We have been working with Subathra Subramaniam, a choreographer, dancer and educator who is also the artistic director of Sadhana Dance to begin our programme of involving young people with poor mental health in our cultural programme. This will be a fantastic 3 year programme and Suba is involved in our first year.
This first collaboration – bringing her dance piece Unkindest Cut to Liverpool as part of the Liverpool Mental Health Festival was to culminate in a number of performances this weekend. Unfortunately due to things outside of our control we have had to cancel the performances this week. All the partners are working to reschedule the workshop and performances for Spring/Summer of 2018 and we are really excited about the opportunity for young people to be involved in co-creating and for audiences to see the work.
We are really sad that this happened – it is a blow to us all, but we recognise that working in cities doesn’t always go as planned……there’s a myriad of permissions and paperwork and conflicting needs from different parties who have various controls over spaces that we, the public, feel are ours.
It’s an ongoing balancing act that We Make Places and our peers and friends in the world of culture, city change, development and urban activism are constantly exploring and sometimes you just have to concede that pushing a department or a person too far is not beneficial to the big picture. So sometimes we have to change our plans.
It is frustrating for us that despite having planning consent to build beneath The Flyover using containers and the WikiHouse, we keep ebbing and flowing towards and away from the reality of this build because of the conflicting needs of varying departments in the council and others. It is all solvable and is important for all parties to hold onto the bigger picture.
Our work on this site will bring benefit through the Urban Workbench programme, creating an occupied space that feels safer for others to walk through, developing a solar power & battery infrastructure that will support our programme, reduce the energy costs of our neighbours, provide electric vehicle charging and position the city at the forefront of renewable use in a very public space. Our current sadnes thought is that we cannot at this moment present the important and thought provoking cultural work we had planned for this weekend. We are committed to making this happen in the future for all concerned.
Unkindest Cut by Sadhana Dance – extracts from Kathy Hinde on Vimeo.
