This month is going to be very busy, here at the Edge.  There’s a whole range of stuff, from the international to the local, and hopefully, something for everybody.

First – an apology.  We had to cancel this month’s Sonic Asylum.  This was due to circumstances beyond our control, honest.  It’s never good to have to cancel a show, and we hope we didn’t disappoint anyone too much.  Sonic Asylum will be back in early December, with a special, festive line-up.

So- onto the good stuff.  First, the Brazilians are coming – soon!  From 16th-18th of September all over Digbeth, there’ll be a whole host of fantastic, Brazilian themed events, showcasing work from our overseas colleagues, alongside the very best of local artists for the very first Espirito Brum festival.  Keep an eye on their website for full details, but there’s a bunch of events here at the Edge.  Firstly, we’re proud to host the festival launch night, which features a screening of the Music Tree (fantastic Brazilian movie), alongside live performance from Wanderson Lopez, Bohdan Piasecki, Paul Murphy and Goodnight Lenin. We’re really looking forward to this one and hope you’ll join us from 4pm-10pm on Friday 16th September.

 On Saturday 17th, from 11am-5pm, there’s loads of Brazilian themed stalls, food and activities on offer during the day – all free.  There’s a chance to attend a workshop with amazing experimental percussionist Babilak Bah (if you like hitting things to make a noise, take this opportunity – only a fiver!).  The evening will feature live music from Little Sister, Escalado and Flavia Bittencourt.

And if that wasn’t enough, on Sunday we’ll be rounding off things here with the ‘People’s Kitchen’ – a mass Brazilian cook-up and wind-down with film screenings and accompanied by our friend Gilberto Mauro, making a return visit after his Flatpack appearance last March. The event will run from 12pm-6pm, and should be a lovely, chilled way to wind the festival down.

That’s just the stuff happening here, please keep checking the Espirito site for full details of the events going on at the other venues in Digbeth, including PST, the Spotted Dog and South Birmingham College.

And that’s not all, either.  On Monday 26th of September we will be receiving a return visit from our favourite purveyors of Canadian four-part harmony, the Wilderness of Manitoba.  Despite a hectic European tour, they’ve managed to squeeze a gig in at their favourite venue in the UK, the Edge.  Doors will be at 8pm – we’ll keep you posted about the details.

Sorry about this, but that’s not all, either, either.  On September 22nd, Sustained Theatre will be hosting another of their Space2develop projects ‘Artist’s Salons’.  The last one went really well, with some great ‘scratch’ performances and a good time being had by all.  If you’re starting out, and you make any kind of performance, check this event out.

We’re very excited and honoured to be helping on Espirito Brum this September.  Our Sonic Asylum collaborators, Soesen Edan and Tessa Burwood have been working incredibly hard to organise the festival, which will bring dozens of Brazilian musicians, performers and artists to Digbeth from 14th-18th September.  Espirito Brum is part of Espirito Mundo, which already has cross-cultural partnerships between Brazil, Spain and France, this is the first time it’s happened in the UK.

In the lead up the the festival, there’s already been visits by four Brazilian artists, and local street artist Newso has had work exhibited in Brazil.  After this year’s festival in Birmingham, a contingent of Birmingham musicians and artists will be part of a reciprocal festival in Brazil. This seems to be the beginning of a great potential relationship between our city and colleagues in Espirito Santo, a we are very pleased to be part of it.

So, keep checking out the festival website for details of concerts, workshops, performances and events, as information becomes available.  We’re holding a number of events here at the Edge, and planning some performances ourselves, so, see you at the festival!

We’re often asked what we are trying to achieve with the work we make, and it’s quite hard to encapsulate that in a soundbite or an artists statement or especially a funding application or a pitch.  Ultimately, I suppose, we’re trying to bring about the world which we’d like to be living in.  There’s a phrase going around at the moment, ‘militant optimists’, and that’s us, really.  Not that we believe we can change the world in a big way, I don’t think we’re quite that arrogant or quite that naive (though we can be both at times).  But I think everybody agrees that we don’t live in a perfect world (unless I’m seriously missing something) and it would be good if things were different.

Well, we believe that things can get better in the long run, and that art is our favourite way of bringing people together, and offering them a catalyst to look at things differently, to create the conditions for that better world. It’s a way of creating a space to create a different kind of sense of the world, a questioning, perspective-shifting approach to building a reality.  That sounded almost arty, I apologise, my, as they say, bad.

