by Paul Paschal
I worked with Chris Goode as part of
Ponyboy Curtis from 2015-16, in developing and presenting two shows
at the Yard Theatre (At
the Yard in May 2015, and
FCKSYSTMS
in June 2016).
These semi-improvised works were
unusual for their high degree of nudity and unsimulated sexual
content, but more conventional in their disappointments.
Ponyboy Curtis was presented as collective: a
sexual-political-artistic experiment towards a different model of
sexual permissiveness and masculine intimacy. Yet Chris, as initiator
of the project and in his role of director-author, tightly held onto
the reins: writing the copy, handling communications with the venue
and press, designing the work’s frames of composition and
improvisation, etc. Chris was significantly more established within
the theatre industry than any of the other members, who stuck to
their roles as performers. As far as I can remember, Chris responded
to many challenges to his authority by wielding his sense of pain:
his poor mental health, the struggles of being a freelance artist,
his feeling of being undervalued by the theatre industry to which he
had devoted his life, and his social and political alienation from
wider society as a queer anarchist.
Chris would gradually exert more and
more authorial control across the making of each show. Having seen
this process take place twice, after having repeatedly expressed
dissatisfaction, I gave up hope that things might change. I was
frustrated by my lack of agency within performances that sought to
convince the audience of the spontaneity and self-determination of my
actions and desire. I was furious that Chris was seemingly
indifferent to the frustrations that I and others were clearly
feeling; and humiliated that I had been foolish enough to go along
with this for so long.
***
From the start, it was explicitly
clear that Ponyboy Curtis would involve significant nudity and sexual
content. Rehearsals frequently involved group discussion about the
erotic quality of materials with which we were working. However,
Chris was clearly keen for the performances to have a greater degree
of explicit sexual contact than would regularly arise from
improvisation. My prevailing memories of the sexual activity I
experienced throughout this work are of it being fleeting and
non-penetrative; anything sustained or more ‘heavy’ felt clumsy,
dry and a bit forced.
I would not describe my experience
of Ponyboy Curtis as ‘abusive’; but it was a process of
‘grooming’. Chris was establishing a set of expectations and
power relations. Select performers would be invited into more
intimate rehearsal processes (as part of, alongside, and in the
promise of work with more significant institutional backing), in
which I understand Chris to have been sexually violent.
As with much experimental
performance in the UK, the work of Ponyboy Curtis was mostly
un-/under-paid. My participation was fuelled by an interest in
working with Chris, a lauded artist; and from my ambition to develop
my own profile in the same field. Despite my frustrations, I held on
to this process for as long as I did due to the excitement of having
a sense of belonging in this scene, and the promise of further work.
The explicitly sexual frame of
Ponyboy Curtis throws these power relations into dramatic relief, but
most of the dynamics of this work are widespread across the
chronically-underfunded sector of UK performance. The precarity of
performers (dancers, actors, etc) encourages them to continually seek
favour from ‘lead artists’ (directors, choreographers, etc).
These freelance artists in turn are significantly disempowered in
their relationships with funders and institutional staff, and accrue
the support needed to make their work (funding, rehearsal space,
performance ‘opportunities’) across a number of organisations. As
such – and for better or worse – the majority of the work in this
field is developed at a distance from any individual organisation
that is involved in its commissioning or presentation. Therefore, the
processes of making that work falls outside of those organisations’
sense of responsibility or (as far as I understand) legal liability.
The underfunded nature of the sector
means there is little time to undertake the slow work of thinking,
reflection and listening (although it is not clear that this takes
place in more robustly funded contexts). There is little willingness
or capacity to seriously consider risk, or address harm when it
arises. Given the fleeting and relatively siloed nature of these
artist-led projects, there is little recourse to processes of
conflict resolution or workplace protections that might be available
within more formalised organisation. Individuals, like me, get pissed
off and drop out; or (if there is enough sustained noise to make
malpractice unignorable) individuals, like Chris, are quietly avoided
or collectively shunned as a ‘lone monster’. The wider conditions
that enable this harm persist.
