Jacky Puzey

Shade at You and Your Work 7 – Platform for Performance, Easton, Bristol

October 17 2009

Shade – Home

Jacky Puzey with Baljinder Bhopal, Ruth Jacobs, Liz Lambert, Leiza McLeod, Hilary Ramsden
With thanks to Jan Winters, Jude Michaels, Taban Othman, filmmaker Pete Critchley, photographer Chandra Prasad and musicians Heather Summers and Amanda Owens.

Shade – Home was created for Your and Your Work 7 and as part of the ongoing Shade project, to create a space of home across cultures, where hosts and guests, performers and helpers, created an intimate evening of food, performance and textile; a small piece of shared culture in a private house in Easton.

Shade is an ongoing project about influence and exchange, beautifully tailored suits acting as passports, dressing to pass across border, tradition and identity.

Shade – Home made a collaborative new space for ‘home’, as a private house, decorated for a feast, became the setting for a shared dinner and an intimate performance. Playing on the idea of public and private, the Shade performers and guests become ambassadors for new inquisitive visual cultures.

Beginning at Easton Community Centre, the Shade cartel of performers and musicians swept in to the strains of the song Putting on the Ritz, about dressing up to pass, sung variously by Fred Astaire and Ella Fitzgerald. Guests were asked what they did to pass, enticed to pakora from Easton’s famous Sweet Mart and whisked off up the cycle track on parade to the dinner venue. Shade comes from old-time Caribbean Carnival slang, meaning to make such a fabulous costume that everyone else is put in the Shade – but it has also been appropriated by the Houses of the New York 1980’s vogueing gay culture scene. For Shade Home,  the House of Shade and guests paraded up the cycle track with style and music, as the Explorer Leiza McLeod planted flags and the Dandy Hilary Ramsden styled her way along the path.

At the dinner venue, guests were announced into the house, handed tamarind mojitos and gin and tonic, and led on an expedition first up the garden path, by Explorer Leiza McLeod, for a variation on Jamaican Pepperpot soup, then back again, with Eastern European Ashkenazi cooking as the Explorer morphed into Ruth Jacobs and offered potato latkes.

Hostess Jacky Puzey, Activist Liz Lambert and honoured guests Taban Othman and Jude Michaels then began to host a sit down dinner for our guests, weaving conversations in and out of cultures, foods, cloths and shared experiences of home, migration and exchange.

Kurdish, Lebanese and African-Asian food was served, as conversations wove from Sierra Leone to Kurdistan, from Lebanon to South Africa, Easton to Horfield.

Poet Baljinder Bhopal produced dinner menus of readings from many sources, some guests also contributed readings themselves, and our photographer Chandra Prasad made studio portraits and cooked a dish of gourds, enjoyed democratically across all societies in India due to the easily available ingredients.

In the House of Shade, all were welcome….. the event finished with a pineapple crumble from Jacky Puzey’s memories of travelling and visiting family in Kenya, and a musical exit, Putting on the Ritz and coats and hats…

Shade Home is developing new spaces this year. An image gallery and recipes from this event will follow shortly. To purchase prints from this event, please contact photographer Chandra Prasad on pics.chandra@googlemail.com.

if you would like more information, please contact Jacky Puzey via this website.

Commissioned by You and Your Work

http://www.youandyourwork.blogspot.com/

http://yayw7.blogspot.com/
Produced by You and Your Work in conjunction with Groundwork South West, funded by the National Lottery through Arts Council England, Groundwork South West and Quartet Community Foundation (Grassroots Grant).

Additional support for Shade project from Bath Spa University.