Maynard Festival 3: Family Dances

Abercych Village Hall & 2 Penrhiw, Abercych

15 - 16 May 2015

www.may-nard.org

Festival Pass: £30/£20

It really helps the organisers if you can register and pay using Eventbrite, but if you'd prefer a different payment method, please e-mail Rhowan rhoalleyne@gmail.com and we can take a reservation.

We think you will get the most from coming for the whole festival, i.e. Friday and Saturday including the Twmpath, but if this is not possible for you and you can only make it for part of it, there are a few different ticket options.

The free tickets for Siriol Joyner's workshops are intended for local families who might not otherwise come. But if you're buying a Festival Pass or a ticket for Saturday daytime, the workshop is included within that. However, please let us know whether or not you're intending to take part in the workshop in any case, as we need to limit the number of participants.

Saturday lunch is included in the ticket price, but Jade will be running a cafe on Friday and Saturday evenings.

For an accommodation list, please see: http://www.may-nard.org/accommodation-list

Here in the village of Abercych, west Wales, we are developing and curating a body of Dance dialogues that promote and explore different ideas and interpretations of place and identity.

This two-day Festival asks how artists engage with communities and people across the generations - including different ideas of 'family' - in the agency of making art, and specifically dance. We hope the festival will seed a long term participatory Dance project with people from the lower Teifi valley. Featuring the work of Cai Tomos, Jane Mason, Joanna Young, Siriol Joyner, Elspeth Owen, Alex Reuben, Mammalian Diving Reflex, Lone Twin and Simon Whitehead.

Programme

Friday 15 May, 7.30pm

Film screening
(Admission £4, included in Festival Pass)

Routes: Dancing to New Orleans (48')
+ Q&A with director Alex Reuben

"Top 20 Films of the Decade – Geoff Andrew (BFI/Time Out)
Top 5 Cinematic Moments of the Year – Jason Wood (Little White Lies/Curzon)
Special Mention Top 5 Movies of the Year – Sight Sound

'As a DJ, people asked me where I learned to dance? I didn’t know so I went to find out' – Alex Reuben

'Commissioned by Arts Council England, Alex Reuben's debut feature Routes, is a road movie through the dance and music of the American Deep South. Inspired by Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music (and evocative of Maya Deren’s seminal Meshes Of The Afternoon), Reuben’s film offers an idiosyncratic documentation of lesser-known forms of American culture, and the extraordinary dancing Americans of the Deep South. From North Carolina to the Holy Grail of his childhood hero, Fats Domino, and the Jazz of New Orleans, Reuben captured on the road Appalachian Bluegrass, Clogging, Mississippi Fife and Drum Blues, Krumping, Memphis Hip-Hop, Indian Smoke Dance, Louisiana Cajun, Zydeco and Swamp Pop, all in a vivid stream of sound and vision.' – Picturehouse Cinemas

'Sexy, funny, socio-politically spot-on, and thrillingly alert and alive in its presentation of popular American music and dance.' – Geoff Andrew, Time Out"

Saturday 16 May from 10am

Workshop:

Led by Siriol Joyner with Stirling Steward and Elspeth Owen

Open to Festival Pass-holders and free to local families.

This is a workshop for individuals of all ages and for families: we will gather together in the village hall to
move, play and create together. This will be a space to explore through dancing, drawing, experimenting with objects, building dens and spaces that we can move within. There will be freedom to explore individually and in small groups as well as whole group activities: experimenting through moving together, following our curiosities, creating environments.

Please bring an object with you that you are happy to share with the group and to be used as part of the workshop, this might be a blanket, a stone, a book, a hat, shells from the beach….
We will begin and end the session with a group activity, please arrive with plenty of time to get settled in.
This is an open and informal space where rest, reading, tea and even sleeping is encouraged alongside dancing, making sounds, drawing and building.

Performance:

Gwrando tu hwnt i Wrando'/ Listening beyond the listening' by Cai Tomos

Cai and Buddug met 5 years ago at the beginning of a regular movement and improvisation class that Cai began facilitating. Over the last year they have exchanged stories, movements and personal histories with the intention of sharing and finding a choreographic voice for Buddug’s solo. This solo explores the revealing of lived experience, expression and narrative. Past and present. The starting point was Buddug's experience of light, and Buddug's experience of listening as her sight deteriorated, both in moving around in the world, and in her life.

Installation at 2 Penrhiw:

Under Dark Skies by Joanna Young

The piece explores ideas of scale and time and what it means for people to look up at the night sky. Under Dark Skies was originally Commissioned by Foundation for Community Dance and produced by Powys Dance for the People Dancing Festival in Cardiff. Reconfigured for a domestic space in Abercych.

Talk:

Jane Mason

Jane reflects on her recent project 'a dance at home' commissioned by Dance4.

The project explored different attitudes and relationships to 'home' and involved three live performances by homeowners in four homes using movement, story-telling and personal objects to connect themes of identity, memory and responsibility.

Films:

Mammalian Diving Reflex - Haircuts for Children
Simon Whitehead
Lone Twin - Street Dance

Jessica Lerner - me-andmyson

Made between oct 2011 – may 2012 as a multi screen installation and re-worked for Maynard 3:The Family Dances as a short film

Featuring Jessica Lerner and her son, Isaac Sucha Thomas

"This work presents a kinaesthetic relationship between mother and son, as he grows from baby to toddler. It presents intimate and detailed performances of their sensing of reality through movement. The dynamic of presence moves from everyday interactions to abstract movement. The mother is holding the performance space and her child within it and through this deconstructing the dimensions of conscious performance.
I have inhabited a shared creative space with Isaac from age twenty one months for six months. I am exploring my performance process with Isaac, and use my experience of being in film to set up situations for filmic language. In the experience of filming, just setting up a camera myself and pressing on, duration has become an important part of the work. For example in the Sleeping Footage I have made, I filmed myself holding Isaac asleep, rocking him, moving from standing to sitting, to attempting to lay him down and him waking.
Merleau-Ponty talked of a “consciousness reverberating in movement”
I aim to develop an aesthetic that is 'situation specific'. So using the presence of the body and movement, I present a situation that marks my present life relationships." JL

Circle Discussion

Evening Twmpath / Village Social Dance, 7.30pm
with The Gower Allstars and Julie Murphy (Admission £6, included in Festival Pass)

Cafe by Wild Pickings

It really helps us with administration if you can register and pay using Eventbrite, but if this is difficult for you, please e-mail Rhowan rhoalleyne@gmail.com

For an accommodation list, please see: http://www.may-nard.org/accommodation-list

The programme is subject to change should there be circumstances beyond our control.