There is something about honouring the unconscious processes of the psyche that can be challenging. For example, here we are – or here I am – wanting to share this piece of work with you, and more to the point the story behind it, rather than be filming the next lesson in the Creative Instinct Course and publishing and promoting a set of articles on managing stress.
Maybe there is reason for it that I have yet to realise. Perhaps I am just distracting myself?
In such moments, unless I feel really clear, I tend to go with what feels right.
Maybe there is something here of deeper significance in this tale that my psyche wants me to become conscious of – or just more conscious of.
Maybe it is broader than that. Maybe, as a part of the universe there is a drive from the collective psyche to express this example of synchronicity so that you as the reader might be able to add it to your own cannon and in doing so realise a deeper knowledge of the unfolding fabric of the universe.
I don’t know, and I don’t need to know. I’m just acting until the next thing shows up that feels like the right thing to be doing and trusting that life will reveal itself just as it needs to.
And so, on with the story…
In 2005 I was working as an artist and was being drawn more and more to work with moving image. I didn’t know why, and I had no real sense of what stories I wanted to tell, if any, I just loved the medium.
I had documented a couple of arts projects for friends and had made a short out of some random footage, but other than that was new to the medium.
Even so, I managed to get invited onto a collaborative arts project as a filmmaker and ended up working with local artists, one of whom, Phil Smith, I went on to collaborate with in future projects – Drift, The Gaps Between, and The Great Walk.
The project in question was centred on a Local Primary School which sits at the mouth of the river Teign in South Devon.
We worked with the children there for a week running a series of workshops that included a mythogeographic survey of the village, the creation of a puppets from gathered materials, poetry and music making, all of which would end up documented as some sort of film.
The climax of the week of workshops culminated in a sort of performance, which involved 130 children in procession through the streets of their small town, carrying their puppet avatars to the shore of the sea, and sending their messages, wishes and dreams, folded into paper boats, onto the surface of the water to be carried off by the tide to the many corners of the earth.
Despite our somewhat magical intentions our ritual didn’t quite go according to plan. The precession itself was a relative success. By ‘relative success’ I mean that all of the children managed to get from the school to the beach without any getting maimed or someone getting vomited on.
Once at the beach though, the romantic image of a watching a flotilla of paper boats leaving the harbour and heading off to sea, following a shimmering path of light cast upon the surface of the water by a low lingering evening sun turned into something less dreamlike.
Due to an error in planing on our part, the tide, which was coming in, washed all of the messages, all of the dreams, and all of the wishes, of all of the children straight back onto the shore in waterlogged clumps of paper, despite their best efforts to shoo them off with sticks.
Perhaps, symbolically, the way I like to think of it, was that the sea had taken the messages, the wishes, and the dreams of the children, absorbed them through the written words and intentions set within the boats, and the returned the vacant husks back to be recycled in the appropriate way. At least that is how i justified it to myself and any of the children who asked.
And then every one when home.
My role, in part, was to provide a document of the performance in the shape of a film.
Documentation of arts projects is generally a mediocre type of work at best. In these sort of educational settings, there is generally some end event that workshops are building to and some sort of theme that the institution is either attempting to (or pretending to) adhere to. This is to justify funding such engagements, because even if individual teachers know the value of creative practice for the sake of just being creative, it is rare that the bodies who fund them do. So there are hoops to jump through. Metrics to be accounted for. Educational goals to be met, and so on.
The thing about being an artist though – at least for me – is to follow ones own creative process, to express one’s own creative light, and showing up to that can – and often is – challenging. As soon as you start making work to fit an agenda imposed upon you from outside, you are no longer making art, you are creating propaganda.
There are of course many subtle caveats to this. I still have an audience in mind when making anything. I am not so devoid of compassion that I want to make something purely for myself. Sure, sometimes I will, but much depends upon the moment of inspiration. If there is a baseline interpretation of art for me it is that it needs to be expressing a truth – either of a soul and/or to a soul. Different work will do this by different degrees.
