BLKDOG by Botis Seva and Far From The Norm: Touring Dates

Highly Recommend!

One of the UK’s most exciting, politically engaged and thought provoking dance artists. Botis and company create visceral and daring dance theatre that makes many other companies/artists look stagnant and absolutely out of touch with contemporary issues. Forget placing Botis and company into tiny, lazy, and restrictive press categorisations such as Hip Hop or Hip Hop Dance Theatre. The labelling of great work such as this as Hip Hop or Hip Hop Dance Theatre is highly simplistic and encompasses a continual compromise imposed by the Hip Hop Dance Theatre brand and its financial and cultural capital values (Bourdieu, 2010).

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Choreographer –Botis Seva Creative
Producer –Far From The Norm -Lee Griffiths 
Music Composer –Torben Lars Sylvest 
Lighting Designer–Tom Visser 
Costume Designer–Ryan Dawson Laight 
Dancers –Far From The Norm -Victoria Shulungu, Naïma Souhaïr, Hayleigh Sellors, Jordan Douglas, Joshua Nash, Shangomola Edunjobi and Ezra Owen.

I look forward to the day when unique and innovative companies and artists such as Botis and Far From The Norm find the space(s) to (and are encouraged to) step out of the theatrical boxes they inevitably inherit as a part of the commercially (and governmentally) funded dance/theatre performance and touring environment of the UK. Given enough unfettered support and spatial freedom they might define a new landscape for performance that is more suited to the precarity and turbulence of the subject matter which they engage with.

Gentrifying City - Cultural Capital - Gentrifying Arts

Important questions arise regarding what artistic, political and cultural compromises are demanded from and made for artists to remain in a funding and mentorship cycle that is dictated by the financialisation of culture in London. This appraisal of artistic work based on economically driven outcomes bears out Jen Harvie’s suggestion that the industrialisation of the arts compromises democratic expression’ (2005: 9). As UK hip hop theatre pioneer Benji Reid observes, this policy essentially means that artistic work ‘is now seen as a product, and you have to have something that sells […] it must be packaged and marketed within a box that an audience recognises’ (interview with the author, 25 June 2015).
(Sadot, 2019)

A note on reviews/reviewers and the insignificance of the UK Star rating system.

Mainstream media reviews are almost unanimously eulogistic and superficial in tone, lacking what critic Lyn Gardner (2011) describes as ‘restraint, consideration, contextualisation and enough space to write meaningfully and thoughtfully about a show’ (Sadot, 2019).

Citations

Bourdieu, P. (2010). Distinction, Oxon: Routledge Classics.

Gardner, L. (2011). When Every Edinburgh Show Gets Five Stars, Rating System Inflation Has Won, Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2011/aug/21/critics-notebook-lyn-gardner [accessed 10 June 2016].

Sadot, P. (2019) Unsteady State: hip hop dance artists in the space(s) of UK dance theatre. University of Chichester.



The Northern Soul Scene book nominated for award

The Northern Soul Scene has been nominated for the 2020 Association for Recorded Sounds Collection Awards for Excellence in Historical Recorded Sound Research. The winners will be announced in September.

https://www.equinoxpub.com/home/northern-soul/

I contributed Chapter 16 of the book which examines the nuanced complexities of dancing to Northern Soul and the claims of authenticity that resound within the scene.

Description

Drawing on the author’s embodied knowledge as a Northern Soul dancer, and his work as a practice research scholar investigating popular dance forms, this chapter investigates two distinct Northern Soul scenes: the ‘oldies’ and the ‘newies’. It places in dialogue notions of space, temporality and musical taste to examine how each scene constructs and relates to Northern Soul history and the different movement vocabularies that result. In doing so, the chapter discusses evolving musical diversity on the northern soul scene, set against notions of fixity, historical re-enactment and pastiche, and their relationship to a version of northern soul dancing that has gripped the imagination of outside UK media and academics for some time. It explores how these corporeal myths are often acted out by insiders on the oldies scene and examines the possible impact on the dancing styles of younger participants.

