So what is the Creative Ensemble @ Saviours Event all about?

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Here is something that hopefully captures the essence of our work. Do get in touch if you have any questions or feel you have something of interest to offer to the symposium workshops!

Thank you for reading!

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:) Carrie

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Film makers weave with the imaginal and the everyday. They conjure the viewer into a world that will overlay onto the vision they each own. As with all art, this comes with the power to affect change. Film is a powerful medium.

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In truth, there is a conversation that happens between the everyday and the mythical all of the time. The ancients knew this and built their lives around iconic reverence of the way all aspects of life would interact. The way they would place monuments and marking of times of year, all communicated a significance to the wider web of everything. They consciously spoke and listened with the many realms. They were caretakers of the earth, keeping a balance, the original lawyers, the creative forces of the universe as their instrument, aware and interactive with the wider communication systems at play.

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I think that there is little that is human made that is as magical as projecting images with light through darkness, onto the screens of our physical world and to be able to dream with it. In these light drawn theatres, there is an opening to the liminal that happens, bringing with it the chance to transcend to another realm. It was filming the powerfully iconic Mood Singer scenes of Parallel Realms last year, on location in King's Cave on the Isle of Arran that I suddenly felt the chill of time travel as I imagined the torch lit carvings and pavings of these symbols in times gone by. Symbol maker met symbol maker. Suddenly the archetypal was timeless and I knew that these same codes and story fields keep repeating. It is through the power of art and film that we have the power to weave with the scripts on earth.

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Myth is a constant. It moves slowly, like icebergs. We are made of them. Some of them have embedded themselves nour cultural operations - and often not for the best!. For a long time as an artist and a writer I have playing with the idea of how to bring mythical story and archetypal beings of place into the everyday world and change it for the better. I have also been playing with the placing of therapeutic and compassionate models into systems to generate healthy communication systems and enhance creativity. This has been in the world of education and in the therpeutic work I oversee as a shamanic constellator and pluralistic counsellor. Recently I have brought both into the world of filmmaking.

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The Parallel Realms film is the beginning of showing this weave. It brings in a notion that grief and mental health struggle can be the openers to a new way of seeing and interacting with the worlds. It is beautifully filmed by cinematographer Ryan Hunt. On our film sets a pluralistic counselling model was applied to the ethos and way we worked. I discovered from the onset organising the shoot around the original questionnaires of preferences and goals, that we were all so diverse in our needs and ways of working. I also discovered that we each had a curiosity to learn about the roles of different members of the film set. Showing and sharing became part of the mix. Being open about all of this from the onset and making provision for one another created a relational depth with palpable results. Our findings are shown in the autoethnographical films Becoming Geese that are shown as part of the Creative Ensemble installation.

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The notion of Creative Ensemble is that we can only find things out collectively. Mystery and discovery reveal themselves when we don't really know what is going to become. So we may as well all be open to the discovery together. But mystery and discover do need well organised, skilled, healthy and communicative teams to set up the task of making the expedition. Creative Ensemble @ Saviours is as much as taking you into the creation that our adventure making Parallel Realms took us on, also opening up a space for sharing and exploration of what true collaboration and mythical and everyday interweaving might look like.

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Over the weekend, we will premiere Parallel Realms (Private view with drink); have a Saviour's Shorts space for other films that have similar concerns and themes at their heart; open up an exhibition space that will show our findings so far and take you into a sensory experience of the cave. Then, as a way of keeping the thread flowing we will have two symposium workshop spaces, for up to twenty people, which we will film and sound record to create more findings.

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Creative Ensemble is about finding out what the power of working together creatively can bring. It is about seeing ourselves as part of a wider web of creative expression that moves through the archetypal and through time. Bringing the cave, the ancestors and their symbols and sounds into the space will be an invitation to the invisible realms and the cast of a timeless story to take our place with us. I wonder what we will discover and uncover about the scope and role of filmmaking in Scotland today and about the stories that need to be told?

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You are all invited! Filmmakers, film lovers, promoters of diversity and a need to create new models, actors, artists, writers, therapists, educators, anthropologists, historians, anyone who is interested. Get your tickets today! It's all free!