***
In early 2017, a few months after I
left the ‘collective’, I approached Chris for a one-on-one
conversation to address my departure and reflect on the work more
broadly. I was disappointed at his lack of remorse, and refusal to
take any responsibility for the growing number of people
acrimoniously leaving his practices.
Chris Goode & Company – the
small-scale organisation that administered and produced much of
Chris’ work – had been comparatively
dormant during the years of Ponyboy Curtis,
but secured regular funding from 2018 as one of Arts Council
England’s National Portfolio Organisations. A few
months previously, a former
member of Ponyboy Curtis published
a text that alluded to their
experience of abuse as part of this work. In 2018 CG&C
commissioned an investigative report into Chris’s practices. Once
this report had been ‘published’ (shared with those anonymous
individuals who had agreed to be interviewed), I met with other
former collaborators to discuss its findings and recommendations. We
co-wrote emails to the company to ask for clarity on its statements,
and then again later to ensure it was upholding the safeguarding
protocols it had promised to implement. Rather than relying on Chris’
personal sense of remorse, I looked to the organisational
infrastructure that surrounded and enabled his work to ensure safe
working practices.
In 2019, CG&C announced it was
presenting Narcolepsy,
a solo performance written and performed by Chris, at the Edinburgh
Fringe. This felt fine. It was important to me that Chris was able to
continue his practice as an artist; and any solo show would
automatically adhere to the safeguarding commitments, given that they
primarily addressed how he worked with performers. However, the
company made an announcement on social media, to invite young queer
artists to share free accommodation with Chris for the duration of
the festival. This offer profoundly contradicted the spirit of the
statements and promises the company had previously made. Following
private correspondence to query this decision, the senior producer at
CG&C resigned. Now lacking administrative capacity, the company
cancelled its performances at the Fringe. At this point, the company
was composed of Chris, one part-time member of administrative staff,
and an incomplete board of trustees. I decided to pull back until
they had a chance to rehire, such that dialogue with the organisation
would not be limited to engaging with Chris as an individual.
In early 2021, Chris Goode &
Company had resumed public activity. In early June, by the time that
some of us had begun to gather together to rekindle these
conversations, Chris had killed himself. (HIs death was announced here.)
***
The revelation of Chris’
paedophilia (announced here), following his death, significantly complicates any
telling of this history.
Perhaps more than any other, the
figure of the paedophile in the UK is invoked to incite extreme moral
revulsion. Paedophiles are demonised: rendered an extraordinary and
exceptional monster that is uniformly malevolent and undeserving of
any compassion. This is woven into the moral regard of queer men,
whose acceptability is often implicitly or explicitly bound up in
this rejection of the paedophile. Think of the mother’s speech in
the coming out scene in Jack Rooke’s
Big Boys: “We don’t
care…. As long as you’re happy and healthy, and not a nonce,
that’s all that matters.”
This makes it very hard to talk
about Chris without conflating many different things: his active
participation in the sexual abuse of children; his physical and
sexual violence toward certain collaborators; his exploitative
relationship to younger artists; and many of his other behaviours
(his weaponising of his wounded-ness, his need to maintain control,
his prioritisation of his understanding of himself as a ‘good
person’ over acknowledging another’s
pain) that might be questionable, yet of which most people, including
myself, are culpable. All these things dynamically and complexly
played out in the same person; but they are different kinds of moral
claims, that demand different kinds of action from others.
When reflecting on Chris’
practices, I want to be careful about what is being understood as
sitting within or beyond the tolerable realms of everyday conflict
and interpersonal failing. I stand in full solidarity with those who
use the language of ‘abuse’ to describe their experiences of
working with him. But I find it urgent to specify what kinds of
experiences and behaviours we are classifying as such. The majority
of my experiences of Ponyboy Curtis – the complex social dynamics,
the compulsion to please the director/choreographer, the performance
of ‘agency’ while adhering to the lead artist’s vision – are
common to many working practices across theatre, dance and visual
arts in the UK. To wholly condemn everything that Chris Goode did in
his rehearsal rooms as abusive, implies the same for the majority of
the sector. This seems neither true, nor particularly useful to any
serious effort to identify and address the widespread harms that
pervade the arts.
