Friday, 22 September 2017
receptivity / a constant question / a clumsiness, which is a form of hospitality
Note added 9 July 2021: following the discovery that, through all the years I was working with him, Chris Goode was consuming images of child abuse, I've returned to a self-evaluation process rethinking the work I did with him. That process began in 2018 and some of what it raised is detailed in this post from December that year, in which I acknowledge that I was complicit in some of the harms he caused, for instance by erasing the work of other women who worked with him, fuelling a cult of genius around him, and consistently asking people who criticised his work (particularly the sexually explicit work) to see it in softer ways. A second post is now in process in which I look in more detail at the ways in which Chris coerced and abused particularly young men who worked with him, using radical queer politics to conceal these harms and police reactions. I hope that any other writing about his work on this blog, including the post below, will be read with that information in mind.
Further note added 27 July 2021: that new post is now written and undergoing an extensive rewriting process as it's read and commented on by people who appear in it (that is, other people who worked with Chris in the seven years when I did). It could be up to a month before it's ready to share publicly, but I'm happy to share it privately in the meantime.
New note added 14 September 2022 (yes, almost a full year later): what's actually happened is that, since April this year, I've substantially rewritten that text, not least to be more conscientious around whose names and what identifying information are being shared. Until it's absolutely ready for publishing, I'll be rethinking what names appear in this blog. I have repeatedly considered trashing all the writing about Chris's work from this blog - after all, anything I wrote for the Company website was first trashed when the website was attacked by malware, and trashed again when the company closed - but with each iteration of this thought cycle I return to the wise words of Rajni Shah: 'I have a fear that these calls for destruction might be where the work of this moment ends, leading us from one dangerous archetype (the figure of the lone genius) to another (the figure of the villain, who can be eradicated, thus eradicating harm from our community).' The work remains, but with fewer names.
*
This was written as a
presentation paper for the conference John Berger Now, organised by
Richard Turney, which took place at Canterbury Christ Church
University on 12-13 September 2017. Its original title was Redrawing
the Map to The Field of Performance, which I think we can all agree
is pretty terrible. It was designed so that each titled section could
be read in any order; on the day itself I dropped two sections to fit
within the time limit. When reading it aloud to a room of academics,
at least one of whom was playing solitaire on their computer, it felt
like a blog post, interior in its address; reading it back to myself
to publish it feels like an inert document of something that should
be spoken. Maybe this between-ness, or liminality, is appropriate.
BEGINNING
I'll start with some
background:
Redrawing the Maps was
a five-day “free school” event dedicated to John Berger, which
took place in November 2012. One of its three co-curators was writer
and activist Dougald Hine, who also keeps a blog called Redrawing the
Maps, in which he attempts to “make sense of the mess the world is
in and what kind of actions might be meaningful in the face of that
mess”. Before attending The Field of Performance, he hadn't
included theatre among those actions.
Central to Redrawing
the Maps was an “open invitation to anyone who wants to host or
take part in a conversation, collaboration or workshop within this
space”. The Field of Performance was Chris Goode's response to that
invitation, and was an attempt to give shape to ideas rising like a
morning mist from Berger's essay Field. It took place at Somerset
House, a former tax office repurposed as a hub for art and
ice-skating, on the afternoon of Friday 9 November, 2012, and the
people who took part were M, T, K, J, G, G, T, K and, at a distance, R. The event was
free to attend; I recognised a few theatre academics and
performance-makers among the audience. I was there as a kind of
double agent: mostly in an audience capacity, but also as critical
writer in Chris' theatre company (although back then we called it
critic-in-residence, and we're due another name change any day now).
It's fairly typical of my working relationship with Chris that I'm
only getting round to reflecting publicly on that afternoon now,
almost five years later, even though it's been a model for the kind
of rooms the company wants to live in ever since.
What follows is a
haphazard collection of memories – some my own, some shared with me
by others who were present, some recorded in a makeshift notebook,
ungrammatical text and quick jerky sketches scrawled in a rough blue
pen. It took me weeks to think of an overall title, but eventually I
found one in a letter from Berger to the artist Leon Kossoff,
published in The Space of a Pocket. Although this book barely
mentions theatre, it was here also that I first found an image of the
kind of writing about theatre I started thinking about in 2009 and
began putting into practice in 2011 on joining Chris Goode &
Company. Berger talks of painting as “an affirmation of the visible
which surrounds us and which continually appears and disappears”
(and what is theatre if not the visible that appears and disappears)
and of the painter as “a receiver … giving form to what he has
received”. He talks also of the necessity of the painter
collaborating with the painted, a fraught collaboration because: “To
go in close means forgetting convention, reputation, reasoning,
hierarchies and self. It also means risking incoherence, even
madness.” More and more this closeness with theatre and the people
who make it is the thing that I'm trying to achieve.
There was another
possible title hidden in The Space of a Pocket, in Berger's
description of the River Po as: “A sprawling story of regular
repetitions and unpredictability.” That's my little notebook, and
this reflection on The Field of Performance, in a nutshell.
PICNIC
It was like looking at a picnic it feels, a kind of untidiness that goes with that; and looking at, when I was near the edge, an ongoing re-arrangement of people, and activities; a coming together and stepping out.
