The River Bank is a relevant topic for us 24/7, and therefore we try to attract an audience, help develop current projects, for this we buy sociology paper, and also communicate with historians, cultural experts, etc., in order to provide the most complete answers to the questions before we are.

More Films From the River Bank – Saturday 8th June – GlenFrome Primary School, Eastville, Bristol

Posted on May 21, 2013 by Lindsey McEwen

More Films by the River Bank Programme_FINALCOPY

MSW_Film afternoon flier_8th June 2013

We are running an afternoon of Frome-themed films as part of the extension to the Multi-story water project. The event is entitled: ‘More films from the River Bank’, and will take place in GlenFrome Primary School (Eastville, Bristol) on Saturday 8th June, 1-4 pm. On request, this is a re-run of the films shown under the M32 during the Multi-story-water Performance weekend in September 2012, with some new additions. Additions will include a new film made by a local filmmaker in the Eastville community that draws on local water stories, and digital stories created from the oral history interviews we gathered as a key part of the Multi-story water project. The event is free and there will be free tea and home-made cakes and refreshments. Please join us if you can, and feel free to pass this invitation on. The draft programme of films is provided as an attachment to this post.

Best wishes, Lindsey, Jess, Jo and the project team

A date for the diary: ‘More Films by the River Bank’ – Saturday 8th June 2013

Posted on March 28, 2013 by Lindsey McEwen

Due to several requests from people in Eastville, we are going to have a repeat showing of the Multi-Story-Water-Eastville films and audio (originally screened underneath the M32) in Glen Frome Primary School (tbc) on Saturday afternoon 8^th June 2013. There will be free refreshments and homemade cakes. We are working with a local film maker to produce a new film about Eastville and the River Frome in the spirit of some of the early films by Mervyn Upton. We are also adding some new digital stories (short audio clips with images), produced with Eastville residents focusing on their memories and local knowledge of the River Frome.

We are now looking for community members to help us with the development of the film and the film showing on the 8^th June. You can help in a variety of ways: by suggesting scenes and stories about the River Frome at Eastville that could form part of the new film; by offering photographs of Eastville and the River Frome that could be included in the digital stories; or by offering to be part of the film.

We are working to ensure that the Multi-Story-Water-Eastville project provides a legacy of resources that can be accessed and added to. With the individual’s agreement all digital stories will be lodged on the Multi-Story-Water-Eastville website and also on the Bristol Stories project website.

Please get in touch at . We look forward to hearing from you.

Best wishes, Lindsey

Lindsey McEwen, University of the West of England, Bristol.

Working with GlenFrome Primary School, Eastville

Posted on March 28, 2013 by Lindsey McEwen

We continued working with GlenFrome Primary School on river project-work up to Christmas. The children had a river day on the River Frome above Eastville Lake on 8^th November 2012 and put on a great show of their work at the School on 10^th December 2012. Thank you to everyone who supported that event. The following week, the children staged the same exhibition at the Create Centre, in central Bristol. Many thanks to Glen Frome School, and Lisa Worgan and Alys Parker (Real Ideas Organisation) for their work on this part of the project. A practical toolbox (A River Topic: How can we tell people about the power of Rivers and Flooding?) produced from this school work is now being shared with other Bristol schools. Please get in touch at if you would like further information.

Update: Photographs and audio from the Multi-Story Water, Eastville Performance Weekend

Posted on March 28, 2013 by Lindsey McEwen

All the photographs from the Performance Weekend are on the project website. Many thanks to Jess Allen (Arts Facilitator) for getting these posted.

We now have copy of the oral history excerpts/ community narratives that were interwoven with music during the Promenade Dance-Circus Performance on Sunday 30^th September 2012. If anyone would like a copy on CD, please contact: . The music has been removed for copyright reasons. In November 2012, Ali Crowther (Streets Alive) contacted some residents about their memories of the Performance Weekend and the project more generally. If you have any further feedback that you would like to add now – looking back at the activities and your engagement with living with the River Frome – please email us at .

FREE! M32 Pillar Painting and Design Workshop Sun 16th Sept 12-4 (drop in)

Posted on September 10, 2012 by Jess Allen

Please come along and join us at this street art workshop this Sunday – we’ll be at the Cottrell Road entrance to Eastville Park (other side of bridge from Merchants Arms/Hungry Horse on Stapleton Road) from 12-4… you can drop in for as much or little time as you’d like.

FREE PHOTO COMP – DEADLINE EXTENDED to FRI 14th SEPT

Posted on September 2, 2012 by Jess Allen

The deadline for our extreme weather photography competition has been extended to Friday 14th September. Please do send us your entries – it is FREE and you could win a prize including £20 Amazon/iTunes vouchers!

The competition details are given below. Good luck!

Calling ALL photographers of Eastville, whether you use a disposable camera, phone or SLR! The Multi-Story Water Project invites you to submit your photographs on the theme of Extreme Weather in the UK. From last winter’s big freeze to this summer’s flash floods – how did you record or experience the weird and wonderful weather patterns that have frustrated, flummoxed and fascinated us over the past few years? Or, thinking completely outside the box, what else does ‘extreme weather’ mean to you?

