Thoughts a year on

As we prepare for the 2010 delegation to SXSW, those of us who took part in the first one reflect back on what the trip delivered.  As we met in a wet and wintery January with the new group of delegates who will head off to Texas for the 2010 trip, thoughts turned to experiences last year, and the collaborations that came about as a result.

Sarah Ellis from Apples and Snakes has been going great guns - her interest in digital, stimulated at SXSW, has meant an exploration for her, and projects that have involved the poets she works with in a range of digital experiments.

First is "London Poems", in partnership with Andrew Wilson from Blink Media who was also on the trip, a three-year poetry text project working with audiences from all the London boroughs by 2012. The project invites the public through various forms of advertising (e.g. posters at bus stops, beer mats) to text poems about their city to a number.  This poem is then shared on a website and builds a body of work which is shared in a digital space.  Each poem will then be able to be shared with any member of the public who wishes to see what poems have been created in these spaces.  A map of London Poems will be built and extend the collaboration further by inviting performance poets to create work inspired by this poetry map, eventually creating an artist/audience collaboration.  It will be a large-scale event connected to the Olympics and also feed into a national performance poetry Olympics project for young people.

Second up, with Nina Steiger, Director of the Writer's Center at Soho Theatre, is "Who Is Writer X".  The project commissions a series of artists to take on the persona of Writer X and create a narrative through digital networks to see how audiences engage with interactive storytelling.

Thirdly, "My Place Or Yours".  Sarah secured £5000 funding to research and develop a creative collaboration with the British Council, also in collaboration with Nina Steiger and the Soho Theatre.  An international project in creative labs in Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia that ask artists to build ideas based on personalised maps and place.  A creative lab will then be run in the UK with artists to exchange ideas between these countries and share the work in a digital space.

Not only projects, but on the back of what she picked up at SXSWi, Sarah created a digital training programme for performance poets and invited practitioners such as Chris Unitt from Meshed Media to lead innovative masterclasses that built artist skills in working with technology and creating work.  So what was learnt trickles down.
Added to that, Soho Theatre commissioned Simon Games to develop a 3 week game to co-incide with it's run of Sharadda - a love story between a gypsy girl and a council-estate boy, set against the displacement of the Hackney Romany settlement in East London as their camping grounds are redeveloped for the London Olympics.  The game, called "Drom", explored the precarious life of the Romani, also known as Gypsies - the generations-old nomadic people which once moved through England and other parts of Europe but now find their way of life increasingly threatened by urban expansion and changing council laws.

The game's two travellers caravaned through London's streets, searching nightly for a safe place to park guided only by recommendations from the games' online players, who made suggestions via email, Twitter or SMS. Players provided a location and a justification for their submission, but otherwise the travellers were utterly at the whim of the players.  Closest they got to the Theatre itself was Algate East.  Not bad.

A meeting of the group at the new Freeword Centre was in itself an example of the cross-fertilisation between artists and producers the SXSWi delegation produced - digital artists, gamers, theatre practitioners and musicians all meeting at the new home of literature and spoken word.  With all the members of the original delegation agreeing again the best part of the trip was getting to know and spending time with their counterparts from the UK.