2015 » United Kingdom » Student Section

The View from Here

The View From Here was launched online in October 2014 as the first collaborative project between the Association of Courses in Theatre Design (ACTD) and the Society of British Theatre Designers (SBTD). We invited course leaders to bring their students together to debate what SharedSpace: Music Weather Politics meant to them.

Every participating student group around the country was asked to nominate 2 student ambassadors to represent that discussion in the form of a 3 min film and upload it to the Facebook group. They shared distinctness, commonality, diversity and anything and everything else that was pre-occupying them in the UK now. We asked them to propose what the UK PQ 2015 student exposition should look like.

15 extraordinary proposals from 30 students representing their colleagues from over 20 UK institutions formed the bedrock of a three-day residency held in January 2015 at Nottingham Trent University to coincide with Make / Believe, the SBTD’s national open exhibition.

We grouped existing concepts together and made new ones.

We explored Britishness, foreignness, shared space and politics in all their complexity.

We got stuck and we became unstuck.

We talked and wrote more than we drew and made but it was always the drawing, making and physically re-ordering in the real space that ultimately took us another step forward…

At the beginning of the residency each student knew only one another in the room, by the end 30 animated young artists had engaged with a 1:1 replica of our space at PQ and come up with the bold final ideas that have become the springboard for this exposition.

A smaller group of representative students have become part of the UK PQ Student Team: Stella Chung, Flor Dias, Joseph Craig, Jonathan Gilmer, Nicki Harvey, Tellevero Lappalainen, Chuck Lowry, Thea Luckcock, Rachel Matthews, Barbara Moriera, Karina Smith, Alena Tryapitsyna, Alice Tulip and Rosie Whiting.

This project has been facilitated by professional curators, designers and academics, Peter Farley, Will Hargreaves, Andreas Skourtis and Fiona Watt.