Greetings, Social Media and Metaverse Wombles! Not use that intro for a while. This is episode 27 of the West Park Park Bench Podcast and yes, I am back sitting on the bench.
Those of you that have listened to some previous episodes, first of all, I thank you, but 2023 has a word for meditation for me and that is 'Balance'.
And just that one word being present on the tip of your tongue all the time is, is a really unintrusive yet beneficial way of just keeping yourself on track, especially if you have some deep seated anxieties and especially if those deep seated anxieties come from self sabotage of that little voice in your head that's telling you that you aren't good enough or you're not doing enough or you could be doing better or you should be some it's different. And that's me, by the way.
So, balance has been a very useful word for me to just say and remind myself of, and you may notice that there has been two weeks between Episode 26 and episode 27. That was because life happened, or at least work happened. A fantastic little short freelance job with the Spark Arts Festival in, Leicester Children's Festival.
I helped them in 2021 at the Christmas lockdown, so as we came out of Christmas, there was a school's lockdown just as kids went back to school, and Spark Arts approached me. Harriet Roy, who I worked with at Leicester, Haymarket, many years ago, has known for a while that I am that strange digital stage manager. And she got in touch and said, Am I doing digital stage management? I said, Yes, I am. And on that festival, it really was taking the entire festival and placing it in a digital structure. It was a pivot to digital, and we had three zoom accounts running as three auditoriums and each of those auditoriums had their own programme shedule. There was work going on for two weeks, may have been a week. That was just back back to back content. And I was running a main auditorium where there was a few more stage management type processes that I needed to put in place for those companies whether it was liaising with them to get into zoom. Whether they had something a little more technical that they needed to adapt, but they were very much one after the other after ...a... little bit like an Edinburgh Fringe venue, but digital. Then the other two venues were slightly different programmes. They didn't have quite as much stuff in but they did have work that needed community engagement with the audience bringing them in. One was working with a poet who spoke to and made poems with a family at each performance. And another one was some stories that had been gathered from the community and were augmented with slides. So there's a lot of virtual slides going on a lot of the a lot of the techniques that I use in zoom control to just make things easy, I mean, basically in zoom, I like to use virtual backgrounds as slide holders so that I can use a second media source just through basic zoom. And that's so that I can play a music track whilst I'm actually showing a full slide. And then I can take that slide I can fade the music very, very simple and without using anything like OBS or an extended studio. So that was 2021. 2022 only took the bumper videos so I produced a bumper video for the beginning and end of the performances so that when people arrived and we started it was very much welcome to the show. The show is going to start in Ten, Nine, Eight and Welcome to the Show, and then the show would happen. And then at the end, they would say goodbye. And there would be a thank you for coming, go and see other shows. And those had been recorded the year before with a couple of local children. And so I use their audio track and rebranded those bumpers and that was really all I did for them last year. And then this year, they've approached me and they wanted to do something a little bit more hybrid. So they've got the festival itself taking place on the ground, but they really saw the benefit of having this At Home component or this component where accessibility or geography just mean that that going to something on the ground is just a little bit more of a faff or it's not realistic or there's a viability issue that's that just makes having something at home a little more in your comfort zone and that can be physical accessibility to you know, psychological and mental health issues with the outside world, but it can also be enabling families to come together in a living room with a child with special needs to be able to engage with families that are also in the same situation.
Now these two shows that I am looking after this year one is called Getting Dressed, and it's been out on the road as a physical tour as a relaxed performed. Studio piece, where Secondhand Dance, incorporate the mechanism of putting clothes on and dancing and playing with clothes so things that you've got in your home. We all have clothes in our wardrobe, but there's you know, playing with socks dancing with socks and putting them on your feet, and then jumpers and jackets because actually the mechanism of learning how we dress ourselves has got quite a lot of complex moves. There's balance in there. There's coordination, there's there's micro coordination with buttons and being able to get your hands down to your feet. And so there's I really like this piece and it's a workshop. So the families log in Miaya Leake who is in the little films because what they're doing is screening a film of the performances, that shows the items and the different processes that they use in the music from the films, but they've also invited people at home to have sent in clips and those little clips are going to be incorporated into that little video.
So they're going to come and watch the video and then they're using the music to do a workshop with Miaya who's also in the films to just sort of be able to put the clothes on yourself and now going through this there's some great music it is lovely music as well. I really do. Like the music that I've had I have to play in so there's socks and jackets and skirts and a finale. So that is the second hand dance.
The other one which my good friend Helen Raw is stage managing for me because it takes place simultaneously on the Sunday with the 12 o'clock performance of Secondhand Dance. And their piece is Sound Symphony and Helen is just looking after the back end of zoom for me she's being me in the absence of me and the fact that I can rely on Helen to operate the zoom in a way that is seamless and reliable is invaluable to me. So thanks a lot Helen. And sound symphony is a similar kind of piece. It had a studio life on the ground and it had a studio life and an extended workshop life where families can make these noises whether it's for autistic or neuro diverse or special needs. Individuals and this is about sound Symphony so in in the piece again, there's gonna be screening of a film, there's cello and violin and just making noise and one of the great ways of making noise that I love in this is putting dry pasture on the ground and then driving over it with your wheelchair with your electric wheelchair and the crunches and the scrunches and, and to be able to make noises like that as an extension of your body is very... it's a very...
I have a doggy visitor again. Morning. I often get little doggie visitors because yes, I do record this in West Park, and I picked a bench that is kind of out of the way but it does have some people walking past it. It was a better than the original bench which often had people sat on it so I was using this as a secondary bench, but it just became easier to just use this bench.
