Transition Network Liverpool Conference 8th - 11th of July 2011

Hey Avaloneans, for those of you in the UK, there's an opportunity nearby, to participate in conference on sustainable living and community support.
The Transition Network is all over the world now, in Holland too, go look here, at the introduction movie, with an explanation about the vision of this network: http://www.transitionnetwork.org/support/publications/transition-movie

It's an amazing insightful and lovely movie, be in grace, Victoria Tintagel



We'll be in Liverpool in the North of England at Hope University for the two and a half days of the 8th - 11th July. The conference is a perfect opportunity to meet with other Transitioners taking this challenging journey, to delve deeper into the areas that interest you most, and to gain new skills that will serve you and your initiative well over the coming years.

This year's conference aims to provide knowledge, tools and understanding to help us live well in uncertain times. We'll all share our successes and challenges, hopes and fears, our questions and answers. We're planning an innovative structure and processes that enable each of us to get better at operating in group environments - a crucial skill as our transition journeys move into an increasingly uncertain future. When you leave the conference, you'll have new connections, insights and skills that will make both you and your transition initiative stronger for the times ahead.

You can expect innovative workshops; plenty of open space sessions; skill sharing; in-depth project discussions; process work; entertainment (bring instruments!); creative outlets galore (particularly for kids); revitalising activities (bring loose clothing); and lots of meaningful fun and frivolity. All you need to bring is yourself, your energy, your experience and your thirst for learning more!

And just to make sure you didn't miss that - we're welcoming kids too this year. We finally got our act together and are welcoming children and young people with an exciting programme and plenty to do.

Read further here....
http://www.transitionnetwork.org/conference-2011-uk?utm_source=Transition+Network&utm_campaign=a681ae035e-Conference_2011_mailout_14_21_2011&utm_medium=email

 Part of an interview withLucy Neal, artist at Transition Town Tooting UK:

"The more involved I got with Transition,  the more obsessed I became with trying to weave together what a Transitional arts practice would look like. What would a practice look like that was daily and carried with it an intention to bring about change in the world? That allowed the stories and the narratives we bring from our lives and the way we see the world together with others, that affected change, and that was ultimately a creative practice? That was where the book started for me, thinking about that practice and how we would define it.

I could see it happening in communities everywhere and amongst participatory and collaborative arts practices. One of the exciting things was to be able to see it, but realise it needed better definition; it needed to be made more visible for everyone to see. I describe it a bit as if it were an animal, a chameleon that’s there but you have to get your eye in to see it.

It might be a growing project in an allotment with a school, an arts project in a hospital, on the street, on the coast or in a bandstand: not everyday places people expect to see art making, but where art becomes part and parcel of people and place and a powerful transformative process is taking place.

The book has gathered up those stories with over 60 people giving voice to that narrative of change through the artwork they’re making.
That realigning of an arts practice as being in service to a community, in service to a wider process, somehow it runs counter to what one often imagines an artist’s practice to being, which is quite solitary, inward, quite self-indulgent some might say. Do you think that that kind of artist that you’re talking about with that Transition focus, that Transition motivation, that anybody can become that? Are they born or are they nurtured?

It is in us all, absolutely. The book is trying to make that abundantly clear by offering that redefinition. Sarah Woods, a playwright and activist, uses the phrase “live story making”.  When we gather people, for example, to show a film like ‘Chasing Ice’ or ‘Gaslands’, drawing out people’s responses and shared hopes for the future -  that’s a new situation.

The idea of dramaturgy - the shaping of a story into a form that can be acted - leads to the question about how we can act in the narrative of our own lives. In a film evening, for example, we’re making small choices in the moment about listening, interacting and acting. This is ‘live story-making’ and theatre in its broadest sense.

Other work might be around the creative potential of water, or leading a land journey as Fern Smith does, where the journeying introduces a dialogue with the land, meeting artists and others who emerge from the landscape.

‘Being an artist’ you become a circuit breaker, interrupting the familiar to create a different way of looking at things. The arts and being an artist create emergent space for us to do that. That’s precisely what Transition’s doing - presenting us with a new context to live our lives and a coherent narrative.
That’s what interests me about the arts - how they tap into that emergent space,  opening out possibilities for people, changing the way they see things.

One of the projects we did in Tooting with Ruth Ben-Tovim, was a shop where ‘nothing was on sale but lots was on offer’. People came off the High Street and in quite a gentle way connected with the spirit of Tooting in terms of what their memories were, what their hopes and fears for the future were.

An imaginative, celebratory space was created which was utterly different to anything ordinarily on the High Street. The possibility allowed people to express deeply and personally what it was they yearned for. That depth of connection changes a place. It changes our behaviour and how we engage with each other.

Here's a link to Lucy Neal's book Playing for Time:
http://oberonbooks.com/featured/playing-for-time


Here's a link to an audio interview with Lucy Neal by Rob Hopkins, spokesman of Transition Network UK, the text in this post is part of it:

https://soundcloud.com/transition-culture/lucy-neal-on-playing-for-time (hope the link works alright)