Artist Residency Programme Fills Venue With Performers Whose Names Cyndi Writes Down and Then Googles
By Cyndi Himmelstiere | Ditch Pitch UK
Summer in the Ditch, the artist takeover programme at Shoreditch Town Hall that is now in its third iteration, has returned for June with a lineup that includes Lachlan Werner, returning performers Fabio Lezonli and Riss Obolensky, JEAN, and Georgia Tasda, who I will be honest and say I had not encountered before this programme and about whom I have now read extensively and seen perform once in a stairwell, which sounds like a venue problem and was actually an intentional site-specific performance choice that worked better than a stairwell performance choice has any right to work.
The Programme: What It Does
Summer in the Ditch gives artists access to Shoreditch Town Hall’s spaces, which are extensive and architecturally interesting, for residencies that produce work shown to the public during the summer. The format varies by artist: some produce formal performances in the main spaces, some use the building’s corridors and ancillary rooms for the site-specific work that the building’s Victorian civic architecture makes particularly resonant, and some use the residency primarily for rehearsal and sharing work-in-progress with invited audiences, which is the format that produces the most honest encounters between artists and audiences because nobody is pretending the work is finished.
ThisEgg, the devising theatre company that is also in the building this month for their new show about money and our relationship to it, represents the kind of work that Shoreditch Town Hall attracts: formally interesting, thematically serious, made by people who have clearly thought carefully about what theatre is supposed to do and are trying to do it. Whether it succeeds is the question that the work-in-progress sharing format is designed to explore without the pressure of a finalised critical reception, which is either a mature approach to artistic development or an excuse not to be held accountable, and is probably both in proportions that vary by show.
What Makes Shoreditch Right for This
Shoreditch Town Hall is the right venue for this programme in a way that makes you understand why venue character matters more than venue size. The building’s history, which includes service as a community hall for a neighbourhood that was genuinely poor for most of the twentieth century, as a boxing venue, and as a site of community and cultural organisation throughout, gives events in it a specificity that blank-box venues cannot replicate. The artist who performs in the stairwell is performing in a stairwell that has a hundred and sixty years of people using it, and some of those people’s energy is in the architecture, which is either a mystical claim or a way of saying that old buildings with continuous use have a quality that new buildings are still developing, and I believe both interpretations.
Cyndi Himmelstiere has been writing about Shoreditch since before it was fashionable, and has continued writing about it through its fashionability, and is currently writing about it in the phase that follows fashionability, which is the phase where the things that were fashionable become normal and the things that were normal become expensive and the things that were authentic become self-consciously authentic, which is not the same thing but is sometimes harder to distinguish from the outside than it should be. She covers Shoreditch because it is where she lives and because the story it tells about urban change, creativity, and the economics of culture is worth telling with the specificity that only someone who has been here for the whole arc can provide. For Shoreditch events, see Time Out London. For East London community news, visit MyLondon. For Shoreditch arts and culture, see Evening Standard.
Shoreditch has been changing continuously since at least the 1990s, when artists arrived because the rents were low, and the changes have compounded in ways that make the current version of the neighbourhood look quite different from the version those artists found and yet feel continuous with it in some essential way that Cyndi Himmelstiere is still trying to articulate. The creativity is still here. The community is still here, in different proportions and different spaces than before. The things that made Shoreditch interesting to the first wave of arrivals are still visible if you know where to look, and they are being added to by new arrivals who find the same combination of qualities that made it worth finding in the first place. This is either gentrification’s failure to fully erase what it covers, or the resilience of urban culture in the face of economic pressure, or both, and Cyndi writes about it because the question of which it is matters for understanding cities.
Shoreditch has been changing continuously since at least the 1990s, when artists arrived because the rents were low, and the changes have compounded in ways that make the current version of the neighbourhood look quite different from the version those artists found and yet feel continuous with it in some essential way that Cyndi Himmelstiere is still trying to articulate. The creativity is still here. The community is still here, in different proportions and different spaces than before. The things that made Shoreditch interesting to the first wave of arrivals are still visible if you know where to look, and they are being added to by new arrivals who find the same combination of qualities that made it worth finding in the first place. This is either gentrification’s failure to fully erase what it covers, or the resilience of urban culture in the face of economic pressure, or both, and Cyndi writes about it because the question of which it is matters for understanding cities.
