Still Loitering

Still Walking gets full value from the intern: Danielle helps with the usual admin and event behind-the-scenes stuff but she’s also doing the opening event – no pressure there, then!

“Hello I’m Danielle and Ill be leading the opening walk of the new Still Walking festival on Fri 25th July: Still Loitering. It’s hard to pin a definition to loitering, but it’s often seen as spending at least fifteen minutes in the same place without intention, according to officials… when pushed, that intention really translates as ‘commercial intention’. This free event invites participants to contemplate whether loitering ought to be forbidden especially when the rhetoric of Birmingham’s homeless community is considered. Lots of places in Birmingham forbid loitering; and once you have seen one sign, it makes it easier to spot others in the city. Here are a few:

Working as a collective flash-mob, the purpose of this opening event is to purposely ‘loiter’ in places which forbid it to encourage authority to challenge our static presence. Who will feel more threatened; ourselves or our observers? I’m really looking forward to the event and I hope that you’ll join in to discover and experience your own definition of loitering. The larger our group, the more powerful our impact.

I come from a performance background, having just graduated* from the University of Birmingham’s Drama and Theatre Arts degree programme. Studying for my degree particularly ignited my interest in political theatre and political performance and how these practices are very different from each other; with political theatre being set in the institution of the theatre and political performance happening around us every day from begging and busking to even putting on make-up and taking ‘selfies’. I see this opening event as a political performance, particularly reflecting Augusto Boal’s Invisible Theatre, where the spectators of a particular action are not aware that it is a performance that has been organised and agreed on beforehand.

As well as facilitating this event, I am also Still Walking’s first festival intern which involves developing events with Ben and guides and dealing with event logistics and promotion. My first association with the festival was last summer where I was conducting market research for Flatpack Film Festival. I came across Still Walking’s Twitter account, and thought that this is a festival I really want to get involved in. I messaged Ben and volunteered for various walks. Among these was David Helbich and Shila Anaraki’s “Drag and Drop”. In this, audience members were instructed to wear ear plugs and remain silent, led through streets in one of two separate groups, before being individually dropped at carefully choreographed corners. After a few minutes standing alone, they were picked up again after five minutes or so by another guide and dragged to the next drop-spot. Ben experienced this for the first time in beautiful Brussels – and the back-streets of Birmingham on a dark autumn evening provided a very different experience! However, this event was certainly the first time I found myself consciously loitering. The experience made me acutely aware of myself and the environment around me, and it made me wonder how powerful a collective of loiterers would be to an unsuspecting public”.

Thanks Danielle! Can’t wait to see how this turns out. Don’t hang around, book tickets today.

•with a First