Reflections on the 2024 Everyday Creativity Conference: Nick Ewbank

Aside from catching up with old friends, and meeting new people, and the content of the day itself of course, one of best bits of going to conferences is visiting new places, seeing new things. I’d never been to the venue for the 2024 Everyday Creativity conference before, and it turns out it’s a gem. Cecil Sharp House is a few minutes’ walk from Camden Town, nestled on one of those smart avenues that rise gently from the back of Regent’s Park up towards Primrose Hill; semi-detached villas going for a song at £8 million. The building opened in 1930 as the first dedicated folk arts centre in the UK, named in memory of Cecil Sharp; Fabian, musician, teacher, theosophist, prolific collector of English vernacular song and dance, Sharp had died in 1924. The building was hit by four bombs during the war, and, when they rebuilt it, they commissioned Ivon Hitchens to paint a huge mural on the wall of the main hall; twenty-one metres long, six metres high, it took him more than three years. So, it’s under Hitchens’s abstracted, mythical landscape in mellow pastoral colours that the conference plenaries take place: wild animals, nymphs and dryads seeming to dance alongside folk icons: Horn Dancers; the Queen of the May mounted on horseback; the Padstow ‘Obby ‘Oss lured forward by its Teaser.

Christopher Smith, Executive Chair of the Arts and Humanities Research Council, which funds the Everyday Creativity network, gave the opening keynote. Ordinary lives, he says, are the hardest to see. He spoke about Grenfell and how such an immensely creative and sophisticated community could become, tragically, invisible and unheard. And he said: “If I’m right that humanities is about humanity, not just humanism, then this is right where we should be – in this network – trying to find the way to help each other, from policy makers to practitioners, make it a little bit easier for us to flourish, a little bit harder for others to be left to falter.”

We need, he says, really to face up to the radical consequences of replacing a humanistic methodology with an insistence on the total humanity of humanities: “If we know we can’t see everyone, we need people to squint really hard to catch out of the corner of their eyes the most invisible people, and then to follow those figures to really see them.” Only then, he says, can we unlock what Marc Stears, in his book Out of the Ordinary, calls the “extraordinary redemptive value of everyday life”.

A roomful of squinters, we split into groups and disperse around the building. It’s impossible to capture four parallel strands running at once; twenty-three sessions crowded into a morning. All I can offer is fleeting questions:

When did you last notice your breath?

Will everyday language give us new poems that can build us a better place?

Can our unfolding impact wheel atomise the dimensions of everyday creativity?

How can we apprehend this entanglement of aesthetics and ecology?

Can allyship and advocacy in dance movement help trans men’s and cis men’s mental health?

Are we really to believe that VR is the ultimate empathy machine?

And how can we work together to support these many, many ways of making better health and care environments, better learning journeys, better communities, a better future?

It’s not about seeing the world through other eyes, says Conn Honohan. We need to be engaged witnesses: we need to bring our own sensibilities to bear.

Surely the revolution, as Kathryn Welch tells us, will be handmade.

In between the presentations, laptop slides freeze and then unfreeze; doors bang; tea trolleys clatter; coffee and pastries are consumed; introductions are made and vivid conversations are had.

And after lunch, Will Gompertz, former Arts Editor for the BBC, author of Think Like An Artist, urges us to place curiosity at the foundation of life.  His talk sweeps us from Édouard Manet to Marcel Duchamp to Theaster Gates, and poses tough questions over the tripartite relationship between art, the everyday, and our innate human creativity.

Ask yourself Duchamp’s four questions, Gompertz says: Why does it have to be beautiful?; Why does it have to be unique?; Why does it have to be made by an artist?; Putting the medium to one side for a moment, what’s the idea you’re trying to convey?

Then Mark Taylor shows us the data slides: the way we measure inequality, he says, matters. Who gets to choose?

And now a break from the slides: we’ve invited the evening celebrations to leak into our afternoon; these women, sitting on the stage where in a few hours their Creative Lives awards will be presented to them; Arlene Pryce unfolding her story of theatre-making in the mining communities of South Wales; masculinity, mental health, criminality, identities, relationships, gambling, class, power and unemployment.

Sir Nicholas Serota, Chair of Arts Council England, is up next. There’s been a lot of discussion, quite heated at times, he reminds us, playing out in the pages of newspapers and journals, on social media and on radio and television, in which access and excellence in the arts and culture are placed in opposition to one another. The huge range of activities that fall under everyday creativity, he tells us, are part of access. “The prize at stake for the winner, it is argued, is our nation’s creative and cultural soul.” But access and excellence are not mutually exclusive, he says: “We must recognize that everyone has the power to be creative, and that talent has the right to be nurtured wherever it is found, and there can be no doubt in my mind that there is excellence in everyday creativity”.

He says that excellence is defined as “the highest quality in both process and product”. But, naturally enough, all assessments of quality involve value judgements, and as Christopher Smith has not long since told us, quoting Elizabeth D Rockwell: “those who do not share the value judgements of the dominant indicators cannot be shown whether or to what extent their values are shared by the chosen policy”. There’s much room here for debate.

And now Jerri Daboo, Professor of Performance at Exeter, sums up for us. Issues of value, validation, visibility, representation, inclusion, and diversity were being discussed forty years ago, she reminds us. The flowers that push up and bloom through cracks in the pavement. Forty years on, what’s changed? “It’s not that these communities coming in have to adapt to us, but the fact that Britain itself has adapted, has changed, due to this shift in cultures coming in and different forms of creativity and creative expression”. Now we’re watching a video of Devon Morris dancers who create new choreographies based on the landscape and folklore of Dartmoor. One of the participants works at the Met Office: “In my spare time, I’m a climatologist”. For those of us who engage in these activities, Jerri Daboo says, maybe our day job is what we do on the side. These activities are the things we do because we love them.

Stand up, feel your body, adjures Lewis Hou as we reach the end; we’ve been sitting here and listening to words flow for much too long. He goes to the piano and plays a beautiful piece; musical closing remarks.

That’s it. No more presentations. Time to go home. The Creative Lives team have worked their socks off, but they’ve still got the dinner and the awards to go.

And alongside all the talking, starting in the morning and working all through the day, Gemma Cook, in overalls, down on the floor, amid swirls of charcoal, long screeds of paper filling with expressive marks, semi-human forms; reflective creative understands of the meanings we’ve been making, the questions we’ve been asking. Ivon Hitchens would have nodded and smiled.