The Art of Listening

I met John Riches, our Creative Agent, very briefly this afternoon for a chat about our progress as a School of Creativity. We had a very productive talk, mostly about what we might hope to achieve by the end of this academic year and what our ambitions for next year might be. I think we are both now in agreement that the work this summer, that will contribute to you all hopefully achieving an Arts Mark Silver Award, might be better conceived as a series of smaller events/happenings/interventions rather than one huge one. Here are some ideas for you to mull over before next Tuesday's meeting:

• I am hoping to talk to an ex student who is now a playwright and theatre director about the possibility of Tallis hosting a performance of a new improvised piece called "Home" by the company Tangled Feet.
• We could commission a range of artists to respond to the school environment using a variety of strategies (sound, illustration, graffiti etc.) so that work is installed at the weekend and we return to unexplained and surprising spaces on Monday morning
• We could commission the Sixth Form Guerilla Art squad under the direction of our artist in residence Michael Shaw, to complete a series of interventions in the spaces of the current building. They have already developed some work along these lines and I can ask Mike (who is a very respected sound artist in his own right) to tell us more about what they've been doing at a future meeting.
• We could work with a photographer to create unusual photographic representations of the building
  
• We could present our manifesto for a Creative Tallis to parents at a special event and ask parents to volunteer their talents in future school projects
  
• We could attend a future Leadership Team meeting to present what we've been up to and make recommendations about the support we need from the school to move the creativity agenda forward

I realise that these ideas don't really fully capture the more ambitious ideas about transforming the school into a kind of game experience. I wonder if we might need a bit more time to make this work effectively? I would appreciate your thoughts about this. I suggested to John that we could use some time in the summer holidays to work more intensively with various practitioners to plan this project (a kind of creativity summer school). We could then hope to stage this event in the Autumn Term.

Finally, I would like to draw your intention to The Experiment. It is a podcast created by Kevin Quigley for The Institute of Contemporary Arts. It's a bit bonkers but, if you like strange music and abstract soundscapes, yu'll love this. I particularly like the episode entitled "The Art of Listening Part 1". Check it out!