tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-86511457642368055872024-03-18T03:03:55.632+00:00Deliq.thoughts on theatre, writing, music, feminism, dancing, dreaming & mothering, by maddy costamaddy costahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04929576408540749708noreply@blogger.comBlogger123125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8651145764236805587.post-44296669487323153742022-10-07T09:23:00.002+01:002022-10-07T09:23:35.055+01:00On working with Chris Goode: personal accounts and calls for action<p>This is a collective introduction to a number of texts written by artists, writers, actors and producers, who have worked with Chris Goode since 2011. </p><p>For anyone who might not know, Goode was an influential writer, blogger, theatre-maker and director in British theatre. He was also an abuser who hurt many adult people, over many years. He misused his power as a director, employer and lauded artist, and wilfully obscured this through misusing the languages of contemporary performance, queer liberation, and safeguarding policy. As a consequence, for many years his abuses and harms were misinterpreted, overlooked and denied. </p><p>Since 2017, a number of people who worked with Goode have been gathering to address these acts of harm and abuse, to bring them to light, and to prevent them continuing. Since his death in June 2021, this group has also worked to organise support for some with direct experience of his practices. This has included informal spaces for connection and reflection; fundraising for therapeutic support for individuals; and facilitated spaces for group conversation that can address ongoing conflict. </p><p>The texts collected here have been written alongside and as part of these reparative efforts. While we endeavour to resist the culture of silence that surrounds Goode’s practices, we acknowledge the vulnerabilities of many who were harmed by this work, and the ways in which they might be harmed again by public writing. As we now open our conversation out to a broader community, we continue to prioritise the ideals of bridging and care. </p><p>We hope that this complex and painful history can take on a legacy of learning, transformation and growth. We want these reflections to contribute to the growing dialogue of #MeToo across theatre and performance in the UK, and make a number of recommendations for change in the cultural sector. Goode was not unique in his abuse of power. Our personal experiences of harm in working with Goode, and the ways in which he made his collaborators complicit, motivate our desire that such harm should not be replicated. We act in solidarity with many people who resist exploitation, abuse, sexism and sexual violence, and who seek safe working conditions for all. </p><p>The history we are writing is complex and full of unknowns. It is neither possible nor appropriate for any individual to tell the full story. Eschewing any singular narrative, four of us have instead written individual accounts of our experiences and understandings. We appreciate our different – at times contradictory – perspectives, and find them useful to comprehend how a culture of harm arose and was sustained for years. </p><p>Rather than forming any definite or final word, we see these texts as a beginning. The work of processing requires time; understandings continue to emerge as the many people connected to Goode’s work share experiences with each other. We hope these texts might encourage more sharing, such that the broader community can continue to develop a rounded picture of a complex situation. With an eye on safety within the unregulated space of what is otherwise a personal blog, we are closing the comments box, but this blog will remain a space to which anyone who would like to address this history can contribute, whenever it might feel like the right time for that to happen. </p><p>We would like to thank many people who have made this writing possible. We thank those who have co-organised with us over these years; the many individuals who have bravely entered into dialogue with us; those who have offered us care, support and guidance; those donors who enabled us to access counselling and conflict mediation; and the LGBT+ mental health charity ELOP. </p><p>We apologise that these texts are not immediately available in audio versions: this will be attended to as soon as possible. </p><p>In solidarity, and alongside and with others, </p><p>Lucy, Maddy, Paul, and Xavier </p><p> </p><p style="text-align: center;"> * </p><p style="text-align: center;"><br /></p><p>Please note: the following texts contain extensive discussion of coercion, manipulation, adult and child sexual abuse, and suicide. If you find these texts distressing, please know that you can reach out to <a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1S8-EaiFvgQ_xMpkp0SjZVIEnaTinXXoVkFq2Ks8VdCc/edit?pli=1" target="_blank">these organisations for support</a>. We are
speaking here about the need to improve safeguarding, and ways
to report abuse. If this is happening to you, or if you are
worrying about someone else, please reach out for help. Get a
friend to support you. Do it today.</p><p> </p><p><b>Act on concerns, by Lucy Ellinson</b>, performer with Signal to Noise, Chris Goode & Company, and independent works, 2005-2018<b> </b></p><p><a href="https://statesofdeliquescence.blogspot.com/2022/10/act-on-concerns.html" target="_blank">Text here</a></p><p><a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/1gsua9rEdCiWGZ_yEFPuRr4T4xpx9Kzyq/view?usp=sharing" target="_blank">Audio here</a><br /></p><p><b>Silence is not an option,
by Xavier de Sousa</b>, Senior Producer at Chris Goode & Company, 2017 </p><p><a href="https://statesofdeliquescence.blogspot.com/2022/10/silence-is-not-option.html" rel="nofollow">Text here</a></p><p><a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/12AYsqXD-nEVw8lUtKcs8WiKkaeROdvHE/view?usp=sharing" target="_blank">Audio for part 1 here</a> </p><p><a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/1kGMlFJjnykEQIkwnUYHmjbh2bvaWkDiM/view?usp=sharing" target="_blank">Audio for part 2 here</a><br /></p><p><b>Accountability in process, by Maddy Costa</b>, critical writer with Chris Goode & Company, 2011-2018</p><p><a href="https://statesofdeliquescence.blogspot.com/2022/10/accountability-in-process.html" target="_blank">Text here</a></p><p><a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/1tDIqUAUt6mNxQ_EcsZ4YBzPHQ17KfBqe/view?usp=sharing" target="_blank">Audio here</a> <br /></p><p><b>On working with, and after, Chris Goode
by Paul Paschal</b>, performer with Ponyboy Curtis 2015-2016</p><p><a href="https://statesofdeliquescence.blogspot.com/2022/10/on-working-with-and-after-chris-goode.html" target="_blank">Text here</a></p><p><a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/1yhS9cpG6_bVhGfBoWlFNMxvIpwwvOUGW/view?usp=sharing" target="_blank">Audio here</a> <br /></p><p>These texts sit alongside two articles, written by journalists <a href="https://www.thestage.co.uk/long-reads/abuse-in-theatre-how-did-chris-goode-avoid-scrutiny-for-so-long" target="_blank">Lyn Gardner for The Stage</a>, and David Levesley for The Face.</p>maddy costahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04929576408540749708noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8651145764236805587.post-8665581951817159852022-10-07T09:16:00.002+01:002022-10-10T12:29:36.340+01:00Act on concerns<div style="text-align: left;"><p><b><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">by
Lucy Ellinson</span></span></b></p></div><div style="text-align: left;"><p><b><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></span></b></p></div><div style="text-align: left;"><p><a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/1gsua9rEdCiWGZ_yEFPuRr4T4xpx9Kzyq/view?usp=sharing" target="_blank"><b><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">AUDIO VERSION HERE</span></span></b></a></p></div><div style="text-align: left;"><p><b><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></span></b></p></div>
<div class="western" style="text-align: left;"><p><b><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">Content
warning </span></span></b>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
Below, I mention sexual abuse, coercion, rape and
paedophilia, but only in the</span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">context
of them having occurred. I do not go into detail.</span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
There
are useful links provided at the end of this document.</span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="break-after: avoid; break-inside: avoid; line-height: 115%; text-align: left;"><p><a name="_heading=h.b4lwjargyaw2"></a>
<span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><u><span style="font-weight: normal;"><a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1S8-EaiFvgQ_xMpkp0SjZVIEnaTinXXoVkFq2Ks8VdCc/edit?usp=sharing" target="_blank"><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Support
services are also listed here</span></span></span></a></span></u></span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="break-after: avoid; break-inside: avoid; line-height: 115%; text-align: left;"><p><a name="_heading=h.nfgy649bikwc"></a>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></span></p></div><div class="western" style="break-after: avoid; break-inside: avoid; line-height: 115%; text-align: left;"><p><b><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">Introduction</span></span></b></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">My
name is Lucy. I work as a freelancer in theatre, usually performing
in shows, sometimes making small projects. Writing here, I am
speaking only for myself.</span></span></p></div><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">I
am writing this in a dual capacity. First, I am an artist who worked
with Chris Goode over many years and on many different types of
projects: early fringe work, studio and main house shows, and lots of
research and development. All work that I dearly loved making and in
a time where we shared a friendship (I find that hard to think about
now). It may seem contradictory when written down, but I also
experienced some of his abusive behaviour and practices; I absorbed
it, like others did. It always seemed like he might break if we
didn’t. We fell out very badly in 2014, worked together again in
2017. I severed our relationship in 2018.</span></span></p></div><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">Second,
I have been involved in a mutual support circle that includes adult
survivors of Chris’s abuse. Since 2018 we have been trying to work
towards accountability and sector change. I am grateful for the care,
wisdom and compassionate leadership of the thoughtful people in this
group.</span></span></p></div><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">I
have been trying to understand how Chris manipulated the creative
processes I was involved in and to ask tough questions of myself. I
have also been trying to understand how he was able to continue
hurting people for so long. I often hear people refer to our
industry's ‘safeguarding system,' but I'm telling you: there isn't
one.</span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">There
are internal processes, people with expertise, knowledge and a lot of
</span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>policy</i></span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">,
but it isn't joined up. We need more. [Please note: I don’t make
this statement about theatres and safeguarding with reference to work
for young people and children: their processes are different, and I
am not able to discuss them with any degree of authority.]</span></span></p></div><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">We
need an energetic and united move to improve safeguarding across the
entire theatre landscape. I believe the information drawn from our</span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>
</i></span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">experiences
can be useful to that effort.</span></span></p></div><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">This
writing is in three parts: some brief words on Chris, a personal
account and a call to action. I don’t wish to stir up unwanted
attention and pain for people in need of healing or who were close to
Chris. I hope that whoever reads this is supported. I have included
links to resources for support.</span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div><div class="western" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">Before
I begin:</span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
Speaking</span></span></p></div>
<ul style="text-align: left;"><li><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">There
are places in this writing where I still need to respect
confidentiality.</span></span></p></div><div><p>
</p></div></li><li><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">Many
people have been trying to process this experience offline and
prefer not to unpack it on social media. This is not what I mean by
“silence”.</span></span></p></div><div><p>
</p></div></li><li><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">Many
of us have different language for describing ourselves and what
happened to us. That needs to be respected.</span></span></p></div><div><p>
</p></div></li></ul>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 1.27cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 1.27cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">Sharing</span></span></p></div>
<ul style="text-align: left;"><li><div class="western" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">I
am still learning things which put memories and experiences into a
new light.</span></span></p></div><div><p>
</p></div></li><li><div class="western" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">Revelations
over the years have created (for me) a sort of ‘speaking with
hindsight’. I will do my best to be alert to this and be accurate
about what I knew when.</span></span></p></div><div><p>
</p></div></li><li><div class="western" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">Those
of us who knew him are all in very different places in terms of
knowledge about his behaviour, and our own healing. Many report
feeling isolated, positioned ever so slightly differently, all
facing – my words – “the wrong way”, so that none of us
could ever see the whole picture of his operations at any one time.
As such I believe that much more talking and listening needs to be
done. </span></span>
</p></div><div><p>
</p></div></li></ul>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 1.27cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">Warning
</span></span>
</p></div>
<ul style="text-align: left;"><li><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">There
are people with anti-trans-rights views who are seeking to exploit
this painful situation by producing podcasts and the like under the
guise of campaign journalism. I find this appalling. It is the
self-serving exploitation of people’s trauma, and only more harm
can come from it.</span></span></p></div><div><p>
</p></div></li></ul>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 1.27cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">A
partial view</span></span></p></div>
<ul style="text-align: left;"><li><div class="western" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">There
are many others, not represented here, and who I didn’t wish to
spotlight, or speak for. </span></span>
</p></div><div><p>
</p></div></li><li><div class="western" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">I
will do my best to be kind, but I am angry. I believe these two
things can co-exist.</span></span></p></div><div><p>
</p></div></li></ul>
<div class="western" style="break-after: avoid; break-inside: avoid; line-height: 115%; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 115%; text-align: left;"><p><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></span></p></div><div class="western" style="line-height: 115%; text-align: left;"><p><b><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">Part
1: Background</span></span></b></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">I
don’t wish to centre Chris Goode, but I do need to provide some
vital context for anyone who might not know. Chris was an influential
writer, blogger, theatre maker and director in British theatre. He
was also an abuser who hurt many people over many years. That abuse
and harm was hidden, wilfully obscured by his misuse of a) his power
as a director, employer and lauded artist; and b) crucially, the
language of contemporary performance in discourses around queer
liberation and safeguarding policy. As a consequence, the abuse and
harm he perpetrated was misinterpreted, overlooked and denied. Much
of this isn’t widely known today and it is survivors and the people
who have been harmed who carry that burden.</span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">In
2021 that burden was added to when Chris’s participation in the
repulsive, industrialised abuse of children was revealed to us all
after he was arrested for possession of a significant amount of abuse
images and video. He then evaded justice by ending his own life
before being formally charged by the police.</span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">When
we learnt about his paedophilia, it was an indescribable shock. A
horror. The news has re-traumatised adults already having to cope
with their own experiences of Chris’s abuse and many more people
across our sector who are survivors of childhood sexual abuse. This
trauma has been exacerbated by silence.</span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">Chris
Goode coerced and abused young adult artists. He committed acts of
serious sexual violence. He showed no remorse for his actions. He
worked all across our sector – in higher education and drama
training institutions, experimental spaces, festivals and studio and
main house productions. He published books and online writing. His
influence was considerable. However painful and exposing it may be,
we need to piece together how he was able to evade safeguarding in so
many contexts. We need to identify the gaps, look into mistakes and
how measures and processes failed and become aware of the techniques
this abuser used (which others like him continue to use) to evade
detection and oversight.</span></span></p></div><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></span></p></div><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; text-align: left;"><p><a name="_heading=h.5taoqnohervt"></a>
<b><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">Part
2 A personal account</span></span></b></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">This
piece of writing will address my experience of Chris Goode, over the
years 2005-2014, and focus more on 2018-2022. It is intended to work
</span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>with</i></span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">
the Call to Action, that is the priority and purpose of writing. </span></span>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">I
write this in solidarity with those who have not yet had an
opportunity to speak.</span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; text-align: left;"><p><a name="_heading=h.cf7se13573nt"></a>
<b><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></span></b></p></div><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; text-align: left;"><p><b><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">2005-2014</span></span></b></p></div>
<div class="western" style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 137%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">There
are other people who may wish to share more in the future about their
experience of Chris (outside of Chris Goode and Company, or Ponyboy
Curtis). I might at some point, as more context about a) the
conditions we were working in when we started our careers might be
helpful and b) it is important to convey why people wanted to work on
these projects, in these rehearsal rooms, why many artists poured
their hearts into the work and audience members connected to it. It
was because we enjoyed much of that making and believed that </span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>what</i></span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">
we were making had honesty and compassion at its core.</span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 137%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">Something
I’ve learnt over these recent years is that you can be in a room
with people and feel it to be a kind and wonderful space, while not
being aware of abuse and oppression happening for everyone in it. It
is much easier to see </span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>now</i></span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">
how and why Chris was able to charm people to work with and be loyal
to him. At the time we were just making theatre.</span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 137%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 137%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">My
first acting job was with Chris in 2005, (he was just a few years
older than me). I was starting out, zero confidence, no training and
no clue how to get work. No pay/ low pay gigs mostly then but I was
passionate about live performance and wanting theatre to talk
directly to how we lived. 17 years later - there is so much pain.</span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 137%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">I
have heard “why didn’t you do anything?” and that is an
important question. I have heard “why would you let yourself be
treated like that?” but that suggests that the blame for abusive
behaviour lies with someone other than Chris. That question creates
shame and can prevent people from getting help.</span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 137%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">I
don’t describe myself as a victim or a survivor. But I did
experience harm, through nasty, sometimes bullying behaviour,
manipulation, refusal to pay me for work, verbal sexual harassment,
an attempt to coerce for a nudity/sex scene, one physical assault. </span></span>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 137%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">I
am not the only one. I'm still processing and I don’t seek sympathy
or publicity. Nor do I suggest my experience is comparable to others,
definitely not more important. I recognise my privilege. My
motivation for writing any of this is to make people alert to the
fact that this is happening all around us, all the time.</span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 137%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">There
were moments when I felt uncomfortable. There were moments when I
felt he was messing with people. There were moments that when
confronted, he would lose it. There were moments when I </span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>didn’t
</i></span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">confront
him and believed how he described things to be. There were others
like me who felt like we were tasked with keeping him safe from
himself. There were moments when I felt unsafe and kept away from
people who now I think were not safe themselves. There were moments
when I felt that my loyalty was being tested, only I didn’t think
</span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>he</i></span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">
would do something like </span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>that</i></span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">
and I didn’t have that language at the time. There are </span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>many
</i></span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">moments
when I was told that my objections were actually a sign of an inner
hatred of myself and my self-directed homophobia. When disagreement
in the rehearsal room meant you got crushed. There were moments,
toward the end of our relationship, when he was just so hateful in
his actions, words and work; where he slipped his guard and forgot
who I was but I saw him and what he was capable of almost-clearly,
after 13 years. </span></span>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 137%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">I
wish I had seen him for who he was earlier. I wish I had seen what
others were going through, pursued questions about people’s
well-being and paid attention to why I didn’t feel comfortable. I
wish I had had the training that (by pure luck) I have now; more
awareness, to look for the signs, be alert to red flags, join the
dots.</span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;"><b>Content
warning: references to sexual abuse in this section</b></span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 115%; text-align: left;"><p><a name="_heading=h.lf3m4ah9pms8"></a>
<b><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">2018-2022 </span></span></b></p></div><div class="western" style="line-height: 115%; text-align: left;"><p><b><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></span></b></p></div><div style="text-align: left;"><p><b>
</b></p></div><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; text-align: left;"><p><b><a name="_heading=h.9ah18mfqd5p8"></a>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">2018
</span></span></b>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;"><b>Disclosure
and reporting:</b></span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">In
2018 I heard a disclosure relating to sexual abuse by Chris. I deeply
admire the courage it took to share this experience. I was profoundly
shocked; the coercion, the abuse of power, the controlling and
threatening behaviour and the sexual and psychological abuse were
clear. With the permission of the person who made the disclosure, I
was empowered to communicate it to someone who could help.</span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">I
was upset and I didn’t know what to do. I had been involved in
Chris’s work for a long time, and my mind scanned back through the
years for more people he might have harmed and abused. Questioning
what I had seen and heard, I would go on to recall moments of
personal discomfort and things said that had felt unusual. It didn’t
yet make clear sense as part of a greater pattern. My focus was on
the present moment. I had immediate support from two close friends,
who I thank with every fibre of my being.</span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">One
of them was Wendy Hubbard, another of Chris’s long-term
collaborators, who had directed many of his solo shows. Wendy worked
brilliantly with actors, an area in which Chris had little skill.
She, too, was horrified. With Wendy’s support, I contacted </span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">three
senior female leaders in the industry</span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">
and I was really nervous making those approaches, but they believed
me. They were shocked and incredibly kind, and they moved swiftly
into action.</span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;"><b>I
would like to pause here and say to any freelancers out there,
particularly young or emerging artists: Yes, going to speak to
people, especially people in positions of authority, can feel really
daunting. But if you are in harm’s way or need to report a concern,
</b></span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;"><i><b>please</b></i></span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;"><b>
take a step in that direction. While part of our work in publishing
these blogs is to ask our industry to make it easier to report
things, there </b></span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;"><i><b>are
</b></i></span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;"><b>ways
to get help now. My advice is to get a friend to help you and never
doubt yourself.</b></span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">These
meetings all happened within a few days of each other, and around
them several things happened. I met with Maddy Costa and explained to
her what I knew. She listened, took what I said seriously and shared
that there were potentially other people who had expressed concerns
about Chris. She offered to put us in touch, and during my lunch and
coffee breaks at rehearsals, I emailed (clumsily), had phone calls
and then went back to work and tried to keep it together. Each
communication clarified the scope of the situation, which was much
bigger and more frightening than I had originally realised: the abuse
that Chris had perpetrated was extensive. He had targeted individuals
and, through abusive work practices, hurt many people.</span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">It
was suggested to me that I should contact Xavier De Sousa, who had
been a producer with Chris Goode & Company. I called him and
explained what I’d learned, and he shared his experience of raising
complaints while working for the Company – the actions he’d
taken, the blocks he’d faced and how he’d been mistreated. I
latched onto his strength then and have held on ever since.</span></span></p></div><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0.14cm; margin-top: 0.56cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;"><b>Inquiry
and confidentiality</b></span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">Things
continued to move quickly. </span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">Chris
Goode & Company were sent a joint letter from the leaders I had
approached demanding an independent inquiry into Chris Goode's
practice. I don’t have knowledge of this process but staff
responded with seriousness, engaging a consultancy firm to carry out
the inquiry. Once it began, Chris Goode & Company were the entity
first contacting people for interviews, which I assume was about GDPR
and probably unavoidable but it was also off-putting. There must be a
better way</span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">.
</span></span>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">I
met and was interviewed – another rehearsal lunch break – trying
to keep it together.</span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">Like
many people, I invested a lot of hope in the inquiry. I didn’t know
how it would play out, but because I knew that some survivors had
taken part (which must have taken a lot of courage and strength), I
assumed the report would be damning in its findings. I believed that
it would bring justice, that it would stop Chris in his tracks and
prevent him from being able to lure, coerce and harm other young
people who just wanted to make meaningful art and start their
careers. I believed that people in our sector would find out what
he’d done to people and how he’d lied, or at least that everyone
would pay attention. Of course it would – it was an independent
inquiry, right?</span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">During
this time I struggled to balance my responsibilities. On the one
hand, it was essential that people knew about Chris. On the other, I
was bound to confidentiality, unable to speak publicly about what had
been disclosed to me without consent. As Xav mentions in his blog,
there are limited options when supporting adults </span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>who
have every right </i></span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">to
control how their information is shared. Questions can be invasive
and people can be traumatised and made unsafe by contact with the
police.</span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">So
here, the silence was mine, I felt stuck and I worried about what
that silence was doing. I tried to speak to friends and colleagues
that Chris and I had in common, but I was wary; I thought people
would go straight to him, and I was counselled to be careful lest I
accidentally identify someone. I took this very seriously: I was
learning more and more about his threatening behaviour and capacity
to lie and deliberately cause real harm (none of us knew about
Chris’s paedophilia until 2021). This abuse – by someone who for
many years I’d believed was incapable of such behaviour – was
difficult to comprehend.</span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">When
I did talk to people during this time, I was guarded – too much so,
I now think. I would say to them that I’d ended my relationship
with Chris because of the harm he was causing and because of the
inquiry, and that they should keep an eye on what came out in the
report. </span></span>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">It
was like they couldn’t hear me. Even months later, I’d see people
conversing on Twitter and I couldn’t understand it. I felt
increasingly afraid, and I started to become paranoid that no one
would believe me if I </span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>did</i></span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">
say something publicly. Deep anxiety and depression took hold of me.</span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">The
last time I saw Chris was in early 2018. I hadn’t heard from him
for a long while, which wasn’t strange; he’d been vile and
abusive when we’d worked together, and we weren’t on good terms.
But over 2018 and 2019, I received two emails from him enquiring
about friendship. I didn’t reply because I was afraid of what I
would say. I felt a moral responsibility to challenge him directly.
But I didn’t want to put people in danger. He blocked me on
Twitter, and I didn’t hear from him again.</span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0.14cm; margin-top: 0.56cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;"><b>The
Report</b></span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">When
the report finally came out in October 2018. it felt like someone had
switched out the future that was meant to happen and replaced it with
something different.</span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">In
the post-report process I had visualised, Chris Goode & Company
followed the recommendations. Chris faced personal consequences for
his actions, larger bodies with power and oversight stepped in and
withdrew support from him as an artist (and therefore from his
company). Survivors were empowered; able to influence the process;
seen, heard and believed. Once some or most of this work was
underway, I believed we would go public. From there, we would have a
</span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>lot</i></span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">
of organising to do to get any closer to some kind of justice.</span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">The
report was confidential, for the protection of survivors and people
harmed. Campaigning or confrontation on Twitter (a platform where
Chris had a lot of influence) might be, I agreed back then,
potentially damaging to people’s chances to achieve accountability
and justice.</span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">But
I was naïve. None of this happened. And it’s important to be real
here: is there any precedent for a </span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>process</i></span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">
like this in UK theatre? Possibly. But we won’t ever know about it
because of confidentiality and the risk of legal action.</span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">And
now I think initial confidentiality agreements need to have
flexibility, to be revisited and participants consulted, once it
becomes apparent that patterns of abusive behaviour are ongoing and
misconduct is evident. Otherwise: who is actually being protected
here? </span></span>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">The
inquiry and report had been carried out independently (my experience
of the consultancy firm was one of sound, solid practice, ethical
rigour and a thoughtful, intelligent grasp on the complexity of the
situation. I remain grateful for what they did). But the Inquiry was
limited – due to limited finances and scope.</span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">Chris
Goode & Company did </span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>begin
</i></span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">work
in response to a list of strong recommendations, they brought in
freelance consultants to assist with dealing with one of them – the
creation and implementation of a code of conduct. I didn’t know
anything of this at the time but now looking back, I believe that the
people contracted by the company were conscientious and diligent in
trying to deliver this properly (as well as some figures within the
company structure, who stayed with the process because of a
commitment to seeing the work was done). </span></span>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">However,
the company response to the report’s list of strong recommendations
– at least as far as I’m aware – did fall under Chris Goode &
Company management. So did </span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>oversight</i></span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">
of that response and this risked the integrity of the process. The
company had been built around Chris. His influence and reach were
considerable across its workings. Many of his people were colleagues
or fans. He was known to be angry and resistant when faced with
dissent, and he was being investigated for, among many things, abuse
of power. </span></span>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">I
now know that many people involved in the processes of the inquiry
and the company response were manipulated by him, including
freelancers and some staff at the company and some on the board. That
he presented himself outwardly as ‘welcoming the conversation’ –
but behind closed doors he despised the process and said so. I know
now – this became apparent through his reluctant responses to
requests for progress reports – that he was eventually able to
wholly manipulate the company’s response.</span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">The
report was a lot to absorb, I had to read through it in stages
because I was really struggling with the fallout in my mental health
and I anticipated it being full of details about the abuse, this was
unfounded due to the need to protect people from being identified. (A
reminder here that people directly affected by Chris had no access to
advocacy or counselling themselves.) I thought that the report tended
to give Chris’s intentions more credit than he deserved (he didn’t
deserve any, that would have been clear if the inquiry had involved
interviews with more people) but it did contain </span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>clear
</i></span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">evidence
of misconduct and what I would describe as abusive practices. As I
tried to reconcile what I knew with what I was reading, my faith
dwindled.</span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">I
learnt that important voices weren’t part of the process. Some
chose not to be, of course, it was </span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>absolutely
the right of survivors to decide</i></span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">
not to be interviewed; why should they have to relive their trauma?
And why would they believe that an inquiry initiated by Chris Goode &
Company could be effective, neutral or even fair? An invitation to
participate asked people who were (at minimum) affected by misconduct
to engage in a process that </span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>appeared</i></span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">
to be organised and paid for by the perpetrator. I also learnt that
important voices were never </span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>invited</i></span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">
in that initial Chris Goode & Company email – sent to Company
collaborators. I believe Chris is responsible for this. </span></span>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">There
was a clear list of strong recommendations for the company in the
report, including that some activities be stopped. These
recommendations should have sparked curiosity (from people in
positions of oversight especially) as well as the question “Wait –
what does this mean? Is everyone ok?” This did not happen. </span></span>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">The
report became another grey area that Chris was able to manipulate. I
ask this question of all of us: what grey areas are now operating in
the </span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>language
of safeguarding </i></span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">that
we as a sector have settled on using? What are we actually saying –
and doing?</span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">Some
recommendations were strong and unequivocal, others felt adjacent or
perhaps irrelevant to the way Chris worked. I remember thinking that
it would be easy for him to ignore them. I remembered how many times
over the years he had encouraged or demanded “risk-taking” from
us as performers (‘risk’ being one of theatre’s favourite and
most dangerously unspecific buzzwords) and how he sneered at the
venues we’d worked at, taking the piss as soon as venue staff were
clear after a meet-and-greet or health and safety/safe space
messaging. Those kinds of things were always subtly derided.</span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">It
is important to note that in recent years, language around
safeguarding and now well-being has become more present in how we
talk about work. Back in the earlier years of working with Chris,
this wasn’t so, so his use of similar language and the exploration
of opening yourself up, sharing about vulnerable experiences, loss,
trauma, identity, desire, made his rehearsal rooms and live work feel
like a rare invitation to disarm. For audiences and artists alike it
felt like a ‘safe place’ in comparison to the world in which we
live. As he became more fluent in this type of language, the industry
was developing its own safe-space terminology. And loved him for his.
We were, as devising performers, sharing our experiences of being
human, our vulnerable moments, mental health struggles, abuse,
assault, feeling ourselves to be safe while in fact being put at real
risk. He would use the “check in/check out” exercise – asking
“how are you?” – and in the investigation argued that it was an
adequate safeguarding mechanism. When days were difficult and he’d
been horrible, I’m telling you that mechanism was worse than
useless, it was used to crush dissent. He made “inappropriate
comments” (verbal sexual abuse) frequently over the years, which I
won’t describe here yet I remember him “holding space” for
people to share intimate MeToo experiences. He joked privately about
“not having been MeToo-d yet”. Thinking of that today turns my
stomach. </span></span>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">Many
of us had hoped for and visualised an outcome that meant Chris would
not be able to hurt anyone any more. Instead, the company somehow,
inexplicably, carried on being an NPO (they had paused while the
inquiry was ongoing). Chris would go on (in 2019) to frame the
experience through smooth talking Company PR online (don’t forget,
“the Company” was pretty much him). His own version of events
heavily quoted in our industry newspaper. </span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">This
was </span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">warmly
received offline, by fans and people who didn’t know what was
happening. I heard people say “yes well it's tricky isn’t it”
and thinking well of him for “doing the work”. </span></span>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">I
think it would have been so helpful for there to have been curiosity
in this moment, too. For people to have taken a beat and asked, “What
is this? Is everyone ok?” But that didn’t happen, as far as I
know. I don’t even know how many people knew there was an inquiry
or what those who did thought of it. I don’t want to think that
people looked away because this was happening to young men and queer
people, making it “just LGBTQ+ stuff”. I don’t say this to
shame or accuse anyone; I just think it would be worth taking a look,
internally, at what was going on there. Chris had a hold over what
people thought of him and his work, a powerful reputation that he’d
cultivated for decades. It just would have been useful in that moment
to have asked “What is this? Is everyone ok?” because these
questions require a response, follow-up and action. We can all learn
from that, </span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;"><u>me
included.</u></span></span></p><p><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;"><u> </u></span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="text-align: left;"><p><a name="_heading=h.akpo8tsrjapf"></a><a name="_heading=h.5yjl849hknob"></a>
<b><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">2019
</span></span></b>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;"><b>Holding
Chris Goode to account</b></span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">I
am ashamed to admit that at this point in the timeline I went under;
most of 2019 was a blur. I remember trying to work while
simultaneously pushing this away and it not going anywhere.</span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">Xav
and other people affected by Chris gathered to hold him and the
company to account. They did extraordinary work, writing letters in
response to the report and its recommendations, following up, asking
for progress reports and even intervening when somehow, inexplicably,
Chris Goode & Company offered free accommodation for an upcoming
artist at the 2019 Edinburgh festival.</span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">This
group worked incredibly hard, without support or access to advocacy
or counselling. They just had each other. They should </span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>never</i></span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">
have had to do it all alone.</span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">Xav
kindly kept in touch during this time, while I would reach out and
retract. I worried that survivors might feel unsafe around me and
perhaps be unable to heal, that I would contaminate their safe space
because of my past connection to Chris. Furthermore, this connection
still looked active online, and I was concerned that this could be
perceived as validating him in some way, especially in the eyes of
the amazing students and emerging artists that I worked with and
mentored. Chris was still seen as a “maverick avant-garde theatre
genius”, and I was someone they could talk to about his work. I was
so unsure of what to do in any direction. I did seek out advice from
friends in education and social care but there just weren’t any
pathways. I felt broken, worried that I would break others with any
decision I made, whether that meant speaking out or staying quiet.</span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">
Xav
and the group laboured away. Demanding to see evidence of the
safeguarding work that was promised. You can read about his
observations and work in his blog.</span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">We
are still piecing together what exactly happened but I personally
believe that:</span></span></p></div><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">Chris
manipulated the process by positioning the code of conduct as the
centrepiece of the company response.</span></span></p></div><div><p>
</p></div></li></ul>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 1.27cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<ul style="text-align: left;"><li><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">A
series of staff resignations led to organisational tailspin, which
blighted Chris’s company work but also consolidated his power;
enabling him to pause the work on that same code of conduct. This is
even said by him, in The Stage (2019).</span></span></p></div><div><p>
</p></div></li></ul>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<ul style="text-align: left;"><li><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">Chris
name-dropped respected professionals that weren’t actually
contracted to do anything. There is still a lot of haziness for me
around this, but this is my educated guess.</span></span></p></div><div><p>
</p></div></li></ul>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<ul style="text-align: left;"><li><div class="western" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">Abused,
harmed and affected people were the ones having to carry out
oversight and hold the company to account. This should never happen.</span></span></p></div><div><p>
</p></div></li></ul>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 1.27cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<ul style="text-align: left;"><li><div class="western" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">Abused,
harmed and affected people in order to hold the company to account,
ended up having to communicate with the abuser. They were able to do
so anonymously but this does not afford adequate protection.</span></span></p></div><div><p>
</p></div></li></ul>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0.42cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">During
this period, as I mentioned, I tried to keep working. But it felt
like there was a hole in the centre of everything. An emptiness. It
took a while to realise that that emptiness was probably me. Because
of my long collaboration with Chris, he would come up a lot in
conversation, and I would either shut down or flinch and scrape to
get away.</span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">Sometimes
I would engage; this often meant me sharing, followed by awkwardness,
which I read as disbelief, denial and possibly homophobia. It made me
less confident to proactively make these conversations happen. I wish
I could go back and change that, toughen up some. I would share with
people who asked about him in relation to work I was also involved
in. I was extremely anxious that he would be working with younger
artists again.</span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">Sometimes
I was approached for a specific conversation about people’s own
concerns and about things someone had “been hearing about",
and I noticed that these conversations were becoming more frequent.
But this was completely unsustainable, as well as ineffective. It
only led to his name being silently added to that long list of people
in our sector who abuse, harass and bully – a list that exists only
in people’s heads, because we have no power to do anything about it
- and even if we do – we’ll get sued.</span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">I
couldn't see a way to speak out publicly without retaliation or
repercussions for individuals who didn’t want to be identified. I
felt fearful of Chris. Such were people's strong protective feelings
for him that I didn't think I would be believed if I said anything
publicly. I found myself saying, "Our relationship is over
because I think he is a danger to people. Please, ask to read the
report." </span></span>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">Sometimes
people got it. But all these quiet warnings, in between the line
readings, reshuffles and withdrawals, it does us no good. It isn't
safeguarding. It’s abuser management, damage mitigation.</span></span></p></div><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">I’ve
spoken about my mental health a lot here but I didn’t really clock
what was up until doing an interview with an industry newspaper about
a show I was performing in. I was self-conscious anyway (don’t love
interviews), but particularly in regard to Chris coming up in
conversation, as it generally did. (Much as I wished for everything
to be known and discussed transparently in our industry press, I
didn't have survivors’ consent, and I couldn’t drag my colleagues
and employer at the time into the situation. I was meant to be
talking about the project I was working on). I managed to get through
it, but in a moment of chat afterwards, Chris Goode’s name came up.
I tried to bat it away by saying that I had a lot of “Chris-s” in
my life – something daft like that. But when I read the article he
was named as a regular collaborator of mine. I have no idea why –
he wasn't even involved in the project. I had an immediate and full
panic attack (I still have them because of all this, though fewer
now, thankfully). I understood then that we were in trouble. All of
us. Because this was just how things were now, and we didn't have
anywhere to go.</span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">The
year ended with me recovering from an injury and emailing with Xav,
who sent me Chris’s latest “response”. </span></span></p><p><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></span>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="text-align: left;"><p><a name="_heading=h.er37etq2u6qv"></a>
<b><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">2020</span></span></b></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">Xav
and I reconnected. We both noted that, thankfully, conversations with
people asking questions were becoming more frequent, but that the
inquiry had clearly not been able to contain Chris. He, the abuser,
was now in control of the process of creating safeguarding for his
company. Because of the threat he posed, we knew our next step must
be to move from private to public information-sharing but we didn't
yet know how. Or if we’d be empowered to do so. Then the pandemic
began, and like everyone in our industry and communities, our work
was cancelled or adapted or became entirely about fighting fire.</span></span></p><p><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0.42cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p><p>
</p><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="text-align: left;"><p><a name="_heading=h.um928x10e5qg"></a>
<b><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">2021</span></span></b></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;"><b>Content
warning: references to rape, paedophilia and suicide in this section</b></span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">In
March, Xav and I reconnected again; we'd both seen the incredible
work that </span></span><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><u><a href="https://www.helenraw.com/press-industry-sexual-harassment-bullying"><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">Helen
Raw</span></span></a></u></span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">
was doing in keeping the industry engaged in </span></span><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><u><a href="https://www.globalfundforwomen.org/movements/me-too/"><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">MeToo</span></span></a></u></span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">
justice and sector change work.</span></span>
</p></div><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">In
the same month, something happened that freaked me out and helped me
see things with clarity. </span></span>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">I
saw a tweet of Chris’s (he'd evidently unblocked me at some point)
that referenced the horrific kidnapping, rape and murder of a woman
walking home in Clapham by police officer Wayne Couzens (I’m
omitting her name purposefully so as not to create any attention/draw
her family into this). It instantly made me feel panicked and
physically sick. At that time, there was a collective call for men to
do something about misogyny in their circles and intervene when other
men abused women or circulated hateful material. For his part, Chris
cited his 2014 play </span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>Men
in the Cities</i></span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">
as an example of courageously facing up to and exploring
misogynistic, violent and abusive behaviour by men. I can't remember
his words precisely, but I believed he was trying to use that moment
of anguish, horror and fear to elevate himself as a progressive moral
example who was </span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>doing
the work</i></span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">.
