Author: drnicko

Awarded an MBE for services to arts-based businesses, I am passionate about generating inspiring, socially engaging, creative practice within educational contexts both nationally and internationally.

Paddy Masefield: still sending out shock waves and unsettling foundations

It’s been a hectic few months what with Treasured at the Cathedral, the Serbian and Macedonian visit, the business start up work at Liverpool Vision and the myriad of other activities we are musing about, thinking of and trying to lay the foundations for. Paddy’s commemoration means that I can get away for a few days and think about all that fragmentation and stresses and strains in an environment which is a little quieter and offers the opportunity to reassess exactly what it is we want from the world ahead.

This was Paddy’s legacy for me. Working with him both at LIPA and within Aspire during times of organisational growth and stress and challenge meant that you had to step back from the common place, the usual, the humdrum, and completely reassess what we were doing, how we were doing it, and why we doing it at all.

His work with us at LIPA on establishing Solid Foundations sent powerful shock waves through the organisation, challenging established ways of thinking about disability, ability, arts training, arts development and who had a right in the first place to stand on stage and command attention.

His work meant we had to rethink everything about the student experience; how they got into HE, what he meant by accredited prior learning, the integrated curriculum and student progression. This of course had a direct impact on the students who joined solid foundations – but it’s impact and his influence were more wide ranging.

It meant that students on the so called mainstream programmes had to address their own concepts of identity, of ability and what was being asked of them when it came to not only developing and devising new work, but what it meant to rethink traditional ways of acting, of music making, and of dance for example. It meant that staff had to rethink how impairment might inform the student assessment process for example and whether there were other insights that disabled staff could bring to the process that couldn’t be accessed by their nondisabled counterparts. Far from providing solid foundations, Paddy was instrumental in rocking the very foundations which we thought held up conservatoire arts training in the UK.

Paddy’s influence was felt by many students and staff, although many may not have met him in their times at LIPA. Many of them are still working and have gone onto great things, Mark Rowlands, Mandy Redvers Rowe and Jaye Wilson Bowe to name just a few. I’d like to thank you Paddy for giving me that space to rethink, to replay and regalvanise. Your shock waves are still rocking our foundations to this day.

Testimonial for Paddy Masefield, 20 October 2012
Battersea Arts Centre, London

Taxi wisdom: give a guy a Satnav and he thinks he’s Robert De Niro. Number 7 in the series: Knowledge, traffic and arts based research.

Whilst taxi drivers seem to losing their abilities to know where they are, where they’ve been and where they’re going, they have no shortage of knowledge about the state of the world we’re in and where we all should be.

What is it about taxi drivers that means that for better for worse, we feel obliged to engage in banter about celebrities, footballers, politicians and the dog across the road who is urinating into the nearest macdonalds burger wrapper? Do they have some mystical power, sat there in front of their cab, staring at you with one eye through the rear view mirror, which means they can hold forth on any subject under the sun whilst reducing you to a mumbling wreck who will agree with almost anything until the ride stops, you pays your money and insist on a receipt for the journey from hell and back?

There are some honorable exceptions though. A driver this morning, whilst opining on the terrible story that is unravelling around Jimmy Saville, offered the astute observation that the only thing he believed in the newspapers was the date at the top of the page. A breath of fresh air from the usual polluted atmosphere you find in the backs of cabs.

There must be a great business opportunity out there for someone to set up a cab firm who employed drivers who knew where they were going, how to get there in the shortest possible time and in a manner which was both civilised and civilising.

More travel knowledge here.

Calling teachers interested in educational and cultural exchange in the Caribbean

Over the last two years, Aspire has organised international  conferences for Principals and Head teachers from India, Nigeria and the UAE to visit UK schools.  We have also produced student exchange programmes for students from Nigeria, Serbia and Macedonia.

These events have been very powerful in establishing links between UK and overseas schools, developing educational exchanges, facilitating visits by UK Head teachers to India and offering unique insights into our mutual educational cultures.

