HAPPY INTERNATIONAL DAY OF RURAL WOMEN!

This time last year the QVWC and the Clunes Neighbourhood House co-hosted a
celebratory dinner with the women of Clunes. Clunes is on Dja Dja Wurrung
Country a couple of hours west of Melbourne

Clunes resident, Christy Flaws was responsible for getting us participating
in a bit of feather balancing. During the past year she has continued
working with kids in Clunes, as well as making her own performance work
with her partner Luke and their performing company Asking For Trouble. She
also facilitates community strength through the Clunes - Cup of Sugar/cup
of kindness FaceBook group. As we weren’t able to do it again this year, we
caught up with Christy via email to get her perspective on these times …

This time last year the QVWC and the Clunes Neighbourhood House co-hosted a celebratory dinner with the women of Clunes. Clunes is on Dja Dja Wurrung Country  a couple of hours west of Melbourne

We were welcomed by Traditional Custodial Paulie Ugle,  and later conversations were facilitated by Karen Pickering. It was a noisy, happy room-full of  catching up, eating, drinking, meeting new people and …balancing feathers on our hands and noses!

Maybe the best quote of the night was “I didn’t know there were this many women in Clunes” but more generally I think most of us agreed we should do it again.

Clunes resident, Christy Flaws was responsible for getting us participating in a bit of feather balancing. During the  past year she has continued working with kids in Clunes, as well as making her own performance work with her partner Luke and their performing company Asking For Trouble. She also facilitates community strength through the Clunes - Cup of Sugar/cup of kindness FaceBook group.  As we weren’t able to do it again this year, we caught up with Christy via email to get her  perspective on these times …

Hi Christy,

It’s almost a year since we had our lovely event in Clunes for the International Day of Rural Women! Sadly we’re still in lockdown in Melbs so can’t do it anywhere this year even though we thought a reprise in Clunes with dancing would be great! SO while we’re together apart how about an interview…

QVWC: We all know about the huge issues that bushfires and the pandemic (COVID-19) have created, and will get onto that in a sec, but any [other] news since we saw you last?

CF: For us we’ve just found ourselves in this massive transition period, over the past few years we’ve found ourselves moving further away from seeing ourselves as ’touring artists’ and now the majority of the work we are doing is becoming increasingly localised.

Through Art Attack [of which more below]  we’ve been able to open these conversations with young people but also their parents, grandparents and other community groups in town. We’ve gone from seeing Clunes as a gorgeous place to store our various theatre set paraphernalia and visit ‘occasionally’ and into this really community based practice. 

I think also while we still want to make and share art, we’ve been thinking a lot about what skills we have in the arts that transfer to other potential projects, community resilience building, gardening and facilitation in general. I say we because Luke and I have always worked so collaboratively but we’re both starting to think about various individual projects which feels exciting.

Also we got a puppy called Banjo who is absolutely divine, we figured if we were not going to tour this year it was finally time to get the pooch of our dreams, then when I went to visit a friend and he sat on my lap and wouldn’t leave… love at first sight.

QVWC: You and your partner are “Asking For Trouble”, making & touring performances; running Art Attack with young people. What’s your approach to making work and performing it

CF: Ha! It is very responsive… I think the approach varies quite a lot depending on the work it always involves play in the development and we devise rather than pre-script. We always ask ourselves and community collaborators -who are we right now, why are we making a work, what do we have (inspiration, skills, ideas for imagery, resources).

One of my favourite examples of working collaboratively was with Barham High School for a Fairfax Youth Initiative Residency [in Swan Hill].   The  first questions we asked (‘who are you and why are you here?’) meant that we learned that the majority of the students were there ’to get out of maths’ and that they loved sport but we also learned that one quietly spoken young man loved to make origami and a young woman loved to sing. Those elements together blew me away and still make me a little teary.

I’ve attached some images from that performance, but basically we meet our artistic collaborators where they are at and we aim to build something we all love from there. 

QVWC: So the obvious question…how the pandemic has impacted you?

CF: We’re really grateful that we are based regionally.  I’m conscious of our community/network of artists/friends who don’t have access to the space that we have. We chose to pause our Art Attack project early on, unfortunately we were about to jump into creative development/production mode with a group of young people we have been working with for about 2 years, everything was coming together so beautifully. But we’re really lucky in that we have very low overheads and we were able to extend our funding agreement with Creative Victoria so we have just restarted outdoor training recently.

I have  realised how much I use my face to express myself and to connect. It’s also really highlighted to us the various interconnected systems we rely on as humans and their fragility, I think this will impact the kinds of work we continue to make. 

QVWC: What you have missed this year?

CF: I miss my friends both in Melbourne and those overseas… the distance is really painful, I have missed taking shows on tour. 

