It feels as if it’s been a long time coming, but at last respond_ is live… and it works!

respond_is a new digital platform, based on Liz Lerman’s renowned Critical Response Process (CRP), built by Yorkshire Dance, Breakfast Creatives, the University of Leeds & Liz Lerman, and funded by the Digital R&D Fund for the Arts.

We’re building it to test how a digital platform might advance audience engagement, artistic development, co-production, individual and group critical enquiry, and artistic learning.

For a week in September, users from around the world logged on and contributed to the creative process of two new dance works. A ‘closed group’ of participants, guided by researchers from University of Leeds, watched a film by Hagit Yakira which showcased her new-work-in-progress, ‘Air Hunger’, and then undertook the four steps of CRP. They interacted directly with Hagit, answering her questions to them about the work, and asking their own questions of her in turn.

Dr Brighid Webster was one of them. Our ‘closed group’ includes people who self-identified as ‘Frequent Attenders’ at contemporary dance performances, ‘Infrequent Attenders’ and ‘Non-Attenders’. Brighid, a ‘Frequent Attender’, said of the experience, “being a part of this innovative, exciting and perplexing project has affected me profoundly. I love and have loved being a part of it all… I love the way in which it has been organized and recognize the enormous work, preparation and thought, which has been put into it by everyone concerned. I am invigorated by it all and actually feel privileged to have been given the opportunity to peek for a time into another creative discipline.”

Read Brighid’s full article about taking part in respond_ here:
www.respondto.org/brighid/

When the week was over, Hagit wrote to all the participants in the ‘closed group’, saying, “Let me first say how inspired I feel reading your comments. Some echoing my thoughts and some challenging my ideas. I have been reading them all and sometimes more than once. It gives me a lot to think about! You all have your own individual way to respond and write and still you are all doing it with so much respect. Thank you and more soon, Hagit X”

A film of ‘Douglas’ by Robbie Synge was made available to anyone, anywhere in the world, who wanted to join in, and participants from around the world engaged with him and his work through CRP.

Nearly 4000 people have so far visited the website, almost 900 of whom took part in the initial public vote which resulted in Hagit and Robbie being commissioned to make new dance works for respond_

The ‘closed group’ comprises 30 participants, each selected by the University of Leeds using a variety of research criteria. The ‘open group’, working with Robbie, was recruited by a variety of methods – call-outs through social media, targeting the audiences of other dance agencies and companies, haranguing our friends and neighbours, collaring other parents in school playgrounds… and, in the end, 55 people registered as participants in that ‘open group’.

Not all of those participants made it to the end of the process, and we’re evaluating the reasons for that at the moment. We remind ourselves that respond_ is an experiment – a research and development project. One of our big challenges is to find ways to increase the number of active participants, and to maintain their engagement with the site and the process over quite a long span of time.

And it’s a very complicated thing that we’ve built. We experienced a few technical hitches, and we discovered how difficult it can be to moderate the process of CRP between two artists and scores of online participants. Since this first step of the process finished on Friday 26 September, Team respond_ has been back together, refining the website and the way we use it to make it more user-friendly, more helpful to the artists, and more rewarding for the participants to engage with.

We’ve been to Manchester this month, to take part in a ‘Learning Day’ organised by Nesta, at which we swapped stories, experiences and questions with some of the other 60+ partnerships who’ve been funded to develop new projects by the Digital R&D Fund for the Arts, and gave a presentation about respond_ and what it’s taught us so far. There was quite a lot to say, and it was exciting to talk to members of other projets who quickly identified ways in which respond_ might be able to help them in their own work. So there also quite a lot of potentially fruitful conversations to come as respond_ develops.

In the meanwhile, Hagit and Robbie are going back into the studio, developing their respective pieces of dance with all the feedback and ideas from the Critical Response Process fresh in their minds. From Friday 14 – Friday 21 November, they’ll present new films which show how their works-in-progress have developed, and you’ll be invited again, at that point, to contribute to Robbie’s process. Again, Hagit will work with the ‘closed group’ and University of Leeds.

Then it’s back into the studio for the last time, to finish working on the pieces before their world premieres, here at Yorkshire Dance in Leeds, on Friday 5 and Saturday 6 December.

