2014 workshops
REFLECTIONS AND MEMORY – Liberated Words Festival III 1914–2014
This festival inspired a number of workshops that were screened at The Arnolfini, Bristol. The video above includes all of them but you can watch individual sections at our Vimeo page https://vimeo.com/liberatedwords
There is a lot to say about each workshop. Each one was absolutely different from the previous one, and meant we were all working from a blank page each time. It was fun and exciting as a result!
I was very fortunate to be the project lead with two wonderful workshop leaders: ecopoet Helen Moore and digital artist and filmmaker (singer and musician) Howard Vause. For The Golden Bird project they excelled in quite a difficult situation working with dementia patients at the Royal United Hospital in Bath, through At at the Heart. A homely situation was created with cake and tea, and a few of the patients came along with family and took part in the workshop. I think Helen and Howard did a wonderful job. A stuffed bird was just the prompt that was needed. It is hard to work with patients who need time to get to know you and think around a subject, but are also hard to keep in touch with, maybe in for a few days then back home again.
Mametz Wood project was with St Gregory’s Catholic College, Bath and was organised through inspiring teacher Tom Fieldhouse for their creativity week in the summer. With an array of Macs to work on, the students, of all ages, really responded imaginatively to Owen Sheer’s reflective poem. Even though it was quite hard to find a quiet room to record sound in!
St Brendan’s School, Bristol, also sent me a couple of films after I visited the school earlier in the year.
During the actual festival in 2014 Lucy invited Marc Neys to run a workshop, which was attended by Chaucer Cameron, Helen Dewbery, Caleb Parkin, Lucy English, Howard Vause and myself. The resulting film is part of this screening. It was a very good workshop. Marc made it fun but informative and gave some lovely examples of poetry films – we used the Bristol docks for our sound and images. The final poem was a joint effort between Lucy and Caleb. Thank you Marc for coming over, and it is good to see that we are all still very much involved in poetry film today!