To be honest I think one of the things that emerged from this year for me is how much my facilitation feeds me. There have been so many things in my life that exist by default because of the work I’ve chosen to do… social connection, physical exercise, having a sense of agency and many opportunities to be playful and vulnerable with people, meeting with people from really diverse backgrounds and different perspectives to me. It’s made me realise how incredibly privileged I am in that sense, I know that my arts community is suffering right now and at the same time it’s been really interesting to see how much WORK it is to try to structure those things into your day when they aren’t just an integrated part of what you do in everyday life. 
 

QVWC:  We are avid followers of the FB page you manage Clunes - Cup of sugar/cup of kindness. What motivated you to set it up? What kindnesses have you found especially kind?

CF: With cup of kindness partly I just wanted to DO something, I wanted to create and amplify local stories which weren’t about toilet paper hoarding and human selfishness but about how incredibly kind and generous our community is.  There have been so many kindnesses I don’t think I could pick one, but more and more I feel like community connection through generosity and care for each other is just going to play the biggest role going forward.

I’m really interested in the role artists can play in creating/ framing/facilitating spaces for that. I should mention that online is probably my least favourite place to be and I don’t think I would have explored its use for community connection if it hadn’t been for COVID… I’m still trying to figure out how to use it for positive change but I often feel very wary and awkward on social media. I’m always trying to think about how to create and share a story which is welcoming and brings people along with me and it’s a challenging place to do that!

QVWC: You seem to live your values in your art, your friendships and community relationships… tell us about your motivation, inspiration, support mechanisms…

CF: Ah! Right now I am surviving on a combo of gardening, coffee and regular reading of Rebecca Solnit. 

I am very, very curious about people and the world, I can’t help but see more potential projects that could be brought to life and I am regularly talking to a couple of mentors who I have great respect for who get to remind me that just because I could make a thing happen doesn’t mean I should… I listen to them sometimes.

My life with Luke (and now [child] Tully and Banjo) is (and always has been) a mashup of love/work/friendships/community and while I know it’s not everyone’s cup of tea and occasionally this makes things incredibly challenging (what is a weekend?)  I think my experience of the world is richer for it.

I really do feel like for me to not feel overwhelmed by the challenges we’re facing in the world I need to find some kind of positive action (even if it’s as small as sharing sunflower seeds) to feel like I’m helping to dream up a more hopeful future. 

QVWC: What are you looking forward to?

CF: I’m working on looking forward less… I’m a planner and have generally spent a lot of energy on thinking about what happens next but I’m attempting to really be in the little moments when they’re happening. Savouring right now in all its complexity.

QVWC: Thanks Christy. Love you, love your work, can’t wait to catch up for some fun and keep well in the meantime.

***

Christy also gave us an Art Attack update and some background to this long-term community-based project that Asking For Trouble initiated after working on a number of shorter term projects. The shorter term projects included collaborating  with young people in Clunes on a circus performance in and around the Clunes swimming pool - subsequently also performed in pools in Newstead and Trentham.  It’s evident from Christy’s description how artists build outcomes of skills development, social cohesion and jobs in all kinds of communities.

“The background to Art Attack really is that Luke and I had spent a decade delivering creative projects with and for communities (often with youth) and many, many times we talked about how we felt the projects would have had better engagement and outcomes if they had been developed with the community right from the very beginning (including them in the initial planning).

Creative Victoria opened a new grant program around social impact and it felt like such a brilliant opportunity to test out what a co-design model might look like. The project was (and continues to be) designed  with local young people. This has included ongoing circus training as well as a monthly event ’The Saturday Project’ where we invited creative facilitators from many backgrounds to deliver workshops/performances. The workshops delivered ranged from contraption building, SFX and makeup, costume design/creation, bamboo architecture, film, dance and more,  because I built flexibility into the project we were also able to provide responsive workshops when interest emerged like one on one sessions between a young person and a locally based textile artist or a trip to a performance as part of Midsumma for two other young people.

One of my favourite examples of how this flexibility  played out was that one young person with a passion for Special Effects Makeup was super keen to upskill in creating some particularly horrific makeup effects, after a bunch of conversations about who she would like to work with we realised that what she really wanted/needed was to be equipped with the materials to teach herself via YouTube. In the meantime I had a group request for a dance workshop (which was delivered by the ever awesome Joh Fairley) and also some interest around film-making. By having the freedom to ‘make it up as we went along’ this quickly led to the development of a spectacular Zombie film, over a two day period 27 young people came together over a Friday and Saturday night, our now upskilled youth SFX artist shared her skills, teaching and  co-ordinating the makeup application and we brought our beloved collaborator Chris Bennett of underground media up and captured a combo of circus skills, dance, horrific SFX and all the devised (gory) glory that presented itself over the two evenings.

We had planned to create a live performance together but are currently reimagining the final public outcome as a film based project, I hesitate to say too much about what it will look like because as we all know 2020 seems full of surprises but I’m excited to share it with you once it has been completed!”

Interview Jo Porter