Creative Peninsula → River Radio

Art Work Exeter's summer project for Exeter Custom House is River Radio - a community radio project that invites Exeter residents to explore the sounds and stories of the River Exe and bring them to life for listeners across the city - and across the world!

AWE is running a series of FREE creative artist-led workshops… but places are limited and booking up quickly. Sign up while they are available!

On Sunday 21st July...

Join poet and sound artist, Kerry Priest, as we explore the quayside, and think how language and water work as both a conduit and a container for meaning. We will spend the day foraging for words and sounds, leading towards a communal sound poem to be played on River Radio.

The workshops are suitable for people with lots of writing experience or none. They will be of particular interest to anyone interested in using sound and a chorus of voices in performance.

There will be plenty of time for creative writing, with prompts inspired by the historic quayside and the materiality of the eddies and flows of water. We will explore different types of listening as a means to create writing: Inner listening, outer listening, bodily listening. For our final piece, we will think about the voice in space and how resonance and echoes affect how we interact with the spoken word. We will create a communal 'polyphonic poetry' piece together to be broadcast 13th-15th September on Art Work Exeter's River Radio at Exeter Custom House.

Workshops are free to attend.

You are welcome to join for the whole day (please book on for both parts), or half day:

10am - 1pm: Foraging at the water's edge: Listening as a way into writing. Building up a cache of memories, sketches and images from the past, present and future of the quayside.

2pm - 5pm My Language is a River: Working towards a final communal performance. We will bring together threads from the day into a poetic sound collage piece influenced by the rhythms and motions of water.

Kerry Priest is an award-winning poet and interdisciplinary artist, working with text, performance, and sound design. She uses the principle of ‘polyphony’ as a form of entangled practice with the natural world and as a means to foreground the acoustic, psychological, and communal properties of language. Her pieces have appeared at the Royal Opera House, the Minack Theatre and on BBC Radio 3.

On Sunday 28th July...

Join composer Emma Welton to explore the soundscapes of the River Exe as it meets the quayside, and work with the river as a musical collaborator. The first workshop is suitable for people with some level of musical experience that play an instrument or sing. We will spend time with the sounds of what moves above and below the river's surface, asking how the different soundscapes of the river meet, compliment and interrupt our human sounds and music. We will test how our human sounds travel across, through and with the flows and eddies of the river.

Workshop 1. 10am-3pm (with an hour for lunch)
Letting the river into our music: Working in different sites along the quayside we will explore the river as a musical collaborator. Using our instruments and voices to sound out the river, and letting the river into our music to break open its potential, we’ll make music that moves between the familiar and the strange and wondrous.

This workshop is for musicians and singers with some experience - but you don't have to be a professional! Bring instruments you can carry, and a seat if you need one to be able to play. The most important thing to bring is your curiosity and readiness to explore your instrument (including voice if that’s your instrument) and the sounds of the river Exe habitat.

On Sunday 24th August...
Workshop 2. 9am - 11am
Sounding the river: We will walk together, listening carefully. We'll talk and learn more about the flows and eddies of the Exe as it meets the quayside. We'll listen to some of the strange voices of the river's underwater inhabitants and attempt to imagine the underwater symphony. We’ll explore the science of sound in water and air. We’ll take a sounding of the river’s health today by sampling its water and making our own acoustic observations. Learning from data collected by citizen scientist water testers, we’ll imagine how the river has sounded in the past, and how it could sound in the future. We’re likely to make a few sounds ourselves, and all our soundings will feed into a new piece being brought together by Emma Welton for River Radio.

This is suitable for people who are curious about experiencing a familiar place in a new way, by following our ears rather than our eyes.
The quayside terrain is level, mostly paving with some short grass. We’ll be walking approximately 1 kilometre, slowly, with pauses. Folding chairs will be available if you’ll need to sit rather than stand.
Meet at Exeter Custom House to begin the workshop. The workshop will be adapted to the weather if it’s very rainy.

Emma Welton is a composer and performs on violin and viola. With Icebreaker she has performed contemporary music internationally, including at New York City’s Carnegie Hall and the Lincoln Centre, with Brian Eno at the Brighton International Festival, and in London’s Science Museum Imax cinema. Emma co-curates with Tony Whitehead - A Quiet Night In, music nights exploring the creative possibilities in quiet/silence. In summer 2021 A Quiet Night In was commissioned by Exeter’s Outside the Box Festival to make at the end of the day, a devised piece for humans sounding with an outdoor habitat. In 2017 A Quiet Night In performance was recorded and broadcast by BBC Radio’s 3 ‘Exposure’, hosted by Verity Sharp, in a concert showcasing new and experimental music.

BOOK HERE

River Radio is part of Art Work Exeter’s cultural partners programme with Exeter Custom House funded by Exeter Canal and Quay Trust. This project is funded with the support of the Creative Arc Programme, an initiative funded by the University of Exeter, Exeter City Council and the UK government through the Shared Prosperity Fund.