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.

He’s Behind You! – the Twitter Panto Bible

The Christmas Panto this year is a new form of Christmas entertainment as it’s composed entirely through contributions from Twitter. We’re offering prompts advice and input as the story continues and performance day gets closer.

Contributions should be no more than 160 characters please: any more than that will result in us exerting unilateral editorial decisions 🙂

We’re up and running and now it’s over to you!

THE PREMISE
Panto Land starts here:

Once Upon A Time there was a very, very kind caring and considerate BANKER, Heinous, who spent her lifetime looking after other peoples financial problems. She had a vast collection of piggy banks which she regularly tended with great care and affection.

Set in the ancient town of Royal Gluttonnee Bloater, Heinous tends to the rich, the poor and the ultra-poor without favour, prejudice or discrimination. Times are good in Royal Gluttonee Bloater with everyone being able to get some piece of the action. Plates are full, Christmas stockings are full to bursting, shops are bursting to the seams with food from all corners of the world and everyone’s living in the best of all possible worlds.

Once a year the town congregate to their national anthem – Piggies make the World go Round and party to the early hours of the following week. Life couldn’t get any better. Could it?

In the heart of the town though, there is a dark dark dark place which many know about but which few admit to knowing about: the House of the Porkie Pies.

Here, people furtively visit for all sorts of devious purposes: to take revenge against their neighbours in the Garden of Nede, to distort own public profiles in the Corridor of Distorting Mirrors or to damage the reputation and honor of complete strangers in the Kitchens of Teflon.

Many more scurrilous activies have been reported across the town in recent years and their incidence seems to be increasing. A rumour is spreading that disturbing forces in the House of the Porkie Pies are not happy. Quite what they’re not happy with is not clear. Quite who that Some-one is, is also not clear. But Some-one is Not Happy. And Some-one has made it clear that Something Must Be Done. That Some-one has somehow managed to start a feeling that things are not quite right in the town… that there may even be a crisis in the brewing… Whatever the truth of the matter, Everyone is becoming more and more unsettled by the actions of Someone and are beginning to cast around for Anyone to pin the blame to.

NEXT STEPS (in postings of no more than 160 characters please)

THE CHARACTERS

THE BANKER – a young woman called Heinous. She is bright, careful, is concerned for the planet and drives fast cars. Heinous pronounces her name ‘Heenous’ and gets upset when people call her ‘Haynous’ for obvious double-entendre reasons.

FAILURE is there waiting in the shadows to pounce on poor suspecting people trying to make their way in life http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BKg0z2zmUs

FAILURE is teamed up with another character called GREED, both of whom are nasty characters whose names/titles sum them up as panto baddies. However, you would not know this from their first appearances. They are docile, mild mannered and give to charity.

HONEY is named, not because of her hair or personality because she does tend to stick to people, often outstaying her welcome.

Male Hero: FLASH BUTTONS. Handsome, eligible, yet slightly vulnerable aspirational racing driver, fan of the Antiques Roadshow and son of the wealty, bullish but increasingly influential Minister for SustainabilitY, called VIRIDIAN. VIRIDIAN strongly objects to his son’s chosen sport and as a result, has cut FLASH out of the Will. Never terribly careful with money, FLASH now finds his only two motivations to continue racing are his dream of one day owning a team with his name on while continuing to add to his collection of fine china, especially his beloved, treasured, Piggy Banks.

It has not however been the most successful of seasons for Flash. Constantly harried by the judges and with the Ruber Taurus team carrying all before them, Flash has got himself in with a bad crowd, including FAILURE and GREED yet the attentions of the sweet girl called HONEY have led to the occasional sticky situation and a meeting with a rival gang led by STRENGTH and his trusty lieutenants HOPE and PROSPERITY.

Although FLASH doesn’t want to push HONEY away, and may indeed have great difficulty in doing so, he has found himself longing for someone who knows about money. Someone who loves fast cars. And Piggy Banks.

MERLOT Merlin the Magician has a cousin. MERLOT. Merlot is widely travelled and became very popular in most countries from Chile to Australia but he felt most comfortable in Europe and helped keep a little place in France called Château Petrus. He was accustomed to blending in, just playing a supporting role, but as his richer and smoother friends drifted out of fashion, Merlot became the reluctant darling, the easy going, ever reliable life and soul of the magical wizard parties. But time and loneliness started to take its toll.

With little genuine companionship, a public highly sceptical about even the existence of wizards and only the European Central Bank crying out for a magic so powerful that not even his more clever cousin, MERLIN, could conjure up, MERLOT started to feel cold, became thin-skinned and prone to a variety of ailments. For solace, he turned to drink, but when tipsy he had trouble remembering spells, in particular the right spells, which only caused him to drink more.

