Author: Laura Sayers

By Felicity Truscott

Hurstpierpoint school visited the DLWP looking for inspiration for a new, major A–level project. The Elizabeth Price curated exhibition, In A Dream I Saw A Way To Survive and You Were Full of Joy, is a fantastic opportunity to be inspired by over fifty different artworks and their horizontal relationships.

In the exhibition, we discussed Price’s meticulous research method, amassing associations and narratives by combining objects and images. Looking at her initial inspiration, Paulini’s Necessaire and Henry Onslow Ford’s Snowdrift the concept of horizontality in art began to embed, we went under the cloth with Metzger’s Historic photograph discussing how it altered our perception of the work, its content and possible associations. We deliberately hung around work that repelled us aesthetically or disturbed us in other ways to see if time spent with an artwork was fruitful, testing whether we trusted our own observations sufficiently to reach any new association or understanding.

Back in the studio, Katrina Palmer’s New Stone text-based piece was the starting point for making work that associates with what’s been thrown away and layers compressed down beneath the earth to become rock.

Trying to influence our own states of consciousness and sense of horizontality were elements of our experimental physical action drawing. Students scooted over materials associated with the geological cycle and compression, ash and chalk and created abstract drawings built up over repetition.

For a contrasting sense of focus and detail, the students moved between animated physical action drawing and stillness carefully observing horizontal line in the landscape outside the studio by drawing directly onto the windows reproducing only the horizontal lines.

There was a variety of work and approach reflecting individual’s characters; students and teachers influenced each other and extended ideas. At the end of the workshop, we looked together at the work, discussing it and observing how just like In A Dream I Saw A Way To Survive and You Were Full of Joy putting together a combination of images can create a bigger story we are all part of.

Elizabeth Price exhibition closes on Monday 1 May.

By Zowie Martin, Yoga Tutor

My first thoughts on creating a Yoga practice, in connection with this exhibition, were simply to explore horizontality physically, through asana, the postures.

But as I pondered on it more, I realised there was so much more just in the title.

Yoga and Buddhist philosophy teach that we are essentially asleep. Ignorance, misunderstanding and misconception (Avidya) prevent us from knowing our true nature. We see life through a veil of illusion (Maya). This life is essentially a dream, an illusion. In my life, the spiritual practice of Yoga has been the way I saw to survive. A raft of wisdom to cling to on a turbulent ocean of trials, an island to retreat to, to find peace in turmoil, it does give me great joy.

At the start of our first session on Monday 20 March, as the video and audio shut down and the gallery fell into silence, I invited students to consider the artwork Necessaire, which I felt most drawn to. Its simplicity and emptiness seemed to bring a wave of relief over my mind. A clearing. The joy of escaping the constant narrative of the mind.

This stilling of the thought waves, (the vrittis) is Yoga.  The moment we are able to glimpse our true nature, the Self and know the illusory nature of temporal reality.  My mind, so constantly full, is longing to be empty. For me, Necessaire represents the goal of Yoga, the cessation of thought, and dissolution of mind, the beauty and purity of emptiness.

We lay amongst the recumbent figures in the SLEEPING section for a body scan, a form of mindfulness practice to increase awareness of our present experience, to ‘fall awake’.

We explored our relationship to the ground through a sequence of lying stretches before moving mats into the WORKING section and creating horizontal lines in Asana postures.

In the MOURNING section, we paid close attention to the breath – inhalation, exhalation and the pause in between, the suspension of breath, the stillness.

In the DANCING section, we adopted corpse pose and visualised Shiva as Nataraja – Lord of the Dance. The purpose of his dance which is played out within the heart is to release all souls from the snare of illusion.

“STUDENT QUOTE” Student

In preparation for our second workshop on Monday 10 April, I thought less about a specific piece of work (although the genre of landscape in the working section was uppermost in my mind), but rather the general theme of Horizontality and stripping it back to the root being the Horizon itself.

These words of Elizabeth Price the curator seemed to give permission for my own creative license:

“The project of the exhibition is to bring together images and objects that manifest a horizontal composition or express horizontal states. It comprises to some extent a formal survey, but it also seeks to extend stories …………. a key artistic objective is the composition of a supplementary narrative…….”

My intention was to invite students to become part of the exhibition as bodies brought together to explore the possibility of expressing horizontal states using yoga asana to manifest a horizontal composition.

We drew around the small photograph XXX and I offered this supplementary narrative from “A book of silence” by Sara Maitland to propose more meaning and connection between the key theme of the exhibition and the practice of Yoga.

“The horizon line of the hills abided. It was uncluttered by trees or houses. I could see it out of every window. Wherever I sat to meditate, there was the clear clean line that divides earth and sky, and also unites them. That line was constant. It emerged out of the dark in the first dawn light and was swallowed back into the dark at nightfall. Above the line infinity; below the line mortality. But the line itself was both, and the wind blew along it fresh and free like the passage of the spirit.”

