Longdendale Lights: Perspectives (I) and Longdendale Lights: Perspectives (II)., presented at 'Cross, Multi, Intra, Trans conference

A Night at Shinning Clough: 

An introduction to From Longdendale Valley to Shinning Clough

Thanks to Laura-Gray and Judy. Judy is the midwife of this new work, a collaboration between myself and American poet Laura-Gray Street, & American poet Ann Fisher-Wirth and painter Barbara Howey. We met only last night in person, after months emails and communication. 

We were set the challenge, in the context of the exhibition In the Open and this conference to produce a work together. 

The straight forward information for my collaboration with Laura-Gray is that at the end of this we produced a new time-based work, From Longdendale Lights to Shinning Clough. For me shortened to (From Shinning Clough). And Laura-Gray and I batted back possible subject-matter back and forth, agreeing that whatever we choose it would need to reference, or wholly embrace a site-oriented approach of either Sheffield city itself or the environs or wider region. 

After looking at legal battles over trees in Sheffield, underground rivers, (which as much as I loved the images, I saw I admit, and Laura-Gray was sensitive enough to pick up, I balked at carrying camera and sound equipment into claustrophobic underground tunnels which might flood. Finally, we settled on a Valley between Sheffield and Manchester: the Longdendale Valley.

Longesdale Valley
Longdendale Valley has been a place where for centuries odd lights have been seen, occasionally. 

There are various theories about why the lights exists: 

• Of course, there has been rumors and folklore the lights are the work of ghosts, spirits, wil-o-the-whisps

• and UFO’s, that the lights are somehow connected to methane and other marsh gases from rotting vegetable and animal matter bubbling up through the bogs, which ignited can produce wispy flames or balls of fire that flit about. 

• There are thought it is also caused by fissures opened up by mining. 
• It seems they are likely there is a kind of natural geological phenomena, 

• the ‘earthlights’ theory is the common one now; 
apparently, it could be caused by connection between lights and the "faulted geology of the regions in which they appear. Although no clear mechanism at work which scientists are entirely happy with, the theory suggests the lights are the product of a buildup of electrical charge in areas of geological stress, rather than being directly caused by earthquakes or tremors. 
We noted the work of David Clarke, from Sheffield Hallam University, which indicated “the lights are symptoms of the earth’s internal traumas, springing into life as electrons are slowly released into the air and possibly through the water table as strain waxes and wanes in zones of geological faulting”.

So, the Longdenale landscape, with its stories of semi magical lights, already had a force to it, was in fact energized by cosmic forces, or the idea of this, which I hoped we could translate into words and images…. Probably without ever really seeing a Longdendale light. 

It also helps us that the topology of the area of the Longdendale valley is so nicely named: 

Much of the activity for our work happens around ‘The Shining Clough’.
Also, the Lantern Pike
Bleaklow
Woodhead Pass
Devil’s Elbow 
Glossop
Lantern Lane
Tintwistle 
Torside Clough

Onto the nature of a Cross disciplinary collaboration itself: 

Laura-Gray and I did settle on a loose working method, one formed of course by two strangers, working across continents and time zones. 

Laura-Gray did an initial period of research on possible sites for the project. 

I responded and indicated some specific locations, like Longdendale, which we then burrowed into, albeit virtually, from a distance. 

We came up with a series of locations and sighting of phenomenon but were clear the project was in no way about the literal search for ‘spooky lights’, but that Laura-Gray’s words might illuminate precisely what my camera does not see, and that this gap, between what is seen and what is heard might be a productive one for us. 

I was also interested in eventually taking Laura-Gray’s poem back, to the location of its subject, and in figuring a way to enact a performative reading of Laura-Gray’s words, trying to find a method that took on something of the dynamic rhythm of the words that might also indicate another way to move and situate a camera in a landscape; that tried not to simply frame a subject as a picturesque stable site of meaning but connect in some meaningful way to the energies and flows of the subject-matter. 

I liked the idea of taking Laura-Gray’s lines of text into the landscape of the Valley, combining this with my own literal lines of walking and traversing the hillsides and Cloughs of Longdendale Valley, and including in this a staging, adding a visual line of storytelling. After all, my own practice in its various ways does explore the ways narrative is entangled in place. 

What might it mean to situate a reading of Laura-Gray’s poem in the places which are the poems subject? 
In late April I then went to the Valley on a ‘recce’, taking a series of images, video sequences, sound and stills, also maps and location points to present to Laura, intended to provoke a response. 

A rhythm of ‘call and response’, Iterative cycles of exchange, began in earnest. 

To my surprise Laura-Gray decided to respond by travelling to the Peak District in May to walk the Pennine Way. What commitment, I thought! 

We agreed that on July 11th, so in fact very recently, Laura-Gray would send me her text. 

It arrived. Laura-Gray’s lines of text were not linear, but meandered, crossed histories, locations, and times. A document of several pages and sections, spiraling out from the literal subject matter to take on other histories and times, and then driving my focus right back down to the earth and peat bog, rocks and matter below my feet. Along with it was a sound recording of Laura-Gray’s voice reading the poem. 

