On Residencies

And immersion...

Dear Dancers,

I’m a little late for rehearsals today. It’s been an extremely busy couple of weeks, and finding headspace to write has been hard. My daughter had her last week of the school year, and there has been no routine whatsoever.

Anyway.

This post was, in part, an attempt to reply to

Ruth Allen

’s post How to do your own creative residency. Once I sorted writing it, I think it took off in another direction, but I wanted to explore the topic. Ruth, if you’re reading this, let me know what you make of it.

Sending love,
I hope you’re not being incinerated in the heat.

xx
Sebastian

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A scenography-at-home project I did last year.

What is a residency, and who cares?

A residency is an interesting thing. For me, it’s connected to what Dorothy Elmhirst called “Progressive Retreat” — going somewhere partially, but not entirely, isolated from the big wide world, to be alone, partially but not entirely with your artistic process and work.

Back in ye old’n days, posh people had big houses and lots of resources. Some of said posh people liked art and music and could be very patronising. Sometimes, artists would be offered residence somewhere in the west wing, the summer lodge, or a cottage on their patron’s estate. They would have space and time, away from their usual troubles and struggles of existence, to paint or write or compose and, in exchange, would be expected to leave something of what they created in the care of their patron.

At some point, modernity emerged, and the dominant organs of society became various public and private institutions rather than the monarchy and the aristocracy. Instead of patronage coming from the tastes and whims of aristocrats and their families, similar patronage began to come from the tastes and whims of the various institutions of society.

In some ways, things have changed, but in many ways, they haven't. Artists remain, as before, economically vulnerable to whoever decides on behalf of society —however those people come to be in the position and whatever their decision-making process looks like - what counts as worthwhile of being supported or not. Of course, many artists, including many well-regarded and successful ones, choose to be independent of these funding systems (see my artists & day jobs posts), which loops us back to the residency.

There is a myth doing the perpetual rounds that artists spend their days lazily yet semi-productively cocooned in their studios, making work. This is not the case for most artists I know, although most would also give their dominant arm for it. Those are the good moments—the cherished times. Most of us have our own version of the daily grind: our day jobs, funding applications, or for some of our recent artistic ancestors, and schmoozing with current and/or potential aristocrat-patrons. And the grind demands our mental and emotional resources and for us to be in a different domain than where we produce our best work.

Yet many artistic processes require depth work. There is something which happens when you immerse — to live and breathe the material you grapple with and encounter it in a fairly undistracted way for extended amounts of time. As movers, it takes a substantial portion of rehearsal time to “arrive” into a feeling of bodily presence, let alone the artistic material itself. And that’s to say nothing of working with multiple collaborators in the flesh in a physical space.

We go into the cognitive psychology of this, but there is a simple phenomenal reality, too. We’ve all experienced, in one domain or another, something like the adult version of child’s play, which Lynda Barry calls “creative concentration.”

I am a real believer in the art that can emerge from a "little and often" approach, but for most people, at some point, this isn't enough. There comes a time when you need to sink your teeth in and suck the marrow from the bone.

So, the residency is a context for this.

But there is another aspect less often mentioned:

Dialogue

The difficulty with disappearing from the world too much is that you are very, very alone. There is a fine line between being alone with your thoughts and being lost in them. So, a residency usually offers some of this—a respite from the hustle and bustle and the isolation that comes from following this extremely strange and precarious calling.

This conversation occurs on at least one of two levels: where in ye olden days you left a painting behind, in modern terms, this often has a more socially engaged flavour. A nice example is the various poets-in-schools programmes, where a poet gets a residency in a school with space to think and write. In exchange, they engage the students in an encounter with beautiful language as a facilitator or co-creator.

Another kind of dialogue is that many residencies are conceived around a former of a few artists working in parallel in a shared period. There is the formal and informal exchange that happens when you shove a bunch of people with similar interests in a room together to work, eat, and, in some cases, bunk together.

A taxonomy

I’ll tell you a small story before I leave you to write your applications.

When I was in my early twenties, I stayed overnight with a performance artist friend. He was applying for residencies, and he said this:

"You have three kinds of residencies:
Bad ones, who charge you the privilege;
Good ones, where you neither pay you nor charge you; and REALLY GOOD ONES, who actually pay you."

Of course, as artists, we should get paid for what we do, but I'm also a pragmatist. If there's work you need to make and you are prepared to accept a good residency rather than a really good one, you're onto something.