Dawn chorus

Three Jos, in the warmer days of summer

As winter goes on, it’s a challenge for the two wordy Jos (Jo Bell and Jo Blake Cave) to summon up the vivid light and the warmth of spring on the banks of the river Nene; but we are getting on with it. Jo Blake Cave is working in Northamptonshire, Jo Bell in Cheshire. We share material and ideas by phone and email, and always return to our own work with a fresh sense of purpose and shared ambition.

Our other projects also inform what we do – both of us are working on other collaborations which bleed into Riverlands in unexpected and exciting ways. Here’s a short video of Jo BC talking (last summer) about the show, which we then thought would happen in October; and a little piece too of Jo Bell doing the same. Although the performance will now premiere in April, you can have a glimpse at the space where it will be shown.

The material we include in Riverlands will  convey the pleasures of water and fresh air on a May morning. For you, dear reader, is it a struggle to remember what that feels like? Have a listen to this and other recordings of the dawn chorus to remind you that the darkest hour is just before dawn….

Duck!

No, you haven’t gone mad; our Three Jos in a Boat show (officially called Riverlands now that it is taking shape) was supposed to open in October, but life got in the way. Our postponement was illness-induced but worry not, we’ll be fighting fit for the first performance in Aldwincle, Northants on 21st April 2012 and after that will be touring with it.

Storyteller Jo Blake Cave (new name because she got married) and poet Jo Bell (same name because she didn’t) are using the time to make the show better, wetter and birdier – because the bird-related stories and poems keep coming. Here’s something to whet your appetite. If ducks could speak, what would they say?

from Oiks

Over here lads, there’s some bird
with a sandwich.
Don’t give us plate-scraped lettuce,
couscous, scraps of rocket for fuck’s sake;
we want bread
and none of your granary shit.
What do we want?
BREAD.
When do we want it?
NOW, and NOW, and NOW.

Hatching ideas….

Eggs from chickens at Nene Valley Boats

Quiet, aren’t we? That’s because we’ve actually been doing some work instead of just messing about on the river. After our trips together in May by narrowboat, canoe and on foot, we’ve had a few weeks of reflection and first-draft creativity.

Each of the three Jos – storyteller, poet and visual artist – has been doing her own research to feel her way into our collaboration, ready for our first performances in October and November (of which more later). Visual artist Jo Dacombe has been back on the banks of the Nene with photographer Kate Dyer, foraging for ideas and images which will inform her input to the performance. Jo Blake has been doing lots of research.

Bleary-eyed birders at 5am

For me (Jo Bell) the writing itself has brought good meaty challenges. When this project was first mooted as ‘a journey in the footsteps of nature writer “BB”‘ I had some qualms. I like to be outdoors, but I’m no nature writer. An archaeologist by trade, I expected my contribution to be more about heritage and landscape. But a dawn chorus walk with poet/birder Matt Merritt turned into a small epiphany. As Jo Blake and I talked about ways into our performance, we were often drawn back to birds.

For Jo Blake, birds unlock a wealth of story-telling traditions; skeletons on which to build stories about the Nene. For me, they give me voices to inhabit, or moments on which to focus my poems. In the voice of a kingfisher or heron or even an egg, I can interrupt Jo’s fluid, river-like narrative with short interjections and refrains. Now that my own boat Tinker is on the move again, I have plenty of raw material flitting about on the canal bank or quacking noisily outside the front door. I’m also reading up on Northamptonshire dialect – how many of you know what half sharp or ikey mean, what it is to chelp, or what an eckle or a fligger are? I now know the gestation period for a heron in the egg. I know how very dull is that great work of the fourth Lord Lilford, Notes on the Birds of Northamptonshire and Neighbourhood. But the results are starting to appear. Here’s a fragment of a poem about…. which bird?

….A run, a zip, a scoot, a zoom, a crossbow shot
a firebrand, a sting, a dash, a nip, a sprint;
the river’s knuckle-duster flashes its little fist,
comes cherry-knocking at the door of dusk –

and you, open-mouthed as a fish on the hook:
no-one there when you look.

The show (called Riverlands) will not be all about birds and creatures. There is plenty of human interest, and at least one rather rude poem about anglers. But because the material is unusual for me, I’ve been pushed into experimenting with new forms and styles. In late July I spent a week with other writers at Lumb Bank, and tested out the piece which I hope will open the show. It wasn’t, as you might say, fully fledged. But I felt the crack of an egg, and something inside it struggling to get out.

Our timetable has changed slightly owing to circumstances beyond our control. We will definitely be touring next spring and summer, but the scheduled autumn performances may be delayed. Keep them pencilled in for now – we hope to perform at Aldwincle Church, Northants on Saturday 29th October (evening) and Sunday 30th October (4pm): and then at the Fishmarket, Northampton on Saturday 19th and Sunday 20th November. More info soon! 

Messing about on the river….

This month's boat in the foreground: last month's in the background!

….is not what we are doing. No, no, heaven forbid. We are doing fieldwork for a performance in October/November which will stretch and fascinate the audience in equal measure. But it does feel a lot like having fun; and we too are stretched and fascinated.

To recap: a poet, a storyteller and a visual artist (three Jos) are working on a creative project on the river Nene. We travelled in April by narrowboat and in June we will be back, on foot: but in May, we have travelled mostly by canoe.

