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.

It’s WORLD CREATIVITY WEEK! 8 articles to get you going…

World Creativity Week! And about time to.  You can never get enough of all things creative.   Because creativity‘s great isn’t it?  Like apple pie, Christmas and Easter bunnies all rolled into one?  Well, yes and no.  Not really.  ‘Creativity’ and our recent glamorisation of all things creative really needs a good shake up.

And here’s some places to start:

The concept of The Creative.  https://drnicko.wordpress.com/2012/04/18/are-you-a-creative-or-a-non-creative-for-everyone-in-world-creativity-week/

The benefits of Useless Creativity. https://drnicko.wordpress.com/2012/04/17/5-tests-to-measure-u-creativity-useless-creativity-for-world-creativity-week/

The concept of M-Creativity. Creativity in all places at all times. https://drnicko.wordpress.com/2012/04/16/introducing-a-new-form-of-creativity-m-creativity-especially-for-world-creativity-week/

The Creative School as Creative City. https://drnicko.wordpress.com/2011/10/12/how-does-a-creative-school-become-a-creative-city/

The Perils of Schools becoming Creative Cities. https://drnicko.wordpress.com/2011/10/13/here’s-how-a-creative-school-becomes-a-creative-city-2/

Unleashing the unwanted on the unexpecting. https://drnicko.wordpress.com/2011/09/04/unleashing-the-unwanted-on-the-unexpecting/

Reasons to be uncreative. Part 3. https://drnicko.wordpress.com/2012/04/20/poetry-on-the-hoof-best-excuses-dedicated-to-the-end-of-world-creativity-week/

How to get rid of it altogether. https://drnicko.wordpress.com/2011/08/31/2-easy-routes-to-killing-creativity/

Welcome to the Surprise Zones – start here…

Surprise Zones are literal, metaphorical and temporal spaces which arise through the mining, merging and melding of various engagement and participation principles:

Relaxed working relationships
Informal learning structures
Encouragement of innovation and risk taking
Participant centred and directed
Suspension of disbelief
Welcoming complex results

Surprise Zones offer spaces of amplification where progression and achievement can be accelerated.  They catalyse surprise: of young people in their own potential and capabilities; and of peers, adults and the wider world in their expectations and perceptions of what those young people can say, do and achieve.

Surprise Zones offer spaces and possibilities for magic and miracles.

Find out how Surprise Zones emerge from the transformation of space and time by clicking here:

http://web.me.com/aspiretrust/SURPRISE_ZONES/Welcome.html

The Surprise Zones
© Aspire Trust 2010

Driving down standards? Why it might be better than driving them up!

Who on earth would want to drive down standards in schools these days? In our target ridden output obsessed culture, the mantra of driving up standards is never far from the pursed lips of school bursars and head teachers. Increasingly from the bursars in fact as they are only too well aware that if standards are seen to fall – or worse, be driven down – then their school’s future health and well being is not the bright sunny road that’s painted in the school prospectus and which resembles that Start Rite shoe graphic of many years ago.

So we’re all on message when it comes to standards. They are to be driven up, not ratcheted down. They are to be maintained, not devalued. They are to be hoist up high, and their benefits proclaimed to the hills. So far so ok.

But your standards may not necessarily be my standards. You may want your kids to reach level 5 in their literacy by the time they are 10; I would prefer it if they could actually read a sentence; or even better a string of sentences that take the form of what used to be called a book. You may want your kids to take home 10 A* GCSEs this June; I would prefer it if rather than have a clutch of certificates they could demonstrate amongst other things – they had read the whole of Hamlet – including the difficult bits – and could write some semblance of an argument about it.

The standards you hoist high on your academic mountainsides may be nothing more than flags which flutter in the wind but are then swept away in an avalanche of real life challenges which the Level 5 literacy and A* in English have done nothing to prepare you for. By all means drive up your standards – but know too when its time to take them down and replace them with snow shelters, bivouacs and tins of corned beef.

Pitch a Film on a Friday: Liverpool Greets Southampton: April 1912.

Scene 1: a waiting room at the quayside of Southampton docks. Posters on the wall exhort everybody to mind their luggage, their personal safety and boarding papers. The launch day of the Titanic has arrived. Whilst full of noise and bustle outside – porters shouting, announcements on the p.a. Etc., the room is quiet until Dick, and his wife, Ros, enter. They’ve arrived late for embarkation. Dick is nervous, excited at the thought of his wife’s imminent departure and the thought of being able to leave her: but he’s trying to translate his excitement into something resembling concern over his wife’s journey. Ros is subdued, uneasy about something but unable to identify the cause of her unease. She doesn’t want to leave Dick but desperately wants to see her parents again – they haven’t met since the marriage 10 years previously.

