Dear
LUTSF
Lisa
Ullman Travelling Scholarship Fund - Report
Please accept my humble apologies for not forwarding
this report earlier – and thank you for granting me the chance to forward it
now.
The opportunity to go to
Many thanks for your organisation’s support of me in
this fundamental personal journey.
Yours
sincerely,
Katrina
Carter
I was awarded a grant of £450 to travel to the
- To discover the lost world of my Palestinian Grandmother, seeking
stories, music, dance and imagery that could aid the furtherance of
understanding for my passion for the
- To meet with three diverse contemporary organisations: Jerusalem
Circus, Al Kasaba Theatre & Cinematique and Dar al Sonun
to gain an understanding into current Israeli and Palestinian contemporary
practice;
- To see if there were any correlations between my work with
disaffected young people in
I spent two emotionally charged weeks travelling
around
I
entered a room full of strangers, the youngest was 5 with the oldest into his
70s; their voices sang musically in a language I didn’t understand but their
faces smiled at me, followed by arms wanting to touch me, to welcome me, hug me
and kiss me: “Just like Trishy, just like Trishy”… at which point the tears just gushed out and I
realised that here I was in the bosom of a family that I hadn’t really believed
existed.
This
is not the place to detail the familial tales that were unfurled, nor is it the
place to examine the complexities of the continuing conflict that haunts so
many lives on all sides of the political spectrum, other than how it impacted
on my time and research that was generously co-funded by the Travelling
Scholarship Fund.
In a way my journey and research failed from the
start; but that is not to say that the time was wasted or that lessons haven’t
been learned. I failed in fulfilling
some of the criteria I set myself in my application simply because I hadn’t
understood the power of family and culture when time and space have been so
constrained. I set out on a personal quest
to discover more about who I was, where I came from and what this life-long
passion for
I had fears that my unmet family would be too busy
in their own lives and concerns to be interested in me and mine, so paid little
heed to what impact I may have had upon them.
This selfish drive for self-determination smacked me straight in the
face on first meeting – such generosity of spirit and open heartedness struck
me to the core; how could I possibly contemplate turning these experiences into
‘art’ when life was a perpetual struggle for so many of these people? They didn’t have access to galleries and
theatres, and dance only occasioned from old movies and what was offered on the
TV or at familial functions – there was no access to dance education, though
the dance I did see was energised, enthusiastic and full of hope as it told of
a young girl’s (my cousin) interpretation of ‘staying alive’…
I had hoped to capture sounds, images and smells
that could lead to the inspirational development of a new aerial-dance work;
and perhaps in time this will happen. My
cousins dream of travelling the world and shared these fragile fantasies openly
with me and I felt ashamed to think that I had come here to steal from them, to
recapture elements of lives that had lived with captivity or exile for
decades. But I didn’t halt my
documentation; I didn’t flagellate myself over the selfish pursuit of knowledge
and experience; I kept a journal written and recorded onto mini-disc, collected
sounds of my surroundings at night and kept a visual record through
photographs.
Coming from a devising and improvisational
performance background, it felt natural to remove the constraints of my ‘aims
and objectives’ and I allowed myself to open up to the journey itself, to allow
a more spontaneous attitude to steer the time I had – not that I really had
much choice: having met my exuberant cousins, aunts and uncles just once it was
clear that they had plans for my time – “we haven’t seen you for 36 years, so
you can allow us to have at least two weeks of your life” – a hard one to
argue!
My journey to Ramallah
was one out of a mafia movie. I was
protected on all sides with family and close friends ensuring that I had the
right paperwork, knew what buses to go on, and had escorts from one side to the
other. I was anxious but determined to
visit my Grandmother’s youngest sister trapped inside the
I had made contact with all the organisations
mentioned in my application, but once in the Middle East discovered that the Dar
al Sonun had shut for a few weeks (that had been
unpublished at time of applying) and I decided not to stay in
On my return to
I did hold a ‘sharing’ at Whitstable’s Horsebridge Arts and Community Centre a few
weeks after returning; I hadn’t known what this would really entail, though it
became a photographic exhibition accompanied by a soundtrack of recorded sounds
and my whispered journals. The
photographs have since been exhibited in two other galleries. On my return I was also asked to give a
workshop for young people relating to my journey and most significantly for me,
the impact of the journey helped me to take the plunge and I applied to the
University of Kent at Canterbury to undertake a full time Practice as
Research MA to further investigate where I really wanted to go as an
artist, and if and how my passions for Palestine could relate to my work as a
contemporary aerialist.
For the future:
I hope to return to the land of the holies as family member, volunteer
olive picker and artist. On completion
of my MA I hope to pursue links with the Palestine Culture Palace and Al
Kasaba, as well as looking to taking workshops
and a performance to Jordan. In a land
of such pain there is yet such colour, vibrancy, love and compassion.
The journey continues.