Sunday with Me: 30.3.07: with Ian Abbot.

Ian Abbott has just left, an hour or so ago. Last night (Saturday 29th, Ian seemed to enjoy the fish pie, then we went to The Sportsman, which has been refurbished, then the Royal, then to the Pack Horse talking about the state of the performance scene in the North West.
Waking early, I had a cup of tea in bed before getting up and making smoked salmon and scrambled egg. We ended up not walking Kinder, as we were advised that bad weather was due in the afternoon so, instead, we headed up past the campsite through Kinder woods and up to Mount Famine. Near the top of mount famine we met two Mountain Rescue chaps on a training exercise with a huge radio aerial, and got chatting a bit. They recommended a route to us and we found the wet boggy bit they warned us about (Ian almost lost a boot) and the had fun jumping over the waterlogged parts (Ian can jump further than me, we found), before getting very blustered until we turned off to near Jacob's ladder. We pressed on to Edale Cross (where my father left Paul and I on our Sunday 3.4.06), before dropping back own into Hayfield. Ian was (and is always) good company, kind to a fault.
A journey of 7 to 7 1/2 miles, a steady walk, before returning for pasta and sauce and a read of the papers. It didn't rain a drop, so we could have done Kinder after all.
I gave the stills camera to Ian, I will upload a select few of them sometime soon.

Forthcoming: Sunday with Ian Abbott

Good News!

Ian Abbott, with whom I spent a fantastic Sunday traveling through Devon on 22.10.06, is coming up for a second Sunday on 30.3.08. He will arrive on the Saturday evening "give or take 30 mins of 6pm" and we will be having fish pie for tea before going for a couple of pints of ale. On the Sunday morning we will walk up Kinder Scout and be brightened by the exercise. If you follow this blog you might remember that Kinder Scout is where Mariella Greil and I walked in preparation for our lecture last November, in entirely abysmal weather.

Sometimes...Presents Volume: 13th March 2008

Sometimes... Presents: Volume. First Quarter. Spring. 13th March 2008 at greenroom, Whitworth St. West. Admission will be £FREE and the festivities will last 8PM-Midnight.

I am performing as Fare-Well's, singing a few Old-Timey Songs, Hymns, and Dan Amos covers, from 9PM.

Also on the bill is lo-fi vocal & drone from Roses, with Pachuco and Maroogally, disc-jockeying with their usual panache.

From Sometimes... with Love x X x

Selected for Rules & Regs, Nuffield Theatre, 31st March - April 26th

Rules and Regs is a month-long commission, where artists devise performances in response to a set of specially designed limitations (or parameters). Anyway, I got selected for the North-West one, which is keeping a smile on my face.

More details soon. Watch this space.

Invited Contributor to thelastperformance.org

Judd Morrissey, a USA-based artist, has invited me to contribute to thelastperformance.org, a web-based meditation on lastness, in response to performance company Goat Island's final work, 'The Lastmaker'.

In Judd's words, thelastperformance.org is an online collaborative writing project responding to Goat Island's decision to make a final work...writers, artists, critics, etc. are invited monthly to contribute two short pieces of writing (or responses in other media). At the end of the month, the invited contributors may decide to contribute again for the new month or to invite a new participant to replace them (completion expected sometime in 2009).

I have also been invited, with Robert Wilsmore, Giles Brokensha, Simon Piasecki, and Sarah Jane Bailes, to 'interrupt' Judd's performance (with Lucy Cash) at the Nuffield Theatre, Lancaster, Friday 29th February, Prior to Goat Island's Performance of the Lastmaker and the Goat Island Symposium, Sat 1 / Sun 2nd March.

FORTHCOMING: Application for Residency at the Institute for the Art and Practice of Dissent at Home Accepted!