DICK
You’ve got the ticket haven’t you?

ROS
I thought you did.

DICK
Oh.

ROS
Calm down. You’re making me nervous.

DICK
Just imagine, setting off on the greatest voyage in the history of mankind within seconds.

ROS
I can’t fathom why you had to go and buy such an expensive ticket.

DICK
Don’t you want to see your mother?

ROS
Of course I do.

DICK
You haven’t seen her since the marriage. Now you’re going and you’ve not stopped complaining.

ROS
I know. I’m sorry.

DICK
She might be dead next week. Then how would you feel? Guilty, that’s how.

ROS
I wanted us both to go, not just me. They’d get to meet you at long last.

DICK
Well, I can’t can I? Someone’s got to earn the money to afford these holidays. Let’s have a look in that shoulder bag. (HE STARTS TO LOOK THROUGH IT).

ROS
Dick, I’m sorry, really I am. I didn’t mean it to be like this.

DICK
It must be here somewhere. Make-up case. Perhaps it’s in your make-up case.

ROS
I thought you wanted to come, I thought you’d meet them, I thought you could do with a break, I don’t want you slaving away at work, no-one to come home to of a night, it’ll be awful for you being on your own, I know how you hate it.

DICK
Why haven’t you got a decent makeup case?

ROS
(INCENSED THAT HE’S NOT BEEN LISTENING)
Look at that bag. I had it all neatly packed and you’ve ruined it.

DICK
I’ll put it all back.

HE STARTS STUFFING THINGS INTO THE BAG BUT IT DOESN’T FIT.

ROS
I spent an hour on that.

DICK
Let me try again.

ROS
All that fuss and you’ve forgotten the ticket.

DICK
I don’t understand it.

ROS
I won’t be able to go now.

DICK
You bloody well will, after all that palava. I’ll fix it.

ROS
D’you know, it’s as if you’re trying to get rid of me?

DICK
Don’t be daft.

A STEWARD ENTERS THE WAITING ROOM.

STEWARD
Morning everyone, bright as buttons are we? Ready for the big adventure?

DICK
You could say that.

ROS
You are, aren’t you?

DICK
Ros, please, not now.

STEWARD
Jolly good, jolly good. That’s what I like to hear. Got your ticket sir?

DICK
No.

ROS
I’ve hit on something here, haven’t I?

DICK
No.

STEWARD
Don’t go thinking you’re boarding the Titanic without a ticket.

ROS
What have you got planned up that sleeve of yours?

DICK
Nothing at all. Steward, I’ve come to wave off my wife. I shall be straight off your premises afterwards, fear not.

ROS
I bet you will.

DICK
But we have a problem, we can’t find our ticket. But we must be on your passenger list… look, there we are… Stubbs… Rosalyn Stubbs.

ROS
And who’s on your passenger list then Dick? Who are you sailing off with after you get shot of me?

DICK
Nobody. Rosalyn my dear, you really do talk the most indisputable garbage.
STEWARD
Are you sure? She might be anybody.

DICK
Well she’s not anybody. They’re nobody.

STEWARD
Pardon? No-one said anything about this sort of incident. I’d better report back.

DICK
But what about her, she’s got to get on the boat.

STEWARD
She’ll be allowed to board when it’s clear her papers are in order. If you’ll excuse me, I need to see my chief.

ROS
You’re panicking aren’t you?

DICK
I am not panicking.

ROS
Just suppose I miss the boat, then what? We go home and try again, but we can’t do that can we, because do you know why?

DICK
I haven’t wasted three thousand quid for all this…

ROS
No, because you’ve got a nice little tugboat sunning herself back home haven’t you?

DICK
I don’t know what you’re talking about.

(THE SHIPS STEWARD RETURNS WITH THE CHIEF STEWARD)

CHIEF
My steward says there’s a problem with your tickets.

ROS
I think you do and I think you’re lying through your pulled back grin and your newly capped teeth. Who is she then?

DICK
Ros, you’re making a scene.

CHIEF
Do you have any receipt of payment about your person?

