this is the last of the slow fade posts that i'm moving here. the original (and actually terrible - what was i thinking??) title was Three anchors and the Gate, and it was published on 9 October 2020. (the new title i've given it isn't much better but for now i'm sticking with simplicity)
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Back in the before times I used to play a game of my own devising with a cumbersome title that changed according to mood. Usually it was See All the Art and Definitely the Art by Friends But Especially the Art that Will Feel Like Fresh Air; sometimes it was See as Much Art as Possible While Not Erasing Time for Other Human Things; and in a bad month it became Try To See All the Art Even Though It’s Impossible Without Becoming Totally Exhausted and Losing Heart or Mind. The picture is of a typical game card. On one side is a list of possible dates: evenings that weren’t already booked up with other theatre, or work, or dance practice, or occasional obligatory family time. On the other side is a list of things I was trying to squeeze in: theatre, films, a discussion event. This was the game card I was working on earlier this year, as February shook hands with March, and Covid-19 sidled through the country. I’d spent a maddening number of hours matching and re-matching these dates and events and if I’m honest, there was an element of relief in all that possibility just vanishing.
The shame-carrying part of me is wriggling in discomfort at the clang of complaint: of course it is a privilege of affluence to be able to see as much art as I’d like to. I’m starting with this confession to try and work through a different feeling. Early in the year I was overwhelmed and disillusioned by constantly diving into the high tide of all the art that London has to offer. And then it stopped. Theatres, galleries, cinemas closed. The waters stilled, leaving me adrift, unanchored.
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The last play I saw before the theatres closed was The High Table at the Bush on Friday 13 March. Already it was being deemed irresponsible to gather in crowded public places, and on such an inauspicious date? Defiance abutted by doubt. I enjoyed the play a lot: it’s a love story about two women who want to marry, their relationship rocked by homophobia, and the subject of fractious debate among the Nigerian ancestors of one of the women, who speak of the clamp of colonialism, and long to rebuild their older culture, in which sexuality was less regimented, gender more fluid. I wanted to see it because I admire its writer, Temi Wilkey, but the Bush is a 40-minute journey via two sardine-tin tube trains from my house, and I might more readily have skipped it were it not for Theatre Club.
For those who don’t know, Theatre Club is like a book group for performances, a discussion space that anyone can join to chat about a show we’ve all seen. The conversation about The High Table – which happened online once I stopped sulking that we couldn’t share biscuits together – was typical of why I love Theatre Club so much: lots of disagreement, all of it agreeable, lots of consideration (the questioning kind, and the caring kind) given to the style and structure and argument of the play, and one person who loved it outright, who eventually spoke of the personal connection she felt with the story, its resonance with her own experience as a bisexual woman constantly being challenged for who she happened to love. They are always a gift, these moments of candour, of glimpsing the full life that a human brings to the art they encounter.
Theatre Club has been a beacon in these Covid times, a continuance of community and connection with strangers and the possibility inherent in what philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah calls “cosmopolitanism”: openness to difference. As the motley, ever-shifting group has continued to meet over the summer, we’ve been able to talk in less usual ways: not about the new shows that rush at you in high tide, but the plays that linger long in memory, and why we think theatre matters, and the venues we most like to watch theatre in, be they real or of our dreams.
The first of these wide-ranging conversations was dedicated to theatre that has inspired “ways to think differently about how people live, and live together” or “felt really meaningful in a small-p political way”. And it was glorious, a tapestry of recollection taking in a production of The Crucible at the National Theatre in the 1990s, which exposed with unaccustomed clarity the inability of people in power to admit that they are wrong; a work by New Zealand performer James Nokise radically exposing the unthinking racism of white liberal arts lovers; the pleasure of watching complex Muslim characters, not at all caricatured, in Danusia Samal’s play Out of Sorts; and ending with a flurry of love for Emma Rice, reaching across several Kneehigh performances plus her work at the Globe. As the invitation itself was unpicked and respun, more and more what was discussed was not what the shows were about, but the feeling of being in the audience for them: of all responding at once – to a song, a speech, a moment of dance – and exulting in that collective response.