Your entries will be displayed outdoors at the celebratory Multi-Story Water Weekend, 29-30^thSeptember.

You can submit up to 3 photos per person. Please state when and where taken, plus a sentence or two about what inspired you to take it/them. (The Guardian In Pictures weekly competition is full of great examples of creative photographic responses to a theme)

PRIZES will be awarded to a winner and a runner-up in each competition, and include£20 Amazon/iTunes vouchers.

CLOSING DATE
Friday 14^th September

SUBMISSION Entries should be submitted by email or post with name and contact details to or
Multi-Story Water Project
c/o Nancy Campbell
Faculty of Environment & Technology (FET)
UWE Bristol
Frenchay Campus
Coldharbour Lane
Bristol
BS16 1QY

Remember, the competitions open to all ages. Winning photos will be selected by a judging panel that will include representatives from the local community, the Environment Agency, UWE and Bristol City Council.

TWO FREE ARTS COMPETITIONS!

Posted on July 16, 2012 by Jess Allen

Just when you were running out of things to do on rainy days this summer, Multi-Story Water has paddled to the rescue with TWO, FREE arts competitions for ALL ages, with a chance to win £20 of iTunes/Amazon vouchers in each one. Interested? Read on…

1. DESIGN A POSTER!
Do you like to draw and design? Are you passionate about celebrating the River Frome? Do you want to see your art work shown around Eastville this September?

If so, then we need you to design an eye-catching, river-themed poster for the Multi-Story Water Weekend 29^th-30^th September! The winning design will be used to promote this celebratory weekend of events including: dance and circus performances around the river and under the M32, storytelling, science and wildlife river walks, community film and photography exhibition, street art, face-painting and more!

Your design should be A4 portrait size and you should remember to include:

title of the weekend – Multi-Story Water Weekend!
dates – Saturday & Sunday, 29^th-30^th September
and please leave some space for us to add our logo, web address and final details about the events and locations…

The winning designs will be used to produce the official event posters, but we will share all entries on the website and also endeavour to display them during the final weekend.

(If you’d like some help with layout ideas for your poster, you can see an example of one of our earlier posters here)

2. PHOTOGRAPHY COMPETITION – EXTREME WEATHER
Calling ALL photographers of Eastville, whether you use a disposable camera, phone or SLR! The Multi-Story Water Project invites you to submit your photographs on the theme of Extreme Weather in the UK. From last winter’s big freeze to this summer’s flash floods – how did you record or experience the weird and wonderful weather patterns that have frustrated, flummoxed and fascinated us over the past few years? Or, thinking completely outside the box, what else does ‘extreme weather’ mean to you?

Your entries will be used to accompany live performance and/or to produce a slideshow that will be projected outdoors at the celebratory Multi-Story Water Weekend, 29-30^th September.

PRIZES will be awarded to a winner and a runner-up in each competition, and include £20 Amazon/iTunes vouchers.

CLOSING DATES
POSTER Monday 20^th August
PHOTOS Friday 7^th September
(Please note earlier date for poster to allow us to get it produced in time to promote the September event!)

SUBMISSION Entries to either competition should be submitted by post OR email with name and contact details to:
Multi-Story Water Project
c/o Nancy Campbell
Faculty of Environment & Technology (FET)
UWE Bristol
Frenchay Campus
Coldharbour Lane
Bristol
BS16 1QY

Please label your envelope/email ‘POSTER’ or ‘PHOTO’ (or both if you are entering together!)

Remember, the competitions are open to all ages. Winning designs and photos will be selected by a judging panel that will include representatives from the local community, the Environment Agency, UWE and Bristol City Council.

Frome in the Room – Arts Workshop 16th June

Posted on July 15, 2012 by Jess Allen

The Multi-Story Water arts process officially set sail last month (it’s taken a while for this story to float downstream onto the blog!) with the first workshop at Glenfrome School on Saturday 16th June. A big thank you to everyone who came along and shared their enthusiasm for all things riparian.

Using a heady mix of scrapstore delights, scissors, glue and that other great universal adhesive (imagination not Pritt-Stick), each group created their own artistic representation of the Frome-in-the-Room. Rivers sprung over and under tables, which became topographical features, weirs and waterfalls, or concrete bridges to carry busy motorways. Water flowed into and out of tunnels, whirlpools spun mercilessly, canoeists dropped off the edge of the falls, trees sprung up – and fell down – while, in peaceful stretches amongst the lush vegetation, kingfishers perched and wildlife calmly flourished. It was clear that the river was very present in the creative imagination of the residents of Eastville.

After an indoor picnic lunch, the school gym floor became a boat-building yard and driftwood sticks (collected by me from Aberystwyth beach, the day after the flash floods there on June 9/10th), seaweed, willow from a Fromeside tree in Eastville Park, leaves, and raffia were used to create rafts, boats and crafts to be floated down the Frome.