ROS
You bet I am, you’re about to go screw some piece of fluff the moment we’re out of sight and you expect me not to make a scene. Is it Maud?

DICK
Excited, she’s just getting excited. Don’t be silly.

CHIEF
Hmm… Difficult situation. But in the circumstances…

DICK
The receipt, I’ve got the receipt!

ROS
It’s Jane, isn’t it? Jane with the bob?

CHIEF
Jones, take Mr. Stubbs here across to HQ, get hold of Temple, tell him there’s an emergency…

DICK
Jane and Bob? Honestly, Rosalyn, what do you take me for?

CHIEF
Tell him I’m requesting a D3 embarkation, and that he has to sort it out.

DICK
Thank you, thank you. I’ll be straight back.

CHIEF
Hurry up Mr. Stubbs. There’s no time to waste.

DICK LEAVES THE WAITING ROOM RAPIDLY.

ROS
It’s Jane you conniving piece of low life isn’t it? And you expect to pack me off to the States to have some sordid affair with some half baked haddock from accounts.

CHIEF
A memorable day, madam, the Titanic, the biggest ship in history. 46,000 tons. Certain to be quite a splash when it sets sail.

THE STEWARD RE-ENTERS

STEWARD
Mrs. Stubbs? What are you doing here? I thought you were on board..

ROS
Dick… where is he?

THEY ALL RUSH TO THE WINDOW AS THE BOAT LEAVES THE HARBOUR AMIDST HORNS BLOWING AND MUCH SHOUTING AND CHEERING.

ROS
Will you look at that. He’s on the boat, waving at us all. The nerve…

STEWARD
How on earth?

CHIEF
(SPOTTING SOMETHING ON THE FLOOR UNDER THE BAGGAGE) Madam… is this yours?

ROS
The ticket, it was there all along… what’s this… a letter… Dear Ros, by the time you read this… can’t cope any more with your jealousy… need to escape… new life on my own… will write soon. Dick.

STEWARD
So he wasn’t packing you off to the States to have an affair with a haddock.

CHIEF
Steward. Know your place.

STEWARD
Sorry Chief.

ROS
He’s gone. I don’t believe it.

CHIEF
Don’t despair madam. He won’t get far. He’ll be on the next fishing boat back to Southampton before he knows it. Taking advantage of the system like that.

ROS
Jealous? I’ll give him jealous. Just wait until he gets back. He’ll regret the day he bought that ticket, I can tell you.

CHIEF
A small drink perhaps to calm the nerves? Scotch on the rocks perhaps?

ROS
Thank you captain. I don’t mind if I do. And make sure there’s plenty of ice.

THEY LEAVE THE WAITING ROOM WITH THE SOUND OF SHIPS HORNS, SHOUTING CROWDS AND BRASS BANDS DROWN THEIR CONVERSATION.

FADE TO BLACK END

An Open Letter to Jeremy Paxman: how do you like your artists? Poached, fried or skewered?

The post below was written over 12 years ago but Damien Hirst continues to irritate the whole wide world with his approach to his art and making money.  

Dear Jeremy Paxman,

The recent and utterly predictable furore about Damien Hirst’s retrospective at Tate Modern has so far unsuccessfully (on the BBC at least) tried floating the same old questions when you’re talking about Hirst and his ilk: is it art? Is it any good? And hidden behind those questions – often poorly masquerading as intelligent criticism Jeremy – is the punter’s stealth bombing attitude that is appalled at the economy that surrounds Hirst. He makes money. Tut. He makes tons of money. Tut tut. He bypasses the traditional dealers and sells dead flies to rich foreigners. Tut tut bloody tut.

The question of whether or not Hirst’s oeuvre is ‘art’ is as dead a question as that shark in the formaldehyde. It just stares at you, demanding you look directly into its mouth and be scared, be very scared that you get the wrong answer. Worse, be prepared for your flimsy swimming costume of a rationale for what constitutes art will be torn from your human flesh, exposing you in all your idiotic posturing. No, the question of whether something is art or not just generates un-ending trails of snail mucus which never answer the question (because its always the wrong question) and just serve to reinforce the critic’s own habits predilections and prejudices. The slime trail wends its way slowly, inexorably over the ‘I know what I like and I like what I know’ tautology.