The Institute for the Art and Practice of Dissent at Home is funded by Lena Simic and Gary Anderson of twoaddthree on 10% of their annual wage. The remit for The Institute extends to homemade/DIY aesthetics, family matters, home, private/public). In their words:

"The Institute for the Art and Practice of Dissent at Home is a space for dissenting the Capitalism of Culture. We are unhappy about how the culture is produced, consumed and digested here/now – Liverpool08, European Capital of Culture. We are interested in creating an alternative to the mainstream production and consumption of art and culture" - Email to Simon Bowes 7th Feb 2008.

I submitted the following Application in early February. I want to use The Institute as a base from which to explore the vanishing traces of my family's ties to the city of Liverpool and surrounds, and to develop a model of discrete works disseminated through performance lecture.

Application to the Institute for the Art and Practice of Dissent at Home, for Research and Development Period and subsequent Performance Lecture (Untitled) (expected timescale, March – April 2008)

Foreword: From the outset, note that this project is neither proposed not undertaken specifically manufacture or critically reflect upon dissent, although its aims, intentions, methodologies may contribute perspectives on the home (as place, journey, or place-as-journey) as a counterpoint to commercialization of Culture as an industry. My foremost aim will be to explore “home” in terms of spatial practices, outside of architectures, as I am seeking to perform a revaluation of the concept of home in my own practice, and to offer points of reference to the practical/theoretical remit of The Institute.

Proposal: 1. Born here, I don’t know the city. And we are disappearing, slowly. So: why “here” (why “home”)? The phrase recurs: “A family of absences”, and very little to trace them out. My granddad died recently, reminding us how little we will know, now, of our lineages and histories. Goodnight. God Bless. 2. To come here, now, is to arrive in a changing city. It is also, we might argue, to become the recipient, (perhaps not the beneficiary) of privately funded culture (you get of at Lime St., someone hands you a flyer for an event. You rush past, on your way to wherever, say “no thanks”). 3. I feel drawn-in, I need to come (back) here (but how?). There are lots and lots of things to see, lots and lots of things to do. I could go and visit Ben Johnson’s 170,000 hectare painting The Liverpool City Scape. Or I could embark, with other tourists, on the Magical History Tour (each of these implies a particular model of spatial practice relying, in the first instance, on an artist’s visual re-interpretation of the city or, I the second, interpretations of its history. Of course, neither experience is likely to bring me any closer to what I am seeking – home). 4. In respectful opposition, I propose for myself an different model of tourism, a personal and largely anonymous performance in response to the vanishing of our histories. 5. Acknowledging the wisdom of the saying Svakog gosta tri dana dosta! (Each guest is enough after three days), I propose to visit Liverpool for three days, using the residency as a base. From there I will plot a series of routes according to the barest of biographical about my family: street names, addresses of the back of photographs, places featured in the old stories, before I tour the City and surrounds. 6. Navigating according to an inherited, but rather outdated, social geography, the journeys will permit often tenuous or even fictional and misremembered correlations to dictate my course, in the full hope and anticipation of getting lost. The journeys will research (i.e., turn, re-turn, search-again) the impossibility of belonging to homes that were never mine. My aim will be to translate a sense of loss and lost-ness into a sense of reverie, hope, and optimism, as I record my journey, not only as a record of people and things past, but as a testimony to homes still occupied, journeys still made, lives still lived. 7. (Because All at Once Am I Several Stories) I will keep a notebook of events in relation to site, place, location and journey. 8. This research period will inform the development of a lecture, delivered one week later at The Institute, to an invited audience (Liverpool-based practitioners, Liverpool Hope Staff, Students?), before opening up the themes of home, familiar relations to general dialogue. 9. Budget: TRAVEL 2 x10.50 New Mills Central to Liverpool Lime St = £21.00, Buses round Liverpool: £7.50 / R&D (Liverpool) £5.22 x 8 = 41.60 x 3= £125 / WRITING / RESEARCH / LECTURE £5.22 x 8 = £41.60 TOTAL: £195.10.

Forthcoming: Pamphleteers!

Pamphleteers! is on-going research into: The Writing and Distribution of Tracts, Pamphlets, Broadsides, Printed Ephemera (and Other Zealousnesses).