It would have been egotistical even if he wasn't an abuser, but I was
horrified – unable-to-breathe horrified – that someone I knew to
be guilty of secretly and repeatedly committing the most serious
violent sexual crimes was promoting himself as an ally to women who
were calling out that same violence. It wasn't just a repugnant act:
it was a signal of his utter lack of remorse and any sense of
responsibility, perhaps even of delusional thinking. I was deeply
worried that he was active and dangerous again.</span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">It
felt clear that there was now no choice but to go public. Xav and I
connected, we hadn't worked out anything, but we started reaching out
to some survivors we were still in touch with to see how they felt
about making some kind of a public statement (by this point, many
were understandably exhausted and needed time away). Slowly, we
arranged a date to meet.</span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">Before
it arrived, I became aware that Chris had been in hospital. I didn't
know what for.</span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">At
each point during this short period in spring 2021, the image I have
in my head is of an elevator dangling in a lift shaft. With each
revelation, another support line breaks, plunging you further down.
You are jolted and left dangling. You don't imagine it can get worse,
and then it does.</span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">During
this period, I can’t remember precisely when, a piece of paper
saying that (paraphrased) “abusers work here" was left on the
door of a theatre. Chris's name was on it, along with others. </span></span>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">I
then learnt from a friend that he had been </span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>arrested</i></span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">.
I assumed this meant an adult survivor had come forward.</span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">Friends
exchanged calls as we tried to understand what had happened, and it
didn't take long to discover the real reason Chris had been arrested:
possession of child sexual abuse images and video. He was to be
charged soon.</span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">There
were a lot of calls now, and the nature of them changed;
increasingly, people needed help and emotional support from one
another, friends and former colleagues. People made an effort to make
sure vulnerable individuals had people to speak to, whether we knew
them or not. We worked to piece together the perspectives of this
broken constellation of people facing different ways.</span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">It
felt like the news would become public soon (I myself found out quite
late), the thought of anyone finding out via Twitter was awful. Chris
had been so completely out of my life since 2018 that I didn’t even
know some of the people he’d recently collaborated with, much less
how to contact them. Recent colleagues, long-term collaborators,
organisations that had worked with him, particularly those that had
community casts in (it felt like many people in that context might
feel vulnerable and unsupported), many many people connecting on the
phone. Credit to the organisations that started putting together
plans to support people. There were a lot of us connecting,
creatives, designers, deputy stage managers and companies and
supporters from the early days; assistant directors that he'd
exploited and treated like crap; friends and colleagues who had
experienced abuse themselves and who might need advance warning and
support.</span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">A
lot of care extended to one another. A lot of care extended by those
themselves suffering most deeply.</span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">Long
days and long conversations. Shock. Tears. Calls always ended with,
"Ok, what can I do? Can I call someone? I'll think about who to
reach out to…" Even in the moment of learning the news,
people’s first thought was of others who might need support.</span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">This
fills my heart, all these freelancers. It was "is everyone ok?"
in action.</span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">Another
line in the lift shaft broke when an article in </span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>The
Stage</i></span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">
announced that Chris Goode & Company was closing due to "personal
reasons". He was lying again, and again it was hard to breathe.</span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">Then
another: I received a call from Maddy, who told me that Chris, rather
than face police charges as he was meant to, had decided to end his
life and avoid the consequences of his actions.</span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">We
drew up a list of people we felt we had to call. After a few calls, I
realised there was no way we could contact everyone who would have
appreciated a personal message or phone call. (I never heard from
Chris Goode & Company, whatever it was at that point. There was a
hole where duty of care should have been.) </span></span>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">Xav,
Maddy and I did have that meeting with the group, and I was so
grateful to be together, I hadn't before. We were in shock. We didn’t
do anything in particular; we just spent time together. It was
apparent we all needed proper support.</span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">When
the news of Chris’s death went online, so many people responded
with pain and shock, expressing their love for his work. It was
understandable – they didn't know about his arrest, his abuse of
adults or his paedophilia, which we had just learnt about and were
still reeling from. It was painful for them. It was also painful for
those he had abused, people I don’t even know, but whose tweets I
saw. People who had been gaslit, ignored and silenced and who
remained unsupported. They watched as these tributes were made. </span></span>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">The
next day, there was another article in </span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>The
Stage</i></span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">.
This one was about his arrest and paedophilia. Online, everything
went quiet. I saw the generation that grew up with social media
tweeting, understandably, that they were frustrated that people
weren't talking more because it was so important. I also saw
generations, mine included, for whom the idea of processing something
so devastating and raw “out loud” – that is, on social media –
was inconceivable.</span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">Offline,
it wasn’t quiet. Offline, things were raging. There were emergency
meetings in theatre organisations. Trustees and talk of brand
toxification and then…?</span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">Theatre
workers, audience members, and the communities around us were reeling
with shock and fear. Many people found themselves scanning back over
the years, searching for sense, danger they’d missed and
information. They needed time to process, and </span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>a
</i></span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">process
– a place to put their questions, find answers and experience their
feelings.</span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">Offline,
survivors of abuse – including childhood sexual abuse and abuse by
Chris – were suffering. The quiet they experienced looked and felt
like distancing and secrecy. The quiet, day by day, was turning into
silence. They, too, needed a process.</span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">They
– </span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>we</i></span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">
– are still waiting.</span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">It
is an impossible conversation. But the abuse Chris perpetrated, which
went on for years, relied on silence and secrets, shame and
distancing and denial. It continued because of the hole where useful
curiosity should have been. It grew because of that emptiness where
action, follow-up and difficult questions needed, so very much, to
be. </span></span>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">In
the immediate aftermath of Chris's death, we reached out to people
for urgent help. We needed to organise counselling support for
survivors and people affected by Chris who were re-traumatised by the
revelation of Chris's paedophilia and who hadn't yet been able to
access support. If that last point is surprising, remember:
Freelancers can't afford therapy. Nor can they access employee
assistance programmes, and freelancers who aren't union members
aren't eligible for union-subsidised 6-session short-term
counselling.</span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">We
talked to a lot of people to try and make this happen. We tried to
contact the remaining people in post at what had been Chris Goode &
Company. We contacted organisations who knew us, who came to Zooms
and listened to us unpack our experiences. We wanted to start a
conversation on how we could usefully share our experience of Chris –
as we put it then, "Rather than positioning ourselves as
carriers of this painful history, we are keen for information to be
shared with a wider theatre community seeking greater understanding."</span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">Some
organisations listened. I think some of them thought that by
listening, they were helping. But arranging and taking part in these
Zooms took a lot of time and so much effort; it was a job. And it was
draining for us to unpack everything over and over. For some, it was
traumatic. At the time, the only way I could think to express it was
"We need someone to scoop us up".<br />
<br />
We made
contact with a provider, the </span></span><span style="color: #1155cc;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><u><a href="https://www.facebook.com/elop.LGBT/" target="_blank"><span style="color: #1155cc;"><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">East
London Out Project (ELOP)</span></span></span></a></u></span></span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">,
a holistic LGBT+ centre that offers a range of social, emotional and
support services to LGBT+ communities – and they were incredible. A
plan was created to support people. They understood our situation and
prioritised people getting support ASAP. To cover the cost, we
decided we would have to just jump in and commit to future
fundraising. But how? Beyond us there were others, in more precarity,
to think about too.</span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">I
am extremely grateful to Royal Exchange Theatre, The Yard, Theatre in
the Mill, Royal Court (and some individuals I can't name here) for
the various ways they gave help. I am grateful to the Arts Council
for taking us seriously and listening compassionately and bringing us
into the work of </span></span><span style="color: #1155cc;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><u><a href="https://www.artscouncil.org.uk/publication/raising-concern"><span style="color: #1155cc;"><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">Raising
A Concern.</span></span></span></a></u></span></span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">We
were fortunate to get that help, but it took a lot of work. It took
an unexpected act of deeply kind individual giving.</span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">It
shouldn't have been that hard.</span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">There
was a hole where duty of care could have been.</span></span></p><p><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="text-align: left;"><p><a name="_heading=h.qw86nqup5f69"></a>
<b><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">2022</span></span></b></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">This
year, we had conversations with some former freelancers and staff of
Chris Goode & Company, some of whom only worked for the company
for a short time. I am thankful they were willing to meet, this
provided useful information that needs to go somewhere.</span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">We
learnt a lot about Chris's manipulation. We learnt about his
willingness to steal from the reputations of respected theatre
professionals in order to protect himself and project a false image
of work being done on safeguarding. We learnt how things could be
done differently.</span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">There
is much, much more to learn, and this short period of reflection and
self-examination is only the beginning. I don't know the inside of
people's heads. Or how we as a sector are to navigate the turbulent
times ahead, yet more government cuts, bitter economic challenges,
misinformation, reactionary backlash.</span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">But
I do know that institutional silence, kicking this can of "What
to do about abuse?" down the road (again) only means that we'll
return to this place of extraordinary pain again, which will mean
more lives deeply affected and more people damaged. </span></span>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">We
can't let that happen.</span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">There
are many already working on this. There are a lot of really observant
and thoughtful theatre workers who for various lengths of time were
involved in Chris's work – before and during Chris Goode &
Company and in independent projects. There are many more involved in
commissioning works, making shows happen and supporting productions
in countless ways. Many people beyond us, who have their own
experiences, observations and knowledge to share. </span></span>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">We
are </span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>ready
</i></span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">to
make our experiences count.</span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">We
– British theatre, from makers to administrators, individual
freelancers to large organisations – need a space, a process, in
which we can work together, roll up our sleeves and share what we
know, learning from failures by holding them up to the light and
studying them. </span></span>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">In
this way, we can build robust, </span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;"><b>interconnected
</b></span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">and
dynamic systems</span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>
</i></span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">that
support survivors and stop abuse.</span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">We
can</span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>
create a survivor-centred and properly resourced action plan</i></span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">
to effect the radical cultural shift needed so that abusers are no
longer empowered and protected.</span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">We
can create a</span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>
culture-making environment where abuse cannot hide</i></span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">
in the shadows. Where it is detected, reported and stopped.<br />
<br />
We
can, in our places of work – from official rehearsal rooms to the
unseen spaces beyond them – </span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>identify
and remove all barriers to reporting abuse </i></span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">and</span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>
be ready to support survivors and their networks,</i></span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">
so that they do not have to hold it all, as so many do and as we have
done.</span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
<span style="text-decoration: none;">What
follows is a call for action that contains some specific
recommendations to this end.</span></span></span></p><p><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"> </span></span></span></p></div><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="text-align: left;"><p><a name="_heading=h.sy8sasgepff8"></a>
<b><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">Part
3 </span></span></b>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="text-align: left;"><p><a name="_heading=h.5tk2yj1lrflq"></a>
<b><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">CALL
FOR ACTION</span></span></b></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;"><b>We
need a full-sector, survivor-centred, inclusive and transparent
conversation. </b></span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">This
section is intended to contribute to that with a number of concrete
actions steps, followed by some remaining questions. In compiling
these steps, I have used the following guiding principles:<b> </b></span></span></p></div><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;"><b> </b></span></span></p></div><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;"><b>We
need a resourced process</b></span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">
where teams communicate with one another, sharing findings,
practices, useful models and working proposals. We need to be willing
to commit to public-facing communication so that our future
workforce, the communities around our work, audiences and
international contacts can access the conversation.</span></span></p></div><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">Across
all of these exchanges, there must be commitment to safe-space
policy, structured support, confidentiality and agreement to share
findings, particularly when handling people’s experiences of abuse
and harassment.</span></span></p></div><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;"><b>I
know that important useful work on safeguarding already exists, and I
recognise that people have put a lot of effort into it</b></span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">.</span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">I
know that institutional silence does not necessarily mean the work
isn’t being done internally, and that some situations stay quiet
because of legal complications.</span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">But
I also know that for many reasons – among them, organisations being
stretched beyond capacity, government cuts, Covid-19, defensiveness
and staff shortages – </span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;"><b>we
still need to bring it all together. </b></span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">And
many freelancers feel left in the dark.</span></span></p></div><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;"><b>We
would love to hear from anyone who is already working on this. We
would like to amplify your good practices and engage and assist you
in your work.</b></span></span></p><p><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;"><b> </b></span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0.42cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p><p>
</p><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="text-align: left;"><p><span style="color: black;"><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;"><b>Steps
we can take together</b></span></span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></span></p><p>
</p></div>
<ul style="text-align: left;"><li><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>Value
the small steps</i></span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">:
identify and implement the practical changes we can make now.</span></span></p></div><div><p>
</p></div></li></ul>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 1.27cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<ul style="text-align: left;"><li><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>Share
and improve</i></span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">
upon efforts that have been made to address safeguarding over recent
years, whether they were successful or not. Many individuals and
organisations have been committed to this aim, and the information
they can share, successes (and in particular) failures is useful
data.</span></span></p></div><div><p>
</p></div></li></ul>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<ul style="text-align: left;"><li><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>Consult
with other sectors and industries</i></span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">
(education, sport, voluntary and community-based) to share
information on working practices and tackling challenges.</span></span></p></div><div><p>
</p></div></li></ul>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<ul style="text-align: left;"><li><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>Release
the defensive holding position</i></span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">
that many institutions find themselves locked into. Ask what the
obstacles are, from risk assessment to recruitment to response.
Disallowing fear will help stop the silence.</span></span></p><p><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></span></p></div><div><p>
</p></div></li></ul>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p><p>
</p></div><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0.42cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;"><b>TRAINING</b></span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0.42cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">The
quickest measure we can take right now is to</span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;"><b>
</b></span></span><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><u><b><a href="https://www.thestage.co.uk/opinion/lyn-gardner-safeguarding-training-is-the-key-to-protecting-theatres-most-vulnerable"><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">r</span></span></a></b></u></span></span><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><u><b><a href="https://www.thestage.co.uk/opinion/lyn-gardner-safeguarding-training-is-the-key-to-protecting-theatres-most-vulnerable"><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">emove
financial and access barriers to high-quality training</span></span></a></b></u></span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;"><b>.
</b></span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">Due
to the high costs involved, freelancers and students cannot afford
the training that is currently provided to select staff at
organisations and venues. </span></span><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><u><a href="https://uktheatre.org/theatre-industry/guidance-reports-and-resources/removing-barriers-to-d-deaf-and-disabled-people/"><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">Deaf
and disabled freelancers are shut out</span></span></a></u></span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">.</span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">In
addition, we can:</span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<ul style="text-align: left;"><li><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">Consult
with and listen to stage management. Equip these freelancers by
providing free training. Too often, stage managers and company stage
managers are simply assumed to be responsible for reporting. Yet the
people in these roles are also subject to abuse themselves, and
under pressure to deliver, whether freelancers or in a permanent
position.</span></span></p></div><div><p>
</p></div></li></ul>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 1.27cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<ul style="text-align: left;"><li><div class="western" style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">Provide
free and accessible resources and training tools on how to recognise
harm and offer assistance when you suspect that abuse is occurring.
Refresh this training regularly. (The Lyric Hammersmith offer their
training for free to all freelancers they engage for example).</span></span></p></div><div><p>
</p></div></li></ul>
<div class="western" style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<ul style="text-align: left;"><li><div class="western" style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">Provide
free and mental health first aid training and seek out / share
materials and resources from authors and </span></span><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><u><a href="http://www.thevacuumcleaner.co.uk/2-8millionminds/" target="_blank"><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">creators
with</span></span></a></u></span></span><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><i><u><a href="http://www.thevacuumcleaner.co.uk/2-8millionminds/"><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">
lived experience</span></span></a></u></i></span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">,
not just the MH first aid standardised training, generic NHS
resources or general well-being material.</span></span></p></div><div><p>
</p></div></li></ul>
<div class="western" style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p><p>
</p></div>
<ul style="text-align: left;"><li><div class="western" style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">Make
this training compulsory for students in drama schools and training
institutions and as part of freelance recruitment processes and
company orientations. Require that directors who are
commissioned provide proof of having completed this training.
Require that funding recipients have completed this training.</span></span></p></div><div><p>
</p></div></li></ul>
<div class="western" style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p><p>
</p></div>
<ul style="text-align: left;"><li><div class="western" style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">Include
in training packages: anti-racism training & resources, </span></span><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><u><a href="https://www.deafinitelytheatre.co.uk/deaf-awareness"><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">Deaf
awareness</span></span></a></u></span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">,
Neuro Diversity Awareness and Disability awareness training. They
are not luxury extras, they create healthier, safer, more successful
workspaces.</span></span></p></div><div><p>
</p></div></li></ul>
<div class="western" style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p><p>
</p></div>
<ul style="text-align: left;"><li><div class="western" style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">Extend
this reach beyond the walls of the theatre by identifying practical
ways to </span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">reach
the most vulnerable creators and workers in your neighbourhood.
Where are the actors who are marginalised, those who are </span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>not</i></span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">
currently working in your rehearsal rooms, or walking past your
green room noticeboard? How can you get the training to them? </span></span></p></div><div><p>
</p></div></li></ul><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0.42cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;"><b> </b></span></span></p><p><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;"><b>REPORTING
– </b></span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;"><b>Make
it easier to report and offer robust support:</b></span></span></p></div>
<ul style="text-align: left;"><li><div class="western" style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0.42cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">Amplify
</span></span><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><u><a href="https://www.artscouncil.org.uk/publication/raising-concern" target="_blank"><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">Arts
Council England’s new “raising a concern” guidelines.</span></span></a></u></span></span></p></div><div><p>
</p></div></li><li><div class="western" style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0.42cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">Provide
multiple / flexible reporting options for people experiencing abuse.
People need different ways to take this step.</span></span></p></div><div><p>
</p></div></li><li><div class="western" style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0.42cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">Make
it easy - test that the terminology you are using is clear. Produce
simple “how to report” guides in accessible, shareable media.</span></span></p></div><div><p>
</p></div></li></ul>
<div class="western" style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 1.27cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p><p>
</p></div>
<ul style="text-align: left;"><li><div class="western" style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0.42cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">Establish
</span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>and
communicate</i></span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">
a clear reporting pathway (both internally and including potential
referrals to external authorities). Asking people to step into the
unknown prevents people coming forward. Share the process.</span></span></p></div><div><p>
</p></div></li><li><div class="western" style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0.42cm; margin-top: 0.42cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">Ensure
any survivor or supporter that raises a complaint will be able to do
so anonymously and give them the option of bringing a third party to
the conversations.</span></span></p></div><div><p>
</p></div></li><li><div class="western" style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0.42cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">Ensure
that </span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">personalised
support such as counselling and advocacy is available for people who
have disclosed or reported abuse. Make it flexible and make it
available long-term if necessary. Centre the person’s needs and
access requirements.</span></span></p></div><div><p>
</p></div></li></ul>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;"><b> </b></span></span></p><p><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;"><b>BOARDS
–</b></span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;"><b>Reconsider
responsibility</b></span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<ul style="text-align: left;"><li><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">Reconsider
the role and responsibilities of boards and advisory boards in
relation to safeguarding. What are the human costs of defensive
decision making? </span></span></p></div><div><p>
</p></div></li></ul>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 1.27cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<ul style="text-align: left;"><li><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">Create
clear access to board members for reporting and whistleblowing
scenarios. </span></span></p></div><div><p>
</p></div></li></ul>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 1.27cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<ul style="text-align: left;"><li><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">Provide
robust, compulsory safeguarding training for individuals becoming
trustees so that this difficult work is centred and prioritised by
all board members (not just designated officers). Update the
training regularly.</span></span></p></div><div><p>
</p></div></li></ul>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<ul style="text-align: left;"><li><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">Commit
to investigating concerns, don’t wait for them to become “clear
complaints” that your recognise according to your formal
processes. Enlist a third-party organisation for support.</span></span></p></div><div><p>
</p></div></li></ul>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<ul style="text-align: left;"><li><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">Seek
out and work with thorough oversight – including by funders – in
looking at the decision-making processes of board and advisory board
members, so that we no longer have situations where abusers are paid
off and sent away, free to work for adjacent organisations in the
sector. No more quiet goodbyes for abusers moving on to
pastures new.</span></span></p></div><div><p>
</p></div></li></ul>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<ul style="text-align: left;"><li><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">Be
accountable to an independent standards authority (if and when we
get one) about your recruiting, training and complaints procedures.</span></span></p></div><div><p>
</p></div></li></ul><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0.42cm; margin-top: 0.42cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;"><b> </b></span></span></p><p><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;"><b>EMPLOYERS/EMPLOYMENT
– Talk to find solutions to the tough challenges</b></span></span></p></div>
<ul style="text-align: left;"><li><div class="western" style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0.42cm; margin-top: 0.42cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">As
part of your recruitment process for freelance directors, check for
references and evidence of prior complaints around conduct before
hiring. Just as you would for full-time, contracted employees of
theatre organisations. This must include drama schools and training
institutions. (Chris Goode was working in drama schools). </span></span>
</p></div><div><p>
</p></div></li></ul>
<ul style="text-align: left;"><li><div class="western" style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0.42cm; margin-top: 0.42cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">Require
participation - or proof of participation in safety training (as
mentioned above) before directors receive commissions. </span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">(Theatres
and HR departments: If a director objects, ask why. Actors and
creatives: ask yourself if you would like to work with directors
opposed to training that would alert people to abuse.)</span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span>
</p></div><div><p>
</p></div></li></ul>
<ul style="text-align: left;"><li><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">Work
together with other theatre organisations and professionals in HR
and executive management positions to identify the challenges in
employment law and real-world blocks that employers face. Seek
expert legal advice from beyond our sector. </span></span>
</p></div><div><p>
</p></div></li><li><div class="western" style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0.42cm; margin-top: 0.42cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">Our
current situation means that freelance directors who are
perpetrators are protected - and thus enabled to be repeatedly
rehired. What can we do about this? Given the high levels of abuse
in our sector, is it unreasonable for potential employees to be
required to show evidence of their safe record? How will that be
managed? In regards to references, what formal, responsible and
legally sound process can be created to share information about a
known perpetrator? </span></span>
</p></div><div><p>
</p></div></li><li><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">Keep
the knowledge in the organisation (and out of your head). What
do you do when you leave your post? There needs to be a process.</span></span></p></div><div><p>
</p></div></li></ul><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0.42cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;"><b> </b></span></span></p><p><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;"><b>SUPPORTING
& ADVOCACY</b></span></span></p></div><div class="western" style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0.42cm; text-align: left;"><p><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
Experience
with Chris Goode shows that we need to develop practical strategies
around third-party involvement for complaints processes,
investigations and inquiries. And that there need to be consistency
across the four nations of the UK> By “third party involvement”
I mean assigned individuals, teams or “neutral” organisations who
could be called in to provide or ensure the provision of:</span></span></p></div>
<ul style="text-align: left;"><li><div class="western" style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0.42cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">Advocacy,
advice and support services for individuals making complaints; some
theatres already doing this work call this providing a “guardian”</span></span></p></div><div><p>
</p></div></li><li><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">Obtaining
resources and structural support for proper management of processes</span></span></p></div><div><p>
</p></div></li></ul>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 1.27cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<ul style="text-align: left;"><li><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">Providing
Independent oversight, monitoring of processes and delivery of
outcomes</span></span></p></div><div><p>
</p></div></li></ul>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<ul style="text-align: left;"><li><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">Acting
as a communication buffer who can relay messages between parties
(this is active safeguarding)</span></span></p></div><div><p>
</p></div></li></ul>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 1.27cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<ul style="text-align: left;"><li><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">Reporting
to funders such as ACE and ensuring that the message is getting
through successfully</span></span></p></div><div><p>
</p></div></li></ul>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 1.27cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<ul style="text-align: left;"><li><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">Ensuring
that ethical standards around confidentiality, transparency and
inclusivity are upheld, including a) a commitment to regular,
public-facing communication; b) consciousness of how marginalised
and racialised individuals experience the process; and c) the
provision of full access to the conversation for disabled and Deaf
participants and communities. </span></span>
</p></div><div><p>
</p></div></li></ul>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 1.27cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 1.27cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;"><b> </b></span></span></p><p><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;"><b>CULTURE
SHIFT: All of us play a part</b></span></span></p></div>
<ul style="text-align: left;"><li><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">Chris
Goode was repeatedly described as a “genius”. Refuse to
perpetuate “genius culture”. Let’s change how we talk about
artistic achievement – it is steeped in all kinds of privilege.<br />
</span></span>
</p></div><div><p>
</p></div></li></ul>
<ul style="text-align: left;"><li><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">Replace
shame, fear and defensiveness about mistakes, with a culture of
understanding what went wrong and sharing information.</span></span></p></div><div><p>
</p></div></li></ul>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<ul style="text-align: left;"><li><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">See
safeguarding policy as a sector-wide, open-source, living thing.
Strive to make it better. Safeguarding policy isn’t just a pdf, a
policy document or a disclaimer. It is your neighbourhood, your
past, present and future communities. It is all the places you can’t
see.<br />
</span></span>
</p></div><div><p>
</p></div></li></ul>
<ul style="text-align: left;"><li><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">Harness
the power of freelancers. Freelancers are powerful, we move around
all the time and we can do a lot of good. We are 70 percent of our
workforce. Imagine what could happen if 70% of our workforce were
empowered by training in how to identify where abuse might be
happening? What could happen if 70% of our workforce were trained to
be more aware of people’s needs within a rehearsal room
environment? </span></span>
</p></div><div><p>
</p></div></li></ul>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 1.27cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<ul style="text-align: left;"><li><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">Empower
our future workers by communicating and including them. Drama
students, new graduates, untrained actors, especially LGBTQ+ young
people are unseen and working in unrecognised creative spaces. Their
employment situation and working conditions are precarious, and they
are vulnerable, particularly given the career stage they are in.
This is particularly relevant to Chris Goode’s abuse. (In many
cases students are fighting for justice on their own).</span></span></p></div><div><p>
</p></div></li></ul>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<ul style="text-align: left;"><li><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">Push
back against any reactionary backlash - online, in government policy
making and in arts programming/funding decisions. In regard to Chris
Goode, stand with LGBTQ+ makers. Radical queer theatre was NEVER the
problem: Chris’s abuse and exploitation was.<br />
</span></span>
</p></div><div><p>
</p></div></li></ul>
<ul style="text-align: left;"><li><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">Embed
the need for useful curiosity. In leadership training, normalise
questions like “Wait – what’s going on? Is everyone ok?” and
“What can I do to help?” If you’re the chair of an
organisation, consider it your role to ask questions and extend care
beyond what is written in the organisation’s constitution.</span></span></p></div><div><p>
</p></div></li></ul>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<ul style="text-align: left;"><li><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">Venue/freelancer
power relations have been much discussed over lockdown (thanks to
all the people who have worked so hard on this). Let’s reconsider
what leadership can be. What leadership models do we have?
Collective working, co-operatives and mutual support networks are
powerful, experienced, diverse and rich in talent. “How do we work
/ together?” is a creative question.</span></span></p></div><div><p>
</p></div></li></ul>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<ul style="text-align: left;"><li><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">Men:
work to dismantle patriarchy and sexual harassment, abuse and male
violence in our industry and wider society. If you’re afraid of
centring yourselves in MeToo conversations, remain active, be
directed by people of other genders, offer support in the form of
resources.</span></span></p></div><div><p>
</p></div></li></ul>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 1.27cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;"><b> </b></span></span></p><p><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;"><b>Questions
and points for development</b></span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></span></p><p>
</p></div>
<ul style="text-align: left;"><li><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">How
can we adhere to confidentiality whilst remaining engaged and
dynamic in dealing with a particular process or complaint? (I
believe this is a hugely important question for people in
organisational structures and processes and those in management
roles. People have reported to me that they feel “stuck” once a
report has been made – that it hits a ceiling and their options
are limited).</span></span></p></div><div><p>
</p></div></li></ul>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<ul style="text-align: left;"><li><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">How
can we provide immediate and personalised support (i.e. counselling
and advocacy support) for people who have bravely come forward to
report and disclose? Employment Assistance Programmes don’t work
(because each time you call, you may end up speaking to someone
different. You can’t ask a survivor to unpack their experience of
abuse every time they call).</span></span></p></div><div><p>
</p></div></li></ul>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<ul style="text-align: left;"><li><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">How
can we provide the long-term support needed for lengthy and
isolating inquiry/complaints processes? (A type of support that can
grow and remain flexible with the needs of the survivor/complainant,
as their needs and capacity to engage will differ throughout their
journey.)</span></span></p></div><div><p>
</p></div></li></ul>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<ul style="text-align: left;"><li><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">How
do we make all this </span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>freely</i></span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">
available (and I mean available-as-in-accessible) for Deaf and
disabled people? BSL users are frequently required to contact
services and use email, rather than have BSL in person counselling
provided, for eg.</span></span></p></div><div><p>
</p></div></li></ul>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<ul style="text-align: left;"><li><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">With
regard to personalised support plans, how do we ensure that someone
who is marginalised and experiences racism, homophobia or
transphobia isn’t partnered with a counsellor or advocate who they
don’t feel comfortable or safe with? (These oppressions are
present in counselling and advocacy services).</span></span></p></div><div><p>
</p></div></li></ul>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<ul style="text-align: left;"><li><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">What
do organisations need during these processes to make sure they can
deliver a thorough, exhaustive inquiry? (Here I’m thinking
particularly of independent companies with their capacities already
stretched.) Investigation rightly takes up space and time, which
means resources taken away from company operations. I’m not saying
perpetrators should be offered support, but rather that complaints
and investigations would be conducted with more rigour if there were
more resources for the management of these processes. </span></span></p></div><div><p>
</p></div></li></ul><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;"><b><br />
</b></span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">These
are just a few starting points. If we – the entire sector
(individuals, companies, large/small organisations, funders across
the four nations) work in a united, action-oriented way, all are
within our power. There are a lot of wise people in our sector,
including experienced freelancers, people in HR and management. Many
people have lived experience of survival and trying to hold abusers
to account; we can advise on how we can make this happen. We are
ready. We just need resourcing. </span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">We
are a sector of collaborative workers, problem solvers, strategists
and communicators. We design processes, use feedback tools, value
innovation and aim to be reflective and responsive</span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">.
</span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">We
can stop the silence and remove shame and defensiveness from the
equation. We can be intensely powerful and effective in keeping
people safe from harm. </span></span>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0.42cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;"><b> </b></span></span></p><p><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;"><b>Doing
this is not optional. It is our responsibility.</b></span></span></p><p><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;"><b> </b></span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0.42cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0.42cm; text-align: left;"><p><a name="_heading=h.3434knty6rs0"></a><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><u><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"></span></span></span><a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1S8-EaiFvgQ_xMpkp0SjZVIEnaTinXXoVkFq2Ks8VdCc/edit?usp=sharing" target="_blank"><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Support
services are listed here</span></span></span></a></span></u></span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></span></p><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;"><b>Relevant
links</b></span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="break-after: avoid; break-inside: avoid; line-height: 115%; text-align: left;"><p><a name="_heading=h.t1prv1een936"></a>
<span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><u><span style="font-weight: normal;"><a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1S8-EaiFvgQ_xMpkp0SjZVIEnaTinXXoVkFq2Ks8VdCc/edit?usp=sharing"><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Support
services are listed here</span></span></span></a></span></u></span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span style="color: #1155cc;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><u><a href="https://www.facebook.com/elop.LGBT/"><span style="color: #1155cc;"><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">elop
LGBTQ+ mental health and wellbeing</span></span></span></a></u></span></span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span style="color: #1155cc;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><u><a href="https://galop.org.uk/types-of-abuse/sexual-violence/"><span style="color: #1155cc;"><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">GALOP
advice on sexual violence and LGBTQ+ support service</span></span></span></a></u></span></span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><u><a href="https://royalcourttheatre.com/code-of-behaviour/"><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">No
Grey Area Code of Behaviour</span></span></a></u></span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><u><a href="https://www.equity.org.uk/media/1263/agenda-for-change.pdf"><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">Equity
Agenda for Change</span></span></a></u></span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><u><a href="https://www.artscouncil.org.uk/publication/raising-concern"><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">Arts
Council England Raising a Concern</span></span></a></u></span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><u><a href="https://uktheatre.org/theatre-industry/guidance-reports-and-resources/safe-and-supportive-working-practices/"><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">UK
Theatre and SOLT safeguarding working group</span></span></a></u></span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><u><a href="https://www.helenraw.com/press-industry-sexual-harassment-bullying"><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">Helen
Raw’s activism</span></span></a></u></span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><u><a href="https://timesupnow.org/"><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">Times
Up campaign</span></span></a></u></span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><u><a href="https://www.globalfundforwomen.org/movements/me-too/"><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">MeToo
campaign</span></span></a></u></span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><u><a href="https://www.fawcettsociety.org.uk/tackling-sexual-harassment-in-the-workplace"><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">Fawcett
Society Recommendations for Employers</span></span></a></u></span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><u><a href="https://scudd.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/SexualHarassmentGuidelinesv6.1FINAL.pdf"><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">University
drama department guidelines for preventing sexual harrassment</span></span></a></u></span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;"><b>Resources:</b></span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><u><a href="https://eclipsetheatre.org.uk/news/1617-anti-racism-touring-rider"><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">Anti
racism touring rider resources</span></span></a></u></span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">
(please note this is not anti racism training)</span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><u><a href="https://weareunlimited.org.uk/resources/"><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">Unlimited’s
resource page for disability justice and access in the arts</span></span></a></u></span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><u><a href="https://freelancersmaketheatrework.com/"><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">Freelancers
Make Theatre Work website</span></span></a></u></span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><u><a href="https://freelancersmaketheatrework.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Big-Freelancer-Survey-2-report-FINAL.pdf"><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">Freelancer
Survey 2022</span></span></a></u></span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><u><a href="https://www.equity.org.uk/at-work/equity-for-women-toolkit/sexual-harassment/"><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">Equity
sexual harrassment toolkit</span></span></a></u></span></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">
this is pitched toward women but many of the resources can be
accessed by all genders.</span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><u><a href="https://www.equity.org.uk/at-work/equity-for-women-toolkit/intimacy-and-nudity/"><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">Equity
Best Practice Guide for nudity and sex scenes</span></span></a></u></span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><u><a href="https://www.equity.org.uk/news/2020/august/staying-safe-at-castings-and-auditions/"><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">Equity
advice for staying safe and castings and auditions</span></span></a></u></span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><u><a href="https://www.equity.org.uk/at-work/legal-support/"><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">Equity
members free legal support</span></span></a></u></span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><u><a href="https://www.fawcettsociety.org.uk/forms/sexual-harassment-toolkit"><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">Fawcett
Society Tackling Sexual Harassment in the Workplace toolkit</span></span></a></u></span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><u><a href="https://www.fawcettsociety.org.uk/event/creating-a-safe-workplace-culture-to-prevent-sexual-harassment"><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">Fawcett
Society video panel session on </span></span></a></u></span></span><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><u><a href="https://www.fawcettsociety.org.uk/event/creating-a-safe-workplace-culture-to-prevent-sexual-harassment"><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">creating
a safe workplace culture</span></span></a></u></span></span></p><p><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><u><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://www.vincentdt.com/project/safeguarding-questions-for-working-in-the-arts/" target="_blank">Vincent Dance Theatre Safeguarding resources</a> <br /></span></span></u></span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;"><b>News
articles:</b></span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><u><a href="https://www.thestage.co.uk/opinion/lyn-gardner-safeguarding-training-is-the-key-to-protecting-theatres-most-vulnerable"><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">Lyn
Gardner’s article on Safeguarding training is the key to protecting
theatre’s most vulnerable</span></span></a></u></span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><u><a href="https://www.thestage.co.uk/features/harassment-and-bullying-in-the-theatre-industry-special-report-sexual-harassment"><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">The
Stage special report: Harassment in Theatre</span></span></a></u></span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><u><a href="https://www.thestage.co.uk/news/exclusive-backstage-workers-warn-sexual-harassment-persists-despite-me-too-promises"><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">The
Stage Backstage staff warn sexual harrassment persists</span></span></a></u></span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); break-after: auto; break-inside: auto; line-height: 110%; margin-bottom: 0.32cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><u><a href="https://www.thestage.co.uk/news/drama-school-students-report-racism-casting-bias-and-widespread-harassment"><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">The
Stage Drama school students report racism, casting bias and
widespread harassment</span></span></a></u></span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><u><a href="https://www.thestage.co.uk/long-reads/theatres-titanic-the-story-of-how-alra-went-under"><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">The
Stage article on ALRA drama school collapse</span></span></a></u></span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); break-after: auto; break-inside: auto; line-height: 110%; margin-bottom: 0.32cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p><p>
</p><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); break-after: auto; break-inside: auto; line-height: 110%; margin-bottom: 0.32cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;"><b>Reporting
(vulnerable adults and children):</b></span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><u><a href="https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/social-care-and-support-guide/help-from-social-services-and-charities/abuse-and-neglect-vulnerable-adults/"><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">NHS
advice on Abuse and neglect of vulnerable adults</span></span></a></u></span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
<span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><u><a href="https://www.nspcc.org.uk/keeping-children-safe/reporting-abuse/report/"><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small;">NSPCC
advice What to do if you're worried about a child</span></span></a></u></span></span></p></div>
<div class="western" style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p><p>
</p></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><p>
</p><p>
</p></div>
maddy costahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04929576408540749708noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8651145764236805587.post-59974231016023572602022-10-07T09:16:00.000+01:002022-10-07T09:16:04.103+01:00Silence is not an option<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left; text-decoration: none;"><b>by Xavier de Sousa</b></div><div class="western" style="font-style: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left; text-decoration: none;"><b> </b></div><div class="western" style="font-style: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left; text-decoration: none;"><a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/12AYsqXD-nEVw8lUtKcs8WiKkaeROdvHE/view?usp=sharing" target="_blank"><b>AUDIO VERSION FOR PART 1 HERE</b></a></div><div class="western" style="font-style: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left; text-decoration: none;"><b> </b></div><div class="western" style="font-style: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left; text-decoration: none;"><b><a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/1kGMlFJjnykEQIkwnUYHmjbh2bvaWkDiM/view?usp=sharing" target="_blank">AUDIO VERSION FOR PART 2 HERE</a> </b><br /></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">This
text is long, messy, disjointed, and bumpy. While it is not an
exhaustive text, it is a culmination of 5 years of working to hold an
abuser to account and the hurdles we encountered when dealing with
those who sought to protect him along the way.
