Phobias

It's always great to see staff and students collaborating on rich, inter-disciplinary projects that have real audiences. But when the quality of the work is as high as it was during the two nights of 'Phobias', you realise that this kind of learning creates fantastic outcomes for all involved. The students of different ages get to behave like real arts practitioners, producing original and exciting work to a very high standard. The staff work as a team and learn skills from one another and the students, extending notions of what is possible. The audience leave with a sense of what can be achieved by young people and their teachers when they are prepared to take a few risks and trust in each other's skills.

Last year's 'Restaurant' project was the first time we had attempted an inter-disciplinary arts event quite so ambitious. I am delighted to say that 'Phobias' has raised the bar again. The audience was stimulated by a massive variety of multi-sensory experiences in a wide variety of art forms that wouldn't have been out of place in a contemporary art gallery or cutting edge theatrical space.

The company of costumed performers was enhanced by an army of backstage technical wizards with banks of laptops, speakers, cameras and other props. Visitors could begin their exploration of various irrational fears in the bar in two complimentary installations by feeling what it might be like to be be buried alive. Then it was time to be whisked into an operating theatre where they witnessed a patient close to death, live brain surgery via a video projection and the overpowering smell of chemicals and animal flesh. They then journeyed down a dark tunnel, where disfigured toys brushed against their faces, strangers screamed and hands reached out to grab their legs. Making their way through a hot, burning room and a door of flames, the audience then entered a large space which was quickly transformed into a mixture of therapy room, living nightmare and punishment chamber. Wall to wall video projections and a synchronised team of performers assaulted them with horrifying tales of death by fire, water and earth, before they were finally and unceremoniously ordered to leave.

The entire event was a real tribute to the energy, creativity and faith displayed by a dedicated team of staff at Tallis and the immense trust they have in the talents of our students. Thanks to everyone involved!

Learners Y Factor

Tomorrow, four Tallis representatives will tell the story of our Oklahoma adventure to an audience at the Learners Y Factor event in central London. The event is designed to showcase innovative approaches to learning and ICT by young people. We are presenting the story of our Pop Up School and our disruptive presence at the Creativity World Forum in Oklahoma in November 2010.

Our presentation begins with a video (above) outlining the project from its inception several months prior to the trip to Oklahoma. We are then going to describe how we used social networks, scavenging skills and a mixture of handheld and online technologies to propose that the future of learning might look quite different to the schools, classrooms, corridors and textbooks of the present.

Learners Y Factor presentation on Prezi

Our presentation ends with a question and answer session with the judges which will be attended by Joseph Horton, one of our collaborators from Howe High School in Oklahoma, via the magic of Skype.

We are competing against several schools who have each demonstrated that young people have the potential to radically transform the learning process, in part through their innovative use of new technologies. We are both proud and excited to be involved in the event.

Tree Dressing 2009

This year's tree dressing celebrations on the Ferrier Estate had a musical theme. The Tallis Year 8 steel band played to an appreciative crowd in Telemann Square, following a lantern parade around the estate led by a jazz band. The fireworks orchestrated by Emergency Exit Arts were spectacular, as was Rosa's soup served up free for everyone from the Community Hall. Listen to the festive sounds of the band as people gathered together out of the cold.



We hope to create a website this year celebrating the sights and sounds of this special occasion. Thanks to everyone who took part, to the artists, technicians, cooks, police officers and organisers, and especially our very own Creative Communities Development Officer, Lisa Sproat, who sadly missed the event that she had worked so hard to help organise because of a dodgy tooth! Get well soon Lisa.

Meeting with Clare Burnett

Here are the notes I made during our conversation with Clare this afternoon. Thanks to everyone for coming and I look forward to working with you next Monday. make sure you get your permission slips back to Mr Hawes ASAP.

Brief:
to create an abstract sculpture based on the London skyline

Location:
Delfina at London Bridge

Ideas:
a journey down the river, rhythms, 3D drawing, demonstrating the process of making the work, a corner space so not completely 3D, time to explore the river setting, bring sketch books to draw on site, add labels to the sculpture with people’s views, how do we feel about London and its skyline? travel to Delfina on the riverbus?

How do we capture the combination of industry, commerce, tourism, poverty, wealth, history, regeneration etc? How will we make the most of the lights available? Favourite places in London…

Timescale:
Arrive at about 10am. Put up photos, play with the wood, then do some sketching, then build in the afternoon (?) We need to be finished by 5pm. Visitors arrive at 6pm. Finished by 7pm.

Resources:
Sketchbooks, coloured pens/pencils, paper straws, lollipop skills, 2 drills, elastic bands, still camera, video camera, tripod, laptop(s)

Homework:
Bring an idea, artefact, story, poem about London to the event next Monday.

Here's the poster that I made at school

"VOTE Seb" lol

I think it might also be nice to use more than one poster to catch people's eyes more than once. When I got home I made 2 more posters just so there are more to chose from:

Let the voting begin!