To be a successful artist in these regards one must live true to oneself.
Sadly, perhaps the most prevalent interpretation of being a successful artist is that of commercial success.
I cannot count the number of people I have watched sacrifice their creativity and talents to the agendas of institutions and organisations over the years in order to make a living from their creativity. The moment they compromise the truth of themselves in that expression is the moment in which they are selling their souls.
Of course, there are some who manage to do both. This however requires a certain amount of cunning.
For those who don’t I see talents exploited to fit the agendas of institutions and organisations, many of whom have had their own soul, their own original natures directed by larger bodies who dictate the flow of resources to them.
Yes. It all gets quite political, because creativity is a real power. How we exercise it in our lives, to what principles, determines the sort of world in which we end up living, because what we create is what we create.
The school in question needed to meet its goals and justify funding us to come in and engage with the children. That’s fair enough. Yet, at the same time, I needed to show up to the truth of what the creative process in me. If I sacrifice the truth of that process to an external institution; to its agendas and its ideologies, then I am giving away my creative instinct in the service of that. I become a subject of its will. When I do that then I merely become an extension of an ideology. Maybe the same is true for you, I don’t know, but this doesn’t seem right to me.
The final film then was an experiment of sorts – and, I have to add, it was a creative collaboration with the children – I used their words, their voices, there creations, I just processed it through my own filter.
All that said, there is a point to this story. The title mentions synchronicity and magic, and I am still not entirely convinced that I know where one principle ends and the other begins in the case of the example of the children of the tide because I can’t help wondering if the film was an encapsulation of a spell that we all wove together – or was some sort of prophetic creation that anticipate the event that was to follow when one month later we returned to show the finished film at the school.
The morning of the premier of the film coincided with a storm. I was already drenched by the time I met one of the other artists with whom I was to share the journey to the school.
We drove at a snails pace through torrential rain most of the way. The world beyond veiled in an ever flowing film of water that the wipers struggled to clear even on full power.
Everywhere was storm.
The force of it was showing us the limits of who we were and where we could go.
Roads had begun to close. The force of the world was showing us who was really in control.
We reached the bridge that led to the small town where the school was situated only to find that there was no way to go on.
A man, in full waterproofs, signalled us to turn back. His words struggled to find their way in through the gap in the wound down window. The storm trying to steal them from our ears.
Evacuated … freak waves … high tide and storm combined … the school? … flooded … flooded and abandoned, along with the lower parts of town!
We turned back and drove home.
It was only when we finally got to premier the film a couple of weeks later that i wondered if the film had been an invitation. That the sea itself was just responding to the invitation the children had made to it.
Of course the whole thing may just have been a coincidence.
Yes, of course it was. Not all cinema is not a magic act – unless of course all cinema is a magical act? There just happened to be a high tide combined with a flash flood on the day we planned to show the film. Nothing strange there really.
Nature can be a bit of a freak sometimes.
As for the films reception, I do remember that a couple of the children stayed for both showings maybe because they wanted to try and spot their creations of their contributions. Mostly I seem to remember a lot of fairly blank looks though, but maybe something moved somewhere. Who knows. Maybe they pulled out a copy of the DVD some years later. Maybe they yet will.
Maybe they will think, ‘What the f*&k was that about?’
Maybe it will end up in landfill, or as a bird scarer, or a clock.
Maybe they will remember that it happened around the time that the school flooded and wonder if there was a connection. Unlikely I suspect, but fun to consider all the same.
I do remember one of the parents telling me that they felt like it was a cross between a David Lynch movie and the Blair Witch Project but I can’t recall whether is was supposed to be a critique or a threat.
I welcomed the uncertainty of it and accepted it all the same.
In honour of them I stopped the colour our of the original edit and present it here for you as evidence of the potential spell or prophetic anticipation.
Good luck!