Citation

Sadot, Paul. I'm Still Looking for Unknowns All the Time: The Forward (E)motion of Northern Soul Dancing. The Northern Soul Scene. Equinox eBooks Publishing, United Kingdom. p. 292-310 Feb 2019. ISBN 9781781795583.

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Corporate Watch: Delancey, Tax Havens, Arts and Cultural Power

Full article link:

https://corporatewatch.org/delancey-tax-haven-tory-developer-devouring-neighbourhoods/#whorunsit

A great site for detailed accounting of the movement(s) of tax avoidance and so called philanthropy and patronage of the arts. Interesting to note the many arts boards that these people sit on and operate within. I have only lifted parts of the article to include here and it really is advisable to read the full piece.

HOW DELANCEY WORKS

Delancey was founded in the 1995 by Jamie Ritblat, an Eton-educated Conservative donor born to wealth and power. Jamie is the son of Sir John Ritblat, a well-known property tycoon worth an estimated £234m, who for decades ran Britain’s second biggest property company, British Land. Jamie learnt the ropes at his father’s company before striking out on his own with Delancey.

Delancey describes itself as a property investment “advisor”. That is, its developments don’t just use the company’s own capital, but bring in other investors from across the world.

In the last two decades, Delancey “has acquired, developed, managed and sold over £20bn of property” through its various funds and companies. It bulked up during the 2008 financial crisis – taking advantage of the dip in property prices to buy up ‘distressed’ assets from the Royal Bank of Scotland, and to take over another major London development company, Minerva.

The funds Delancey “advises” own buildings across London and the UK. Its investments reflect the big trends in UK property speculation: from corporate office developments in the 1990s and early 2000s, to today’s focus on “Build to Rent” housing. Delancey’s latest major venture is its Get Living rented apartment complexes (see below).

Delancey also has an educational sideline: a chain of elite private schools called Alpha Plus.

WHO RUNS IT? THE RITBLATS, THEIR ENTOURAGE, AND THEIR CULTURAL POWER

All Delancey’s network of companies trace back to one man: Jamie Ritblat. And Jamie got where he is today thanks to the support of his property tycoon father Sir John Ritblat, who continues to pull strings for his son’s business.

But the Ritblats, and the other directors around them, aren’t just businessmen. They are also heavyweight players in Britain’s elite cultural scene, sponsoring and sitting as directors on numerous national institutions. Of course this helps them keep up an impressive network of powerful connections which are great for business too.

The boss: Jamie Ritblat

Jamie Ritblat is Delancey’s founder and CEO. He has a London address at 24 St Petersburgh Place in Bayswater. He also built and owns a fake 18th Century stately home in Winchcombe in the Gloucestershire Cotswolds.

When he’s not busy donating to the Tories, stashing millions out of sight of the taxman, or getting plebs to serve him in his mansion, Jamie lends his name and elitist credentials to prestigious London art institutions and universities. In the past, he’s been a member of Kings College London’s College Council and member of the Southbank Centre’s Board of Governors. He also helps out other property financiers: he is non-executive chairperson of private equity real estate firm Mitheridge Capital Management.

But, according to his bio on the Mitheridge website, he has now stepped down from his voluntary roles except for one: he remains an “active Trustee” of the Bathurst Estate – an 8,000-acre estate in Gloucestershire where he helps out the Earl Bathurst and the rest of his ‘barmy’, hunting enthusiastfamily.

Big Daddy: Sir John Ritblat

Ritblat senior has provided backing, advice and crucial connections through the years. After stepping down from British Land in 2007, he became chair of Delancey’s advisory board.

Now formally retired, Sir John and his wife Lady Jill have been directors or trustees of many top arts, education and sporting institutions. Their current and former positions include the boards of the Wallace Collection, Royal Academy of Music, the Design Museum, the Royal College of Art and the London Business School.

