Unusual changes

Never had a come-down like it. Exhaustion and then illness. Normally a huge show has the recompense of singing and performing for the next 20 days which re-fills my pot, but here the safety net was different and I blindly fell into an abyss of gloom. Luckily my attention span is short, so my abyss moment lasted about 8 hours before emerging just a bit ill. An unusual upshot of all this work, is extra listening...or maybe I was just too tired to jump in like I normally do....but back in the bar, folks would reel out a long sentence, pile through a long drinks list, but rather than me interrupt, I just waited and then asked questions.... to my surprise, people responded with warmth, I was tipped, thanked, smiled at.... how extraordinary... my previous thought was being efficient....jumping in quick to ask details....but no, people want to be listened to, not 'corrected'. Listen, wow... life changes in unusual ways.

What The Guardian said....

Concrete Dreams: new show celebrates Southbank's history of performance Exclusive: exhibition looks back on London cultural centre’s legacy through 50 years of archive material Chris Wiegand @ChrisWiegand Mon 9 Apr 2018 16.33 BST Last modified on Mon 9 Apr 2018 23.55 BST An innovative new exhibition at London’s Southbank Centre gives visitors a performer’s perspective of its newly renovated brutalist venues, the Queen Elizabeth Hall and the Purcell Room. Concrete Dreams, which opens on Tuesday, is a tour through 50 years of archive material, imaginatively presented in dressing rooms, bathrooms and other backstage areas. It is a tribute to the eclectic talents who have played there over the years. Rifle through a box of index cards and find handwritten notes recording performance dates for Stan Getz, Roaring Jelly and André Previn. In one room, you can watch a Deep Purple gig, scan one of David Bowie’s set lists, see Cleo Laine’s dressing room sign and programmes for poetry festivals featuring Wole Soyinka. Meticulously kept attendance books list artists who played there and how many tickets they sold. Pick up the receiver of a dial telephone and hear oral histories from those who worked at the venues. Concrete Dreams is heaven for architecture nerds too. Original hand-drawn plans for the building line the corridor walls and are used in animations projected on to office windows, accompanied by Steve Reich’s music. The exhibition features original plans of the building. You can watch TV documentaries about London’s 60s building boom and listen to Harold Wilson’s 1963 speech about the “white heat” of technology. In wood-panelled dressing rooms, concrete cores removed from the QEH during rewiring are displayed alongside scale models. The tour ends with an arresting live performance in the Purcell Room that captures the venues’ incredibly eclectic artistic history with sophistication, style and humour. The finale features footage of Merce Cunningham’s dancers, the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and Lemn Sissay among many others. The exhibition has been created by design practice LYN Atelier and performer collective KlangHaus, who had a hit at the Edinburgh festival in 2014 with an atmospheric gig-come-installation staged in a former small-animal hospital. That show was a sort of musical mystery tour, with projections on the walls and performers popping up in unexpected places, playing right under the audience’s noses. The company’s ethos is to make “a collaboration with buildings” and they say they became obsessed with concrete while preparing the new exhibition. They have even used tracks by musicians who trained as architects: the composer Iannis Xenakis and Pink Floyd. The bathroom is used to display images from the Hayward Gallery. KlangHaus’s Jon Baker explains that they chose to open and end the tour with birdsong – a reference to the bird noises on Cirrus Minor by Pink Floyd, who played at the QEH in 1967, and to the influence of birdsong on other artists whose work has been heard at the venues, from Olivier Messiaen to gamelan musicians. “We had this weird notion that when you build a building, what you’re actually doing is enclosing the outside. You’re colonising a space that was once outside,” says Baker. “So we wanted to bring the sound of birds into the building.” As part of the Concrete Dreams season, there will be a concert of Sam Lee’s Singing With Nightingales, an evening of “human-bird duets”. Georgia Ward, participation producer at the Southbank, said: “We wanted to talk about the amazing history and design of these buildings, but also the performative history. There were some real firsts here: Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells, Jessye Norman did an extraordinary performance, Different Trains by Steve Reich. We knew KlangHaus could play with the archive in a beautiful, creative way.” The Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall was built in 1951 for the Festival of Britain. Sixteen years later, it added the QEH, for classical music, dance and opera, and the smaller Purcell Room for chamber music, solo concerts and cabaret. Concrete Dreams also acknowledges the history of the Hayward Gallery, which opened in 1968. A backstage bathroom features displays from the Hayward’s 1969 pop art show and the 1972 exhibition The New Art, where Gilbert and George were billed as George and Gilbert. On the bathroom wall, beautiful silhouettes of photographed visitors at the gallery’s 1970 Kinetics exhibition stand out against the white tiles. The free, one-hour guided tours, supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund, are designed for 15 visitors at a time. Concrete Dreams runs until 29 April and culminates in a three-day festival including a workshop run by the Rambert dance company who once rehearsed in the QEH’s foyer.