G
I remember a picture
frame, and two people, maybe T and G, sitting either side
of it, reaching through it, as though they were each other's
reflection, as though they could be for each other a portal to
another world.
I remember K lying
beside the wooden bench – the kind of long low wooden bench used in
school gymnasiums – then squeezing her body through the seemingly
impossible space beneath it.
I remember the sharp
loud green of a Granny Smith's apple.
I remember J
testing every limit of the space: questioning the handle of the
locked door, framing himself within the picture windows, running his
hands across their edges, his naked body rippling through the room.
I remember J and
Chris lying on the floor together, spoon snuggled, Chris with his
arms around J, and someone else, K perhaps, joining them on
the floor, her arms wrapped around Chris.
My notes remind me that
we started with a discussion of Berger's essay Field, talking about
the sensation of being absorbed by details into the intricate life of
a space – a space that is framed but has continuity with the space
around it, which is a different way of thinking about the performance
space.
My notes remind me that
someone in the audience commented that there is a direct relationship
between the word play, denoting a text/performance that takes place
in a theatre, and playing, denoting the human activity most often
engaged in by children, and later someone else returned to the point,
drawing attention to the seriousness of play, how seriously children
play.
My notes remind me that
K wriggled her foot, and did something with some tea lights.
My notes remind me that
we talked about the violence of the world we're living in, in which
everything is commensurable, everything has a price. I recognise
those words now as Berger's.
My notes remind me that
K peeled apples and offered chunks to the audience.
My notes remind me that
M talked about taking everything seriously, not as an
interchangeable sign but for what it is.
My notes remind me that
G said that things don't change, the way you look at them
changes.
My notes remind me that
it was when M talked about framing (conceptually) that T held
the picture frame (literally) in front of G.
My notes remind me that
K stretched her arms in the air and said: this is what I did in a
field.
My notes remind me that
someone in the audience quoted Gwen Gorden writing about play: you
need to be held in order to play, need boundaries to let yourself go
and surrender to something. That holding, said artist Alex Eisenberg,
is what an audience does, and it enables beautiful things to happen.
One note simply reads:
HOLD EVERYTHING DEAR.
My notes remind me that
K wrapped her arms around a small stool, and T wrapped his
arms around the bench, and it was K wrapping her arms around
Chris wrapping his arms around J.
My notes contain the
words: J – small fire – smell now in room. I no longer
remember if this was real or metaphorical.
My notes remind me that
someone described the Bible as a review of the Jesus show.
My notes quote Berger's
description of writing as dialogue, and as a way of dancing with
people. I'm sad that I forgot that bit.
The final note reads:
Indelible – thing once heard can never unknow.
Later, G sent me
another email to say:
it was like, or looked like, a creche toowhich may be even closer than a picnic
POCKET
It can happen, suddenly, unexpectedly, and most frequently in the half-light of glimpses, that we catch sight of another visible order which intersects with ours and has nothing to do with it.
John Berger
The Space of a
Pocket
In Berger's writing –
at least, the fraction I've read – those glimpses tend to come in
forests, places in proximity to the eerie, or the consciousness from
which humans have broken away. The room in which The Field of
Performance took place was not, in its architecture, like a forest.
It was a white room with wooden floorboards on the lower level of
Somerset House, with an open door on one side, a sealed door on
another side, possibly a mantelpiece on a third side and definitely a
row of tall windows on the fourth wall. The passing of time made
itself known in the darkening of the light outside those windows,
petrol blue seeping across them as the world beyond the room turned
to dusk. “Yet saying this implies narrative time”, as Berger
remarks in Field, “and the essence of the experience is that it
takes place outside time.”
But already I am
drifting from the forest to the field, that landscape Berger
describes as “a space awaiting events” and “an event itself”.
In its ideal state, says Berger, this Field has “certain qualities
in common with (a) a painting – defined edges, an accessible
distance, and so on; and (b) a theatre-in-the-round stage – an
attendant openness to events, with a maximum possibility for exits
and entrances”.
The forest, the field,
the room that was neither, with the wall of windows on one side and
the open door on the other. The windows framing the activity inside
for people passing by, and as the sky darkened reflecting it inwards,
back to ourselves; the open door inviting participation, not only
physical entry but the unconscious participation of footsteps or a
conversation drifting disembodied to join us. I think of all the
conferences, discussion events, “immersive theatre” I've been to
held in closed rooms, with closed doors, with windows barricaded by
shutters or curtains or windows not present at all. What openness to
events is attendant in those spaces? What openness to improvisation,
half-light or glimpses?
Describing The Field of
Performance for Contemporary Theatre Review, Chris remembers:
the audience—perhaps because they were sitting around on the floor (and in the light) with us—would happily join in not just with the conversation, but also with the performance actions. They improvised in response to our responsive improvisations. I think it hadn’t been clear to many of them that ‘my’ actors were actors in the first place: so when things started to happen, a pocket of permission and encouragement was also opened.