The Activities of the Pamphleteers! will be Governed by The Following Rules:

1. Pamphlets (etc) will relate to particular geographies, of path, street, road, junction, station, etc, and will document events occurring within (or through!) particular sites, places, locations, or journeys, relating the events observed, heard (or otherwise witnessed or participated-in), based on durational observations of a few hours, days, weeks, or months.

2. Pamphlets (etc) will be distributed, for free, by hand, in the sites they document or reflect upon. They will not be made widely available digitally (but we reserve the right to archive these digitally, on-line at a later date).

3. Pamphlets (etc) will court "old world charm", and "new world optimism", and will look lovely (despite being cheaply produced).

29th-31st January: Making Space Follow-Up Residency at the Nuffield Theatre.

The Nuffield are very kindly supporting a short follow-up residency, in order to collate & categorize the Nuffield Theatre Photographic Archive. The photographs, found shoved in a box during last summer's Making Space project, are believed to have been taken by Ivor Dikes during the his time as Chief Technician.

The residency at the Nuffield will be prior to an interview with Ivor, scheduled for the 7th February, through which Ivor will remember and forget the histories of people and performances shown in the photographs.

November 2007: On Hillwalking (and Falling Over).

Mariella Greil (who had a Sunday with Me in August '06) invited me to do a guest Lecture for Chester University's Dance in Discourse Module. Since I am now surrounded by hills, I am learning to love my feet by walking short walks. In July of '07 I attended 'Unknown Terra-tories', run by Neil Callaghan and Simone Kenyon as part of ArtsAdmin's DIY4 series, artists running events for the benefit of other artists. A research into performance and landscape, 'Unknown Terra-tories' involved a 10-mile hike over Borrowdale in the Lake District.

Mariella and I walked up Kinder Scout in terrible weather. On the top there was very little visibility. Without exaggeration, we feared for our safety. I led us down from the Mountain.When we'd had a cup of tea and a sit down, we put together a lecture. Here are some of the extracts I wrote. Email me at simon_bowes@hotmail.co.uk and I'll send you a copy of the most recent version.

On Hillwalking (and falling over) (extracts):

6.
The weather is not mild and the temperature is not moderate.
You take my hand as we are pushed about by the wind.
The weather is not poor, or even bad.
It is shitty, shitty weather – crap weather – the worst weather
I have been in for
years.
Were it not for you I would be alone in this.
I know that the weather is happening to somebody else.

11.
Earlier –
We saw the jawbone and pelvis of a dead sheep.
Where are the other bones? (a mis-remembrance)
You photographed it. I don’t think you should photograph it.
I don’t tell you.
I wonder who will see the photograph and what they will think.
We saw an oblong box with a pipe of black, ridged plastic coming out of it,
cut into the hillside. There is a curved wire on the top of the box.
I put the fingers of my left hand round the wire and lift the lid.
I go ‘o’ and jump back, inside is a dead weasel, or a dead stoat.
I drop the lid down and
I can’t look at the body of the animal.
I am fighting against the thought of the dead animals
for the rest of the day (a response to a hope for the future).

12.
Earlier –
We see a swathe of burnt ground,
black against dark reds,
oranges and greens.
I explain to you that
the foliage on the ground is called ‘heather’.
The line goes:
In spring, the heather says ‘wish’,
In summer, the heather says ‘swish’,
In autumn, the heather says ‘die,’
In wintertime she dies.
Domino Pop.
I am still here (Charles Bukowski - Song for Sadists Without a Place to Sit Down)
I explain that in late summer they burn patches of the heather,
leaving large tracts of scorched ground. The ash on the
ground ensures renewed growth, keeps the land fertile.