This, I realised, was the anchor I was searching for in the absence of theatre: not the work itself so much as the architecture around the work. The being-in-audience, the feeling-in-community, and these occasional evenings of vigorous dialogue, talking within and across difference of opinion.
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The loneliness of lockdown has been chipping away at my wariness of audio work. Disembodied voices quite often unnerve me, but lately I’m feeling grateful for the company, especially when it’s a voice I know in real life. Jo Bannon’s Absent Tense leant against the kitchen counter, chatty and graceful, snaffling discs of carrot while I cooked dinner: it’s a set of 12 meditations on absences, personal and philosophical, taking in Catholic saints, memory games, her shielding father, and – the segment that has stayed with me most vividly – the absence of a word for the colour blue from most languages until about the eighth century. Last year I read the Odyssey to my son, in Emily Wilson’s subtle translation, and the wine-darkness of the sea became a running joke between us; we didn’t think there might be wider implications.
Caridad Svich’s Day for Night mixes a drink while the soup bubbles: she reads out poetry, essays, portions of plays, in a voice that is road tar in the gloaming, lick of flame in the wood stove. I especially recommend episode 33, mostly dedicated to a bracing essay by Tim Crouch called Darling, You Were Marvellous, calling for more genuine criticality in the conversation around theatre. I winced a bit when listening, because I know the kind of criticism I’ve been writing for a few years now, focused on feeling, reserving criticism for the social and particularly economic conditions in which theatre is made, can skate over the kind of rigour Tim demands. I winced significantly more – almost folded in half with the stab of it – listening to Nice White Parents: what a painful exercise in recognition that is, not only of the systems I’ve taken advantage of in getting my own children to the secondary school of my choice, but the assumptions and biases expressed in that choice.
The work that has assuaged loneliness most tenderly is Letters at the Gate. Its premise is simple: pairs of performers have written letters for each other during lockdown, and they are opened and read out on Zoom, between a series of playful tasks – getting dressed up (Nina Bowers as Prince was a particular delight), drawing each other in chalk, dancing amid confetti at the end. It opens to the buoyant rhythm of Ray Charles’ Mess Around, and it’s true that there is a deliberately messy, makeshift feel to it, but none of the performances I’ve seen has felt frivolous. Writing about the first Letters in Exeunt, Lily Levinson struggled with a sense of banality, but for me that’s been one of the strengths. These letters hold the humdrum of life hand in hand with its complexity, the tedium of days when you can’t be bothered to cook with the sharp poignancy of remembering a friend on the anniversary of their death. Lately I’ve been reading Sarah Ruhl’s 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time To Write and her brief thought on lightness captures exactly the delicacy of Letters’ relationship with the mundane:
“A suspicion that lightness is not deeply serious (but instead whimsical) pervades aesthetic discourse. But what if lightness is a philosophical choice to temper reality with strangeness, to temper the intellect with emotion, and to temper emotion with humor. Lightness is then a philosophical victory over heaviness. A reckoning with the humble and the small and the invisible.”
That’s a deft description of Annie Siddons’ letter, a generous and lyrical meander through her worries about her father in a care home, her crush on the local DPD driver, and the relationship between poetry and time. Reading it out, Joseph Akubeze’s emotions rippled at the surface: there were phrases that caught in his throat, and phrases that had him effervescing laughter. And this is another anchor I’ve been reaching for, what draws me always back to theatre: those luminous moments of people being real, saying – and listening to – something true.
The texts move gently through time, the first letters dated early in lockdown, uncertainty and a sense of suspension solidifying with the impact of the murder of George Floyd, politics expressed partly in the letters themselves but mostly through the choice of poems the performers give each other to read, by Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Hannah Drake. The severity of recent (and deep-rooted) politics brought out the stickiness potential in even the playful exercises. Between letter and poem the performers are invited simultaneously to complete a sentence starting with the words “I want”. In what at first felt like an uncomfortable disparity, Chris Thorpe’s card read, I want to give you a massive fucking hug, while beside him, Kayla Meikle had written: I want to end systemic racism. It happened again with Annie and Joseph – neither of whom, I realised, had watched any one else’s performances, enabling their own to be more genuinely unplanned and live – where Joseph wished for another month of sun while Annie wrote a list of justice-related desires starting with social housing for everyone who needs it. Both times the hilarity, the reassurance, in the meeting of these wants – the meeting of the consequential and the light – has created a feeling not just humble but kind.
