Cardiff’s unique arts and culture programme celebrates three years on air with specially commissioned new writing.Thursday 5th June sees the broadcast of the first two in a series of new works written for Radio Cardiff’s arts and culture programme Pitch. Pitch was set up 3 years ago by artists Richard Huw Morgan and John Rowley as a 12 week art project, but has proved so successful with the arts community in Cardiff, Wales and further afield that it has now broadcast 131 hour-long programmes. Pitch normally features informal conversations between the hosts and two or three studio guests involved in the arts in Cardiff. These range from some of the biggest names in the Welsh arts to recent graduates to artists visiting Cardiff to work, exhibit or perform. The on-line archive of the programme at the Culture Colony website has recieved over a quarter of a million hits since broadcasting began on 21st June 2011. For the Pitch3 commissions Morgan and Rowley wanted to try something a little different, as Morgan describes. “We always wanted to try out different kinds of things, to put some art on the air rather than just having people talk about art, but it gets expensive once you have to start paying writers, poets, actors the professional rate for the job. We are all for supporting voluntary activity but it shouldn’t be forgotten that if Wales is to have a thriving arts economy then it also needs to invest in the professionals, otherwise, like it or not, they will have to move elsewhere. We applied to the Arts Council Wales with a proposal to fund our ideas and were really pleased to be given the backing we needed. As an all talk show with no records played, and no break apart from the adverts, we sometimes wish we could put a record on to give ourselves a chance to catch our breath, or think of new conversations. So we thought of the ideal length of a hit single being 3 minutes and thought it a good challenge to give to writers – come up with a 3 minute poem, piece of prose or play, and if it was a play, a play for 3 characters. We commissioned 12 new works from a wealth of ideas submitted from all over Wales and beyond and are really pleased with the results. It did go a bit astray and we have ended up with a wide variation in length and some of the writings are a bit hard to categorise...but thats what art should be! We will be slotting one or two of these commissions into the regular format of the programme over the next 6 to 8 weeks. We are really pleased with the results, even if it has taken us slightly longer to get to broadcast than we anticipated due to other commitments. In our other guise as the performance company “good cop bad cop” we produced “Lleisiau” as part of the Dylan Thomas 100 festival which involved traveling all over Wales to uncover unusual vocal talents – it took up far more time than we anticipated, but fortunately it means that the Pitch 3 commissions are now ready to air in celebration of Pitch’s 3rd anniversary!” The first two of the commissions, “Summertime in the City” written and read by Florence Jillett and “Qualifying”, written by Ryan Romain and performed by Sian Davies, Stephen Lyons and Edward Llewelyn, will be broadcast during the programme between 10 and 11am on Thursday 5th June. Other new works in the series are by Tim Etchells, Richard Owain Roberts, Freya Dooley & Cinzia Mutigli, David E Oprava, |
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| e-mail: rhmorgan@mac.com |
Tuesday, June 3, 2014 |
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