So all the stuff we do is working to that goal, hopefully each thing we do makes things just a little bit better and helps things head in the right direction.  And is fun, preferably.

We’re sort of evolutionary revolutionaries.

Viva la evolution!

So, we often say that the edges are the most interesting places to be – (see the word ‘liminal’ in a million dissertations in the last ten years or so).  That culture is like a ring doughnut, the sweet and tasty stuff is on the edge, whilst the centre is pretty empty and tasteless (why we called our space, The Edge). Maybe that’s a prejudiced view, but it’s something I personally have come to believe, and it’s no surprise that it’s happened.  My life has kind of pointed the way. 

I grew up on a council estate on the edge of the city, literally.  The Maypole estate, where our maisonette was situated, is a typical concrete jungle (i’m sure much improved since the early 70s, when I resided there), but just across the way the countryside begins.  So my days were spent between your usual trying to survive on a dodgy estate, attempting to read every book in the tiny portakabin that served as a library, and murdering a range of fluffy and feathered animals for our meagre dinner table – I got my first shotgun at the age of 8, my stepfather was an inveterate poacher and we would often go out for ‘country walks’, returning blood smeared, with pockets full of dead creatures and live ferrets.  So, I never joined in much with life on the estate, avoided the gangs (my possession of a number of illegal firearms, crossbows and evil gutting knives meant they avoided me, too), preferring the company of my books and the countryside to my potential compatriots.

I won a scholarship to a grammar school (King Edwards Camp Hill), where the ‘liminality’ continued.  I couldn’t stand school, the other kids were ‘too posh’ (actually they were all pretty middle class, but that was posh as far as I was concerned) – and it was definitely mutual.  Contracting a mystery long-term illness didn’t help, (which actually turned out to be a ‘mild’ dose of TB, diagnosed years later when we got our ‘TB jabs’), which meant I never really engaged with the school.  TBH, at that time the teachers wore cloaks around school, and there was a real ‘poor mans’ public school vibe at the place, so how was a poor boy from a council estate supposed to understand or engage with that world?

So, about the age of thirteen I discovered the joys of drug-taking, petty crime and sudden violence, spending the next couple of years indulging heavily in all three, whilst occasionally popping into school often enough to keep my mother from the arms of the law (obviously I put her through hell, poor woman – but I made up for it later, promise).  So, on the one hand I was going to this ‘good’ school, all uniforms, ‘old boys’ and games of fives (for fucks sake!), then going off to hang out with bikers, junkies, thieves, rastas, and, worst of all, musicians. I turned up to one of my ‘O’level exams on the back of a Triumph ‘Bonnie’, clutching a half-pint of stolen brandy, wearing nothing but a pair of old cut-off jeans – needless to say I am yet to obtain any official qualifications, though I probably earned a Phd in the old University of Life, having quaffed, smoked, ingested, injected, fought and fucked more than many people twice my age before I ever left school.

Anyway, I don’t want to write a whole autobiography here, I’m maybe being self-indulgent enough – the pattern has continued to this day, in that the communities and activities I have engaged in over the years have tended to be at the margins, in those liminal spaces between this and that, legality and illegality, society and anarchy.  The point I’m making, I think, and I’m not entirely sure, is that I have enjoyed it immensely, and continue to do so.  The edges of the doughnut are where all the taste is for me, and I guess that’s why we, as artists aren’t afraid to take risks (Sandra’s bio is very different, but no less liminal, born in Africa, punk, traveller, etc).  We’re actually more comfortable in places that would be out of most people’s comfort zones, it’s why we can breezily make work in some of the dodgiest places on the planet, why we can find a way to communicate with people that others feel they can’t.  And, I guess also it’s why we’ll never be part of the ‘art gang’, never be entirely accepted in our ‘own community’.

And of course, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

‘Community’, whatever that is, and we shall come to that, is well and truly on the agenda these days.  It’s just one of those words you seem to hear in all kinds of contexts now – people are even talking about ‘community arts’ again, which has been a dirty word (phrase) for ages.  People often think we do work with the community, and of course they’d be completely wrong – we don’t.  To paraphrase my favourite psychopath, ‘there’s no such thing as the community’.  There’s just people.