After yet another spell had gone strangely awry, he found himself waking up in a very full recycling bin listening to the most beautiful voice he had ever heard. What was she singing about? Something about a Banker? As he climbed out of the bin and pulled an empty bottle of Rosé from his nostril he thought ‘What’s wrong with these peoples taste-buds?’ But MERLOT could feel cool soil beneath his feet and a warm sun on his cheeks. His journey towards salvation had begun. MERLOT’S first stop however was to find some trousers to cover his cheeks.

Eventually, MERLOT might run off with HONEY, have two children called CINNAMON and NUTMEG and live happily ever after in an orange grove making mulled wine. What could be more appropriate around Christmas time?

MISS MARPLE AND HER FAIRY GOD-SONS

Our fairy god mother – MISS MARPLE – is the antithesis of the traditional fairy – she’s Amazonian in stature with a heart and guts to match her ample physique. Rubens could have learnt a thing or two about the larger woman had he met Miss Marple.  Tinkerbelle she ain’t.

Her trusty sidekicks – the fairy godsons – Girl Elvis and Boy George – are a god send to her, procuring her every need and providing her with the fleet footedness she used to possess in her dancing days which are long gone although she doesn’t accept that. Whilst clearly the fairy godmother of the piece, her flying abilities are not apparent until the end of the story when she will fly, unaided, over the whole town dispensing her grace and favours to the grateful town citizens. Previous efforts at flight have been constantly thwarted by all manner of distractions.

She’s a classic fairy godmother dispensing goodness love and affection to everyone who needs it, righting wrongs and putting the misguided on the straight and narrow.

Named Miss Marple after her favourite flavour of smoked bacon (marple tree leaf) she revels frequently in all things sticky and sweet. She is also – of course – a classic sleuth who will be able to solve any intractable problems the other characters generate.

Who are the other characters in this story?
How do these characters communicate? Speak? Move? Gesture?
How might these characters interact?

YOU CAN SEE A SCRIPT SCRAPBOOK HERE: https://drnicko.wordpress.com/2011/10/30/hes-behind-you-the-script-scrapbook-of-the-aspire-twitter-panto/

This will eventually turn into the final script. Please feel free to add script between the characters as you see fit. Please note you cannot add script until characters have been accepted.

Authors and contributors (in order of appearance)
Ged McKenna
Angela Morris
Nick Owen
Alan Bradbury
Clare Bentley
Owen Hutchings

He’s Behind You! The AspireTwitterPanto – join in here!

The Aspire Christmas Panto this year will be a new form of Christmas entertainment as it will be composed entirely through contributions from Twitter.

It’s devastatingly simple: send your thoughts and contributions for title, plot, characters and audience to us at Aspire via Nowen.aspire@btconnect.com – and we will edit, shape and collaborate with all and every one of you.

It’s working title is ‘He’s Behind You’. Further directions on how to generate your contributions will be forthcoming in the weeks up until Christmas.

We aim to produce the final piece through a twitter feed on Friday 23 December at 12.00hrs GMT. We hope all our collaborators will be able to participate in that event either through tweeting in character, providing images for the production or perhaps even audio tweets through Audioboo or other appropriate channels.

All you have to do is tweet in!

Pitch a Film on a Friday: A Lifetime in 5 Years

Pushing through the market square, many mothers sighing, a 16 year old boy with knife in hand, blooded, hunting for somebody, pushes baskets aside, stalls, traders, horses, fruit goes flying, carcasses of meat crash to the floor. He’s pushed over and he wakes with a start: his day dream over, KEN finds himself herded out of a police van, through the front gates of HMYOI (Her Majesty’s Young Offenders Institution) St. Albans in the Home Counties in the Spring of 1972.

HMYOI St. Albans provides ‘a family for those with no family; a jail which provides a respite from the prison of normal life (according to the institutions mission statement).

1621 is Ken’s prison ID number and highlights the 5 years he’s been sentenced for, following the alleged knife attack on his step father.

1621 is the 5 year story of his progress through the penal system and his appeal against his imprisonment. It takes 5 years for us to find out whether he was guilty or not.

The stories of HMYOI St. Albans are about the stories of young people who are about to lose 5 years of their lives. But it’s not just about the usual, stereotypical things we associate with prisons: haircuts, drugs, rough diamonds, violence, solitary confinement, bullying, Dear John letters, boredom, the inanity of it all.

1621 is about friendships, moralities, justice, criminalisation, socialisation, the subterranean lives of young men locked up: the secret laws, codes of conduct, languages, allegiances, ‘otherness’, punishment, reward, the journeys through adolescence (for both teenagers and staff), the myths of childhood, of adulthood, of adolescence.

But 1621 is not only their story; the program follows the stories of staff, friends and families who converge on the prison and play out their own conflicts and dramas over a 5 year period.