28.
The edges do not blur.
We never become each other.
We do not flow.
But we flood.

29.
Simon Bowes, Mariella Greil...
and One Other Person
Wearing a yellow waterproof jacket
And shorts (if I remember)
Shorts!
Man
of 55, 60?
Carrying a stick
A mile and half from the end
Going the opposite direction.
“Is it windy up top”
“Unbelievable”
He does not stop long
And I do not think to ask
His Name.





top-to-bottom: Mariella video-ing a sign (for Snake Pass, Just after Twenty Trees),
Shooting Cabin (the white splotch In The Distance)
Burnt Heather (photo glitched on import)
Crossing the Stream, Kinder Scout.

Notes: Photo & Video documentation sparse due to poor conditions. Mariella's "to follow".

On Hillwalking (and falling over) was, partly, a response to Neil and Simon's weekend.Information about Neil Callaghan, Simone Kenyon and Tamara Ashley's work (which involves a lot of walking) can be found here: propeller, The Legs That Make Us and here: Thinking on Your Feet

September 2007: Making Space, Nuffield Theatre

Commissioned by the Nuffield Theatre, Lancaster, to do one-week's residency, resulting in a work-in-progress called performance / installation, "White Crosses", in which I explored vacated spaces and echoed them, saying:

White Crosses (extracts):

For Broken Chords
Six strings for John – Famed Classical Guitarist, who, according to Robert, was the first person to play here (and according to someone else) one of the first, perhaps in 1969, and for all those for whom the music has stopped.
And Red Wool for Juliet who said: “Perhaps the most interesting thing about our lives are that they are continuous, unbroken threads” (Pulls wool down).

For Making Spit
Because Nikki told us – If you spit in Vienna you stay in Vienna, that the trace you leave is more than a trace, that we are present and alive in every place we’ve ever been, and every fractional time we’ve ever lived out, so there are no goodbyes after all.

For Injuries and for Fainting
Nobody has died here. But Simon fell of his chair. And Alice and Sam both fainted. Alice also punched someone in the nose, but that was next door. Someone in the Audience was stabbed. And Keith blew himself up. And Gabby literally broke a leg and was carried from the stage.

For Future
… about the way you use your legs to stumble, or the time when we saw you twirl, and your footsteps all the way from the coast, or the hours you spent building this city and the seconds it took to destroy, or the thought of your body, sick, choking me (in the cold house), the sounds of the pennies raining, about when you couldn’t think of anything, couldn’t speak, and we watched you, for a long time, and cared, or the water you splashed on your foot for your landlady’s mother, or the walk out to the wild world, and the ragged verse you sang, and the water she poured on her hair, much like the water she poured on her hair, or the ice that came, or your drunken dance in glitter slash, or the two days of aching because you didn’t warm up, about the: you’re playing that sad song again… or: when you leave absolutely disconsolate you look your friend in the eye and do not speak until the next day because the show you just seen has taken away all your hope, or the way you played dead, or the time you flew like birds.

Of the Devising







Photos (by Me, Simon Bowes and Steph Sims) (top-to-bottom):
Poor Archive (selected photographs randomly scattered)
White Gaffer tape (25mm width, a scarcity!)
Red Wool (6 strings for John)
(and for Juliet)
Whistling into Flour for Station House Opera, Black Works, 1991)
Drums for Joy: (She's Lost Control: Curtis, Hook, Sumner, Morris)
Square (with line leading) for Spit in Vienna

Of the Performance:






Photos by Jristos Boukalas (top-to-bottom) -
The Diving Into The Swimming Pool
The Clearing Out Of The Costume Cupboard
Unidentified Body in Light
Sifting Through the Archive
Audience Members Clearing the Space (1)
Audience Members Clearing the Space (2)


/ / / / / / /

Thanks to:
Matt, Alice, Julia, Sarah, Graham, Bill, Viv, Chas, Bill, Robert, Andrew, Gerry, Shamshad, Sam, Lena, Michael, Mike, Kate, Jristos

June 2007: Wouldn't it be nice...

Sometimes... is an arts collective formed in 2000 in Preston, Lancashire, we fled to Manchester in 2005, and began running quarterly performance event Volume at greenroom.

