The Arts Practice
Independent agency launched in 2006 as catalyst, enabler and spur to nurture and support imaginative contemporary arts practice that is grounded and informed by social, political and cultural concerns.
Jean Cameron – Creative Producer / Project Consultant
Enjoying ‘la dolce vita’ during Selective Memory: Scotland & Venice 05 at the Venice Biennale
I’m a current recipient of the Scottish Arts Council’s inaugural Creative Producers’ Bursary award and I’m based in Glasgow. My work is “practice” led rather than artform led and my freelance portfolio spans live art, contemporary dance, theatre and visual arts. This includes my role as project manager for Selective Memory: Scotland & Venice 05, Scotland’s national presentation at the Venice Biennale.
I best enjoy working as a creative producer when I’m finding new and meaningful contexts for artists to locate their practice – often bringing artists together from different disciplines to work together. An important part of what I do is to create a sense of cohesion in projects that juxtapose ideas and offer ‘the unexpected’ to the public.
I am interested in creating circumstances for meaningful dialogues.
New Plaza event I curated for NewTerritories Festival in 2002. Toby Paterson was commissioned to make new art work that offered a very direct opportunity to combine his practice as an artist with his commitment to skateboarding. In response, he created a dynamic street course that took on a “stage set” quality during a two day interactive art event. Sculptures were alchemically altered though the act of skateboarding by 700 young local skaters and pro skaters.
Recently my practice has shifted from programming and producing work in arts venues and moved towards programmes that include ephemeral and dialogue based activity, social processes, discreet individual experiences and communal activities sited in public locations and amongst diverse communities. Recent projects include events for Glasgow 2020 with the think-tank Demos and the Reputations art in public sites programme with Castlemilk Environment Trust Glasgow
I believe that artists and cultural agencies should be policy instigators and see a key function of my role as creative producer being to advocate for this, especially at this pivotal time in Scotland. I was recently commissioned to createBarefoot iPod my first pod-path project – a series of audio choreographies and spatial theatre experiences – by Changing Scotland, who host “weekends of politics and culture” at the Ceilidh Place in Ullapool.
Barefoot iPod offered up the reflections and poems of a solitary wanderer in Ullapool that individual participants could walk into and inhabit bodily, tracing his observations with their feet as well as their eyes and ears. Participants picked up iPods from the Ceilidh Place onto which I’d uploaded the Barefoot iPod experience and, armed with a map, they went out for a walk…Ullapool’s stunning landscape provided the backdrop. A single narrator offered companionship on the journey, offering poems and spontaneous reflections that traced a kind of “spiritual geography” around the village. Social entrepreneur Martin Stepek’s words provided the “walking meditation” punctuated by readings from poet Mandy Haggith and a delicate soundscape from Scottish composer David Paul Jones. Over the course of the weekend, by walking, members of the public brought to life this “theatre for one”.
Ballet de la MC - Bronja Novak and Susanne Martin at ECITE 03 - residential conference, showcase of choreography, exhibition and public workshop programme, which I co-produced with Bodysurf Scotland. ECITE 03 was located in the ecological and spiritual Findhorn Community in the Scottish Highlands and attended by 80 professional dancers from 22 countries.
Barefoot iPod is the first of a series of “pod path” experiences that I’m creating for a range of contexts over the new few months, including an “Invisible Cities Imagined City” pod path, commissioned by the Eccentrico Theatre Festival in Turin, Glasgow’s twin city.
On The Edge Research 