They are also big patrons of the arts themselves. John Ritblat has a room named after him at the British Library, “The Sir John Ritblat Gallery, Treasures of The British Library”. Jill has donated her personal dress collection to the Victoria and Albert Museum, and they once bought a Damien Hirst as a birthday present for Jamie.

Despite now being an octogenarian, Sir John is still involved with the following organisations:

'Barca Nostra' - cynical art.....

Great blog by Dr Stephen Pritchard about the Venice Biennale. read the full post here http://colouringinculture.org/blog/ourboat

“Barca Nostra” was installed at the Arsenale for this year’s Venice Art Biennale a few days ago. The work of Swiss-Icelandic artist Christoph Büchel, “Barca Nostra” has attracted immense media attention, with most of the media blindly parroting the official press release unquestioningly.

“Barca Nostra” is a boat: a fishing boat on which more than 800 migrants died in 2015 when the vessel sank in the Mediterranean. “Barca Nostra” has been variously described as “a relic of a human tragedy but also a monument to contemporary migration, a symbol of the (im)possibility of freedom of movement”; “a vehicle of significant socio-political, ethical, and historical importance”; “The Ship of Commons” that is a “Monument to Tragedy” and “a relic of a human tragedy”; and a “Migrant Death Ship”!

The shipwreck was the grave of hundreds and hundreds of people trying to flee their countries for a better life in the EU. It now is now an art object on display at the world’s most prestigious art festival, forming part of the Biennale’s headline exhibition. The exhibition is called (without any hint of irony) “May You Live In Interesting Times”.

For the Venice Biennale, these “interesting times” seem to focus on standing and gawping at a cleaned-up shipwreck on which more than 800 innocent children, women and men died! How very “interesting”!

In these “interesting times” it is clearly ok for the world’s top art event to be sponsored by Japan Tobacco International – one of the world’s largest cigarette manufacturers! But, hey, this is “art” – contemporary art of the sort where literally anything goes. The art of the spectacle and the simulation. A sinister postmodern world in which “Migrant Death Ships” have immense pulling power and incredible PR value. By exhibiting the boat at the Venice Biennale also, of course, creates increased cultural and economic value for this newly appropriated art object.

To see the art world fawn over a shipwreck that was a grave to so many people is utterly abhorrent.

The total cost of salvaging the boat, maintaining and restoring it (it has been restored) is somewhere in the region of €33 million. God knows how much it cost to transport it to Venice!

Demand the Impossible: New Communities and Concrete Human Existence: Stephen Pritchard

A great blog and site and an interesting article (amongst many). http://colouringinculture.org/blog/demandtheimpossible

This is my paper I presented alongside Cara Courage and Sir Nick Serota at The Coming Community conference at MK Gallery on 24th May 2019. It followed by, overlaps with, and is linked to the keynote I did the previous day in Berlin

DEMAND THE IMPOSSIBLE: NEW COMMUNITIES AND CONCRETE HUMAN EXISTENCE

The UK is facing many crises. Our NHS is in crisis. Our schools are in crisis. Our government is in crisis. We face a staggering homelessness crisis. Many of our families and children are suffering from abject poverty. Racism and fascism are on the rise. Our culture (or rather our cultures) are in crisis. And, of course, we are facing a housing crisis of a magnitude not faced since the end of the Second World War. People are being dispossessed of and displaced from their homes and there’s nowhere, for many, to go.

And we talk about creative placemaking…

Don’t get me wrong, we need to build entirely new cities, towns and villages and we need to build them all over the UK, not just centred around the South East of England. We need to build much more than just new villages, towns and cities, however. We need to build new economies that deal with the London-centric population and wealth accumulation that has for far too long sucked the life and the people from other UK countries and the English regions into its all-consuming core. This needs new infrastructure and restructured investment of a kind never before imagined.

We need to make new towns and cities and villages that are well-connected - in every sense of the word; that are able to mitigate the climate catastrophe this country and our planet now faces; that provide real jobs that give people real security – not precarious post-Fordist living which fetishises artists as its ragged heroes. We need to return to local living – whether in villages, towns or cities.

