This blog was written by Laetitia Clarke!

At the moment we are very busy programming(…hence our silence…)and three people in particular have been working non-stop, but things have really started to tick over now, it’s all shaping up nicely like a lovely peach.

 
I’ve been doing a creative apprenticeship in the education department at Aspex (Portsmouth’s beautiful contemporary art gallery- check it out.) This alongside planning our very own extravaganza has been tiring (a LOT of travel- in fact on the day I wrote my last exec log I had travelled around 250 miles from Cardiff to London to Portsmouth) and suffice to say I was ready to hit the hay. I’m getting used to it now though, starting to take it in my stride a bit better.

I’ve found a nice way to pass the time on the train, knitting a blanket for my sister’s soon-to-be-born godchild and watching spring bloom all over the UK (more reluctantly in some places.) Whenever I arrive on destination I am always greeted by a house full of lovely people (be it my Mum, Dad and Brother or my lovely London housemates.) I’m fit to burst with excitement about having a fully programmed festival- thanks to all who applied, we wish we could house you all and given more time and more money, we probably would.
HOLD ON TO YOUR SEATBELTS THOUGH- AF2010 is about to EXPLODE!!!

Soon this elusive ‘thing’ we have been calling the Accidental Festival 2010 will have a shape – a strange and beautiful beast is emerging from our pool of applications and I’m pretty much as excited as I was when I busted a move to Jedwards ‘Ice Ice Baby’  in a club for the first time, after having learnt all the lyrics within four days of the singles release.  It was an awesome moment, I really wish you had seen it.

True to my previous blog, programming has been exactly the thing to pick up collective energy levels within the team.  Definitely the most exciting time of the year for me so far – we’ve read so many interesting and inspiring pieces, it’s a pity we didn’t have twice as much money and twice as much space because paring them down is getting more and more difficult every day.  O, to have more resources…

So much to think about and so little I can write!  Owwweee!  How much can I say?  Programming is all around me and all I can think about right now, but I’ve got to watch my blabber-mouth and not let anything interesting slip before we release the final line up.  I can say (slightly tangentially) that reading the applications has been a really humbling experience for me as an artist.  The amazing and innovative ideas that emerging practitioners are developing gives me loads of hope for the future.  Each programming meeting I sit down, read applications and think ‘I kind of want to be involved in that show’ or ‘I’d love to work with these artists’.

Jemima revealing the preliminary Programme.

The process has certainly inspired many ideas for my own creative practice (not in a plagiaristic way – completely wholesomely!) and got me itching for a chance to continue with my own work during the summer and beyond.  The Creative Apprenticeship I’m doing alongside this with 8-technology (performance/art research group) has helped scratch this artistic itch to create and perform again – while I’m rather sleep deprived and stretched to my workload limit at the moment, it’s been really a enjoyable experience alongside the festival.   I’ve been making zen-garden inspired installations, performing de-contextualised tea ceremonies, designing websites and washing feet (?) for four glorious and bewildering weeks now. I’m not giving them a very articulate write up, best to check them out for yourselves …

So I won’t patter on – this is the only festival process insight I can give right now.  Other than this parting comment for next year’s AF team – make sure you don’t miss the very crucial festival research phase of ‘scouting for after party venues’.  You know you’ve got a good job when a Guinness fuelled pub crawl (we had to test the wares at each venue, naturally) is classified as research, as it was last Saturday around Battersea and Clapham. Mmmm.  Good times.

Take care, comrades.

Sian’s post should be making you very excited! As I sit here, uploading this at a festival meeting devoted to our preliminary programme, I am astounded at the work she, Pete and Jemima have done over the past few weeks, not to mention the whole of the artistic department: taking 260 applications and cramming as many as possible in to 4 rooms over 3 days. Golly gosh, my brains are scrambling with excitement!!!

At the moment I fear the team has hit a bit of a wall. We’re all busy on our Creative Apprenticeships so we are spread out across London, across England and across the Globe. All of this is exciting of course, but it also means it is extremely hard to keep in touch. I think we are all struggling at the moment, and it feels like the weight of the festival is being carried by very few at the moment. What is most important in any process is someone who actions the ideas of the group, and as I see it at the moment, the floor is littered with ideas but very few people are picking them up and turning them into rockets. We will never be remembered for the ideas we didn’t try.

