Project X Presents

Project X Presents was a collaborative arts network based in Birmingham, England, active from around 2004 to 2009. The group produced a series of themed performance events in the city which they christened "omnimedia experiences".

The network was centred on Rich Batsford, Marc Reck, Anne-Marie Pope and Ant Ramm, who become friends during shared participation in various creative endeavours including the Fierce! festival and the music and party scene based in and around the Birmingham suburb of Moseley. Their intention was to create a new form of live event enabling each participant to further their own practice, as well as to learn from engaging with other disciplines. The show would involve and engage the audience at different levels, leading them on a potentially transformative journey.

The group coined the phrase "omnimedia experience" to describe a new kind of event to potentially include any kind of creative endeavour such as a wide variety of styles of music along with stand up comedy, poetry, physical theatre, dynamic visual projections, dance, set design, costume, make up, interactive installations and even aroma.

Through an organic collaborative process, the group took all these many disparate and diverse strands and wove them together into one seamless, immersive, holistic whole, so the many parts effectively become one.

The core structure around which the events evolved was an experiential narrative, a series of stages defining the mood which the group aimed to lead the audience through. This was developed from the observation that audiences engage with different types of performance in different ways and that sequenced sections could lead the audiences through progressively elevated emotional states, as though they were experiencing a whole series of different events, but all combined into one seamless experience. The experiential narrative structure for the first event was "meditation, exploration, celebration."

A modular composition technique was developed to program a sequence of acts around this structure, centred mainly around the music along with stand up comedy and poetry. Each group or individual was asked to collaborate with those performing directly afterwards and before them create a new segue section. This was designed to stimulate the production of exciting new work and create the seamless ongoing experience for the audience. Dynamic visual projections, sets and physical theatre performances were also added to complement and enhance the action.

The ethos was one of shared effort for the common good, no one was paid for their time and most of the equipment was borrowed or provided by the participants themselves. Two small grants were received from the Arts Council. Decision making was organic, consensual and collective and there was a conscious effort to demonstrate the possibilities of positive and cooperative action. The process arose out of friendship and continued in that vein throughout.

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Wikipedia