We need these new places to have all the facilities that future generations will need. We need community centres and sports facilities and green spaces. Far too many have been sold-off for profit or destroyed by thoughtless developments. And, of course, the communities who have lost the most are those who had the least to begin with: working-class communities. We need communities. We need community spirit. Capitalism and neoliberalism have devastated our communities and our ways of being and living together creatively.

We must Demand The Impossible.

Unfortunately, creative placemaking does not demand the impossible. It reproduces and reinforces the already possible. And it does this over and over and over again. Pretty bunting, patches of grass, rainbow pedestrian crossings, bikeable, walkable, commissioned street art, quirky sunflower street signs, saccharin-sweet salves to the onward march of a neoliberalism that is well-versed in disguising its heartlessly selfish greed behind colourful and fun symbols of capital.

I have written my critique of creative placemaking at length elsewhere and will not rehearse my arguments in detail here today. Suffice to say that we need to think much bigger and demand the impossible right now!

We need to take back our existing cities, towns and villages from the grabbing hands of capital and profit. We need to take back our new towns, cities and villages before they are even built; whilst they are being built. We have a right to the city (and other places where we live) and we must exercise our right to the city by demanding the impossible.

We need to organise ourselves and we need to demand we are, at national, regional, and, crucially, local levels fully able to participate in the planning of our social, economic and political systems at every level.

We live in – and this is becoming increasingly apparent as each day passes – a failing representative democracy that has always favoured the few, not the many. We need to rethink this political system and put people at the heart of everything that we do, every decision that we make. We need participatory democracy and that should be, wherever possible, devolved to as local a level as is possible.

I’m talking about a radical shift in how we govern ourselves and those who have ruled over us for centuries and centuries will not let their grip on power slip. Our rights have never been gifted to us and they will not now. We have always had to struggle. And it is struggle that is behind my notion of place guarding – something very different yet in some ways similar to placemaking.

The trouble with placemaking and, perhaps even more so with creative placemaking, is that it does not and cannot offer people the freedom to take back the city because it is often rolled out as an integral part of neoliberalism’s totalising system. Creative placemaking uses art to window-dress neoliberal regeneration and renewal agendas.

The crucial question here is: ‘Why should we (re)make your places for you?’

People, communities, cultures already exist in places. They produce and reproduce their own social spaces.

Creative placemaking is ultimately a state- and local authority-led policy, filtered down to arts institutions and then on to artists and down to participants and audiences via agencies, funders and a raft of philanthropic foundations and charities. Agencies typically seek to ‘empower’ marginalised people and places through a mixture of socially engaged art, education and outreach.

Whilst creative placemaking could avoid criticism that it is simply remaking places to fit white, middle-class norms, thereby effectively acting to help gentrify neighbourhoods, by being deployed in new cities and towns, it will still, I argue, serve as a toolkit for state- and local authority-led governance, planning and design principles that are tied to false forms of “participation” and “inclusion”.

Place guarding is different. It puts people first, not place. It puts the people who either already live in an area threatened by redevelopment first, or, in the case of new towns and cities (which of course also have existing populations and environments, etc.), place guarding puts the existing and new inhabitants at the heart of deciding what the new urban space needs.

People need to decide on what development and redevelopment is needed, not be “consulted” when planners and government officials have drawn up “draft” plans.

Place guarding is about demanding the impossible. This impossible is, of course, possible: a realisable utopia.

 

 

Utopia stands in opposition to the present culture and against the dominant ideology that controls our social, political and economic thinking with mantras like There Is No Alternative. Critical utopias seek to imagine new visions of that which has not yet been realised but which is immanently realisable.

This type of thinking is about hope for a better world and a radically different world from the one we live in today. It is about thinking about both what has and has not yet been achieved. It is about visualising futures that go beyond a commodity society and global economy based upon the exploitation of humans and nature and natural resources.

Critical utopias imagine futures that cannot be fully articulated because they do not yet exist.

My approach to place guarding is grounded in praxis – in practice as research and research as practice – in thinking and doing. Living and being creatively.

