SOAK Live Art: How Art Thrives in the Fertile Margins

Kerry Priest

PART 1 – GATHERING, GALVANISING

Plymouth is a funny place. It is West of the map. Situated between the ocean and the moors, you are never more than a few miles from some kind of wilderness. The ocean rains pour into streets of grey post-war brutalism, full of the cries of gulls and the warbles of pigeons. It is so far from the metropolitan centres that it has created its own scene; punky, queer, pagan.

When I arrived in Devon in 2015, I noticed an appetite for the avant-garde and the surreal in the poverty-stricken streets of Plymouth. Yet there was very little money or creative infrastructure to make it work successfully. Dan Leahy had been programming the Aslomga nights at Union Corner, using his own money, and the Plymouth Art Weekender had begun to unify creatives from disparate disciplines in an annual get-together. The recently closed Dartington College of Arts had also gifted the region with a cohort of creatives whose practice was often interdisciplinary and often embedded in somatic and movement-based practice.

When Sarah Blissett and I decided to curate a series of Live Art events in Plymouth, we called it SOAK, standing for Support Our Artist Kin. The SOAK Live Art nights bring together performers from all over the South West, across multiple disciplines, be they artists, poets, dancers, filmmakers or musicians. Although their practices are almost kaleidoscopically different, they have come together in bi-monthly events to perform and witness one another’s bold and experimental work.  The nights have proven a resounding word-of-mouth hit with audiences and artists, with the most recent events selling out.

Tap-dancing Mariachi band Kid Hyena performing

Sierra Leonean actor Patrice Naiambana performed Perception Gap

Our decision to program live art along with spoken word and experimental music came about initially because of the artistic practice Sarah and I share, which lies somewhere between performance art, sound art and poetry. Having attended many a woefully under-attended experimental music night in Plymouth, I thought that there might be a strength in numbers if we could bring together the different communities under one umbrella. This intuition has proven to be correct, and the SOAK Live Art nights have become a popular catch-all platform for any weird, unclassifiable, and ambitious work that happens in the city.

We have enabled, for example, the queer Christian poet Sarah Cave to share a stage with Cantonese-British dancer, Jan-Lee Ming; the A/V band Psychepoetic Laundrette to share a stage with the contemporary classical composer Sam Richards; The Sierra Leone-Born actor Patrice Naiambana to perform on the same bill as tap-dancing Mariachi band, Kid Hyena. By placing these performers in one another’s orbit, an osmosis is happening, and artists are beginning to find influences well beyond their usual bubble.

By uniting these disparate artists under the banner of ‘live art’, SOAK is expanding Live Art’s definition and, at the same time, inviting performers in to make work that is more cerebral and risk-taking.

PART 2 – SHARED THREADS, SHARED PATHS

Given Plymouth’s geography between moor and sea, it is no surprise that many of the artists who have come through SOAK’s doors are involved in land-based and ecological arts practice. Artists go up onto Dartmoor, one of England’s few wildernesses, to wild camp and to seek out ancient remains.  They go down to swim in the Plymouth Sound, the rather fortuitously-named harbour area that butts onto the city, and they make art about waves and seaweed and the curative effects of wild swimming.  It has been really interesting to see how people’s site-specific practice has translated to the warehouse space of the Leadworks.

Emma Welton spends most of her artistic life working outdoors. She is perhaps best known for her walking scores, Exeter Sound Walks, and is a deeply committed eco-composer-activist. She recently spent a winter observing waterfowl preening and dipping in the muddy banks of the Exe, inviting the public to learn about bird migration and the precarity of many of those species amid climate chaos. The great challenge for her, in bringing her community-focused composition practice to SOAK was how to honour site-specific environmental work in the confines of a warehouse space in downtown Plymouth. She wore wellies and waterproofs and delivered a presentation performance, Overwintering, which evoked the deep listening practises she had undertaken on the Exe estuary earlier in the year.