Hardest day of work

Sunday April 8th. It has become a blur, the day lasted two days with 20 minutes sleep. an extraordinary meeting happened at 7pm on the first half of the two days. A meeting of supreme focus, to request new footage and oral histories that really had to be included, for the sake of professional relationships. Meanwhile the archive still not quite in position, with some perspex fronts not the right size... We spent hours running backwards and forwards with film and photo content on USB sticks, the files too big to export. Nathan at Sal's shoulder, editing what she had the brain space to delegate. Meanwhile permissions for copyright were coming and going.... you can't use this, you can this... You can't use the Harold Wilson, White Heat speech... Jon, requested the transcript of the speech, disappeared into a dressing room with his recording set up. Fashioned his voice, pitch shifted it and Harold Wilson appeared, job done! 24 hour printers were used to print the give-away postcard... print was collected at 5am. We fell asleep briefly onstage on beanbags. The finale was completed at 6.30am. We grabbed a cab home for showers and clean clothes. To return for press calls and interviews at 9.15am. All day we met folks, talked about the exhibition. The Guardian came in first, a reporter who had seen us first in Edinburgh with the very first KlangHaus. He turned his review around within hours.... More tours, an interview with Concrete Magazine, Aesthetica Magazine...the speeches...Jude Kelly and her successor, reeling out speeches, but proudly saying, the whole Concrete Dreams Team slept onstage together to get the job done... legacy....THe QEH opened with the Chineke Orchestra, I had been looking forward to it for weeks, but couldn't go knowing I would fall asleep. We sat on an island of a table, with booze, I barely drank, again, knowing I'd lose myself, we laughed and chatted and tables we're cleared around us, re-laid and moved again. We gathered in huddles outside, smoked fags and laughed. later that night we slept.

Knife through butter

The last day of having the place to ourselves. Like knives through butter on lots of things. Sal has arrived after her mammoth editing session with Jon last night. The archive is going in. We want to set the ground floor tonight before Chi Chi and her orchestra turn up tomorrow. We will be like ghosts. The tear sheets don’t tear easily because the graphics place put the holes too close together and the billboard vinyl is peeling off. We didn’t give then enough time to turn the job around with the care and attention it needed. Andrew, the designer, is patient, he just gets stuff re-made, re-printed. We plotted the lights for the dancers and screens, we sorted the phones. We laughed a tonne especially in the cab on the way home.

Three days to go

Today was hard. I spent two hours getting in as had errands to do, but the errands seemed small for the time spent. 10 bulldog clips and thank you presents for the team. Our producer had tricky problems from the furniture movers and a brick wall on us using sofas from the RFH. The legs fall off when they are moved apparently.... rather than fight that thinly made battle, we went on gumtree and bought two sofas. Next we needed to give the dancers attention. The project lead came up trumps and revealed herself to be an expert choreographer! At points they move like ‘toothpaste’ as she instructed! Then we realised the lighting state would have to be incredibly dark for the screens... would the dancers be visible? Could we gently introduce light, that could be programmed with a one button push? The wearable sound devise is unresolved. The sound in the cupboard in the corridor is too complex. The First floor looked like a problem.. a quick conversation to the right people solved it. Dead tired. Feet hurt, can feel the bones.

The run of the place

Hurray for bank holidays.. and this 4 day block, we have had the run of the Southbank offices just for us and the Concrete Dreams team. It’s been amazing. Writing texts, pulling info together that seemed insurmountable this morning. We are slowly getting really tired... it’s 9pm and Jon and Mark are oral history editing, Andrew is formatting artwork, Georgia, Kate and Chloe are hoovering the exhibition space, Sal is designing the entrance hoarding and I’m photocopying newspaper cuttings onto newsprint. All quietly busy with no difficult questions to answer.... until tomorrow

A call out for help....

