With Dominic Biddle and Heidi McEvoy-Swift, Rojo Art
An art/performance research collaboration producing site or situation responsive work
Supported by Once Upon a Festival seed funding, Theatre Royal, Bury St Edmunds
Into the Somewhere started out as a research project investigating innovative ways to bring together performance and visual art. It also looked to make an art encounter relevant to the thoughts and concerns of primary school children. Through the R & D phase we took a sparser version of the constructed space into schools, recording and reflecting on how the students engaged and where their interests might lie. The emergent knowledge from this phase has led us to make an immersive experience that allows children to explore ways of encountering the unknown.
Six months later The Somewhere Place has starting appearing in schools around the region. As researchers we always have a limited time to enter and explore this place and we enlist the help of a team of research assistants from the school.
The children experiment with the skills and tools they might need to encounter an unknown place and approach anything that might be living there.
The skills of the artist and scientist coincide in this cross disciplinary experience. We practice deep looking as a sensory experience, we ask questions, we make connections, propose theories, start to make meaning and generate non linear story lines.
This encounter starts to explore how we deal with uncertainty and the skills we need to meet an unknown situation. How does it feel not to find an answer to our questions, how do we live with not knowing, how to we build resilience.
In many ways this encounter brings us into a place where we can start to consider the artistic process itself.
Jac Campbell 