The Creative Case is a re-imagining of Arts Council England’s approach to diversity and equality, setting out how these areas can and should enrich the arts for artists, audiences and our wider society. It puts the creativity of artists first and looks at how they have inspired and directly created change and momentum around them. [...]
Stumble DanceCircus has just released a great trailer for Box of Frogs, interviewing the director Mish Weaver about the the show and why she chose circus as a medium for exploring her own experiences of bipolar disorder
I love The Space. I’m a real advocate. I just wish I could access more of it. So at the end of of the formal panel session on The Space at FutureEverything it was time for questions, so I stuck up my hand to ask about accessibility – a key element for PUSH ME [...]
Did you catch any of FutureEverything? – a cutting edge festival of music, art and all things digital held in Manchester now in its 17th year? It’s a great event with a host of fascinating sessions – including one this year on The Space, so I popped along to find out more.
Filming with Claire Cunningham was always going to be unusual. The three bags full of crutches were a bit of a clue, and then the location – an undeveloped part of The Arches in Glasgow – complete with lights, projections and even a smoke machine.
Not many people can shimmy up a rope, give it a few twists and then sit – silent and poised. Ramesh Mayyappan can, and once there he can also create of what we, the audience, might see if we were up there too, within the world of his piece Skewered Snails.
Beautiful day filming with Janice Parker and some of the dancers from her dance event, Private Dancer. It’s a rich and many-layered event and it was a real privilege to be allowed to witness some of the individual rehearsals as two of the dancers built up their solo pieces – which only some of [...]
We had our first shoot this week with Simon McKeown… at an inflatables factory. Simon’s Unlimited commission is about taking his world travelling exhibition Motion Disabled one phase further – with new footage and subjects, a new iPhone app - and a 10 metre high inflatable avatar.
Jez Colborne is one of our featured artists: an actor, a performer and in his heart of hearts – a musician. He’s never happier than when in the studio laying down tracks. We’ve got a link here to some of his tracks that feature as part of his Unlimited commission – Irresistible.
‘At the heart of the show, of course, is Ramesh’s absolutely captivating, compelling performance. His assured, physicality is all the more remarkable, given that much of the choreography — and there really isn’t a better term for the seemingly effortless quality of his precise, graceful movement — takes place some 20 feet above a [...]
We did the shoot for Bobby Baker’s PUSH ME film yesterday, and in the process learnt that there is nothing Bobby likes more than a nice cup of tea, made by her own hand, just for herself. Not that Bobby is against making tea for others, oh no. Just that there is something especially [...]
Much Wenlock is a small Shropshire town, home of the late William Penny Brookes who inspired the modern Olympic Games. Last weekend, it came alive with a variety of art events by disabled artists, including PUSH ME’s Simon McKeown. Entitled M21: From the Medieval to the 21st Century the collection of interventions was presented by [...]
Fantastic day filming with Jez and Mind the Gap yesterday to get the footage to create his first PUSH ME 90 second short – the wind nearly blew us off Ilkley Moor though! We were filming at the venue for the Yorkshire performances of Irresistible – the famous Cow and Calf rocks at Ilkley. [...]
When Ruth Mackenzie, Director, London 2012 Cultural Olympiad, announced the final commissions in the Unlimited programme she said: ‘Unlimited is about commissioning world-class artists to create brilliant work which will change perceptions of the work of disabled and deaf artists.’ And she was absolutely right. Unlimited is quite simply the largest commissioning fund for disabled [...]
I must stop saying we are putting artists into space – that simply isn’t true. We are putting them into The Space, which is a whole different thing. But what is The Space? If you go to Arts Council England’s site, this is their definition: …an experimental digital arts media service and commissioning programme that [...]