Being with people, navigating our differences, reconciling the inequitable conditions we live within, is all hard. I find it easier in audience, for every kind of art form, but particularly theatre: I am always in company, always in discourse, permitted – encouraged – to be quiet in the shadows, to be introverted, to be witness. Being in audience is like having an assigned role and does much to temper the awkwardness of being in society (so does being host, as in Theatre Club). In these months of enforced physical distancing I’ve felt my awkwardness intensify, insecurity calcifying with prolonged interiority. So of course I loved that first performance of Letters so much I went back another three times. Brief and messy as it is, it invites you to be in intimate companionship with people as they put a frame around this tricky business of being alive.
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The first post of this new blog started with me being disillusioned as well, although more specifically with the entrenched ableism of the theatre industry, among its many contributions to social injustice. One of the things I’ve suggested in a conversation about possible futures for theatre has been that all buildings that aren’t accessible to wheelchairs are permanently closed. So that would include the Gate then. If these Covid times have blessings, maybe the transformation of the Gate into an online venue (which has its own problems with accessibility for sure) could be one of them. Before Letters they programmed an invigorating conversation about possible futures for theatre, a Town Hall discussion inviting international perspectives, including from Jumatatu Poe, a choreographer/performer and co-author of the document Creating New Futures, a communal publication rethinking the power balance in organisation-artist relationships. Jumatatu began with a healing touch ritual, quoted liberally from adrienne maree brown’s book Emergent Strategy, spoke of rethinking the structures of conversation as a necessary first step in opening space to reimagine organisational, political, educational structures, and by the time they name-checked artist Amara Tabor-Smith, who works as “a death doula for the patriarchy”, my crush-o-meter had tipped off the scale.
Better still, the Gate have hosted an online installation by Rosie Elnile called Prayer that placed into my hands, firmly and thoughtfully, the third anchor I’ve been yearning for in these months without theatre: its very particular interaction with, embodiment of, ideas. Embedded in the etymology of rehearse, Rosie notes in the text of Prayer, is the image of raking over soil, making it ready for planting: “to make a fertile space for ideas”. Prayer is an argument for rethinking how these fertile spaces of theatre are used: not to reproduce conditions of injustice, imperialism, climate crisis, but “to engender collective acts of imagination” that might, with time, and work, shift these present realities.
Rosie is a performance designer and speaks from that perspective, questioning how design is taught, how “often design works towards a reassertion of white middle-class aesthetics as the default”, how design impacts environment local and global, and how designers might reject the notion of theatre as an “empty space” and instead work with the specific conditions around them: the history of the building, its relationship to colonialism, the composition of its local community. To think all this through she creates a kind of kitchen garden online, with not only her own texts but images of plants, work by other visual artists, poems and excerpts from various other essays, occasionally with an accompanying comment or qualification, but mostly inviting the participant to wander through its winding paths, tending meaning for themselves. Throughout Rosie is alert to the contradictions she is unearthing: she advocates “deep and careful thought about the communities that live in direct proximity to theatre buildings” even as said communities are absent from Prayer; she acknowledges that ideas of nature and the natural have been used as tools of oppression but so too has the idea that humans are beyond nature. Prayer is positioned within these complexities.
