Telling Our Stories, Finding Our Roots Story Telling Evening at Exeter Phoenix

Story Teller Sandhya Dave 

Hot on the heels of a fully booked spring performance at RAMM, Telling Our Stories, Finding Our Roots, presents an evening of storytelling, inspired by new historical research into Exeter's multicultural history, on Wednesday 5 June at the  Exeter Phoenix  for the 2013 Exeter Ignite Theatre festival. Rich story-telling, music and verse bring a new multi-cultural perspective to Exeter’s history in a special performance.

Expect an evening of traditional tales mixed with original stories of people from around the world, moving to, living in and affecting lives in Exeter. Hosted by story-teller Sandhya Dave and local historian Lucy MacKeith, Telling Our Stories' volunteer team will present stories of Black GIs in St Thomas, Exeter's Jewish History, tales of slavery, abolition and more.

In this special performance for Exeter's Ignite Theatre Festival, the Telling Our Stories, Finding Our Roots collection of stories takes inspiration from new research uncovering Exeter's diverse past. Part of a year long Heritage Lottery Funded project, the 5 June event follows hot on the heels of a fully booked storytelling evening at the RAMM earlier this spring and will give insight into just a few of the human stories revealed in more than 20 different research inquiries and interviews with modern day Exeter residents from a wide range of cultural backgrounds. 

The stories will include pieces that bring new perspectives to the Royal Albert Memorial Museum's Collections and local stately homes. How did war time Exeter respond to a US Army presence that kept black and white GIs separated on the city's streets? Hear tales of Exeter's Jewish community in the Middle Ages and today. Discover how Exeter's residents were affected by slavery and abolition. What happened when Tennessee's Fisk Singers Jubilee Singers arrived in Victorian Exeter and more.

Telling Our Stories, Finding Our Roots, £6/£4, at Exeter Phoenix on Wednesday 5 June at 7:30pm for more information visit www.exeterphoenix.co.uk

Arts: The Red Ball Project comes to Exeter

Source: The RedBall Project Toronto by Rob Burke on Flickr

Exeter will be one of five UK cities visited by the internationally mysterious RedBall Project from artist Kurt Perschke this summer. I am extremely excited about this and hope to see it in town at one of it's installation spaces during the 3 day visit from Friday 15 June to Sunday 17 June. From what I can gather, it is just what is says on the tin, a big red ball, a really big red ball, placed in various locations around the city. It's been all over the world - Chicago, Toronto, Barcelona, Perth, Dubai and more - and everyone seems to agree that it's awesome.

Source: The RedBall Project in Norwich by Leo Reynolds on Flickr

Source: RedBallProject.co.uk

According to Perschke, The RedBall Project is about creating a 'catalyst for new encounters within the everyday. Through the magnetic, playful, and charismatic nature of the RedBall the work is able to access the imagination embedded in all of us.' And I can see exactly where he's going with that. There is something so universal about a ball - the fact that you just want to touch it or kick it or poke it or something - which brings an immediate sense of childhood and whimsy. The fact that it's SO big totally reinforces that.

The project is remeinscent of Carsten Holler's Test Site giant slide installation that was part of the Tate Modern's Unilever Series back in 2007. For that thoroughly successful installation, the artist built three giant slides in the turbine hall in order to capture 'the visual spectacle of watching people sliding and the ‘inner spectacle’ experienced by the sliders themselves, the state of simultaneous delight and anxiety that you enter as you descend'. The title of the project, 'Test Site', was an invitation for towns and businesses to integrate slides into everyday life. Though London did not permanently take him up on this offer, thousands of grown up visitors became part of the 'inner spectacle' of his artsy indoor play area.

Souce Duvet Dayz

And I guess that's what it comes down to. While I fully respect the statements of both artist here, with regards to 'imagination' and 'visual spectacle', this sort of art - installations based on exaggeration and recontextualisation of childhood experiences - is good because it's really about creating an opportunity for grown ups to do things that they should have grown out of years ago, in an intellectually acceptable space. Don't get me wrong, I think there should be more of it and I am extremely pleased that Torbay Council and Dartington Trust worked to get this project here in the South West. That said, I'm sure that intellectuals looking for something to deconsturct would get the same stimulus from putting a fun fair in the Tate or an adult only ball pool on the Cathedral Green, whether they called it art or not. And every music festival in the UK will have a similar 'installation' in place, not for the sake of art, but for the sake of fun. 

I love a good laugh and the colour red, so I'm planning to go along on Friday to the Guildhall for this very reason.

Debating Devon: Did James Ravilious capture real reality in rural Devon?

Ivor Brock carrying holly for Christmas Decorations by James Ravilious from Beaford-arts.org.uk

Tonight, Exeter's Royal Albert Memorial Museum (RAMM) will host a debate on photographer James Ravilious' depiction of rural life in North Devon.  The subjects will be the pictures in the photographic exhibition of achive images from of one of the UK's most renowned documentary photographers, James Ravilious: Reflecting the Rural (at RAMM's Gallery until 29 July). 

A panel chaired by Sir Harry Studholme, Chair of the South West RDA and Forestry Commissioner for England, will discuss how Ravilious depicted rural Devon during the 1970 and 80s. Fellow panellists, Prof Michael Winter, Director, Centre for Rural Policy Research, Exeter University; Dr Mike Moser, Chair of North Devon’s UNESCO Biosphere Reserve Partnership; Dr Robert Fish, Exeter University, author of Cinematic Countrysides; and Mary Quicke, farmer and cheesemaker, will no doubt create a lively and frank discussion on the continuing cultural relevance of his images.

Street Scene by James Ravilious from Beaford-arts.org.uk

The Reflecting the Rural exhibition will feature a selection of images from the 70,000 Ravilious images in the Beaford Archive as curated by by photographer Liz Nicol and agriculturalist Martyn Warren (University of Plymouth).  And James Ravilious's black and white photographs of North Devon are described as showing 'a largely unspoilt, but vulnerable, country area'.

For what it's worth, I think the thing that makes these images so striking is that they are not just landscapes - they are portraits and vignettes of the people who existed in these spaces. So often, depictions of rural life don't show much life at all. We've all seen those beautiful landscape photos or windswept trees in Dartmoor and solitary ponies standing beneath Hay Tor, but Ravilious has a way of capturing the people of these spaces in a way that is much more akin to an urban photographer like Garry Winogrand. Here the people are the focus and setting is the frame. 

Dick French Family watching the Cup Final

American Legion Convention, Dallas, Texas, 1964. © Estate of Garry Winogrand

The debate is on Tuesday 12 June at 7pm. £4.50 tickets can be purchased from the museum reception or by calling 01392 265858, concessions £3.00.