1621 is not a soap played out in ‘current real time’ but has a historical perspective. It starts in 1972 and has a cut off date, 1977, which is reached 5 years after the start of the series. It is seen as a mix of ‘soap opera’, ‘faction’ and ‘fly on the wall documentary’ with a cast of professional and non-professional actors. It is played against the soundtrack of the era, opening with David Bowie’s 5 Years from Ziggy Stardust.

Pitching Your Film on a Friday

In these days of austerity, going out to the cinema is beginning to cost more than a good night out. You’ll need to be thinking about parking, candyfloss, 3D glasses, meal after and before, a few drinks in the intermission never mind the price of the seat. And then there are all those interminaable adverts to sit through!

So why not settle back, buy in a few six packs and create the film in your own head?

Pitch a Film on a Friday allows you to do exactly that. By giving you – absolutely free – a pitch for a film that hasn’t yet been made, this blog enables you to become your very own film maker, casting agent, distributor, audience and critic all rolled into one. You can even imagine your own awards ceremony!

Pitch a Film on a Friday is released every Friday (surprisingly) just in time for the weekend. Settle down, settle back, put away your credit card and throw away your parking ways: the film is in your head and its just about to begin!

The Thursday Dialectics: convincing the unconvinceable.

The Thursday Dialectics are a series of posts which aim to look at both sides of an argument in a frivolous yet serious, meaningful and meaningless, significant but throwaway kind of style.

They’re for the days when you can’t make up your mind, when the act of decision making is a step too far and anything that resembles committing yourself to a position, idea or action fills you with horror.

The Thursday Dialectics are for those of you who doubt, steadily remain unconvinced and enjoy sitting on fences. May you never fall off them!

Recent Thursday Dialectics include:

https://drnicko.wordpress.com/2011/10/27/whats-the-big-deal-about-sustainability/

Or, on the other hand:

https://drnicko.wordpress.com/2011/10/27/reincarnation-is-the-way-forward-new-approaches-to-business-planning/

Give Us This Day: a Toast to Reincarnation.

At a recent education conference, our presenter talked about the value of the green curriculum, stressing its importance in Eco-viability, sustainability and all good things in general.  Ironically sponsored by Pepsi Cola, she added that as we only had one life we best make the best of it, that we only had one life on this planet and that it was our moral duty to be good guardians of it.

In an important nod to her audience however she also recognised that there was more than one way of looking at our lives on the planet: “to those of you who believe in reincarnation” she finished, “ the greening of the curriculum is not so much about saving the planet now, but making it a better place for you when you return”.

Reincarnation is a particularly handy idea to deal with common sense notions that we only have one life; that life is not a dress rehearsal; that death is a foregone conclusion and like taxes, we best face up to the giant tax collector in the sky and pay what’s due on time, with no argument and with good grace. Reincarnation allows us to plan for the second, third, fourth and who knows how many times around, hopefully securing a better deal on the next visit unless we have been particularly obnoxious on this occasion.

Planning for reincarnation would be a useful addition to funding applications as it would be a tacit acknowledgement that our cultural efforts are always flawed, no matter how many business plans we write. A box which asks us how we intend to produce the production, deliver the curriculum or save the world when we are reincarnated either a) as a lizard or b) as a superhero would make writing and reading funding applications a lot more of an entertaining process for everyone.

My Lords, Ladies, Gentlemen and Members of the Jury, please raise a toast to Reincarnation.

Give Us This Day Our Daily Toast: read all about toasting here.

What’s the big deal about sustainability?

In much public life, the idea that ones efforts – whether artistic or educational or economic – should be sustainable is a highly persuasive piece of rhetoric. If your work is any good, the argument goes, and if you want money for it, then you must have a sustainability plan. You must want to see it existing over and beyond the short time of its current life time. If you can’t argue that it’s sustainable, there is an almost automatic burocratic frown placed against the merits of the project. It can’t be that good, they say, if it can’t be sustained. If there’s no more of the same, then what is the point of the project in the first place?

But why? Our lives are unsustainable. Like it or not, our death partners will call for us all one day. No-ones going to be left out of that particular public project. Our lives are the essence of unsustainability so why do we expect it of the artefacts we make, the dreams that we dream ?

Death and decay is much a part of creativity as its more user-friendly sister, birth and generation. Perhaps we should plan for project ending, closure and fading away in the public sector as much as we argue for sustainability, legacy and immortality.  It would at least make for much shorter funding applications and mean that the short time we have on this planet has one less burocratic task attached to it.

Eurovision Song Contests: hey, musicians, your EU needs You!

Controversy about Englebert Humperdinck representing the U’nul-point’K and a gang of Russian grandmothers representing Roman Abramovich at the 2012 Eurovision summit in Baku has led to the resurrection of a song which narrowly failed to qualify for selection as the EU official’s entry to the competition back in 1995 when the Euro was unleashed on the world of Irish farmers, British shop-keepers and Bulgarian flea market owners.