And you, of course, are invited…
www.yorkshiredance.com/douglas-air-hunger

Antony Dunn, Marketing & Communications Manager of Yorkshire Dance reflects on the early development of respond_

Image: Hagit Yakira rehearsing Air Hunger

We’re more than halfway through the official year-long life our Digital R&D Fund project, respond_

We’ve built a preliminary website, we’ve shortlisted six artists who’d like to involve you in the creative process as they make new dance works as part of the project, you’ve voted for two of them (Robbie Synge and Hagit Yakira), and we’ve commissioned their new works, Douglas and Air Hunger.

Underneath the surface of the project, though, there’s a whole lot more going on. Breakfast Creatives are currently building a new platform which will be a digital adaptation of Liz Lerman’s renowned Critical Response Process – a system of peer-to-peer response originating in Liz’s questioning of how the process of giving and receiving feedback can be the most useful, informative and productive. And we need it to be ready by Friday 19 September. No pressure, Breakfast!

It’s a huge, complicated job, and we’re very glad indeed to have the support of Liz Lerman herself, and her team in the USA, particularly as we try and find the right words with which to guide users through the process online. One of the other major challenges for us is that CRP is a moderated process – and we’re building into the new platform a kind of Artificial Intelligence. In short, the site will learn from the artists and other participants who use it, becoming more and more effective as a moderator of CRP, guiding, coaching and policing us all through each of its four steps.

Now, this is a Research & Development project – it’s an experiment – and we honestly don’t know how this is going to work out… The meetings between Yorkshire Dance, the University of Leeds and Breakfast Creatives can sometimes feel that they’re revealing more complications than they’re solving, but we’re making progress, we’re really learning a lot, and we’ve every reason to hope that it’s going to work the way we intend it to.

This week we received feedback from Liz and her team on an early design of the respond_ platform, and it’s certainly been encouraging to hear that they think we’re heading in the right direction. They’ve given us lots of helpful, specific suggestions about making the digital platform more human, more like the experience of CRP in a physical rehearsal room.

We’ve also benefited greatly from Robbie Synge’s response to the early design of respond_ and he’s made us think very clearly about protecting artists in this online arena where they might be exposed to the thoughts of – in theory, at least – thousands of individuals. He’s usefully crystallised some thoughts about CRP for us from the artist’s point of view: that two key considerations of involvement in respond_ must be good will, and a shared commitment to investing in the constructive development of a new work.

One of the joys of this project is that it’s collaborative – much more so than many projects. And the collaboration is fun, stimulating, challenging, often revelatory. All the things you want out of a day at work, really.

And this collaboration is big – much wider than the partnership between Yorkshire Dance, the University of Leeds and Breakfast Creatives. To have co-creators like Liz Lerman, Robbie Synge, Hagit Yakira, and like the adults with learning disabilities who’ve helped us to work on the accessibility of respond_’s user interface, and like Nesta, the Arts & Humanities Research Council and Arts Council England who, between them, have funded us into this Digital R&D project, and like the many, many other organisations also creating new projects through this fund, means that our experience of respond_ is very much in the spirit of the Critical Response Process itself.

Design and digital partners in a collaboration with the Writing Squad and Transform, West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds. www.aleedsseen.com

A LEEDS SEEN explores four views of Leeds, through new writing from the Writing Squad and photography by John Stenson and Lizzie Coombes. The works were exhibited as part of Transform: My Leeds, My City at the West Yorkshire Playhouse.

www.aleedsseen.com

built for thespace.org

A multimedia online digital artwork built in response to the live art event OverWorlds&UnderWorlds that took place over three days in Leeds city centre as part of ‘Artist’s Taking the Lead’ and as Yorkshire’s flagship arts event for the Cultural Olympiad 2012.

www.overworldsandunderworlds.com please note for the full experience this is best viewed on a laptop or desktop with your audio turned on.

www.overworldsandunderworlds.com

www.thespace.org

Briggate, Leeds.

www.overworldsandunderworlds.com

Sculpture designed by the Quay Brothers.

Have you seen/ heard what has been going on?

A sign of things to come www.overworldsandunderworlds.com

Organising chalk drawings across Leeds city centre linking to social media in the run up to www.overworldsandunderworlds.com

Behind the scenes during the photo shoot for the OverWorldsandUnderWorlds project image.

With thanks to Guy Farrow and the Northern Ballet.

The launch of www.overworldsandunderworlds.com

Our new website for Yorkshire’s flagship art project for the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad, being directed by The Quay Brothers and produced by Leeds Canvas and the Arts Council.We launched our new website for OverWorldsandUnderWorlds to coincide with Leeds Canvas organising a tour for for journalists and the unsuspecting few, through the gaols and rooftoop of Leeds City Hall…