Beauty from Different Directions, 8th Sept 2012

Beauty from Different Directions saw the accumilation of the summers hard work.
As well as the Cultural Catwalk performance we also launched the new Loan box "Precious Treasures" and had the Media team on hand to film and document the days events.

Here's how the day unfolded...


We all arrived bright and early to set up the dancer's sites and help them get into costume...

Photos by Sian Stammers

We had three performances planned for the day, one at 1.15, 1.15 and 3.00. The 8th was part of the Heritage Open Weekend, which meant Castle entry was free. It was
also the start of the WEYA festival, with saw 1000 artists from around the world coming together for the week to show work.


The Performance

At 1.00 our two Dohl drummers, Nick and Ajay started to drum, drawing the crowd towards the Bandstand.

Photo by Graham Lucas Commons

Hayley then danced her way, in costume, down the path from the Castle towards the bandstand.

Photo by Sian Stammers

She was helped into costume by members of the Illuminate group, hidden behind her huge skirt and Xiao Ling began playing the chinese harp as Hayley danced.

Photo by Graham Lucas Commons

After the dance, the drummers lead the promenade up to the Castle,

Photo by Graham Lucas Commons

Through the Museum and up the stairs past Georgia and Cherry, our Illuminate Window Ledge Dancers

Photo by Graham Lucas Commons

Photo by Sian Stammers

and in to the Long Gallery, where Conrad and Jen performed amongst the galleries paintings to music from Blockwerk Orchestra, a sound piece by Tom Hill and Noel Murphy that had been commissioned the year before.

Photos by Graham Lucas Commons

We had an amazing day, with around 1000 people overall seeing the performances. It was brilliant to see all our hard work come together and to celebrate our Stories of the World project. As a group we have achieved and learnt a lot over the past year, planning and curating the "Unravelled" exhibition and running events to accompany it. We all feel very honoured to have been given such an opportunity by Nottingham City Museums and Galleries.

Guest Post- Jennifer Manderson, Dancer and Choreographer.

As part of the Cultural Catwalk "Beauty from different Directions" project we had the pleasure of working with Jennifer Manderson, the WEYA young leader based with Dance4.
Here she shares her experience of creating the dance and movement for the event...

To begin with, I spoke to the group about what their initial ideas for the costumes were – What was the stimulus? What were they trying to convey? It felt very important for me to focus on the ideas behind the costumes, as primarily, this was a textiles project. It was my job to showcase the artistic work of the costume makers through the medium of movement: to bring the costume to life! The group were very articulate about the ideas behind their creative process and the vocabulary they used I could automatically link to movement. It felt like a very natural process and I felt comfortable as both dancers and costume makers were clearly coming from the same place, on the same page.

I began by working in the long gallery with one of the dancers, Conrad. We had the immediate sense that the costumes needed to be provided with a character, as they were both based on the tudor time period. We decided to take inspiration from the paintings in the gallery (would be odd not to!) and this resulted in us choreographing separate movements from over 200 of the paintings. We also decided to introduce speech, and scripted some sections of our performance. We wanted the characters to be portrayed as extravagant and eccentric, but also quite cheeky. I felt this challenged the historic conventions of the art gallery space: viewers often feel that that they have to walk around in silence, quietly contemplating what they witness. By placing two unusual moving and speaking bodies in the space, we automatically challenged the audience members and the gallery space.


Hayley’s process in the bandstand was more of a challenge due to time constraints, but it all came together in the end! We focused on commanding and powerful movements for her entrance, moving slowly so that she demanded attention from the audience members as well as passers by. We decided that Hayley’s performance would be mostly improvised, due to the restrictions of the costume. However this allowed Hayley to really embody the performance and respond in the moment to the beautiful sound of the Chinese harp.

Working with the window ledge performers, Cherry Lui and Georgia Kalinowska
was really interesting for me as I had little studio time with the untrained dancers. I choreographed a movement motif that I hoped would be accessible for them and they managed exceptionally well. Although they were not given an opportunity to rehearse in the space until the day, they were really confident and adapted very well. I focused on grounded, earthy movements to create the movement material used.

At first I thought it may be very difficult to perform the piece for 3 hours straight, but in actual fact it was so enjoyable, and each performance so different, that the time flew by! I think the idea of a promenading audience, led by the drummer worked really well as the audience were in a situation where they were unsure in what unusual space a performer would be found.

The costumes were fantastic and the audience reaction was wonderful. Overall, definitely a success! It was such a pleasure to collaborate with Nottingham Castle and it was an extremely enjoyable project to be part of. We felt extremely welcome and I think this allowed our choreography and performance to reach it’s full potential.