When we raise our arms to shoulder height we create a horizontal which intersects our vertical axis at the heart like the symbol of the cross. The heart is the central chakra, the point of transition between the worldly concerns and the spiritual.

All above the line infinity, all below mortality. But the line (and the heart) being both, life in the world, relationships, work and play, and also, beyond life in the world, the Heart being the seat of the Self, the Atman, the soul.

“Unable to check in a mirror if extended limbs were truly parallel to the ground, Zowie invited us to feel the line of postures and asked us to consider why the truth of a line we can see, would be truer than the truth of a line we can sense – a great question in the context of a visual art exhibition, where some people might not always feel our responses, sensations and thoughts, are as important as images and forms we are presented with – but of course they are” Student

On the day after Billie Piper was awarded an Olivier Award for Best Actress for Yerma, a play that also won an Olivier award last night for Best Revival, we are delighted to announce we will be showing Yerma as a live broadcast at the Pavilion on Thursday 14 September.

The roll-call of the best of British acting continues with a live broadcast of Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead starring Daniel Radcliffe on Thursday 20 April and an NT Encore Twelfth Night starring Tamsin Greig as Malvolia,  a new twist on Shakespeare’s classic comedy of mistaken identity on Saturday 22 April.

Other broadcasts include RSC Live Julius Caesar on Wednesday 26 April where Angus Jackson directs Shakespeare’s epic political tragedy, as the race to claim the empire spirals out of control.

On Thursday 11 May Jude Law stars in the new stage adaptation of Obsession, broadcast live from the Barbican Theatre and on Thursday 18 May see Imelda Staunton in James Macdonald’s new production of Edward Albee’s landmark play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.

On Saturday 10 June the Pavilion will be showing their first matinee production of NT Encore Peter Pan – perfect treat for all the family.

On Wednesday 9 August don’t miss the RSC Live production of Titus Andronicus – The decay of Rome reaches violent depths in Shakespeare’s most bloody play.

For four years now the De La Warr Pavilion introduced National Theatre Live and RSC Live events for theatre lovers who enjoy the live theatre experience but cannot go to London to watch the shows of their choice.  We are most popular venue in the South East for this work because, unlike the cinemas, you are actually watching the plays in a real theatre.

The project launched in June 2009 with a broadcast of the National Theatre production of Phèdre with Helen Mirren and has since broadcast more than forty other productions live, from both the National Theatre and from other theatres in the UK.

The De La Warr Pavilion introduced the NT Live broadcasts in 2013 and has since screened some of their best, award-winning and popular productions including Danny Boyle’s Frankenstein with Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller; War Horse; Man and Superman with Ralph Fiennes; Hedda Gabler with Ruth Wilson and Saint Joan with Gemma Arterton.

Live Broadcasts from other UK theatres include Coriolanus from the Donmar Warehouse; A View from the Bridge from the Young Vic; Macbeth from the Manchester International Festival; and Hangmen and The Audience from London’s West End. The NT Live biggest single broadcast to date screened live at the Pavilion is Hamlet with Benedict Cumberbatch at the Barbican, which was seen by over 550,000 people simultaneously.

How do they do it?

Though each broadcast is filmed in front of a live audience in the theatre, cameras are carefully positioned throughout the auditorium to ensure that cinema audiences get the ‘best seat in the house’ view of each production. Where these cameras are placed is different for each broadcast, to make sure that cinema audiences enjoy the best possible experience every time.

Satellites allow the productions to be broadcast live to cinemas throughout the UK, as well as many European venues. Some of the productions have been so popular that they have come back for an “Encore” – recorded live in the first instance and re-played ”as live” on its return.

The screenings at the Pavilion attract a lot of local audiences who always have an amazing time. Many people say they prefer it to live theatre as the cameras concentrate on close-ups and different angles that you would not see if you were at the theatre itself, and the fact that the broadcast gets a round of applause at the curtain call indicates how much people have suspended their disbelief at not being at the National Theatre! Tickets cost £14 and £12 for DLWP Members, concessions, and students.

For more information visit www.dlwp.com

Having delved into the poisoning exploits of genteel Brighton resident Christiana Edmunds, my series of lectures on Discovering Women in Sussex came to a close, almost a year to the day when they began. The DLWP hosted nine lectures, which I organised thematically, with each lecture featuring women either born in Sussex or drawn to this county, and whom I thought deserved re-discovery. As lectures progressed, I also responded to the interests of some of those who attended, which meant encountering women I hadn’t known much about such as photojournalist Grace Robertson, whose images of women in the 1950s have become classics of their kind.