The more significant question about Hirst is what our concern about his earning capacity tells us about what we expect from our artists; how they behave, how they should look and what place in society they should feel content to inhabit. Our concern and sometime hostility to his relationship with the arts markets suggests not so much that we’re are appalled that his spot paintings generate a million times their value every time he adds another row of pastel spots, but that he has the nerve to make any money at all. Artists surely do what they do because they love it? They’re driven by a vocational call that has nothing to do with filthy lucre? Surely they should be living in hovels, surrounded by the dead cows they carve up with their chain saws: not living off their profits?

Clearly, artists shouldn’t be linked to the word profit at all. Their place in the world should be at the altar – or better still, in the kitchen gallery ready to be poached, fried or plain old skewered on our prejudices that artists should be poor, anonymous and plain old dead before they’re entitled to benefit from the madness that is the arts marketplace and the market in general.

Hirst will only really have ‘made it’ once he dies and leaves instructions in his will for his own body to be drenched in formaldehyde and then strung up on a plinth in Trafalgar Square. When that happens Jeremy, you and your colleagues will no doubt be leading the campaign for the sanctification of Hirst because as you know, the only great artist is a dead one.

Number 1 in the series Write an Open Letter to a Famous Person!

It’s World Spinach Day! A salutary warning.

It’s world spinach day!

No, really it is. Time to dust off all those Popeye cliches and remind ourselves what an impertinent little vegetable that spinach is. Frisky, unreliable and a complete lack of deference to greens everywhere.  If it wasn’t for spinach, our dining tables would be much quieter places with less haranguing by parents of their offsprings reluctance to engage with the Big Green. Without spinach in our lives, we might have taken to the 5 A Day mantra a little easier, with a little less rebelliousness in our eating habits. If it were not for spinach, the teenage years would have been a time of studiousness; of youth knowing their place in the wider world; of people everywhere knowing their place.

The early introduction of spinach into our diets has, like rock and roll, clearly been a major disruptive force in the last part of the 20th century on the youth of today. National Spinach Day does at least allow us to sombrely reflect on how the world might have turned out had it not been for this most troublesome of vegetables.

Aspire Trust е организација за уметност од Велика Британија, посветена на трансформирање на животните приказни на луѓето на креативен начин.

Aspire Trust е организација за уметност од Велика Британија, посветена на трансформирање на животните приказни на луѓето на креативен начин. Ни причинува задоволство да објавиме дека после неодамнешните значителни инвестиции од Советот за уметност на Англија, во моментов планираме да го создадеме „Скапоцени“: врвен културен и образовен настан во англиканската катедрала во Ливерпул, во октомври 2012 година.

„Скапоцени“ ќе претставува инспиративна, мултимедијална театарска продукција со висок квалитет, направена врз основа на приказните од Титаник. Настанот ќе вклучува продукција на настани во живо, медиумски, дигитални и образовни настани, и општествени настани низ Велика Британија и во светот, и ќе се одржи првата недела во октомври 2012-та година.

Продукцијата ќе опфати приказни, филмски снимки, звучни пејзажи, изворна музика и театар во живо, со цел да се оживее патувањето на Титаник и да се истражат приказните на луѓето погодени од трагедијата. Поставена во навистина импресивната театарска сцена на англиканската катедрала, продукцијата ќе биде едно од највизионерските и неодоливите театарски искуства на годината.

Ние развиваме врвна стратегија за интернет-технологија и технологија на игри („Digi-Treasured“) којашто гарантира изненадувачка, иновациска и врвна форма на развој на публиката и нејзино учество, какви што нема во светот. Digi-Treasured ќе им овозможи на потенцијалните учесници да нурнат не само во продукцијата, туку и да учествуваат заедно со уметниците и публиката пред, за време на настанот и по самиот настан, преку уред за виртуелна реалност на интернет. Ова ќе биде од посебен интерес за луѓето кои не се во состојба да присуствуваат на самиот настан поради географските или временските разлики.

Во потрага сме по 12 (дванаесет) меѓународни партнери коишто се заинтересирани за можноста да работат заедно. Партнери може да бидат невладини организации, организации за уметност, училишта, претпријатија за информатичка и комуникациска технологија од приватниот сектор, универзитети: секој што е заинтересиран да учествува виртуелно во еден од најголемите настани за јавен настап во Велика Британија годинава.

Tips for Business Start Ups: 3 blindingly obvious things about the arts business: ideas, experiences and immortality.

What do you actually do, many people ask of Aspire. Do you provide products or services? Services or products? What do you sell? someone asked insistently this week when we were part of a trade mission to Skopje in Macedonia.

