Challenging Traditional Journeys The view from Townhill Campus is unmatched. The iconic seascape of the bay sweeps below Swansea’s highest Metropolitan campus above sea level. The city sprawls beneath; your eye is drawn to the Mumbles pier and the lighthouse. From here you can gauge the life of the distant blue as it daubs a white collar around the base of the island. As I take in this panorama my imagination is drawn to the bays beyond, golden swathes stroked, at rocky intervals, around the shores of the Gower peninsula … Oxwich, Port Eynon, Rhossili. My thoughts lead me into the building in front of me. I climb a few steel steps and those names are repeated on the doors of rooms I pass. Entering the Port Eynon Board Room, I’m acknowledged by the team from the Centre for Contemporary Performance Practices who are in busy conversation. There’s a sense of a flow of excitement, of one meeting following into another and it feels as if that might have been happening all day, everything inextricably linked, staff joining for one meeting and staying for the next: year-end assessment, community, programme validation, branding, marketing, course development. Lucy Beddall, Community Engagement Coordinator, is at the centre of the discussion. Lucy seems to be trying to leave, realising it’s getting late, but every comment she leaves behind is loaded with achievements and also tinged with greater future potential and she’s raising everyone’s energy levels again. She brushes past me with a smile and in her wake is Jason Benson, slim, neat and in charge. He encourages me to join the group and introduces Martin, Jon and Sarah. Jason seems to absorb the obvious creative energy in the room around him and instil it in himself with a quiet intensity. The assembled staff greet me chattily and immediately relax me, making me a part of the thread that connects the activity that has gone before during this day and that will continue after I leave. Jason has a mantra, one with which he attracts students, welcomes them and guides them: Challenge, Explore, Create. I think this is the thread I’ve identified - it’s a philosophy that underpins the Centre; it’s the driver for staff, it’s an ideology for students, it’s a logo, a brand and it defines the department’s community engagement too. It is also the perfect tool for Jason to break down for me his interpretation of performance. Contemporary practice, undeniably, has to place performance in a 21st century context. Swansea has very recently been shortlisted for the 2017 UK City of Culture and forms the perfect metropolitan setting for a programme that draws on a diverse range of cultural interests. The city itself acts as an alternative space to the studio, allowing the process of creative enquiry to shift sinuously between spaces. The first act within that process of enquiry is to challenge. Students are meant to challenge their own preconceptions, encouraged to challenge conventions and their own interpretation of what is performance. How can they apply that understanding to different aspects of their lives? When watching football or rugby matches, for example, students may be asked to consider where the performance is and how it can be analysed in terms of tribalism or feminism. Exploration is particularly exploration of unknown territory. That which is unknown by the students about themselves is something that is integral to the exploration, at the same time as considering what is unknown about the subject matter they are processing. Collaboration with other practitioners from other schools of artistic disciplines has always been encouraged. Now, more than ever, Jason can see potential for hybrid work and further dynamic departures within the context of considering education outdoors.
Working alongside professional performers and practitioners and gaining industry experience are both key to maintaining relevance in the evolution of creative process to creative product. Jay Shewry, a second year student, last year toured with No Fit State Circus’ production of Barricade and the ongoing Unknown Pleasures is a recurring project, Jason explains, that was initiated by Volcano Theatre when they were artists-in-residence at the University. The creation of an artistic output may be as a result of solo practice or working in small research groups. The process is made distinctive by a very particular balance between an inherently collaborative approach and emphasis on the creative integrity of the individual. The consequences are live art performances that unsettle perception in a manner that echoes the beginning of the journey. There is a continuity of which I am becoming very aware. The three words challenge, explore and create combine to form a very strong identity for the centre but each can also be a link to other aspects of the University’s portfolio. It’s clear that the ambition for graduates from the centre is, in part, to produce multiple-skilled arts creators, but also to develop articulate multidisciplinary individuals with a greater knowledge and understanding of themselves and their relationships with others, forged within the fire of contemporary performance.