Sian and I were talking last night and she said her best advice to anyone going into the festival is to be good to one another. Don’t stop helping each other out, get stuck in, even if it’s just smiling encouragement during a pitch or a meeting.

There is nothing more upsetting or dissapointing in any creative process as 17 blank faces staring back at you as you try to brainstorm. I would much rather have five million good ideas that fail, than no enthusiasm. Team moral needs to be upped!

Letty’s Lack-Lutster Litany is not Likely to Last Long. Let’s all Laugh and Light-up our once Lame and Lorn expressions, so her next Litany will be Light, Lovely and (giving up alliteration) full of excited anticipation for all the things coming our way!

If you have an idea but have never had a chance to try it please get in touch, we are always looking for collaborators.

We are advertising for applications at the moment, as well as finalising room-hire for the festival weekend, planning the launch of Accidental TV and our box office and trying to work out a preliminary plan for our festival, on top of which my fellow execs and I have been re-thinking the structure of the group and how things are run right now, trying to evaluate and see where changes can be made for the better. One of such changes has been to set up a ‘content group’ that meets on Monday afternoons. As you may have noted, a lot of work has been put into our website and blog, (for which I feel James Cawson deserves a very large round of applause) and even more work needs to be put into Accidental TV to make it work, so Valmar suggested we set up a group that generates the ideas behind what the content of all this air time should be. We are hoping that by putting together this group, the blog will work more efficiently, as well as compliment the TV episodes we eventually generate.

I’m also pleased to announce that John East has joined the team and will be fulfilling the role of Front of House and Hospitality Management. From the very beginning, when the group first put pen to paper we knew that we wanted our festival to be built around our audience and I think John is the man to push us closer to achieving this goal.

At the moment the Artistic Team are looking into ways to make all our pre-festival events as dynamic as possible, which includes finding ways to make the Accidental TV launch on February 5th a web-based innovation. However, we are not web-based innovators, and if you feel you are, or if you have an idea but have never had a chance to try it please get in touch, we are looking for collaborators, and what we may lack in technological-skill we make up for with enthusiasm and man-power!

The last two weeks have been very busy: alongside planning for the festival we have been studying Butoh, the Japanese ‘Dance of Darkness.’ This has not only provided me with aches and pains, but also new-fangled ideas on how we can review group process (I know, what a cliché to express ourselves through the medium of dance!).

However strange these new ideas may be, the Festival Team will be somewhat agonisingly asked to trial these shortly, after all, experiment and risk taking is what the Accidental Festival is all about, and it is just the sort of thing that excites us on Performance Arts!

Juggling Butoh with festival preparations also meant that when I met with Richard Duffy and Amy Sibley-Allen from Battersea Arts Centre they met with a tired looking scruff. The Festival Team are still scouting in the quest to find the Accidental Festival’s new home, and I was excited to experience at first hand a venue described by the Daily Telegraph as a ‘cultural powerhouse’. Even the locals got very excited about BAC when I stopped to ask them for directions. I must say, as I walked in the front door, the building’s beautiful spaces and atmosphere made me feel as if I’d just received a warm hug.

Back on home turf, I met with Debbie Scully, Deputy CEO of the Central School of Speech and Drama, a truly inspirational woman. She gave us the time, support and guidance needed to push our work still further!

Rest assured though reader, my clumsy tongue has made several slips and slurs this past fortnight, such as accidentally using the phrase ‘bummed out’ in a very serious and important meeting…will the agony of my social awkwardness ever end?

Good Old Letty, still has a back-log of executive entries from last year. Still, it’s great seeing her journey isn’t it?

Hello, beautiful people. This is my first blog for the Accidental Festival website so whoop whoop… I’m not sure where to begin. Our group is in a pretty exciting place right now – after months of venue searching madness, we’ve finally entered into talks with the Battersea Arts Centre about securing a number of spaces there for the festival. I’m pretty excited about that – their ethos towards supporting new innovative work really makes them a compatible choice with our aims and identity as a festival. They are quite close to being the established version of the ideals that we strive towards, and everything else we can bring to them in May 2010!

