B-SIDE (the seaside) Opportunites
B-SIDE (the seaside)
Weymouth and Portland 19th – 28th September 2008.
INFORMATION FOR ARTISTS
"B-Side" (the seaside) is a multi-media arts festival, animating public spaces in Weymouth and Portland during September. It will prioritize younger artists (including students) in Dorset and recent arts graduates/emerging artists from across the South West region. Eight venues and two local routes have been chosen for this year’s event. These include a nuclear bunker, a cafe', a deconsecrated church, a prison sports field, a dance hall and a museum. These venues will host installations, dance, theatre pieces, text-based work, music, projections, computer animations, film and video, light, sound, community radio and social/participatory works.
"B-Side" will open the Cultural Olympiad in Weymouth and Portland alongside other theatre, dance and live music productions. We envisage that participating artists will spend the first few days of the festival on site installing and creating, working towards the festival being fully open between 25 – 28 September.
Information about the sites will be on-line shortly at: www.b-side.org.uk
“B-Side” is inspired by the b-side of vinyl recordings, which often represented the less commercial but more revealing side of a band’s repertoire. “B-Side” (the seaside) offers the opportunity to reappraise and represent some of the issues, which affect traditional South West seaside towns, of which Weymouth is a classic example.
Organising partners have identified a number of areas of interest, or themes, for B-Side including:
• Animating and humanizing public spaces
• Migration / Journey
• Sense of Place
• Coastal Voices
• Turning out your pockets / discovering the hidden
• Feeling the pinch
• Release, re-organize, re-new
• Lucky Dip.
Artists from all disciplines are invited to engage as follows:
1. Submission of material for showcase
Open to artists born or living in the South West region, including students of FE / HE and recent graduates. If you have work which addresses any of the general themes and is already recorded in audio / mac or pc cd / dvd (must be self-launching), or flash / animation formats, these can be submitted to be shown in number of prepared beach huts/changing rooms which will mark the route. Submissions invited for material up to 3 minutes / 3 -10 minutes / over 10 minutes. Please make sure the length of all material and the theme is marked clearly on the outside of the package and include a brief curriculum vitae or details about yourself. All material is non-retunable. Post to B-Side c/o Norman Lomax, Head of Creative Arts, Weymouth College, Cranford Avenue, Weymouth, Dorset DT4 7LQ
Deadline 30th August
2. Site-specific / Artist-in-Residence
We are offering 8 opportunities for South West artists to make installations within the identified places and spaces, particularly the Nothe Fort nuclear bunker, St Peter’s deconsecrated church, The “Bowl” and inside the beach huts, which mark the Weymouth route. Details of these spaces can be found on www.B-Side.org.uk shortly. We are offering £500 to the artists selected for each of these short residencies. This bursary is to cover fees, materials and accommodation. The B-Side team will help to minimise all expenses and maximise fees wherever possible. If you work in installation, (with multiples, text, projections, sensors or audio) or your practise is in site-specific work please send images, video clips, descriptions of the work and information about yourself electronically to alan_rogers@weymouth.ac.uk.
Deadline: 15th August
Notification of selection 25th August
3. South West Screen “Moving Image” commissions
We have secured funding for four new “moving image” commissions from South West Screen. This is a professional development scheme for practitioners in all disciplines wishing to work with the moving image format.
PVA Media Lab in Bridport will facilitate the production of small-scale (1-3 minutes) moving image works exploring the following themes:
• Public places, hidden spaces – an examination of ownership, freedom of action, rules, rights of way and what is permissible within the space that the work takes place in.
• Welcoming the world – how the South West engages with non – nationals and tourists and how this could change for 2012.
• Open up / Turning Out Your Pockets – revealing and exposing what we have in terms of private obsessions, both personally and as a borough.
• Migration / Coastal Voices / Sense of Place.
We are looking for exciting narratives, visual flare, new voices and extraordinary characters, which utilize mobile phone, HDV, animation or 8/16mm to tell a story effectively. The chosen artists will work together in residence at PVA Media Lab for approx 5/7 days: 7th – 14th September.
Workshops, studio space, technical help, camera, sound, script and editing etc, together with self-catering accommodation will all be provided free of charge. We will also pay an artist’s fee of £500.
The scheme is open to practitioners in Dorset and the South West and two bursaries will be prioritized for the age bracket 18-30. The works will be profiled in September at the B-side festival to coincide with the launch of the Cultural Olympiad in Weymouth and Portland.
To apply send a synopsis/storyboard, CV/statement and supporting materials electronically or by post to Mandy Rathbone:
mandy@pva.org.uk
PVA MediaLab
1 King Square Bridport Dorset DT6 3QE
Deadline 10th August 2008, 6pm
Notification 15th August 2008
Residency 7-14 September 2008
4. Weymouth College Short Film Weekends
Subject to to an Awards for All funding application. An opportunity for young film-makers of all ages to work on intensive film making weekend and produce a short film which will be shown at the festival. The workshops will be on either the 13/14 or the 20/21 September, facilitated by professionals and B.A. students at Weymouth College.
Contact alan_rogers@weymouth.ac.uk for further details, how to apply, deadline and funding update.
5. Dance, performance and theatre.
In 2008, working with partners Activate and Weymouth College, we have identified Dorset-based performance and dance groups to work with. However if you are a performance artist or a performer who responds to site or this year’s themes, we would like to hear from you now for inclusion in future programmes. Please send information and images about yourself and your work, marked “B-Side” to:
beccagill@activateperformingarts.org.uk
6. Building business relationships
There is an opportunity to build relationships with particular businesses and industries, which are relevant to your practise as an artist and show the results at the B-Side festival. If you have a proposal, which could be mutually beneficial both parties, we would like to hear from you. It may be that you would like to use either the products or processes to further your own research or show your work in the best possible circumstances, but you must consider your ideas from the businesses point of view – does it help them with their research, give them a new advertising angle, meet their community obligations, furnish their offices, light their building etc.
In our working partnership with Arts and Business, we can try and broker the deal and offer a conference platform to show the results. This is a longer process and it may not be possible to show in this year’s event, but we would like to hear from you straight away. Businesses showing interest at this moment are an IT solutions company, a mobile phone company, a property tax consultancy and a mobile advertisement company. However the onus is on you to propose others.
Mark “B-Side Arts and Business” and send ideas to: alan_rogers@weymouth.ac.uk and elaine.arnold@AandB.org.uk
Deadline 30 August.
7. W.A.N.
Members of Weymouth Arts Network have a dedicated venue at Brewers Quay, funds from the Weymouth and Portland Partnership and will be working together to make a group installation/exhibition.
B-Side are:
Weymouth and Portland Partnership, Weymouth College, PVA Media Lab, Activate (The Theatre and Dance Development Agency for Dorset, Bournemouth and Poole), Departure (Dorset's Arts Education Agency), Weymouth Arts Network, The Engine (Young Writers Group, Poole) and Dorset Community Music.