Gwyl Metamorffosis Festival

How is Utopias Bach coping with emerging from lockdown? Well, we started with a mini-festival, “Gwyl Metamorffosis” (20-27 June), in Bangor/Porthaethwy, experimenting with ‘post(?)’ pandemic formats for creating/showing/sharing creativity, and most of all, perhaps, experiencing community again.

If you missed the festival you can see/hear/read what we got up to here, gan gynnwys blog gan Seran Dolma, ein Awdur Preswyl, yma

And whether you did or didn’t attend, you can try out this guided visualisation by Sarah Pogoda for creating your own ‘Imaginary Museum of Gwyl Metamorffosis’ here.

Guided visualisations

One of the things we’ve been using quite bit so far (perhaps because everything is, as our ‘Participant Observer’, Francis Williams says - “apparitional”), are guided visualisations, trying out different ways to free our imagination/shake off our normative ways of thinking. These are all still in development, and all feedback, alternative versions and ideas are welcome. If you’d like to have a go, or hear some of the results, here are a few links to explore:

• Trawsffurfiad - listen to the (bilingual) results of our shape shifting workshop in June

• Work with schools - see/hear some of the results of our guided visualisation workshops with Ysgol Siôn Cwilt and Ysgol y Ffridd

• Three different guided visualisations to try out - have a go, let us know what you think! If you have another angle you’d like to try out, or to amend any aspect/create one in a different language, we’d love to hear from you.

Arbrofion/Experiments

Others might call these ‘projects’, but one of the things we are trying to do with Utopias Bach is to work with the idea of ‘not knowing/not being sure’ - of making small scale experiments, and learning from them, rather than large-scale dictats and blanket solutions.

You are warmly invited to join some of our live/developing ‘experiments’ … or to create your own (personal or collective) experiments.

Collaboratory - learning, sharing and documenting

The Utopias Bach Collaboratory is a diverse, bilingual, action-learning community open to all who are interested in Utopias Bach. We are indivdiuals, artists, ‘community connectors’, academics, writers and invited participants (and often a combination) from Wales and internationally, who work together to generate ideas, support projects and develop a culture of personal and professional development by sharing skills and knowledge in co-created art practice, working with communities and working at small scale with radical imagination.

We currently seeking people who have ideas for a topic or process or focus of some kind for our future (monthly-ish) meetings, and any ideas for documenting the results. We even have a bit of funding to support you in taking on a hosting and/or documenting role.

Please join us! See here for the latest events