Henri Lefebvre in Critique of Everyday Life wrote:

Our towns may be read like a book … [They] show us the history of power and of human possibilities which, while becoming increasingly broad, have at the same time been increasingly taken over and controlled …

He points out that it is not academics or populists or middle-class people, or even artists alone, who are best placed to decide upon the everyday lives of working-class people. Working-class people and communities should be trusted to build the places and spaces they need and desire together.

Rethinking our cultures is clearly part of that. We must break free of a limited and narrow definition of culture and instead accept that, in the words of Raymond Williams, culture is ordinary. It exists in the everyday. It is everyday life. And it is only by being trusted to fully participate in the unfulfilled possibilities of everyday life and our cultures and cultural activities that everyone can begin to experience the possibilities of concrete human existence.

This is because space is socially produced. It is a concrete abstraction. And to socially produce space based on the principles of neoliberal capitalism transforms such spaces into commodities to be produced, distributed and consumed. This is the language (no matter how it is dressed up) of creative placemaking.

Utopia – and particularly critical utopias – are tomorrow’s possibilities.

Creative placemaking is the product of neoliberalism – make no mistake. And neoliberalism is a false utopia, offering only further oppression for the majority of people. As Lefebvre pointed out in 1968, “To put art at the service of the urban does not mean to prettify urban space with works of art.”

Urban Warfare: housing under the empire of finance: Event March 25th 2019

 

On Monday Professor Raquel Rolnik will present key arguments from her latest book ‘Urban Warfare: housing under the empire of finance’.

 

This book launch will discuss how our homes and neighbourhoods have become the “last subprime frontiers of capitalism”.

 

Raquel Rolnik’s new book explores how financialisation has colonised cities and housing systems around the world, provoking homelessness and dispossession despite its promise of homeownership for all. The book examines housing politics and policy from numerous national contexts including the UK, Kazakhstan, Chile, the USA and Brazil. Rolnik will offer a searing critique of the political economy of housing under neoliberalism and a poignant analysis of how it has decimated households across the globe, as well as an account of how residents and social movements are fighting back.

 

Monday 25 March, 6:30-8:00pm

PAN.G.01, Pankhurst House

Speaker: Professor Raquel Rolnik (University of São Paulo)

Discussants: Dr Glyn Robbins (Defend Council Housing), Dr David Madden (LSE)

Chair: Dr Suzi Hall (LSE)

 This event is open to all

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See you there perhaps…..

 



Northern Soul Scene Book Launch - May 1st 2019

The launch of this groundbreaking book takes place at Birmingham City University on May 1st. It is an all day event with a variety of presentations and discussions and all are welcome.

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To find out more about the book: https://www.equinoxpub.com/home/northern-soul/ 

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Im very pleased to have been invited to contribute a chapter to the book, details below:


I'm Still Looking for Unknowns All the Time: The Forward (E)motion of Northern Soul Dancing

Paul Sadot

Description

Drawing on the author’s embodied knowledge as a Northern Soul dancer, and his work as a practice research scholar investigating popular dance forms, this chapter investigates two distinct Northern Soul scenes: the ‘oldies’ and the ‘newies’. It places in dialogue notions of space, temporality and musical taste to examine how each scene constructs and relates to Northern Soul history and the different movement vocabularies that result. In doing so, the chapter discusses evolving musical diversity on the northern soul scene, set against notions of fixity, historical re-enactment and pastiche, and their relationship to a version of northern soul dancing that has gripped the imagination of outside UK media and academics for some time. It explores how these corporeal myths are often acted out by insiders on the oldies scene and examines the possible impact on the dancing styles of younger participants.



Citation

Sadot, Paul. I'm Still Looking for Unknowns All the Time: The Forward (E)motion of Northern Soul Dancing. The Northern Soul Scene. Equinox eBooks Publishing, United Kingdom. p. 292-310 Feb 2019. ISBN 9781781795583. https://www.equinoxpub.com/home/view-chapter/?id=36971.