Over the weekend, we put a long-disused canoe in the river at Oundle and waited to see if it would float. It did. We put three artists in it and waited to see if they would capsize. They didn’t. So we set off upstream, wobbling precariously at first. It was immediately different from last month’s narrowboat journey. In the few weeks since we were last on the water, the vegetation has changed and we were much closer to it, being lower in the water this time. Yellow flag irises burn like torches on the riverbank. Elderflowers and cow parsley are frothing in the hedgerows, and the meadows are polka-dotted with poppies and dandelions. On the water, new arrivals are everywhere: cygnets, ducklings, goslings – and in one little flurry of movement, a water rail with its cheeping young hurrying behind it. With no narrowboat engine to scare them off, we saw these birds at much closer range than last month.

Two Jos and a beer: discussion begins

Working as an artist, you can feel like a fraud, because those around you don’t ‘get’ your work: on other occasions you meet a disappointing lack of ambition or understanding in those you are working with. In this project, though, there is a real feeling of momentum and shared energy. The three Jos are supported by Ros 1 (director), Ros 2 (manager) and Kate (documenteer), and others. On Saturday we all shared a wonderful meal with Peter Hill, fount of local knowledge and history. We began to explain to him the way the project works, and what we want from our performance in October. The room began to warm up; this was an animated, generous discussion. We were all lively, full of ideas, pouncing on snippets of information, sharing suggestions. Everyone is able to say ‘YES! that’s exactly it!’ or ‘No, that’s not quite what I want to do,’ in a very open and fruitful way. And of course, we were all slightly drunk – which helps too.

Good art often happens through creative friction. When good artists rub together (sometimes literally), new possibilities appear. For Jo Bell and Jo Blake, the challenge is to write a piece that is both poetic and story-like, but makes an engrossing whole. For Jo Dacombe, the task is to make a visual object which represents the physical river as well as our specific experiences of it. We are stepping slightly out of our comfort zones – which is where artists need to be. Our collaboration is a real one: the project feels like a top beginning to spin. We want to make something better than any one of us could make alone, something that is more than the sum of our parts – so that you, dear audience, can be shown something astonishing, moving, uplifting in the darker days of autumn. In a few days we go back to the river for a final spell of fieldwork. Watch this space to see what we begin to make.

Riverbank inspiration

A little taster…

Here’s a little collection of images from last week’s adventure on the Nene. We will be back for the last weekend in May, canoeing parts of the river. Our final trip will be by foot in June – and the resulting work will be performed over the last weekend in October, around the Nene. We’ll be writing more soon, but in the meantime, have a little look at this and please do share it with anyone who might be interested.

Last day of cruising…

Our next lock, waiting for us in the dawn mist

And so we face the final curtain. The grown-ups (project director Ros Stoddart, and project manager Ros Patching) have left, and our assorted creative hangers-on (storyteller Adrian Johnson, poet Matt Merritt) have gone back to the shore. Our visual artist Jo Dacombe is slaving over a hot drawing board… so today, it is just Jo Bell and Jo Blake on board for the final stretch of our narrowboat trip. We woke up in the dawn mist at Denford, near Thrapston – and indeed, we walked to Thrapston last night having found that the only pub here doesn’t serve food on Thursdays. Today, we are heading downstream towards Oundle, with only two of us to work the heavy locks and perform the boat-related tasks that have become so familiar. Tomorrow, we return the boat to its hire place.

Jo Blake at the helm

Birdwatching at 5.30am

We cannot tell a lie – this has been a fantastic week, full of sunshine and good company as the artists get to know each other. We’ve been on a dawn chorus walk with Matt Merritt and heard Ros Patching enthuse about the nature reserve where she volunteers. We have been reading the work of BB, whose writings are the original spark behind this project, and sharing some of our own stories about the Nene, boats and other rivers. We’ve been learning about boat-handling skills and about one another’s work.

But it’s not just a jolly enterprise: this is only the first part of the project. We are building up material and ideas for a weekend of performance in late October, at venues near the Nene. Before that we have further fieldwork. In May, we return to the Nene in a canoe, to see how the river looks from a simpler vessel. In June, we will be walking stretches of the riverbank. The two remaining Jos have started to frame ideas for how the October performance might look, and for a fully-developed performance piece to be shown in summer 2012. Watch this space for further information and snippets of work in the next few weeks.

Moored at Denford

…and all who sail in her

Our first guillotine lock. See how stressed we are.

Spot the storyteller

Right – we are properly under way with our project (see here for an explanation). To the untrained eye, it might look as if we were having fun. We certainly are enjoying narrowboat Sammy, floating past nice buildings and visiting idyllic village pubs where the sun sets behind trees in bud, etc etc. But it really is in the name of art. These first days have been a very intense time of conversation, exchanging ideas, reading the works of ‘BB’ and trying to figure out how all the artists involved can make a contribution.

Inside Fotheringhay Collegiate Church

So far we have had on board all three Jos, Ros Stoddart (our project director), Ros Patching (project manager), and Kate Dyer (photographer and documenteer). Hardened boat-dweller Jo Bell has been introduced to the stunning countryside and architecture of Northamptonshire; whilst the more hardened Northantonians have been learning how different their landscape looks from the water.

The star of the show is the river Nene – so slow-flowing that it’s almost a canal, and populated by grebes, swans and half-naked boaters (it’s been hot….) We spent our first night at Ashton – home of the World Conker Championship – and today visited the fantastic church at Fotheringhay, which gave us all sorts of ideas about the venue, format and style for our eventual output. At this stage, the exact details are not clear – we want to spend a

Jo Blake at Fotheringhay

little longer learning about one another’s practice, and getting a feel for the river. Tonight we find ourselves moored at a quiet spot by Elton, near Oundle. Tomorrow we turn round and head upstream. Watch this watery space to find out what happens next.