Another Route
End of Year Update
‘We are all going on a journey together, one that has already taken us to the green fields of Gloucestershire and the dizzying bustle of Cairo, and will soon see us heading to Brussels, Ghent and beyond.’
This time last year Another Route was an idea. A speculative plan for a new kind of artistic fellowship dreamed up through phone calls and zoom meetings; a project whose only tangible existence was as a series of answers to questions on a funding application. Twelve months later and Another Route is alive – drawing together funders, international partners, a consortium of companies from the worlds of circus, dance, live art and theatre, and most importantly the 12 incredible artists and companies who make up our first fellows.
We are all going on a journey together, one that has already taken us to the green fields of Gloucestershire and the dizzying bustle of Cairo, and will soon see us heading to Brussels, Ghent and beyond.
We wanted to take this moment at the end of the year to tell you a little about the journey so far and what we will be happening in the new year.
Getting up and running
Another Route was conceived by a consortium of small-scale England-based performance companies led by Forest Fringe, Total Theatre Network and Artsadmin. Rather than rely on the kind of big institutional partners that are normally entrusted with such ambitious and complicated projects, we wanted Another Route to be guided by the knowledge and expertise of these companies. People who really know what is involved in touring work from country to country, building relationships with international partners, figuring out visas and exchange rates, sending and replying to a seemingly infinite stream of logistical emails and generally trying to make things work as best as you can.
But in order to make this consortium model work we needed someone who was going to hold this errant collective together. Someone who could harness the knowledge contained within the consortium and take on the burden of managing Another Route day-to-day. This was why we made finding this person our first priority.
After a thorough search we were thrilled to appoint Daniel Kok to this role. He was joined shortly after by a Nene Camara as project assistant and for the last twelve months they have guided Another Route on its journey, doing incredible work behind the scenes to build an infrastructure that could manage the project’s complex logistics.
With Dan and Nene on board we were able to begin the process of finding the twelve artists who would be form our first cohort of Another Route fellows. We’ve written about the process of finding those artists elsewhere on our website here, where you can find the names of everyone involved – including the 19 assessors who took part in the first round of assessments and the seven artists, producers and programmers who made up our final independent panel of judges. By the beginning of June we had confirmed the final 12 artists who would take part (you can read about them on over here) and we were ready to begin our journey together.
‘In order to make this consortium model work we needed someone who was going to hold this errant collective together. Someone who could harness the knowledge contained within the consortium and take on the burden of managing Another Route day-to-day.’
Lab 1 – Hawkwood
Our first in-person gathering was held at the Hawkwood Centre for Future Thinking – a residency space contained inside a labyrinthine Murder-She-Wrote country house lost in the gently rolling Cotswold hills.
By this point each of the artists had already been paired with a fellowship mentor and the aim of this first residency was to bring everyone together to begin to build a sense of community around the project and start the conversations that we hoped would fuel it over the next 12 months.
We opened the four-day lab with a session hosted by writer and artist Season Butler. We had asked Season to help us develop a Charter of Care for the project – a set of guidelines to help us navigate any challenges that might arise over the coming months. As with everything in Another Route, this document is a work-in-progress; something we are building from scratch with the input of everyone involved in the project.
After this first session the conversations continued, in a variety of forms, over the next several days. We broke into groups to listen to the artists talk about the aims and ideas behind their work. The mentors told us the stories of how their respective companies came to be in cold rehearsal rooms, dusty church halls and tiny Taiwanese apartments. We hosted a talk by Greenpeace’s Mel Evans, with whom we talked about the importance of solidarity and coalition-building in the climate crisis and the way governments and corporate interests steer us into the cul-de-sac of individualised responsibility. Each night we all ate together in the dining hall, breaking up into groups to enjoy the last of the late-afternoon sunshine. On the final night we said goodbye to Hawkwood with a round of late-night Karaoke – strangled renditions of popular Disney ballads drifting along sleepy hallways. In the morning we went our separate ways.
Much still felt uncertain about where we were all going and how we would get there, but the conversation had been started and a fragile sense of community was undoubtedly beginning to form.
