Finding
co creatives…
When I told a friend I was going to a
gathering at ACMI (Australian Centre for the Moving Image) called “Co-Creative
Communities – Storytelling futures for community arts and media” she said, “Be
careful what you wish for, they won’t mean the same thing by storytelling that
you do!” There are ways in which she was
perfectly right, but there were other discoveries of good people doing
beautiful work that I was really happy to meet.
Let me give you a glimpse of who was there, this is a happenstance
guide, not a thorough report, and it starts with who I sat next to. First I met
Phil Heuzenroeder from Wildatheart a community arts project in North Melbourne www.wildatheart.org.au/ Phil
was an astute and observant companion through the sessions. I also bumped into my colleague Mark Silver there,
he has done sustained projects in teaching secondary school students to gather
stories from older people and document them on video – PADSIP – Positive Ageing
and Digital storytelling.
From the main stage (which is really just a pocket of space under
the cinema screen) Mimi Pickering spoke. She works in community radio in the
Appalachian mountains in the USA http://appalshop.org/
and told a story that resonated through the day. She said the station realized
their biggest audience was in a nearby prison. When the phone company hiked up
the call costs into the prison, the station started an evening program where
people could ring in with messages for their relatives inside. Mimi said it
changed the way the listening community on the outside began to think of those
on the inside.
Sam Gregory from Witness was
also impressive, ‘Cameras for everywhere’ using video for human rights http://www.witness.org/cameras-everywhere
He was spare in words and strong on content.
More locally,
Cath Dwyer from ABC Open https://open.abc.net.au/
has 45 producers in regional Australia facilitating storytelling via text,
video, audio and photography. It made me glad to see such a thoughtful,
insightful person at the head of this big story gathering enterprise. Cath
remarked that ABC Open is a moderated, safe space for a certain kind of Australian
story, and a distribution network. You can find out about classes, they have a
monthly 500-word story invitation. This month the theme is “Someone who formed
you” December is “Family Rituals”.
That’s all for
now, more soon!
Other impressive presentations at ACMI were
the sharp edged Carl Kuddell of Change
Media http://www.changemedia.net.au/ (SA
based) on working outside the comfort zone, “unless there’s a moment when I am
embarrassed, it is not a good workshop”. He showed a video of indigenous responses
to the dominant cultural ‘frame’ that was full of hilarious and serious takes
of people interacting with an empty picture frame. I got to speak with Change
Media’s Creative Director, Jennifer Lyons-Reid and she had a fine attentive
intelligence that I really warmed to. My friend Richard Leigh from
Campfire films
http://campfire.org.au/ was also really impressed
by Carl's work, he was certainly a standout.
Indu
Balachandran from Sydney’s Information and Cultural Exchange (ICE) was
memorable, as was a glimpse of one of the programs they’d made on African
parenting. Lachlan Macdowall from Victorian College of the Arts, Community
Cultural Development had some useful observations about Evaluation in the Arts.
There were
organisations with names like Feral Arts and Big hArt – Scott Rankin began with virtually the only
words spoken during the day about oral exchange. He evoked beautifully the
membranes in the ear and the throat, and the exhalation of breath, the vibrations
of sound which arise out of our craving for meaning. It seems he set off the
oral storytellers at that point, both myself and the delightful Fadzai
of StillWaters Storytelling Collective http://stillwaterswomen.org/
were hands up with comments.
I offered a
quote from Ursula Le Guin about breath and story, it was picked up in the
closing comments. Even though oral storytelling seems to sit at the edge of a
lot of the new media, I think we can call people back into their bodies and the
face-to-face power of story. Meanwhile I met an extraordinary array of “co
creators” at this event – story making in its many many forms.
Julie Perrin
blog.tellingwords.com.au
November 12,
2012
