Joy Workshops
Workshop, Recording, Performance (2019 and ongoing)
Benji Jeffrey and Penny Klein are frequent collaborators of mine who have a mutual interest in centring joy, enthusiasm and friendship within an art practice. We view our shared work as a test bed for expressing our ideas in a way we describe as 'quick and dirty'. Nothing we do is ever really 'finished'. It is a proposal for ways of engaging with creativity, particularly as a partnership, sometimes practically, sometimes utopian.
We have developed educational workshops from this way of working and have, to date, worked with students at Goldsmiths University, Royal College of Art, Chelsea College of Art and the University of the Underground, as well as running a workshop at Supernormal Festival.
This first video is a visual manifesto for our way of working.
1 | We are friends and we want to enjoy our friendship
2 | We want to dance, sing, draw, play and fiddle
3 | We want to share our enjoyment
4 | We want to talk face to face
5 | We will trust each other’s vision
6 | We will be patient
7 | We will coax each other out of fear and anxiety
8 | We will be bold in the confusion we feel
9 | It will come from the heart
Workshop, Recording, Performance (2019 and ongoing)
Benji Jeffrey and Penny Klein are frequent collaborators of mine who have a mutual interest in centring joy, enthusiasm and friendship within an art practice. We view our shared work as a test bed for expressing our ideas in a way we describe as 'quick and dirty'. Nothing we do is ever really 'finished'. It is a proposal for ways of engaging with creativity, particularly as a partnership, sometimes practically, sometimes utopian.
We have developed educational workshops from this way of working and have, to date, worked with students at Goldsmiths University, Royal College of Art, Chelsea College of Art and the University of the Underground, as well as running a workshop at Supernormal Festival.
This first video is a visual manifesto for our way of working.
1 | We are friends and we want to enjoy our friendship
2 | We want to dance, sing, draw, play and fiddle
3 | We want to share our enjoyment
4 | We want to talk face to face
5 | We will trust each other’s vision
6 | We will be patient
7 | We will coax each other out of fear and anxiety
8 | We will be bold in the confusion we feel
9 | It will come from the heart
These next videos are works initially made for ourselves which have became part of our pedagogical practices. The idea is simple; one person creates a video which they pass to the next. The second person adds a layer before sending to a third who does the same and completes the video. I have employed this technique with students as a proposal for a DIY approach to making, and I would recommend you try it with a couple of pals.
Isolation videos (2020)
The final example of our practice is similar to the last, but rather than adding on top, each person responds to the previous video with something to be added at the end. This can be done with as many people as you like, but in this example it's just the three of us. Within this chain you only ever see the last video, not the one that came before that. We completed the version below as a prelude to a workshop on Joy, Enthusiasm and Friendship at Supernormal festival which included a performance of Pauline Oliveros' Tuning Meditation, an exquisite corpse drawing circle and a group choreography session.
Isolation videos (2020)
The final example of our practice is similar to the last, but rather than adding on top, each person responds to the previous video with something to be added at the end. This can be done with as many people as you like, but in this example it's just the three of us. Within this chain you only ever see the last video, not the one that came before that. We completed the version below as a prelude to a workshop on Joy, Enthusiasm and Friendship at Supernormal festival which included a performance of Pauline Oliveros' Tuning Meditation, an exquisite corpse drawing circle and a group choreography session.
Documentation from Workshop, Supernormal Festival,
Oxfordshire, Saturday 3rd August, 2019(Photos: Eleni Parousi)
Joy! Enthusiasm! Friendship, 2019
Benji, Rose and Penny met through the South London Art School scene and began collaborating in 2009 as a band called Wap Wap Wow, later Rhosyn. Our collective practice is based on a foundation of friendship. The comfort, support, enthusiasm and joy we share is what makes us want to create together. Using joy as a tool for disarming and tackling the troubles we have between ‘being’ and ‘appearing’ in the world.
Why does it feel like a novelty to make work with your friends? Would we make time for this otherwise? Why is there not time? What will we make if we get the time? How valued is real friendship in the arts? We realise that friendship is often fetishised within the context of art making and its movements, in the margins of art history, yet, in all its messy glory, not often the main topic.
We will be initiating a new collective work with joy prioritised over productivity. Doing more than thinking. Playing as a way to overcome anxiety. A chance to locate, explore and relish in our own personal appetites for enjoyment and discuss the barriers we have to finding that euphoric glee. Will it be possible? That blissful feeling can be hard to articulate but we're going to try.
We will start out with a tuning meditation as a way to find each other and find our feet on the ground. As a group of friends we must trust each other and let each other play. An opening exercise in attentiveness and letting go. Then we will draw an exquisite corpse in which everyone’s idiosyncrasies will come through but ultimately the end result will be bigger than the individual. A time to contemplate and discuss our relationships to joy. Then let’s take this drawing, this still and quiet exercise, and turn it into a choreographed dance. Let's get bodily!
We will become a group of friends and discuss our experiences of joy personally and collectively. There's no right. There's no wrong. There's just us.