🗓️ Friday 17 May, 5.00PM – 8.00PM

📍Start: Open School East, 39 Hawley Square, CT9 1NZ
📍Moving to: Margate Caves, Margate, CT9 1FG

Join artist Alex Margo Arden and OSE Associate Lucia Coppola for a performance and storytelling workshop held in the Margate Caves.

In this participatory workshop we will undertake improvisational exercises to develop an alternative tour of Margate Caves, devised and delivered by all participants. The collective performance will allow us each to share stories, ideas and experiences related to the imagery within paintings on the walls of Margate Caves.

Within the performance we will all become tour guides, guiding each other around the site of Margate Caves using our own stories to animate and explore the various animals and human figures depicted. We will share and speculate how a crocodile appeared on the wall of the caves, what a lion means to us, what guards might be guarding, and why an elephant might not be not such a different size to a horse.

The workshop will explore methods of storytelling, remembering, and interjecting, through encouraging active participation. Together we will develop and question how we can talk about and tour the location of Margate Caves, populating and interpreting the space through our own experiences and imagination.

Workshop Schedule

5:00pm – Meet at Open School East for introductions
5:40pm – Walk to Margate Caves as a group 
6:00pm – Enter the Margate Caves
6:05pm – Introduction to the caves from Alex Margo Arden
6:20pm – Storytelling workshop in response to the images in the caves 
6:45pm – Devising performances 
7:15pm – Sharing performances 
8:00pm – End 

Parts of the event will be recorded.

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Alex Margo Arden is a multidisciplinary artist who lives and works in London. Her work excavates theatrical models of production and interpretation. She considers questionable authority through creating multilayered performances, installations, and odours. Recent projects have been presented at Quench, Margate; Royal Academy of Arts, London; Art-O-Rama, Marseille; Ginny on Frederick, London; Cell Project Space, London; La Casa Encendida, Madrid; World Pride 2021, Malmö. Her work has been written about in Frieze, Art Monthly, The Art Newspaper, Flash Art, Another Magazine, and American Vogue. She is currently studying at the Royal Academy Schools and she previously graduated from Goldsmiths where she was awarded the Hamad Butt Memorial Prize.

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If you’re unable to attend after booking – we ask that you cancel your ticket via Eventbrite and free up a space for another participant. If this event is fully booked and you would like to be placed on a waiting list, or you have any other queries, please contact george@openschooleast.org   

OSE Public Programme 2023-24

This year’s Associate-led Public Programme, Where Echo Lies, takes us to the edges of our experience, where it is dark, and all is not necessarily clear. Plunging into new depths, the programme thinks through deep time and the unconscious mind. What forms of solace might be found in the night that cannot emerge in the light of day? What might we hear when surrounded by this darkness? Through myth making, spectatorship, performance, and painting, you are invited to look inward and ask how can our experience help us understand what lies beneath the knowable?

We’re excited to announce our continued partnership with Turner Contemporary, who are generously hosting part of the public programme. Turner Contemporary is one of the UK’s leading art galleries. Founded to celebrate JMW Turner’s connection to Margate in 2001, the David Chipperfield designed gallery opened in 2011.

You can find more Public Programme events at: openschooleast.org/ose-public-programme-2024