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">It
has two parts, one consisting of a notes and comment section on a few
particular issues and one with a more timeline-driven description of
events as they happened around me and as I experienced them. We
decided to publish these writings as a way to shine some light into a
grey area that has been corrosive and incredibly tangled for so long,
and grey areas is how Chris operated across all levels of his work,
so he could also abuse people.
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">All
of what is written in this text and elsewhere, in my view abolishes
any potential consideration or celebrations of his work, archive,
methods, or talent, or profile. There is an argument elsewhere on
separating the art from the artist but in this instance, you cannot
separate the man from the work, for the abuse is embedded in the
creation method, its intentions, and its outcomes. </div><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"> </div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><b>Notes:</b></div>
<ol style="text-align: left;"><li><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<u><b>Content Warnings: Paedophilia; Gender and identity based
violence; References to physical, sexual and psychological abuse;
Gaslighting and coercion; Death by suicide</b></u></div><div>
</div></li></ol>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 2.54cm; text-align: left;">
<br />
</div>
<ol start="2" style="text-align: left;"><li><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
It is important to note first that for the vast majority of us the
reality is that we did not know about Chris Goode’s paedophilia up
until the news of his arrest in May 2021. The shock of the
triple-punch news (arrest-paedophilia-death) is something I am yet
to fully recover from.
</div><div>
</div></li></ol>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br />
</div>
<ol start="3" style="text-align: left;"><li><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Chris isn’t a unique case in the culture sector and the abuse he
inflicted on so many is vastly beyond his paedophilia. We cannot
make this story solely about him because every other month we hear
stories of other abusers and then nothing ever happens, or they go
into obscurity. But people continue to be abused on a daily basis –
and we all know it is daily because it happens to all of us,
specifically those in more disadvantaged positions.</div><div>
</div></li></ol>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 1.27cm; text-align: left;">
<br />
</div>
<ol start="4" style="text-align: left;"><li><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
I’m particularly tired of the focus on the victim and/or
individual responsibility as a way to deflect from responsibilities
of the sector as a whole. Chris used this systemic individualism to
put the onus on his victims and try and wash his hands of any
accountability. It took 5 years of the survivors of his abuse
holding the bastard and his Company to account, to get <i>anything</i>
to be done.
</div><div>
</div></li></ol>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 1.27cm; text-align: left;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 1.27cm; text-align: left;">
With this in mind, I think it is important to put forward a few
things in order for us to be able to navigate the culture sector in a
more healthy, safe way:</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 1.27cm; text-align: left;">
<br />
</div>
<ul style="text-align: left;"><li><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b>Theatres, production companies, funding bodies and unions</b>
have as much a responsibility to ensure safe practices are put in
place and actively enforced in projects they commission or
green-light, even if the making process happens outside of their
spaces. You commission the work, so you are helping to make it
happen. It is <i><u>also</u></i><u> your responsibility</u> to
ensure the safe and material conditions of any of the workers
employed, salaried or freelancers.</div><div>
</div></li></ul>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0.64cm; text-align: left;">
<br />
</div>
<ul style="text-align: left;"><li><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b>Theatres, festivals and venues</b> in particular have a
responsibility to ensure their spaces and the work they commission
and/or present (including hires!) are navigated in a safe way.
</div><div>
</div><ul><li><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Create safe and anonymised ways that anyone working on a production
or event that you are a part of, can raise an issue of abuse with
you, and you directly act on the complaints. Make sure that any
person who raises the complaint is dealt with with respect and
care, and that they can be anonymous and if they wish, they can
have a third party (a friend, a colleague, a union representative)
with them at all times when dealing with this.
</div><div>
</div></li><li><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Make it a funding/programming condition that teams ensure they have
appropriate safe strategies in place. This includes:</div><div>
</div><ul><ul><li><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Codes of Conduct included in all contracts and agreements with
the production/show/company’s teams</div><div>
</div></li><li><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Safe and anonymised ways to report abuse, directly to the board
or a dedicated member of staff that can deal with it swiftly</div><div>
</div></li></ul></ul><div>
</div></li></ul><div>
</div></li></ul>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br />
</div>
<ul style="text-align: left;"><li><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b>Funding bodies</b> have a responsibility to ensure that any money
they award a project is not used to create unsafe, abusive
environments. You fund it, so you help make it happen. It is <i>also</i>
your responsibility to ensure the safe and material conditions of
the workers employed. Here are some clear examples of what funding
bodies can do:</div><div>
</div></li></ul>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 2.54cm; text-align: left;">
<br />
</div>
<ul style="text-align: left;"><li><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Make it a condition of getting any grant/funding/commission that
award/grant recipients need to prove they have safety measures in
place, including codes of conducts and safe ways to report any type
of abuse. There are plenty of examples of good practice out there,
including the <span style="color: #1155cc;"><u><a href="https://royalcourttheatre.com/code-of-behaviour/" target="_blank"><span style="color: #1155cc;">Royal
Court Code of Conduct</span></a></u></span> or the various examples
in the <span style="color: #1155cc;"><u><a href="https://producergathering.com/resources/" target="_blank"><span style="color: #1155cc;">Producer
Gathering Resources</span></a></u></span> page. If they don’t have
these, please work with them to help them create it. Often
artists/small companies don’t have the infrastructure, and they
could do with the guidance/help.
</div><div>
</div></li></ul>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 1.27cm; text-align: left;">
<br />
</div>
<ul style="text-align: left;"><li><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Create safe and anonymised ways that any person working on a project
funded by you, can use to raise a concern about the abuse they are
facing in said project, and make sure you follow it up and act on
it.
</div><div>
</div></li></ul>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 1.27cm; text-align: left;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 1.27cm; text-align: left;">
During the last year, myself and Lucy Ellinson worked on Arts Council
England’s <span style="color: #1155cc;"><u><a href="https://www.artscouncil.org.uk/publication/raising-concern" target="_blank"><span style="color: #1155cc;">Raising
a Concern</span></a></u></span> guidance and procedure, to ensure
that anyone can raise an issue in safe and anonymous ways, and that
the complaints will be escalated and investigated. Now, anyone who is
a recipient of ACE grants and is found to be an abuser, will no
longer be able to access public money in the future. It is by no
means enough, but it is a start.
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 1.27cm; text-align: left;">
<br />
</div>
<ul style="text-align: left;"><li><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Create a way to ensure that any person found to be an abuser (be it
in sexual violence, financial corruption or identity-based violence)
is barred from accessing future funding.
</div><div>
</div></li></ul>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 3.81cm; text-align: left;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">Part
of the issue here is this ‘arms-length’ approach towards
commissioning and funding of art work across the sector. This is a
fallacy, and one used historically to protect those with already
extensive power in the sector. Even if not <i>intentionally</i> bad
as a policy, the consequences are devastating and isolating for those
who rely on the approval of the select few to even exist in the
sector in the first place.
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 3.81cm; text-align: left;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">Let
me be very clear: <u><b>no one accesses or is able to exist in the
sector without the approval of funding bodies like the Arts Council,
Trusts & Foundations, or Theatres with commissioning grants. No
one.</b></u><b> </b>By selecting a project to be commissioned or a
grant application to be funded, you are technically selecting and
supporting a group of people to be a part of the sector. You are
making that group or individual part of your ecology. Thus, you are
as much responsible for whatever happens to that project and its
workers’ safety and material conditions as everyone else involved.
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0.64cm; text-align: left;">
<br />
</div>
<ul style="text-align: left;"><li><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b>Unions</b> have a responsibility to ensure that individuals in
the sector can access membership and protection of exploitative and
abusive labour practices. It is also the Unions’ responsibility to
ensure that freelancers have access to them:</div><div>
</div><ul><li><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Reduce your membership rates for freelancers and create easier
pathways to union membership. We wouldn't be able to do a lot of
what we did without union representation and the benefits that came
with it, including access to legal advice and representation.</div><div>
</div></li></ul><div>
</div></li></ul>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 1.91cm; text-align: left;">
<br />
</div>
<ul style="text-align: left;"><ul><li><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Please create more resources for freelancers to use in their
working practices that are related to creating safe working
conditions and ways to report abuse in their work spaces. This
should be complemented with more training opportunities for
freelancers to learn how to deal with situations of abuse in the
work space, and how to find safe ways to report them to you.</div><div>
</div></li></ul></ul>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0.64cm; text-align: left;">
<br />
</div>
<ul style="text-align: left;"><li><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
As an arts sector that wants to be open and championing of
international artistic excellence, we must resist the labelling of
experimental work (specifically work that is led by and/or explores
sexuality, sex, intimacy, queer and trans identities) as inherently
wrong or deserving of censorship. Instead, we should focus on the
establishing of sector-wide provisions for the creation of safe
environments so that creatives can work and explore safely and with
the assurance that any abuse will be dealt with immediately and with
consequences. This is both in and outside of the rehearsal room and
performance space.
</div><div>
</div></li></ul>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br />
</div>
<ul style="text-align: left;"><li><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Victims of abuse are often defenceless and/or scared to say anything
precisely because of the repercussions this can have on their own
career and mental health. So many in this story have had their
careers and lives destroyed from this, precisely because there are
no mechanisms to deal with it properly. Why does it consistently
fall on the victims’ shoulders to raise a concern? I hope the next
few sections of this text provide some clarification to why it was
down to the victims to do anything – anything at all –
throughout this.
</div><div>
</div></li></ul>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">We
have a collective responsibility across the sector. The safety and
material conditions of a performer or a stage manager in a rehearsal
room are as much the responsibility of the director or the producer,
as they are of the institution that helped that rehearsal being
scheduled in the first place. Abusers exist everywhere, in every
office, in every stage, in every café, school, parliament, court,
train, etc etc etc. This is not an issue inherent only to the culture
sector, but the creation of collaborative and sector-wide structures
of safeguarding, open dialogue and ways to deal with abuse are ever
more urgent, and the longer we continue to be individualised and
silenced, the more violence we are helping to create.</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br />
</div>
<ol start="5" style="text-align: left;"><li><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
I am not interested in engaging in any discourse on whether Chris
was also a victim. As a survivor of various instances of violent
sexual abuse and coercion (both as a child and across well over a
decade of working in this sector), I know first hand the impact it
can have on people, on our relationships with our bodies, intimacy,
mental health and career. But I also know that if you use your own
experiences of abuse to excuse abusing others, you are also
replicating the abuse. I also understand how Chris manipulated many
people’s own trauma to gaslight them into his world view. Victims
and survivors are not abusers. Abusers are abusers. Chris was an
abuser who tried to propagate and normalise his abuse through his
work.
</div><div>
</div></li></ol>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 1.27cm; text-align: left;">
<br />
</div>
<ol start="6" style="text-align: left;"><li><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Chris was a master manipulator of narratives. Throughout the past 5
years, we have been uncovering so much gaslighting, abuse, omission
of information and straight-up lies, and we understand now that
pretty much everyone has a different story/narrative about Chris
based on what he told them and what information they had available
at the time. This is what predators do. They distort reality to make
you believe that they are innocent or that, at the very least, you
doubt your own sanity to protect theirs.
</div><div>
</div></li></ol>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 1.27cm; text-align: left;">
<br />
</div>
<ol start="7" style="text-align: left;"><li><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Manipulation of narratives is exactly where I place a big focus of
his abuse. He used us, our stories, and our collective history, as
protective shields for himself to normalise his abuse. When I say
‘us’ I mean everyone who worked with him but specifically queer
and trans people and our shared histories.
</div><div>
</div></li></ol>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 1.27cm; text-align: left;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 1.27cm; text-align: left;">
Across his work, he often narrated and wrote about young men,
inter-generational relationships, queer utopias. Often his work
revolved around entering a new, exciting if obscured world. <i>Weaklings</i>
had the form and narratives one might find when lost in an
internet-hole at 4am in search for something one hasn't quite figured
out yet. <i>Ponyboy</i> <i>Curtis </i>was about young men’s
explorations of their own identities and sexuality. <i>Men in the
Cities</i> explored fantasies of intergenerational lust and rape
among other things. This was all merged within a broad artistic
practice that existed in a grey area of definition, intentionally.
The constant greyness of it all, allowed for him to play with nuances
of trauma and fill them with obscurity and abuses that obfuscated our
understanding that those narratives were actually an attempt to
normalise the concept of paedophilia. The violence in those stories
was the point, the normalisation of abuse was the point.
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 1.27cm; text-align: left;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 1.27cm; text-align: left;">
There are some incredibly dangerous precedents set by his actions.
First, the ‘experimentalism’ of his writing and directing styles.
He used experimentation as departure point but also as cloaking
shield. Reflecting back now, I can see that the nuances he so revered
in his writing, was in the <i>language</i> used, not in the actual
content. The content was abuse, as was the goal, and they were
actually in plain sight, framed as ‘difficult’ and ‘dark’
aspects of the human condition. The language was intricate and
nuanced to obfuscate our perception of the abuses that happen in
these stories, and their normalisation.</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 1.27cm; text-align: left;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 1.27cm; text-align: left;">
Secondly, many contexts have told me that they won’t engage or
commission “this type of work any more” (i.e. queer work).
Experimental theatre and performance art are already considered ‘too
challenging’ in the UK theatre landscape, often too risky to
programme/support. There are many studies on this, and frankly there
isn't enough time or space here to go fully into that.
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 2.54cm; text-align: left;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 1.27cm; text-align: left;">
The truth is that queerness, and growing up and discovering sexuality
and identity is not to be confused with abuse or paedophilia. Abuse
is abuse, paedophilia is paedophilia. If you deliberately
characterise the exploration of sexuality, of queerness and/or
identity as being inherently abusive, or imply that there is a
greater risk of abuse being present than in a heterosexual context,
then I’m afraid it is you that is behaving abusively, and your
homophobia and queerphobia are clear to see. Abuse is abuse,
paedophilia is paedophilia. Homosexuality, queer relationships and
the exploration of sexuality are not.</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 1.27cm; text-align: left;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 1.27cm; text-align: left;">
Chris, however, bastardised our queer experiences to help normalise
his paedophilia and abusive intentions. He used the very normal and
common relationships that men have with other men as a way to try and
attempt a normalisation of coercion and abuse of teenage men and
children by older men across his plays. This is something I will
never be able to forget, nor forgive. He bastardised our shared
histories for his own disgusting gains, and threatened to take us all
down with him, tapping into anti-queer and homophobic and transphobic
attacks and bad-faith agendas that could inevitably use this story to
yet again call us all groomers and paedos. How fucking vile is that?
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 1.27cm; text-align: left;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 1.27cm; text-align: left;">
Alongside the texts written in these blogs, you will read daunting
descriptions of violence, coercion and the duplicity of him using a
veil of ‘queerness’ that was merely a superficial way of
disguising his abuse. That veil didn’t really hold still as soon as
he was out of his comfort zone, across two projects in 2017,
surrounded by diverse groups of queer artists and culture workers who
challenged him and who refused to take his abuse. He crumbled in
front of our very eyes. Whereas others protected him, it took a
diverse group of members of the queer community to bring the fucker
down, because no one else did.
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 1.27cm; text-align: left;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 1.27cm; text-align: left;">
<i>He</i> was the paedophile, the groomer. Chris Goode is not
representative of the queer community, no matter how much he tried,
for he did not write about a collective experience. He was writing
about <i>himself </i>and using <i>us </i>as a cloaking shield, and
that needs to be very clear.</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 1.27cm; text-align: left;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 1.27cm; text-align: left;">
This time though, he messed with the wrong queers and I am very proud
we were able to put a stop to at least some of the abuse. That is a
sentiment I will take to my own grave.
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br />
</div>
<ol start="8" style="text-align: left;"><li><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Plenty of theatre and performance practitioners across the world
employ performance-making methods that involve nudity, queer and
trans identities, live sex and intimacy in very safe and consensual
ways. This is something to be protected and supported, as it is a
perfectly legitimate form of artistic exploration. Any conflation of
these practices with abuse resulting from conservatism, prudeness,
bigotry or deliberately misreading/mistreating the content for
hateful purposes is nothing more than hate and fear, and only
inflicts violence and abuse.
</div><div>
</div></li></ol>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 1.27cm; text-align: left;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 1.27cm; text-align: left;">
Sadly, in the UK specifically, we have seen bad-faith ‘activists’
conflating experimental performance, queerness and sexuality with
abuse, and I want to draw a clear line here. One of the reasons I was
attracted to Chris’s work was that it showcased a different and
radical (for the UK theatre scene) approach to experimental theatre
based on narrative experimentation, or on physical/devised theatre
collective experiments. It is not unique work, for plenty of
practitioners the world over have tried similar approaches or have
succeeded in experimenting with the same themes, concepts and
methods. However, in the more conservative playfield of the UK
performance and theatre scene, it felt interesting and proposed an
exploration of apparently queer takes on performativity and identity
that could appeal to a queer crowd.
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 1.27cm; text-align: left;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 1.27cm; text-align: left;">
Once I started to be more in tune with what Chris’s processes of
making performance were, it started to become apparent to me that the
‘queerness’ and radicalness he talked about were not as
representative of the work in real terms. The ‘collective work’
was highly choreographed at all stages by Chris, resulting in reduced
agency in the workplace for everyone else involved. This is not to
say they didn't have any agency, but there is a difference between
saying they do while he is the person with the utmost power and final
word (in every way!). The ‘safe’ strategies he promised were
being employed in the rehearsal rooms were nothing more than a daily
‘check in’ at the beginning and a ‘check out’ at the end, if
that. This is basic standard practice for <i>all</i> rehearsal rooms
and certainly not enough for works dealing with such intense levels
of intimacy and physical and emotional exploration. Hierarchy and
patriarchy were inherent parts of his work and this was Chris’ work
– that is how everything was framed, and he sat on top of every
aspect of the works’ processes, structures and narratives.
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 1.27cm; text-align: left;">
For many years, Chris refused to pay the performers of his side
project at the centre of this story, even when he was taking
commissions and funding grants to make the work. He paid <i>himself
</i>only. His refusal to pay, he told me later in 2017, came because
he wanted the performers to ‘believe’ and have ‘hunger’ for
the work. If they believed in it, they would do it regardless of the
lack of money. He, a very prominent and highly regarded ‘genius’,
was using his position to groom younger, impressionable men at the
start of their careers, to work with him unpaid <i>on purpose</i>
even when he could pay them. After 20 years of working in the sector
and getting large amounts of commissions and successful funding bids,
he knew very well he could get bigger funding to pay his performers,
but he <i>chose</i> not to as a control mechanism.
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 1.27cm; text-align: left;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 1.27cm; text-align: left;">
Across his contracts and ‘established norms’ in his processes,
were clauses and stipulations on how you - the individual<i> you</i>
- were solely responsible for your actions in the process. While he
framed this under a queer-umbrella of liberation against capitalist
models of control, it allowed him to navigate really intricate and
intimate relationships that created intimately abusive and
long-lasting traumatic experiences without culpability. Many
collaborators tell tales of when they had to intervene for he
wouldn’t when things were going south or abusive in the rooms he
set up. Yet, he was the director, the writer, the dramaturg, the
leader, the person with the money, the genius, the mentor.</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 1.27cm; text-align: left;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 1.27cm; text-align: left;">
Over the past 5 years we have come to learn of young men being filmed
performing sexual acts, often on camera – framed by Chris as being
legitimate artistic performance research, outside-rehearsal intimate
‘rehearsals’ at his place (or in other spaces) or "solo
work". We have come to learn of abuses happening on stage and in
rehearsals, of performers being coerced into doing acts they didn’t
want to. These young artists were coerced into participating, not
only through Chris's insistence that this was genuine artistic work,
but also because of his promises of future employment, ie paid work
in more mainstream productions.
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br />
</div>
<ol start="9" style="text-align: left;"><li><div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">Historically,
we always had so-called ‘progressives’ taking advantage of
under-privileged communities to wrap themselves in protective cloaks
and further their own careers while abusing, coercing and
gaslighting members of that same community. You see it in anti-trans
movements who co-opt the lack of visibility of the lesbian community
to further their own anti-trans agenda. The same people who
consistently portray themselves as ‘protecting and championing
women!’ in order to gain support as they continue to work to roll
back the rights of trans women and by default, the rights of all
women.
</div><div>
</div></li></ol>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 1.27cm; text-align: left;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 1.27cm; text-align: left;">
Sadly, a lot of people have used the language and identities of the
LGBTQ+ community to further their own bigoted agendas. The result has
been a contemporary rolling back of support for queer and trans
communities in particular. We have had very high profile TERFs
circulating this story to try and capitalise on survivors’ own
trauma for their own bigoted agendas: wanting to do podcasts, write
full length-articles or chapters in their books, etc. These people
are only out for themselves, as seen in the hate campaigns they have
been levelling at our communities for years. <i>Everyone</i> suffers
at the hand of these individual and bigoted agendas, and they will
never have the support or consent of the survivors of this story.
Never.
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 1.27cm; text-align: left;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 1.27cm; text-align: left;">
The UK theatre and culture sector is not protected from this. Many of
the responses I had from industry people since my work with Chris and
the company was that, especially since news and word around this
particular case have come to light, they will no longer programme
‘this type of work’, i.e. work that explores intimacy,
vulnerability, sexuality and queerness. We have seen perfectly
legitimate work being cancelled and/or censored across the UK because
people from the community conflate LGBTQ+ identities as inherently
abusive or ‘wrong’.
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 1.27cm; text-align: left;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 1.27cm; text-align: left;">
You can see this from creatives being forced to tone-down LGBTQ+
stories, to framing LGBTQ+ stories as ‘too risky’, to the
horrific abuse levelled at Josie and the cast and crew of <i>The
Family Sex Show</i> earlier this year by anti-trans and right-wing
‘moralists’ who conflate queerness and discourse around sex with
‘grooming’, a very loud fascist dog-whistle that has a long
history of abusing children and queers across the UK and the world
over (look at how Bolsonaro called experimental artists paedos and
perverts to facilitate the decimation of arts funding in Brazil
recently, or in North America where artists’ exploring the trauma
of the AIDS crisis was used to facilitate the decimation of funding
for artists).</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 1.27cm; text-align: left;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 1.27cm; text-align: left;">
Chris’ work isn’t an example of queer work that is reflective of
the queer experience, nor is it reflective of what queer theatre is
like. It is an example of a type of work that was utilised by an
abuser to further his abuse. Don’t blanket us all under the Chris
Goode umbrella, because by doing that you are simply replicating the
harm he caused to so many, and capitulating to a very dangerous
climate of hostility to the LGBTQ+ community both within the culture
sector and outside of it.
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 1.27cm; text-align: left;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">This
is partly why it has taken us so long to go public, as the history of
abusers using progressive and queer language to gaslight their
audiences into thinking of queers, trans people and progressive
discourse as ‘grooming’ or ‘abuse’ is very prevalent in the
UK. Chris often used progressive language to obfuscate the truth and
make you think that <i>you</i> actually are the one in the wrong
here. He would target young, impressionable and vulnerable men who
wanted a break in the sector or who were in awe of his work and
‘genius’. He talked about working with ‘queer methodologies’,
‘collectivity’ and ‘creating safe spaces’ while at the same
time gaslighting us all away from the reality: there were no safe
practices in place and he actively worked against installing them.</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 1.27cm; text-align: left;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">Thus
Chris is not an example of queer practice or progressiveness. He is
an example of abuse. The abuse levelled by Chris at his employees is
very distant from legitimate artistic exploration, for he
consistently abused his power, privilege and position, and set up
unsafe, coercive and violent processes and methods to achieve his
vision. </div><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"> </div><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"> </div><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><h3 style="text-align: left;"><b>My Experience</b></h3></div><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"> </div><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">My
direct experiences with Chris Goode and the culture of abuse,
coercion and gaslighting around him, his work and his artistic
practice started around 2016, lasted until November 2017, and
revolved around my appointment as Senior Producer for Chris Goode &
Company. It is important to say that up until that point, I was a big
fan of his work and artistic practice. I read his book, watched his
shows, and read Maddy’s blogs on it. My own artistic work was
influenced by some of his writing and methods up until I left the
company.</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"> </div><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">The
job of producer was offered to me seemingly without much of a bother.
I went to lunch with Chris and his producer at the time, on separate
occasions, and that was it. A few things to note in this:
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
</div>
<ul style="text-align: left;"><li><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
I was told specifically that this was a great opportunity for me, as
a budding independent producer of live art and experimental
performance. It was laid out how I would ‘find that Chris has a
large amount of power and fans across the sector, who will go out of
their way to support him’.</div><div>
</div></li></ul>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 1.27cm; text-align: left;">
</div>
<ul style="text-align: left;"><li><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
I was also told, repeatedly by him and people close to him that he
was a genius theatre-maker and that I was lucky to get the job, what
an opportunity this was for me, and I bought in on that at the time.</div><div>
</div></li></ul>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 1.27cm; text-align: left;">
</div>
<ul style="text-align: left;"><li><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
I was also told, by Chris, that he felt wronged about not being
treated with the same level of respect, celebration and
commissioning as some of his peers. It was now my responsibility to
address this.
</div><div>
</div></li></ul>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 1.27cm; text-align: left;">
</div>
<ul style="text-align: left;"><li><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
I asked to be part of the rehearsal processes so I could understand
the work and how it was done. This was promised to me, although I
was only ever allowed in on one rehearsal for one hour throughout my
year at the company and that was in a highly-controlled setting
where I was watching only a ‘section’ of the work that was being
done. Chris controlled exactly when and where, and what I would see.
</div><div>
</div></li></ul>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
</div>
<ul style="text-align: left;"><li><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
During our first meeting, we talked about a few things that now make
much more sense than they did back then and yes, I do raise my hands
in guilt that I didn't action on these fast enough: </div><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;"> </div><div>
</div><ul><li><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
He operated in a grey area in all aspects of his process.
</div><div>
</div></li><li><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
All performers of explicit content must be under the ages of 25.</div><div>
</div></li><li><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
The performers of his side project were not paid so that they do
the work because they ‘crave it’.
</div><div>
</div></li><li><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
His side projects were not to be linked with the company, nor was
his work as a director for projects outside of the company. This, I
now understand, has been a key element used by Chris and some of
his colleagues to obfuscate any responsibility or duty of care
throughout this story.
</div><div>
</div></li></ul><div>
</div></li></ul>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">I
didn't take action on the above right away and the best way I can
explain this is by stating that I did not completely understand what
he was telling me then, though I kept these in my mind and they
informed my thinking going forward. What I should have done was raise
these issues and red flags immediately with the person who led the
company with Chris.
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">A
few things became very clear to me as soon as I arrived at the
company:
</div>
<ul style="text-align: left;"><li><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
The mess that the company was in, financially and structurally.
There was no formal structure beyond a Company’s House
registration and the company had accumulated a large amount of debt
which I was now responsible for covering.</div><div>
</div></li></ul>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 1.27cm; text-align: left;">
</div>
<ul style="text-align: left;"><li><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
There was information I kept asking for (bank statements, account
details, spreadsheets, company information, previous
correspondences) and which I never had access to throughout this
period. Numerous requests went either unanswered or deflected with
vague reasoning as to why the heads of the company couldn't give it
to me or would ‘do it later’.
</div><div>
</div></li></ul>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">When
you work in a freelance capacity, you are used to having to navigate
a lot of work contexts where you don’t know much of what is going
on, you are kept outside. It is important here to note that I was
still very much a freelancer, on an invoice-by-invoice and
project-by-project type of deal, no contract, so my capacity to
actually map out the whole situation was incredibly limited. </div><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"> </div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">The
main reason I lay this down here is because not knowing the full
picture, not having information you need, being told only a few
things and being kept ‘outside’ are among the methods that Chris
employed to ensure that you were confused and doubted yourself. If
you don’t know the full picture, how can you do anything that is
not what is directly and immediately asked of you?</div><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"> </div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">By
Spring 2017, I was asked to do 3 unpaid days as producer for a side
project that he had going on at a London theatre. This is when
everything that I now know kicked off. </div><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"> </div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">Early
summer 2017, the Company receives the news that it was to be awarded
NPO status. At this time I also learned that a play he had been
commissioned to write had been lost on a hard-drive that was broken.
We now know this was either a lie or that the hard-drive was never
taken to be fixed precisely because it contained paedophilia, and he
was obviously against any repairing of the hard-drive. </div><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"> </div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">The
first time I came across any mentions of abuse, was in a response to
a Facebook post of mine advertising the opening of that side project.
Written by a previous member of the collective (who wishes to remain
anonymous), it indicated that there might have been coercion going on
in the rehearsal room, that the process wasn't as ‘collective’ as
advertised, and the performers had little agency in the process. </div><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"> </div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><i>Before
we go into further detail here, I must admit that my first reaction
was to contact this person directly and ask for more information.
Once they said they wanted no more interactions with this or talk any
further, I asked them to remove the post while I investigated
further. This was wrong of me and while I have apologised directly to
said person, I feel this needs stating, as asking someone to remove a
perfectly legitimate complaint, no matter how publicly, is wrong and
is akin to victim-blaming. I take full responsibility for the
violence of that action. </i></div><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><i> </i>
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">The
poster told me they did not want any further involvement in this.
None the less, I started to investigate because the mentioned abuse
would have serious implications for the current performers and
everyone around that project. Chris’ response was ultimately to
dismiss it as ‘a misunderstanding of something that happened by
chance in the beginning of the project when things were not very
clear in terms of process or what was to be achieved’. I was also
told by others this same story and ‘not to worry’. </div><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"> </div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">I
demanded to be more close to rehearsal/making processes as I was
starting to doubt what I was being told not just with that project
but across Chris’ work. Around this time, I talked with many
contemporary and previous collaborators who told me, directly or
indirectly, that Chris was always a difficult person to work with,
who controlled everything while pretending that everyone had agency
in the process, and that there were serious concerns about how unsafe
his work methods were. </div><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"> </div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">Upon
request from him, I set up a ‘check-in’ day for the cast of that
project, but was told I was not allowed in the space myself as they
were to discuss very intimate things about the future of the project.
Afterwards, I was told by Chris that the group had decided to close
the project and no more shows or rehearsals were to be done for it. </div><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"> </div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">In
September 2017, Chris informed me he was planning more versions of
that project for 2018 and that I should start conversations with
venues/festivals about it. I asked about the decision of the
collective to end the project and he said that ultimately it was his
project and that he would do it with other performers. I said I
wanted nothing to do with it as I had concerns for the safety of the
performers, he looked at me angrily and frustrated and moved the
conversation to the company’s work and upcoming start of NPO. </div><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"> </div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">In
November 2017, on my arrival in Manchester to watch the opening of
one of his directing projects, I was made aware of two other cases of
abuse, one of which was posted on an online blog and one which was
raised to me in person right outside of the theatre. Furthermore, two
other people in the cast for that evening’s show told me in no
loose terms that Chris had been incredibly problematic in the process
of making it. </div><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"> </div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">I
will leave exposition or commentary of those complaints to those who
raised them, as they are not my story to tell, but what became clear
to me right there and then was that Chris was at the very centre of
clear abusive practices and experiences, some of which were
incredibly sexually and psychologically violent. </div><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"> </div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">Make
no mistake here:
</div>
<ul style="text-align: left;"><li><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Across the projects that I witnessed and the ones we are dissecting
here, Chris was the main responsible person for the spaces he
created. He originated them, he was the director, writer and
facilitator of those projects, those spaces and practices.</div><div>
</div></li></ul>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 1.27cm; text-align: left;">
</div>
<ul style="text-align: left;"><li><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Every single one of the people who were abused alluded to here were
in positions of disadvantage (all were young queer people, fresh out
of uni or just starting in the sector), while he enjoyed the vast
privileges his name, his status and his position both across the
sector and in the rehearsal room brought to him.
</div><div>
</div></li></ul>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">As
soon as I knew of these instances of abuse, I tried to contact Chris
and the chair of the Company, and a few things happened which I want
to state very clearly here:</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
</div>
<ul style="text-align: left;"><li><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Chris refused to answer any of my calls or text messages throughout
the day. He eventually texted the next day saying that I had no
right to interfere, to mind my own business and that it was my role
to focus on the upcoming meeting we had booked with a London
theatre.
</div><div>
</div></li></ul>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 1.27cm; text-align: left;">
</div>
<ul style="text-align: left;"><li><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
The (at the time ) chair of the Company told me, when I asked if he
was aware of the complaints, that ‘my responsibility was to ensure
the future of the Company, so I shouldn’t get involved as the
issue was with another project that sat outside the Company’. He
told me this to my face, while I was sitting on the sofa of the café
in the middle of the theatre building. He then turned his back on me
and left. I remember it so vividly because it was the moment it
finally clicked that I was alone in this and had nowhere to turn. It
is a moment I will never forget.
</div><div>
</div></li></ul>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">Part
of the reason why everyone was happy to ‘not get involved’ was
because, very cleverly, Chris was adamant that his side projects -
small or mid-scale in scope but around which most of the abuse took
place - were separate from the Company. This is something his board
members – especially the 3 chairs – used as an excuse to not
investigate or do anything at all about this, then or since. To them
I say: you tried to wash your hands of real abuse when you had the
power to help, and that reflects on you, and you only.
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">Hear
me out here: if the director of your company was abusing people
elsewhere, wouldn't you want to do something about it? Or at least
investigate? Or reach out to see if you could help with a situation
that your director was implicated in and at the centre of? Do you
have no care for the safety of others, let alone your staff? A
company that allowed him to have any sort of sustainability and
continue to operate in the sector, has the responsibility to deal
with staff and board members’ abusive behaviour, does it not?
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">The
next day I emailed Chris and the chair of the Company, demanding an
immediate stop to any Company work and to start an internal
investigation followed by an external one. I detailed the complaints
and that there were serious concerns about Chris, his character and
how it was affecting employers and freelancers working with him.
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">Immediately,
Chris responded with a lengthy email on how I had no idea what I was
doing and had acted unprofessionally and disappointingly. He also
made veiled threats about what might happen in the event of an
investigation, specifically naming individuals he knew were close
friends of mine, to imply that there would be consequences for them
that would also affect me. I have no qualms in saying this was a form
of gaslighting. Basically ‘shut up or your friends will also be in
the shit’.</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">Speaking
with the people he mentioned in the email and going back to the
people who raised the instances of abuse, none of them wanted to go
any further than this had already gone for they were fearful of
consequences. What I wanted to do then was to go to the police, or
the press. Those were the only things I could think of that would
shine a light on this and enforce some form of accountability.
However, when the very people who were at the hands of the abuser
didn’t want to go to the police or the press for fear of visibility
and impact on them, I had to respect that. Beyond their experiences
at the hands of Chris, most of were migrant, trans, queer and/or PoC,
and all had traumas related to historical and direct state and/or
police violence. So my hands were tied.
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">What
happened over the next few months is, frankly, a bit of a blur to me,
but here is what I remember:</div>
<ul style="text-align: left;"><li><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Later that week, I quit the Company upon realising that I wasn't
able to do anything from within.</div><div>
</div></li><li><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
I spent 4 months in bed, depressed and unable to do anything, with
constant panic attacks and a few trips to A&E, as well as
high-dose antidepressants.
</div><div>
</div></li><li><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
I developed PTSD that impacts my ability to breathe. Still today,
whenever I am in high anxiety or stressful situations, I struggle to
breath properly.
</div><div>
</div></li></ul>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">In
Spring 2018, Maddy emailed introducing me to Lucy Ellinson. We had
never chatted before, nor had we even met, so I was very surprised to
be connected to this stranger whom I knew only from her work in the
sector.
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">Talking
to Lucy saved me in that moment, for she told me what happened to
her, what she had observed happening to others and said she believed
me. She was the first person to do that, to even reach out, and as a
result of her uncompromising care, we have been able to support
survivors and create some sector change. I will forever be thankful
to her and in awe of her work, ethics and sense of justice.</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">We
discussed the work that needed to be done to stop Chris and his
abuse. Lucy along with another long-term collaborator Wendy Hubbard,
had independently from me recently raised the alarm with senior
female leaders at two high-profile venues. It is very apparent to me
that it was precisely because these institutions got involved that
the Company acted on the request for an investigation. Once again,
individuals have no power unless institutions get involved, remember?
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">The
investigation was led by an independent body, and it took a few
months to conclude. I think it is safe to say that it was nowhere
near conclusive or expansive enough to cover everything. Furthermore,
I’ve learned since that some people didn’t feel comfortable
sharing their experiences, and some now regret how they engaged with
it.
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">The
report, despite Chris's efforts to redact it (and he did), concludes
that vast amounts of different types of abuse were committed by
Chris, even when it plays some of it down. They are laid out across
the various points of the findings, although a lot of the abuse that
we know of is not included. It also proposes some concrete steps for
the company to introduce processes of accountability and for future
implementation of Codes of Conducts.</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">I
remember the report coming out and feeling utterly deflated by it, as
a lot of what we knew at this point was not included, and it all
sounded very vague. However, talking with people who were part of
this process, a few things were pointed out to me that just showcased
the deep shit we were all involved in:</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">1.
That Chris had been resistant to the investigation throughout</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">2.
That Chris did not see people as people, but as objects or obstacles
towards his goals</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">3.
That there was no actual way of the Company being held accountable
for any of it, let alone be forced to implement any of the suggested
changes, for there are no systems in place across the sector to
provide accountability of the kind that was needed here.
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><b>One
thing that was said to my face after this process was done, which I
will never forget: that because there was no system to hold the
Company to account, or Chris, that it was up to </b><i><b>us</b></i><b>,
the victims of his abuse, to create some form of accountability. </b>
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">I
know this isn't fair, and I can't tell you how enraged and distraught
I was, because finally the penny dropped for me that actually the
systems in place across the sector are designed to protect the
abusers, even if that is not their inherent intention. The way the
sector works, it is up to the victim to carry the burden of the abuse
<i>and</i> to ensure that the abuser is held accountable for ever
more.
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><b>A
quick note before we carry on: </b><i>what comes next should never,
ever be the responsibility of the survivors and/or victims to do.