Invitation to take part in Creative Agents event on July 1st

Jon and John Riches suggested we could use the blog to ask if a group of Tallis students would be interested in talking to 25 creative agents (people like John Riches working in schools on the creative partnerships programme across London) at an event I'm organising on July 1st.

It is really a training/development day for the agents, and they are very interested in hearing about how young people are communicating about ideas on creativity with each other and the school, and the impact they can have on school development.

We could allocate 30-45 minutes, or more if you would like, for you to present to the creative agents in any creative way you suggest, and to talk to them/answer questions etc. The day will be held at the October Gallery near Holborn/Russell Square tubes, and it could start at 10 with an informal warmup for everyone (led by your group, or by one of the agents), followed by your session at about 10.15am. If a later time would be better for you we could make it later.

I'll look forward to hearing what you think; it would be great if you would like to do it!

Judith Ackrill
CP agents training days co-ordinator

Home is where the art is

This afternoon I spoke to a former Tallis student, Kat Joyce, about two exciting projects. I taught Kat when she was in Year 8 (I think that was 1991) and she was later in my sixth form tutor group. She has since gone on to bigger and better things, working in the performing arts as a writer/director. The first project is called Home. This is how it's described on the website:

Whether home is a mansion, a shack, or a tent, we all strive to protect the place of safety that we’ve created. Is home a place, a language, a network of people, or a four-walled structure? How fragile is the membrane between home and the rest of the world? We wanted to challenge ourselves to create a show which did not rely on a traditional theatre building – which has its suitcase packed and is ready to be performed anywhere. A homeless piece of theatre that can happen in tents, car parks and in woods, in fact anywhere. The concept for the show sprung from a desire to challenge and stretch the ensemble’s ability to react honestly and freshly to each new performance, making each show real and live. Home is a nomadic performance which we are continuing to devise and test in many different spaces – inside and outside, in the woods, in underground tunnels, in nightclubs and at festivals, for audiences of many and audiences of one. We are still finding out what Home might become, but we are excited by the idea that, rather than making a show which has a finished, fixed form, we could create a show which is like a resourceful camper, with the outfit and gadgets to adapt to each new circumstance, which is formed afresh each time from an expanding repertoire of work, responding live to each new temporary home.

The film above is a document of a previous residency carried out by Tangled Feet at a school in St. Albans. I like the way the performance uses different spaces around the school, takes people by surprise and asks some challenging questions about the idea of home. It occurred to me that the project echoed many of our thoughts about the nature of creativity (risk, challenge, imagination, collaboration, exploration etc.) and the ideas we have shared about a site specific event at Tallis. One of the key issues we face, of course, is our own change of home as we move to a new school. This mirrors the creation of new residential homes to replace the existing Ferrier Estate just on our doorstep.

Kat is also working on a project called 1 Mile Away in collaboration with Nathan Curry. It is a new play about a one-mile-radius area of London. From Parliament to Elephant, Vauxhall Farm to Lower Marsh, Kat and Nathan are collaborating with many local people to build a literary picture of the many narratives in this complex area. Kat will be weaving all the ideas into a new play, which will be performed by a professional cast in the summer. I really liked the idea of a community generated story, the strands of which are collected using social networking tools.

Again, I thought it would be great to chat to Kat about the possibility that we could collaborate with her on our event, perhaps incorporating elements of both Home and 1 Mile Away. As a result, I have asked Kat to come in to talk to us next Friday after school. I think this will help to put some meat on the bones of our emerging ideas. Come prepared to explain to her what we've been doing and ask her questions about both of these exciting projects. I look forward to seeing you all then.

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!

Secret Cinema

Nic sent through the final evaluation of the Living Cinema project at Tallis today. It makes for interesting reading and I'll bring a copy to our next meeting. In amongst the links to various websites that formed part of the research element of their project I found one for a project called Secret Cinema. Organised by a group called Future Cinema, Secret Cinema evenings involve a themed screening of a famous film in an unusual location. Recent events have included them taking over the Hackney Empire to screen the Marx Brothers’ Night at the Opera and a screening of the new Watchmen movie in transformed tunnels under London Bridge station.

The one that caught my attention though was Lindsay Anderson's If screened at Dulwich College. The film is about a rebellion at a boys' public school. Ushers seem to have taken on the roles of the main characters and the group obviously took full advantage of their surroundings to make the evening quite memorable.

I wonder if we could borrow this idea and have a film screening as part of our event in the summer. Which film would we choose to show? How might it relate to our central theme of creative learning? Where would we screen it and for whom?

Living Cinema

It would be great if every member of the Creative Tallis Action Research Group could attend this event. In a sense, it's a dress rehearsal for the "Food for Thought" installation in the summer. We also need some volunteers on the night to help with food and I'm hoping that the VJs will be able to give us an insight into the way they work. I will attempt to get a letter out to you all on Monday explaining everything. In the meantime, please show your parents the flyer and ask them if they want to come along and if they are happy with you being involved.