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.

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.

I blame the parents! Perhaps the Daily Mail has been right all along

Dear Daily Mail,

There has been more in you today about how parents need to be castigated for their wayward offsprings behaviours, morals and ongoing general bad taste in music. Now, that’s not a very nice way to talk about the Royal Family or Ed Miliband but we’ll let that pass.

What would be a more interesting angle on this would be blaming parents for the behaviour of bankers – Fred Goodwin – just where was your dad when you were growing up?  Perhaps he was in the betting shop, placing a fiver on a nag that was going to end up in a Belgium meat market as you were going through your formative years- that would account for the devastation you and your company wreaked in 2008 wouldn’t it?

Politicians too need to be reminded of just how irritating they have become due to the parents foibles: Chris Huhne, did your mum smoke when she was pregnant with you? Perhaps that’s the reason for your terrible driving skills… oh, and your lieing skills… And your sheer bloody nerve skills…

And let’s not forget the parents of the press barons – what did Rupert Murdoch’s parents do to him which have led to oversee the immoral and corrupted media machines we see feeding filth to the public on a daily basis? And what of those who chose to hang around the back of the bike sheds with him? Their parents must shoulder some of the blame too.

But you, The Daily Mail, on second thoughts, perhaps you have got it right: although some parents need more blaming than others.

RIP Lanternhouse, Cumbria. Lest we forget.

Like a cantakerous old Uncle, I’ll remember Lanternhouse in Cumbria as a somewhat distant relative – but whose influence over my professional growing up was always keenly felt: hovering over my shoulder, whispering exhortations, yelling out criticisms and the ocassionally deranged epiphet which caused the rest of us in the extended community arts family to look at each other in that modern, knowing way. Uncle John was clearly not on form we might mutter; he’s seen better days someone else would offer.

What we shouldn’t forget that without Uncle John, we would not be stood where we are now. Sometimes the shoulders of the giants we stand on start to tremble– and its at that point we’re obliged to stand up straight and take the load off them rather than castigate them for not being who they have been, and for what they’re not doing any longer.

Farewell Lanternhouse and everyone who was fortunate to benefit from your lights. They’ll continue to shine into the darkness of this recession long after the politicians who put you there have faded into miserable obscurity.

If you have a memory of Lanternhouse – or indeed any of the arts companies that are now fading away in the cultural freeze of this recession, please feel free to send them in and we’ll post them up here.

From Paul Kleiman:

Lanternhouse magical moment: a beautiful midsummer’s evening concert, with the band starting in the streets of the town, a tower of instruments and bells, and at the climax, a hot-air balloon flying right over the top of the tower. (the balloon was pure coincidence!!)

For an ongoing list of companies MIA click here.

Lest we forget: dear departed arts and culture organisations who won’t be remembered in despatches (unless we remind people)

As the recession continues its grip on arts companies, small businesses and sole traders up and down the country, its noticeable that many of them are slowly disappearing without a murmur. We don’t think that’s a fitting way to say farewell to those many organisations who have contributed to our national cultural health – whether they’ve been around for 1, 10 or 50 years.

If you’d like to commemorate any arts organisation’s demise, please let us know here and we’ll compile a list of unfortunate souls who didn’t make out of the credit crunch, recession or economic downturn or whatever it’s called today. We’ll make a list which we’ll send onto the relevant organisations (local authorities, arts funders, charities and so on) to put them in the picture of who we’ve lost. If you can add details of a website, numbers of jobs lost, matched funding opportunities missed – and other useful, public quantitative data – that would be great too.

In memoriam:

A-Foundation, Liverpool

Activ8 Success, Birkenhead

Aspire Trust and Aspire Creative Enterprises

Audiences Central

Brewery Theatre, Taunton.

Contemporary Urban Centre (CUC), Liverpool

Durham City Art

The Cholmondeleys and the Featherstonehaughs

Flambard Press

Foursight Theatre Company

Jazz Action

Lanternhouse, Cumbria

Matthew Street Festival *gone but not forgotten, even though some of us would love to forget it and all it stood for”

Pacific Road Arts Centre, Birkenhead

Pele Productions

Quicksilver Theatre, London. Lost the funding after 34 successful years.

7 Sefton Libraries

Theatre Writing Partnership

Urban Strawberry Lunch

Wolstenholme Creative Space

Whilst other organisations are not yet extinct, the combination of funding cuts at national and local levels is putting them under immense strain. Many organisations have seen massive staff cut backs or remaining staff giving their time for free in order to save the long term health of the company. Their efforts should not go un-noticed.

More at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-17536195

What constitutes an Olympian Educator?

In June 2012, we’ll be celebrating the concept of the ‘Olympian Educator’ with educators from across the world in a unique conference on London’s South Bank. As well as meeting diverse speakers and colleagues and sharing pedagogies, ideas and approaches from across the world, delegates will be able to visit London schools and meet – through the magic of the internet and the performing arts – ancient educators such as Socrates, Dewey, Piaget, Vygotsky and Montessori.

But by Olympian, we don’t just mean schools with the highest visibility or schools with the highest performing pupils – but schools in which the efforts, talents and skills of the staff are making a real –Olympic – difference to local children’s and families lives.

So, to get the ball rolling, we’d like to know: what does being an Olympic Educator mean to you? Is it something in their training? Their performance? Their relationships with their students? Their pedagogy? The Olympic Educators Conference has kicked off now and will be a further 4 months in the making.

For further information or for the chance to be involved please see

https://drnicko.wordpress.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=735&action=edit

or contact me at nowen.aspire@btconnect.com

5 Stanislavskian tips for teachers: role play made easy

1. Characters have objectives. This is expressed through the use of an active and transitive verb eg kick off gracefully.