Never. The fact that we, of all people, had to carry so much burden
and violence from both him and the sector at large, is frankly
disgusting and something I will never forget. Change will never come
while we keep forcing this on the very people who were directly
affected by it in the first place, for it keeps those in power and
with the privilege of dealing with it with more direct action from
having to do anything.</i><b> </b>
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">After
the report came out, Maddy left the Company and we had a long call
where we discussed what had happened, our fears and our wants from
this situation. I believe people deserve second chances, especially
when you have been groomed and/or gaslighted to believe an abuser’s
narrative. Plus, at least Maddy reached out, and has worked with us
ever since. None of the others did, and certainly not one of them
even sent a fucking email asking if we were ok, not even the ones I
used to consider my friends.</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">Upon
Lucy’s suggestion, I rounded up a few of us whom I knew were
directly impacted, and our group got together in early 2019. Some
others, including Maddy and Lucy, were kept in the loop. With the
help of an ally (who wishes to be anonymous) we sent communications
to the company demanding clarity and information on progress made
according to the demands of the report, as well as demands on further
action including:
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br />
</div>
<ul style="text-align: left;"><li><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Demands to show us how the Company was implementing the report’s
proposals, specifically the work on creating safe-guards in any of
the current and future projects that Chris would engage in;</div><div>
</div></li></ul>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 1.27cm; text-align: left;">
<br />
</div>
<ul style="text-align: left;"><li><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Demands to delete all documentation and marketing that included
nudity and instances of abuse, from all Company records, hard-drives
and any partners’ platforms who also had that content;
</div><div>
</div></li></ul>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 1.27cm; text-align: left;">
<br />
</div>
<ul style="text-align: left;"><li><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Demands for the Company to post a statement on the situation, which
clarified what had happened and the nuances of the situation;</div><div>
</div></li></ul>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 1.27cm; text-align: left;">
<br />
</div>
<ul style="text-align: left;"><li><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Demands for the Company to cease any work that involved Chris
attending any university or education-led work, and specifically for
the Company to ensure that Chris’ work wasn't taught at university
levels;</div><div>
</div></li></ul>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 1.27cm; text-align: left;">
<br />
</div>
<ul style="text-align: left;"><li><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
For the Company to ensure that any future activity would be preceded
by the Company engaging in dialogue about the need for safety
measures AND show the report to any partner, staff or collaborator
(both individuals and institutions).
</div><div>
</div></li></ul>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">Throughout
2019, we engaged in a very lengthy and exhausting back and forth over
emails where we would ask questions in the vein of the points above
and would get some vague promises of change, specifically related to
the creation and implementation of a code of conduct, and a lot of
gaslighting. While this was done anonymously, I am sure they knew
that at least some of us were involved in this work. This took a lot
of our time, effort, emotional and physical labour to do. At every
stage, we were consistently made to feel like a bother, like we had
no right to ask these questions or make these demands, and the
gaslighting continued.
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><b>Some
other things happened throughout this which are very relevant to
understand how all of this impacts on the individuals across the
sector: </b>
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br />
</div>
<ul style="text-align: left;"><li><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
The Company contracted new staff, some of whom stayed on even after
knowing about all of this, and some of whom went on to get new shiny
jobs in the sector!
</div><div>
</div></li></ul>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 1.27cm; text-align: left;">
<br />
</div>
<ul style="text-align: left;"><li><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Chris continued to be invited to events, to get commissions and new
board members. The Company continued to hold NPO status, although
little is known of what work was done throughout that time.
</div><div>
</div></li></ul>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br />
</div>
<ul style="text-align: left;"><li><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Some of us started to be treated like pariahs in the sector, some
had doors shut in their faces, some literally lost jobs because of
this, some became just ‘too much’ to employ.</div><div>
</div></li></ul>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">Around
Spring 2019, I was alerted to the fact that the Company was
advertising a spare room in Chris’ apartment in Edinburgh during
the Fringe Festival, reserved for an upcoming artist, for free. I
took issue with it on safety grounds and directly contacted the then
Company producer and chair of the Company. The producer responded
very swiftly that I had no idea what I was talking about and that
there was no indication that Chris was an abuser. Around this time,
Maddy expressed concerns for my mental health and suggested that I
should just let it go. It becomes apparent to me that either I am
going completely out of my mind, or these people are not quite seeing
the whole picture.
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">So I
sent the email below to the Company in response:</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><i>Just
to make this clear - what exactly do you perceive as 'no allegation
on record of any personal impropriety against Chris' on the
investigation? </i>
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><i>Does
point 1, 2 and 3 (on page 6 of the report) not clearly state that
there there was abuse taken place? Emotional abuse, disempowerment
and denial of reality, is abuse. Specially when you put it in the
context of the work of actual sexual nature within Ponyboy in which
Chris was the sole director and writer of, is of a much older age and
position of power both within the industry and the Ponyboy curtis
company at large, and the rest of the company were young,
impressionable, just out of University performers. </i>
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><i>Doesnt
the report also state at various points that Chris did not seek - and
at points proposed to not use the word at all as hindering of the
process - consent? There are whole sections around this on the
report.</i></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><i>Doesnt
the blog put on the internet in November 2017 as a response to abuse
being led within the Ponyboy Curtis not highlight the levels of
discrepancy of power structures and coercive abuse within the room? A
room in which Chris was the ultimate director of, with the ultimate
power over? </i>
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><i>Doesnt
the response from Chris himself to my challenging in November 2017 to
circumstances of abuse show the character of this person? Gaslighting
is a form of abuse. For instance, I was left bed-bound for months,
not able to breathe properly and that continues to affect me to this
day in anxious situations. I give my example here just to illustrate
the effect this whole situation and response from CG&Co has had.
Others have gone through various similar situations and their
cripling anxiety about coming forward is in fact due to the way the
company and Chris himself have behaved in this process. </i>
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">That
producer and the Company’s chair (finally) resigned with immediate
effect. Eventually, last year (2021) I reconnected with that producer
and it became clear that she had only received limited passages of
the report, nor had she been made aware of all the issues that led to
it or happened since. This person should not be held to account, for
she was gaslit in her job, and should be supported for she has been
nothing but clear and caring with this situation since.
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">From
what I understand, as a consequence of my challenges, the Company
cancelled the work they had planned for the rest of the year
(including an Edinburgh Fringe run at the prestigious Traverse
Theatre), as they were left with only a General Manager in position.</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">From
then on, upon our group challenging the company yet again through our
anonymous ally, we received an extensive letter written by Chris but
with absolutely no new information on anything we asked for clarity
on, plus a heavy dose of gaslighting. In this letter, among other
things, he made it very clear that it was due to our actions that he
was left on his own to deal with all of this, so we had to wait. So
we waited. From what I know, later that summer a new Chair was
appointed and a new group of people from around the sector were
assembled to work on the Code of Conduct that everyone had been
waiting for for so long.</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">Meanwhile,
I would get occasional emails or calls from people I know in the
sector saying that they had been either contacted by Chris with a job
offer or been told to talk to me as they were considering working for
him. I always told them what I knew. In March 2020, Lucy and I
express concerns that there seem to be more and more people talking
about Chris to us and the general consensus is that people are
willing to consider working with him. We worry that a whitewashing of
this situation is at play and wonder how much people actually know.
We decide to meet but then lockdown happens, and honestly the abrupt
change of life is enough to make you forget about it. I don't think I
remembered the story until much later in the year when I started to
be contacted again by people who were pondering, yet again, working
with him.</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">Early
in March 2021, Lucy and I decided we should reconnect and meet up
again, and potentially get the group back together again to check on
how everyone was doing.
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">Then,
in late May 2021 upon my return to the UK to work on a project, out
of the blue, I got an email from Maddy that he had been arrested. She
says in the email that I was right about his character and the danger
he presents. I went into shock, my whole body shut down and I slept
throughout the whole weekend (I don't think I was awake for more than
6 hours the whole weekend, and I have friends who can attest to
that). It has been hard to breathe again ever since then, I have a
constant feeling of anxiety and have gone back on really high
medication.</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">The
group decided to meet again, to talk about this new development, this
time with Maddy and Lucy directly in the group as well. Honestly I
was both relieved and frightened. Relieved because, even though I do
not believe in the institution of the police or the act of policing,
I knew that <i>some</i> form of accountability could come from that.
Frightened because I had no idea what was coming towards us, what
violence was about to be published online. Also, he was a fucking
paedophile, and I had been abused by paedophiles from a young age, so
PTSD kicked in, big time.</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">Just
before the group was about to reconvene for the first time in over a
year, news of his suicide came through. I cannot tell you how glad I
am that we were all together in that room, for it felt like
everything around us was burning and we at least had each other, yet
again. Social media was rife with celebrations and stories about how
moved people were by Chris and his work.
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">When
news came out of his paedophilia, there were various people publicly
standing by him, some even accusing me and/or our group of driving
him to his death (I have the screenshots). Others sought to protect
his legacy or even his profile, stating that it was outrageous he was
being defamed when he could no longer challenge those accusations.
Others, prominent figures in the sector, wrote comments under press
articles on how he had been a victim of so-called cancel culture,
like Kevin Spacey and other abusers (and yes, I also have these
screenshots saved). To them, I say that I hope that soiling yourself
online to protect an abuser was worth it. There will always be people
whose first reactions will be to either place blame on the victims or
create doubt. Many of those who levelled abuse at us throughout these
years, were these kinds of people.</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">Yet
there we were, the only people who had been challenging the bastard
for years, all in different parts of the world, in a zoom room
talking about ways we could support each other moving forward.
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">A
few things became clear in that meeting:</div>
<ol style="text-align: left;"><li><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
We needed help and counselling both as a group and individually. The
toll on all of us was immense.
</div><div>
</div></li></ol>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 1.27cm; text-align: left;">
Not only was the group already facing a history of sexual abuse,
coercion and gaslighting among us from him, we were also grappling
with the newly learned fact that most of the work we had done was
deeply tainted by his paedophilia. A whole new angle had descended
upon us and this had horrendous impact on our perceptions of what had
happened over the years.</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 1.27cm; text-align: left;">
<br />
</div>
<ol start="2" style="text-align: left;"><li><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
We needed to do something to bring some light into this story. There
are so many grey areas, so much misinformation, too many lies told
and believed. That’s what he wanted, so we should do the opposite.
</div><div>
</div></li></ol>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 1.27cm; text-align: left;">
<br />
</div>
<ol start="3" style="text-align: left;"><li><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
We could not let his legacy be one of a ‘genius’ like so many
other stories of abusers. We needed to ensure that Chris wasn’t
another isolated case in the sector, and that in fact, it was a
sector issue that we needed to tackle.</div><div>
</div></li></ol>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">Every
other month we hear stories in the press, or by word of mouth, of
abusers in the sector. Abusers of all kinds: sexual abusers, racists,
xenophobia, classism, etc etc etc. We hear them all, and we all get
outraged, but then the story disappears and no one talks about them
any more, until a new abuser comes to light for a few days and then
it all vanishes again.</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">We
asked ourselves the question: following the #metoo movement, what
exactly has happened in the arts sector to better protect our people?
Not just the actors in the audition rooms, or the artists just
leaving university looking for a way in, but the techs, the stage
managers, the company directors, or the box office staff? Nothing.</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">Where
are the systems for us to turn to when we inevitably get abused
sexually, or coerced into doing harm to others, or gaslit into
depression? Where are the mechanisms that hold power to account in
real terms, other than going to the press or the police? Neither of
those are safe options, specially for women, queer, trans, black and
minority ethnic, migrant or working class people. So what do we do to
hold abusers to account, when there are no safe systems to report the
abuse that we have to endure on a daily basis? And yes, it is
everywhere. You know this, and admitting it is perhaps the first
step. Talking about it is perhaps the second. The third is working
for collective action and system change. Nothing else will do it, I’m
afraid.
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">It
fucks me up to know this, but I also know that had the majority of
this group been women, or people of colour, or migrants, or primarily
trans people, the following would have been much,<i> much</i> harder
to achieve. While our group includes people who fall into those
categories, the majority is white, British and male, and that is not
lost on me. On top of that, some of us already had plenty of contacts
and security in the sector to make this happen too. Most survivors
don’t have any of these privileges, and if anything, let this be a
fucking lesson so that others with less, can have equal access to the
bare fucking minimum.
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">Here
is what we did:</div>
<ol style="text-align: left;"><li><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
We had meetings with venues, individuals and other institutions and
begged support in two ways:</div><div>
</div><ol type="a"><li><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Financial contributions to secure trauma support for individuals
who had been abused (that we knew of).</div><div>
</div></li><li><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Access to rooms with key industry people that could allow us to
change some specific industry policy that were preventing victims
of abuse from coming forward. Luckily, some of these came through,
though certainly not nearly enough. Venues like the Royal Court
Theatre, Theatre in the Mill, the Royal Exchange and the Yard
theatre supported us enough for us to move forward. Others backed
away cowardly, or only offered moral support. Don’t get me wrong,
I appreciate moral support. But we desperately need material
support too. Trying to get resources and help took a lot of time
and work, as theatre organisations did not have readily available
options.
</div><div>
</div></li></ol><div>
</div></li></ol>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 1.27cm; text-align: left;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 1.27cm; text-align: left;">
However, through different channels, we were able to resource support
and to offer members of our group fully funded individual counselling
and collective healing work via ELOP. We also contacted a few other
people whom we knew had been abused by Chris and offered access to
therapy via ELOP and through other ways. Some accepted, others did
not for their own private reasons.
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0.64cm; text-align: left;">
<br />
</div>
<ol start="2" style="text-align: left;"><li><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
We were listened to by the Arts Council and invited to work with
them on their safety policies, specifically <span style="color: #1155cc;"><u><a href="https://www.artscouncil.org.uk/publication/raising-concern" target="_blank"><span style="color: #1155cc;">Raising
a Concern</span></a></u></span>. Now, everyone can raise a concern
about abusing practices occurring in spaces and/or projects,
companies or events funded by the Arts Council and have their
concerns investigated, with protections around them, and
consequences to the abusers in the event of investigations
concluding that the abuse occurred. It is nowhere near perfect, and
there is a lot to still change, but it is a start. I wish we would
do more, but right now we’re exhausted.</div><div>
</div></li></ol>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0.64cm; text-align: left;">
<br />
</div>
<ol start="3" style="text-align: left;"><li><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
We reached out to previous board and company members of the company,
with varying degrees of success. Earlier this year we met with some
former staff/freelancers and we listened to each other and learnt
more about what had happened in their experiences. We do not agree
on everything and certainly, I am still quite unsure about a lot of
what was said then and how things played out. However, the last two
Chairs of the board continue to not respond to us to this day, and
have made it clear to others that they see themselves as having no
responsibility for any of this, and therefore do not want to get
involved in any way. No care, no interest, hands washed, etc.
Communications from us were unanswered by them throughout the years
and especially coldly since his death.</div><div>
</div></li></ol>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 1.27cm; text-align: left;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">Now
that the process is coming to an end, we needed some form of
collective closure. The grey areas are still all over this story, and
perhaps will always be there. Others have told their side, and that
is to be respected too. Perhaps this story will never leave us, and
that is a burden that none of us asked for, nor do any of us deserve
this. But many out there are still looking for closure, and I am
sorry we haven't been able to get to everyone with our support or
space. There were just too many people and too many different stories
for us to be able to collect them all.
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">Which
is why we are going public now. To shine some light on an impossible
situation that marked so many in so many different ways, and perhaps
to get some collective healing together, even if in an imperfect way.
It is also not enough: many stories, including some from our group,
are still to be told – but that is their story to tell, and we will
be here to support them when or if that happens.</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">Finally,
we need sector change. The longer we delay this, the longer
Chris-like figures will continue to abuse others. While we can’t
protect everyone, we can certainly install the tools to deal with
situations like this promptly, and to the best of our abilities.
We’ve spent the past 5 years doing what we could to the best of our
abilities, and it is still not enough.
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">Personally,
I can't tell you how proud I am of our group. We held each other in
the worst of times, in our own time and we worked to be able to
provide for each other and for others beyond us. We did it in our own
time (none of us got paid for any of the care and fundraising work
we’ve done over the past few years, just to make that clear!) and
we never backed away from challenging moments, or the violence
inflicted on us by him or those who fought to protect him or his
work.
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">This
to me is what queer solidarity is.</div></div>
maddy costahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04929576408540749708noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8651145764236805587.post-52838744405891072192022-10-07T09:14:00.001+01:002022-10-07T09:14:16.312+01:00Accountability in process<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><b>by Maddy Costa</b></div><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><b> </b></div><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><b><a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/1tDIqUAUt6mNxQ_EcsZ4YBzPHQ17KfBqe/view?usp=sharing" target="_blank">AUDIO VERSION HERE</a> </b><br /></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">‘Writing
can hurt people; self-exposure or self-flagellation offers no
insurance against the pain. And while I do not think all
autobiographical writing is essentially an act of betrayal, as I’ve
also heard it said, in my experience it does nearly always make
someone feel betrayed. [A]ll it has to do is offer the record of one
person’s consciousness, one person’s interpretation of events
that involved others.’ Maggie Nelson, The Art of Cruelty</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">I
ended this blog in 2018 with a set of thoughts on working with Chris
Goode and, more pertinently, deciding not to work with him any more.
I had, since November 2017, been re-examining our relationship, the
amount of his thinking I had absorbed, and the ways in which I’d
written about his work; my final post documented some of that
reflection process. But there was much that remained untold, for many
reasons: there were aspects to working with Chris that I didn’t yet
fully understand; I feared that speaking publicly about what I did
understand could harm him and other people involved; after a year of
grieving over the distance between who I thought Chris was and the
man I was discovering him to be, I was tired and wanted not to have
to think about him at all.</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">In
the five years since November 2017, but particularly since his death
in June 2021, I’ve learned so much about the man Chris was, and all
of it has been devastating. A bully who assaulted people. An abuser
who coerced and manipulated people, particularly young men; who used
his collaborators as shields, armour, to hide behind, even as he
rallied people to drop their own armour. A paedophile who actively
sought out images of children being sexually abused. This is the man
I worked with for seven years, summer 2011 to autumn 2018, for much
of that time romanticising his work and narrating a politics of
resistance and care around it that would have encouraged other people
to work with him too. In the five years since November 2017, I’ve
devoted days and weeks to dialogue, silent reflection, and writing,
in an attempt to understand how I could have been so beguiled by him,
how I could have missed so many warning signs, and why I carry such
intense feelings of shame and guilt for the harms he inflicted on
others.
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">I’m
not alone in feelings of regret: many of the people who worked with
Chris share them. None of them, however, were tasked by Chris with
building a narrative around his work, building bridges across space
and time between him and potential audiences. I write from a hope
that by sharing more of what I witnessed between 2011 and 2018, and
something of what I’ve understood since 2018 through dialogue and
reflection, I might go some way towards deconstructing the romantic
picture of Chris I had previously maintained, help to clear some of
the murk that surrounds Chris’s life and death, and counteract the
obfuscations of a man who compulsively lied and misled people.
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">Although
I don’t speak for others, only myself, it’s impossible not to
speak of others, including people who don’t want to be named or
remembered for Chris’s part in their lives. This is my third
attempt to write this piece, each time working harder not to betray
people, while knowing, as Maggie Nelson writes, that some level of
betrayal is inevitable. I quote other writers throughout because I’ve
needed their thinking to help me navigate the confusion and tangle of
misaligned stories Chris left behind him when he died. What I narrate
is incomplete, a work in progress. Something I began arguing before
working with Chris – it was one of the reasons he approached me to
work with him – is the importance of attending not only to product
but to process. In this case, not so much to producing a perfect
piece of writing but engaging in a process of accountability. That
process began in the December 2018 text, continues here, and will
continue long after this text ends.
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: center;">*</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">‘The
story of a family is always a story of complicity. It’s about not
being able to choose the secrets you’ve been let in on.’ Patricia
Lockwood, Priestdaddy
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">I
write assuming that you’ve read the December 2018 blog post in
which I explained why I was leaving Chris Goode & Company. I
assume you know already its three conclusions: in my writing about
Chris and his work, I had erased the work of other women who
collaborated with him, and fuelled a cult of genius around him, and
existed within a circle of hypnosis in which I consistently asked
people who criticised his work to see it another way, a way more
sympathetic to Chris or attuned to (what I knew of) his thinking. I
assume you know from that text that I had witnessed, and begun
discussing with Chris, problems in his relationship with power: that
he would begin a rehearsal process assuring everyone present that his
was a non-hierarchical room, in which all ideas were equally welcome;
but that half way through the process he would bamboozle
collaborators by pulling rank, and expecting them to do as he, the
director, the lead artist, said.
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">These
are all things I wrote about in 2018, but I did so in an incomplete
way. I didn’t detail harms I knew to have resulted from Chris’s
exercise of power. I didn’t go into any detail regarding the
investigation into Chris’s practice that was conducted in 2018, the
contents of the resulting report, or Chris’s vituperative reaction
to it. I didn’t mention the artist who had told me earlier in 2018:
‘Chris is not a feminist and I don’t trust him.’ Nor did I
mention how hard I found this to hear, having not only trusted but
admired and respected Chris for 15 years, since becoming a fan of his
work. I wrote a bit about the final show of Ponyboy Curtis, but
nothing about the narrative emerging behind that work: of young men
being coerced and manipulated into performing sexual acts beyond
their desire or wholehearted consent. I didn’t mention any of these
things because I believed Chris was too vulnerable to be confronted
with them. Me leaving his Company was betrayal enough.</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">It
felt like betrayal because, to the extent that Chris engaged in such
language, I had been part of his work-family. The first time Chris
used the word ‘family’ was in June 2011, a month after I’d
started working with him: it was how he introduced me to a rehearsal
room team, all people he had worked with before, and I felt such
warmth in being so included. People took their clothes off in that
rehearsal room, in a way that I felt a bit awkward about, but it was
fine, because the room had an open door, and anyway we were all
adults, and anyway I’d seen a lot of nakedness in the past decade
of writing about theatre.
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">From
what Chris said about his work, and from what he wrote on his blog
(the bits of it that I read), the naked body was an integral element
of his practice. His practice, though, had two sides, one more
mainstream, one much less: at the point when he formed the Company,
naked bodies tended to appear in the less mainstream, more
alternative work. Meanwhile in his writing he was putting a lot of
intellectual energy into thinking about how people respond to
nakedness, and what that nakedness might say to people about how we
live together and treat each other. The monologue Chris performed in
2013, accompanied in the space by a naked young man and a cat, became
the basis of an entire book (which I haven’t read) on the subject.
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">In
2014 I watched a show directed by Chris, which tore at the structures
of capitalism, and ended with a different young man standing naked
but for socks and clumpy boots. I noticed at the time how this young
man’s jaw was set, teeth gritted in an expression of enduring
something he didn’t want to do. As part of my response to the show,
I wrote in this blog of ‘the failure in my thinking about [Chris’s]
work, my incomplete understanding of how and why he asks for
nakedness’. In 2012 I was part of a small audience for a duet that
Chris performed with yet another young man, in which Chris was
clothed and the young man half-naked. At one point the young man
masturbated, which was difficult to watch, because I felt he was
forcing himself to do it.
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">That
young man who masturbated was in his early mid-20s, maybe 14 years
younger than Chris. He had been part of Chris’s work for at least
two years already, all work I hadn’t seen, in which he frequently
performed naked. We chatted a bit in those months, and he shared with
me some of the pain he felt in his relationship with Chris, a
relationship Chris talked about in terms of love, but which the young
man felt was short even of friendship. Some evenings, the young man
said, he would suggest they sit on the sofa and watch a movie
together, but Chris would insist that they rehearse. Invariably this
meant the young man being naked, and/or masturbating, while Chris
filmed him.
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">By
2015, that man had stopped working with Chris, and another young man
had taken his place. This second one was more like 17 years younger
than Chris, and the relationship between them felt even less equal.
Whereas the first young man was increasingly vocal in his critique of
Chris’s practice, particularly Chris’s reliance on people working
for love rather than pay (for context, in the seven years I worked
with Chris, I invoiced for a little under £3500 across Company and
side projects, not quite all of which was paid), the second young man
was more like Chris’s mentee: Chris would give him books to read,
shaping his intellect around the work Chris wanted him to do. Again,
that work primarily involved performing naked, and private
rehearsals, and sexual acts.
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">Do
you hear alarm bells ringing? I didn’t, because I was listening and
looking for other things. My attention wasn’t on the naked male
body – such an established element of Chris’s practice it could
be as visible, and invisible, as that of a cat – but the political
ideas Chris projected across that body. The damage of patriarchy,
homophobia, capitalism, and how to resist them. I was present for the
first research and development days on Ponyboy Curtis, and felt that
Chris was trying to create an alternative environment: a ‘temporary
autonomous zone’ in which young men could escape the toxicity of
masculinity shaped by capitalist patriarchy, and shape new
identities, new ways of being, practising care. The young men in that
room weren’t certain what they were doing, and the ways in which
they pushed back against Chris’s directing – his dictating of
mood and task – was part of what made it interesting.</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">‘Temporary
autonomous zone’ is a phrase coined by anarchist thinker Hakim Bey;
it appeared in a text used in a Ponyboy Curtis show in 2016, the same
show that a critic of Chris’s work described dismissively as ‘an
argument for pederasty’. I didn’t know what pederasty meant at
the time, and had to look it up in a dictionary. Hakim Bey was also
criticised for making arguments for pederasty. But that wasn’t
where I was putting my attention.
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">I
didn’t return to the Ponyboy Curtis rehearsal room after the R&D
in 2014, but as the ensemble continued to perform over the next two
and a half years, performers leaving and being replaced by even
younger performers, particularly university students, I increasingly
understood there was a gap between my romantic understanding and the
actuality of the work. In November 2017, some of the performers began
to speak out about their negative sexual experiences, particularly in
private rehearsal settings; immediately the Chris Goode & Company
producer, Xavier de Sousa, contacted Chris insisting that all work be
suspended until an internal investigation had been conducted into
these charges, and a code of conduct written. Chris’s response was
immediately aggressive, and Xavier resigned within the next
fortnight. I knew resigning was the ethical action to take, but I
also felt implicated – accountable – and that my work in that
moment might involve staying in the Company to conduct my own
investigation. My impulse, however, wasn’t to speak to the young
performers of Ponyboy Curtis, but to turn to other women who had
worked with Chris. People I’d witnessed, in rehearsal room after
rehearsal room, take on the care work that Chris claimed to practise.
People who, like me, wouldn’t have been objectified by him
sexually, but might bring some insight into other ways in which he
used people.
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">It
took me until spring 2018, when the 17-years-younger man disclosed to
Lucy Ellinson that he was being coerced, and had been assaulted by
Chris, that I began to see a pattern in Chris’s relationships with
young men. That I properly and fully understood he was abusing them.
Shortly after, an external investigation into Chris’s practice was
requested by the senior leaders of two high-profile theatres. I
stayed in the Company through that investigation, from an
understanding that my role as critical writer should be included in
the process of accountability. In fact, the report didn’t address
it, and so I’ve been pushing through that process myself.
Recognising my silence, my lack of questioning, my averted attention,
as part of the problem. Recognising myself as a custodian of secrets,
and creator of narratives, that enabled the perpetuation of harm.</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: center;">*</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">‘He
spoke a big game about “queering”. … In (what seemed to be)
queer porn, and in kink, he saw revolutionary interventions ... a
political subjectivity that works to undo both hetero- and
homo-normativities – queer-as-disruption, as opposed to
gay-as-assimilation: “Not gay as in happy; queer as in ‘fuck
you’.” … He viewed certain sex – certainly not all sex – as
a necessary rite of passage, without which appropriate radicalisation
was impossible.’ Natasha Lennard, Policing Desire, from the essay
collection Being Numerous</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">There
were young men who performed naked in Chris’s work, and then there
were young men Chris singled out. As I contemplated the similarities
between the first young man, 14 years younger than Chris, and the
second, 17 years younger than him, I realised with a jolt that they
were part of a pattern. There was another man who had preceded them,
although he was only a couple of years younger than Chris. Through
talking to that man’s partner in 2018, I learned there was another
man before him; in June 2021 I spoke to that man and learned of
another man before him; both of them also only a couple of years
younger than Chris. All five of these men identified as straight. All
of them experienced a pressured demand to perform naked, particularly
in private, with Chris filming and explaining that through this
private work they were shaping his public work, public work in which
they would excel. All of them were, at the age Chris first focused
the attention of his desire on them, in their late teens or early
twenties. Young enough, as Chris aged, to be impressionable.</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">One
of the things Chris wanted to impress on people – young men and
audiences alike – was the radical potential of queerness. Not the
cosy queerness that sought equal marriage (assimilation) but a
queerness that actively resisted dominant cultures (disruption). Some
of what he argued for I found inspiring; but when he spoke of an
activist group that, at the height of the Aids crisis, distributed
deliberately damaged condoms to welcome risk, I felt less sure. But
to me, with my cis-het conventionality, and lack of reading in queer
theory, most of what Chris said about queerness felt incontestable.
It was like being policed, a feeling shared by other people who
worked with him – including queer people. When I read Natasha
Lennard’s essay Policing Desire in 2021, I found it hard to believe
she was writing about her abusive ex-partner and not Chris himself.
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">An
older gay male friend told me once that for a gay man to obsess over
straight men is a trope of internalised homophobia. Lennard points
towards the ways that, in Chris’s case, it was something more
sinister. In October 2017, a problem arose between the
17-years-younger man and another collaborator in a work Chris was
directing. I queried it with Chris, and was told that I might see the
situation differently if I understood the young man to be bisexual
and closeted: that is, if I weren’t erasing the young man’s queer
identity. It was an identity Chris was cultivating – but Chris’s
policing successfully shamed me into silence.
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">The
other collaborator in that situation was queer, as were many other
people in that cast; and I was aware that Chris felt challenged by
them, insecure in their presence. On the wall in that rehearsal room
was an extract from the text being rehearsed, written by Chris: a
diatribe against privacy and its interconnections with privatization.
It was full of crossings out and questions, where it had been picked
apart by the cast. Chris wrote against privacy while coercing the
17-years-younger man to perform sex acts in private rehearsals. Chris
told me that the man was bisexual and closeted, and also told me that
the rehearsal room full of queer people was reminding him of a
traumatic experience in his past, in which he’d been victim of a
homophobic attack. That scene was replaying in his mind, alongside
thoughts of suicide. He was presenting himself publicly as a
political thinker, and presenting himself to me as a victim, to hide
his acts of abuse, and hide that the queer sex he saw as radicalising
involved emotional and sometimes physical non-consensual violence.
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: center;">*</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">‘Queer
culture enacts rupture as substitution as the queer child steps out
of the assembly line of heterosexual production and turns toward a
new project. This new project holds on to vestiges of the old but
distorts the old beyond recognition; for example, a relation to the
father dedicated to social stability in straight culture becomes a
daddy-boy relationship in queer contexts dedicated to the
sexualization of generational difference.’ Jack Halberstam, The
Queer Art of Failure</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">In
2015 I had a long conversation with a performer who had been asked by
Chris, as part of a rehearsal process, to read aloud some writing
(not by Chris) that detailed the sexual abuse of a child. I was an
occasional visitor to Chris’s rehearsal rooms, and was absent that
day. I learned after November 2017 that this was another pattern:
Chris avoiding certain material, certain asks, when I was around. The
performer hadn’t been given warning of what the text contained, nor
was his consent sought, and afterwards he was shaken. Together we
discussed the moral ambiguity of this material, and our discomfort
with the thought that for some people, such texts might be a
masturbatory aid. Neither of us thought for even a moment that Chris
might be among the masturbators.
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">In
2018, as part of my reflection process of that year, I read a blog
post published by Chris in 2014, in which he wrote about persuading
an actor to perform naked, who didn’t want to perform naked, via
references to several pieces of porn he’d watched, at least one of
which featured people who might not be legal age. On 14 March 2021, I
learned that Chris had downloaded pornographic material featuring
children; he was then arrested on 5 May. I don’t think it’s a
coincidence that it wasn’t until 1 June – in the hours after
Chris died, although I didn’t know that until 2 June – that I
felt able to ask any questions about the age of the children
involved. With apologies to anyone who doesn’t believe in the
uncanny, I believe Chris had a hold on my mind, a hold that insisted
I care about him and not judge him, and his death set me free from
these concerns.
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">Given
that I don’t watch porn but otherwise live a conventional cis-het
life, and given that I fell in love with Chris’s work in 2003
specifically for how beautifully he wrote about love and
vulnerability between gay men, it was always important to me not to
judge Chris’s desires. I read the Halberstam quote in January 2021
and thought: yes, this is what Chris was tapping into when he named
Ponyboy Curtis, the culture of daddy-boy relationships that distort
heteronormative structures. A key problem of that room, however, was
that Chris refused to see its generational difference: in his eyes,
they were all boys together, despite Chris being daddy age. Once I
learned that Chris was a paedophile, I understood Chris’s
sexualisation of generational difference completely differently.
Chris was hiding paedophilia behind his own version of disruptive
queerness: making disruptive queerness and abuse of children look
like the same thing.
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">As
the realisation sank in that Chris actively sought out images of
children being sexually abused for his own pleasure, I began to see
his Company work in a new light. I heard anew the references to Woody
Allen in one of his monologues. I saw again the character who is
raped while dressed in school uniform, with short trousers to make
him appear even younger, in another of his shows. I no longer trusted
the humble, honourable relationship between a lost and lonely teenage
boy and a lugubrious middle-aged man wearing nothing but a loin cloth
in another show. The one reassurance I had to cling on to concerned
Monkey Bars: although it was constructed from interviews with
children, Chris wasn’t present at any of those conversations;
instead the children talked with Karl James, a specialist in dialogue
and someone who genuinely values care and attention to safeguarding
in his work with children and adults.</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">Paedophilia
was in Chris’s work all along, and yet I refuse to accept that this
means I, or anyone, should have known all along that Chris himself
was a paedophile. Whenever I think about this accusation, I think of
Tim Crouch’s play The Author, in which Crouch himself appears as a
playwright called Tim, who dies by suicide after being caught
watching a film of a baby being sexually abused. The force of that
play – aside from that sucker-punch scene – was its relentless,
clear-eyed gaze at the slipperiness of theatre, the ways in which
theatre makes truth from fiction and spins fiction from truth, makes
these categories unstable, brings the very concept of what’s ‘real’
into question – and makes its audiences complicit in the violence
theatre, often unthinkingly, reproduces. In 2010, The Author played
for four weeks at the Traverse in Edinburgh, where I saw it, with
Chris performing opposite Crouch in the cast of four. I have puzzled
over this for more than a year, and in September 2022 have come to
the conclusion that for Chris, The Author was a smokescreen, armour
he could hide behind, protecting him from accusations that his own
works, however seemingly autobiographical, might be true. But this is
conjecture: as with anything that Chris isn’t here to explain for
himself, I can’t know for sure.</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">At
the same time, I recognise that there were other aspects of Chris’s
work that I was very ready to accept as truth. His descriptions of
suicidal impulses and attempts, for instance, I understood implicitly
to be his own. I had such a clear sense of Chris’s vulnerability
that I never properly appreciated his power, or his violence.</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: center;">*</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">‘Narcissism
is not self-love. It’s the opposite of that. It’s a nagging
horror that you are, deep down, unlovable. A narcissist needs the
love, attention and admiration of others to survive because he or she
cannot produce enough healthy self-respect to be at peace. […]
Their dark secret, the secret they can’t face, is that they loathe
themselves.’ Deborah Orr, Motherwell</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">There
were so many ways in which Chris saw himself as vulnerable, a victim.
He’d grown up amid the Aids crisis and turned 15 the same year
Section 28 was passed. He had a fat body in a fatphobic world. He was
an experimental theatre maker in a UK theatre scene terrified of
risk. I absorbed his sense of victimhood and believed that, through
his work, Chris was resisting and even seeking to dismantle
oppressive structures of privilege and inequality.
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">Repeatedly
in my years of working with him, things would happen that challenged
these beliefs, but in ways I couldn’t make sense of. It was like
being given pieces of a jigsaw that didn’t match the picture Chris
had given me to work from, and so I put those pieces aside in my
mind, to figure them out later. Performers told me that he was
bullying in rehearsal rooms. A young male performer told me that
Chris chose days when I was absent from the rehearsal room to
escalate his demands around nakedness. In 2014, Chris had written
into a monologue accounts of a ten-year-old boy committing a rape and
a heterosexual man raping his wife and a description of himself in
the midst of a sexual encounter fantasising about a paedophilic
relationship, and when the director of that monologue began to
challenge his choices, Chris became sulky and uncommunicative. I
challenged none of this, because I trusted the political work I
thought Chris was doing. Making theatre in ways that refused to make
capitalism; rehearsing for a performance, but also rehearsing less
hierarchical ways of living.</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">I
trusted this because Chris’s language, his articulation of his
work, his resistant politics, seemed absolute and true. This is why
2018 was a year of grief for me: belief had died, and yet still the
language remained. I know deeply that there are many people who
worked with Chris who don’t recognise the person whose actions
required the commissioning of a report and whose death revealed an
abuser and a paedophile: people for whom the experience has been like
discovering a Mr Hyde, or seeing the grotesque corpse of Dorian Grey.
There are many who experienced Chris as generous and supportive,
people who learned from him practices of care and resistance, people
inspired by his articulations of queer resistance. It is disorienting
to discover this opposite.</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">Once
I learned that Chris was a paedophile, the hidden jigsaw picture
became punishingly obvious. In July 2021 I read Deborah Orr’s
description of narcissism and it became a helpful frame through which
to understand Chris’s projected victimhood. According to some
research shared with me by someone else who worked with Chris –
someone who did challenge him, and also stopped working with him in
2016 – paedophilic disorder sits in the same part of the brain as
narcissism and antisocial personality disorder. The latter is
characterised by a disregard for consequences: a disregard for
people, and how they might be hurt, that I now see in a lot of
Chris’s actions, including his choice to die instead of accept
responsibility and be accountable for himself.</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">Whether
I was cast by Chris, or took that role myself, there were ways in
which I functioned as the Echo to his narcissist: so enraptured by
his work that I repeated the political ideas I wanted to believe in,
without sufficiently questioning the gap between intellect and
action. Now that I see the ways in which Chris distorted and
exploited the language of queerness, and resistance, I see Chris
himself as an embodiment of toxicity, and it affects how I see his
work. Ponyboy Curtis has become to me essentially fascistic: an
exaltation of whiteness and masculine virility, erasing rather than
engaging with difference. And his Company work, work that I thought
decried the inequality and violence of a world that denies people
food, shelter, education, access to art, a brutal world that trains
people from a young age to replicate the power structures of
heteronormativity, patriarchy, class, now reads to me as work
decrying the inequality of a world in which a man can’t fuck people
of the age he desires.