It's useful, that word
pocket. Berger defines it as: “a small pocket of resistance …
formed when two or more people come together in agreement. The
resistance is against the inhumanity of the new world economic
order.” I have seen enough now of the industry side of theatre that
its participation in that economic order is horribly apparent: the
ways in which it's hierarchical, exploitative, ungenerous, silently
corrupt. And yet somehow, in its side rooms, its rehearsal rooms,
even on stage, I will encounter another visible order. Another kind
of social organisation, expressions of the resistance Berger
describes as “compassion that refutes indifference and is
irreconcilable with any easy hope”.
CANDLE
Draw a candle at your end
R
R is a writer and
performance-maker who describes herself on her website, accurately,
as “a quiet voice of change”. When Chris began gauging interest
in the event he was planning and asked his favourite writers and
theatre-makers whether they would describe Berger as an influence,
she responded – with more diffidence than might be implied in
quotation –
Yes: because he treats language as a substance that contains movement and is intricately entwined with politics - the real politics of how we invent the world. And because he recognises – again, not just on an abstract scale, really recognises – the diverse languages at play in human thinking. Because peoples really matter in his work. And because the space of language is not separate to the space of thinking is not separate to the space of eating and walking and falling and hesitating and implying etc.
Unable to take part
herself, R sent many of the performers an instruction, in
private, “to be used as you wish and if you wish”. To one she
wrote:
Please imagine this is written on a beautiful slip of paper, in a small envelope, received in the post. It says:Draw a candle at your end.
She shared this with me
a month ago and I'm still not sure what to make of it. I have a vague
feeling, somewhere deep, that the invitation is to illuminate
something/other people, or to risk something of the self, and to do
this in accordance with some intuition in the gut, without anxiety as
to what others might think. But in truth, I don't know.
R never got to see
what emerged from her instructions. “I imagine a messy converging
of similar gestures, some small smiles perhaps, confusion, and,
hopefully, a kind of light(ness),” she wrote to me. That feels
exactly right.
There were other
instructions in the room, notes left by Chris as prompts for the
performers whenever they felt stuck. K recalled:
I read an instruction on one of Chris’ cards which said 'skin to skin', I responded by putting apple peel around my wrist as I didn’t feel comfortable applying that instruction to another human being. I was at the BAC years later and one of the ushers told me she remembered me putting the peel on my arm.
In my notebook I find a
scruffy drawing of a candle.
NAKED
I remember having my back to J when he took his clothes off and when I turned around it was both shocking and mundane, similar to a time I looked out of the window of a moving train and saw some people in a field, one of them was pulling a calf out of a cow that was giving birth.
K
It really was like
that. One moment J was prowling restlessly about the room; the
next he was a naked body, with all the electricity and stifled
giggles attendant on so much skin. There was such delight in seeing
him trying to open the locked door this way, as though, having
transgressed a cultural barrier, he might overcome a physical one
too.
J's nakedness was
remarkable because he wasn't acting or performing anything, he was
simply being, a being without clothes, in a room full of clothed
people sitting on the floor side by side, a vision of utmost intimacy
in a situation already intimate. A human body unfettered, relaxed and
entirely itself: “To be naked is to be oneself,” Berger commented
in Ways of Seeing. “To be naked is to be without disguise.”
Chris has written so
much about the naked body in the performance space, particularly in
relation to Berger's writing, that the challenge is to find my own
frames of reference. The Dark Mountain Manifesto, co-written by
Dougald and the writer Paul Kingsnorth in 2009, is a battle-scarred
argument for a new way of telling stories about humanity, and
particularly the progress named civilisation. They write:
The myth of progress is founded on the myth of nature. The very fact that we have a word for ‘nature’ is evidence that we do not regard ourselves as part of it. Indeed, our separation from it is a myth integral to the triumph of our civilisation.
This “triumph”,
they write, has made humans “the first species capable of
effectively eliminating life on Earth”. And so Dougald and
Kingsnorth reject it, “questioning the intrinsic values of
civilisation” and positing instead the possibilities of
“Uncivilised art”: art which
attempts to stand outside the human bubble and see us as we are: highly evolved apes with an array of talents and abilities which we are unleashing without sufficient thought, control, compassion or intelligence;
art that is “untamed
and undomesticated”,
Human, inhuman, stoic and entirely natural. Humble, questioning, suspicious of the big idea and the easy answer ... its practitioners always willing to get their hands dirty; aware, in fact, that dirt is essential.
Dougald and Kingsnorth
identify Berger's writing among that art. I'd put the naked searching
body of J there too.
It's such a simple
point I'm embarrassed to make it but clothes are the front-line of
civilisation: the immediate outward sign of our separation from other
animals. To shed them is to return, even for a moment, to that
pre-civilised existence: an existence that pre-dated shame and social
judgement and all the oppressions these attitudes enabled. J's
nakedness tells a different story about what it is to be human
together, to be brave and vulnerable, to draw the candle in a way
that brings lightness but also that risks getting burned. It is
another glimpse of a world order different from this one,
disencumbered of false proprieties. It might not impact climate
change, but in making us rethink our bodies and how they relate to
each other, it might help us rethink our relationship with nature
too.