2. Superobjectives  link objectives through a line of action.’ eg kick off gracefully then retire to the bar to recuperate.

3. In analyzing an action, the actor answers three questions, ‘What do I (the character) do?’ ‘Why do I (the character) do it?’ and ‘How do I (the character) do it?’ eg what on earth possessed me to kick off, go to the bar and then end up having a full day of assessment?

4. Truth on stage is different from truth in real life. Just because you are acting a full day of assessment in role, does not mean that is what you are actually doing.

5. The aim of the actor should be to use his technique to turn the play into a theatrical reality. In this process imagination plays by far the greatest part. So, an act of assessment would be much better accompanied by acts of fanciful daydreamings. E,g this school should be closed down… But would be so much more effective if it was placed on the top of a mountain.

The Tuesday Rant: how the arts sector is being shafted by parts of the public sector who should know better.

Dear local authority,

It has come to our attention that you are increasingly awarding tenders for arts projects to universities whose turnover is a zillion times higher than the value of that tender.

Do you not realise that you are undermining the sector you claim to represent?

Dear university, why do you insist on putting students on public projects which effectively takes the bread out of local artists mouths? Do you not realise you are shooting the local arts economy in the head every time you place an unqualified graduate into an arts project?  Would you accept student doctors diagnosing your children’s health if they’d done just one year in medical school?

Dear local authority, why are you complicit with this act under the guise of getting ‘value of for money?’ Old mill owners got value for money by exploiting their workers to within an inch of their lives.  Why are you contributing to this outdated industrial practice? And more importantly, why are you allowed to keep getting away with it?

Maybe you’ll appreciate our case once all your arts workers have lost their jobs because of your funding cuts and come back to the sector to look for work… Only to find there is a skeleton of a sector left because it’s been shafted by universities who place unqualified students on projects which should be run by qualified local professionals. And offer access to their so called ‘premium spaces’ in order to claw back some of the massive capital deficit they’ve built up in ‘investing’ in the local economy. 

Dear local authority, dear university, please don’t coming looking to the sector to dig you out of a cultural desert in a few years time. The responsibility for that emptiness will be yours and the students who have long flown the city.

The Tuesday Rant: write an Open Letter to a famous person!

The Tuesday Rant is an occasional series of irritated and indignant responses to various public figures, some famous, some infamous, others aspiring to be either one of the other.

The Open Letter format allows you for the possibility that your target might even care just a little bit about what you think about them, their practice, their pet dog or bar-room habits. Certainly enough to bother to read beyond the first couple of lines.

If you have any Open Letter you would like to share, then please feel free to add to the comments below. You never know what might happen next.

More Open Letters here.

Removing the Rat Runs: call for European Partners

New adult learning programme for 2012: Removing the Rat Runs

We frequently use arts and creative practice in the development of innovative community engagement strategies and work directly with local communities to generate new local policies in the field of health, environment, education and culture. In 2012 we will be focusing on the health and environmental effects of urban traffic and will be doing this through the delivery of our adult learning programme, Removing the Rat Runs.

Removing the Rat Runs: calming local traffic through community actions

The ‘Rat Run’ project aims to increase local communities knowledge, skills and capabilities to reduce road traffic accidents in neighbourhoods and residential areas. Success of the speed reduction programmes in Liverpool UK, for example, has been proven to depend on good communications and building grass roots support and demand for reduced speed. It is the culture shift which ensures successful outcomes on traffic calming and road traffic accidents.
Grundtivg partners on the project will be involved in developing a European project which provides innovative insights and advice on best practice on establishing community based models of traffic calming.
Learners from the Grundtvig partners will be involved in designing local, national and European models of traffic calming based on the following model:

1. Devising a communications plan and overseeing an approach which will include
a. Identification of key stakeholders, interest groups etc and proposals for their engagement and recruitment to the campaign.
b. Utilise appropriate research to develop and co-ordinate a campaign across grassroots and influencers to achieve successful speed reduction
c. Develop key messages based on insight into attitudes, behaviours, motivations and barriers, and co-ordinate use across all partners for engagement and formal consultations to support consistency, using research to support targeting /effectiveness.
d. Develop communications protocol to ensure effective partnership approach
e. Develop supporting branding for partners to use
f. Develop a media relations strategy and action plan that will educate journalists, garner support for the agenda and result in positive media coverage.
g. Support community delivery partner / groups to run effective supporting campaigns – building community ownership and capacity
h. Evaluate the approach during delivery and refine approach in response to feedback

2. Identify community partners / organisations and individuals interested in championing this issue and taking the message into their own communities…eg schools campaigns, Councillors, parent led road safety campaigns, youth associations etc..
3. Ensure appropriate and effective reach of engagement with communities.
4. Facilitate with training, skills, financial and other resources, community led activities and campaigns to build support for the process and shift attitudes.
5. Integrate community activity with implementation phasing and partner agency communications to ensure an effective city wide approach.
6. Develop responsive and pro-active approach to engaging widely and building community capacity using social networking as one approach.

Do you want to be a Grundtvig partner?

We are now seeking European partners who would wish to collaborate on this project through a Grundtvig Partnership scheme. We are particularly looking for partners who:

* Regularly run innovative, creative adult learning programmes especially for disaffected and socially excluded adults

* Have experience of working within Grundtvig, Comenius or Leonardo European funding schemes

* Can bring a portfolio of teaching and learning expertise to the project including technical skills such as website design, production of learning materials

If you would like to become a Grundtvig partner please contact me at:

Aspire Trust Ltd
Valkyrie Lodge
30 Valkyrie Road
Wallasey CH45 4RJ

Tel. + 44 (0) 151639 9231
Mob + 44 (0) 77422 71570
Email nowen.aspire@btconnect.com
Skype name richardnyowen