After some spinning around of the options – tickets? consultancies? projects? It occurred to me that we do all and none of things. No, what we sell are ideas. As simple and complex as that: ideas.

And we sell them to audiences, participants, staff, funders, project holders and stakeholders, past present and future. it’s not even as something as structured and regulated as knowledge or know-how although that’s part of the picture. No, It’s ideas. Widgets we are not.

The difficulty in selling ideas is that they’re difficult to demonstrate to people and say, there you are, there’s an idea. Would you like to buy it? We have neither have catalogues nor a website which advertises stuff we can sell on in a clear unambiguous way. An idea may as frequently be present on the back of a fag packet as it is in a business plan. Many of the better ones don’t even make it onto the fag packet.

Annoyingly for the accountants amongst us, ideas cannot be pinned down, measured or assessed with much confidence about their economic viability. Ideas are a bit like thought bubbles which lead to further thoughts, which lead to actions which lead to consequences –some beneficial and worthwhile, others unexpected and unwelcome.

We may –and do –produce many things over a year – but given the nature of the arts, these are frequently ephemeral, may just last for a few minutes or hours and may have taken many weeks or months of preparation for that big moment of arts production – when whoof! Its all gone in the flash of an eye, the curtain has come down, the houselights gone up and you’re left looking at a bare stage going, is that all there is?

The notion of arts as service is equally unreliable. Good arts activities will lead to personal experiences which are memorable, transferrable and irreversible. Once you participate in a workshop for example, you may not like it – but you can’t un-do the experience and you can’t take it back to the retailer complaining that you don’t like the colour, that it doesn’t fit or that you were given it by mistake by your grand-aunt. An arts workshop is for life, not just for Christmas. It’s a service you don’t always know what you’re going to be getting from it.

So, the products fade quickly and cost a small fortune to put together; the services may be modest and last for a few hours on a wet Tuesday afternoon in a school in Ellesmere Port.

But what they alll have in common is that the ideas that drives this economy lead to fundamental and vital experiences – learning, fun, play, entertainment, reflection, friendship, connection, love, humour and bewonderment.

Oh, and perhaps even immortality on a good day: a big claim for any business, to be sure, but one which ranks up there with the best of all human aspirational activity.

A Waiting Story: Little Red Riding Hood in the Macedonian Forest

In the time before Red Riding Hood got betrayed by a Wolf in Grandma’s clothing, the young girl would quiz her elderly relative about her habits and whereabouts. Some would say that this was the cause of her early demise but others dispute this telling of the fable.

Why do you cook toffee apples granny? Why is your house made of gingerbread? Why do you go walking in a forest? Is it for the peace and quiet?
Hardly, dear, you can hear trains and cars and city bustle. A call to prayers from a nearby mosque sounds like a wolf weeping but that’s no reason to walk in the forest.

Is it for the Fresh air and invigorating atmosphere?
Upto a point my dear: until the logging trucks drive by and the fumes wash over as you sit by the roadside, slightly blackened from the sooty deposits. So that’s no reason to walk in the forest.

Is it for exercise and maintaining a healthy body?
That may be fine dear, as long as you haven’t got knees which give you grief and buckle every step of the way. That’s no reason to walk in the forest.

Do you commune with nature, then? asked Little riding Hood impatiently. Or perhaps even yourself?

If you stood still long enough, it might be possible to commune with anything, but to walk in the forest you have to keep on walking: stumbling cursing sweating breathing so much, there’s not a lot of communing to be done. That’s no reason to walk in the forest.

Is it to get around the next corner then? asked Little Red Riding Hood sarcastically.

Ah, smiled her elderley relative, that is an answer. There’s always another next corner, another bend to get around, a hillock to navigate, there’s just another view to catch before you turn around and do the same journey but in reverse order.

So that’s why you go for a walk in the forest, Granny? she asked with a faux impression of relief.

Yes, my dear, that’s the reason to walk in the forest: to retrace your steps. I walk in the forest in order to go around in circles.

And enough of the prying questions! True to her word, Little Red Riding Hood’s grandmother – who had her own genetic stock of impatience – stepped back, sprung the latch from the pantry and out leapt a huge brown wolf, scantily dressed in grandma’s clothing who proceeded to devour her then and there, lock stock and barrel. And that, dear reader, was the end of Little Red Riding Hood and her inquisitive questions.