The very name Prayer is an admission that active change requires not only work but faith: a belief that the work will come to fruition, however far in the future. In her book All About Love, bell hooks thinks about the relationship between fear and faith; “Cultures of domination rely on the cultivation of fear as a way to ensure obedience,” she writes, while: “Faith enables us to move past fear.” Prayer ends with a set of images of model boxes Rosie has made, indoor gardens likely impossible to grow in a theatre without some abuse of natural resources. Looking at one of these images, in which boulders float tantalisingly in mid-air, I remembered seeing a realised design similar to this before, in the exploded island of Uninvited Guests’ This Last Tempest – another work that beautifully, profoundly, opened space for its performers to be real and speak true, not least about a world beyond extractive, exploitative capitalism. Theatre is my anchor because it is, in its ideal state, the place where I get to glimpse social and political change in action, however compromised, however fleeting.
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But there’s another problem. Space for contemplation, let alone action, is often missing when swimming in the high tide of London’s arts scene. As Rosie says: “The pace of theatre-making rarely allows for complicated thoughts around process, and I think that is in part why it is so hard to make change.” I think about this from the position of audience too: that theatre might be a distraction from the slow and patient work of organising for change. In the stillness of theatre’s relative absence I’ve found more space to talk with people who are doing that organising: with a mutual aid group interested in setting up neighbourhood food co-ops, modelled on the work of Cooperation Town; and a group advocating for universal basic income as a version of redistributive economy; and a group building up a new cultural workers branch of the union United Voices of the World. (Confession: in the many hours, days even, it’s taken to write this, I’ve done no work supporting those groups at all.) What all these groups are preoccupied with is people having basic human rights: access to food as a priority, but also access to the time that gets freed up when life isn’t dominated by low-paid work. At the very, very least, access to the modified inequality described by Ha-Joon Chang, in his excellent and unexpectedly entertaining book 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism: “an environment where everyone is guaranteed some minimum capabilities through some guarantee of minimum income, education and healthcare”.
In Covid times I’ve also hosted a few change-focused conversations myself, inviting theatre-y people to think about how we might work differently together: with each other, with organisations, with other people. Theatre is where I glimpse social and political change in action and also where I see most closely and infuriatingly how resistant structures are to change. As artist Adam York Gregory notes in an excoriating tweet: “If you want to understand how difficult systemic change is, look at the arts. We've been talking about fairness, transparency and equality for decades, yet still struggle with the basics.” The more I work with dialogue, but in particular the more attentive I am to how artists such as Lois Weaver and Rajni Shah and Selina Thompson, the more I understand why talking isn’t enough: the dialogue itself has to model, in its very construction, fairness, transparency and equality, and indeed to question what equality means, how it is being defined, and by whom. None of this is easy. Not least when it requires so many people (I include myself here) to give up power, step aside, listen rather than speak. For the people having the dialogue and shaping it to change too.
And the pull of what is known is strong: tidal, gravitational. In her spoken text in Prayer, Rosie quotes a thought of director Anthony Sampson-Pike: “We are living through a crisis of imagination.” Theatre is a space in which imagination can wander, stretch out, test, play; but in its frenetic pace – and look at how the word pace pushes at the edges even of the word space – theatre can also restrict its possibility, trapping what could be within the confines of what is. As I rewrite and rework these final thoughts, getting tangled in nets of metaphor and contradiction (mostly, I hope, now deleted), I notice what I’m talking about here is two things: theatre as human activity and theatre as industry. Inspired by Prayer I’m now reading Ngũgĩ’s Decolonising the Mind: the pre-colonial Kenyan theatre he describes is not a forceful wave of isolated events, but “part and parcel of the rhythm of daily and seasonal life of the community[,] an activity among other activities, often drawing its energy from those other activities.” Community artist Rosie Priest describes something similar in this blog on the language of transformation so often employed in the arts: where she grew up, a tiny village in Cumbria, “the opportunity to explore art wasn’t considered an alternative activity, it was just what you did”.
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These anchors of theatre I’ve been thinking about are really just one (and yes, I do find the tenacity of Christian tropes unsettling). I hold it in my hands: how heavy it is, how solid. Fear and faith balanced within it. I think about what it might mean to fragment it, shatter and share the pieces more fairly. How the language of “viable business” shatters it another way. I hold it and look across the water, this strange and challenging pool of time, and think about starting to swim.