Emma called upon those present to imitate water birds and played violin motifs written to accompany birdsong and field recordings. Music became a common language which humans share with the more-than-human, and which can transport us from the city to animalistic other-worlds.

 

Emma Welton – Overwintering

 

 

This sense of foraging and reproduction brings to mind the local folk and folklore collectors of the 20th Century and before, and how time seems to become non-linear once we enter the mythic temporality of wilderness. Many poets have found themselves drawn to Devon over the centuries, whether writing pastoral pieces or depicting the violent reality of nature. SOAK has featured spoken word artists at every event, and many have chosen to combine their words with music.

 

 

Arun Sood brought fragments of his Searching Erskine album to SOAK in March.

Arun Sood – Searching Erskine

Along with Alastair Smith (electronics) and William Kempe (violin), his performance responded to the uninhabited island of Vallay in the Outer Hebrides, exploring the intersections between sound, memory, place, and ecology. The piece was part spoken word, part Folktronica, part photographic archive. Images of the rugged, weather-beaten landscape and its people, hunched against the elements, collide with hypnotic dance beats and folk melodies, evoking a sense of depth; of almost archaeological layers of occupation.  Like Emma’s work, it succeeds in evoking place. The subtleties of the poetry added layers of personal meaning, showing the intersections of identity and location for a mixed race person growing up in the Scottish Islands. Once again, we had a sense of collection and of listening. Yet Sood blends collage with quasi-romanticism – we have a reframing and repurposing of evocative images and sounds.

In Charms for Candlemas, Lucinda Guy invites us into the world of 17th Century Poet and Cleric Robert Herrick. He spent several years in Devon, sometimes collecting charms and spells from wise women. Lucinda’s performance combined Herrick lyrics with improvised music, and audience participation. Bread was broken – evoking perhaps the holy communion – and the pieces of bread contained the titles of Herrick charms, and their method for delivery.

Lucinda Guy, Jan-Ming Lee and Howl Yuan – Lying Down

Musically, Lucinda’s improvisations played with aspects of folk and plainchant. Yet the aleatoric randomness of the piece’s structure brought us bang up to date with digital methods of composition. Together with the threads of witchcraft in the lyrics, this musical performance gave us a sense of a continuing tradition of the crone and how this might ultimately outlive Herrick’s enlightenment scepticism.

 

 

 

 

Jacqui Orly and Mark Leahy’s separate practices brought to light the lives, cries and smells of domesticated animals. Their pieces asked questions about land use and our relationship with the not-quite-other. As with Arun’s crashing waves, Lucinda’s spells, and Emma’s eerie underwater recordings, we get a sense of the Gothic-Sublime being subsumed within a local aesthetic of deep attention, but also of uncompromising resistance. Nature artists are sometimes accused of being apolitical, but all these works remind us of subaltern and marginalised voices living precariously on the edge of modernity.

Mark Leahy – Cream of the Crop

 

PART 3 – MULTI-DISCIPLINARY MAKING

Besides being a platform for contemporary experimental performance, SOAK is also a lab space and artistic forum. In the summer of 2024, Sarah and I embarked on our first SOAK Lab project. This series of workshops coincided with the summer solstice and evoked that time of year’s sense of celebration and awakening.

Through programming over 60 artists over the course of the year, we had begun to see commonalities and overlaps. There was so much rich site-based artistic knowledge in the region that it seemed a perfect opportunity to come together and make something that responded to watery locations around Plymouth. We brought together poets, dancers, visual artists and composers to share practice. We collected words, echoes and gestures through somatic and deep listening exercises. We talked at length about the human -more-than-human relationship, and we immersed ourselves in water.

SOAK Lab at Devil’s Point

On day 1, SOAK Lab explored sounds from above and beneath the waves, using our bodies, ears and hydrophones. Emma Welton taught us how to slap the waters and we thought about the sonic world of sea creatures, whose auditory worlds are polluted as much as their water is. We listened to the other-worldly sucking and creeping of marine bivalves in their rock pools, and asked questions about what is greeting what when a human enters a pool.

