellyn, which takes the dystopian frame of Master Chef as its starting point. The result, even at this early stage, was an affecting cacophony of ideas and textures presented as fragments of music, movement and text. The care and respect given by each performer to the material was palpable. This was something Blowers also highlighted as a key consideration in supporting the making of work dealing with difficult, real stories, considering care across the artists, producers and audiences involved. If the audience felt triggered in anyway they were assured they could leave the sharing and it was important that they did. From this glimpse of MasterShit, audience members saw that something powerful was being ‘cooked up’ by Gordon and team through the support  of SALF. It served as an example of the need and appetite of SALF to not just present the easy but tackle the necessary. 

After dinner there were conversations with artist and festival team hosts, including the Directors of GL4 Sarah O'Donnell and Naomi Draper, an arts organisation running from the Matson Estate. They are now their own organisation and Strike A Light's sister festival, programming, producing and supporting incoming and local artists and developing audiences around the estate where they live. Young beatboxers 5 Mics gave a flavour of their talents and a glimpse of new material from the company who are making their first theatre piece with support from SALF.

The night was celebratory and in the asking for support shone a light on the need for those who can to support in ways they can, whether volunteering, buying tickets or donating. They say nothing is certain, especially in regards to funding, but what was clear is that SALF are certainly making an impact in Gloucester. 

- Tracy Gentles

Links relevant to this diagnosis:

Strike A Light

Viv Gordon

GL4

5 Mics

Arts Sponsorship and Funding Pressures - Guardian