DREAMS
My memories of the event are quite hazy, which I think is appropriate, as I want to think it was a hazy event - with indeterminate boundaries, and fluid perceptions, in which I was sometimes looking at things from outside of them and sometimes from inside. I have a memory of wooden stumps that we sat on, but in my memory they also became a long log, and somehow one of us was inside the log while the others were sitting on it. I also remember there being curtains on the windows, or the light fading outside them, or somehow being aware of what separated what we were doing there from everything that was outside, and feeling two different things at once: wanting that separation to be erased, so that everything outside would rush in, and at the same time wanting to keep what we were doing precious and safe, delicate as it was, in the way we were listening and caring for each other, knowing we had given this much time and this much space to be held within.
T
Everything in T's
description of The Field of Performance makes it sound like a dream.
The haziness, the ways in which objects shift purpose, that feeling
of sometimes looking at things from outside of them and sometimes
from inside. Earlier in 2012, the performance-maker Andy Field wrote
a manifesto for the making of political theatre, and dedicated one
section, called Dreams, to Chris. He asked:
Could theatre be a
place in which ideas
Are made out of bodies
Breathing together
Moving around each
other
Nonsensical scenarios
Nightmares
Fantasies
In which we think not
by listening
But by doing
Together
Figuring out a way of
living
In the shapes that form
in the space between us
Out of chaos
And play
And possibilities
A theatre that is
actually, properly dream-like
Because it feels like a
real life
That we might be living
But aren’t
Yet
The Field of
Performance itself began with a dream. Or perhaps I'm taking too
literally something Chris wrote to T, M, K, R and me
three weeks before it took place:
I'm dreaming of a space that is at one and the same time a conversation and a performance workshop. Wondering whether, say, M and T and I might be able to explore discursively some ideas arising (quite personally for us) from Berger, and how those ideas might be refracted productively through theatre/performance; and whether a small group of performers, perhaps including you K, might respond in real-time as that conversation unfolds. Such that the conversation and the improvised performance would quite easily start to bleed into and around each other, with neither, in the end, leading the other.
Contrary to Andy's
notion of a dream in which “we think not by listening but by
doing”, what The Field of Performance achieved was a thinking that
was at once doing and listening. A space in which doing was
made possible by listening. And maybe it did this by being a
space in which the lines between waking and sleeping were blurred: “I
liked falling asleep at one point,” K wrote to me in
remembering, “and drawing whilst a poem/writing was read aloud.”
Chris wrote to us all the day after it happened:
what we made together was probably closer than I've ever got to the kind of space I wish we were making all the time: talky but also listeny; thoughtful but also playful; serious-minded but fun; self-conscious but sincere; diverse but not scattered. ... And a space in which it was possible to actually go to sleep for a few moments: which I did and it was lovely.
Berger writes about
“that state between waking and dreaming” in And Our Faces, My
Heart, Brief as Photos: “What distinguishes this state from that of
full wakefulness is that there is no distance between word and
meaning. It is the place of original naming.” I think of the bank
under construction on my local high street, the advertising slogan
emblazoned on its hoarding: “Join the revolution”. In the place
of original naming, language belongs to nature again, language
becomes again true. This language, for me, is always Berger's subject,
even when he's writing of art. He looks at paintings, and people,
closely enough to hear them: their pulse, their electric crackle.
This he translates into words – the words, as he writes in Hold
Everything Dear – of “multitudinous, disparate, sometimes
disappearing, languages, with whose vocabularies a sense can be made
of life”.
Seeing becomes
listening becomes doing but also dreaming. As K wrote to Chris,
of how Berger has influenced her as a theatre-maker: “I think my
response to him is physical. I remember specific descriptions of
motion and behaviour that changed the way I understood the reading of
human beings. His active observations of any and every thing gave me
permission to fall into reveries of absorption.”
And through listening,
doing, dreaming, describing, reading, permitting and falling into
reverie, we find new ways to shape the life we might be living,
rehearse its possibilities, and give it the breath of our lungs.
SHAME
I was initially thrown by the word liminality, a word I hadn't previously come across. In fact throughout the event I was torn between drawing attention to my personal confusion and trying to go with the flow. It reminded me of being a child at an adults' dinner party, where you feel awkward, curious, out of your depth, marginalised and intermittently bold.
K
If you had asked me at
the time how I felt about The Field of Performance, it might have
sounded like that. Or like this, from someone who asked to stay
anonymous:
When I think about it now I have an aching sense of guilt and shame that I revealed myself to be an idiot who doesn't understand John Berger in a room full of people who are the opposite to both those things.
I recognise those
feelings. I sat in the cafe with Chris and the team after it finished
quietly holding my own shame as close to my chest as I could, trying
to pay attention to the conversation while counting off on mental
fingers all the stupid things I'd said. In particular I was kicking
myself for an observation I'd made about the windows. We were talking
about the relationships between theatre and society / theatre and
self, and it occurred to me that – like the windows, still
transparent, but made opaque and so reflective in the gloaming –
theatre does both at once: lets you look through to others
simultaneous to mirroring some truth of you. And then one voice after
another rejected that idea. I quote a couple of them in my notebook:
I don't want to see myself on stage, performance-maker Alex Eisenberg
remarked, but to feel myself in a room with a bunch of people.
Those feelings of guilt
and shame – as my correspondent went on to acknowledge – say
“more about me than about anything or anyone else”. They're
certainly at odds with Dougald's description of the event. He
recalls:
A spirit of conviviality and hospitality, playful and serious, creating a space where it was safe to speak thoughts that were still half-finished, without the fear that your words will be used against you.