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: center;">*</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">‘I
heard the news about Chris’ death in the same moment that <a href="https://www.aptnnews.ca/ourstories/kamloops/" target="_blank">other excavations were happening</a>, literally revealing bodily evidence
of the many years of child abuse and genocide that have occurred on
the lands that are colonially known as Canada. Evidence of histories
that have largely been ignored, in spite of <a href="http://trc.ca/assets/pdf/Calls_to_Action_English2.pdf" target="_blank">repeated reports</a> and <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jul/08/canada-indigenous-children-deaths-residential-schools" target="_blank">campaigns for justice</a>. The two stories arrived in proximity, and they felt
utterly connected. They are both stories about harms that were
happening and continue to happen within structures that are upheld by
white supremacy. They are stories about what we choose to ignore. And
they are stories about the tightly-wound relationships between power,
hero-worshipping, and violence. [...] Our work now is to transform
those narratives, and part of that work lies inside us. In
recognising our own attachments to those narratives, in recognising
that we are part of the stories we tell.’</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">Rajni
Shah, <a href="https://autumnbling.blogspot.com/2021/07/going-into-difficulty.html" target="_blank">Going Into the Difficulty</a>, blog post published 19 July 2021 on
autumnbling
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">I’ve
quoted at length Rajni Shah – someone I’m very grateful to have
met through Chris, and to have been able to talk with about Chris for
many years – because they articulate with precision and compassion
the position I hope to inhabit in relation to Chris. Although I’ve
lost all belief in Chris’s work (and therefore in the work I did as
critical writer for Chris Goode & Company), I agree with Rajni
when they write elsewhere in their blog that erasing Chris is
potentially ‘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)’.
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">It
would be so easy to see Chris as an anomaly, an outlier; maverick as
a theatre-maker, monster as a paedophile. It’s more difficult –
and essential – to look at the ways in which Chris was
disappointingly ordinary: a white cis man with a warped relationship
to power, who used the environment of trust, good-will and love
relied on in theatre-making to disguise acts of abuse. Theatre is
full of them. The women I spoke to in 2018 about working with Chris
told me other troubling stories of working with different
high-profile men in theatre: men who were bullies in the rehearsal
room; men who coerced their performers to give more of themselves –
if not their naked bodies then their minds, their experiences,
particularly their experiences of trauma – than they wanted to
give; men who erased the work of their female collaborators. In March
2021, a friend sent me a photograph of a handwritten poster they’d
seen stuck to the window of the National Theatre Studio, naming Chris
beside seven other male directors with the words: ‘I HEARD YOU’RE
WORKING WITH … BE CAREFUL’ and ‘This is not a complete list.
#me too’.
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">These
aren’t stories I’m ignoring, but nor are they stories I’m
telling. These aren’t people I want to protect, and yet they’re
people I’m not naming: to do so would be, from what little I know
of libel law, litigious. I’m trying to rebuild my shattered
integrity, and yet I feel myself caught within a whirligig of silent
complicity that spins on, my ethics as a storyteller still in
question, my role in upholding this culture of harm and power
essentially intact.</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">It’s
a culture made by all of us that can, with patient work, and
attention, be unmade. That unmaking will require people to change. In
2018, Chris was asked to change. The report into his practice advised
that he write and abide by a comprehensive code of conduct, that he
adhere to safeguarding policies, that he not work in private
rehearsal rooms any more, least of all with young men, that he engage
actors through transparent audition processes, and that he bring
together an advisory board to whom he would be accountable. (In the
years I worked with him, Chris Goode & Company had an advisory
board, but they met rarely and I didn’t meet them once.) The report
appeared to be describing, not the abuse of which Chris was
specifically culpable, but the malpractice that harms and that is
rife across the theatre sector. And while it was ineffective in
regards to Chris, that doesn’t mean it’s not useful in other
ways. I heard many of its recommendations repeated in very different
contexts, in the early months of the pandemic, when theatre people
committed seriously to discussing how to bring change to this
industry that puts the show, the product, above the health,
well-being and capacity to pay rent or buy food of those who make it
– conversations all too easily forgotten when theatres reopened.
Chris was typical of an entire sector that is built on, thrives on,
commitments to human relationships, while treating humans as
disposable resources in service of a product.
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">Challenging
this is hard, and I know because of how I’m trying to change. In
March 2022 I was part of an awful, damaging performance-making
process with a lead artist who appeared to be centring care – for
instance, by including an intimacy director as part of the team –
but who didn’t take on board the recommendations of the intimacy
director, made other performers feel appalling when they asked
questions about the material, and sulked because the others didn’t
want to perform naked. As relationships in the rehearsal room
deteriorated, I attempted to ‘save’ the show, but doing so only
made everything worse. And so I began bringing the underlying tension
to the surface, with the result that the show was cancelled, five
days before it was due to open. There are times when the show must
not go on: this was one of them.</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">To
be absolutely clear, this lead artist was not abusing anyone, and is
not an abuser. That difference is crucial. But people experienced
different kinds of emotional and physical harm in the room he was
leading. And abuse should not be the one thing people making theatre
are not willing to accept.
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">Writing
this text has also required some change. I’ve been committed to
thinking about process, dialogue and transparency for a good decade
now, but this writing has pushed me to live that thinking, more fully
than ever. From the moment I started writing in June 2021 I’ve been
in dialogue: with Rajni, Lucy Ellinson, Xavier de Sousa; with people
I was writing about, including people harmed by Chris. All of them
have enabled me to reach new understandings, have responded to the
text in ways that led to reconsiderations and rewrites, above all
have supported me as I recognised the ways in which my writing could
replicate or perpetuate the very harms I was attempting to write
against. That delicate process of sharing, receiving, listening,
rethinking, has been difficult for sure, but an energising challenge.
It’s shown me a more ethical way of living, one in which dialogue
and transparency are tools of repair.</div>
maddy costahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04929576408540749708noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8651145764236805587.post-67428840835730968842022-10-07T09:12:00.002+01:002022-10-07T09:12:32.178+01:00On working with, and after, Chris Goode<p><b><span face="Calibri, sans-serif">by Paul Paschal</span></b></p><p><b><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/1yhS9cpG6_bVhGfBoWlFNMxvIpwwvOUGW/view?usp=sharing" target="_blank">AUDIO VERSION HERE</a> </span></b>
</p><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif">I worked with Chris Goode as part of
Ponyboy Curtis from 2015-16, in developing and presenting two shows
at the Yard Theatre (</span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><i>At
the Yard</i></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"> in May 2015, and
</span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><i>FCKSYSTMS</i></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif">
in June 2016). </span>
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif">These semi-improvised works were
unusual for their high degree of nudity and unsimulated sexual
content, but more conventional in their </span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif">disappointments.</span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif">
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.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif">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. </span>
</div>
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<br />
</div>
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<span face="Calibri, sans-serif">***</span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif">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. </span>
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif">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. </span>
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif">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. </span>
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif">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.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif">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.</span></div>
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<br />
</div>
<div align="center" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 0; widows: 0;">
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif">***</span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif">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. </span>
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif">Chris Goode & Company – the
small-scale organisation that administered and produced much of
Chris’ work – had been </span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif">comparatively</span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif">
dormant during the years of Ponyboy Cu</span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif">r</span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif">tis,
but secured regular funding from 2018 as one of Arts Council
England’s National Portfolio Organisations. A </span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif">few
months previously</span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif">, a former
member of Ponyboy Curtis </span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif">published
a text</span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"> 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.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif">In 2019, CG&C announced it was
presenting </span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><i>Narcolepsy</i></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif">,
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.</span></div>
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<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif">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. (<a href="https://www.thestage.co.uk/news/writer-and-performer-chris-goode-dies-aged-48" target="_blank">HIs death was announced here.</a>)</span>
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<br />
</div>
<div align="center" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 0; widows: 0;">
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif">***</span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif">The revelation of Chris’
paedophilia (<a href="https://www.thestage.co.uk/news/chris-goode-arrested-for-possession-of-indecent-images-prior-to-death" target="_blank">announced here</a>), following his death, significantly complicates any
telling of this history. </span>
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif">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</span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><i>
Big Boys</i></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif">: “We don’t
care…. As long as you’re happy and healthy, and not a nonce,
that’s all that matters.”</span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif">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 </span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif">an</span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif">other</span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif">’</span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif">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. </span>
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif">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.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif">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.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif">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. </span>
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<br />
</div>
<div align="center" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 0; widows: 0;">
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif">***</span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif">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.”</span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif">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.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif">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. </span>
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif">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.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif">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.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: right;">
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><i>With thanks to the many
interlocutors over the past six years whose listening, challenge</i></span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif">,
</span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><i>thinking and care has made
this text possible.</i></span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: right;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: right;">
<span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><i>Paul Paschal, October 2022</i></span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: right;">
<br />
</div>
maddy costahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04929576408540749708noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8651145764236805587.post-41509786305648116882022-09-30T23:27:00.000+01:002022-10-07T09:13:21.232+01:00thoughts from the first pandemic autumn<p>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)<br /></p><p> </p><p> ---</p><p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-r2KjpRxbLdQ/X4AlU9zFmuI/AAAAAAAAIFQ/r9N0czIGs1IEbX0j4Zk3W2HJdcwWAkGDACLcBGAsYHQ/s2048/sf%2Banchors%2Bimage.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1423" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-r2KjpRxbLdQ/X4AlU9zFmuI/AAAAAAAAIFQ/r9N0czIGs1IEbX0j4Zk3W2HJdcwWAkGDACLcBGAsYHQ/s320/sf%2Banchors%2Bimage.jpg" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p><br /></p><p class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">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.
</p>
<p class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
</p>
<p class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">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.</p>
<p class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
</p>
<p class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: center;">*</p>
<p class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
</p>
<p class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">The
last play I saw before the theatres closed was <a href="http://exeuntmagazine.com/reviews/review-high-table-bush-theatre/" target="_blank">The High Table</a> 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, <a href="https://www.bushtheatre.co.uk/artists/podcast-making-it-with-temi-wilkey/" target="_blank">Temi Wilkey</a>,
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.</p>
<p class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
</p>
<p class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">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.</p>
<p class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
</p>
<p class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">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.</p>
<p class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
</p>
<p class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">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 <a href="https://pantograph-punch.com/posts/review-rukahu" target="_blank">James Nokise</a> 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 <a href="http://exeuntmagazine.com/reviews/review-sorts-theatre-503/" target="_blank">Out of Sorts</a>; 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.
</p>
<p class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
</p>
<p class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">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.</p>
<p class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
</p>
<p class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">*</p>
<p class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
</p>
<p class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">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 <a href="https://www.jobannon.co.uk/absent-tense" target="_blank">Absent Tense</a> 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 <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/dec/08/the-odyssey-translated-emily-wilson-review" target="_blank">subtle translation</a>,
and the wine-darkness of the sea became a running joke between us; we
didn’t think there might be wider implications.</p>
<p class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
</p>
<p class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">Caridad
Svich’s <a href="https://anchor.fm/caridad-svich" target="_blank">Day for Night</a> 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 <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/7oBSLCZFCgpdCaBjIG8mLV" target="_blank">Nice White Parents</a>: 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.</p>
<p class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
</p>
<p class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">The
work that has assuaged loneliness most tenderly is <a href="https://www.gatetheatre.co.uk/letters/" target="_blank">Letters</a> 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’
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNe5npkid-s" target="_blank">Mess Around</a>, 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 <a href="http://exeuntmagazine.com/reviews/review-letters-gate-theatre/" target="_blank">Letters in Exeunt</a>, 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 <a href="https://tumblr.austinkleon.com/post/109314542541" target="_blank">100 Essays I Don’t Have Time To Write</a> and her brief
thought on lightness captures exactly the delicacy of Letters’
relationship with the mundane:</p>
<p class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
</p>
<p class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">“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.”</p>
<p class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
</p>
<p class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">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.
</p>
<p class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
</p>
<p class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">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.</p>
<p class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
</p>
<p class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">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.</p>
<p class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
</p>
<p class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">*</p>
<p class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
</p>
<p class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">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 <a href="https://www.gatetheatre.co.uk/town-hall-how-do-we-rebuild-better/" target="_blank">Town Hall discussion</a> inviting international perspectives, including from <a href="https://www.jumatatu.org/" target="_blank">Jumatatu Poe</a>, a choreographer/performer and co-author of
the document <a href="https://creatingnewfutures.tumblr.com/" target="_blank">Creating New Futures</a>, 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.
</p>
<p class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
</p>
<p class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">Better
still, the Gate have hosted an online installation by Rosie Elnile
called <a href="https://www.gatetheatre.co.uk/whats-on/prayer/" target="_blank">Prayer</a> 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.
</p>
<p class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
</p>
<p class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">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.
</p>
<p class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
</p>
<p class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">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’ <a href="https://statesofdeliquescence.blogspot.com/2014/11/got-life-got-music-got-theatre.html" target="_blank">This Last Tempest</a>
– 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.
</p>
<p class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
</p>
<p class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">*</p>
<p class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
</p>
<p class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">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 <a href="https://cooperation.town/organise/" target="_blank">Cooperation Town</a>; and a
group advocating for <a href="https://www.ubilabnetwork.org/" target="_blank">universal basic income</a> as a version of redistributive
economy; and a group building up a new <a href="https://www.uvwunion.org.uk/design-culture-workers" target="_blank">cultural workers branch</a> 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 <a href="https://hajoonchang.net/" target="_blank">Ha-Joon Chang</a>, 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”.</p>
<p class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
</p>
<p class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">In
Covid times I’ve also hosted a few <a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1IAbv_-0gz-MhbynWJh9B1LQhwBHsyxiMitk4xnybWWg/edit" target="_blank">change-focused conversations</a> 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 <a href="https://twitter.com/Adam_Y/status/1312007383183437824" target="_blank">excoriating tweet</a>: “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 <a href="http://www.split-britches.com/public-address-systems" target="_blank">Lois Weaver</a> and <a href="https://autumnbling.blogspot.com/2020/09/breaking-open-work-of-listening-in.html" target="_blank">Rajni Shah</a> and <a href="https://www.artsadmin.co.uk/selina-thompson-immersion/ work with dialogue" target="_blank">Selina Thompson</a>, 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.
</p>
<p class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
</p>
<p class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">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 <a href="https://colouringinculture.org/blog/the-myth-of-transformative-art/" target="_blank">this blog</a> 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”. </p><p class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;"></p><p class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">*</p>
<p class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
</p>
<p class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">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.</p><p> </p>maddy costahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04929576408540749708noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8651145764236805587.post-89365835162536355572022-09-30T18:04:00.001+01:002022-09-30T18:04:09.906+01:00some things that got me through the early days of pandemic<p>this is another post from slow fade that i'm transferring here. as the new title says, it's a list of things that gave me joy in the first few weeks of pandemic, those days of being penned in and trying not to panic. it was first published 31 March 2020 with the title in search of delight</p><p>--</p><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
January was its usual brittle mess; February I swept up the shards
and read two self-help books simultaneously, swapping from one to the
other every few pages, like feet moving forward, right left right
left. I’d tried to read John Paul Flintoff’s <a href="https://www.flintoff.org/how-to-change-the-world-1" target="_blank">How To Change the World</a> before, in 2017, but was defeated at page 28 when he insisted I
ask myself impossible questions like “Who am I?” and “Why am I
doing this?” before I continue. This time around I found more
kindness towards myself, and I’m going to credit Flintoff, along
with my friend Selina, for the fact that I’m now involved in <a href="https://covidmutualaid.org/" target="_blank">local Mutual Aid work</a>, checking in with a smattering of neighbours and
diffidently waiting for someone to need me.</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Selina
also pointed me in the direction of Beth Pickens’ <a href="http://www.bethpickens.com/your-art" target="_blank">Your Art Will Save Your Life</a>. Written in the immediate aftermath of the Trump
election, it calls itself a love letter to artists but really it’s
a set of tools and strategies offered with a plea: to keep making
work, to understand art as a survival mechanism, not just for the
artist but for any mysterious stranger who might need it. I’ve been
trying to hold tight to Pickens in these first days of lockdown,
returning again to her admonishment: “You and I both know that you
need to make your work in order to be alive.” Some days I believe
her and write a few more sentences; some days all motivation drains
from me and I’m back to asking, “Why am I doing this?” –
again with no answer.
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
It’s
not that there isn’t time to write; in this weird dilation time
washes in waves. But I drift in it unanchored by a sense of purpose;
it’s hard to write in this glassy state. Thankfully – and I know
I’m blessed to be able to say this – one thing I can still do is
read.</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: center;">
*</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Jenny
Offill, Weather, p107</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
There
are thousands and thousands of deer here. Soon it will be hunting
season. “At least most people who hunt up here hunt them for food,
not sport,” she says. I watch them bound away as we turn down her
dirt road. “Why don’t they farm deer?” I wonder. “Is it
because they are too pretty?” She shakes her head: “It’s
because they panic when penned.”</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: center;">
*</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Books
have minds of their own. I’ve had books literally slide out of my
hands after five or six pages if I picked them up before they felt it
was time for me to read them. They know when I need them, and then
they come calling. On Friday 20 March, the day the schools closed,
the book that came calling was Delight, by JB Priestley.
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Published
in 1949, when Priestley – yes, him of An Inspector Calls – was in
his mid-50s, Delight is a list of 114 things that, just like the
title says, give him a feeling of particular enchantment. Some relate
to his life as a playwright: the fantasy casting of a play, before
brutish reality takes hold; that moment mid-rehearsals when “the
play is more alive than it ever will be again for you”; the
exquisite promise of the theatre just before the curtain rises, when
“nothing stirs for a second except our imagination”. Several
detail his love of smoking good tobacco, preferably in the bath, or
when other people think he’s hard at work. There’s a twinkling,
often naughty humour in a lot of this writing, and a joy in play:
playing music (however badly), playing charades, rough-and-tumble
games he played when a child, nonsense playing with his own children,
tricks you can pull on other adults. He has a teasing eye for others’
foibles, but also his own; the entry on being recognised, he admits
cheerfully, is “contemptible”.
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
The
pages sing when he describes the landscapes he most loves, the gold
mist of dawn, the way his soul responds to the sight of pine and fir.
He declares Shakespeare the curse and ruin of the English theatre,
reveres a forgotten music-hall magician, and wonders whether any art
is higher than the sublime joy of a Marx brothers movie. A
fascinating chapter on making writing simple discusses the gulf
between younger critics/writers and those of his own generation:
between their taste for “cleverness and solemnity” and his desire
to write in a way that might connect with “the people in the the
nearest factories, shops and pubs”. The whole book glows with
generosity: a true and abiding care for those who might be overlooked
or hurt by society, written by someone who grew up witnessing “the
deep cancer of injustice”.
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
The
tone of the writing is cheerful, in an unforced and genuine way, but
a glimpse of the tumult he’s lived through is never far away. A
chapter called “sound of a football” thinks back to the boys he
played with as a youth, and in passing but devastating parenthesis
mentions that most of them “never reached their middle twenties but
died among the shell holes and barbed wire on July 1st 1916”. In a
chapter on the stereoscope (and what a weird contraption that was),
“several years of bombed London” hover like a dust mote. Solving
crimes in detective novels is “easy and sensible compared with the
problem of remaining a sane citizen in the middle of the 20th
century”.
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
But
it’s clear from his list of delights that he sees the problem of
the modern world not just in the violence of war but in
capitalist-industrialist progress, in the tick of the clock and the
turn of the record player that distance humans from the best in
themselves. He writes as a declared Socialist Intellectual, one with
“a streak of the jeering anarchist, who parts company even with his
friends when they have succeeded to power”, somehow reconciling
this with his repeated grumbles at the monstrousness of income tax.
“The society of split seconds is also the society of split minds,”
he mourns. When he imagines civilisation in ruins, “no more radio,
no more electricity”, he gives every impression of finding this
quite a good thing. Even in the late 1940s he was reading urgent
books warning of “soil erosion and dwindling water supplies and
mounting hungry populations, until you see nothing in the future but
wars, famine and death”. Who wouldn’t dream of a future different
to, better than, that.</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
But
this book didn’t jump off the shelf to taunt me with foreknowledge.
It came to me because in these wild and strange and frightening
times, I crave delight, and that’s what its pages gave me. More
than that: it gifted me a sense of connection, not just across time,
but across writing.
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: center;">
*</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
This
started out as a title, “little bits of joy”, and a list of four
or five things. Small things, sweet things, things unrelated to
theatre that I wanted to share with friends but felt shy to write and
do so directly. Every night I’ve written this, I’ve not written
emails. On nights when I’ve not written this, I’ve not written
emails either, just sunk deeper into stupor. I’m trying to let go
of the pressure to be productive, to get things done; it’s part of
trying to recognise my participation in what writer <a href="http://www.cassmarketos.me/" target="_blank">Cassie Marketos</a> –
in <a href="https://tinyletter.com/cassiem" target="_blank">another text</a> shared with me by Selina – calls “emotional
capitalism”:</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
‘It
seems that the complete shutdown of functioning society has,
perversely, created a gap in the wall of what I will call “emotional”
capitalism. That is, the constant, overpowering pressure to shape
even our most private lives according to metrics of tangible output
and efficiency. We “spend” time or we “waste” time. We have
to do things right, “feel” them correctly, have only good
friends, write when we're not working, read when we brush our teeth,
catch up on podcasts, know what everybody else seems to be knowing.
We all know this is exhausting. Until COVID, though, none of us had a
gigantic, collective psychological permission slip to refuse it.
Doing “nothing,” these days, is all that most of us can do. In
fact, doing nothing has become our shared moral imperative.’</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Every
day, a little planting in the garden. Every day, making a lunch and a
dinner for four people. Every day phoning my mum to check she’s OK.
Every day checking five different Mutual Aid whatsapp groups,
fascinated and sometimes alarmed by the social dynamics, beguiled by
each glimpse of generosity. These things are only nothing in the
warped value system of capitalism. A value system that lives in my
body like a virus for which I have no cure.</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: center;">
*</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
I’m
steering clear of theatre online. To quote Durga Chew-Bose: ‘Too
much and not the mood.’ For sure I’m a little envious of David
Jays and his brilliant idea to set up a <a href="https://www.artsjournal.com/performancemonkey/2020/03/lockdown-theatre-club.html" target="_blank">#lockdowntheatreclub</a> on
twitter, but even that is watching theatre-related films rather than
filmed performance. If anyone asks, I shrug and tell them the bottom
has fallen out of my life, and that’s just how it is for now.
Nothing makes sense. Except for the occasional blog post or open
letter demanding a radical change to the exploitative conditions
under which theatre/all art is made. Thank you <a href="https://harryjosephine.com/2020/03/20/i-woke-up-and-the-arts-was-gone/" target="_blank">Harry Josephine Giles</a>,
<a href="http://alexandrinahemsley.com/letter-to-arts-council-england/" target="_blank">Alexandrina Hemsley</a>, the authors of the <a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1KB6UfGflY_kalslrVSW09OzhpYm-ETq0Qn9lqFaiLgA/edit?ts=5e7bb45e" target="_blank">challenge to the Arts Council</a>
to reconsider their typically dismissive attitude to independent
artists, from a different field <a href="http://www.padwickjonesarts.co.uk/artists-emergency-arts-policys-role-in-the-future-of-artists-livelihoods/" target="_blank">Susan Jones</a>, also <a href="https://parliamentofdreams.com/2020/03/25/lets-use-this-breathing-space-wisely/" target="_blank">Francois Matarasso</a>:
thank you for your eloquence and inspiration.
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
By
comparison I’m writing about fripperies here. But if there’s one
thing John Paul Flintoff and Beth Pickens agree on, it’s the
necessity of joy and the inter-relationship between fun and
social-justice work. ‘There are two ways to change the world,’
writes Flintoff: ‘to decrease suffering or increase pleasure.’
Either way, writes Pickens, doing it in a joy-filled way is more
sustainable.</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
And
so, a small list of little things that have delighted me since the
theatres, and then the schools, were closed. It won’t change the
world. It’s required me to be selfish to get it written. But I
offer it in hope that someone else might find something here
delightful too.</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b><a href="https://open.spotify.com/album/1x35ZXYkHwW5raijUM7O8B" target="_blank">Playing Out by the Crayonettes</a></b></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
One
week into lockdown and I feel a lot like I did when my youngest was a
baby and the elder not yet three: all that freedom I’d slowly
discovered with just one child suddenly yanked away from me, replaced
by the plate-spinning panic of one or other of them always needing
something and those needs never being the same or in sync. This album
was released towards the end of the worst of that time, in autumn
2010, and carried us into the first few years of primary school. It’s
the work of two musicians – Kathryn Williams and Anna Spencer –
who are also parents, and has the sophistication of the very best
Pixar movies, plaiting emotion and humour and a love of pop music to
create a series of perfect partnerships: an electropop tune about the
disco-bright properties of toothpaste; a song about the spooky way
home burping and bleeping with strange hoots and squelches; a bouncy
chalk-scratch chant about playing hopscotch. I hadn’t listened to
it for years when I put it on again last week, wanting to remind my
youngest, now 11, of the dry-toned instructions of Illegal – don’t
climb those shelves, don’t put lemonade in the fish bowl, don’t
drink the dog’s water – set to a dirty low funk pulse, like a spy
cop card shark pulling an ace from their sleeve. But it’s an album
that lives inside me, time immaterial: any time I see a sweet on the
floor, the song Sweet on the Floor will unspool in my head, a
yearning lament for what is wanted but cannot be, as painful as any
unrequited or broken love. </div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b><a href="https://twitter.com/lesbianpulpbot" target="_blank">@lesbianpulpbot on twitter</a></b></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
A
bot that tweets, thrice a day, the cover of a lesbian pulp fiction
book from the mid-20th century. Some of them are clearly trash (‘men
wanted her luscious body … yet she was a woman driven to the
sadistic pleasures of inverted love’), some are hilarious (‘Lesbian
Web of Evil’ is quite some title), and occasionally there’s one
that sings true: Vin Packer, author of Spring Fire (‘A story once
told in whispers now frankly, honestly written’), was the pseudonym
of Marijane Meaker, who wrote about lesbian love from her own heart.
The illustrated covers are glorious, a frenzy of stockings and
loosened cleavage, tousled hair and gazes turned inwards, one woman
to another, not giving a damn who can see.</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b><a href="https://obligatorynoteofhope.com/" target="_blank">Weather, by Jenny Offill</a></b></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
There’s
a moment in Weather when the narrator, Lizzie, realises how
extraordinary it is that she keeps not bumping into the annoying
school-gate mum she’s constantly avoiding – so extraordinary, in
fact, that it can’t be her skill alone that keeps them apart, but
the other mum actively avoiding her too. She works in a library and
notes: “My book-ordering history is definitely going to get me
flagged by some evil government algorithm.” She meets someone new
but remembers that her husband “is used to my all talk, no action
ways”, that it “took a long time to bank all that goodwill”.
Now and then a line reminded me of that bit in the National’s
Demons, where Matt Berninger sings “I stay down, with my demons”,
and the note drops on the word “demons”, and the fall is too
easy, too manipulative an emotional trick. Mostly, though, Weather is
as concise and pellucid as Dept of Speculation, and a little steadier
too. Which is just as well because Weather is a novel about a small
person trying to live with the enormity of climate change,
environmental catastrophe even, and shitty right-wing politics, and
so many people dependent on the overpowering love you have for them;
it was too much to read now, in the heart of disaster, and also the
perfect reminder that the disaster was always there, we’re just
looking at it through a different lens.</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
(The
link embedded into the title is to a website Offill created, also on
changing the world, and who wants to read it along with me?)</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b>A
new fish pie</b></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Sometimes
I get stuck in my ways with cooking: I’m so often in a rush, trying
to finish before racing out to the theatre, and my main imperative is
pleasing the kids, who change their food likes frequently and
arbitrarily and rarely seem to like a vegetable in common. Being home
all the time has opened up a space in which I can be slower: it’s
like I’m actually cooking every day rather than hustling a meal
together. A couple of disasters have emerged from this, not least my
daughter’s birthday cake, my second attempt at following a Felicity
Cloake recipe and definitely my last. But there has also been a
triumph: a new fish pie, made with smoked mackerel, leeks, capers and
a bechamel sauce seasoned with sherry, topped with potato and
breadcrumbs, a sophisticated step up from the fish pie I used to
make, at least until one of the kids goes off mackerel, or leeks, or
both.</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b>Magnolias
in bloom</b></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
I
mean, they were when I first made notes for this post: mostly the
magnolia petals are wilting now, pushed aside by unfurling leaves.
They are my first sign of spring amassing, that I’ll be able to
unhunch my shoulders soon. Now I’m noticing other signs: gaudy
crowds of hyacinths chattering in the livelier flower beds; electric
blue ceanothus throwing up sparks; drift of blossom, pink and white.
I’m so grateful for every tulip I pass on the regulation daily
walk, for the new leaves spiking from lavender, eruptions of daisies
in revitalised grass. I can’t think about next week, or next month,
or next year, without plunging into panic: the spring flowers help to
hold me in now, to take pleasure in everything small that surrounds
me, getting on with growing, getting on with being.
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b>Blue
skies</b></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
But
also, it dawned on me this morning: no aeroplanes. Remember when the
volcano in Iceland erupted and planes were grounded for a few days? I
didn’t notice. I live on a Heathrow flight path so the sky above me
is always crowded, slashed with contrails; this time I want to
appreciate the clear and the quiet. Mum, says my youngest, have you
noticed that ‘listen’ and ‘silent’ are made of the same
letters? One day pouring into another, an expanse of emptiest blue.</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b><a href="https://www.rhiannonarmstrong.net/projects/slowgif/" target="_blank">Rhiannon’s slow gifs</a></b></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
I
have to be careful watching plot-heavy movies, thrillers or
adventures, the tension of them messes with my breathing, induces the
mildest of asthma attacks. Lately the anxiety of coronavirus has
triggered the mildest of panic attacks; invisible hands squeeze tight
beneath my ribs, my diaphragm heavy as iron. My wonderful friend
Rhiannon Armstrong, for whom illness isn’t a sudden catastrophe but
a lived, daily experience, has made a set of slow gifs that encourage
steadier breathing, kaleidoscope whorls, inhale as they emerge,
exhale as they retreat. She’s also made poems from shreds of paper,
which slowly tick like the ponderous pendulum of a grandfather clock
too old now to keep modern time. My favourite is a gif of two bubbles
falling to a wooden floor and bursting, played in reverse so it seems
that the bubbles are rising from its dust. </div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b><a href="https://covidmutualaid.org/" target="_blank">The local Mutual Aid movement</a></b></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
The
blessed kindness of strangers. Organising shopping for each other.
Popping to the pharmacy. Offering reassurance. Dispensing advice.
Every few days another call: thank you for your flyer, I’m OK, I
don’t need help, but thank you. I’m so glad you’re well, I’m
so glad you’re safe. Figuring out how to get through this together.</div><p></p>maddy costahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04929576408540749708noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8651145764236805587.post-63747485449819223652022-09-28T18:00:00.002+01:002022-09-28T18:03:17.642+01:002020 thoughts in a 2018 space<p>a brief explanation:</p><p>in 2020 i started a new blog, slow fade, and wrote five things for it, then Chris Goode died, and then i struggled to write anything at all. as i slowly move towards being able to publish the text about working with him that i've been writing, i'm also rethinking where i publish what online, and in particular rethinking what slow fade might be as a space: or rather, how it might genuinely be the new space, for me, free of Chris, that i wanted it to be. so i'm moving a few posts that i published on slow fade here, which feels more their natural home actually. </p><p>this post actually features two posts in one. the first was called open for business, and was first published on 28 January 2020. the second was called scattered thoughts of a busy fortnight and was originally published on 28 February 2020.<br /></p><p><br /></p><p>*<br /></p><p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><b>open for business</b></span></p><p><br /></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">“Academics, activists, artists, and cartoon characters have long
been on a quest to articulate an alternative vision of life, love,
and labor and to put such a vision into practice. Through the use of
manifestoes, a range of political tactics, and new technologies of
representation, radical utopians continue to search for different
ways of being in the world and being in relation to one another than
those already prescribed for the liberal and consumer subject.” J.
Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure</span>
</p><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Add
to the first list, people who write about theatre.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Add
to the second, theatre blogs.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">*</span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">I’ve
read 17 reviews of Athena Stevens’ play Scrounger and a lot of them
describe it as an uncomfortable experience. This is how [my]
excellent, astute [friend] Rosemary Waugh unpacks that discomfort, in
her review for <a href="https://www.timeout.com/london/theatre/scrounger-review" target="_blank">Time Out</a>:
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">“The
brilliance of Stevens’s work is that it directly angles its
comments about how disabled people are routinely treated at those
lovely, left-leaning, Guardian-reading, petition-signing people most
likely to be sitting in the audience (*waves*). It doesn’t, in
other words, allow the ‘nice’ people to feel good about
themselves by placing the blame on the Tories, the Daily Mail or
outdated attitudes. It asks if your well-meaning bullshit is
precisely that: bullshit.
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">And
that’s something so little of the theatre that’s on stage is
doing right now. Instead of preaching to the converted and inviting
everyone inside for an intellectual circle jerk, it sinks its teeth
into the hypocrisies of people who tell themselves they’re doing
good without actually doing anything. It’s theatre that’s
designed to make you feel properly uncomfortable, and then to do
something about that.”</span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">What
follows is in no way a dig at Rosemary, it’s an open question about
the purpose of theatre criticism, and the ways in which it might be
“doing something”.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">I
found Scrounger a desperately uncomfortable experience, for two
reasons:</span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">1.
On walking into the auditorium the usher said in a peremptory tone
that the benches seat five people. The benches in the Finborough
Theatre do not fit five adult humans. They fit 4.5. I know because I
was the 0.5 barely lodged, like the thin end of a wedge, in the
middle of a row. Any fat person attempting to sit in one of these
benches will be made to feel like shit – which is no different from
any other public space, but that doesn’t mean it should pass
without comment.
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">2.
After watching Stevens, who has athetoid cerebral palsy, being
supported by her co-performer to leave the room, I checked the
Finborough’s accessibility policy. In a classic pass of the buck,
it says: “We regret that the Pub no longer provides disabled toilet
facilities.” It does not, apparently, regret that: “There are 23
steps to the theatre (including a turn in the stairs).”</span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Precisely
two of the reviews I read thought to comment on this.
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">“What
an indication of the shit so many disabled people have to deal with
day in, day out,” marvels Simon Gwynn in <a href="http://exeuntmagazine.com/reviews/review-scrounger-finborough-theatre/" target="_blank">Exeunt</a> (a review that made
me proud to write for them, tbh).
“Perhaps the reassessment of privilege and re-evaluation of
conflict avoidance that it instigates will reach the pub downstairs,
which has turned its disabled toilet into a kitchen,” suggests
Cindy Marcolina in <a href="https://www.broadwayworld.com/westend/article/BWW-Review-SCROUNGER-at-Finborough-Theatre-20200110" target="_blank">Broadway World</a>.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Perhaps.
But not if there’s no outcry about it. Or, as Andrew Curtis puts it
in his review for <a href="https://www.londonpubtheatres.com/review-scrounger-by-athena-stevens-at-finborough-theatre-7-january-1-february-2020" target="_blank">London Pub Theatres Magazine</a>:
“The main target of Stevens’ ire are the people around her, who
are seen as complicit with the bureaucratic forces she is fighting.
This extends to the audience. Goodwill alone is not enough, the
important thing is to take a stand. But who present is going to do
that?”</span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">*</span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">One
of my favourite pieces of work I did last year was an essay for the
Bruntwood Prize Write a Play blog about the <a href="https://www.writeaplay.co.uk/the-well-made-play-and-the-play-made-well-by-maddy-costa/" target="_blank">well-made play</a>
– why people continue to write them, and why people who don’t
write them struggle for oxygen in the UK’s deeply conservative and
risk-averse theatre industry. Scrounger is not a well-made play, in
ways I find appealing. It’s a one-woman roar at social injustice
with a second performer sketching in the world around her: selfish
best friend, boyfriend put to the test, evasive bureaucracy,
subsidiary characters including Uber driver and human rights
campaigner, both depicted with an unnecessary grotesquerie. But
Scrounger also reminded me of a pertinent question raised by Vicky
Featherstone, artistic director at the Royal Court, when I
interviewed her for that piece: “What’s the difference that turns
something into a piece of theatre, that could be told better in a
documentary or a really good news article?”</span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Stevens,
her co-performer Leigh Quinn, her director Lily McLeish, the rest of
the design team, everyone involved in this production works hard at
making that difference. The fact that Scrounger is on at the
Finborough means that a lot of new people – me included – will
have found out about this based-on-true-events story of the typical
neglect experienced by people who are disabled by their environment,
by the lack of thought around access that typifies social design. But
if the Finborough itself isn’t accessible – if it isn’t
possible for someone who uses a wheelchair to see this show and think
yes, that is something I recognise, there on that stage – isn’t
the very fact that Scrounger is performed there exacerbating typical
neglect? What if the programming of this play, and its reception,
aren’t part of the solution, but part of the problem?</span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">*</span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">I
didn’t use to think about any of this. Then I saw Jess Thom, aka
<a href="https://www.touretteshero.com/category/blog/" target="_blank">Tourettes Hero</a>, perform
Backstage in Biscuit Land, and everything that had been invisible to
me – including my own unconscious discrimination – was suddenly
pressingly present. The number of theatres in London (let alone the
UK) that exclude wheelchair users. The miniscule proportion of
performances that are relaxed. Wanting to support Jess, I’ve
written a few times about the necessity of making theatre more
accessible, most recently for <a href="http://exeuntmagazine.com/features/relaxed-venues/" target="_blank">Exeunt</a>, a piece also
partly inspired by Kirsty Sedgman’s vigorously argued book <a href="https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9783319991658" target="_blank">The Reasonable Audience</a>,
particularly this bit (which I’ve had to lift from the Exeunt piece
while her book practises its invisibility trick):</span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">“If
only one disabled person is excluded from theatre, that is still a
fundamental failure of social morality.” After all, “how can a
place claim to be ‘public space’ if only certain subjectivities
are afforded equitable access?” Theatre, Sedgman says, might
transform “individuals” into “publics”, but: “what good is
a public if not actually representative of the public?”</span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Neil
McPherson, artistic director at the Finborough, does seem to have
given these questions some thought. In an interview with the <a href="https://inews.co.uk/news/athena-stevens-scroungers-theatre-stairs-disabled-finborough-theatre-1371434" target="_blank">i paper</a>,
who contacted him for a news report with the headline “A disabled
actor has to crawl up the theatre's stairs so she can perform her
play” (and why isn’t that observation in any of the reviews?),
McPherson says:</span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">“We
recently spent a great deal of time and not a little expense to
source the only stair lift that would be practical within the
confines of our 152 year old building, and made a funding application
to have it installed. We are a registered charity but do not receive
any public funding of any kind. Sadly, our application for a stair
lift was turned down flat with no reason given by the Royal Borough
of Kensington and Chelsea.”</span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">The
thing is, it’s really easy to say that these things are someone
else’s fault. We all do it – I do it. The problem I’m railing
against is a collective one, that might be summarised as: “oh well,
we tried, change is hard, so let’s carry on with business as
usual”.