In mid-July I went back to Longdenadale, having selected parts of it that it not directly describes what the camera could record but reached for accounts of the Longdendale lights themselves, but also at times had an ecstatic response to the boggy, craggy, decayed and decaying mass of matter and phenomenon of that place. 

I then, with some help, crawled up hillsides and through bracken, l lay down and stood near to the dam, and recorded, again and again, parts of the poem until I was familiar with it rhythms. Always aware of the problems of transposing literary form into visually rhythmic structure, in the present tense. The languages and structures of another medium: the landscape as narrated by Laura-Gray but enacted, performed, by me.  - The edit was put together in record time which you will shortly see.

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Observations on cross disciplinary collaboration:

• Although Laura-Gray and I worked together we adhered to our disciplines but surrendered to the interpretations and selection we each made of the work we presented to each other. 

• I had the chance to witness Laura-Gray’s discipline-specific response to our shared subject-matter, in the context of a writer and poet; to not just view her tackle her subject matter but whilst doing that I got to see how she was able to negotiate across the language of her discipline, its methods and approaches. And visa-versa.

• I had the chance to see how see how we both carved out a new space, to establish a new ground for our collaboration.  

• And that ground, literally in Longdendale valley, but also by analogy, our project occupied a shifting ground, and one that appears to be inherent in cross-disciplinary practice. All creative practice is synonymous with doing and making, and as Tim Ingold argues, the thinking is implicit in the doing. Does this then mean that ‘doing’ together this is also indicative of thinking together? 

•  Laura-Gray and I were - rather undeclared to each other - united in an act of creative surrender to the resonances and shared territory of each other’s practices. We were joined in following the forces and flows of materials, of the valley but also of the qualities of our disciplines. And it seemed to be this which brought the form of our new shared work into being. 

• Our collaboration involved improvisation, and an opening up of connections. But it was also a form of co-respondence - co-responding to each other and the landscape and terrain of the Longdendale Valley. Taking as our subject not just a place, but the fluxes and flows of materials present, or mythologized as present, in the Longdendale Valley.

Anne-Marie Creamer
2017

Brief summary

For the In the Open Exhibition American poet Laura-Gray Street and British artist Anne-Marie Creamer propose a new short time-based work which takes as its subject the ‘Longdendale lights’, which are said to originate from a valley in the moorlands of Derbyshire, not far from Sheffield. The valley has gained a reputation for strange phenomena including witness accounts of encounters with unexplained lights, especially around an area known as the Shinning Clough and the Bleaklow Mountains. While the valley has been regarded as a site of folklore it has now been suggested the phenomena may be caused by the earth’s internal traumas; literally in an area of geological fault pressure can grow on underlying rocks leading to a build-up of electrical charge released as luminosity. Using the topology of the valley as a starting point we will develop images, prose and recorded actions that will both search for and reflect on the implications of the earthlights of Longdendale. 

Laura-Grey Street & Anne-Marie Creamer, March 2017. 

Practically:
Practically the work will likely be a single channel short digital film, with spoken narration or speech, to be devised by Laura-Gray Street. Visuals and actions to be developed by Anne-Marie Creamer. The work will need a video projector or monitor, ideally with speakers. Headphones can be considered. 

Biog:
Laura-Grey Street is an American poet. She is the author of Pigment and Fume (Salmon Poetry, 2014) and co-editor with Ann Fisher-Wirth of The Ecopoetry Anthology (Trinity University Press, 2013). She has been the recipient of poetry prizes from The Greensboro Review, the Dana Awards, the Southern Women Writers Conference, Isotope: A Journal of Literary Science and Nature Writing, and Terrain.org: A Journal of the Built and Natural Environments. Her work has been published in The Colorado Review, Poecology, Poet Lore, Poetry Daily, Hawk & Handsaw, Many Mountains Moving, amongst others. She is an associate professor of English and directs the Creative Writing Program at Randolph College in Lynchburg, Virginia.

Biog:
Anne-Marie Creamer is a British artist based in London whose work experiments with cinematic and theatrical forms using digital film, fiction, drawing, written films, filmed staged scenarios, and live voice-over. For Anne-Marie narrative is complexly entangled in place - always underpinned by her interest in the relationship between representation and presence.  Anne-Marie's work will feature in a forthcoming solo exhibition at the Foyle Project space, the Sir John Soane's Museum, London, 2018. Her work has been exhibited at: FRAC Bretagne, (France), Exeter Phoenix Galley, Exeter, UK), Sogn og Fjordane Kunstmuseum (Norway), Palm Springs Art Museum, Kunstvereniging Diepenheim (The Netherlands). She received the Derek Hill Scholarship in Drawing at British School at Rome, (2012).  She was educated at Middlesex University & the Royal College of Art and lives in London where she is a Lecturer at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London.