A Long Side
Moving image / HD Video / 2015–2016
20 minutes 5 seconds / Contact for full video
Collaboration with Emilyn Claid / Commissioned and funded by Bait.
Exhibited at Woodhorn Museum, Northumberland, UK.Download exhibition booklet >> for full credits.A year-long, socially engaged project with choreographer, Emilyn Claid and The Elderflowers - a small group of elders from ex-mining communities in Pegswood, UK.
Exploring intimate connections between memory, gesture and place, A Long Side explores friendship and community for a group of individuals who might otherwise experience increasing isolation. Associating simple choreographies for the body with observed movements in the local landscape the project is a gathering of shared histories.
In A Long Side bodies and landscapes are inextricably entwined and never still: Jean tells us that the shore at Newbiggin beach was eroded and re-built with sand from Norway; the ashes of Ella’s husband are scattered on a hill constructed over the top of the old pit’s slag heap. Fear of the fierce wind and memories of fishing boats that never return keep the women from walking the shoreline, but when they do they find unexpected connections. A Long Side explores these layers of thinking and process and celebrates the irrepressible sense of life shared by this group of elders.
A Long Side was exhibited between October 2016 and March 2017 at Woodhorn Museum, Northumberland and has continued to be screened at festivals and as part of a community film programme in Northumberland schools, GP surgeries and waiting rooms.
The chair, the sea, hands - Lucy Cash
“What is a likeness? When a person dies, they leave behind, for those who knew them, an emptiness, a space: the space has contours and is different for each person mourned. This space with its contours is the person’s likeness and is what the artist searches for when making a living portrait. A likeness is something left behind invisibly.”
John Berger, The Shape of a Pocket
A Long Side is a film portrait of a group of people (the Elderflowers), in a particular place, (South East Northumberland) over a few particular days in the beginning of March, 2016. It collages moments of dancing with movements of the wind and of crows, and fragments of thoughts and memories.
It observes the doing of things and listens to the talking about the doing. What was created and filmed during the space of a week in fact had its roots and beginnings in a process that was initiated during the previous summer and continued through Winter into Spring through meetings and conversations, and walks along the shore-line and visits to dance halls in the area. Encounters that I feel exquisitely privileged to have seen and heard and which have shaped me in ways that I can’t quite describe.
Each moment of experience as it happens and then disappears has a quality to it, which is felt by us all as it’s happening but which is only, but not always, later nameable. For instance, the release of effort after the long, group walk up Collier’s Hill in Pegswood, or the lively debate over a shared movement task gone awry.
The process of making a film, with its sudden shifts of rhythm, its need for repetition and its responsiveness to light and weather, provides a kind of net for what might often remain invisible or overlooked in these experiences and in the world around us. For capturing ‘likeness’.
If the net is well-made it can provide a democratic setting in which the gentle turning of hands can tell us about a whole life or the fluctuating shape of a beach can disclose the decades-long misfortune of a coastline.
This quality of feeling extends to objects as well as people and places. The red plastic chairs in Pegswood Miners’ Welfare are at the same time just a splash of vibrant colour in a particular shape and also an infinite array of past conversations, moments of rest, and bridges between performer and audience.
The more we spent time with the chairs in Pegswood, the more they quietly revealed about the friendships in the community they support. After a while, it began to feel like the chairs were equally getting to know us and to suggest how we might want to pile them up or position them at a certain angle in a passing moment of late-afternoon sun.
The process of things appearing and disappearing or revealing and concealing themselves carries on all the way through to the moment on a film when the picture is finally ‘locked’ and the sound, ‘mixed’.
There are always more than a few images, or pieces of dialogue that never find their place in the final edit but which somehow, mysteriously, lend something of their presence to the place they might have occupied. Or so we aim.
For instance a story that Doris recalled about anearly memory of dancing in the street at night - the street lamps newly lit for the first time after six years of blackouts during the Second World War, was one that we kept returning to in the edit of the film.
The stillness of the dark November night suddenly flickering into light and life again – movement and singing as celebration, as defiance, spontaneous and improvised. What we imagined this moment felt like – the giddy, exhausted exuberance – the powerful ritual of a group dancing, felt essential in what it reveals about a shared energy in space and time.
But every time we tried to include Doris’ narration of this moment, ironically, it made the energy of the film dip. It was almost as if the story were too complete, (from another time), too powerful by itself to lend itself to be part of something new. And this is just one example from a dozen more that you, dear viewer, won’t actually see in the film.
However, we hope, if we’ve looked and listened well enough, that something of their colour and defiance appears in A Long Side.
credits:TURNS Exhibition Film, A Long Side:
Performers
Tommy Appleby, Norma B Wooly Back, Norma Charlton, Pat Dixon, Jean Foster, Elsie Lewis, Walther Matthews, Linda McGeever, Kevan McGeever, Jill Merrick, Margaret Muckle, Lynn Munro, Lillian Read, Cynthia Richardon, Allan Robinson, Evelyn Scott, Doris White, Ella Wonders aka Ella of the Elderflowers, Claudine Zardi
Many thanks to: Grand Gestures Dance Collective for peer mentoring, friendship and support.
Filmmaker - Lucy Cash; Artistic director - Emilyn Claid; Choreographic development - Paula Turner; Assistant choreographer - Luke Pell; Composer - Fraya Thomsen; Sound designer - Chu-Li Shewring; Sound recordist - Duncan Whitley; Focus puller - Jason Walker; Musicians - ELB
With thanks to: Ashington Brass Band, Ellington Brass Band,Ole Birkeland, Rosie Morris, Café Bertorelli, Newbiggin, Metro Imaging
Related Material
Download: Turns brochure