Tikhtak

The LIFT Living Archive Opened! - A lesson for the church

This week I attended the official opening of the Lift Living Archive at Goldsmiths college. The archive moved from Lifts offices over the summer to be housed at Goldsmiths college, who have been encouraging various groups to explore it. The archive covers the work of Lift (London International Theatre Festival) from 1981 to 2001. My own involvement in the archive has been as a researcher for about 6 months as part of my MA placement. That meant delving into boxes, reading reviews and eventually creating an on-line trail on the Lift living archive website called Foreign theatre in a foreign land. (Pic above is Al Kasaba's  "Alive from Palestine,")

Lifts work in bringing top international theatre companies who perform in non traditional settings and with a whole range of creative approaches appealed to me because I could see how the vision of Lift could be applied to the church. Just as Lift celebrate different expressions of theatre both in and outside of the building so the church needs to learn how to flex the same muscle. Read Jonny Bakers take on preaching  "Throwing a grenade into the fruit bowl" for a bit of inspiration on this.

The evening itself was done in a very creative way. There was a room full of tables with people from Lift past and present as well as representatives from the various user groups. I sat with The Magic Me contingency. Magic me is an inter-generational arts organisation which had facilitated a creative writing project called penfriends among pensioners. In the middle of the table was a box from the archive and having put on white glove's we were encourage to explore and talk about the archive. There was a mic on each table to record our conversations. It really felt like a feast of Lifts history. To round things off we were then provided with a real feast and wine to boot.  A thoroughly enjoyable and inspiring evening.

Jacob Isaac

This weekend we had the pleasure of hosting Jacob Isaac from Bangalore in India. We actually had met him in India in 2005 at the South Asian youth Conference where he was a speaker. He has again been in England as a speaker at Greenbelt this year. Jacob is a real entrepreneur and has set up numerous projects in Bangalore under the banner of Kerygma. They include an outreach coffee bar for young people, a school to train christian leaders and a rehabilitation centre for different addictions.

Greenbelt 08

This year at Greenbelt the CMS youth team juggled between 3D, trax16 and Tajik break dancers. Each day we ran 3D workshops with around 40-50 young people. 3D stands for Drama, Dance and Drumming and using this medium we explored both man's and God's perspective on looking after the environment and encouraged people to engage with A Rocha. As always we got interviews with various people from around Greenbelt  ranging from Martyn Joseph and Comedian Jo Enright to authors Richard Burridge who has  just written "Imitating Jesus" and Philip Yancey. It was also good to catch young people just milling around the site and working in here with various organisations. Again the Tajik breakdancers Vito and Illios were doing their stuff, sharing testimonies and the Youth team compared their programme. Neema crafts from Tanzania in the CMS tent were an inspiration to everyone and engaged people in making paper out of elephant dung, jewelry out of glass and dancing. I think outside of the CMS programme my highlight was chilling with Irfana in the big venue Centaur listening to Aradhna, a white, traditional Indian band, while Zara danced and ran around the wide carpeted expanse. Check out flickr for more pics

Free For All at Lambeth Conference

We arrived at the Lambeth Conference not sure how Free For All would fit in or indeed whether the Bishops wives would throw themselves into it or not. Unfortunately down to a clash of programming and very modest advertising we will never know as we only got one Spouse, Donna. Her husband is the Bishop of Iowa and she was in fact worth about ten Spouses. She herself is an Actor and she fitted into the team as if she had been with us all year. Check out some pics from the rehearsals on flickr. The performance was attended by about 20 in a the massive spouse conference space but we gave it our all and it was received well.

PIM goes to Cotswold Wildlife Park

As part of the programme for the younger participants at the CMS PIM training this week we visited the Cotsold Wildlife Park. We all had a great time and it was the best mix of a zoo and safari park I think I have been to in Britain. Apart from unwinding in a beautiful part of England we saw some strange sights. A bullock and Goat sparring together and what might have been what we mean at CMS by an acknowledged community. Check more pics on flickr

trax16 and Tajik Breakdancers at Angel Space

On Sunday Mike North and I ventured down to Rochester Cathedral to interview young people from the Rochester area at an event called Angel Space. Illyos and Vitalek, two Tajik breakdancers who are on tour with CMS over the Summer joined us and entertained everyone with their back crunching routines and a workshop for anyone who wanted to ache the next morning. It was also an opportunity for people to find out what Tajikistan and breakdancing have in common and how they have both been called into mission in this unorthodox way (excuse the pun) We will be featuring this event in trax16 next month.

First Friday at Wimbledon

On Friday afternoon I had a whacky idea to go down to Wimbledon around 5pm and see if we could get in. Zara's God Parents Bird and Jo kindly stepped in to baby sit and off we went. We got to the ground and the queue for evening tickets looked humungous but it actually only took us an hour and a quarter. On getting to the gate I asked on the off chance for ticket returns for centre court and believe it or not they had two tickets. We got to se a thrilling game between Ancic and Ferrer and it went on well in to the evening with Ancic eventually winning. I think next year we will manage a whole day. Check some of our Wimbledon picks on Flickr.

World To Rights Project for 2009

After our CMS Youth and Children's team meeting last week we agreed the final look of our flyer to promote our project on child rights for 2009 called World To Rights. It will again tour around Cathedrals in the UK in the form of educational workshops with a performance at the end of the day much like Free For All. But we are also hoping to break new ground and take it to more unconventional youth venues such as Pupil referral units, Youth clubs and centres for youth offenders.  A new web page is up and running and will be the place where the project will be documented and educational resources will be available.

Life after Free For All

As a way of documenting our Free For All year of touring 30 plus cathedrals and working with hundreds of school children to commemorate the abolition of the slave trade bill in 1807 we have published a book of some of the images from every cathedral we visited from Peterborough Cathedral on the left here to St Georges Cathedral in Freetown, Sierra Leone. Check out an on line version of this book as well as see what we plan to do next

Once

Got the film Once out on Dvd a few days ago as I had a free evening to myself. What great little Irish gem of a film. It is basically about a meeting between an Irish busker and a Czech girl living in Dublin. She admires his music in the street and then he discovers she too is a bit of a musician and they get a band together to record some music in a sound studio by the end of the week. It sounds a simple plot and it is but that is why it is so good. Both actors had never acted before (alhough he was in the commitments as Outspan Foster)and were musicians writing all the music themselves. The film won an oscar for best sound track. Check out this live recording in LA of "When your minds made up"