In February of '07 we triumphed at greenroom's Instant Win Competition, where you get 60 seconds to pitch an idea for an art project, grand prize £500. Phil and Nathan said they wanted to buy 500 items of 500 people for £500 and exhibit the items for one month, so we spend two weeks bounding, lunging, trudging andtraipsing round the streets of Manchester meeting many kind, helpful and enthusiastic people.
We bought: a broken guitar, a jar of soil from Lanzarote (or: a jar of lanzarote), lots of smoking paraphernalia, lots of keyrings, a bra, clothes for a premature baby, train tickets, someone's bail release form ("I never went down for this"), a bicycle clip from a girl playing the mouth organ, a bicycle maintenance tool, a book to be proof-read, all sorts.



Other Documentation of the opening night of the exhibition, and of some radio interviews can be found here at our virb.com account.

Many thanks to everyone who sold us an item.

March 2007: Sunday with Me Performance Lecture

On 4.3.07 I gave a performance lecture to nine people in Hayfield Derbyshire, North West England.

Here are some extracts describing things that happened on the original 12 Sundays:

Lecture on Bridges:
30.4.06 I’m walking briskly in the very general direction of Castlefields, Manchester, after a year in the city I’m not sure where I’m going. At the Newsagents near Spar on Oxford Road I buy a birthday card for Robin (it has pictures of bears on), and I turn off at the Temple of Convenience, Towards Peveril of the Peak, past Briton’s Protection, remembering (…) I’m following scribbled directions, despite myself, despite my inherent mistrust in academic trends, because I want to say that walking is not a textual practice but here, come over here, my way feels quite legible.
I turn down the steps the narrow way by the old canal. As I walk by, not through, not on, the water I see a boy of about sixteen hanging off a wall, a sheer drop of ten or fifteen feet. There is a football floating below him, which he is trying to rescue. I shout at him to climb back up, because I can see back the way I came a point where the ball could be rescued. The boy ignores me, so I wait ten minutes or so whilst he eventually climbs back, feeling that I could not have left him. By the lock I see the Newsreader Jon Snow, who is out for the day with, presumably, his family. I imagined they were going somewhere very nice for lunch, and afterwards, with full bellies, maybe to the theatre (to sleep it off). I am very early. I write in the card Happy 46th Birthday, Robin, and wonder where we will go, what we will see, what we will hear, what we will say.

Lecture on Music:
15.10.06: You will take one of her loose hairs and wrap it around her finger. You will take the other end and wrap it around yours and you will both pluck it, exploring the sounds, making attempts toward rhythm and melody. You will while a few minutes before the hair breaks too short to be played. And she will say, that she is going to get ready. You will shower and wait on the landing standing at the window watching a flag snap in the wind. A few minutes will pass you will ask where she wants to go.

Lecture on Forgetting:
Yosuke shares his sandwich with me and we talk about our work, and after an hour we go for a walk. We are at a loss for what do, until we arrive at a set of stone steps leading up to the city walls. And our tourism is (inevitably) accomplished quite by accident as we walk around in a circle sharing the narrow walkways with families. We take each other’s picture on his camera phone by a turret. And by fortune we arrive at a little bookshop where he inquires about the English Poet Wordsworth, whom he read as a schoolboy in Japan. He tells me that he loves nature and that when he read Wordsworth he was very moved. He recites the poem by heart.
Weeks later we meet up at the Emergency platform in Manchester, where Mariella is performing. I ask him about the poem again, he recites it. I have an idea (which I keep to myself) to find the poem and recite it, making a recording to send to him when he is back in Japan. I ask him what the title is, but he cannot recall.

4.3.07top-to-bottom:
Wading through the River Sett,
Sign for Public Safety, Nr. Bowden Bridge Campsite, foot of Kinder
Sign for Public footpath to Twenty Trees
Up Twenty Trees (5 of 9 attendees pictured)

Photographs by writings and accompanying photographs by Paul Stapleton over at www.livearchives.org/sunday-with-me/

March 2006-Ongoing: Sunday with Me.