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">*</span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">I am
tired of business as usual.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">In
2011 I started blogging from a place of quiet hopefulness: that I
might be able to write about work or people that were being ignored,
looking from a different angle, shining a different light. That blog
emerged with my own emergence, from a four-year period of
disenchantment in which I saw almost no theatre, during which I felt
that pretty much everything I was seeing was lying to me. By which I
mean, lying about the way in which theatre brings people together to
tell them something important about the world and humanity and this
fraught fucking business of being alive.
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">This
blog is different. It begins with me back in that place of disillusion,
a bleak mood exacerbated by where we are politically, by terror and
disgust at society shaped by fascist-leaning Conservatism,
intractable racism and rising transphobia, but also by fury at the
theatre industry specifically, its obstinate refusal to address
systemic issues that define what is seen and by whom. And of course I
know that there are individuals out there working hard to address
these things: whether artistic directors like <a href="https://arconline.co.uk/blogs/annabel-turpin" target="_blank">Annabel Turpin</a>,
community directors like <a href="https://brightonpeoplestheatre.org/" target="_blank">Naomi Alexander</a>, producers like <a href="https://www.louiseb.co.uk/" target="_blank">Louise Blackwell</a>, artists like <a href="http://selinathompson.co.uk/" target="_blank">Selina Thompson</a>, critics like <a href="https://criticsofcolour.tumblr.com/about" target="_blank">Bridget Minamore</a>, independents like <a href="https://uk.linkedin.com/in/lily-einhorn-a2742651" target="_blank">Lily Einhorn</a> and <a href="https://www.rajnishah.com/" target="_blank">Rajni Shah</a>, or
belligerents like <a href="https://alanlaneblog.wordpress.com/" target="_blank">Alan Lane</a> (yes, that title is deliberate and
intended to amuse). If these people were running the industry –
running the world – we’d all be better off.
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Despite
their commitment and extraordinary work, the big overarching picture
remains roughly the same. The past decade has seen incremental shifts
for sure, with people like Jess Thom finding a national platform to
campaign for change – but what I hear those voices saying time and
again is: this is not enough. The changes are too slow and too timid
and too small to make a meaningful dent in the white supremacist,
capitalist, patriarchal power structures of British theatre.
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
I don’t say any of this like I’m not complicit. I am. There are
small ways in which I try to make change (Theatre Club – email me
if you don’t know what this is – is one of them), but there are
much bigger ways in which I don’t bother. This is what
complicity looks like in my case, how it plays out in my work and
interactions with others: a lack of commitment that comes from not
caring enough, a
lack of compassion that comes from self-absorption, and a lack of
rigour that results in intellectual dishonesty.</div>
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">A
new blog is so not the answer. And yet, as 2020 dawned I speed-read
Megan Vaughan’s book <a href="https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/theatre-blogging-9781350068827/" target="_blank">Theatre Blogging</a> and
felt briefly, giddily enthused. In her introduction she writes: “I
am not here to proclaim blogging the saviour of theatre. With its
high prices, limited audience capacities, and concentration in a
handful of wealthy Western cities, it is very possible that theatre
cannot be saved. And any partial redemption will surely require a sea
change in the way work is commissioned, funded and cast, plus mass
resignations in its major venues and drama schools.” What she does
argue, however, is that theatre blogging has “established the
conditions in which new voices and perspectives could be heard,
outmoded practices could be questioned, and fresh ideas and
initiatives championed”.
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">So
here I am. Cross and heart-sore but with sleeves rolled up, ready to
try again.</span><br />
<br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">-- </span><br />
<br />
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
PS/update: Athena Stevens has written <a href="https://twitter.com/athenastevens/status/1224436970861973505" target="_blank">a response to this post ontwitter</a>, which I haven’t been permitted to reprint in full here but
please do read it. You can add to the list above of ways in which I’m
complicit in the inertia that allows structural injustice to continue
unimpeded “a lack of vigour that makes my work substantial as
confetti that melts in water” - Athena’s phrase and, I think we
can all agree, an exquisite one.
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Athena’s
thread mentions four articles lobbying the theatre industry to get
its shit together on access, linking to <a href="https://www.thestage.co.uk/news/2020/theatres-under-renewed-pressure-to-improve-backstage-access-for-disabled-performers/" target="_blank">this one in the Stage</a>; the
inews one is linked above, another is in the Guardian. There’s also
<a href="https://stagedoorapp.com/lyn-gardner/battersea-arts-centre-becomes-the-worlds-first-fully-relaxed-venue?ia=423" target="_blank">this piece by Lyn Gardner</a> talking about access with Jess Thom. Bring on the changes: they can't come soon enough.</div><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;"> </div><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;"> </div><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">*</div><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;"> </div><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><b>scattered thoughts of a busy fortnight </b></span></div><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;"> </div><div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">In the fortnight after publishing the first post on here, I –
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
1.</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
held
a class in theatre criticism with five students on an MA programme,
looking at reviews of Scrounger, waiting until the end to tell them
who the writers were or where they were published. It’s a super
interesting way of thinking about criticism, because it quickly
exposes the similarities in length, style and tone across newspaper,
journal and online criticism: a surprising level of conformity. (The
group thought six of the 11 reviews I gave them to read were
published in newspapers; in fact it was only two.) We talked a lot
about one review that took umbrage at there not being captions for
Scrounger, how the writer probably thought they were standing up for
access needs, but in fact came across as appallingly insensitive,
criticising the disabled performer rather than the need for
captioning across theatre. All of my insides squirmed, because Athena
Stevens, creator and star of Scrounger, had called me out <a href="https://twitter.com/athenastevens/status/1224436970861973505" target="_blank">on twitter</a>
for making exactly the same mistake.</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
She
was right to do so. There’s a lack of diligence in the argument I
made in that first post: I’d intended to question the purpose of
theatre criticism, and instead questioned the right of a
theatre-maker to choose where to position their work for maximum
impact; I’d intended to challenge theatre as an industry for
perpetuating ableist architecture, but instead criticised a single
theatre for programming work by a disabled artist; I’d intended to
write about my own apathy, but in doing so diminished another’s
vital act of protest. I’m grateful to Athena for taking the time to
respond and to challenge the flaws and lapses of judgement in that
writing, which opened up this space for me to reconsider.</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
At
the same time, I note in Athena’s twitter thread her disdain for my
“review”: her quote marks, intentionally scathing. It amuses me,
because I wasn’t writing a review: I was writing about the
social/cultural context around her work. The conformity of criticism
across online and printed media alike narrows perceptions among
readers of what a response to a piece of theatre should or could look
like, a bias I’m committed to challenging and changing, same as
Athena is committed to challenging and changing what finds a home on
stage – the two endeavours intertwined.<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
2.</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
went
to Devoted & Disgruntled, a big annual theatre gathering that I
was going to miss this year on account of everything I wrote in that
first post about being worse than disgruntled: disenchanted and
disillusioned. (“Theatre-weary”, as one of the MA students put
it.) In the <a href="https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/292159/the-book-you-wish-your-parents-had-read--and-your-children-will-/9780241250990.html" target="_blank">garish orange book about parenting</a>, therapist Philippa
Perry advises people to “feel with not deal with”: to listen to
problems, feel with them, but not attempt to compliment or hush them
away. A D&D conversation led by producer Jo Mackie, on whether
she could effect more positive change in the world by leaving theatre
altogether, did exactly that “feeling with” my own theatre
heart-ache, so tenderly I wanted to do a little cry. And when
wonderful theatre-maker Aleasha Chaunte joined the discussion, and
described the <a href="http://www.metalculture.com/projects/humanise-community-film-club/" target="_blank">Humanise Community Film Club</a> she’s set up in
Liverpool, offering a film, a meal and a conversation to refugee
groups (and general audiences who pay to attend), I actually did a
big cry, overwhelmed with admiration and hope and a sense of
connection. </div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
As I
moved between conversations – and it really was an excellent D&D
year, with discussions on fighting fascism and posh crisps as a
symbol of the gentrification of theatre, both led by director Anna
Himali Howard; on theatre that <a href="https://www.devotedanddisgruntled.com/blog/is-it-possible-to-interrogate-the-oppressor-without-retraumatising-the-oppressed" target="_blank">challenges oppression</a> led by tiata
fahodzi’s Nathalie Ibu; and on <a href="https://www.devotedanddisgruntled.com/blog/theatre-climate-crisis-session-1-on-saturday-1-230-kangaroo" target="_blank">responses to climate change</a> led by
sustainability specialist Nina Klose – I started thinking about
this blog, and my hopes for it. How I want it to be attentive to
questions of accessibility and who is in the room (not just in the
audience or on stage but across the entire team making the work); how
I want to interrogate what I’m choosing to write about and how; and
how I might be more transparent, whether about finances, troublesome
biases, or where I’ve gone wrong.</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
I
talked this through a bit with Lyn Gardner, particularly a nagging
difficulty: that it’s hard to hold oneself to account without it
becoming a judgement on others’ choices too. As an example: I think
the theatre industry generally is not doing enough to ensure it’s
fully accessible; I think I as a writer am not doing enough to demand
that theatre is fully accessible – can I leave it at that, without
turning that statement into an indictment on other writers? On recent
evidence, apparently not. And maybe that’s fine: I’m a distant
admirer of Sara Ahmed’s principle of feminist killjoy and being
actively difficult. But it’s not like I’m some authority on
social ethics, and any method of holding myself to account has to
also account for the fact that I still have much to learn.</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Last
year I was interviewed by Verity Healey for <a href="https://theatreanddance.britishcouncil.org/blog/2019/criticism/" target="_blank">this essay on theatre criticism</a>, and she asked me whether I thought critics could sign up
to a manifesto similar to that created by Milo Rau for NT Gent, an
idea I found disorienting: me and Dominic Cavendish signing up to the
same manifesto? I don’t think so. But maybe there’s another way.
At D&D I started thinking that I could follow in the footsteps of
theatre companies <a href="http://www.actionhero.org.uk/ringoFTW/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/An-ethical-policy-for-Action-Hero-V2-.pdf" target="_blank">Action Hero</a> and <a href="http://sleepdogs.org/2019/12/a-mans-gotta-have-a-code/" target="_blank">Sleep Dogs</a>, and write an ethical
policy or code or promise or pledge for this blog. Something to
encourage me to think more deeply about the systems within which I’m
complicit; something I can use to shape how this blog might be – in
Slung Low’s excellent phrase – kind and useful in the ways it
seeks change. It’ll take me a while to put together; this stands as
a promise to make sure it gets done.<br />
<br />
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
3.</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
wrote
a rapturous <a href="http://exeuntmagazine.com/reviews/review-lite-metle-fire-bird-now-20-yard/" target="_blank">review for Exeunt</a> that almost says what I wanted to say
but not quite. I wanted to think about the ways in which
dancer/choreographers Louise Ahl and Julie Cunningham claim the
(mostly white male) canon of classical ballet music for themselves,
appropriating a status otherwise denied them. I wanted to say that
Cunningham’s version of The Fire Bird felt huge, and in its
hugeness oddly elusive to me. There’s a<a href="https://twitter.com/rachelofmars/status/1222894452437475329" target="_blank"> brilliant tweet</a> by
performance-maker Rachel Mars that gets much closer to its
expansiveness than I could: “it’s proper dance,” she wrote,
“with proper orchestral music and it’s also Freddie Mercury &
queers posturing in smoking areas & gaykids trying to get out of
forests & winky apple eating & then suddenly we’re all
airborne”. A whole queer life and community and culture threaded in
its steps.
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
And
I wanted to say that Louise Ahl’s Lite Metle gave me eerie
delighted flashbacks to a show I’d seen the week before at the
Barbican, Child by Peeping Tom. It’s the third part in a trilogy by
Peeping Tom also seen at the Barbican over the past couple of years,
preceded by Father, my least favourite, a dour comedy set in an old
people’s home; and Mother, which lives in my memory as a set of
uncanny images: an art gallery that is also a morgue that is also a
hospital, a recording studio glowing blood-spatter red, a naked
statue that moves and breathes, a security guard who slurps through
the wall, a body that drowns in the sound of water, a love affair
with a coffee machine… altogether, a work of startling mystery and
beauty.</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Child
didn’t quite inspire the giddy amazement of Mother but came close.
The set is enormous, forest on one side, craggy rock on the other,
and in between a grown-up pretending to be a child, initially in that
slightly annoying way adults have of gurning and curving their
shoulders and rucking a skirt to convey untidy smallness. She cycles
on a too-small bike in the open space of the forest encountering
scenes of unsettling, surrealist disturbance: a forest ranger who
shoots a tourist at close range; a spiky deer with skittery
stilettoed limbs who loses her head; a woman who pulls up a baby tree
by its roots and feeds its tangled branches from her breast. At one
point a crack in the rock bursts open and a series of pink-hued
spiders pour out: naked humans scuttling crab-like, stomachs up and
shoulders twist-jointed and rubber masks over their skulls
repositioning faces at the backs of their heads. Gradually the child
becomes overwhelmed by emotion – triggered not by shooting the
tourist herself, again and sickeningly again, his body flipping like
in a video game with every bullet, a sight she takes gruesome
pleasure in; what actually triggers her is jealousy at the sight of
another child with its caring parents – and she starts to wail:
only in Peeping Tom’s heightened universe, the sound of tantrum is
operatic, as in actually sung by a mezzo-soprano. An equation of
exactitude.
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
At
the end I bumped into Daniel Pitt, director of Chisenhale Dance
Space, and we agreed that artists in the UK just don’t get the
resources – of money or space or time – to make work at that kind
of scale. Watching Louise Ahl, I thought about how there’s another
resource denied to artists working here: belief that their work is
ambitious or expansive enough to merit that material investment. It’s
such a pernicious, diminishing assumption, and so much potential is
thwarted by it.
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
A
work can be small and still huge, holding within its span a whole
queer world like Cunningham, or wild imagined new worlds like Ahl.
It’s vital to appreciate that too. But what I wouldn’t give to
see Ahl unleashed across a stage as big as the Barbican’s main
theatre, her imagination unbound.</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
4.</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
went
to Brighton for a bit of the <a href="https://www.marlboroughtheatre.org.uk/new-queers-on-the-block/" target="_blank">New Queers on the Block weekender</a>, to
see Oozing Gloop’s Glooptopia and host a Theatre Club afterwards.
New Queers on the Block are fantastic: based at the Marlborough
Theatre in Brighton, they put proper funding into supporting queer
artists to make new work, big work, brave work, and then supporting
audiences to come see it, talk about it, and talk beyond it too.
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
This
was the first time I’ve seen Oozing Gloop, self-styled “world’s
leading green autistic drag queen”, and to be honest I was a bit
apprehensive: all their promotion photos are loud and garish and make
me feel very old and very normative. But within a few minutes of
Glooptopia starting I was charmed and beaming. The utopia Gloop
envisages – outlined on stage and in a ferociously yellow fanzine
handed out during the show – is the commucratic revolution:
commucracy to differentiate it from dictatorial Soviet-style
communism and capitalist democracy alike. I mean, I have a few issues
with details of process and vision, but sign me up basically. The
thesis and concept are presented on stage through a lo-fi
presentation of long words on big white sheets of card, like a
craftivist powerpoint presentation, which could have been dry as
fuck, only Gloop has their face painted green, wears an ornate hat
marked M on one side and F the other, and runs through flamboyant
costume changes with more panache than <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/culture/1999/oct/18/artsfeatures6" target="_blank">Cher performing at Wembley Arena</a> (see the link: I know whereof I speak). It’s equal parts
silliness and scouring social critique and sent me bouncing into
Theatre Club with all the energy of a shaken bottle of lemonade
threatening to pop its own lid off.</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
In
the best possible way, the people who gathered for Theatre Club
calmed my enthusiasm with a set of rigorous critiques that invited me
to see the place of privilege from which I’d watched the show. For
instance, one young woman described jolting at a phrase early in the
work that conveyed a particular white carelessness towards people of
colour; and an older woman, in the process of being diagnosed as
autistic, talked about the speed of Gloop’s delivery and how
difficult it was to process such an overwhelm of information at that
pace. We talked about satire, the difference between satire that
genuinely deconstructs and satire that unconsciously replicates, and
about theatre as a space in which – to borrow the thinking of
excellent artist Rajni Shah – ideas and difficult questions can be
“laid before” an audience, who gather to listen without the
imperative to speak or take action. If I hadn’t had to zoom for the
late train back to London, we could have kept going til midnight.</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
*</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
And
now another fortnight has passed and this still isn’t posted and
even though I had intended to keep the posts on here SHORT I’ll
just add on another little bit, about Leonora Carrington’s The
Hearing Trumpet, because I read it this week and am reeling. It’s
one of those books I’d heard a lot about, thanks to people often
name-checking it, but not heard anything specific about it, so
roughly every three pages I boggled at the turn of narrative events.
It’s told by Marian Leatherby, 92, toothless, with a gallant grey
beard, unable to hear anything below a bellow until she’s gifted a
hearing trumpet – a horn that welcomes sound in – by her
similarly aged and seemingly decrepit friend Carmella. On sight
Marian recognises the “infinite possibilities” of the horn, and
while at first what she hears is the ordinary violence and
selfishness of humanity, through it she slowly accesses another
world, of magic and goddesses and furious anarchic politics. I sort
of want to retype half the book, marvelling over individual phrases,
the language is so exuberant and vivid and funny and the ideas so
inventive and sly, but I’m going to limit myself to this slip of
conversation between Marian and Carmella, towards the end of the
story:</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
“It
is impossible to understand how millions and millions of people all
obey a sickly collection of gentlemen that call themselves
‘Government!’ The word, I expect, frightens people. It is a form
of planetary hypnosis, and very unhealthy.”</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
“It
has been going on for years,” I said. “And it only occurred to
relatively few to disobey and make what they call revolutions. If
they won their revolutions, which they occasionally did, they made
more governments, sometimes more cruel and stupid than the last.”</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
“Men
are very difficult to understand,” said Carmella. “Let’s hope
they all freeze to death. I am sure it would be very pleasant and
healthy for human beings to have no authority whatever. They would
have to think for themselves, instead of always being told what to do
and think by advertisements, cinemas, policemen and parliaments.”</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
The
whole book is written in this tone of butter-wouldn’t-melt
innocence and eyebrow-raised perspicacity. It’s also whirlingly,
waftingly poetic: to quote another favourite, bewildering line, to
read it is like basking in “a mist of white ginger perfume which
issued from the beak of an embalmed cuckoo”. Time collapses along
with the structures of Western society, and the alternative
Carrington offers, co-inhabited by crones and werewolves and swarming
bees, is at once absurd, profoundly earnest, and infinitely
preferable to how we live now. I think of The Hearing Trumpet as a
manual for the future, to be consulted as oracle, bible, instructions
for insurrection, and guide to survival as the environmental
catastrophe unfolds.</div></div>
maddy costahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04929576408540749708noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8651145764236805587.post-79577048748317383882018-12-31T01:03:00.006+00:002022-09-14T12:58:59.568+01:00the long goodbye (or, breaking up is hard to do)<p></p><div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">Note added 21 June 2021: following the <a href="https://www.thestage.co.uk/news/chris-goode-arrested-for-possession-of-indecent-images-prior-to-death" target="_blank">recent discovery that, through all the years I was working with him, Chris Goode was consuming images of child sexual abuse</a>, I'm in the process of writing an update to the below, which details some of the reasons I stopped working with him in 2018. In this 2018 post 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 softer ways. With so much guilt and shame wrapped up in this sense of complicity it's taking me a long time to look over the past decade and understand how I might have worked or thought differently. Other changes will be made to this blog as I think this through, and I invite trust and understanding that these might take some time to emerge.
</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
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. (Sept 30 update: had to put it aside because it was consuming my whole life and i had commissioned work becoming overdue. Coming back to it soon.)
</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
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.
</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"> </div><div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><br /></div><div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><br /></div><div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><br /></div><div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">**<br /></div><p></p><p></p><div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"> </div><p></p><div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">In March of this year,
a friend said he'd clicked on my blog to see what I'd been up to and
was startled to find nothing new. It's not like this has ever been a
prolific space, but even so, at that point it had been six months
since I'd published anything, the longest gap since Deliq began. It's
not that I didn't want to write here, I'd just been busy: building a
<a href="https://civicroleartsinquiry.gulbenkian.org.uk/resources?filter=case-study#pagination-anchor" target="_blank">case study library for the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation</a>, 80 texts
looking at “next” practice in socially engaged, community and
participatory arts; collaborating with Mary Paterson and Diana Damian
Martin on two platforms for experimental writing and critical
thinking, <a href="https://somethingother.blog/" target="_blank">Something Other</a> and the <a href="https://medium.com/department-of-feminist-conversations" target="_blank">Department of Feminist Conversations</a>; writing <a href="http://exeuntmagazine.com/author/maddy-costa/" target="_blank">reviews for Exeunt</a>; writing on commission,
including a series of pieces looking at <a href="http://exeuntmagazine.com/features/pivot-audience-club/" target="_blank">Pivot Dance for the Place</a>;
and then doing a bunch of other stuff like thinking about loneliness
at Manchester Royal Exchange, hosting theatre clubs, leading a
workshop at the Almeida for its young critics, coordinating an
informal writers group. It's quite nice making that list: it reminds
me I'm not drifting as inconsequentially as I feel.
<br />
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Blogs shut down all the
time, people move on to other things, but there's something
particular about the story of this blog that makes me want to reflect
on why I'm finally, having thought about it for months, calling it
quits. When it began, in April 2011, I was only just returning to
thinking about theatre after four years of baby-making; in many ways
I was only just returning to thinking at all. I was still working for
the Guardian as a freelance writer on contract, but increasingly
unhappy and wanting to change things. Change my writing. Change my
relationship with theatre: its makers, and its audiences. This blog
was my one banal idea for how to do that. I look back on my early
posts and see how hesitant they are, how embarrassed, no matter how
playful I'm trying to sound. I can also see where the turning points
are, the moments where an outside influence breaks something open for
me. The first is Melanie Wilson's Autobiographer: I'd never written
about someone's work in such an elliptical way before, and loved the
show all the more for <a href="http://statesofdeliquescence.blogspot.com/2012/04/fraying-at-edges.html" target="_blank">what it drew out of me</a>.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
The most crucial
outside influence has been Chris Goode. A fortnight after I started
Deliq, he emailed to ask if I would be interested in trying out a
collaboration within the new company he was setting up. We didn't
have a language for what I might be doing at the time, but we built
one from two words, storyteller and bridge: I would be telling the
story of the company back to itself, and building bridges between the
company and its audiences. Later we shaped more official-sounding job
titles that reflected the wider conversation happening around
“embedded” criticism: first I was Critic in Residence, and later
Critical Writer. But these two notions of storyteller and bridge
remained vital.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Until Chris Goode &
Company built its own website, in 2015, everything I wrote within the
company was published here, in my space. It has meant a lot that all
of it has been independent: I've not had to vet the writing, barring
three exceptional circumstances (and even two of those were my choice): when I needed to run the <a href="http://statesofdeliquescence.blogspot.com/p/chris-goode-and-companys-9.html" target="_blank">9 texts</a>
past West Yorkshire Playhouse; when I <a href="http://statesofdeliquescence.blogspot.com/2014/08/meaning-value-and-matters-of-opinion.html" target="_blank">responded to the reasons</a> given
by Arts Council England for not awarding the company NPO status in
2014; and when I was writing about a heated, uncomfortable moment
during the Rabble R&D that I hadn't witnessed. Even when my CG&Co
work moved to the company website, I carried on writing about Chris's
alt-ensemble, Ponyboy Curtis, here. And so I can't think about Deliq
without thinking about my role in CG&Co. They are entangled. What
follows is a record of unravelling.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: center;">
*</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
This is the fourth
version I've written of this
valedictory post (fifth if I count the additional edits). Here are some things I'm resigned to. It's a mess.
It's pulling in several directions at once. It's too long, too
solipsistic, too laborious to read. I don't really know what it's
doing, or who it's for, other than me. It began as an attempt to
explain to myself and Chris why I'm leaving Chris Goode &
Company, but between the second draft and the third I met up with him
and told him in person and forgot half of what I'd intended to say. I
still want it to be a public explanation because yes, I'm leaving
Chris Goode & Company, but I'm haunted by generous friends who
read earlier drafts and pointed out that people stop working together
all the time, move on to other things: why is a public announcement
necessary?
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
It comes down to that
job title: how many other theatre companies do you know with a critic
in residence? I've spent seven years attempting to stand back and
assess what I'm doing – be an outside eye to my own outside eye, if
you like – and feel some responsibility to continue. Such navel-gazing has felt
requisite, because I'm constantly aware of the ways in which I work
in opposition to the wider culture, which has a marrow-deep suspicion
of people being paid to write about theatre by those who make it. The
writing is seen as biased, skewed, untrustworthy by comparison with
“objective” journalism (pause while I chase after my eyes which
are rolling away). It's seen as marketing. Maybe I'm being elitist in
being furious about that – marketing can be a creative job after
all; or maybe I just recognise that people doing PR get paid far more
than I've ever seen or wanted for my company writing.
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Some of the work I've
done for Chris Goode & Co has been paid; since April 2018, CG&Co
has been a National Portfolio Organisation, which even gives me a
salary (and makes leaving now seem pretty incomprehensible). But I've
never worked with Chris for the money: I said yes to his invitation
because I'm a fan, and most of what I've done has been for love. I
still remember the first time I encountered him, in a cramped and overheated Pleasance venue at the Edinburgh festival in 2002 [later correction! 2003], performing Kiss of
Life: to be honest, that's how the work felt to me, life-giving,
oxygen-gifting, because I'd never seen anything like it, a shy man
telling a love story about two lost souls and the argon in the air
each one breaths out, breaths in, shared with the strangers of the
world. I've loved Chris's work ever since for its queerness, its
delicacy, its anti-capitalist politics, its romance, its empathy with
outsiders, the rejected of society, those in pain, its desire to open
space for those outsiders within theatre. Somewhere along the line of
the company I stopped saying I love his work and started saying I
love him. Which is part of what's made writing this so difficult.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: center;">
*</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Although we started
working together in 2011, it took until 2014 for me to find
confidence in what I might do as part of CG&Co. And it might not
have happened but for the Guardian firing me. (OK, deciding not to
renew my freelance contract. Same difference.) I wrote about that
here in January 2014; seeking what positives I could find for this
calamitous, self-fracturing event, I suggested it might be “the
push I need to stop sitting tentatively on the outside of Chris Goode
& Company, and properly embrace the extraordinary opportunity he
gives me”. And it was. In the next few weeks I finished <a href="http://statesofdeliquescence.blogspot.com/p/cg-godhead.html" target="_blank">writing about God/Head</a>, a process that had taken me two years, presenting it
as an experiment in what Chris dubbed polyvocality: multiple voices
talking about the show, each of the three parts of the writing coming
at it from a different angle, echoing how the show itself told a
single story in multivalent ways. The advent of the CG&Co
website in 2015 gave me space to expand that polyvocal approach
across different kinds of non-linear and cross-disciplinary
storytelling. I played with journals to document Riot Act (2015);
built an online magazine around Weaklings (also 2015), featuring
playlists, ephemera, writing by and interviews with the making team,
and more; did the same but different for Every One (2016), this time
including interviews with makers unconnected to the company who had
also made work that put them face-to-face with death, a video
compendium of versions of the song Oh Death, and a collection of
found texts on the subject of ironing – ludicrously tangential, but such a joy to pull together. In 2017 I went old school and made a
40-page fanzine for Jubilee, carting 500 copies up to Manchester in
the family suitcase. It's painful making this list because the
website got attacked by malware around autumn 2016 and no one has
been able to fix it. Generally I'm hesitant to praise myself, but I
feel stupidly fucking proud of the work I've made alongside Chris and
now so much of it is dead and invisible. I can't even link to it here. It's galling.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
For every thing I did
within the company, there were always two or three things I wasn't
getting round to doing. I still haven't written about the Witch of
Edmonton R&D week in the National Studio (2013), even though
Chris's “remix” of the text, an open invitation to his
collaborators simultaneously to perform, fuck with and comment on the
original remains one of the most electrifying things I've seen him
make. I never wrote a reflection of all the different Open House
weeks. I mentioned, but never went into, the difficulties of the
Weaklings rehearsal process, and didn't write about the work as
performed in Warwick Arts Centre. These and other failures were an
ongoing frustration. But none of them unsettled me as much as not
writing about the last show of Ponyboy Curtis, in June 2017.</div>
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<br /></div>
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*</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Just as Ponyboy was the
place in which Chris could take a radically different approach to
making, writing about Ponyboy was where I leaned into poetry, knowing
that I haven't the verbal or imaginative dexterity to be other than a
terrible poet, knowing that Deliq would shelter me anyway. My
relationship with Ponyboy was very different to that with CG&Co:
I was paid to attend the first R&D week in December 2014 and
write about it, paid again to make a Ponyboy zine in June 2017, but
in between went to no rehearsals and often bought my own tickets to
see the performances. But here I am talking about money again, as
though that validates anything.
</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
At the time Ponyboy
started, I was writing an essay for Duska Radosavljevic's book
Theatre Criticism: Changing Landscapes about working with Chris. It
took me a year. Among other things, I wanted to make the argument
that being a fan does not negate criticality, contradicting an
assertion made in 1992 by Irving Wardle, in his own book called
Theatre Criticism, that the critic who enters the rehearsal room also
enters “the circle of hypnosis”. Paying attention to the process
of making, rather than the product shown on press night, Wardle
insisted:</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
“changes perception
of the work. As an observer, you become the company's mascot. You
make friends. You sympathise with their difficulties. … Having made
the journey with them, you are only conscious of what they have
achieved; and you want what they want – unconditional approval.”</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
It still annoys me,
this piece of text. This is how I batted against it in the essay for
Duska: “As a fan, I wanted, in Wardle's phrase, 'unconditional
approval' for and from Chris. The more rounded picture of how he
makes theatre that I've since gained through access to his rehearsal
room hasn't made this biased perspective more sympathetic but more
exacting. I am scrupulously honest in declaring the moments watching
his work when I feel bored, confused or disappointed: but I am also
meticulous in taking the time to understand why I might be responding
in this way.”
</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
I'd put it differently
these days – maybe instead of bored, confused or disappointed I'd
say challenged, provoked, troubled – but honesty and meticulous
care are still the principles by which I'm trying to live. I try to
question everything, not least myself. I don't think I'll ever do it
well enough.</div>
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<br /></div>
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*</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Inside the Ponyboy zine
is a juvenile poem by me about Walk Pause Walk, a one-night-only
performance at Camden People's Theatre in May 2017. It was Ponyboy's
most sexually explicit show to date, and most physically aggressive,
lighting bright over the men groping and probing each other inches
from their audience. I struggled with it, and did say that in the
zine, in a wonky kind of way – but not here on Deliq, and not as
clearly or astutely as <a href="https://smallertemples.wordpress.com/2017/05/24/walk-pause-walk/" target="_blank">Ben Kulvichit on his blog Smaller Temples</a>, a
review that queried how Chris uses his “position of relative
authority” in choosing which bodies to present on stage, and
whether the “romantic, queer utopia” created by those bodies “is
quite as utopian a model as it wants to be”. Maybe my own choice to
hide in the zine was fine, but it felt weird. And then came Vs.<br />
<br />
<br />
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<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-ezJP6-jmY_4/XCVcq6Sj29I/AAAAAAAAEv0/WtggM6mnLK8KGseMLcl0PkGl0v8dtT88gCLcBGAs/s1600/ponyboy%2Bzine%2Bpage%2Bfor%2Bdeliq.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1166" data-original-width="1600" height="233" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-ezJP6-jmY_4/XCVcq6Sj29I/AAAAAAAAEv0/WtggM6mnLK8KGseMLcl0PkGl0v8dtT88gCLcBGAs/s320/ponyboy%2Bzine%2Bpage%2Bfor%2Bdeliq.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
</div>
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<br /></div>
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<br />
I saw Vs twice that
June, both times in unusual circumstances, and had disconcertingly
different experiences. The first was on a Saturday, and I had spent
the day with one of my oldest friends, celebrating the bat mitzvah of
her daughter, who had made a beautiful, delicate speech about what it
meant to assume the mantle of womanhood, and to acknowledge and
welcome that step in life surrounded by family and friends. With that
backdrop, Vs felt like a pulse of longing: it ached at its core for
ceremony and ritual in secular life, for rites of passage that might
connect men to each other and to the earth, for a social embrace of
queerness, for a way to undo the damage of toxic masculinity and
reacquaint with the sensuality and grace of young men. The six
performers ended the show racing from the back wall of the auditorium
to the feet of the audience, and it felt like they could burst
through to freedom if only we representatives of society weren't
always getting in the way with our conventional attitudes about what
men should do and who men should be. The moment it finished I went
straight to where Chris was sitting and cried on his shoulder at its
sadness and promise and plea.
</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Six days later I saw Vs
again and the moment it finished I went straight to where Chris was
sitting and told him I'd never wanted to punch anyone more in my
life. I was livid and told him that too. For the most part this
performance of Vs, at once a response to and remix of Stravinsky's
Rite of Spring, was passing similar to my first, not least in the final
section. This starts with the selection of a single Ponyboy –
through the child's play trick of spinning a bottle – to be the
centre of the sacrifice; he is sanctified in a shower of sexual
attention; he spins himself dizzy in the centre of the circle; and
then all of them join together in their Olympian race from one end of
the stage to the other. But this night, the “chosen” Ponyboy span
to a point beyond self-control, taking a cyclone hurl out of the
circle and smashing himself against one of the Yard's architectural
pillars. It was horrible to watch because it felt gratuitous, an
endurance test proving nothing, benefitting no one.
</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
For me there was an
additional, acute context: that afternoon, walking my kids home from
school, I'd seen a small group of people gathered on the pavement,
disquiet crackling around them. As I passed I asked one of the women
if everything was OK. She gestured towards another woman at the
centre of the group, standing beside a pushchair, and said: she's
just had a miscarriage. I looked at this stranger's legs and saw
streaks of blood tracing vein lines down her limbs, her hand reaching
down with ragged tissue in a futile attempt to wipe it away. Oh god,
I said, I'm so sorry. And walked on, thinking there was nothing I
could do. It wasn't until I was almost home I remembered that there
was water in my bag that I could have given her to help wash the
blood away. For days after, walking the same route, the kids and I
would see the blood stains on the pavement, slowly turning from
crimson to brown, and I realised that anyone who didn't know the
story of the woman might assume this was the mark of a stabbing or a
fight, gratuitous acts by men with nothing better to prove.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
With that backdrop, Vs
felt less a plea for a different kind of masculinity than an
expression of everything competitive, demanding, swaggering,
bellicose and empowered in the masculinity lauded by patriarchy. It
became telling that this was the first Ponyboy show I'd seen without
a trans male performer, and was the first time I really noticed the
whiteness of the group – which is ironic, because it was the first
performance to include a man with noticeably darker skin. Vs was also
the first time I thought about Ponyboy as a project romantically
enthralled with a kind of ancient Greek notion of masculinity, the
masculinity of heroism and honour and homoeroticism. Given that I'd
been doing <a href="https://somethingother.blog/2017/05/25/bilingual/" target="_blank">a lot of thinking</a> over the previous year about the ways in
which Ancient Greece might have gifted the English-speaking world not
only the words for democracy, misogyny, patriarchy and xenophobia but
a blueprint for their practices of inequality, that was an
uncomfortable connection to be contemplating.
</div>
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*</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Not writing about Vs
immediately was fine: it was summer, and Deliq has long gifted me time and space to think and absorb other resonances that might take me beyond the limits of my own mind. In August I was on holiday in Naples and
dragged the family up to Capodimonte, where Caravaggio's The
Flagellation of Christ lives at the end of a tantalising corridor,
alone in a darkened room. I love Caravaggio and this one is
mesmerising: Christ's body is curved and luminous and behind him
stands a white pillar, symbol of his rectitude; the men who surround
him are swarthier, faces creased with anger and muscles straining
with the effort of binding him. The effort is unnecessary given
Christ's meekness, and so it's clear that, beneath the fury, they're
taking a pleasure in this act of dominance and punishment. There is
pleasure too in the paint itself, in the folds of the fabric, the
dirt encrusted in the feet, the dips of the flesh outlining Christ's
muscles and the skeleton beneath the effulgent skin, collarbone a cradle for desiring fingers. After maybe 20 minutes
of devoutly scanning every inch of paint I noticed something:
barely visible between the white sheet gathered around Christ's
pelvis and the shadowed tousled hair of the man bending down to tie a
rope around his ankles, there is a glimpse of Christ's cock.
Violence. Sacrifice. Homoeroticism. A note for when I came to write
about Vs.</div>
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<br /></div>
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br /></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
In November I travelled
to Warwick Arts Centre to see Ben Kulvichit's production of Speed
Death of the Radiant Child, a play by Chris I'd neither seen nor
read. One of the characters is a lecturer in art history and almost
halfway into the play she starts to talk about another painting by
Caravaggio, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Incredulity_of_Saint_Thomas_(Caravaggio)#/media/File:Caravaggio_-_The_Incredulity_of_Saint_Thomas.jpg" target="_blank">The Incredulity of St Thomas</a>, seeing: “an abyss of
sexuality here”, with “Caravaggio completely lost in this
homoerotic moment”. What does it say about painting, she asks, if
Christ's appearance isn't enough to inspire belief, if “only an
encounter with the body” will do. What does it say about theatre, I
wondered, if only “getting inside the body” will do. Another note
for when I came to write about Vs.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
April 2018, I read an
<a href="https://amp.theguardian.com/books/2018/apr/09/about-the-boys-tim-winton-on-how-toxic-masculinity-is-shackling-men-to-misogyny?__twitter_impression=true" target="_blank">article in the Guardian by Tim Winton</a>, extolling the “lovely.
