Inspiration Exchange at PSi#18 Leeds

Each time we run an Inspiration Exchange it is a slightly different shape and mode. This Saturday we're running one at the Performance Studies International conference at the University of Leeds - though it is still a public presentation, too. Here are the details:

Third Angel presents an

INSPIRATION EXCHANGE

10am - 6pm, Saturday 30 June, FREE!
Room 18, Parkinson Building
(just inside the main entrance)
University of Leeds

Woodhouse Lane, Leeds

Just drop in any time, and swap a story of something that has inspired you for something that has inspired someone else.

At 5.30pm I'll be presenting a reflection on the day's exchanges.

After presenting an Inspiration Exchange as part of Compass in Leeds last year, I agreed to answer some questions about it for Gwen Pew and her website The City I See. I finally got around to answering them this month. They were good questions, too, including this:

How would you defend conversation as an art?
This is a great question. My flippant-sounding answer is that art is conversation. The more portentous-sounding explanation of that is that surely art is part of the conversation between human beings about what it means to be human. There’s not very much I’m certain about when it comes to art and performance, but that’s one of the things that I am certain of.

But more specifically, conversation as art. I think that, often, when we’re making work we’re looking for the right frame, or form, to best explore the ideas we’re interested in. The form that adds something, that articulates something that another form wouldn’t. I’m most interested, I think, in work that can only exist in the form it is presented in. (I’m not particularly interested in theatre you could easily make a film of, for example). And with this idea, the idea of things that have inspired us, a structured conversation felt like the right form. And it is structured, but hopefully that structure is quite light-touch – the conversation can wander off in different directions, and meander quite far, depending on how many people are waiting; but the card-swap structure is there to reset the piece when necessary.

You can check out Gwen's site, and read the whole interview here.