Water Drumming at Devil’s Point

Day 2 was led by Sarah and myself. We looked at ways of holding and mirroring, through voice and also through gesture. We explored material and metaphorical reflections on place through language and embodied movement. We talked about how layers of matter and meaning accumulate and can be transcribed through a poetics of place. Standing on Mountbatten pier, we held hand mirrors and thought about the exportation of tin in ancient times, of Drake, Cook, the Napoleonic wars, the contemporary nuclear submarines who stalk the depths of the Plymouth Sound. Holding the sea and sky in the palm of our hand, we turned the world upside down and looked at things through a new lens. We were each other’s mirror and we reflected on how we are moved by encounters at the edges of land and water.

Working with mirrors at Mount Batten

Later, at the beach, we thought about how seaweeds materialise new modes of relation and historical witnessing in relation to climate and feminist embodied knowledges. We voiced polyphonic imaginings of more-than-human ecologies. Stories are held deep within our bones, residues absorbed across oceans, remnants cast adrift or coming home to shore.

Jan-Ming Lee facilitated day 3 of SOAK Lab, inviting us to sense the flows from Drake’s reservoir through our own bodies, creating moments of gentle reciprocity through touch and gesture. In the afternoon, we brought different threads together from the last three days, giving voice to beachcombed detritus.  We explored ways of moving and sounding in response to these found objects.

With the remnants of sea salt in our hair, more alive to the world, more sensitive to its poisons, we improvised our soundings with a profound sense of how sound and language can both be a container and conduit for meaning. Reflecting on the many varied entanglements, forms of mimesis, and rituals of care which we have witnessed at SOAK Lab, we reflect on the aptness of the name SOAK, and water’s own capacity to carry memory.

CONCLUSIONS

In some ways, you could say that the pared-down arts ecology in the region has created a market for some kind of umbrella platform. SOAK has galvanised people from across the region – and across wildly different practices – to come together in a spirit of experimentation and openness. The SOAK Live Art nights have almost become a celebration of making work in times of economic austerity, and celebrating liveness as a fundamental principle of art-making.

Charlie Cornforth and Finn Roberts – Rhizome Tears

In seeing so many people performing over the year, we have been able to do a sort of litmus test of the South-West scene and see how so many of the region’s performers are finding inspiration in the sea and land. Through SOAK lab, that creative energy is beginning to coalesce into a multi-disciplinary ensemble, and the facilitators are thinking of ways of working with participants outside their usual specialisms.

In just one year, it feels like Plymouth has gone from a city with little to no live art to one where dozens, if not hundreds, of performers are deliberately making their work more interesting and more boundary-pushing, more strange, in the knowledge that it will have a receptive home and an eager audience.

Kerry Priest is an award-winning poet and interdisciplinary artist, working with text, performance, and sound design. She uses the principle of ‘polyphony’ as a form of entangled practice with the natural world and as a means to foreground the acoustic, psychological, and communal properties of language.
Her pieces have appeared at the Royal Opera House, the Minack Theatre and on BBC Radio 3. Her poem, ‘Medicine Wheel’, was nominated for the Forward prize and her pamphlet, The Bone Staircase, was published by Live Canon in 2020. She was named one of Eyewear’s Best New British and Irish Poets 2018.

Kerry is Co-Director (with Sarah Blissett) of SOAK Live Art CIC, an Arts Council-funded performance art platform in Plymouth. She co-curates the SOAK Live Art nights at Leadworks, and makes multi-disciplinary work with Sarah.

In a former life, Kerry was a DJ for a seminal London club night, Twat Boutique and has performed at the Royal Festival Hall, Latitude, Bestival, XOYO, Thekla and many more venues. She uses this experience in electronic music to advocate for women in tech and can often be found mentoring in audio production skills through community radio stations such as Soundart Radio.

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