Plot and Measure, currently under consideration by Seren, explores space and place in a way that reflects contemporary thinking and the geo-cultural context of Wales. Some of the poems and short prose pieces came out of the site-specific ‘In and Between’ project in which I participated with colleagues from USW. The opening prose poem ‘If You can Think of a Place’ emerged as a reflective response to observing Jodie Allinson and Inga Burrows as they explored the abandoned tidal pool at Barry Island in preparation for filming their witty and evocative installation ‘On Vocation’. I was intrigued by their nuanced, layered, multi-faceted interrogation of the site, which seemed to me simultaneously sensual, critical, aesthetic and playful. It allowed me to see that what we mean by ‘place’ is a melding of multiple frames, discourses, intuitions, perceptions and projections; is at once bodily, cerebral, ideological, linguistic and geographical; is illimitable, shifty, permeable, unstable. At the same time it is crucial to identity and even to survival.
As Jodie and Inga looked and felt and walked and crawled and touched and listened, I saw in their practice something akin to ritual: the performance involved in marking and making a place, drawing the imaginary lines that separate it from generic space. Here was a re-enactment of the immemorial human process involved in turning terrain into territory. Plot and Measure owes a great deal to that day I spent observing, with something like wonder, my colleagues at their richly suggestive work. With this in mind I dedicated a poem to each of them: ‘At Bay’ to Jodie; ‘Silent’ to Inga.
My sense that there was something ritualistic in Jodie and Inga’s procedures, and that they were remaking an ancient inscription – no less contemporary for being so – is reflected in poems that delve into the mythic and legendary origins and determinations of place. The sequence which closes the collection draws on a Norman hagiographical account of the 5th-6th century saint, Cadoc (aka, Catwg, Cathmael, Cadfael), after whom sixteen churches, two wells and one river in south-east Wales, two churches in Glasgow, one in Cornwall and an island in Brittany are named. He was an early contender for patron saint of his native land; he established one of the two earliest seats of learning in Britain (at Llancarfan in the Vale of Glamorgan), yet he is little remembered today and the traces of his existence found in place-names are now all but devoid of cultural resonance. In this sense he is a figure of the fraught relationship between history, legend and place, and of the loss of meaning implied by the slippage between contemporary experience and ancient boundaries and place-names. The recognition, constitution, marking-out and naming of places characteristic of hagiographical lore (and playing a significant role in St Cadoc’s ‘Life’), serve to highlight the viral derealization of place in an age for which Christian names have worn out.
Perhaps works like ‘On Vocation’ and ‘Frame and Flow’ (the poetry film collaboration between Wyn Mason and Philip Gross which formed another strand of ‘In and Between’) help us to remake/re-mark ‘place’ today; serve, maybe, to reinscribe on the landscape of modern Wales the provisional boundaries that shape our sense(s) of identity, however polymorphic and flickering they might be. Plot and Measure tours such hazy perimeters in poetic modes, forms and language that seek to reflect both the irreducibly linguistic character and the infinite plasticity of place.
Interweaving film, poetry, performance and critical reflection, this collaborative practice-as-research (PaR) project involved academics and creative practitioners working in the Faculty of Creative Industries and Faculty of Business and Society, in association with the Centre for the Study of Media and Culture in Small Nations and the Border/Lines Group.
Duration: February 2011 – September 2012
Funding: USW Research Investment Scheme
Research team: Alice Entwistle (Principal Investigator), Jodie Allinson, Inga Burrows, Philip Gross, Stephen Lacey, Wyn Mason, Kevin Mills. With additional administrative support from Huw Jones.
The project aimed to investigate the context in which new, mutli- and inter-disciplinary arts practice can occur and be theorised. It looked to promote and evaluate the synergies and potential for exchange and collaboration between working practices across and between different media, and explored methods of recording and documenting creative practice.
The project resulted in two collaborative artworks:
A third strand involving Alice Entwistle, Kevin Mills and Stephen Lacey drew the two projects together via a series of critical-creative responses. The critical-creative responses and documentation relating to the making of the artworks can be found on project’s Wiki-site.
To establish a critical engagement with the artworks a series of workshops were planned. These aimed to explore the relevant creative/critical cross-currencies and suggest new modes of reflections that could, in turn, influence the development of different outcomes.
The first workshop took place at the ATRiuM on 3 March 2012. Critical friends were invited to preview the two works-in-progress. The workshop also involved a roundtable discussion on the process of collaboration and how the project could develop in the future.
A final symposium was held at the ATRiuM on 12 September 2012. Professor John Schad (Lancaster University) gave a keynote lecture, and audiences were give the chance to view the completed artworks. Alice Entwistle, Kevin Mills and Stephen Lacey also discussed their creative-critical responses to the work. The day ended with two panel discussions – one on creative collaboration, the other on how to establish a critical/creative dialogue – involving academics and creative practitioners.
This baseline report by Dr Paul Carr for the Welsh Music Foundation examined the issues surrounding the live music industry in Wales, including issues of inward investment, training provision needs, examples of best practice, sales and marketing issues, and the Welsh language sector. Based on questionnaire data and face-to-face interviews with key music industry personnel, it identified the factors which prevent Wales from having a greater share of the UK’s live music industry.