It's transpired since
that the window/mirror thought was a half-finished one that's stuck.
I relate it now to the ways in which Berger looks at painting –
anything really – seeing both the skin of the thing, every pore and
filigree hair, and penetrating through to the nervous system beneath.
But then I realise I'm comparing myself with Berger and the shame
kicks in once more.
THE ENDING
THAT ISN'T
Wonderfully, when it was time for the performance to end, we knew it and our audience didn’t. And so, one by one, we in the company slipped away, off to the cafe for a post-show debrief and a cup of tea. When the last of us left, the audience were still performing to each other. None of us actors know how the performance ended. None of us ever does.
Chris Goode
Contemporary
Theatre Review
We slipped away like
rabbits disappearing into hedgerow or sprites melting back into
trees. M and Dougald are the last names recorded in my notes,
talking about the ways in which theatre and performance are
documented and/or reviewed. The bullet points read:
writing about theatre
doesn't replace the thing
easy for the writing to
replace the work
text as choreographer's
notation of experience of knowing
another choreographer
can use to create another version
When I sent around a
general request for stories from that day, M responded: “Do you
know, I don't remember much about this, other than the fact that
somebody got naked, which R [her partner] joked about later.”
As someone who has come
to write about theatre as it lives in the memory, rather than
recording what I saw as soon as possible after seeing it, I'm
endlessly fascinated by the fragility and fallibility of memory, the
ways in which the remembered merges with other memories, encounters
and experiences, transforming that single night in the theatre into a
longer strand, curled in spirals, of life. I'm telling you this about
M not only to acknowledge that The Field of Performance didn't
strike everyone in the room equally, although that's true, but
because of its relationship to something said to me by Dougald, in
response to the same request:
With spaces and projects like that, if they must be subject to 'evaluation', then this should consist of a storyteller being sent around, years later, to visit the people who were there and collect the stories of things that have happened since that would not have happened, had that group of people not found themselves in that room on that afternoon.
As I said at the
beginning, when Dougald came to The Field of Performance, he had
little relationship with theatre. Two or three years later, having
moved to Sweden, he became head of artistic development at
Rikstheatern, Sweden's national touring theatre, with a remit to
consider the ways in which theatre-makers might address and inspire
action against environmental catastrophe. More recently, on a brief
residency in London, he invited political activists, economic
change-makers and theatre-makers to a series of conversations on the
art of the impossible: how we might regard the seemingly impossible
happening (the resurgence, at mainstream level, of fascist ideology)
as an opportunity to make other impossible things happen – the
collape of neoliberalism, say. He sees theatre as a vital tool in
this, not least in bringing neoliberalism to social account. Dark
Mountain is on the surface of those shifts in his work – but I'd
argue that The Field of Performance was the mulch beneath.
Similarly, in 2013 M
contacted me about a project she was dreaming up, which eventually
she called Something Other. It would be a website that attempted to
think differently about writing in relation to performance, what
writing is doing when it translates and transcribes live experience,
and how writing might function differently online. M and I have
been shaping Something Other ever since, and last year, with Diana
Damian Martin, developed a companion project, The Department of
Feminist Conversations. I like to say that these are inter-related
projects that think politically about performance and performatively
about politics. Neither M nor I remember the other being in the
room for The Field of Performance. “The inability to remember is
itself perhaps a memory,” Berger writes of childhood forgetting in
And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos. M and I haven't needed
that first memory because we have been building on it ever since.
Chris Goode &
Company tried, in October 2013, to host a similar gathering: a
full-day symposium around a work Chris was trying to make called
Albemarle. We told the story behind the work (genuinely the narrative
came from a dream Chris had had, in that state between waking and
sleeping), showed a little of what the company had been rehearsing,
offered workshops in movement and sign language, and most of all
invited conversation. If the result was off-key, discordant in some
elusive but insistent way, I think it's because our motives weren't
totally pure. We had something to sell at this gathering/symposium:
we wanted people to buy into the idea of Albemarle, because that way
we we might access the money needed to get it on stage.
The writing of Berger
reminds us – as he says of Hieronymous Bosch – that
the first step towards building an alternative world has to be a refusal of the world-picture implanted in our minds and all the false promises used everywhere to justify and idealise the delinquent and insatiable need to sell. Another space is vitally necessary.
The Field of
Performance was that other space. In offering nothing more than a
room in which people might think, talk, listen, do, get naked, sleep,
eat apples, draw candles, squeeze under benches, play or be playful
together, it became a space out of time, a glimpse of another world
order in which theatre is not a transaction but a way of telling
stories, untamed and undomesticated stories, to each other. This
isn't so much a story of that afternoon as notes towards another
version, a redrawn map pointing to another field of performance: a
proliferation of fields perhaps, reaching to the horizon and beyond.