Using a shopping trolley (one that we’d captured after it had gone feral in the Napier Road underpass) that was speedily converted into a pirate ship (thanks to the genius of Read and Kath), we transported the miniature boats down to the park. It was a soggy crew of rain-coated pirates who processed through the rain behind it, but all the boats proved river-worthy and floated off downstream, though the willows near Stapleton Bridge may have proved too difficult a bankside obstacle to navigate.

We ended the day – courtesy of Chrissy and Justin (thank you!) – with a sneak peak at the Frome as it runs between Cottrell and Heath Roads. Kath told us it was like a ‘Heathrow airport’ for kingfishers earlier in the summer. But they didn’t get their raincoats on to give us a display. But maybe, just maybe they will be making a special guest appearance later on in the project…. (guesses on the back of a postcard)

A huge thank you to all who attended and especially to Mrs O’Callaghan and Glenfrome School for providing a fantastic venue.

Please keep watching this space for the next events in the autumn, and and please feel free to keep adding suggestions or ideas for other river-related arts and performance workshops you might like to take part in or lead, as we progress towards our final celebratory weekend on 29-30 September.

In the following images, you should be able to find, creative culverts, the M32, freshwater crabs, canoes, rafts, desert islands, great crested newts, waterfalls, whirlpools and water snakes, stick-boats with leaf sails, a pirate ship shopping trolley and a boat launch…

with thanks to Chrissy and Steve for the additional photos…

ar ôl y llifogydd 2

Posted on June 13, 2012 by Jess Allen

On a more positive note, with all the flood debris including lots of freshwater inland wood, reeds and leaves washed up on the beach, I went down to collect some for our boat-making session at the first Multi-Story arts workshop at Glenfrome School this weekend.

I thought I’d take advantage of some rare sun on the beach to practice designing, making and launching a boat…

sea weed rigging

under the jetty

deciding where to launch (sea weed leash so we didn’t lose it! it will be coming to the workshop on Sat!)

it floats!

I’ve collected some weird and wonderful materials from Welsh seashore and Bristolian riverside, I look forward to working with all the budding boat-builders of Bristol to see what kind of varied craft they come up with to float down the Frome on Saturday.

Photos by Sara Penrhyn Jones (diolch!!)

ar ôl y llifogydd ~ after the floods

Posted on June 13, 2012 by Jess Allen

“I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river
Is a strong brown god – sullen, untamed and intractable,
Patient to some degree, at first recognised as a frontier;
Useful, untrustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce;
Then only a problem confronting the builder of bridges.
The problem once solved, the brown god is almost forgotten
By the dwellers in cities – ever, however, implacable.
Keeping his seasons, and rages, destroyer, reminder
Of what men choose to forget…”

T. S. Eliot The Dry Salvages | Four Quartets (excerpt)

A few years ago, I made a durational performance piece little bird, listening with my mum (in her 70s) which we periodically revive at different venues. While I dance and recite from memory T. S Eliot’s Four Quartets, she tells family stories to the audience over mobile phone from Aberystwyth, where she lives and I grew up. The stories are linked to the images from text and the place these poems occupy in our lives. In this way, the poems link us through time and space.

The third quartet – called The Dry Salvages – is associated with the element of water, and these particular words above have been racing through my head this weekend.

Coming back home to work with some local dancers in a remote woodland centre further down the coast on Friday, I was amazed by what I returned to on Saturday. We emerged muddy and unkempt from the sodden woods where we’d been dancing (blissfully, with no mobile signal) to sudden miles of closed roads, traffic tailbacks, RNLI dinghies, police coastguards, helicopters and apocalyptic scenes. Five feet of water racing through the main street in Talybont, houses flooded, caravan parks submerged, bridges bulging, animals washed up on the beach. The statistics were growing exponentially like Chinese whispers – by the time I got home after an hour in traffic crawling the last 3 miles in to town, mum was telling me that 1000 people had been airlifted (it was about 150) but, still it was shocking. My old school opposite my mum’s house was set up as a refuge for the flood victims, many of them holidaying in caravan parks along the River Leri which runs into the sea at Borth.

When I first started working for the Multi-Story Water project, I remarked to the team that I’d never had much experience of flooding until I moved to Herefordshire (the Wye floods quite regularly and rapidly, usually in response to heavy rainfall in Mid-Wales!) because ‘it nevers floods in Aberystwyth’… How strange that I am eating those words now, in the middle of the project. How strange that I’ve been looking at pictures of the River Frome in flood, filming the open sluice gates and then seeing different brown water rushing across familiar childhood roads and submerging the caravan sites that, before they altered the water mains pressure, used to reduce our tap water to a trickle in the summer…

When I was learning Welsh at school, our teacher Mrs Jones used to remind us (in a probably rather un-feminist way) that the gender of the word ‘tywydd’ (weather) was feminine because ‘it is so unpredictable, like women’. Extending the negative stereotype, the word for flooding itself (llifogydd) is masculine, perhaps because it is so destructive a force. These events have really brought home to me (literally) just how unpredictable, rapid and destructive those things can be.

A strong brown god… the River Frome and the River Leri

(from http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2012/06/09/article-2156782-1385F89C000005DC-974_964x643.jpg)