'Blacklist' - Joshua Nash and Jordan Douglas at the Place

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https://www.theplace.org.uk/whats-on/jane-chan-joshua-nash-tribe

A new piece by Joshua Nash, featuring two dancers who I have had the pleasure of working with on my long-term research practice and who I cannot endorse highly enough!

They are two fearless (an oft overused phrase) young artists, a rarity in todays up-skilling, product selling, neoliberal cultural-agenda driven dance sector. Please avoid boxing them in with brand indicators like hip hop theatre or hip hop dance theatre….they take the space and explore it with forward (e)motion and that is enough. Go see…….

In My Beginning Is My End' by Stephen Pritchard

‘The instrumentalisation of our arts and culture reduces our culture to money – to economic outcomes, cost benefit analyses, jobs created by the “creative industries” (Adorno turns in his grave), etc.; and to numbers – people and places are counted and analysed, their individuality, their cultural differences, their collective identities, their very humanity turned into dots and lines on graphs and pins and coloured segments on maps.’

Taken from the blog: ART, ACTIVISM & POLITICS IN THE PLACE WHERE WE LIVE by Dr Stephen Pritchard

http://colouringinculture.org/blog/inmybeginningismyend - for full article

This is culture-by-numbers.  A dot-to-dot culture.  A culture of imposed uniformity, categorisation, stereotyping and exclusion.  A new system that meets the insatiable demands of neoliberalism based upon an old system of elitism, power, wealth, property, manipulation, and control.

Instrumentalism reproduces and reinforces our subjugation, our suppression, our exploitation, our oppression.  When our arts and our cultures are instrumentalised (both directly and indirectly) by governments and government agencies (central and local alike), corporations, NGOs, and other third sector organisations alike, as they clearly are today, they become vehicles for “outcomes” which are inherently political and economic in nature. “ (Pritchard, 2018)

Artists 4 Artists present 'The Landscape is Changing' September 27th 2018

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In discussion 1, am looking forward to hearing the companies articulate and expand on their role in the corporate arts strategy that is represented by UK NPO’s; now heavily, and increasingly, linked to governmental cultural tourism outputs, as outlined by ACE.

Some of my burning questions after receiving no information from three recent FOI requests to three different organisations are:

  • Who is actually funding the proposed Hip Hop Academy at Sadler’s Wells East that is due to open in 2021 (is it still happening?)

  • Will it follow a Contemporary Dance Conservatoire model based on P.A.R.T.S in Belgium, as has been written by some?

  • Will it be free access or based on student fees and debt? Will it be certificated and if so, by which body?

  • In a rapidly gentrifying, (socially cleansing) capital that increasingly denies access to housing, transport, health and other basic needs to many citizens, including hip hop dance/theatre artists? How do the NPO’s feel about the dangers of hip hop dance/theatre’s implicit or explicit role in ‘Artwashing’?

  • Does the threat of periodic funding cuts (being dropped as an NPO) affect their output?

  • Did/do they find themselves linked to a series (or triptych) of monolithic, legitimising, venues in their journey to becoming an NPO, for instance Sadler’s Well’s, The Barbican and The Place?

  • Do artists/companies see anything problematic in regularly re-staging/re-imagining classical Western narratives? Bearing in mind bell hooks comment that:

    “The Eurocentric perspective/gaze see and values only those aspects that mimic familiar white Western artistic traditions."

    and Danny Hoch’s statement about the use Western theatrical narratives in Hip Hop Theatre where classic texts such as Sondheim, Dickens and Shakespeare often dominate:
    [I]t sends a message that the hip-hop generation have no stories of its own and that in order for hip-hop to qualify as theatre it must attach itself to such certified texts (…) The feeling that results is of watching a hip-hop minstrel show.”

In discussion 2, I am looking forward to hearing the artists talk about what ‘break through’ represents. Is its a financial proposition, is is being legitimised by certain venues, is it being allowed access and agency and what does ‘within our community” mean to them?

Please try to get along and support the event.