TRUCE! Tableaux – young people from Barking & Dagenham feature on the Olympic Big Screens this summer!
“During the Olympic and Paralympic Games, competing countries sign up to a ‘Truce’. This can mean many things – shaking hands, putting down arms – pausing and reflecting on what is really important. Here artists and young people respond to this idea, and relate it to their own lives.”
From the Truce Arts website
As our contribution to the Olympiad, Arc has worked together with 12 young people from the Borough, in partnership with visual artists, Grennan & Sperandio and media production company O Production, to produce eight films for large scale exhibition on public screens during London 2012.
Through a process of practical workshops scrutinising the dramatic representation of ‘truce’ moments, the young people were invited to focus upon and understand eight scenes of emotional compromise or conflict resolution from existing favourite films. They interrogated, directed, appeared in and helped to produce eight still photographic ‘tableaux’ reconstructions of these scenes, using only locations with which they were personally familiar in Barking & Dagenham, and appearing in each scene themselves.
The process of making these tableaux was also filmed, producing the final digital HD films documenting the moments up to the taking of the still image and the moments afterwards – and including the new still image itself and the source image from the original scene on which the tableau is based.
Funded by the Arts Council with A New Direction, the project is now live at Truce Arts and can also be viewed on YouTube (including ‘The Making of’ video).
Stop Press!
Arc with Grennan & Sperandio are hosting a special celebratory screening event at Arc’s Studios at The Malthouse on Thursday 19 July at 6pm – to find out more, download the TRUCE! invitation (pdf, 736k). If you are interested in attending, please RSVP to Nita Bocking by Friday 13 July.
Charlie Quirke in a still from the film ‘Fast Five Lesley’s Barking Cards’ by Grennan & Sperandio
Header image: Ebun Ore and Shana Noelise in a still from the film ‘Bridesmaids Abbey Road’ by Grennan & Sperandio