When I hear the word community come out of the mouth of most people, particularly within my ‘community’ of the cultural and ‘creative’ sector, what I hear is ‘them, over there’.  What it seems to mean is often, the poor, the people who don’t engage like I do, the disenfranchised, etc.  But we all belong to multiple communities, just start listing the communities you belong to  – geographical, career interests,cultural, leisure groups, friendship circles, family, etc, etc, it just goes on.  We often say that there are (getting on for) 7 billion cultures on the planet – how’s that for multicultural? And this ties in with the community thing. There are billions of communities, communities aren’t fixed, they are living, changing, adapting things – and defy reductive approaches, it’s just all part of the way we try to make sense of things.

So, as I said, we don’t work with the community, we work with people, with individuals from all kinds of communities, and I guess that’s one of the reasons we’re good at it.  We recognise that each person is a whole bundle of cultures and communities and we just take them as they are, on an individual basis, and day to day.  The problem with trying to define community is that we start to box things off, to say this is so and so community, the Muslim community, the Highgate community, the Black community and then we start to define what that is – but communities are made up of individuals, very different individuals with different values and approaches to being in the world, but that may have something in common.  And they’re not fixed, communities are ameboid, constantly changing shape and membership.

We’re not about community at all, we’re all about connectiveness, communication and mobility.  We want to see those billions of communities in a constant dance, shifting, changing, influencing each other – even breeding in a way, to create that rich tapestry of life, to make it a more complex and beautiful picture.

Let’s get embroidering!

Last Friday we had our second BASS Festival outing – Woman – The Revolution Has Been Feminised!  And I think the point was proved quite nicely, with superb performances by a range of female or female-led acts, including Annette Fagon, Unique, Indigo and a storming set by Sykes and Amazon Sheek, with Soesmix on the decks.  Annette was a great compere and really helped the vibe along, another ‘my cheeks hurt from grinning too much’ evening – we have a lot of those at the Edge.  Quite large-ups to Ian Sergeant who worked hard putting the night together (and getting down on the decks at the ‘after party’ ), Rose Oliver for the pics (below) and everyone else who contributed to make it such a special night.  We shall look forward to many more like it.

To You From Super Me continues at the Public in West Bromwich until this Sunday.  Get your skates on for your last few chances to see this ‘mesmerising’, ‘beautiful’ and ‘brave and inspiring’ installation.  While stocks last.

Wednesday evening was the launch of our new exhibition To You From Super Me at the Public in West Bromwich. Lots of fun was had by all, not least the young people who were the ‘stars’ of the show. The Exhibition, in the lower gallery, consists of three sections. A documentary, filmed by Si Walker and edited by Babis Alexiadis, which shows the workshops and sessions we’ve been doing with the Sandwell AAYP group at the Windmill centre in Smethwick, since July last year. It’s a great film in its own right and one of the audience members thought that it was the artwork, and was happily surprised when the other two parts of the exhibition were revealed. Part two is a display of seven large images, created by comics artist John McCrea, showing the young people’s super alter egos, developed during the workshops. The images are really fantastic and really show how special the young people are, and how individual. Part three consists of three large widescreen projections, arranged into a ‘goalpost’ shape , if viewed from above, where the young people are projected life-size to surround you. The film, shot and edited by Chris Keenan, with a great soundtrack by Martin Clarke, lasts about 15 minutes – I must have seen it a hundred times and I’m still not in any sense bored with it, it really gives you a glimpse into the worlds of the young people and reminds us all about our individuality, that we all have ‘powers’ in some way and really reveals why we love the young people so much. It’s well worth a visit, so if you are anywhere near the Public in West Brom, take a look, promise you won’t regret it. To You From Super Me runs at the Public until 26th June, normal gallery opening times.

Other News

Tonight, Friday 10th of June at the Edge, we are being honoured with a visit by ‘Queen of 2 Tone’, Pauline Black.  She’ll be performing some music and also talking about her new book ‘Black by Design’ as part of Bass Festival.  This year’s theme was ‘Revolution’ so we have hooked up with Ian Sergeant to create two events looking at the sexual revolution in Black music, tonights ‘in conversation’ event with Pauline and next week ‘Woman – The Revolution Will Be Feminised’ will have a host of female artists working in the ‘urban’ genre (loosely)  – more information over on the Facebook page.