So the venue has finally been chosen, but the workload is still as high and slightly stressful as ever. Right now the artistic team is busy looking for acts, doing audience outreach and writing up proposals for their own curatorial projects for the Festival. They’ll hopefully be programmed soon, with the work of myself and my amazingly insightful programming team, Ms Jemima Yong and Ms Carly Dandy. Pete and I have also just accepted roles as the hosts of Accidental TV video blog, which should be amazingly fun. Look out for us on the website, I’m the cynic who talks too much with mildly offensive facial piercings. I might have the world weary appearance of a woman slightly over worked. But whatever, right now the pressures are completely outweighed by excitement about the festival and the year to come.

The first exciting event of which is the official opening of the AF 2010, an event that should be absolutely deadly (which means cool in Dublin-speak, I use it a lot). My small mind is still trying to get itself around the fact that Liz LeCompte is coming to our opening event after years of no public interviews – it’s going to be a pretty inspiring day. You can check out our footage of it on Accidental TV soon. I think that’s about all lads. I’ll write again with loads more (hopefully more exciting) news on AF 2010.

Rocket. Parmesan. Beautiful. Done. *

Lots of love, Sian Ní Mhuirí (but you can call me Irish Sian)

*Look out for more celebrity chef sign-offs in my future blogs

We have finally managed to get moving with Accidental TV, we have very good hosts and the team is really getting more and more enthusiastic. I guess the more you get to know something the more you get attached. It certainly works with me. Pete (international co-ordinator) said to me that it is good that we have started so early though I feel we are a bit late. We’ll see. There is still a long way to go till we actually start producing some material… but it’s alright. What else? I am happy with marketing, HOD is very independent and somehow I am not worried at all. So Emily! Why am I not worried? Should I be? Finance and admin is also functioning without problems. How could there be any problems, the department is run by Denise. I will end my little entry with what I want from next week. I desperately want us to have a venue so that we can start planning our sales. I want to find somebody who can animate our logo for Accidental TV and I want Large Hadron Collider to really work this time.

Valma wrote this back in 2009. (wow that feels weird) Lets hope he gets all he wants from 2010! He will be keeping us regularly up-to-date with his festival experience, like all our Executive team, so stay tuned. He is also the driving force behind Accidental TV, our soon-to-launch vlog. Ooohhheee! Isn’t it all getting exciting?!

23/09/2009

Rather vainly, I have agreed to a log of my experiences working on the Accidental Festival. I was hoping I would be asked to write critically about London’s art scene, but I am content with this.

The most amazing thing about working on the festival is I am surrounded by people far more intelligent than myself, and I get to witness their hard work and learn from it (and even, on occasion, take credit for it.)

I won’t lie and declare this long process is easy, but if I have learnt one thing during my time at the Central, it is that stress generally only delays the process of actual achievement. My plan so far has been to fight on through, which has led to some very embarrassing moments of madness on my part. So far, I have filled my entire living room with papers full of festival plans, (most of which were useless) and become stranded in a sea of my own work. Worse still, I have turned into a militant elder, telling my colleagues to ‘have some respect’ during a meeting.

To counter this, I have taken inspiration from the wonderful Nenagh Watson’s leadership style, as I find her to be the kindest and most respectful guide. Nenagh has been leading us in some puppetry workshops, and her energy and enthusiasm is so encouraging! Previously to this she founded the company Doo Cot, but currently she is studying ephemeral animation.

So what crisis have I single-handedly averted? None. I never will. Even if I wanted to I have far too much support! The team are currently looking into ways to make our festival as audience-orientated as possible, therefore reader, I suggest you count yourself in that number because what they are cooking up looks delicious.

This is the first of a series of Executive Journals uploaded. Letty is our Executive Producer and from the word ‘go’ has taken the reigns of the project. Keep visiting the blog to watch the experiences of our three Executives unfold…