On Monday 27th June I flew out to Valencia with four young artists to kick off the Under 25 project with four days of a ‘Laboratory’ where they would prepare themselves for their four week residency through workshops, presentations and seminars with Spanish artists Bea Fernandez, Cristina Blanco, Roger Bernat, La Dula and Agost Productions.
Although I have been involved in the planning for this project since September 2015, it was still difficult to know what to expect from the days ahead and much of my attention was on making sure that our artists were settled, comfortable and ready to express themselves and get the best from the opportunity that awaited them (earning me the title of ‘travel mum’!).
The majority of the week consisted of intense workshops with Bea and Cris that introduced the group to tools that they may use to inspire their work in the coming weeks. Both practitioners, although different in their approaches, one as a choreographer and the other as a contemporary artist working in performance and film, provided the group with an opportunity to think conceptually and in an abstract way about performance and creation, with the focus on providing tools to support the creative process, not focussing on specific themes.
For me, as something of an outside observer, the most interesting thing was to see how the members of our Peshkar group interact with the other artists and the material within the workshops. As our artists come from different backgrounds themselves, the week required them to push themselves in often unfamiliar and challenging directions. It is not often that a digital animator gets to take part in a contemporary dance workshop!
Language is, of course, a challenge when working across cultures. The group have already started to develop their own language and way of communicating across the language barriers that exist between them. There are words, sounds, phrases and facial expressions that bleed into the interactions between the group that will become a unique way of comm
unicating existing alongside the efforts of the whole group to learn and understand the languages that are present.
For the next month the group will be working creatively alongside each other under the guidance of Jaume Ibanez, a tutor from Spanish partner Escuela Del Actor. On the 28th July they will share the results of this first residency in whatever form it emerges as. In the meantime, you can follow the journey of the Peshkar artists through their individual Tumblr blogs which are linked on our special Under25 project page and the Under 25 Instagram page.