To speak of my own experience: I
came to London in my early 20s, having grown up in Catholic Ireland
in the ‘90s and early ‘00s, with a profound and inarticulate
hunger for queer mentorship and belonging. I was desperate to
encounter examples of gay life, politics, and artistic practice.
Ponyboy Curtis and Chris Goode were what I found. Since Chris’
death, I have begun to appreciate how profoundly the breakdown of my
relationship with him affected me in the years after. When I quit
Ponyboy Curtis, I felt compelled to leave London, to separate myself
from the wider artistic milieu within which I had tried to situate
myself, and carried with me a profound distrust of gay men in roles
of power. But the pain I had felt was as much to do with the
tremendous vulnerabilities I had carried into that work, as it was
Chris’ own lack of compassion. I had neither been able to account
for this vulnerability to Chris nor myself; and ultimately, I believe
it to have exceeded his responsibility for care. I do not believe
that that trauma I experienced in relation to this work (and to be
clear, I am speaking solely about my own experience here) in itself
to constitute or evidence abuse.
All workers deserve safe working
conditions. There will always be an unregulated field of grassroots
performance-making that takes place outside of (and at times in
resistance to) organisational structures – and on which these
organisations will depend. But resources can be developed to which
these independent practitioners can avail themselves: template
working agreements, guidance documents, helplines, toolkits for
addressing conflict, and funds designed to be more easily accessible
to individuals and collectives. Organisations can set help set
standards of practice across the freelance sector by being more
transparent in addressing their own histories of abuse, and the
structures they have put in place to mitigate harm. And rather than
continual deference to (and by default, celebration of) the voices of
lead/lone artists, our conversations should include and elevate the
perspectives of collaborators, performers and administrative staff.
***
I remember the artist and thinker
Rajni Shah once saying something along the lines of: “In
performance, we talk so much about giving care to how processes and
collaborations begin. But we rarely pay similar attention to how
things end.”
I find Chris’ suicide tremendously
sad. I wish that things could have unfolded in a way that hadn’t
involved investigations, litigiousness, the police, and the complex
pressures that led him to kill himself. I wish Chris had been more
brave in listening to the people he had hurt.
For a long time, I craved an
opportunity to gather with others who had been connected to Chris’
work, such that we could collectively make sense of our experiences.
At the end of 2021, I was invited to participate in a series of
conversations open to those who had taken part in Ponyboy Curtis. The
conversations were complex, vulnerable, and transformative. They felt
extraordinarily rare. They were expertly facilitated by ELOP, an
LGBT+ mental health charity in London, which was made possible due to
a generous donation from an anonymous individual. I left these
conversations feeling utterly convinced of the urgency and beauty of
reparative dialogue, and with an appreciation that such processes can
often take place over far broader stretches of time than I had
imagined. These things can’t be rushed, and don’t need to be
rushed. The past is still tangibly unfolding in the present.
Many might feel a reasonable desire
to tidy away this history. Chris’ practices can be casually
dismissed as inherently compromised and dangerous; and we can
question why we should give any more attention to someone who
unrepentantly caused harm. The story is ripe to be appropriated by
right-wing commentators seeking to attack queer experimental art. But
I find myself drawn towards continued conversations and reflections.
Chris was a revered artist within UK experimental theatre, and wrote
extensively on the processes and ethics of performance-making. Like
many others, I am inextricably influenced by his work. His practices
were concerned with queer making, the intimacy of director-performers
relations, and how queer people can hold compassionate spaces for
each other within an otherwise inhospitable world. These are still
urgent questions. We – those who worked with Chris, and were
changed by this work – have the opportunity to determine the legacy
of these practices. This legacy will take shape through how each of
us uses our experience to inform how we move through and work within
the world.
I came to Chris with a desire for
queer belonging. He was my first gay male mentor. His work and
thinking have profoundly shaped my artistic practice and sense of
self. And so, instead of trying to banish him from my conversation
and thoughts, I say: ok, come on Chris, haunt me. Let me take you as
my queer ancestor, and this ongoing, unfolding situation as my
inheritance.
With thanks to the many
interlocutors over the past six years whose listening, challenge,
thinking and care has made
this text possible.
Paul Paschal, October 2022