Saturday, 26 August 2017
Eleven kinds of loneliness (for Annie Siddons, with love)
The loneliness of professional envy
Theatre is such a gift for the socially incompetent. You get
to spend entire evenings in the company of fascinating, talented people,
without having to worry about making a fool of yourself the moment you open
your mouth. I’m most usually alone when I see work, but somehow I knew that Annie
Siddons’ How (Not) To Live in Suburbia would be a show I’d want to share. And
not with just anyone: with my two closest female, mum, struggling with the
whole being middle-aged and married thing, friends, both of whom live in
London's sprawling suburbia and have variegated feelings about it. It was
February 2017 when we saw it, in Soho’s Upstairs Theatre, and as I sit down to
write this I’m wondering what exactly I remember of it. Beyond the sensation of
wanting to hide how I cried, even from these people I love so, surreptitiously
cupping my chin to catch the tears before they spilled on my clothes.
And of course I wanted to write about the show straight away,
but I saw it at the end of another fucking school holiday (my god they roll
around so frequently) and had an impossible accumulation of other work to do.
At least, that's the story I told myself. The real problem was that I could
still – can still now – hear in my head what Megan Vaughan had written when she
saw the show in January 2016. The way she described the sunset in London that
night, the flagrant colours of the sky. The way she wrote about what London
means to her, the decision to leave everyone she knew and had grown up with to
live here, the ways in which my birth city has made her grow different. Her
description of the northern line as her black aorta. I couldn't remember what
aorta meant and when I looked it up I felt like such an imbecile.
The loneliness of the engaged tone
About a month ago Meg interviewed me as part of her PhD on
theatre fan-writing/criticism and asked me if I feel part of a community doing
this work. And I was surprised by how quickly and vehemently I replied that I
don't. It's so many things: feeling older, and unaffiliated, and unable to keep
pace either with the performance schedule or other writers or the juggle of
different strands of work that also serve to sever, but most of all feeling
recurrently disappointed by how hard it is to maintain a sense of connection
and sorority in a city as frantic as this, that breathes in ambition and
breathes out individualism. I keep trying to collaborate with others, to be
social, to open up pockets of space in which people, a community, might meet.
But it's a struggle, and mostly I feel like I fail.
The loneliness of worrying that you never get to the point,
because you spend so much time mithering, and perhaps haven't really a point to
make
Shall I tell you something about Annie Siddons?
Yes, that would be nice.
The loneliness of living in suburbia when urbia isn't just
what you're used to but defines your very being
Annie Siddons lives in suburbia. Twickenham Home of Rugby,
to be precise. She says it like that, with a twinkle, every time – except when
she abbreviates it to THoR, which is somehow even more deflating, a cartoon
swipe at rugby's deification of masculinity. Intermittently rugby fans descend
on Twickenham in a deluge for a few hours of rumbustious drinking, and then the
rugby leaves and Twickenham exhales and returns to its more placid state, as a
leafy, prim, somewhat conservative kind of place, where the schools are good,
the people are friendly...
What Siddons does is pick at that surface, to show that a
place like Twickenham isn't quite as accommodating as it might be. As far as
THoR's concerned she's an outsider – not just a newcomer, or an urbanite, but a
woman of Greek/Egyptian background, which still (I suspect, having said goodbye
to suburbia almost 20 years ago) matters. Plus she's a single mother, and we
all know how kindly they've been looked on in the wider Tory culture over the
past seven years. So while people make advances – there's the married neighbour
who makes a pass at her, for instance – they do so in a way that makes clear
her otherness as an exotic creature who works in The Arts. When you can't even
join the local book group because you've been deemed too different, something
is clearly up.
The loneliness of choosing to sacrifice what you want for
the sake of your kids but refusing to let yourself define it as sacrifice
because come off it with the language of martyrdom already
Siddons lives in suburbia because she moved there with her
husband and two daughters and when they divorced she decided to stay because
London is neither heaving with trustworthy schools nor affordable for a single
parent, let alone a freelance theatre-maker with a career gap for motherhood.
And anyway, all the divorce manuals (I'm told) say that when children are
experiencing the destabilisation of the relationship they've taken for granted
since birth, the blow can be marginally softened by at least maintaining
stability in their physical environment.
Without going into detail, Siddons reveals that one of her
daughters has a chronic health condition acute enough that intermittently she
needs hospitalisation; meaning that among the concatenation of stressful and isolating
events detailed in the show is another bout of child illness, which Siddons has
to support and bear alone. The impression me and my friends get is that this is one of the reasons underlying the
divorce; meaning that in an earlier version of this post, I wrote some violently rude things about her former husband. which I said I wouldn't apologise for but now wish I could. Our assumption is that he left her, but we're wrong; I'm not sure what this says about the baggage we brought into that theatre, the feelings we bear towards husbands, men, generally. Except I do, of course. They're equivocal.
The loneliness of feeling so crowded by others' needs and
demands that you don't have space to think
Now I've started writing about it the whole show is
unfolding before me again – not specific quotes, much as I'd like them to, but
the shape and measure and timbre of it: the steady way Siddons details her
accruing isolation; the tragicomic films in which every attempt to reach for
the starriness of London only leads back to the gutter outside her front garden;
nips of laughter as she makes lists of promise then all too soon crumples them
into balls of regret. The carefully planned birthday that goes awry, with
Siddons alone on the razzle in Soho, screaming at her friends down the phone.