Taken in all the women we looked at included women artists, writers and musicians; political activists, campaigners and philanthropists; explorers, photographers and poets, not to forget “Bognor’s mermaid”, trailblazing ethical entrepreneur Anita Roddick of Body Shop fame, and the wonderful Alison Jolly, who proved to primatologists and anthropologists that in the world of the lemurs, females rule the roost.

My initial lectures were based very much on the research that I had done for my book Sussex Women (Snake River Press, 2007) but as the DLWP kindly decided to run another two sessions, we travelled a long way from my early research to explore and discover an extraordinary range of Sussex-linked women, several of whom were quite new to the very receptive, enthusiastic and supportive audience that attended the lectures. The whole series has been enormously enjoyable and hopefully has helped to put a far greater number of Sussex women onto the map than were there when we first began the voyage of discovery.

Ann Kramer

21 March 2017

House of Commons commission for a creative practitioner to run a residency programme commemorating and celebrating race discrimination legislation.

The Speaker’s Advisory Committee on Works of Art seeks to commission a UK-based creative practitioner to undertake a residency to create six new works, through participatory community workshops, relating to the development of race discrimination legislation. These works will be displayed during October/November 2018 within the participating local communities, and early in 2019 in the Houses of Parliament.

The residency is to mark the campaign for, and the passing of early race discrimination legislation in 1965, 1968 and 1976, it will reflect and celebrate:

• the growth of an inclusive democracy;
• the people who campaigned and fought for the changes of legislation;
• the experience of the generations who, empowered by the legislation, continued to campaign.

At the end of the residency the practitioner will have the opportunity to develop a proposal for a piece of art suitable for permanent display in Parliament and acquisition into the Parliamentary Art Collection.

Practitioners working in the areas of fine art, iPad/digital art, photography, design or craft with experience in both exhibition and community-based practice are invited to apply before 12 noon on April 12^th 2017.

Full details of the commission and application process can be found on http://www.parliament.uk/art-rraresidency.

The project studio space is being established at Bexhill Museum. Here; research will be made, concepts formed, ideas discussed and explorations made  –  Ahead of delivering three innovative heritage exhibitions.

Exploring ancient building material with Bexhill Museum Curator, Julian Porter

Museum volunteer – Yvonne adding the borders to East Sussex in the interactive migration map.

Plotting our own migration history in the museum.

I think the answer is YES…….

People Object Place

This exciting community project will explore the heritage of migration in the region, discover the contributions migration has made to the development of the area, and discusses contemporary global topics. A partnership between Bexhill Museum, Hastings Museum and Art Gallery and De La Warr Pavilion, this project and exhibition is being developed and curated by students from Bexhill 6th Form College and Sussex Coast College Hastings.

De La Warr Pavilion Dates:

People Object Place in the Rooftop Foyer

Saturday 15 April — Monday 1 May

More information coming soon.

The New Line showcases publicity material created by the leading designers of the 1930s for organisations such as Shell, the General Post Office and Fortnum & Mason drawn from the V&A’s National Art Library and three private collections. My research for the exhibition was focused on the designers, their particular working practices and any snippets of information that would add colour or context to the works. We were particularly interested in exploring how design was used to negotiate new ideas of modernity during this decade of social, cultural and political change and its role in explaining to the public how new technologies, such as the telephone, would fit into their everyday lives.

During the 1930s, most designers were men and in the printing industry women were not even allowed to enter the trade as an apprentice, so I was excited to discover that one of the designers, Paul Beaujon, responsible for the pacifist pamphlet Peace Under Earth, was in fact a pseudonym for a woman, Beatrice Warde.

Beatrice Warde (1900-1969) was an expert in typography, a prolific writer and educator who lectured widely to printers, students and typographers. Born in New York, she was the only daughter of May Lamberton Becker, a book reviewer for the New York Herald Tribune and Gustave Becker, a composer and music teacher. In a transcript of a rediscovered 1959 interview, published online in Eye (no. 84 vol. 21, 2012), she described how her love of calligraphy as a child led to a deep interest in typography and explained that she used a ‘pen name’ because women at that time were not well respected in the printing profession; she decided upon a French name to be a little more ‘mysterious’.

Beatrice began her career by working as Henry Lewis Bullen’s assistant at the American Type Founders (ATF) Company’s typographic library, a repository that at its peak contained more than 16,000 books, periodicals and rare works from the printing trade. She later observed that the library didn’t have many visitors so it was the perfect place to research her interest in typography.

