Insiders and outsiders researching insiders and outsiders by Lucy Frears & Laura Hodsdon

Revoice research was an international research project led by Dr Laura Hodsdon at Falmouth University. Our research in Cornwall brought up issues around intersubjectivity - what was happening when non-Cornish (English) interviewers interviewed Cornish people about their identity. We expanded on this idea to create a workshop at the Symposium: Re:voicing Cultural Landscape Narrative and Non-narrative traditions across media

Exeter Contemporary Open, Phoenix Exeter, Exeter

I had two large-scale ceramic wall-based paintings selected as one of fourteen exhibiting artists for the 2023 Exeter Contemporary exhibition. My work was selected by a panel of Gemma Lloyd (Independent Curator), Judith Carlton (Director of Southwark Park Galleries) and Phoenix Gallery Curator, Matt Burrows. Exeter Contemporary Open is an annual open submission exhibition, established in 2006 and hosted by Exeter Phoenix, a busy, multi-artform venue and contemporary art space situated in Exeter’s historic city centre. The exhibition aims to provide an important national platform for contemporary visual art with an emphasis on supporting emerging talent alongside more established artists. The exhibition ran from 15 September – 5 November 2023

David Lynch Constrained

David Lynch’s third feature film Dune, a filmic adaptation of Frank Herbert’s sprawling set of science fiction novels, found itself subject to a full gamut of reviews found at the time of its release in 1984 ranging from “raves to scathing condemnation” (Kaleta 1993: 69). Though Newsweek’s David Ansen described the film as towering over exiting science fiction movies, “a dark, spellbinding dream […] richer and stranger than most anything that commercial cinema has to offer” (1984), the influential Roger Ebert had decided after just nine minutes of the film’s running time that the “movie is a real mess, an incomprehensible, ugly, unstructured pointless excursion into the murkier realms of one of the more confusing screenplays of all time” (1984). In academia Vivian Sobchak described the film as a “schizophrenic text” which “plunges fatally into the absolute space of postmodern and breaks down into a heap of fragments (1987: 278-9). As time passed, these dismissive voices found more traction than Dune’s celebrants and the film has subsequently found itself entrenched in a reading of epic failure. Lynch concretised this vision of his film with his own commentary, frustrated by changes to his vision of the film and a multitude of versions in a film plagued by issues around the age classification, “studio bankruptcy [and] convoluted rights” (Kaleta 1993). He later described himself as having died two times on the film stating that he had; “sold out on that early on, because I didn’t have final cut, and it was a commercial failure” (Sharf 2018). He has referred to the film as a critical moment in determining career, conceding that – in large part – this was the last film he made for “the producers, not for myself” (Corliss 1990: 88). As Matt Armitage notes: “Lynch seems to consider Dune his biggest failure, and rarely talked about it afterwards” (2018). Despite the director’s own dismissal of the film, and his expression of having “zero interest” in watching the Canadian director Denis Villeneuve’s interpretation of Herbert’s novel released in 2021 (Raup 2020), Lynch’s film is indicative of many of the themes that have come to determine Lynchian filmmaking in the forty years since the film’s release. With Villeneuve returning to Herbert’s source material throwing light back onto Lynch’s version, the film is due reconsideration. This chapter explores how Dune presents an exemplar of the evolving Lynchian universe, but also how this universe can collapse in on itself. The film foreshadows many themes that recurred throughout Lynch’s later work in its focus on the impact of industrialisation and exploitation, of familial conflict, uncertainty, identity and– perhaps most significantly – the search for the mystical unknown, where supernatural shifts between dimensions of time and space fuel a fanaticism that errs toward self-destruction. We argue that this was not entirely invoked by the actions of a studio, executive or a production company, as Lynch has suggested in later interviews, though these no doubt remain important factors. Instead it is some of Lynch’s creative choices, compounded by the constraints of his having retained the integrity of the sprawling source material of Frank Herbert’s novels, and the film’s drive to explain the science of the fiction through exposition and voiceover, where ambiguity and obfuscation better served the director’s form in later work

Creating Sustainable Change: sharing good practice in the VLE

Presentation demonstrating guidance on sharing good practice in the use of Virtual Learning Environments

Engaging Students as Entrepreneurs in local communities

This presentation will unpack the approach taken to embedding entrepreneurship and civic impact across the curriculum by Falmouth University. Presenters will focus on ‘hard-wired’ elements of both UG and PG courses including the Launchpad programme which links to MSc Entrepreneurship (Launchpad). The session will comprise academic and student viewpoints, with plenty of time for discussion

Walk Like an Egyptian: Belly Dance Past and Present Practice in England.