The repeated attempts to write, to write, but nothing working out how she wants
it to. The bodies of the Walrus of Loneliness and, later, his twin Seal of
Shame pressing closer and closer to her, not just metaphors but physical
manifestations of the feelings tightening her veins, squeezing her lungs until
she can't breathe. She holds it all with such lightness, uses her body double
(the brilliant Nicky Hobday) to give herself enough distance to be wry, but I
remember now what it was that made me cry so much, the clay-clag sadness at the
heart of it all.
The loneliness so deep-rooted, lived with so long, that it's
not even recognisable, except that it is
I might have told these stories before on here; if so
apologies for doing it again. When I was 12, after maybe three years of moving
from flat to flat, my mum got in her car and started driving north from
Dalston, looking for a house cheap enough to buy. She tried and failed in
Tottenham, Edmonton, Enfield, before finally landing at a place called Waltham
Cross, where the A10 running arrow straight from Liverpool Street into
Hertfordshire intersects with London's orbital, the M25. We spent the next 10
years in suburbia and never felt at home. Back then we were about as ethnic as
our street got; there was one Sunday morning when my dad, grown so
exasper-infuriated by the neighbours' barely concealed racism, opened the front
door, pulled one of the stereo speakers into the front garden, put a Greek
album on the turntable and turned the volume to full. “They want to talk about
us, I'll give them something to fucking talk about,” he fumed.
I figured out how to neck a boy in suburbia, but not how to
make friends: I was still going to school in London, and didn't fancy joining
in with the speed gang my brother was part of up the road. The one female
friend I almost made stole my vinyl copy of Madonna's True Blue album and never
spoke to me again. I realise as I'm writing this why someone said to me
recently that I sound like I was lonely as a young person. I'd never thought of
my teen years that way and didn't know what to say.
“I've never thought of myself as lonely before. But I think that's it. I think that's what I've been feeling.”
That's – as exactly as I remember it – what my friend {a}
said as we walked out of Soho theatre and meandered down to the Curzon for a
drink. {a} and I met in my Waltham Cross years, wholly by chance: we'd caught
eyes at a couple of shoegazey gigs, but at the second one I got distracted by a
boy, who happened to go to her brother's school, so when she spotted me at a
third gig she came and said hello and we've been devoted to each other ever
since. We've supported each other through university, and meeting the people
who became our husbands, and becoming mothers to older daughters and younger
sons; through the struggle to find work, and to feel fulfilled in our work, and
to balance our work with the demands of parenting, and to balance our work with
our husbands' work which, because the pay is higher and the hours more solid,
always takes precedence; through frustration and boredom and, it turns out,
loneliness.
I love that response she had to the show, because I love the
ways in which theatre reaches into the deepest part of the self and pulls open
the door you've been keeping not just shut but barricaded with furniture and
flotsam, and in shining a light on those feelings – the light of shared
experience – makes them, for a moment, easier to bear.
I didn't say any of that to her on the night, though.
Somehow I couldn't find the words.
The loneliness of feeling like you don’t know how to talk,
even to the people you love most
So that was one of the friends who came to the show with me;
the other was my beloved friend [z], who I met when already married, and her
daughter and mine were at the same nursery, although she's since been priced
out of the area and now lives in Crystal Palace – making the same move as my
mum but south instead of north. From the outside, I'd say that there are clear
advantages to her life in a suburban cul-de-sac over mine: her kids can and
frequently do disappear unaccompanied to the neighbours' houses, there's always
someone ready to recommend a local plumber, she's often telling me about
community events she's been involved in. But the truth is, I wouldn't swap with
her for a minute: when I walked out of Waltham Cross for the last time, with my
bag balanced on a skateboard that refused to balance me, I made a promise to
myself never again to live outside of zone 2. (The advantage of being this old
is that I am old enough for this to have been possible.) And [z] would be back
in Stockwell in a heartbeat if she could. She's another one for whom urbia
defines her very being: the hustle of it (she's one of my more pro-capitalism
friends), the vibrancy of it, particularly the abundance of it, all the theatre
and art and food and music and life.
Unlike {a}, [z] didn't recognise, or at least feel
personally, the emotion palette of loneliness in the show. Depression, yes;
disappointment and anger regarding husbands, yes; but not the loneliness, that
was alien. We sat at the Curzon and [z] and {a}, who hadn't met before, bonded
over alcohol and shared frustrations, while I quietly busied myself with
barricading that door again. Two weeks later [z] told me she had decided to
divorce. Everything that has happened to her since has encouraged me to be
considerably more careful with my marriage.
The loneliness of lying in a hotel room with the people you
made and the person you made them with, sobbing, but silently, because they
were arguing for something like an hour before they slept and waking them by
accident would be a disaster
The middle-class heteronormative summer holiday is a fucking
abomination, isn't it? At least, so it seemed as we trudged up an urban slope
in Naples, sticky with heatwave sweat and the accumulated grime of a
long-neglected dirt-encrusted city, nine days of arguing behind the four of us
and three more to go. It's our fault, I guess, for swapping city for sprawling,
mismanaged, brutally inequitable city instead of beach: but then we even
managed to argue on seaside days, hurling insults at each other more stinging
than the salt, grittier than the sand. We're not very good as a family at
giving each other space or solitude. When we got back home I unpacked the
suitcases, packed the kids into bed, sat down at the computer and didn't get up
again until 2.30am. An aloneness that is the very opposite of loneliness.