‘We hosted a talk by Greenpeace’s Mel Evans, with whom we talked about the importance of solidarity and coalition-building in the climate crisis and the way governments and corporate interests steer us into the cul-de-sac of individualised responsibility.’
Lab 2 – Cairo
From the very beginning of Another Route we believed that part of the process of ‘internationalising’ artists’ practice needed to be actually encountering artistic cultures very different to ours in the UK. In doing so we hoped we might be able to offer artists an experience that could reshape the way they think about their own work and their place in the world.
From quite early on the Cairo-based festival DCAF (Downtown Contemporary Arts Festival) seemed like the perfect place for us to go. Several of the artists involved in the Another Route consortium had been a part of DCAF in the past and had been blown away by both the city and the festival. From the moment we approached festival director Ahmed El Attar about the idea of hosting our first international lab at DCAF he and his team did everything they could to make us feel welcome, as did Cathy Costain and her team at British Council Egypt. By the time we arrived we were as prepared as we could be for Cairo, and yet, that is still not really prepared enough.
On the ground, Downtown Cairo is a whirl of energy, a symphony of car horns and bright lights, tiny bars spilling out onto little side streets. An ancient city as big and noisy and complicated as the 21st century itself. At the festival we took part in a programme hosted by ISPA (the International Society for the Performing Arts) – a series of panel discussions that exploded into life each time the local artists present were given the opportunity to take the microphone. They told us about the challenges of being an artist in the Arab world – the lack of money, the lack of connections to your neighbours, the gravitational pull of wealthy Europe and the pseudo-Orientalist expectations European programmers had for art from the MENA region. In the evenings we saw work that did what it could to resist these expectations – a beautiful, dizzying rooftop exhibition of photographs credited to the artist’s pet dog, a shadow puppet show that shimmered with enchantment, a show on an immaculate white stage that took the form of meta-commentary on the relationship between Arab artists and European curators.
On the Saturday we took a trip out to the informal areas of the city, where we were hosted by the architectural collective Cluster who talked to us about the complex relationship between institutional authority and the ordinary people living at the city’s margins – a struggle for power played out in red-brick apartment blocks and DIY highway off-ramps. Behind us the noise of the street seeped into the building, a chorus of horns and drills and shouts that wrapped itself around the talk, eventually becoming an essential part of it.
We left Cairo, as we had left Hawkwood, with more questions than answers, but with a clearer sense nonetheless of how we might begin to use this process to find new routes out into the world.
‘On the ground, Downtown Cairo is a whirl of energy, a symphony of car horns and bright lights, tiny bars spilling out onto little side streets. An ancient city as big and noisy and complicated as the 21st century itself.’
Where Next?
We are now nearly half-way through the Another Route fellowship and there are two key parts of the project left.
In March we will be heading to Brussels and Ghent for the second of our international labs. This will be a very different experience to Cairo. Another kind of international context that comes with its own complicated politics of place and its own set of artistic forms and aesthetics very different to the kind of work you encounter in the UK.
Then the culmination of the project will see each of the twelve artists undertaking their own funded two-week international artistic residency, with each residency to be co-hosted by a UK and an international partner and supported by seed-commissioning from the Jerwood Developing Artists Fund. What the artists choose to do on this residency is up to them, but we hope that each residency will be informed by the remarkable experiences we’ve already had as part of the project in Cairo and Hawkwood, as well as those we hope to have in the Spring in Belgium.
We have structured Another Route as a journey because in our experience the path to working internationally is always long and winding, with diversions and dead-ends and highways you never intended to end up on. It takes time, and lots of conversations, lots of listening, a slow opening up of the world in unexpected ways. Only after all of this is the work itself made.
Our hope is that Another Route is itself a kind of opening up of the world – for the artists, for us as the conceivers of the project and for the partners who are helping us to realise it – Arts Council England, British Council and Jerwood Arts. Undoubtedly, our understanding of the world is already being transformed by this project. We cannot wait to see where it takes us next.
- The Another Route Team
(images by AR’s Creative Documentarian Jemima Yong)