How belly dance practitioners in England construct a sense of self-identity, social-identity and identity-in-practice in a border-crossing belly dance ethnoscape is of interest for this research project. What kinds of identities-in-practice do belly dancers in England construct in order to authenticate their performance? By applying social theories of education and identity formation, in particular Holland et al’s “figured worlds”(2001), it is possible to critically frame the development of a practitioner’s belly dance identity over a period of time. The research presents that case that belly dance in England has an identifiable past and present practice, one that continually wrestles with ownership of what is apparently a Middle Eastern cultural export. Drawing from a literature based case study of two pioneering artists in the early 1980s, Hilal and Buonaventura, the research describes a distinctive English belly dance tradition and identities. There is an explanation of how the English belly dance form has since competed on the global stage. The research also describes how current inheritors of that tradition −Anne White, Caroline Afifi and Siouxsie Cooper are taken as case studies− appropriate and signal Egyptian belly dance as the dominant reference point from which to authenticate their dancing practice; whilst at the same time subverting the Orientalist paradigm underpinning the belly dance trope. Identifying “narratives of authenticity” enable the current generations of English belly dancers to form distinctive belly dancing identities-in-practice. Drawing from both social theories of education and identity formation and reflexive ethnographic modes of inquiry, Walk like an Egyptian examines belly dance in England as a translocated dance form, and the mechanisms which allow its authenticity are analysed. In answer to the research question it is possible for an English practitioner of belly dance to produce an authentic belly dance performance through the production of various narratives of authenticity, narratives which both borrow from and resist pre-existing narratives of authenticity

designdice™ BDF2018

‘…designdice™ are creative tool to aid design thinking, idea generation & problem-solving. They have been developed out of experiences as a graphic designer & lecturer over the past 25 years, and from a simple belief in the value of encouraging creativity to grow in other people…’ Andy will be talking through how the designdice™ project evolved, his belief in the importance of teaching what we practice, and practicing what we teach, as well as the benefits of embracing unfamiliar disciplines, the shifts in education, crowdfunding, and surrounding yourself with people who will champion your creative ambitions

Ambient Literature Festival

For the last two years, the Ambient Literature Project has been developing literary works that manifest alongside your daily routine. Delivered by smartphone, and responding to your presence in the world, these pieces of Ambient Literature offer each reader an opportunity to experience the world a little differently. Whether as a participant in a ghost story that knows where you are, losing yourself in a story of migration, loss and betrayal, or experiencing a poetic reflection on connection, progress and memory as you walk through the streets, these works exist somewhere between the ethereal and the magical. Join us at the British Library Conference Centre for a showcase event on April 23rd. We’ll be celebrating the end of the project, sharing our secrets and discoveries, and letting you look behind the scenes of how these projects are created. The day will feature a number of workshops and talks aimed at industry professionals, students, practitioners, and anyone else interested in the future of reading and writing

100: The Day Our World Changed

This was a 1 year research projects leaving to a whole day event at The Lost Gardens of Heligan commemorating the men who had gone to war in 2014 from 4 parishes surrounding the gardens. The event received an audience of 10,000. A second event will take place in 2018

Beastie 2010 - 2017

Beastie is a participatory performance for 6-10-year olds, by Lone Twin, Whelan’s and Gary Winters’ collaborative performance company (the duo are credited equally for all work). Beastie was commissioned by the Barbican, London, Steirischer Herbst, Graz, Corn Exchange, Newbury and was supported by The National Lottery through Arts Council England. The performance premiered in the UK at the Barbican before moving onto a European premier at Steirischer Herbst. Initial research in 2002, undertaken as Whelan and Winters worked on a project for television with Ragdoll Ltd (Teletubbies, In The Night Garden), revealed children’s outdoor play and exploration to be problematised, understandably, by densely populated urban space. In 2010 Lone Twin returned to this issue with a series of workshops with children in Stratford’s Discover Story Centre, exploring ideas of urban beasts – fictional versions of rural beasts mysteriously roaming the country’s wilder corners. The production, informed by material generated by sessions at Discover, begins in a theatre before spilling out into the real world as the creature, constructed and narrated into life by the young audience, is shown their world on a tour guided by the children themselves: ‘(the children) are not performing for their families; rather, they got lost in the action’ (The Irish Times, 06/10/13). The ‘beast’, a £40,000 costume worn by a performer, creates a confounding moment for adults who accidently happen upon the group, an event that is visibly empowering for the young participants. Beastie continues to tour internationally and has been programmed twice at the South Bank Centre’s Imagine festival (2011, 2012). It is the subject of a study on innovative children’s theatre by Susanne Schittler (Universität Koblenz-Landau) and gave rise to two further Lone Twin children’s projects, Cabaret Simon (The Barbican, 2010) and The Lost Neighbour (2013, The South Bank Centre). Recently versions of Beastie have been shown at The Corn Exchange, Newbury; Chats Palace; Boom Festival, ANTI Contemporary Art Festival, Finland, Liverpool's Unity Theatre, Spill Festival of Performance, Ipswich and In Between Time Festival, Bristol