Yesterday was amazing... Sent this out to the team... Morning Concrete Dream Team, Working with Sal last night it is clear we don’t have enough footage of varied live performances from the QEH from the 80s to present day, for the finale, that we have permission to use. Currently Sal has mostly footage from The Hayward which is varied and exciting, but not enough footage from the last 40 years of music, spoken word, poetry and dance. We also need another 40 or so faces of performers ( hi res) ( with permissions) for the roll-call. This feels a little insurmountable... especially as everyone has been working so hard to get this footage already! Sal needs to make the finale piece on Monday. How can we make this happen? Thanks and sorry and we can do it! Karen x The response was amazing. We went into full power mode... we solved problems and found over a hundred faces of performers for the first room by sitting in the archive rummaging. It was great fun. Then two of the team hunted for live footage.... they stumbled across a box of dance dvds. A gold mine! Things moved on at great pace. A late night, we were bought beers and a taxi home. Marvellous!

The get-in has begun for Concrete Dreams

The get in has begun! We are in! We have so much help and support this is an incredible job. That’s the thing we say when we catch each other’s eye. Today we had a production meeting on the Purcell Room stage.... that felt decadent! Andrew Locke has a team of carpenters putting in the cabinets. The CNC’d wood makes us all thrilled, but think of a future without the need for chippies! The projectors and screens are arriving, the crt monitors are looking ace. The graphics are hitting deadlines and being produced. We are placing and measuring for exhibition text. Andrew revealed that he didn’t sleep for working a couple of days ago. ‘It wouldn’t get done otherwise’ he said, quite naturally. Last night I sat with Sal and we pushed through all the tear sheet texts til past midnight and then sorted monitor placements, to rise early to advise the techs and reassure the head tech that we are trying/working/ not incompetent. The meeting on stage is full of gratitude and acknowledgment that KlangHaus and Andrew were only employed in late January and have hit the ground running. A six meter beacon had also been designed/ imagined and building begins on Tuesday with help from Norwich colleagues... nice! This is a wonderful job, and the brilliant rep/ freelancer from the Heritage Lottery Fund expressed her joy in our involvement and our ideas and our sheer love of the building. We love the building. A first private event was happening in the QEH foyer this evening... it looked stunning and jazz played as it may have done in 1967. It was glorious, sparkling and inspiring.... we snuck through to use the loos and they, the loos, looked incredible... there’s even a concrete column in the loos against bright white tiles.... you have to have a look when it’s open.... stunning! Easter weekend is two days away... and we can’t wait to get in and work in the downtime of Easter. This could be my favourite Easter ever.

It’s ramped up...

It’s ramped up. The emails flow so fast I can’t keep up. Dozens and dozens of threads of conversation... the oil of Concrete Dreams. Monday I’m palpitating about the budget. It’s becoming plain that we are soaring over budget. With the production manager taking charge and ordering top dollar equipment, whereby we are usually wheeling/dealing/ borrowing. Tuesday I can barely think. Wednesday I request a budget meeting... we don’t solve the problem but at least we have said the problem out loud. We are all thinking of mates we know who can do carpentry/screen making/ sparkies. It’s like walking into the sea knowing we have a long hard swim to reach the next shore.

7 hour meetings

Challenging to make myself write as so busy. We are all trying to do our normal jobs at the same time, so reading emails about artistic content and discussing pork pie procedures, whilst the Mac Doctor tells me my iMac is dead. Our Thursday meeting last 7-8 hours followed by a site visit and a scheduling meeting. If something is funny,like Mark telling us about making chairs out of old RFH archive programmes... ( an HLF participation project)whereby a lot of gaffa was used and it was shit... we laughed and laughed til we could hardly breathe. That’s the upside of being over tired. Things are just starting to become impossible. The metronome will be 2 weeks late. The cabinet making is up to the wire.Sal and I are in Arup, structural engineers, re-taking the films of plans and quantities books. The meetings are multi faceted.. we blast through multi layer agendas. The live performer element was worrying for us as we know that a live musician will need direction and given context in order to connect and give a meaningful performance. Rachel, one of the leads had the wonderful idea of the performer being a dancer. It solves all the problems of ‘ stopping the music’ and they look wonderful even just walking. They can move to all the music and demonstrate highlight the architecture. More soon.

So much to do

Group emails, sharing, sharing, sharing...dropbox so full ...constantly up-dated. Grabbing info that is still resonating from previous articles read. Getting to the nub of info we need to relay/share/display. Alongside like a galloping horse is the tech requirements ...monitors, media players, the back end programming and brain of the exhibition. Then me and Sal scrabbling about on the floor, me being a hand model...photographing the archive....finding letters from the Queen's secretary about her coming to the opening...extraordinary language...'Dear Heart....' We are making art form the history....photocopying letters, programme amendments, PRS forms from 50 years ago so that people can touch them...read them like we are allowed to, but touching the letters will feel special...significant...we want to transfer the feeling of discovery.

hand drawn

We use paper and pen to dream, imagine and process info. Here is Andrew lock's mind-map.

