It has been a while since our last post. Officially, our micro-residency ended at the beginning of July when we gave a Friday lunchtime talk at PMStudio about the progress of our Theatre Jukebox to that point.

We are pleased to now be able to say that this was not the end of our time at PMStudio and that, since then, we have been continuing development of the Jukebox in collaboration with the studio.

We collected our prototype of the Theatre Jukebox from the carpenter on the Thursday evening before our Friday lunchtime talk. It made a huge difference to be able to demonstrate the actual unit in action and we got some valuable feedback from that talk.

Since then, we have gained further feedback from members of the public and visitors to the PMStudio. We installed it for one day in the foyer of The Watershed and then spent a week with it at Bristol Old Vic mid-July. This was part of Bristol Ferment, an artist-development programme. It was great to have this extra support for the Jukebox and we are continuing conversations with BOV, as well as PMStudio, about the future of the project.

Both of these feedback gathering exercises were very useful for our development of the unit itself and
the content of our first Theatre Jukebox.

With regards to the artistic content, we have moved on in terms of pinning down our initial curation for it. The Heywood Family Records box that we mentioned in the last post has become a very important focus. All the cards we have made so far relate to the family and to this extraordinary resource that we are lucky enough to have. Interestingly, a main character has begun to emerge; our late Grandfather, Oliver Heywood. Ollo, as everyone called him, was a landscape painter. Coming from an artistocratic background, he inherited a large house near Leeds when he was eighteen. He sold the house and all its contents and spent his life shrugging off what he saw as the trappings of that background and wealth. In the 1960s he built a Modernist house which he and his wife, Denise, or Sneeze, as we call her, lived in until they moved into a small cottage for the last ten or so years of his life. As well as his paintings, we have diaries and photos from trips that Sneeze and Ollo made together, and we also have some transcripts of lectures that Ollo gave about art and spirituality that are very interesting and illuminating about his ethics and artistic processes.

We are still continuing to add cards and develop this initial curation. It is our aim that it will give users an impression of a story that they construct themselves by layering up connections that they find between the cards.

As well as working on the Heywood Family Records curation, we have also been exploring other potential uses for the Jukebox. Our decision to focus initially on our family history has highlighted how suited Theatre Jukebox is to animating archives. As such, we are in touch with several organisations about using it as a way for the public to access their archives.

Pictures work very well, but the Jukebox also offers the potential to use other objects. In short, it is a simple way of allowing objects to tell their stories. However, in order for the experience to be interesting and engaging, it is very important to carefully consider the selection/curation and the narrative threads/themes that we illuminate.

PMStudio continue to be immensely supportive of this project, in terms of extended time at the Studio, producer discussions about the artistic development of the project plus introductions, suggestions and applications for potential future opportunities.

Posted by StandandStare