Next year we are planning a similar programme of conferences in the Caribbean in conjunction with schools and universities there. To set up those programmes, I have been invited to visit Barbados, Trinidad and St Lucia in the first week of February to participate in a trade and culture mission with schools, the University, teachers and other colleagues.

If you would like your school to benefit from my visit – e.g. by making links with schools, connections with head teachers and pupils, curriculum developments, CPD opportunities or other possibilities – then please get in touch to discuss how I could facilitate connections and exchanges between those schools and your own. I can be contacted at nick@aspire-trust.org.

One hack’s beauty is another hack’s bollocks: how the artist confounds the critic.

Why are we surprised when critics disagree about their assessments of a piece of art? It’s astonishing that when presented with the same piece of music, same set of actors, same piece of design that critics behave like they’re from different planets. Say something to one and you’ve offered a piece of golden insight: to another, you’ve insulted his mother.

Of course we know why that is: it’s because they bring their life experiences to the artwork and their own interpretations of your offering. Their criticism is not so much of you but their inner voice prompting them to explode in rage or revel in delight at their own recognition of themselves in the art work in front of them. The hacks complaint or adoration is ultimately a self-referential and self-reverential utterance and little to do with the artwork which mirrors themselves back at themselves.

3 Principles of Artistic Partnership: Liberté, Egalité,Fraternité

There’s been an increase recently of large arts organisations who, in an effort to demonstrate their badge of social conscience, like to present themselves as ‘partners’ to smaller arts organisations. But the notion of what they mean by partnership varies wildly, even sometimes on a day to day basis within the same organisation too.

Whilst they might declare that they have noble intentions in supporting their local cultural ecology, in practice when artistic push turns into economic shove and the smaller partner starts punching above its ecological status, then the larger partner can start forgetting the basics of real partnership working such as:

1. Liberté. The partnership works best when both partners enter that partnership voluntarily and are not coerced into or into an arrangement that suits one partner better than the other.

2. Egalité. Respect language differences. Appreciate your way of knowing the world and acting upon it is not the only way of living the good life. Other partners might speak differently, use different metaphors and may not be hide-bound by your language – the value of your partnership is in appreciating those differences in language and not just railroading over them.

3. Fraternité. Realise that your organisational weight is not the be all and end-all. It’s not just your history that makes you a partner – you have to bring ongoing skills, knowledge and wisdom to this process not just a superior histori-cultural capital. A decent partnership isn’t a forced marriage where you bring your ugly self and explain it away with the large inheritance you’re bringing to justify your place at the table.

All partnerships need the benefit of joint wisdoms and a commitment to talking and respecting each other.  The partner who manages to ignore these guidelines is nothing more than a control freak who can’t tolerate the notion that perhaps some-one somewhere out there might just have something more important to say than the repetition of the tired old canon that many find themselves having to repeat to themselves year after year.

What are the narratives of the Paralympics?

Well, if we were any doubt about some of the underpinning narratives of the Paralympics over the last 2 weeks, the closing ceremony has given us a strong clue about one of them: the military story.  The story which emphasises impairment as a result of military action: the story which emphasises heroism; the story which emphasises the successful melding of  metal and human.  Coe himself draws on the 7/7 story to describe why the Paralympics have been important: as closure on terrorist acts (carried out in the name of god only knows what). And  with the director emphasising that we shouldn’t be looking for narratives, this should make us even more alert to what is being peddled under the banner of disability.

So, is there a correlation between achievement at the Paralympics and levels of militarily or industrial induced  impairment caused by  the countries who are at the top of the medal table?

An Open Letter to Roy Hodgson: please prove the English FA wrong and fail gloriously

Dear Roy Hodgson,

I’ve got nothing against you and happen to think you were on a losing to nothing when you came to Liverpool last year.  We all know the results of that story and there’s not much to add to it now.