Instead of asking nation states to generate nation-state-of-the-art-pop songs, the EU has decided its about time it waved its own flag and get some one in who can do some aural flag waving on their behalves.

The song – Ich bin ein Berliner and du bist ein dummkopf – was written by Brussels burocrats on a night out in Sunderland, picked by Georgio Morodor, given an electronic make over and played to the turbo-folk hoardes across the Balkans through the late ’90s and early ’00s.

The concept that the EU itself should be represented at Eurovision is being hotly contested by the UK government and UKIP as it’s being seen as a surreptitious attempt to ingratiate the British public into the benefits of the Euro: and their resistence ensured that the song was never released on the Great European Public.

But nevertheless, you can’t keep a good man down (as Hotlegs once mumbled on the B side of Neanderthal Man) and the song is attracting a lot of interest on social media.

Well, the lyric maybe: the Brussels burocrats have been politely snubbed by Morodor and they are now looking for a suitable composer and musical arranger to bring their collective efforts to an eager, new young Eurovision audience.

For those aspiring composers and arrangers amongst you, keen to gather fame, fortune and eventual ignominy through the joy that is Eurovision, here are the lyrics in all their unedited glory:

In a restaurant, the elderly memories
one German, one Brit, one Rumanian, 
two Turks, two Hungarians and a Dutchman, 
swapped over cheese, wurst and red wine.
Our gestures give us away; 
the sweep of the hand from the plate to the waitress, 
the cough, the handshake, the awkwardness.
Signifying troubling difference.

but the younger ones laugh
as if nothing were amiss.
This is about them, here and now, 
putting our history behind them.
They ignore the coughs and embarrassments of their elders
adopting the easy going nature of a young Hungarian lad
laughing with a Romanian girl 
with no more to it than that.

And what binds us? The young to the old?
A spirit of peace, democracy and don’t forget the economy.
Its all about the economy, stupide.
You are the next generation of refuge workers
who will do shite jobs for the lousiest of pay
and then not unreasonably
apply for a national, legal identity.
Wir Sind  Berliner aber Sie Sind dummkoepfe.

Nudeln, rosti, pommels frites, pasta,
The European carbohydrates
Differ only in their shape and texture.
Deep down, the Bucharest lady
Secretly harbours the Irish waffle;
The ancient Bulgarian
Longs for tender mung beans,
Yet the Brits all gather around chicken tandoori.

Come in, Graham Norton: your time is up!

The TESCO model of cultural development: partnering up on an unlevel cultural playing fields

Many public sector organisations working in the cultural sector like to present themselves not only as funders but also as partners. The notion of quite what they mean by partnership varies wildly. Clearly, they have every right to be concerned and interested in how public funding is used – but this has always been the case with any public sector funder in the past. The difference with these funder-partners is not only that they are concerned that the funding is used appropriately, but they also see themselves as having a hand in the messy business of production and delivery.

Not content with planning regional strategy and building cultural infrastructure (whatever that is – no amount of centralised planning is going to make the cultural sector resemble the national highways or sewage system), they have been busy redesigning themselves as quasi-production companies; and given the resources they have access to, are quite capable of blowing any other production company out of the water at the mere nod of a local apparatchik.

Whether or not those funder-partners have any skill in production or delivery of those projects is not the point. Their muscling into the day to day activities of specialised organisations whose life blood depends on cultural production distorts the sector so much that any longer term sustainability of those organisations becomes even more of a guessing game than it usually is.

This would be less problematic if those quasi production companies managed to reinvest their skills and resources into the wider ecology and if their protestations of partnership were driven by the five principles of partnership working.

But the frequent fact is that they’re not: they’re driven by the energies of ego, personal glorification and political arrogance. All the qualities that made Tesco the force it has become; and as they say, Every Little Helps (their own bank balance, survivability and cultural domination).

The feeble child: why being feeble is a neat strategy to survive school.

Feeble children don’t fit and don’t come up to the mark of what is being demanded of them by their teachers or politicians. The feeble child isn’t – and doesn’t aspire to be – independent – or develop skills as an independent learner. They are highly dependent on others, whether consciously or not. The call to be prepared for an independent life fills them with horror.

The feeble child may not actually have many aspirations at all, is content to muddle through the day and has no view to the future. The feeble child is neither gifted nor talented – or is even in special measures and has no serious weaknesses. The feeble child is just that – feeble, weak, and dependent – and as such sits outside of the gaze which is directed at their peers who may variously be described as gifted and talented, ‘hard to reach’; dysfunctional or socially excluded.

The feeble child is not hard to reach at all, indeed their feebleness and utter dependency means that they are hard to shake off. We might harbour desires to exclude the feeble child as their dependency is so exhausting for us – but their strength (for they have many) is their instinct to be included, to include themselves in others co-dependent lives.