On one of those days in Naples I tried to start reading
Maggie Nelson's Bluets. But it's a book that needs space, and solitude, not
just in the external environment but internally, in the mind, and after five
pages I gave up and moved on to one of my daughter's books instead. It's called
Wonder, by RJ Pallacio, and {a} had recommended it to me just before the
holidays: she loves it because she recognises in it an extreme version of her
own experience. {a} has scars that run from her chin all the way down her neck,
scars that I stopped seeing so many years ago it surprised me when she
mentioned them again; and August, the boy at the centre of Wonder, was born
with a genetic mutation that particularly affects his face. So she knows what
it is to have people stare at you, and be freaked out by you, and want to know
if you were burned in a fire, as happens to August. Those scars have so much to
do with the loneliness that {a}, for most of her life, has felt as depression
and insecurity.
Before I had to abandon Bluets, I came across this
paragraph:
I admit I may have been lonely. I know that loneliness can produce bolts of hot pain, a pain which, if it stays hot enough for long enough, can begin to simulate, or to provoke – take your pick – an apprehension of the divine.
Instead of going to beaches in Rome and Naples, we took the children
to churches. Dozens of them, florid affairs, with painted ceilings and marble
floors and art commissioned from the leading artists of the time: sculptures by Bernini, paintings by Caravaggio, technically flawless, ravishing.
Those Caravaggios were my salvation, my access to solitude
amid the divine.
The loneliness of aching to go home only to return home and
realise that home is a thing of the past, you watched it being dismantled piece
by piece and did nothing to save or protect it and now you can never go home
any more
In that 12 days' absence from London an abomination has
occurred on my local high street. New hoardings next door to the library – I
library I know we're lucky still to have – announce the imminent arrival of a
branch of Metro Bank, convoy to the branch less than two miles away. Although
it’s an American bank, the hoarding is a distinctly Thatcherite shade of blue.
Running along the bottom of it, in letters the red of fresh blood, is the recurring
slogan LIVE THE REVOLUTION.
And I don't know what's worse. Is it that nothing in this
city, this city swarmed by bankers and estate agents, property investors and
tax evaders and Home Counties trust funds, is sacred any more? Or is it the
ease with which meaning is cleaved from kind words, leaving the language degraded?
The loneliness of trying to do your best but knowing your
best isn’t good enough
Maggie Nelson is one of the two writers I'm most obsessed
with, by which I mean want to write like, at the moment; the other is Claudia
Rankine. Each of them identifies as poet but what I've read is poetic prose; a
prose lapidarian and gimlet, compacted to the point of becoming diamond while
still with the nourishing softness of earth. Neither gives sway to unnecessary
words: that's the quality I most want to learn from them. Focus and precision.
Rankine's Don't Let Me Be Lonely is devastating: a fragile
torch held up against the appalling darkness of this world, a darkness that
expands in every direction, untrammelled. A darkness in which people are
deprived of medications because money, or prescribed medications because money,
or rendered invisible because money, or treated as less than human, in fact
precisely not-human, because money. There is power in this illumination but
fragility too, because hope is precarious and humanity's capacity to invent new
methods of exploitation and control is terrifying and incalculable. Because to
live in this darkness at all seems impossible, and yet we do, and keep doing.
At her most clipped Rankine writes:
Define loneliness.Yes.It's what we can't do for each other.What do we mean to each other?What does a life mean?Why are we here if not for each other?
In those three questions is all the struggle of my
relationship with – well, everyone, but above all my children, and at the
deepest myself. I realise as I'm writing this why someone said to me recently
that I sound like I am lonely now. Only I haven't been thinking of it as
loneliness. I've been thinking of it as shame.
The loneliness of fretting in the late hours and the
overstretched hours and the indolent dilatory hours whether writing about
theatre is the right thing to be doing, and whether it's the writing bit or the
theatre bit that's the problem
The last two paragraphs, each isolated within their own
page, of Don't Let Me Be Lonely read:
Or Paul Celan said that the poem was no different from a handshake. I cannot see any basic difference between a handshake and a poem – is how Rosemary Waldrop translated his German. The handshake is our decided ritual of both asserting (I am here) and handing over (here) a self to another. Hence the poem is that – Here. I am here. This conflation of the solidity of presence with the offering of this same presence perhaps has everything to do with being alive.Or one meaning of here is “In this world, in this life, on earth. In this place or position, indicating the presence of,” or in other words, I am here. It also means to hand something to somebody – Here you are. Here, he said to her. Here both recognises and demands recognition. I see you, or here, he said to her. In order for something to be handed over a hand must extend and a hand must receive. We must both be here in this world in this life in this place indicating the presence of.
Isn't this precisely what happens in theatre – the best
theatre – the theatre that engages its audience in dialogue even when presented
as a monologue from the stage, the dialogue whose extents and limitations I am
constantly questioning and seeking? In that moment of my friend {a} recognising
her own loneliness in Siddons' loneliness, hearing its name, I see a hand
extended and a hand receiving. I see a conflation of two same presences, and I
see how theatre – and the act of talking and writing about it – has everything,
everything, to do with being alive.
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