The new story you’re now part of though is alarming in the way its already being constructed: you’ve ‘steered West Brom to mid-table safety’; you’re a blazer man who ticks all the boxes; an FA man for the FA.  Well, lets hope your appointment doesn’t’ lead to sweet FA, or that if it does, you fail spectacularly and come crashing out of the football heavens burning on all cylinders.

Because Roy, your appointment has all the hall marks of what is tired and miserable about English sporting culture and indeed our public life in general.

Steering your team to mid-table respectability has an air of desperation about it, its risk averseness wearing its heart on its sleeve or on another respectable part of your anatomy.  Respectability?  So that we can look forward to saying things like “unfortunately we just missed out on scraping into the quarter finals but second place in the qualifying qualifying group stage is no mean achievement?’ Is that the extent of the endorsement we can expect from your boys at the FA after the summer?

Because those boys at the FA, Roy, are trying to anoint you as one in the image of themselves: Blazer Men, the stalwarts of the English sporting club tradition. We all know a Blazer Man. He’s the bloke on Saturday afternoon who kicks you off the tennis court cos you’ve not got your membership card with you. The bloke in the bar holding forth on all things, unctuously and loudly. The bloke in the car park who has driven his Jag up the back side of your Ford Orion and driven away, oblivious to the trail of damage behind him cos he’s as pissed as a Friday afternoon lunch time fart. The bloke who will lead us to mid table security making sure his blazer elbow patches don’t rip and tear at the strain of it all.  The Blazer Man. As exemplified by Trevor Brooking and his collection of gold plated carriage clocks. Cuck-bloody-oo.

Beware all those carriage clocks Roy! It’s no wonder you’re in danger of ticking all the boxes. All of them. Hoo bloody ray. A box ticker! We’re all living with box tickers every day Roy, they make up almost every department of every large organisation everywhere in England at the moment; they sit there in the neat and tidy offices, underlining things in red, covering their audit trail arses and ticking their boxes with a rapidity which puts the fastest PC to shame.

We don’t need box tickers Roy in our public life Roy,  we need our sports heroes to tear up the boxes and start again. We need our public figures to show us there’s life after the box, the target, the service level agreement.

We don’t need you to tick the FA’s boxes for them., Roy. We need you to win convincingly, after much struggle, heart break and living on the edge of our collective nerves; but failing that, please fail gloriously and utterly.  Please prove once and for all that the FA Blazer Men and their ticking clocks and ticking boxes should be thrown into a container and carted off to the South China Seas for them to live the rest of their lives in Rousserian decadence.  For Gods sake, for all our English public lives’ sake Roy, go and fail properly: disasterously,  noisily, embarrassingly.

However you do it, just do it with conviction.  We may not like the results but it will be infinitely better than being steered to mid-table respectability. No one wants that in their lives, never mind in their football team.

AspireAustralia – welcome to our arts, education and regeneration programmes

Greetings to the AspireAustralia blog, a one shop blog spot with information, offers, proposals, hunches and ideas about our forthcoming arts and creative education programmes across Australia. We’ve been working in Tasmania since 2012, and are building relationships with schools, artists and educators across the country.

Our work in Tasmania started here:

And carries on here:

Watch this space for further action!

AspireBalkans – MISIM ZNAŠ, TAJ RAD; BRATE!

Greetings to the AspireBalkans blog, a one shop blog spot with information, offers, proposals, hunches and ideas about our forthcoming arts and creative education programmes across the Balkans. We’ve been working in Serbia since 2010, are building relationships in Macedonia, and looking forward to making new friends and colleagues in Bosnia, Croatia, Montenegro, Kosovo, Albania, Slovenia and across the region in the years to come.

Our work in Obrenovac, Serbia started here:

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https://drnicko.wordpress.com/2011/08/29/poetry-on-the-serbian-hoof/

And carries on here:

http://pascotd.weebly.com/index.html

Watch this space for further action!