Duration: April 2010 – October 2010
Funding: Welsh Music Foundation
Research team: Dr Paul Carr
The Welsh live music industry currently constitutes around 4% of the UK total – around £60 million per year. With a population of around 3 million, Wales makes up around 5% of the UK population – so it could be argued that this division of profit seems about right. However, in a globalised economy, Wales as a nation (as opposed to a region of the UK) has an opportunity to focus on specific areas of the live music industry, that would facilitate a greater cut of the £1.5 billion live music currently generates.
This project therefore aimed to identify the factors which prevent Wales from having a greater share of the UK’s live music industry and suggest ways which these could be overcome.
The first stage of the research involved an online questionnaire targeted towards the Welsh music industry. This was closely followed by a range of face-to-face interviews with key industry personnel, who were given the opportunity to elaborate on and introduce specific factors that were relevant to the Welsh music industry. The preliminary findings were then taken into four forum meetings in locations across Wales – Cardiff, Swansea, Caernarfon and Aberystwyth – where the industry at large was given the opportunity to discuss many issues in depth. These forums followed an initial open panel discussion in Newport to launch the research.
The report found that Wales is hampered from taking a greater share of the UK’s live music industry by a lack of specialist venues, slow ticket sales, poor relations between local authorities and promoters, and a shortage of skilled technicians and event managers. It called for better skills and training, seed grants to support bands and promoters, and a more constructive dialogue between industry and local councils. It also called for improved mapping of the live music sector in Wales.
The report was first presented at the Business of Live Music conference organised by the AHRC’s Live Music Exchange at the University of Edinburgh in April 2011. It was also discussed at a number of industry and policy events, including the Hay Festival, the Brecon Jazz Festival and a special coffee-shop debate organised by the Institute for Welsh Affairs, Wales’s leading independent think tank.
The report generated widespread coverage within the Welsh music industry press, with reports in the Miniature Music Press, Official FM and Anna Marie Thomas Wales blog.
The report’s findings have helped to inform the Welsh Music Foundation in its ongoing work in developing the music industry in Wales by way of specialist business support and industry-led representation. The call for a mapping exercise on the live music sector in Wales is currently being implemented as part of the Welsh Government’s Creative Industries Strategy. A follow-up report by Paul Carr for the Higher Education Academy (HEA) also outlines strategies for improving skills and training within the live music industry in Wales.
This project examined the production of television history programming through empirical research of a specific case study, BBC Wales’ The Story of Wales (Green Bay for BBC Wales, 2012). It analysed the commissioning, production and presentation of a landmark national history programme within the specific context of a small nation (Wales) to provide insights into how television intervenes in the construction, revision and remembering of the national past.
Duration: June 2011 – March 2012
Funding: HEFCW’s Strategic Insight Placement
Research team: Steve Blandford and Ruth McElroy
In May 2011, BBC Wales issued a commissioning call for a new landmark series on the History of Wales, the first in over 25 years. The Centre subsequently convened a symposium of television commissioners, producers, media scholars and historians to discuss the challenges involved in making a new series on the nation’s history. This drew particular attention to the differing interpretations of Welsh history which the series producers would need to negotiate.
The commission was awarded to Green Bay, an independent television production company based in Cardiff, and its six-part series, The Story of Wales, was broadcast on BBC One Wales in March 2012 and subsequently on BBC 2 across the whole of the UK network in August/September 2012. During the making of the series, Blandford and McElroy were invited to observe how the series was put together. This provided a unique opportunity to examine how programme-makers are involved in the (re)construction of the nation’s past.
The production of television history programme is a rich site for examining the dynamic relationship between history and memory. This project focused on two key research questions:
The research involved a period of non-participant observation of the pre-production stage of The Story of Wales series at Green Bay’s production offices in Cardiff. It also involved semi-structured interviews with key personnel.
The research highlighted the importance of scheduling to the production of The Story of Wales. The decision to commission broadcaster Huw Edwards, a figure who possesses a 'natural’ authority and trustworthiness from reading the news, to present the series was shown to be integral to its strategic aim of connecting with a primetime BBC One audience. Other strategies identified to make complex historical processes more televisual included the use of historical artefacts, reconstructions using actors, and computer generated images (CGI) – each of which carried both risks and benefits to the integrity and appeal of the series.
The research underlined the role of national histories in the construction of memory and national identity at a time when the legitimacy of nations and states is under question and when governmental and political settlements are shifting within the UK.
Further research aims to investigate just how memorable the series proves to be and the kind of relationship with a wider audiences that the programme-makers manage to achieve.
The research resulted not only in traditional research outputs in the form of a journal article and conference paper. It also led to the development of new teaching material for students and offered insights for the programme-makers themselves.
John Geraint, Green Bay’s Creative Director, said: “We are delighted that Professor Blandford and Dr McElroy have been observing our editorial and production processes in the making of a major commission for BBC Wales. It’s important that academics teaching in the area of television studies experience practical issues and choices faced by programme makers. In turn, they will be able to feed their insights back to us which will inform our practice.
“We would certainly work with this team/department again as they have an exemplary approach to matters of trust and sensitivity, as well as being highly experienced in the field.”
Steve Blandford and Ruth McElroy presenting at the
Narratives and Social Memory Conference, University of Minho, Portugal 2012.