Adam Marek

Short Story Writing - Winner 2011

Okay, here are the nine months of my Arts Foundation Fellowship compressed into a two-minute time-lapse.
Cue the soundtrack – your choice, but I recommend ‘She sells sanctuary’ by the Cult.

Nano-seconds after Grayson Perry has announced my name, I’ve handed in my notice at work and am at my desk in the attic. You see many sunrises and sunsets through the skylight behind me. With time sped up like this, my shadow is going apeshit, and my fingers on the keyboard are a milky blur.
Stories pile up – the final stories of my second collection. The joys, worries and agonies of parenthood and childhood are all represented here, all warming their toes at the burning-hot friction point between fantasy and reality. As the pages fly, you glimpse fragments: a superhuman stone thrower, a Tamagotchi with AIDS, chicks choking on fish, a kid coming apart at the seams, a totalitarian superhero, a shark dentist, swallows wintering underwater, swifts felled by bioluminescent parasites, terracotta robots, genetically modified children with military-tech uniforms fighting on bicycles, a vicious violin teacher haunting a Japanese family, and a man chasing a woman through haunted Cambridge in search of a spontaneous orgasm.
Every now and then we zip away from my attic and I bolt onto stages and read aloud and then flee through a smear of handclaps. I am reading for Booktrust in London, for Arvon in Shropshire, for Bolton University and Portsmouth University sharing stages with many writers. Don’t blink, there’s Clare Wigfall and Ali Smith. Follow me to Serbia where I am with 23 writers from 18 countries for a week of literary hedonism at the Kikinda Short Story Festival. In this timelapse it’s over in seconds. Seconds in which I eat calf testicles, shower in sulphurous water, meet a mammoth, nearly fall off Kalemegdan Fortress, run with a hunger-crazed clan of writers at 2am in search of fried cheese, appear on Serbian radio at 8am hungover after 3hrs sleep, ride in a procession of horse-drawn carriages, and, in a terracotta artist’s colony, find inspiration for a commissioned story.
And there are other commissions that take me to fascinating places. To an airfield in Bristol, home of the Concorde, to the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh, home of Dolly the sheep, to Saatchi and Saatchi, to the British Library in celebration of Stanislaw Lem. Back in my attic, more stories pile up – a coat that saves a boy from a WW2 bomb, a woman giving birth to orangutans, time-travellers meeting to fight over the life of the man who started consumerism, a demonic onion of phenomenal weight.

And then we stop.
The sun locks, low in the sky.
I’m in the attic with a finished story collection and a ton of new ideas awaiting development. I am warm, no, GLOWING, with gratitude.

Thank you to the Arts Foundation, the judges and my nominators who made all of this possible. THANK YOU.

Nicholas Collon

Conducting - Winner 2008

The Award of an Arts Foundation Fellowship in January 2008 came as a huge surprise for me, as I simply didn’t expect to win it! Over the past year, it has completely changed my life and conducting career, by allowing me to invest incredibly important time in my conducting activities.

Firstly, it enabled me to give up two weekly jobs: teaching the piano a day-a-week at a school, and rehearsing an amateur choir in South-West London. Relinquishing these freed up a significant chunk of time in which to achieve more on the conducting front. This has given me stretches of time in which I can work on scores without interruption, time which is so difficult to attain.

This time has also allowed me to put more energy into the promotion and running of my ensemble, Aurora Orchestra. During the Foundation period, the management committee (under my direction) have completed an extensive three-year Business Plan, which has been a very important step for the group. Above all, it sets out strategies to implement a paid administrative staff. With the orchestra’s activities increasing at a slightly alarming rate, this will prove crucial to the orchestra’s success, and it will also allow me to step back from the day-to-day running of the orchestra, which can drain my personal time. It has allowed us to put funding applications in place, and hopefully over the next 6 months, this will see a change in the way the orchestra is run.

In my proposed budget for the Fellowship, I outlined several activities I would like to achieve, with the Fellowship’s aid. The first of these was a website, which I commissioned from a musician friend who also works as a website designer. The result can be seen at www.nicholascollon.co.uk. It is straightforward and simple, with a list of concert engagements, biography, sound clips, photos, but is proving to be a very useful tool. I have had several concerts filmed and recorded, with the ultimate aim of getting more filmed footage of me conducting, which is very important for attracting potential work. A DVD is currently being compiled by a filmmaker (Stanton Media), with various different clips of me conducting in different situations.
I was also able to commission new photos from a professional photographer, Benjamin Ealovega, who is well known for his work with musicians.

One of the key expenses for conductors is the purchasing of scores, which can prove extremely costly. The Fellowship has allowed me to buy scores I would normally have thought twice about, and I now have a much better library than I did a year ago, including a huge amount more opera scores! This is an expensive but very necessary cost for every conductor.

In the past year, I have worked twice in Austria; once with the Vienna Symphony Orchestra, and the other on tour with the Symphonie Orchester Voralberg. I was determined to improve my German, which was previously rather pitiful, and took language courses during the Summer of 2008. This gave me a firm backing to improve my German further on tour in Vorarlberg, and by the end of this tour, I was speaking fairly fluently in rehearsal with orchestra. I am returning again this summer, and will endeavour to improve further! I have also started Italian lessons, and recently used Fellowship money to pay for a Polish coach, for Szymanowski’s ‘King Roger.’

The increased time which I received from the Fellowship has allowed me to go an watch conductors in rehearsal and concert, an activity which is incredibly helpful for me as a conductor. In particular, I have watched Vladimir Jurowski with the London Philharmoni Orchestra and Sir Simon Rattle with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. I have also had lessons with Vladimir and Sir Mark Elder, which have been extremely beneficial.

Above all, this extra time has allowed me to spend more hours actively learning scores. This is something which can become deprioritised when there are many other things to organise, but is in fact the one most important aspect of what I do. I have a huge amount of repertoire to get through over the remainder of the year, including 5 operas (Schoenberg’s Erwartung, Szymanowski’s King Roger, Puccini’s La Bohème, Gluck’s Alceste, Blacher’s Abstract Oper No. 1) and a host of orchestral repertoire. But I feel that I have been able to use this time wisely in preparing works far in advance, something which has eluded me in previous years!

During the period of the Fellowship, I was signed by Van Walsum Management, which has been a big step for my career. This has been an extremely exciting development; it will allow me to entrust the administration of my professional conducting work to the agency, and more importantly, it is already giving me conducting work which I couldn’t hope to have got myself.

In summary, this has been a bit of a watershed year in my conducting career, and no small part of it has been down to the Arts Foundation. It is an incredibly supportive and generous donation, and I can’t begin to thank the Arts Foundation enough for entrusting this opportunity to me.