Graceful. Dreamy. Vulnerable” qualities “shamed out of” young
men when they're called to “pull on the uniform of misogyny and
join the Shithead Army that enforces and polices sexism”. Winton
also spoke of ritual, and how: “In the absence of explicit,
widely-shared and enriching rites of passage, young men in particular
are forced to make themselves up as they go along. Which usually
means they put themselves together from spare parts, and the stuff
closest to hand tends to be cheap and defective.” That, I thought,
is the romance of Vs: it creates an enriching rite of passage
unavailable to young men anywhere else. In the same month, Elizabeth
Smart's The Assumption of the Rogues & Rascals crooned to me this
description of a dream: “Outside in the beech woods, when the
leaves were small and calligraphic, loped a troupe of half-grown boys
like deer, with bodies the colour of sunlight on bracken, and black
eyes, and thick straight hair. They were light-footed, swift, and
evasive, but when a soft moon hung on the edge of the horizon, they
came stampeding towards the stone castle as if they were all hooved.
… They came. With savage grace and royal silence, careering with a
cruel panther purpose. Oh their wild terrible untouchable beauty!”
There too, a romance, an idealism.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
So many notes gathered
to feed into the Ponyboy writing, but when June 2018 rolled around
and I still hadn't written a word, I started to wonder what was
stopping me. Worse: I started to wonder if I were still being
“scrupulously honest in declaring the moments watching [Chris's]
work when I feel bored, confused or disappointed”, challenged,
provoked, troubled, or if I could still trust this to be true.</div>
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<br /></div>
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</div>
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*</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
It took two years to
write about God/Head; five years to write about <a href="http://statesofdeliquescence.blogspot.com/2017/09/receptivity-constant-question.html" target="_blank">a Berger afternoon Chris curated</a> at Somerset House. I'm slow with this stuff sometimes;
a year not writing about Vs wasn't that big a deal. But it felt like
one because of everything else happening. By the end of 2017 Ponyboy
had disbanded; I was too peripheral to tell a story so involved. In spring 2018 Chris Goode & Company began working
with an external consultant to think
particularly about how Ponyboy operated, and by extension about how
Chris works as a director; their report will become the basis
of a new CG&Co code of conduct. With NPO approaching I had set
out on a research project of my own, to figure out what I was and
wasn't doing effectively within the Company, and what I might need to
improve on. All of these things have their parts to play in me
deciding to leave the Company but fucking hell are those parts
complex. Even trying to explain the simple bits is hard enough.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
I started writing this post on September 19th; it's taken four drafts and multiple revisions because it's an incomplete representation of irresolution. Behind seeming decision
is an unresolved difficulty: I am ready to leave, and also
heartbroken by the very idea of leaving. What I do have is a kind of mantra, three clear and straightforward reasons for moving
on. One is a realisation about myself, and what I have and haven't
been writing, drawing attention to, perhaps even noticing or paying attention to, while part of the company. One is
a realisation about Chris, and what it means to be writing about an
artist widely hailed a genius. And one is to do with the widening scope of other
relationships I've built as a fan of performance in general. Anything
beyond this mantra dissolves into confusion any time I approach
it.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: center;">
*</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
There's a way in which
this bit of the story begins in January 2017: in the midst of the NPO
application process, I was beset by splintering confidence and an
anxiety that Chris and I might be pulling in different directions. I
thought about leaving, but the thought drifted. So really this starts in November 2017 – when, ironically, Chris and I
were having some of our most complex, trusting, supportive
conversations to date, inspired by the fraught process of staging
Jubilee at the Royal Exchange in Manchester.
</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
There are ways in which
this work's difficulties were the same as might happen in any
rehearsal and making process: the scale and profile of the event was
unnerving; most of the cast were away from home; a lot of the team
hadn't worked with Chris before. Some were specific to Jubilee
itself: some of the cast were more experienced in cabaret than
main-house theatre settings; there was a responsibility to the Derek
Jarman estate to honour the original film. And something specific to
the moment itself was the unfolding backdrop of #metoo revelations:
particularly stressful given that Jubilee involved a fair bit of
naked and sexually explicit work.
</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
As part of our
conversations, I told Chris I had noticed a pattern in how he runs a
rehearsal room. He will begin by emphasising that he's not a person
of power; that this is a non-hierarchical space in which everyone is
equally valued, equally heard, and making together, not least making
mutual care. There will be an initial period of discussion –
glorious, discursive, intense, difficult sometimes, digging deep into
the ideas or the text that he's brought into the room. And then, as
pressure rises, he will suddenly, dizzingly, pull rank and become The
Director, site of authority.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
I'm aware that dynamic
is pretty typical in theatre. And it doesn't convey how Chris has
made a different kind of listening and mutual endeavour possible: for
that, it's worth reading a blog post by Jubilee's sound designer <a href="http://sleepdogs.org/2018/09/what-we-dont-talk-about-when-we-talk-about-power/" target="_blank">Tim Atack meditating on power</a> in the making process, where Chris is cited as an example of good,
inspiring practice, for shaping “a working process that listened as
much as it spoke” and expressly giving everyone in the room
“permissions to speak up about the tricky or the urgent or the
suppressed stuff”. Ideally you'd also read an essay comparing the
different approaches to generous shared making practised by Chris
when making the 2012 show Monkey Bars, and by the more chaotic group using the principles of Open
Space that I was part of in another rehearsal room at the same
time, but that's another thing I never wrote.
</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
I've mentioned this
dynamic, despite its flaws as an observation, because it was the
first time I'd actually understood it as a pattern, not an odd detail
I was noticing and filing away with many others, uncertain what to do
with it. As Jubilee finished, the feeling continued to niggle that I
had been overlooking things in Chris' rehearsal rooms, both in terms
of not seeing them and not writing about them. To assuage it, in
December 2017 I set up a series of conversations with some of his
long-term collaborators. Through those I discovered:
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
I hadn't written about
any of the directorial work Wendy Hubbard did on Men in the Cities,
instead writing about it as a solo show.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
I had named all four of
the women who worked with Chris as associate directors on Wanted –
Kirsty Housley, Evie Manning, Pauline Mayers, Jennifer Tang – but I
hadn't given any real consideration to what they might have
contributed to it, instead thinking of it in terms of Chris' previous
work, his thinking, his politics.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
I hadn't written about
the ways in which Angela Clerkin played such a positive pastoral role
with the cast of Monkey Bars.
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
I think I did write
retrospectively about the incredibly difficult theatre club I held
for Men in the Cities in Cambridge with a room full of women from the
university's feminist societies, whom I'd personally invited, but I
didn't write about the ways in which lighting designer Katharine
Williams struggled with that work, which might have helped me to
anticipate those women's antipathy to the play, their refusal to see
it in the feminist terms I was presenting to them.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
In fact, I've written
very little about the contributions Katharine Williams makes as
lighting designer, or Naomi Dawson makes as designer.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
In not writing about
the Witch of Edmonton Open House week, I'd left undocumented the
moment – still haunting – when Kelda Holmes walked out, leaving
on the wall a letter explaining that the big, busy room had
“reignited feelings of exclusion and anger”, not least through
“men using their power misogyny / interests to push away strong/
needy women”; and then the other moment, no less haunting, on the
final day, when she pulled off her shirt mid-performance to reveal
her breasts, as both answer and challenge to those men.
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
There's a lot of women
in this list of things I haven't written about when writing about
Chris. And here's something I realised through compulsive rereadings
of the drafts of this post: the reason I'm so insistent on including
Vs is nothing to do with Ponyboy or that work. I have pages of notes
on it that will mostly remain unpublished. What felt important was
telling the stories of those two women: the daughter announcing her
womanhood at her bat mitzvah, the stranger who miscarried on the
street. It's their experiences I want to be remembered.<br />
<br />
<br />
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<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-KbZWOhSC7bI/XClW1Uo79-I/AAAAAAAAEwE/nLYBICfg1CQO2z6PJW3sXDC4aBWPmSbkwCLcBGAs/s1600/ponyboy%2Bvs%2Bnotebook%2Bpage.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1109" height="320" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-KbZWOhSC7bI/XClW1Uo79-I/AAAAAAAAEwE/nLYBICfg1CQO2z6PJW3sXDC4aBWPmSbkwCLcBGAs/s320/ponyboy%2Bvs%2Bnotebook%2Bpage.jpg" width="221" /></a></div>
<br /></div>
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*</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
In one of the bits of
Caitlin Moran's book How to Be a Woman that most irritate me, she
insists that “even the most ardent feminist … can't conceal that
women have basically done fuck all for the last 100,000 years. …
Let's stop exhaustingly pretending that there is a parallel history
of women being victorious and creative, on an equal with men, that's
just been comprehensively covered up by The Man. There isn't.” It
irritates me because I think her intent is satirical but it fails,
coming across instead as untempered internalised misogyny. And even
if it is satirical, it's still typical of how women's work and
creativity haven't just been covered up by The Man, or men.
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Patriarchal constructs
might not prevent women (in the UK) having access to education and
the means of communication any more, but its insidious effects are
such that women don't necessarily use these things to support each
other. When talking to Kirsty Housley about how I had failed really
to think about her work on Wanted, she told me how difficult it has
been to be credited and recognised as co-director of Simon McBurney's
The Encounter. How, whenever Javaad Alipoor's The Believers Are But
Brothers was promoted or written about, his dramaturg Chris Thorpe
would be named but not her as co-director. The prominence of male
artists, male thinking, male work, is pervasive and it's a culture
made and maintained by everyone who contributes to it. Theatre is no
exception to this. And nor am I.
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
This is what I was
thinking about in May 2018 when I found this passage in an essay by
Megan Garber called <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2018/05/the-world-still-spins-around-male-genius/559925/?utm_source=twb" target="_blank">David Foster Wallace and the Dangerous Romance of Male Genius</a>:</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
“Here is the
etymology the Oxford English Dictionary provides for the word genius,
imported to English straight from the Latin: 'male spirit of a
family, existing in the head of the family and subsequently in the
divine or spiritual part of each individual, personification of a
person’s natural appetites, spirit or personality of an emperor
regarded as an object of worship, spirit of a place, spirit of a
corporation, (in literature) talent, inspiration, person endowed with
talent, also demon or spiritual being in general.'</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
There’s more, but
there’s already so much: genius, by definition a male condition.
Genius, a male condition that inflects its maleness on the individual
soul. Genius, an object of worship. ... [M]illennia later, the biases
of the language remain with us, tugging at the edges. Genius itself,
the way we typically conceive of it, remains infused with the male
gaze, or perhaps more aptly, the male haze: It is gendered by
implication. It is a designation reserved, almost exclusively, for
men.”</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
My essay for Duska's
book begins with a quote from the Guardian in which Chris is
described as “one of the geniuses of British theatre”. This
culture of genius is one I am complicit in as writer and storyteller.
If I'm going to contribute to shaping a different culture, and I'd like to, I need to
reconsider who I'm writing about, what stories I'm helping to tell.
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: center;">
*</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
I've been thinking a
lot about complicity over the past year, the ways in which theatre,
as an industry, generates secrecy and gossip. Of course I have: it's
been the year in which #metoo, a movement started in 2006 by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarana_Burke" target="_blank">Tarana Burke</a> to support people to speak out about sexual abuse and assault
and in doing so reveal how pervasive it is, finally reached UK
theatre. I've obsessed over <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2017/nov/04/royal-court-vicky-featherstone-we-all-knew-about-sexual-harassment" target="_blank">an interview with Vicky Featherstone</a>,
published at the beginning of November 2017, in particular this
paragraph:</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
“The reason I’m so
angry is I’m so shocked that we’d got to this point and we’d
all accepted it. We all knew about it! We. All. Knew. … I knew that
pretty much every single woman I know had suffered sexual harassment
in her life. I knew that, and I’d just accepted that. I’m
hardwired to accept it. I’m a feminist, and when I talk about it,
it shocks me. But I had literally accepted it, like I accept that we
have a class system. I’d accepted it like I accept that there are
homeless people. And that’s just bizarre – but it’s what we’ve
done. And then suddenly someone speaks out, and you start to think,
why are we as a society accepting of this situation?”</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
I have this impulse
inside of me to push this away, to ask who the “we” are, and what
exactly they knew, and how many people they shared it with, and how
many other people fell foul of shitty behaviour because they weren't
in the right circles to hear the warning. Two obvious problems with
that: firstly, to do so is to ignore Vicky's real point, which is
that “this situation” isn't personal but systemic. Secondly, to
do so exposes a desire to evade complicity. But I am complicit. I've
lost count of the times that people have confided in me about how
they've been mistreated by artistic directors, given bad deals, bad
contracts, ignored, exploited, underpaid – all the banal sludge
reality of working in theatre – and I've kept that information
tight rather than expose anyone, because like everyone else who works
in theatre I'm scared that if I tell too much truth it will
jeopardise my chance of future work, but also because those people
specifically asked me to keep silent.
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
There's a <a href="http://www.danielbye.co.uk/blog/embedded-criticism-some-arguments-an-offer-and-a-dare" target="_blank">blog post published in April 2012 by Daniel Bye</a> that I hold close and still
recommend frequently, for this chunk in particular:</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
“The
[making/rehearsal] process is constructed of a complex web of
assumptions about the ways people should and do interact with each
other, how best they work under pressure, how they can be enabled to
produce their best work. In this respect a rehearsal process is no
different from any other human interaction geared towards a common
end. And it's amazing to me how many processes work according to
assumptions radically contrary to those the work is attempting to
encode. How much work espousing collectivist left-wing politics is
made under (benign or otherwise) dictatorships? Good critical writing
about process could observe inconsistencies like this in a way
artists might not – could observe assumptions and conventions so
internalised we're not even quite aware of them.”</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
I keep recommending it
because I think Dan was really on to something. I think Tim's long
piece about power is a phenomenal example of what he was describing.
But also, Dan was talking about “embedded criticism”. I don't
think that's what I've been writing, it's just the label that got
slapped on it. Sometimes I've thought I should be writing it, should
be aiming for that level of transparency. Mostly I haven't wanted to:
I've wanted to pursue, within the meagre confines of my ability, a more selfishly creative line.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: center;">
*</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Between drafts three
and four, a writer for the Canadian magazine alt.theatre interviewed
me via email for an article she's writing on “embedded”
criticism. Here's some of what I told her:</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
“so, before emailing
you i emailed a friend, arguing for the umpteenth time against my
work being defined by the word embedded. i feel really bad about the
email, because i think i come across as a raging egotist. but i also
sent her a link to this article -
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2006/jan/25/theatre1 - it's not one
i wrote, it's one i commissioned while working for the Guardian
newspaper. i asked the writer to spend a really serious amount of
time with the theatre company, to get a sense of how they make work.
she was, effectively, embedded. but that's not how i would have
described it. the word embedded is really easy, people latched on to
it quickly, and i totally understand why. it's a word i sort of hold
at arm's length when i use it, and it's part of that sense of gift
that with Chris i was never embedded, i was part of the company,
maybe not right at first, but pretty soon after. the job titles i had
there were, first, critic-in-residence, and second, critical writer.
i much MUCH prefer those as terms, esp the first one - cos everyone
understands the term writer-in-residence, right? so it's just as
clear in its description of the work as embedded, and less of a joke
thing”</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
The way I think about
criticism – not just embedded, all of it – has changed profoundly
through working with Chris, affecting how I want to do it, and how I
want to talk about it. I don't want to see
the performance as a product that consumers need to be attracted to
or warned away from. Nor do I want to go into rehearsal rooms and
write diaries: anyone can do that. I wanted to give proper
attention to the obvious fact that the number of people who can see
the work of CG&Co in person is limited by time and geography,
which requires rethinking how people might instead interact with it
online. Sure, we could post up video footage of a performance: but
again, anyone can do that. What interested me more was the idea of
creating “parallel performances”, using the same materials and
themes and ideas as the company to make work specific to a digital
space that could be accessed at any time, carrying with it some
flavour of the live performance but in no way seeking to represent or
stand in for it. (For an exponentially more inventive, smart and
technologically dazzling variation on the same idea see <a href="http://www.sarahgrochala.com/digital/" target="_blank">Sarah Grochala's work with Headlong</a>: to be honest I can't really look at it
because it makes me want to cry at how humdrum mine is by
comparison.) </div>
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Even when I was/am more
straightforwardly reviewing a performance (writing here and, also
from 2015, on Exeunt), I started to think about how I might honour
the form of the work itself: if not meet the creativity of the makers, at least reach towards it.
In this I was definitely influenced by the critical practice of <a href="https://marypaterson.wordpress.com/" target="_blank">Mary Paterson</a>, now a collaborator, who doesn't describe herself as a
critic but an artist. I'm no more artist than poet. But
I do think of criticism as a process, part of the bigger process of
making theatre.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: center;">
*</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
To me, there isn't much
relationship between any of that and the term “embedded criticism”
that emerged in April 2012 in a <a href="http://postcardsgods.blogspot.com/2012/04/embedded.html" target="_blank">blog post by Andrew Haydon</a>. This was
published several months after I'd started working with Chris, but
around the same time I started collaborating with Jake Orr, now a
producer, on a proposition we called Dialogue, wanting to explore and
advocate for new ways of thinking about the relationships between
people who make, watch and write about theatre. Jake and I met at a
Devoted and Disgruntled session in January 2012 where I talked quite
a lot about working with Chris, and where Jamie Wood asked me a
shrewd question: given that Chris writes so exquisitely about his own
practice (he hadn't yet called his own blog quits), what could I
bring? The question was so piquant I inserted it into the first draft
of the essay for Duska's Theatre Criticism book, answering like this:
“I see through other eyes, address his work through a different
sensibility.”
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
With the accumulation
of time, I began to wonder about that different sensibility: not just
because of being a fan, not just because of love, but because the way
Chris articulated his politics was instrumental in helping me to
articulate mine. I don't just mean ideological politics, I mean a
kind of emotional politics: I think about the number of times I've
(mis)quoted the idea of “putting your armour down”, phrased by Utah
Phillips but introduced to me by <a href="http://beescope.blogspot.com/2010/12/title-of-this-episode-is-new-approach.html" target="_blank">Chris on his blog</a>.
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
With the accumulation
of more time, I began to wonder where our edges were, if I knew any
more where Chris ends and I begin. I was feeling this already in
February 2016 when he published his book The Forest and the Field and
gave me a copy. I didn't read it and still haven't, because somewhere
deep inside I've known I need to preserve some space in my head where
I might think about his work separate from how he thinks about it.
The reflection process I began in December 2017 made me wonder if
even that tactic had been successful. As well as thinking about all
the things I hadn't written, I thought about all the conversations
I'd had since February 2016 – particularly about Ponyboy's work –
in which I'd encouraged people to see things a different way:
arguably, Chris's way. I keep going back to that irksome phrase of
Irving Wardle's, the “circle of hypnosis”, and wondering if I'd
entered it imperceptibly. I want to think I've always maintained
mental independence from Chris. But maybe I need physical
independence to be sure.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Does this mean
“embedded” criticism doesn't work? How can we possibly know?
Every process is different, every writer-maker relationship is
different. Chris and I are just two people: we're not and can't be
representatives of an entire industry, especially an industry as
lacking in transparency and, let's face it, honesty as theatre. We've
followed one path: there are still so many others not walked. All
of them might help to build different relationships between people
who make, watch and write about theatre. I hope I get a chance to
travel some of them too.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: center;">
*</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Deliq began with a
question: what kind of stories do I want to tell? And how do I want
to tell them? As I draw Deliq to a close, those questions are as
alive and pressing as ever. This has been a place of transition for
me, a horizon I've walked towards, which moves a step away with every
step I take towards it (thank you Rebecca Solnit for the image). But
right now Deliq feels like part of an old world: a landscape I've
reached the edge of, far from the horizon where sky meets sea.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Between drafts three
and four I realised another thing. I started writing about theatre in
1997, because I unexpectedly won the Harold Hobson student drama
critic award at the National Student Drama Festival and I was
floundering post-graduation and this seemed like a thing I could do.
I watched theatre intensively for the next seven years, learning,
learning, learning, because I came into this knowing fuck all. In
2004 I burned out. I had nothing left to give to theatre and felt it
had nothing – no truth, no honest feeling – to give me. So I
pretty much stopped watching it, and then came the babies. In 2011 I
started Deliq, because I was falling back in love with theatre and
didn't have anywhere to write about it. If that's three seven-year
cycles – and I have only the faintest inkling of how important a role the number seven
plays in spirituality and psychology – then another is due to
begin.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
So here's the landscape
as I glimpse it on that further shore, across the channel of no more
CG&Co or Deliq. Between spring 2017 and summer 2018 I wrote <a href="https://civicroleartsinquiry.gulbenkian.org.uk/resources?filter=case-study#pagination-anchor" target="_blank">80 case studies</a> – it could easily be more – for the Calouste
Gulbenkian Foundation, looking at “next” practice in socially
engaged, participatory and community arts, across disciplines and the
world. That research and writing has changed me. It has expanded my
imagination of what I could do: particularly writing about <a href="http://thefoundrytheatre.org/" target="_blank">Foundry Theatre</a> in New York, a company that describes so precisely what I
hoped Dialogue might grow into I've wanted to cry that Jake and I gave up so
soon (although the name is still alive in the Theatre Clubs I'm now
co-hosting with Rhiannon Armstrong). But also, it has reminded me of
the responsibility of storytelling. Time and again the people I
interviewed told me that the thing they struggle with most, after
funding of course, is storytelling: dismantling a culture that sees
community art (which is often also grassroots art, and
non-professional art) as less important, lesser quality, by really
shouting about how transformational this work is. That feels like a
useful thing that I could do in the world, helping to tell such
stories. And I've started: in a long essay about <a href="https://www.joshuasofaer.com/2017/08/goldnosegreenginger/" target="_blank">Joshua Sofaer's work in Bransholme</a>, Hull, to be published in a book about him next year;
in another long essay I should have been writing while interminably rewriting this fourth draft, looking at art and
creativity in <a href="http://localtrust.org.uk/library/research-and-evaluation/the-grammar-of-change" target="_blank">communities gifted £1m of Lottery money</a>; and in some
work I'll be doing with <a href="https://brightonpeoplestheatre.org/" target="_blank">Brighton People's Theatre</a>.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
In 2014 I started
collaborating with Mary Paterson, who is amazing, fiercely
intelligent, and endlessly inspiring, on <a href="https://somethingother.blog/" target="_blank">Something Other</a>. That began
as an experiment in how live artists, writers and creative
technologists might work together, but has gradually changed shape to
become a kind of literary journal galvanised by live performance.
Later I joined another collaboration between Mary and Diana Damian
Martin which we call <a href="https://medium.com/department-of-feminist-conversations" target="_blank">The Department of Feminist Conversations</a>, which
I like to describe as inter-related projects that think politically
about performance and performatively about politics. Working together
is a struggle: all three of us have other jobs and parenting/caring
responsibilities; at our best we give time according to our ability, take time
according to our need. We're trying to model collectively a different
mode of collaboration: not working separately alongside each other,
as Chris and I did, but working together in an ongoing negotiation,
making decisions by consensus, instead of unilaterally. It's hard –
difference always is – and I'm not sure I'm capable of it, of really letting go of autonomy and individualism, much as I know it's important to learn. </div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Some of the writing
about theatre now happens within SO and DFC, some of it for Exeunt, and there's a new passion project on the scene: <a href="https://tinyletter.com/criticism-and-love/archive" target="_blank">Criticism & Love</a>, a series of fortnightly essays through which Andy Field and I
are drawing a partial map of the performance scene as we see it. But
there's been another major shift this year: I'm not just writing
about performance now but taking a small part in making it,
progressing from working as dramaturg on three shows over the course
of two years, to being the dramaturg on three shows simultaneously.
It's set me thinking about what the difference might be between the
role of critical writer and the role of dramaturg: both require you
to stand a little outside, to be rigorous, to ask questions, to think
about the audience experience – but critical writer requires you to
remain outside of the work; as dramaturg you take more responsibility
for the work itself. It's fucking exciting, a whole different level
of creative engagement with theatre for me, and one I hope to
continue.
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div align="CENTER" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
*</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
A friend who read the
second draft of this text asked a judicious question: why can't I do
all these things with Chris? Write more about the women he works
with, stop relating to him as a genius, think differently about
collaboration, engage in dramaturgy? Whenever I think about that, a snake
of a thought will come hissing at me. In November 2017, someone who
has worked with Chris, and whom I've written about (favourably I
thought, although they disagreed), named me on Facebook as someone
who works with powerful people because they “think [that] can
advance their careers”. Which I recognise as the time-honoured fate of women who work in the shadow of great
and genius men.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
I've acknowledged
several times in this post how working with Chris changed things for
me. Another change that has happened in that time is that I've
learned to acknowledge my privilege, the privilege that got me into
journalism which got me into the arts world. All the work I've done
since the Guardian fired me, but even before that, all the writing
for this blog, everything for Exeunt, all the creative thinking, has
been possible because my husband pays our bills. I might have started
life a working-class second-generation immigrant but I have white
skin and my mother educated me to the hilt in a bid to make me
middle-class. She was the person who worked for my privilege. To be
sure, I joined the Guardian in an era of discrimination that hasn't
ended, just changed shape, at a time – in 1999 – when the arts
desk was embarassed by how few of its pop critics were women and used
positive discrimination to find some. That doesn't erase the fact
that I have plenty of unearned status.
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
And where has it gotten
me? In the three years after being fired I paid exactly £100 tax:
that's how little money I earned. (It's only because of Gulbenkian
that the 2017-18 accounts are any different.) A lot of the work I've
done online has been lost to website updates; it's all disposable
anyway. When new theatre writers come through who – be warned, I'm
going to be obnoxious here – I'm pretty sure have been at least
partially influenced by the way I talk and write about theatre
criticism, they're described as the new Lyn Gardners. I'm not saying
that to slam Lyn: she has been and continues to be extraordinarily
influential in my life, and crucially is the person who put the
Gulbenkian in touch with me, for which I can't thank her enough. I'm
saying it because this condition of dependent precarity is what I
have to show for my “career”, and still I'm scorned for sailing
on the flannelled shirt tails of Chris. I said earlier I don't know
where he ends and I begin. This is one way I really need to find out.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: center;">
*</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
And yet still I'm in
sixes and sevens, decided and decidedly confused. The fact is,
leaving Chris Goode & Company is emotionally devastating, and has
been for months. It's like calling quits on the most stimulating and
nourishing romance of my life, like moving out of the house we built
from scratch together, shaped to what we needed our world to be.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
But it's time to go;
time, too, to leave this blog. So goodbye Deliq, born States of
Deliquescence; goodbye Chris Goode & Company. But not, I hope,
goodbye dear readers. I mean, I can probably name all 10 of you who
will have read more than 6% of this. And I'm grateful to you, because
you have kept me writing, through every plunge in confidence, every
uncertainty, and every spasm of fear that writing about theatre is
pointless. If you want to keep walking towards that unknown horizon
with me, those links again: here's <a href="https://somethingother.blog/" target="_blank">Something Other</a>, here's the
<a href="https://medium.com/department-of-feminist-conversations" target="_blank">Department of Feminist Conversations</a>, and here's the <a href="https://civicroleartsinquiry.gulbenkian.org.uk/resources?filter=case-study#pagination-anchor" target="_blank">Gulbenkian case study library</a>. I'm hoping one day to map my way into a new website; if I ever manage it I'll post the link on the contact page here. In the meantime, keep yourselves well – and thank you for reading, however little or much. xxx<br />
<br />
ps: throughout the writing of the first two drafts, this song played in my head almost constantly. And what a way to end this blog: with a video of people looking awkward and gawky, uncertain what to do with their bodies, not really sure why they're there.<br />
<br />
<br />
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maddy costahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04929576408540749708noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8651145764236805587.post-63613454412063262822018-11-05T12:12:00.000+00:002018-11-05T12:12:28.300+00:00Once more unto the... (Criticism & Love #13) ((identity crisis #17,962))<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: blue;">This was written for
Criticism & Love, a TinyLetter I've been writing for the past six
months with Andy Field, and I wouldn't normally cross-post it, except
that I've been thinking recently that it's time to stop using this
blog and build a different web home, one that more accurately
reflects where I am in life now, rather than where I was in April
2011. I have one more thing to publish here which might take me a
month or so to put together, and then if I can sort my shit out I'll
start 2019 with the new site. Or not. Maybe it's fine to just scatter
wildflower seeds across the wasteland of the internet without
claiming a whole garden as mine. Anyway. If you like this and want to
read more of the <a href="https://tinyletter.com/criticism-and-love" target="_blank">Criticism & Love essays, please sign up here</a>: it
might help persuade someone to publish them in an actual book one
day. Even if you don't, still sign up, cos Andy's essays are fucking
brilliant. OK, here goes:
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
What is the point of
theatre?</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
I mean, really?</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Please don't think that
calling what you make or see or write about or have an interest in
performance art means I'm not asking you too.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Here are some of the
things that have happened in the world in the four weeks since I last
sat down to write one of these C&L essays:</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Brett Kavanaugh was
sworn in as the 114th Justice of the Supreme Court, a lifelong role,
despite allegations of sexual abuse against him and his readiness to
limit abortion rights in the US.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Jair Bolsonaros was
elected President of Brazil, despite expressions of homophobia and
misogyny and his readiness to raze the Amazon rainforest, killing
indigenous populations through displacement in the short term, future
generations through climate destruction in the longer term.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
The New York Times
reported that Donald Trump wants to create a legal definition of sex
as "a biological, immutable condition determined by genitalia at
birth", erasing trans identities.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
As reported in the
Guardian, the IPCC (the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change) warned that humans have 12 years left to limit temperature
rises “to a maximum of 1.5C, beyond which even half a degree will
significantly worsen the risks of drought, floods, extreme heat and
poverty for hundreds of millions of people”.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
The Guardian also
reported that “humanity has wiped out 60% of mammals, birds, fish
and reptiles since 1970” (figure provided by WWF).</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
A white supremacist man
opened fire in a synagogue in Pittsburgh, killing 11 Jewish people
aged between 54 and 97.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Another white man was
filmed verbally abusing a black woman on a Ryanair plane, later
claiming, eroneously, that he is not a racist person.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Twenty traders of
international backgrounds working in Ridley Road market in Dalston,
east London, were issued evictions orders and given two weeks to
comply. They were granted a last-minute reprieve but at present it's
unknown whether that will last beyond 2018.
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Residents and
campaigners attempting to save the community-run Tidemill Wildlife
Garden in Deptford from destruction/redevelopment were violently
evicted by police and security staff working on council orders.
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
And this is just what
I've skimmed from the surface of my twitter feed.
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
*</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
There's a show by
Breach called The Drill, from 2017, in which the three performers –
Ellice Stevens, Amarnah Amuludun and Luke Lampard, directed by Billy
Barrett, with video by Dorothy Allen-Pickard – take part in a
series of training courses, sold to the public, to learn what they
might do in the event of a terrorist attack, a bomb threat, a
shooting, etc. “Everything feels very uncertain right now,” says
Luke. “So we wanted to do something to make ourselves feel safer.”
And so they attend workshops, imagine, improvise, role-play, act.
Time and again the instructors impress on them the importance of
realism. “Realism is everything,” says one. “If it's not
realistic, if the training's not realistic, then people don't have
the fear.” If you've felt that fear, stress, pressure in a training
environment, it won't shock you when you feel it in a real
environment. You need to immerse yourself, really take part, more
effectively to learn. “The way people learn best is in a safe and
controlled environment,” says another. “So while we will make it
as realistic as we possibly can in this circumstance, it will be safe
and it will be controlled.”
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
These are at once
rehearsals and acts of theatre; as theatre they are events with the
potential to produce catharsis, a safe and controlled experience of
fear in a safe and controlled environment. Which, for Aristotle, was
really the point of theatre. The growing feeling through The Drill,
however, is that all this training is pointless: not only does it not
diminish fear, it exacerbates a latent suspicion of other humans, and
with it a latent othering and racism. And if the training is
pointless, maybe theatre is pointless too. Certainly – and this
might be a delicious in-joke – “realistic” theatre.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
There's a show by
Breach called The Beanfield, from 2015, in which the six performers –
Billy Barrett, Grace Holme, Anna Himali Howard, Max Kennedy, Ellice
Stevens and Tom Wright, directed by Billy and, on video, film-maker
Dorothy Allen-Pickard – re-enact but also investigate the ethics
around re-enacting the clash between police and military on the one
side, and on the other a motley convoy of people including activists,
non-violent protestors and peaceful worshippers of the solstice
heading for the Stonehenge Free Festival in June 1985. The clash was
a climax reached after months of aggression directed at the
travelling community camped there. The performers were students at
University of Warwick at the time, and had been involved in their own
clash with police, called in to break up student protests against the
neoliberal profit drive of their own education.
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
The group wanted to
make this show, Ellice says early on, to do something real. “So
<i>real</i>.” A specialist in historical re-enactment warns them to
“be careful” because the real of performance can all too quickly
become the real of life: pretend violence becoming actual violence,
pretend hate becoming actual hate. The man who now owns the field
where the clash happened refuses to let them perform there, because
he's afraid of what trouble – real – they might stir up. They
find a field and go ahead anyway; Grace gets hit and tells her
friends: “This is really fucking painful.” There is video playing
of the re-enactment and it looks really fucking painful, feels
actually painful to watch. “It's really fucking horrible,” Grace
says again. And it is. I mean, it's only theatre. But it feels
horrible. Because it's also, as Dorothy says on the video, “a real
event”. Historical real. Present real. Now real.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
There's a show by
Breach called Tank, from 2016, in which the four performers –
Ellice Stevens, Victoria Watson, Joe Boylan and Craig Hamilton,
directed by Billy and Ellice, again with video by Dorothy –
question what of historical events can really be pieced together from
the documentary material and memories that remain. The story of Tank
is of a research centre on the US Virgin Island of St Thomas in
which, during the early 1960s, a series of experiments was conducted
in teaching dolphins to speak English. It's also a story about what a
particular dolphin, Peter, might have been thinking, feeling, trying
to communicate during these experiments. Because who can know?
Dolphins have an “alien brain”, it's said at the beginning;
that's why they were chosen for the research. Perhaps if this alien
brain could be taught English, so could all the aliens who might be
discovered during the space race – but so too might all the aliens
who live on the earth itself, all those other, foreign people whose
customs are, within the dictates of xenophobia, so unfamiliar and
terrifying.
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
There's a book by
academic Nicholas Ridout called Theatre & Ethics that considers
how theatre “participates in a process of managing the way people
think about their relationships with one another and their potential
for creating societies in which everyone can enjoy freedom as well as
social solidarity”. He begins with Plato, who lambasted theatre
because “it peddles dangerously pessimistic illusions that
encourage a fearful audience to submit to inexorable fate rather than
struggle to imagine the world differently”. Throughout Ridout
raises the question “How shall I act?”, but always with the
caveat that theatre might be an odd place to come looking for that,
given the relationships between ethics and truth, theatre and
pretending. He resists theatre that presents a “universal concept
of 'human' which … can easily lapse into 'humans like me'”,
seeking out instead performance that challenges “our conception of
what it is to have a human body, and to have intentions that make it
do things … challeng[ing] the human spectator to consider what it
is that allows him or her to recognise another as a fellow human”.
He searches for that “moment of ethical encounter” in performance
that can “be the basis for thought, feeling or action within the
sphere of politics”. That, for him, is the point of theatre.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
*</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Here is a full list of
the works I've encountered in a theatre or theatre setting in the
four weeks since I last sat down to write one of these C&L
essays:</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Risk Lab, by Ada
Mukhina, a participatory performance that invited its audience to
decide whether they wanted to hear a text written by Ada that might
be censored in Russia, where she is from, or in London/the UK, and
rather than delivering on that vote, asked a series of questions
about why each person had chosen the way they did.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
The Malady of Death,
written by Alice Birch, directed by Katie Mitchell, contemplating the
mesh of relationships between masculinity, emotion(lessness),
pornography and misogyny.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Summit, by Andy Smith
(twice, for work), a brief rallying cry for better talking, and
better listening, and more readiness to change, to do the work of
social/political/economic change, performed in three languages:
English, British Sign Language and (in this performance) Malay
(although I've also seen it when the third language was Farsi, spoken
by a young man, and miss the complexity that brought).</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Burgerz, by Travis
Alabanza, in which the burger thrown at Travis on Waterloo Bridge by
a white man affronted by what he perceived as their failure to
conform to patriarchal notions of gender becomes a metaphor through
which those notions can be interrogated and smashed.
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
ear for eye by debbie
tucker green, which is phenomenal, a survey of black life within
white supremacy, meticulous in expression as it travels between the
personal and the systemic, poetic in its protest, as elegant as it is
angry, a defining play not only of this decade but – I'm sure of
this – the decades to come.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Fallen Fruit, by
Katherina Radeva of Two Destination Language, in which she traces the
complex experiences of herself, as a seven-year-old child, and the
adults around her in Bulgaria in the days before and immediately
after the fall of the Berlin Wall: the basic sufficiency before, the
deprivation after; the tedium before, the freedom after, the strained
commonality before, the pained inequality after.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Lock Her Up, three
audio works, by Sabrina Mahfouz, Rachel Mars and Paula Varjack, each
responding to aspects of women's experience in prison. I sat in a now
disused prison cell beneath Leeds Town Hall and listened to the
pieces in that order, experiencing mounting anxiety as I moved from
Sabrina as a scintillating game-show host asking furious questions
about incarceral maternity and motherhood, to Rachel's whispers in
the silence of solitary confinement, and Paula's story of an imminent
future in which immigrant women are increasingly detained as they no
longer conform to invisibly shifting immigration policy, which ends
with one such woman beating a prison guard with a pole, his skin and
muscles collapsing with a squelch, squelch, squelch.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
All those plus I'm a
Phoenix, Bitch by Bryony Kimmings, No One Is Coming To Save You by
new company This Noise, a merging of Othello and Macbeth by Jude
Christian, Paper Cinema's Macbeth, a musical version of Twelfth Night
(you bet it was too much fucking Shakespeare), Andy Smith's The
Preston Bill for the sixth time, two R&D rehearsal sharings and
two work-in-progress performances of #thebabyquestion by Paula
Varjack, Luca Rutherford and Catriona James, Mouth Open Story Jump
Out by Polar Bear, The Day I Fell Into a Book by Lewis Gibson,
Charlie Ward by Sound & Fury, Frankenstein by BAC's Beatbox
Academy, Chekhov's First Play by Dead Centre for the second time, and
yes, you're right, I do see an awful lot of theatre. I'm choosing the
word awful for its double meaning.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
In the midst of all
that, I also saw It's True, It's True, It's True by Breach.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
*</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
It's True is another
re-enactment play, of the trial, in 1612, of Agostino Tassi, the
older man and established artist accused by painter Artemesia
Gentileschi (a teenager at the time) of rape. The word accused there
should not imply I don't believe her. It's quite different from
Breach's other work: there's no video, and the three performers –
Ellice Stevens, Kathryn Bond and Harriet Webb, directed by Billy
Barrett, Dorothy Allen-Pickard joining them as dramaturg – never
slip out of character to speak as themselves, so there is no
metatheatrical discussion of how or why they're making each dramatic
choice, or what the effect of those choices might be. This time the
lines between verbatim speech transcribed by court notaries and
imagined text are entirely blurred. So what is true, exactly?