I draw budgets in boxes... all figures will change/flow between the boxes, but a starting point is essential.

Site visit

Can't believe how thrilled I feel to go to work at the Southbank Centre. Today was our weekly meeting and then a long site visit measuring and plotting and realising our ideas. It was an massive step in our imaginations to be able to have absorbed so much knowledge/history about the place and then to return. One skill I have learned from working artistically in buildings is map making. I can quickly orientate myself and remember room shape and details. I busily sketch rooms and we measure knooks and ceilings. We are working with a tech producer who says 'no' to everything. We understand that we just need not ask at this stage. Everyone else on the Southbank team says 'yes', or they will 'ask the question to see if it can be possible'. The Purcell room walls are incredible. Yehudi Menuhin stamped his foot saying he could not play violin in an a-symetric room.... as a result the back walls to the Purcell Room stand like fantasy mountain sides...... We work long hours, think about detail and global ideas to make the exhibition flow. We worry about the clock, we trust ourselves to know that we will make this work.

Looking for treasure in Chafford Hundred

Chafford Hundred, I kept seeing those words in emails and I kept thinking, what is it? rather than, where is it? We met at Chaffered Hundred it felt like a Russian out-post in the sideways rain and ice wind. We sheltered in a Tescos and bought 'reduced-price' sandwiches. It felt grim. Past Ikea was the warehouse which holds the old BBC control room from the Queen Elizabeth Hall, staircases and plant room equipment and other treasures. We spent three hours unpacking stuff, measuring and identifying what was treasure to us and what was boring. Best find.... a large box or box frame....with a handle...we pulled the handle to reveal a fold-down seat. There was a ticket from 1974 in the seat and the seat number was T1, which is an ushers seat.It was beautiful. I discovered that my attention span is much shorter than Sal's and Andrew's....I tend to drift off in a dream after a couple of hours...I did the same the next day...good to know!Then back on trains to London and chats over pizza and beers to shape the exhibition.

First time exhibition designer....

So what is the process, how do you put together an exhibition? Where do you start? A sketch, an outline. A working title. The original title was 'Made with Care', which felt uncomfortable for the ambition of the exhibition.... Concrete Dreams is strong, pioneering... A narrative was put together, with elements the archive team and heads of departments wanted included. A space was found in the building to create a walk-through journey. This must have been a really challenging part of the process as the exhibition last July was destined for backstage at the QEH, and is now kind of backstage in the Purcell Rooms...glad I wasn't privy to that and well done folks who did the negotiating! Next stage is getting the exhibition designers in. KlangHaus was chosen for our experience and dramatic response to journeys through buildings, our ability to layer tonnes of content without overwhelming the audience and our knack of inducing fast pulse-rate responses to architecture. We are working with LYN Atelier, very experienced at exhibition design, public outdoor art and architectural/interior design. We are working with one part of that team, Andrew Lock, an utter joy. Next stage is establishing how we all work together and immersing ourselves in all the archive material. This is a stage of back to back meetings. Talking, talking, talking is essential, it's the only way a huge group mind can come to any consensus. This is where we are at.

Re-opening the Queen Elizabeth Hall

We've taken a huge leap of faith. The KlangHaus team are exhibition designers for the re-opening of the Queen Elizabeth Hall. It feels amazing. The hard work starts this week. We've had lots of weeks of waiting for the go ahead and a couple of weeks of immersing ourselves in the archive of the building. Working in the Southbank Centre is truly awe-inspiring. I love it 100%. The meeting after meeting, sometimes in glass box-like offices overlooking the Thames...or on the top floor of the Royal Festival Hall over looking The Houses of Parliament. The staff are incredibly skilled and can be described as 'professional'. I recognise how I leap in and react spontaneously in negative ways without measuring my answer...... although it's kind of honest, it's also 'unformed' and in this atmosphere shout of being ugly...interesting...I'd never thought that I'd want to act in a 'professional' manner, rock n roll's the way ahead yeah? But I'm finding more and more with KlangHaus that being professional leads to better results and essentially allows you to get you what you need. I'm not putting my sometimes firery responses to bed, but enjoying a wider pallet of ways to interact is making my life bigger. It's this interaction with people that I thoroughly enjoy and I'm collecting the budgetary emails for deep in the future publication for sheer skill of these Southbank women to navigate financial dealings. (I say women because most of them are.) The exhibition is called Concrete Dreams..tickets can be booked for free here, https://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/whats-on/127136-concrete-dreams-2018