TailSpin

08/07/2021

THE ARTIST AND STORY WORKSHOP - Opening Spaces: online, in your home, inside you...

The workshop emerged about 5 months into the Covid pandemic, when we didn’t have any choice but to stop teaching or go online. That virtual space opened in those early months out of necessity has, over time and with experimentation and dedication, become an exciting new and normalized space to connect, communicate, inspire and play in. Although there’s a deep longing to come back to an in-person space and in-person teaching, we don’t intend to close our online Artist & Story space as that return happens because for us the online isn’t just a compromise or an unwanted substitute, it opens a whole universe of new and complimentary possibilities.

The Artist and Story workshops have brought together a group of creatives from 15 countries on four continents – into connection with each other’s performative, creative, social and cultural landscapes, with each individual artist’s process and its pushes and pulls. The online space has helped forge connection and community, through the dialogue between these wildly different individual projects in a group setting.

It’s also brought big, juicy questions about performative forms. Do we lean in to the digital and find forms there, which may be new for us and for audiences, or do we work with the digital in service of the live (and everything in between)?

It’s also changed the nature of the spaces we “work” in. Many of us have had to “work” in our “home” spaces and, in doing so, we’ve started to find some interesting edges and possibilities. We’ve begun creating more malleable home spaces, finding more possibility of shape-shifting in ourselves. It’s been an invitation to let the artist be present in unlikely spaces, to find solutions. What, after all, is the work of being an artist? And in which spaces can this work happen?

These are some of the spaces and questions that are open as we journey with The Artist and Story. We think they’re great and urgent questions. We hope they tickle your feathers and you’d like to join us for the next workshops, Course 1 starting 9th August (AM: Europe & Australasia friendly-time) and Course 2 on 4th October (PM: Europe and Americas friendly-time).

*** The deadline for Course 1 is 21 JULY and for Course 2 it's 13TH SEPTEMBER***
More info here: https://www.catgerrard.com/artist-and-story

See some of the wonderful work of previous participants in the images below. Thanks to Magda Halska (Poland), Eugene Chow (Singapore), Alba Murcia (Spain) and Nico Pires (France/Portugal).

05/07/2021

THE ARTIST & STORY WORKSHOP - Who's It For?

This workshop is for practitioners and artists from any field who work with story in any way. We’ve worked with wonderful creators from all disciplines and backgrounds: dancers, circus artists, writers, clowns, spoken word artists, musicians, directors, physical theatre performers, puppeteers (and many who occupy multiple backgrounds at once!).

The journey is crafted to give you both broad provocations for your project and process and specific, personal feedback. We meet you where you are and accompany you, helping you to go in the direction you want to go, to evolve the piece as it would like to evolve. Whether your project’s in a very early stage – where something wants to come into the space for the first time – or whether it’s a piece that’s been years in the making and playing.

We work with the spirit of playfulness, encouraging you to look at and experience the story from different perspectives, letting the material run through and live in the body. It’s a kind of echolocation that helps you to find out how the material sits with you now, where it would like to go and what form/s or shape it would like to take in this moment.

See some of the wonderful work of previous participants, created during the workshop, in the images below (please click on the image for details). More to come in the next days...

Deadline: 21st July 2021!
https://www.catgerrard.com/artist-and-story

26/04/2021

April 2021 Newsletter:
Crew Wanted: Join us for our upcoming online courses...

https://mailchi.mp/16d38e3d43aa/upcoming-online-courses

I must down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide
Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied;
And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying,
And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying.
- John Masefield

18/04/2018

Artistic Director Cat Gerrard's latest project, which you may have heard about if you're subscribed to our mailing list. Have a peek! She's super proud of this one. Now into the editing.

And news on TailSpin's re-emergence coming within a few weeks! Such exciting things cooking in the TailSpin pot.

29/03/2018

Creative TailSpin mind!
(We hope you got our mail-out last week about our re-emergence! Email [email protected] to be added to the mailing list if you didn't. More details here SOON. But first!)

What are your FAVOURITE SONGS and songs you love about letters, postcards, sending mail etc?

We're selling gorgeous postcards for another project of Cat Gerrard's Somewhere, Maybe Here & Cat is working on a blog post for the crowdfunding campaign about postcards/letters.

Here's one of her favourites to speed you through the day and get you scribbling a letter to someone...

Writers: Georgia Dobbins, Brian Holland, Robert Bateman, Freddie Gorman, William Garrett Releasing date: August 21, 1961 Format: 7" single Label: Tamla Motow...

10/10/2016

There are some great shows & tellers at the International Storytelling Festival Amsterdam at the end of October! Including Nell Phoenix,
Katrice Horsley & Emma Collins of the wonderful The Village Storytelling Centre. Plus myself & Timothy Mark Ralphs.

Check out the full line up here:
https://www.facebook.com/Storytellingfestivalamsterdam/

Brings together some of the best storytellers, authors, musicians and actors from across the globe. 2025 edition: November 5-9! The program is LIVE!