So I've been very busy and the balance that I need in my life has different stages of equilibrium I've discovered so the word balance is just the starting, it's the foundation of what my word is and then finding words that sit around that to describe the types of balance that I am experiencing. So an equilibrium is really key. And because this work for Spark Arts Festival, kind of consumed me it was only supposed to be a half day, one day a week. Some of that me time was kind of bumped up to the performance itself. But one of the things with my balance and I think my attention is multitasking and multitasking is a is an essential component to being able to work on multiple things. But actually, multitasking is often cited as not possible or a pipe dream. And in some ways, it's true. You can only do one thing at a time. How well you can swap between those tasks is the multitasking component. And for me, if I've got them lined up, I can go from one to the other to the other, but they have to be very structured essentially as one contiguous task. But when I'm focused on a task, and I know there's things that I need to do which are on a separate To Do List, often the task that I am involved in that needs to be kept up to a certain date. Things will get left behind so the task that I have at hand which has a specific deadline can be attended to and that's kind of what's happened with this project.
So although it is a paid project, it's kind of become a project that... I'll have to work out the finances of it. I don't really think of projects in terms of specific finances and this is what's really hard because as long as I can cover my bills and my accommodation and my food the rest of it is project money. I don't have a lot of project money. I've built up a little pot of project money because last year, I had my developing creative practice award. That award in itself paid for the things that I had asked for being able to pay for website being able to look at my infographic being able to attend different workshops. But the balance of actually being able to continue and out of last year's word of the year which was posture I did manage to establish a swim and a yoga session each week and that was part of my posture and coming into balance.
It was really important that those foundation stones that I had, were continued and they're part of this, this balanced meditation. So my yoga has a friend attached to it who hosts the yoga class. So attending that it is for me, but it's also being able to see a familiar face. And the people in the class I've become familiar with and I can I like to see friendly faces but my swim is a little more beyond my comfort zone. It's a walk to the pool. There's the weather to contend with. There is the darkness at the moment I really am hibernating and not really thinking about light and dark until the clocks change and then I'm going to really have a look at my balance and what I might be able to do next year and have a look at when this all starts I think it's I'm okay up to Christmas. And I think there was some stumbling blocks that happened but I think it's important to have this annual review and that meditation and people who are successful in business that is how that that is part of their work life balance. So again, that balance word balance has to be it has to be ongoing, and there's also an equilibrium but there's also keeping something in balance. So the balance has weighed, if that makes sense if you're in equilibrium and it's exactly the same either side, you can just touch one side and you can lose equilibrium very fast. And I think finding the stability and that weight of your balance, which means you have to put more on the other side to achieve equilibrium. I think is is really important. And my the weight of my balance is yoga and swimming. I would like to add some more weight into my life balance with an additional yoga or fitness session. And that needs to have quite a lot of weight because I do need to lose some weight. But that is not what my journey is about. And the more exercise I have, the more balanced I get, the better my posture gets. As a result, I've used more energy and therefore if I eat sensibly, I will lose weight. So I'm kind of letting that look after itself.
But this two week break allowing myself to have that break. And not being disappointed in myself has been as much part of the balance here as actually the balance of delivering it itself. So that you can exist in a state of balance outside of the life tasks that get thrown at you because inevitably, you want life to be varied and you want life to be exciting and you want it to be unexpected. But if you want those kinds of things, you've got to have an internal balance which will allow you to give weight to the things that are going on the other side of that balance.
The rest of this week is going to be Beeston Tales and is going to be All Sorts in the evening. This is another component that's contributing to the weight of my balance. And that is being able to see other people and also be able to see other people enriching themselves and grow and to be able to have conversations. Now, Beeston Tales, Tim Ralph and Mike Payton co host stories, folk tales legends. They have one storyteller as a kind of a keynote an hour storytelling, the stamina and focus of a storyteller in full flow is a joy to behold. That's in Beeston, Beeston Tales, I'll put links in the description.
And then also All Sorts. Now All Sorts is Chronic Insanity's theatre scratch night or theatre jam, and it's a session now held in Nonsuch so a little black box studio that seats about 80 people, which I think is a really good size. I mean, when it's full, it can be quite crowded. But if you've got an audience between 50 and 80, it's a nice sized space. Actually, I think it might hold more than that thinking about it. It might be 120. But anyway, usually two halves, maybe even three depending on how many people step forward to perform. There's usually a few artists who are exploring their love of musical theatre and get up and perform their favourite pieces in character. And exploring on stage inhabiting those songs. There's storytellers and improv actor Ben McPherson comes to mind who tends to do a vaudeville monologue. Really nice spoken word in a character with a letter with just some really nice monologues style, peace to the audience. Last time Tim of Beeston Tales did a story, he took a piece out that he hadn't had a chance to explore and inhabit for a while. And then there'll be musicians there was a musical theatre divisor who had created a musical and just wanted to showcase a couple of the songs in scratch. And that's the evening I tend to have to dash off at 10 because I have the bus to come back to. But that's all about me exploring my comfort zones.
My comfort zone is not being in the audience. I am not comfortable in the audience, and I just feel awkward wherever I sit. I've decided this time I'm going to embrace my comfort zone and I'm actually, can go to the back and sit in the far corner and just just be able to see the space from the back. I can't get behind the sound desk. Joe or Nat tend to do that I have offered my skills to be able to sit in that space of isolation very special space that but yeah, this this Episode Episode 27 has really been about reflecting on balance. Mid February it's actually February the 14th. Valentine's Day. I have been for a swim. I have yoga'd this week if that's a word. And next weekend is the delivery of Sparks Festival's Getting Dressed and also the Sound Symphony I will put links in the description and then I've got 'Horizon' to explore. And yeah we'll talk horizons in Episode 28