Moving to London in the early 1920s with her husband Frederic Warde, a typographic designer who had also been Director of Printing at Princeton University Press, she continued to build on her base of knowledge, publishing her influential article, “The Garamond Types, Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Sources Considered” under her pseudonym, Paul Beaujon in 1926. The article appeared in The Fleuron, the journal of typography and book arts edited by Stanley Morison and was based on her extensive research. It proposed that many typefaces previously attributed to Claude Garmont were in fact created 90 years later by Jean Jannon. As a result of this article, she was offered the part-time role of editor for the Monotype Recorder and was subsequently promoted to publicity manager in 1929, a post she retained until her retirement in 1960.

A strong advocate for greater clarity in the way typography and printing were used in communications, the lecture she gave to the British Typographer’s Guild would become the basis of her influential series of essays published in the volume (1932) in which she asserted ‘that the most important thing about printing is that it conveys thought, ideas, images, from one mind to other minds.’ Reading her texts I was struck by how the force of her personality leaps off the page, she writes with huge enthusiasm, sincerity and wit.

Beatrice was a trailblazer for women in her profession. She was first female (honorary) member of the Type Directors Club in 1960 and her broadside, This is a Printing Office, a rallying cry for the printing industry, has since been displayed inside printing offices all over the world and appears cast in bronze at the entrance to the United States Government Printing Office in Washington, D.C.

For those who would like to find out more about Beatrice and how she inspired future generations of designers, typographers and printers, The V&A’s National Art Library holds a significant amount of Monotype material in their archive and her personal, family and professional papers can be found in the Cadbury Research Library at the University of Birmingham. I hope you enjoy finding out about this extraordinary ‘first lady of typography’ as much as I did.

Written by Sandy Jones

Getting children aged 5-7 years old to engage with art can be a challenge, so I decided to turn the experience into an adventure. The Dancing in Dream Land workshop guided children through a journey in which they explored the artwork in the Elizabeth Price exhibition.

Focusing solely on the Sleeping section of the exhibition, the children considered states of sleeping, consciousness and dreaming through dance and movement. Spending part of the workshop in the gallery, the children were asked to identify sleeping figures and take on their shapes, exploring the different positions that we can sleep in. We studied an excerpt from Charles Laughton’s film, The Night of the Hunter (1955), noting the dreamlike scenarios and imagery.

Back in the studio, we began our journey into dreamland based on Laughton’s imagery and the children’s own imaginations. We ventured through a river made of lemonade, a field with grass so tall it touched the clouds, we were trapped in a spider’s web, and finally were carried back to our beds on giant butterflies.

In each section of dreamland, the children considered how their bodies moved and changed. Our arms became the long grass, we floated into the clouds and we struggled and wriggled free of the giant spider’s web. Through moving, shaking and burning off some half-term energy the children engaged with some of the themes and concepts in the Price exhibition, and we had a lot of fun in the process!

By choreographer Emily Robertson

Hello! My name is Emily Robertson and I am a contemporary dance choreographer and performer. As a choreographer my practice is currently focused on exploring methods to translate works of art into dance. I also run workshops in schools around the country that teach elements of the curriculum through dance and movement, a practice called ‘kinaesthetic learning’. This method offers students a new perspective in which to interact with their school work. It gives them an opportunity to bring their thought processes out of their minds and into the space in front of them and offers them the ability to translate those thoughts into something physical and tactile. It is a practice that is on the rise in dance education, and whilst aiding students in grasping their curriculum it also nurtures creativity and teamwork skills.

The world of visual art can feel inaccessible to school students, and quite often interaction with high art is not something that happens outside of the art classroom. Therefore, I have teamed up with the Learning and Participation department at the De La Warr to formulate workshops and CPD sessions for students and teachers exploring the exhibition IN A DREAM YOU SAW A WAY TO SURVIVE AND YOU WERE FULL OF JOY, curated by Elizabeth Price.

For the CPD session on 30^th January 2017, I wanted to offer the teachers a ‘toolkit’ to implement kinesthetic learning in their classrooms. I ran the CPD session as if they were students, so they could have an immersive experience of the session and discover how it feels to learn kinesthetically for themselves.

After an obligatory round of tea and cake, we entered the gallery space and began to move! I led the teachers through a lesson plan filled with tasks that required them to move, think, explore and create around the artworks in the exhibition. In one particular task, the teachers created physical ‘dream stories’ for Edward Onslow Ford’s Snowdrift (1901) and Gavin Turk’s Nomad (2002). After a few bouts of giggles and nerves, the teachers began to work in groups to create physical dream stories exploring each sculpture. I was genuinely blown away by the artistry and commitment to the movement the whole group applied to the tasks. I could tell they were beginning to explore the concepts of the artworks through this new perspective and may have even surprised themselves with their beautiful physical creations.

After the CPD session, the group had a lovely air of teamwork and creative achievement about them. We played, danced and laughed but also learned how to interact physically with complex artistic concepts and make them tangible and fun to explore. I hope their students have as much fun exploring these tasks in the classroom as we had in the gallery!