Since March 2006 I have been doing a sporadic project called Sunday with Me. It is an invitation for anyone (but often artists, friends, family members) to spend a Sunday with Me in a place of their choosing. The initial invitation, sent to Green Room's Emergency Network, went like this:

The Invitation:

From: simon bowes
Sent: 22 February 2006 12:37:12
To: The Emergency Network
Subject: Sunday with Me:
Dear Emergency:
Sunday with Me:
Hello Everyone, it’s me, Simon Bowes!

This is a general invitation to members of the Emergency Network to spend a Sunday with Me in a place of your choosing (Manchester and surrounds) for a short or long while. Your Sunday with Me can explore everyday practices, talking to each other, walking around, sightseeing, lazing in your favorite haunts or visiting attractions. I initially considered meeting individuals but I can meet you in with your companies if you would prefer. I would be interested to discuss / explore any of your working practices. There are 8 opportunities (every Sunday, March through April) so book early to avoid disappointment!
Your Sunday with Me can be documented by either (or both) of us, in any medium (i.e., written notes, time-based A/V recordings, still photographs). Documentation will be produced collaboratively less than one week after our day out, at a time of your convenience. Documentation may form an appendix of my Practice as Research PhD, due for completion by September. Material to be included is negotiable and will be consensually agreed.

To contact me / more information: simon_bowes@hotmail.co.uk.

Hope to hear from you soon,
Simon B. x

NB. I will be skint through March but flush again in April. Please take this into consideration when suggesting activities. I am a reasonable vegetarian chef and will be happy to cook you tea if you wash up.

Sundays so far: 19.3.06: Lena, Gary, Neal, Gaby, Wladislawa, Sefton Park; Albert Dock; Tate Liverpool; their family home; 2.4.06: Paul and My Dad, my parental home Hayfield, Derbyshire, to Edale; 9.4.06: Roshana, Train journey to Chester, for Curry; 24.4.06: Paul, too much beer and too much food, Cornerhouse, Manchester city centre, Jam St. Whalley Range; 30.4.06: Robin – looking for the meaning of ‘46’ (on Robin’s 46th birthday), on foot, by bus, or by car, through Manchester, various locations; Undated (April 06?). Alastair and Pauline: walking Bonnie (the dog) Corporation Park, Blackburn; 11.6.06. Documenting Nick cleaning Denmark Rd, Hulme, Manchester; 3.9.06.With Mariella: Hilbre tidal island, West Kirby, then home (Chester) to meet Werner; 10.9.06. With Yosuke: walk: round Chester city walls; 15.10.06. With Kate: Teignmouth and Newton Abbot, Devon, taking photos; 22.10.06. With Ian: Touring South Devon by car; 10.12.06. With Dad: West Gallery Singing, Royal Hotel, Dungworth, in Yorkshire (and in response to all these: 4.3.07 Performance Lecture, walking, various locations, Hayfield, Derbyshire); Undated (October 07), Circumnavigating Grindleford, with Claire.

My Photographs on Hilbre Island:









Ian (22.10.06) Challenged me to find my way out of Trago Mills, by looking for a model railway.
Trago Mills is massive. It took ages. I drew 3 maps and then, later, a list of places we went that day.




(top-to-bottom):
'Maps' Pertaining to the Exit at Trago Mills (Newton Abbott).
Incomplete List of Places
(we started out from and ended up in Totnes).

Pictures from Sunday with Ian, 22.10.06: Touring South Devon:







(top-to-bottom):
A Goat at Trago Mills Pet Farm
Marbles in the Gift Shop at House of Marbles
Datmoor/Haytor (for the exercise)
Ian's Welcome Mat
Groyn at Dawlish (The Edge of the World)
Shut Bingo at Amusement Arcade
My Wet Socks.

If you would like a Sunday with Me, email simon_bowes@hotmail.co.uk to say hello.