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
It's certainly not true
that the three women never slip out of character, because they are
constantly slipping into and out of a series of characters: Artemesia
is played by Ellice, Tassi by Harriet, and Artemesia's female
neighbour Tuzia by Kathryn, but they also take turns to play the
judge, Tassi's friends, other witnesses in the case, Bible characters
painted by Artemesia, and more. Nor is it entirely true that they
never play themselves: in the presentation of a woman struggling to
be believed, fighting against a patriarchal system that sets man's
word above woman's, that internalises misogyny to such an extent that
women become the judge and jury of each other, Ellice and Harriet and
Kathryn never stop playing themselves.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Another thing that's
not true is that they don't question or justify their artistic
choices: it's just that their choices snap into focus through an
astonishing speech Artemesia makes explaining why her painting
Susanna and the Elders is different to depictions of the story by
male artists of the day. In men's eyes Susanna was courting the male
gaze, asking for it. Asking for it. Whereas in Artemesia's eyes
Susanna was unable to escape that gaze; she might turn away from it,
push back against it, but such is the aggression of masculinity she
is subject to it none the less.
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
How did the
relationship between Artemesia and Tassi begin? Tassi was asked by
her father to teach his daughter perspective. Perspective. The word
is like a punchline – or, as Hannah Gadsby lays the emphasis in
Nanette, a <i><span style="text-decoration: none;">punch</span></i>
line – to a really bad joke.
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
*</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
There's a book by
Rebecca Solnit called Hope in the Dark in which she describes world
events as taking place on the stage of a theatre. “The traditional
versions of history, the conventional sources of news encourage us to
fix our gaze on that stage,” she says. But she draws her readers'
gaze to the “shadowy spaces” off-stage, to “the aisles,
backstage, outside, in the dark, where other powers are at work”.
What she's particularly interested in is “the power of a story and
of a storyteller” to move across these hidden places in the
margins, because “politics arises out of the spread of ideas and
the shaping of imaginations”, and what better way to spread ideas
and shape imaginations than through stories?
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
For Solnit, writing is
no different from activism: both are acts of faith, because their
effects are indirect, delayed and often invisible. “An essay, a
book, is one statement,” she writes, “in a long conversation you
could call culture or history; you are answering something or
questioning something that may have fallen silent long ago, and the
response to your words may come long after you're gone and never
reach your ears, if anyone hears you in the first place.” And while
“changing the story isn't enough in itself … it has often been
foundational to real changes”.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Now I'm no Solnit,
however much I wish I were. And when I ask what the point is of
theatre, what I'm also or possibly really asking is: what is the
point of (me) being there and (me) writing about it, and beneath that
I guess what I'm really asking is what is the point of me? I'm
thinking about this sharply not only because it feels like that
theatre of world events is on fire right now and always has been, the
gaze of the audience drawn not by the limelights as Solnit suggests
but the glare of blazing flame, but because the response my words
make to it keeps feeling so fucking paltry. Whatever I'm writing
about, I repeat and repeat the same words – patriarchy, capitalism,
neoliberalism, inequality are some of the key ones – as though
intoning them as a mantra might do anything to dismantle their power.
This is the sixth essay I've written for C&L (number 6.5 if you
want to be precise), and each one has basically said the same thing:
patriarchy is bad, capitalism is bad, neoliberalism is bad,
inequality is bad, feminism hasn't solved any of this, fuck. What
good is that doing in the world?</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
As I muddle through
identity crisis number 17,962, there's something in Solnit's
description of the long conversation, the call and the response, that
I want to hold on to – hold faith in – not least because it's
echoed in the final section of Ridout's Theatre & Ethics. Quoting
a text by Adrian Heathfield, Ridout describes that “moment of
ethical encounter” as “a reciprocal and unending cycle of
call-and-response, of gift and counter-gift”. And “the act of
critical writing about performance” is part of that: a recognition
of “response-ability”. The ethical encounter couldn't happen
without the witness, the spectator, the person in the audience
“called upon to recognise that there is a relationship between what
is shown in the theatre and their own experience of the world”, and
“invited to do something about it”.
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
I have to keep
returning to ideas like this because it's all the self-justification
I have for the amount of time I spend, physically and mentally, in
theatre, and for the fear that all I'm really doing is entertaining
myself and hiding from life, never participating in what might
genuinely be described as “action within the sphere of politics”.
I have to keep reminding myself that I share Solnit's belief in
stories, and belief in the need for different stories, and that's
what I'm doing with the response-ability theatre encourages in me,
trying to tell different stories.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
It's True, It's True,
It's True is a story of a rape. It is a story of a woman who would
have married her rapist to maintain her dignity. He refused, and so
she was able to do something better. She was able to paint. To paint
stories told by men from a female perspective. At the end she enters
another of her paintings, one of her many versions of the slaughter
of Holofernes by Judith. Here's what the stage directions say about
her entrance: “Judith appears in a golden dress. She is a rockstar,
a guardian angel, the embodiment of rage.” And here's what the
character says: “The names of my foremothers may be forgotten but
yours and mine will never be.” Because it's not true that It's True
is the story of a rape, a story that seeks to be a silencing and a
full stop. It's the story of female anger, female defiance, female
strength.
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
It's a story that needs
to be told and retold and retold because patriarchy too is angry,
defiant and strong, but more than that, patriarchy is powerful, in
power, perpetually in power. And none of us know when this will
change.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
*</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
I've never asked or
read why Billy, Dorothy and Ellice chose the name Breach for their
company, but it makes me think of that rallying cry Shakespeare has
Henry V deliver on the point of battle: “Once more unto the breach,
dear friends.” Only here, the breach is not a war, but a space in
which to rage, yes, argue, yes, confront, yes, but also care,
speculate, listen, think, see things from a different angle, reshape
ideas around community. All of which, really, is the point of
theatre. Isn't it?
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
With that, dear
friends, once more unto the breach we go.</div>
</div>
maddy costahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04929576408540749708noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8651145764236805587.post-82698883409103341082018-04-14T08:51:00.000+01:002018-04-14T08:51:12.915+01:00A manner of being adequate<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: blue;"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">This
was commissioned by Simon Bowes to be presented at the symposium <a href="https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/hold-everything-dear-performance-politics-and-john-berger-tickets-44219899911" target="_blank">Hold Everything Dear: Performance, Politics and John Berger</a> happening
later today, as part of a trio of responses to that title by
<a href="http://www.somethingother.io/blog/" target="_blank">Something Other</a>, the website I co-make with Mary Paterson and Diana
Damian Martin. So really this belongs there, but my lovely friend
David pointed out that I haven't posted on here in aeons, also this
week is the seventh anniversary of Deliq and this writing
reflects on how and why it started, so it makes sense to cross-post.
Anyway: another polish of the pebble on which I think about how I do
theatre criticism. Thank you for reading.</span></span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> *</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></span>
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Before I read any
Berger – and I was late coming to him – I read an <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2011/apr/23/john-berger-life-in-writing" target="_blank">interview with him</a> by Nicholas Wroe, published in the Guardian in April 2011, in
which he talked about his “decision to abandon painting to write
full time”. Wroe quotes him as saying: “Painting is something
that you need to do if not every day, then certainly most days. It is
almost like being a pianist, if you stop you lose something. The
phrase 'Sunday painter' is not often a compliment. I was attracted to
the novel form because I was attracted to the mystery of a person's
subjectivity and behaviour, their destinies and choices. The things
that can't be schematised. The challenge is to try not just to
explain the mystery, but to ensure the mystery is shared and doesn't
remain isolated.”</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
In April 2011 I felt a
shift or a seep or a click in my brain, perhaps all three motions at
once: my second child had recently turned two, the first was now
four, and this movement inside – a synaptic jolt, the electricity
surging, or simply turning back on – meant I could think clearly
again.
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
And so I started
thinking out loud, otherwise called blogging. I wanted to write about
theatre in untrammelled ways not afforded to me by my day job in
journalism. At the time – in many ways still – bloggers were
looked down on by professional critics: you couldn't, for instance,
become a member of the Critics' Circle Drama Section as someone who
self-published. Bloggers were criticism's Sunday painters. Becoming
one created, for me, a new possibility: in unprofessionalism there
was space to think about criticism as art.
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
I have a difficult
relationship with the word art because in my early 20s I knew I'd
never have the audacity or tenacity to be an artist – specifically
painter – and that's partly how I ended up writing about theatre.
And perhaps I still wouldn't be using the word now but for two
things: working with Mary Paterson, and a passage Berger wrote in The
Shape of a Pocket, describing the relationship between the painter
and the object of their gaze:</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
“The impulse to paint
comes neither from observation nor from the soul (which is probably
blind) but from an encounter... When a painting is lifeless it is the
result of the painter not having the nerve to get close enough for a
collaboration to start. … The modern illusion concerning painting
… is that the artist is a creator. Rather he is a receiver. What
seems like creation is the act of giving form to what he has
received.”</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
What a beautiful way of
thinking about writing about theatre: a collaboration, with the
critic coming close enough to receive, and giving form to that
received.
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Blogging shaped a
pocket in which I could give different forms to writing about
performance, not only treating the form of the “review” as
plastic, malleable, open to invention, but through that attempting a
different kind of collaboration with its makers. I'm still finding
the words for how to describe that relationship: for a while I talked
of writing that honours the form of the work, by seeking to match it
or mirror it or converse with it somehow. More recently I've started
thinking about voice: the ways in which I'm trying to speak back to
the work in something like the voice with which it spoke to me,
listening so closely for its register and cadence that my writing
corresponds to it but at a remove: harmony to its melody. The impulse
to write comes from an encounter with that voice.
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
I choose to write and
to think about criticism this way not because I want to resist being
judgemental (although often I do), but because more and more I think
the challenge of writing about theatre is to try not just to explain
the mystery, but to ensure the mystery is shared and doesn't remain
isolated. Because theatre is isolated: in place and time. Very few
people see it. I want its voice to be heard beyond that very few. I'm
interested in the question of how to stop my voice getting in the
way.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
That challenge has
changed my reading of another passage by Berger, later in The Shape
of a Pocket, that again describes the act of painting but speaks to
me about criticism. He's distilled painting to two words, face and
place:
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Whatever the painter is
looking for, he's looking for its face. … And 'its face' means
what? He's looking for its return gaze and he's looking for its
expression – a slight sign of its inner life. ...</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
A place is more than an
area. A place surrounds something. A place is the extension of a
presence or the consequence of an action.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
How does a painting
become a place? … When a place is found it is found somewhere on
the frontier between nature and art. It is like a hollow in the sand
within which the frontier has been wiped out. The place of the
painting begins in this hollow.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
What preoccupied me six
years ago when I read this was that hollow in the sand where the
frontier between nature and art, between critic and theatre-maker,
between you and me, has been wiped out. But what preoccupies me now
is the place that extends from that hollow, created from the
encounter of the work's voice with mine. What are the parameters of
that place, what are the politics, and who feels invited or permitted
to inhabit it too?
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Berger stopped painting
because he “was attracted to the mystery of a person's subjectivity
and behaviour, their destinies and choices”. I have a difficult
relationship with writing because in my early 20s I knew I'd never
have the audacity or tenacity to be a writer – specifically
novellist – and that's partly how I ended up becoming a theatre
critic. As a blogger I've had more space in which to acknowledge the
ways in which my background, education, tastes, desires, loves,
secrets, frets and hurts affect the way in which I receive theatre.
Often the return gaze that I see looking for the face in a
performance is my own reflected: I might try to escape into theatre
but I'll meet myself coming back, with all the discomfort that
brings. I'm interested in how others might meet their own gaze.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
When I say others what
I mean is people who don't make or write about theatre, who might
have all sorts of complicated thoughts about the work they see, but
not a place in which to articulate them. The brilliant theatre-maker
<a href="http://welcometodialogue.com/projects/dialogue-festival/dialogue-festival-documentation/dialogue-festival-afternoon-ideas/dialogue-festival-tanuja-amarasuriyas-provocation/" target="_blank">Tanuja Amarasuriya wrote about this in a provocation</a> delivered at a
festival I co-curated in 2014:
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
There’s an awful
phrase that theatre professionals use a lot in reference to casual
theatregoers: real people. “I really want to know what real people
think of my work.” ... It’s a horrible term that demeans
everyone; it dismisses theatre-makers as phoneys and patronises
non-professionals as less informed.
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Her provocation was
that more people should feel part of the conversation about theatre:
in the bar afterwards, in blogs, in reviews. She continued:</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
We need to encourage
everyone to own their individual responses to art. If you’ve never
talked about the way something makes you feel, and the only
expressions you hear about how a piece of art makes you feel, don’t
align with what you actually feel… then you might very well either
keep quiet or believe you’re wrong. I don’t think it’s about
hearing from real people, I think it’s about hearing from more
people.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
To make this concrete,
Tanuja went on to describe how “talking about the work and hearing
other people talk about the work” changed her father's relationship
to art, encouraging him to attend, pay attention, and “influencing
the way he thought about ideas and people”. This mattered, she
wrote:</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
because my Dad comes
from Sri Lanka, a country that has been riven by a brutally divisive
civil war that I don’t think anyone inside, never mind outside the
country has any objective perspective on. It’s a country where
people I know as liberally-minded, progressive individuals suddenly
become fearfully defensive and defined in opposition. It’s a
community that needs more people who can appreciate that their own
thinking about a particular theme can change rapidly over the space
of a conversation; and more people who respect different
interpretations of the same subject by different people.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
In the years since
Tanuja wrote this, the UK has experienced a conservative upswing
triggered by the EU referendum and now I don't think it's too
fanciful to describe ourselves as “a community that needs more
people who can appreciate that their own thinking about a particular
theme can change rapidly over the space of a conversation; and more
people who respect different interpretations of the same subject by
different people”. I'm thinking not just about leave vs remain, but
about the toxic conversation happening now about anti-semitism, the
fire burning between some cis- and trans-women. In the days that I've
been writing this, Quentin Letts has been pouring tar over the RSC
for casting a black actor in what he considers a white role and it's
really easy, as a theatre critic writing towards social revolution,
or at the very least a Labour government brave enough to redistribute
wealth, restore the welfare state and redefine the narrative around
immigration, to say: there's a world of difference between me and
Letts. He's racist, homophobic, misogynist, classist, boorish,
priggish, and writes, to quote Berger in Hold Everything Dear, by
spraying “ethicides – agents that kill ethics and therefore any
notion of history and justice”, in doing so destroying or making
extinct “set after set of our human priorities”. I try very hard
not to.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
But those ethicides
reach into the hollow in the sand where the frontier between nature
and art, between critic and theatre-maker, between you and me, has
been wiped out. How could they not? They affect the place that
extends from our presence, that is the consequence of our actions.
I'm thinking about the work I choose to see, the voices I choose to
attend to, the voices I hear, and which I support. I'm thinking about
unconscious or assumed notions of excellence, and who gets to paint
or play piano every day, and of something the performance-maker
<a href="https://readingasawoman.wordpress.com/2017/08/15/you-can-say-much-more-interesting-things-about-a-scar-than-you-can-about-a-wound-interview-with-selina-thompson/" target="_blank">Selina Thompson said in an interview with Sarah Gorman in 2017</a>,
summarising a discussion she has often with other performance-makers
who are women of colour:
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
We talk about how lots
and lots of white people, especially men, especially middle class
white men, make very mediocre work. And it’s okay, it’s all
right. And we talk about how I actually don’t want to make
exceptional work anymore. I want to make mediocre work, and it be
okay. To resist that call to ‘excel’ all the time.
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
I'm thinking about the
phrase 'Sunday painter', and why it's not often a compliment. Who is
responsible for ensuring it's not a compliment. And who has the power
to change that.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
The times I feel most
privileged to do the work I do aren't when I get free tickets to
sold-out shows, although that's a bonus, or when something I've
written is praised, although that's a boost to the ego, but when I
host a theatre club. I've been doing these for five years now – a
very simple discussion event modelled on the book group, sometimes
happening post-show, sometimes at a late point in a performance run
so people can see the show in their own time then come and talk about
it – and it feels symptomatic of theatre's failure – as an
industry – to demonstrate any genuine interest in dialogue that the
work it stages might inspire that there isn't a space like this for
every work ever put on. The people who come are bus drivers, social
workers, architects, administrators; they've experienced addiction,
abuse, homelessness; they are young, old, religious, agnostic, of
every possible background. All of them bring to theatre all the
mystery of a person's subjectivity and behaviour. They look for
theatre's return gaze and often they are startled by the gaze other
people have seen; they come having hated the work, and leave wanting
to see it again. The place of theatre criticism, for me, begins in
this hollow, within which the frontier between professional and
quotidian critique has been wiped out.
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
I came late to Berger
and now I'm slowly working my way through his books; most recently,
Bento's Sketchbook. At the end, Berger offers a brief biographical
sketch of Benedict Spinoza, for whom it was made, admiring “his
calm, his frugality, his cheerful humour, his pertinence, and his
manner of being adequate”.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
I wonder what happens
to theatre, to criticism, to social dialogue, if we resist the
imposing voice of excellence, and celebrate instead the everyday, the
Sunday painters, this manner of being adequate. I have a difficult
relationship with the word expert because lack of audacity and
tenacity has me most days feeling like a fraud, but then the EU
referendum made that relationship more difficult still, because the
word expert was sprayed – asphyxiated – with ethicides by the
leave campaign and I want to distance myself from that. But there's
no qualification in theatre criticism: only long years of watching
and writing, by which token even Quentin Letts, who began reviewing
for the Daily Mail in 2004, might rank among the experts. I wonder
what happens to criticism if we describe the expertise needed to
understand it differently: as an expertise in being human, alive and
surviving this world, sharing its mysteries with each other.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-jF9qoiteRuk/WtGyLKRg0zI/AAAAAAAADjI/KRO-im70hw8pU0M1nVkaVjYo_rtY8kvigCLcBGAs/s1600/SO%2BHED%2Bberger%2Bpainting.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1200" height="320" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-jF9qoiteRuk/WtGyLKRg0zI/AAAAAAAADjI/KRO-im70hw8pU0M1nVkaVjYo_rtY8kvigCLcBGAs/s320/SO%2BHED%2Bberger%2Bpainting.jpg" width="240" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The last painting I was working on, still unfinished when I gave up</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
</div>
maddy costahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04929576408540749708noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8651145764236805587.post-40813166133906772182017-09-22T09:13:00.010+01:002022-09-23T21:47:06.869+01:00receptivity / a constant question / a clumsiness, which is a form of hospitalityNote 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 <a href="https://statesofdeliquescence.blogspot.com/2018/12/the-long-goodbye-or-breaking-up-is-hard.html" target="_blank">this post from December that year</a>, 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.
</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
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.
</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
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.
</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
*
<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
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. </div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div align="CENTER" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
BEGINNING</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
I'll start with some
background:</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
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.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
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.
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
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.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
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.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div align="CENTER" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
PICNIC</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
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.</div>
</blockquote>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
G</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
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.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
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.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
I remember the sharp
loud green of a Granny Smith's apple.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
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.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
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.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
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.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
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.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
My notes remind me that
K wriggled her foot, and did something with some tea lights.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
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.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
My notes remind me that
K peeled apples and offered chunks to the audience.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
My notes remind me that
M talked about taking everything seriously, not as an
interchangeable sign but for what it is.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
My notes remind me that
G said that things don't change, the way you look at them
changes.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
My notes remind me that
it was when M talked about framing (conceptually) that T held
the picture frame (literally) in front of G.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
My notes remind me that
K stretched her arms in the air and said: this is what I did in a
field.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
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.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
One note simply reads:
HOLD EVERYTHING DEAR.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
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.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
My notes contain the
words: J – small fire – smell now in room. I no longer
remember if this was real or metaphorical.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
My notes remind me that
someone described the Bible as a review of the Jesus show.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
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.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
The final note reads:
Indelible – thing once heard can never unknow.
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Later, G sent me
another email to say:
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
it was like, or
looked like, a creche too
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
which may be even
closer than a picnic</div>
</blockquote>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-mSfpI2G59iA/WcTFb1kRJtI/AAAAAAAACaw/MHlGL0TDK4kC78F2LjBIsvQvoVrxlWmlwCLcBGAs/s1600/berger%2Bsketch%2Btwo.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1145" height="320" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-mSfpI2G59iA/WcTFb1kRJtI/AAAAAAAACaw/MHlGL0TDK4kC78F2LjBIsvQvoVrxlWmlwCLcBGAs/s320/berger%2Bsketch%2Btwo.jpg" width="229" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
<br /></div>
<div align="CENTER" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
POCKET</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
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.
</div>
</blockquote>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
John Berger</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
The Space of a
Pocket</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
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.”
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
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”.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
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?
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Describing The Field of
Performance for Contemporary Theatre Review, Chris remembers:
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
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.</div>
</blockquote>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
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”.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div align="CENTER" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
CANDLE</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Draw a candle at your
end</div>
</blockquote>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
R</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
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 –
</div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">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.</span></span></div>
</blockquote>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
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:
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Please imagine this is
written on a beautiful slip of paper, in a small envelope, received
in the post. It says:</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Draw a candle at your
end.</div>
</blockquote>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
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.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
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.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
There were other
instructions in the room, notes left by Chris as prompts for the
performers whenever they felt stuck. K recalled:</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
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.</div>
</blockquote>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
In my notebook I find a
scruffy drawing of a candle.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-d5WsN0-lAFQ/WcTFmKNimgI/AAAAAAAACa0/qdp_4mdWJQ0nQ9Yd_ent1AjFQFwzQ0_PQCLcBGAs/s1600/berger%2Bsketch%2Bthree.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1126" height="320" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-d5WsN0-lAFQ/WcTFmKNimgI/AAAAAAAACa0/qdp_4mdWJQ0nQ9Yd_ent1AjFQFwzQ0_PQCLcBGAs/s320/berger%2Bsketch%2Bthree.jpg" width="225" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
<br /></div>
<div align="CENTER" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
NAKED</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
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.</div>
</blockquote>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
K</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
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.
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
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.”</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
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:</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
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.
</div>
</blockquote>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
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</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
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;</div>
</blockquote>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
art that is “untamed
and undomesticated”,
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
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.</div>
</blockquote>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Dougald and Kingsnorth
identify Berger's writing among that art. I'd put the naked searching
body of J there too.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
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.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div align="CENTER" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
DREAMS</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
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.</div>
</blockquote>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
T</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
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:</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Could theatre be a
place in which ideas</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Are made out of bodies</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Breathing together</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Moving around each
other</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Nonsensical scenarios</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Nightmares</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Fantasies</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
In which we think not
by listening</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
But by doing</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Together</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Figuring out a way of
living</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
In the shapes that form
in the space between us</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Out of chaos</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
And play</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
And possibilities</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
A theatre that is
actually, properly dream-like</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Because it feels like a
real life</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
That we might be living</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
But aren’t</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Yet</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
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:</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">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.</span></span></div>
</blockquote>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
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 <i>and</i> listening. A space in which doing was
made possible <i>by</i> 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:
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
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.</div>
</blockquote>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
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”.
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
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.”</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
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.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
<br /></div>
<div align="CENTER" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
SHAME</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
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.
</div>
</blockquote>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
K</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
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:</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
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.
</div>
</blockquote>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
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.
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
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:
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
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.</div>
</blockquote>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
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.
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div align="CENTER" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
THE ENDING
THAT ISN'T</div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
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.</div>
</blockquote>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Chris Goode</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Contemporary
Theatre Review</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
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:</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
writing about theatre
doesn't replace the thing
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
easy for the writing to
replace the work</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
text as choreographer's
notation of experience of knowing</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
another choreographer
can use to create another version
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
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.”</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
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:</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">With
spaces and projects like that, if they </span></span><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>must</i></span></span><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
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.</span></span></div>
</blockquote>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
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.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
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.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
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.
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
The writing of Berger
reminds us – as he says of Hieronymous Bosch – that
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
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.</div>
</blockquote>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
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.</div>
</div>
maddy costahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04929576408540749708noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8651145764236805587.post-39415376796306902562017-08-26T23:41:00.000+01:002017-08-27T10:10:17.923+01:00Eleven kinds of loneliness (for Annie Siddons, with love)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<i><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-KfKK5TSx-E0/WaH43uQOKyI/AAAAAAAACU4/dVO0V_T3OPA9rC4ANAkiwgRxLF63cX15QCLcBGAs/s1600/siddons%2Bmap.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1344" data-original-width="1600" height="268" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-KfKK5TSx-E0/WaH43uQOKyI/AAAAAAAACU4/dVO0V_T3OPA9rC4ANAkiwgRxLF63cX15QCLcBGAs/s320/siddons%2Bmap.jpg" width="320" /></a></i></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i><span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The loneliness of professional envy</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">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’ <a href="http://anniesiddons.co.uk/suburbia/" target="_blank">How (Not) To Live in Suburbia</a> 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. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">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 <a href="http://synonymsforchurlish.tumblr.com/post/137845900938/for-annie-siddons-argh-london-i-love-it-here" target="_blank">what Megan Vaughan had written</a> 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.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i><span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The loneliness of the engaged tone</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">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.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i><span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">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</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Shall I tell you something about Annie Siddons? </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Yes, that would be nice.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i><span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The loneliness of living in suburbia when urbia isn't just
what you're used to but defines your very being</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">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...</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">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. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i><span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">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</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">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.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">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 </span><span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">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. T</span>he 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. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i><span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The loneliness of feeling so crowded by others' needs and
demands that you don't have space to think</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">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.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i><span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The loneliness so deep-rooted, lived with so long, that it's
not even recognisable, except that it is</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">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. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">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. </span></div>
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">“I've never thought of myself as lonely before. But I think
that's it. I think that's what I've been feeling.”</span></div>
</blockquote>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">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.</span>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">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. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">I didn't say any of that to her on the night, though.
Somehow I couldn't find the words.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i><span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The loneliness of feeling like you don’t know how to talk,
even to the people you love most</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">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.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">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.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i><span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">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 </span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">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.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">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.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Before I had to abandon Bluets, I came across this
paragraph: </span></div>
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">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.</span></div>
</blockquote>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">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: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blessed_Ludovica_Albertoni" target="_blank">sculptures by Bernini</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Calling_of_St_Matthew_(Caravaggio)" target="_blank">paintings by Caravaggio</a>, technically flawless, ravishing. </span>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Those Caravaggios were my salvation, my access to solitude
amid the divine.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i><span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">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</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">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.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">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?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i><span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The loneliness of trying to do your best but knowing your
best isn’t good enough</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">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.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">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.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">At her most clipped Rankine writes: </span></div>
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Define loneliness.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Yes. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">It's what we can't do for each other. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">What do we mean to each other?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">What does a life mean?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Why are we here if not for each other?</span></div>
</blockquote>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">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.</span>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i><span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">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</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The last two paragraphs, each isolated within their own
page, of Don't Let Me Be Lonely read: </span></div>
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Or Paul Celan said that the poem was no different from a
handshake. <i>I cannot see any basic difference between a handshake and a poem</i>
– 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. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">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.</span></div>
</blockquote>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">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.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">But
that apprehension, too, can produce a lonely kind of feeling.</span></div>
maddy costahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04929576408540749708noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8651145764236805587.post-62612418443839157622017-04-09T02:51:00.002+01:002021-07-10T00:20:35.447+01:00Trying to measure the earthquake inside<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<i><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">Assignment:
write a list of everything that fucks you off. Choose things that
directly affect you. It's easy for us all to agree that war is shitty
but if you haven't been on the receiving end of warfare, don't put it
down. </span></i>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">The
performance of With Force and Noise that I saw at IBT17 began with
<a href="http://cargocollective.com/hannahjanesullivan" target="_blank">Hannah Sullivan</a> walking stiffly, tentatively, as though the floor
were carpeted in speckled eggshells, to the position near the
audience that she held throughout, near enough for the faintest
flicker of her features to register but not quite close enough to
read the delicate embroidery of her suit. (That detail is much easier
to see on <a href="https://vimeo.com/159815961" target="_blank">this video</a>.) She stood and in a
voice barely registering above a whisper began to sing, a single
verse that with every repetition grew fractionally louder until she
couldn't hold the tone of it, notes lurching wayward and throat
scratched with quiver:</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">What a
pity it is </span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">to
tease me to sing, </span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">when
it does not lay in my power </span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">to do
such a thing.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">Except
clearly it does, because here she is doing it. A pared but potent
metaphor for the ways in which humans feel goaded when challenged,
react rather than act, wallow, overlook their agency, and give up
before they even try.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">With
Force and Noise is concerned with protest and revolution, both words
stitched into Sullivan's costume, along with careful outlines of
people marching with placards and the entirely correct name Jeremy
Cunt. There's a bit of me thinks that the costume is funny, because
it's impossible to be angry when doing embroidery: it's the most
placid and domestic of past-times. There's a bit of me thinks that
first bit is an idiot, because there's a whole lineage of
needle-wielding feminists: <a href="http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1757&context=tsaconf" target="_blank">suffragettes</a> who used embroidery to
communicate their demand, their frustration, their experience of
prison;
<a href="https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/mark-my-words-the-subversive-history-of-women-using-thread-as-ink" target="_blank">artists</a> who shaped innovative forms of expression through ancient
stitchcraft;
an entire history – herstory – of political activity that
Sullivan and designer Annalies Henny undoubtedly know and respect.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">Before
protest or revolution, however, With Force and Noise is concerned
with anger: the anger needed to prick people into doing something to
change the society they live in. Sullivan's text is (deliberately) a
patchwork of storytelling and verbatim utterances, unknown voices
synthesised with her own, all of them hesitant, diffident, describing
moments of experiencing anger with a kind of embarrassment. I wonder
whether all of the people she spoke to, or had in mind when shaping
the text, were white. Whether the threads of inhibition are
interwoven with whiteness. </span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">I
didn't take enough notes during the show; what I did write is terse
and enigmatic, but might also be suggestive, if I'd ever gotten round
to reading Jung: “dream/scratch the black walls/cut the white sky”
reads one line; “then revolutionaries ran into everything”
another. I don't remember the detail, I remember the atmosphere:
focused, sparse and yet full, seemingly reticent yet so forceful she
might have been gripping her audience individually by the shoulders
and giving us each a shake. Ultimately it's her body that shakes,
judders and rattles with rage, and as it moves there is the eerie
crashing sound of cutlery clattering, crockery shattering, domestic
ease splintering, as though an earthquake were rumbling beneath our
feet with Sullivan as its epicentre. I thought this was recorded
sound at first, but then she turned around and her back was hobbled
by bells. I found the revelation of this burden so unnerving: it made
manifest some pain and weight otherwise locked deep within. </span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<i><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">Assignment:
Look at the list of things that fuck you off, the injustices that
leave you inarticulate but with rage in your belly. Choose one and
write a rant in response to it. It need not be coherent, intelligent
or balanced.</span></i></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">The
day I devoured Jessa Crispin's Why I Am Not a Feminist: A Feminist
Manifesto, I lost my voice. As I write this sentence, 10 days later,
it still hasn't properly come back. And aside from the germs there's
a weird psychological thing going on: certain conversations or
encounters are closing my voice box. I'm trying to speak but
literally haven't the energy, the power, to do such a thing.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">Devoured
isn't quite the word for how I read Why I Am Not a Feminist: it was
more like gulping down an icy drink on a sweltering day, gratefully
but also flinching. The book is brief, sharp and angry. It is also
coherent, intelligent and balanced (although if you're a man
encountering the bit on page 111 where she says: “I just want to be
clear that I don't give a fuck about your response to this book”,
balanced might be the last way you'd describe it. That chapter
certainly put the critic from the <a href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/feminisms-failure-jessa-crispins-why-i-am-not-a-feminist/" target="_blank">LA Review of Books</a> off). Above all,
Crispin is concerned with power: the power of patriarchy to hypnotize
women into perpetuating its systems; the power that humans have to
shape and instigate change, if only they set their minds to it. </span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">As
such, it's an excoriating book, because it exposes the weakness in
feminist thinking, and with it hidden hypocrisy. There are many
strands to feminism, and it's worth making clear that Crispin keeps
her lens quite tight: to categorise her focus as (relatively) young,
white, cis and middle-class feminism is not totally fair but also not
totally inaccurate. What she wants is a feminism that dismantles the
hierarchies “by which the powerful maintain their position through
the control and the oppression of the many”. What she sees is a
feminism concerned with attaining power and wielding power. “A
feminism that springs from self-interest,” she warns, “that is
embraced because it more easily gives access to power – rather than
being embraced out of any social awareness – will necessarily be
part of this system of power and oppression, and so meaningless as a
way towards universal human rights.” What she sees is a feminism
choosing to continue “excluding and exploiting”, in the ongoing
quest for equality.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">In
principle – by which I mean, as a basic position, and also in
keeping with the principles by which I try to live – I agree with
Crispin's argument absolutely. (OK, there is probably the occasional
sentence that I question or recoil from, but none of them have stayed
in memory.) But I also know I agree with her only in thought, not
action. She lives “outside the system”; I bought in. And now I'm
trying to bring up kids there, I'm seeing the extent to which thought
without action is insufficient. On page 87 Crispin writes: “Growing
up in a system that measures success by money, that values
consumerism and competition, that devalues compassion and community,
… girls and women have already been indoctrinated into what to
want. Without close examination, without conversion into a different
way of thinking and acting, what that girl wants is going to be
money, power, and, possibly, her continued subjugation, because a
feminism that does not provide an alternative to the system will
still have the system's values.” In the time between first writing
and rewriting this sentence my daughter turned 10; her favourite
activity is shopping in Zara and Top Shop, and me talking to her
about exploitation in the fashion industry is doing nothing to
convert her to a different way of thinking or acting. In taking her
to the wrong clothes shops at all I have colluded in her
indoctrination.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">(And
now it's the morning of international women's day and, more
pertinently, the global strike action, and guess who did the school
run? Guess who is sitting at their desk rather than joining a day of
protests on the streets in the rain? I have zero sympathy with the
women writing sentences, for money, like this: “As a mother whose
husband works long hours away from home, how am I supposed to stop
taking care of my very young children?” Er, you've had weeks to
sort your shit out: tell your husband that he's doing the unpaid
labour, ie standing in solidarity with you, and go stand in
solidarity with other humans. But here, again, is the hypocrisy
Crispin exposes: it's not as if I've done this.)</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">I felt
frustrated, reading the book, that it's 94% diagnosis of the problem,
when what I crave is a list of actions, solutions, a 13-point
programme to destroy capitalism and patriarchy. Yes, I know, I'm
asking for someone to make it easy, or at least easier, and that's
ridiculous. Where Crispin does instruct, she has already had an
impact, particularly with this paragraph on value: “In order to
dismantle our patriarchal, capitalistic, consumerist society … we
must stop telling each other stories that equate money with value. We
must imagine a world where value is expressed with things like love
and care.” I've fretted so much – on this blog, elsewhere –
about how I am and am not paid for the writing I do, not just because
I'm neurotic about it but as part of a wider conversation about the
ways in which art (and criticism) are (de)valued and exploited. When
artists I know are not only struggling to make rent but being
expected to work for free because they're “doing what they love”,
it's vital to keep that discussion going, and expand it to include
more people. But are there other ways in which I can contribute to
stretching the conversation, arguing for and shaping a dialect of
other values, reclaiming the language of love that has been so
violently and ruthlessly co-opted by market forces and putting it to
fairer purpose? That might be useful work I could do. </span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">This
is Crispin's challenge throughout: nothing will change without
dedicated work. And by work she doesn't mean writing blog posts and
getting busy on twitter, but putting active effort and energy into
building new and non-patriarchal systems of social interaction. “We
have to understand our power, that we are not at the mercy of this
culture,” she says elsewhere in that 6% of solutions. “We are
participants of it. We can shape it. But that requires work, not
simply commentary. Stop reacting to the moving parts. Lay your attack
at the machinery itself.” Figuring out how is also part of the
work.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<i><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">Assignment:
add expletives to the rant, and a call to arms. Who do you want to
stand alongside you? How do you get them on board?</span></i></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">An
hour after With Force and Noise, I returned to the same room in the
Wickham theatre for <a href="http://exeuntmagazine.com/features/fk-alexander-i-use-art-as-my-gun/" target="_blank">FK Alexander</a>'s Recovery. Except it wasn't the
same room at all: the bank of raked seats had been pushed out of
sight, erasing the line between performer and audience; the floor was
scattered with cushions, arranged around a central circle of gongs
and singing bowls; and animated images were projected on a side wall,
abstract, gloopy things, like the squirming movements of bacteria
under a microscope. Welcoming her audience, FK gave reassurance:
there is no metaphor or hidden meaning here, nothing that you need to
work out. And so I lay on the floor, image flow in sight, draped my
coat over me like a blanket against the draughty chill, and let my
brain drift. </span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">The
hour began softly, with caressing luminous rings and chimes, so
mesmeric I began to unburden, for a few moments might have fallen
asleep. And somewhere in that rare quiescence, that limbo of
placidity, another noise began to rise: like static, radio crackle,
electrical disturbance; like the atmospheric build-up of a hurricane;
not just the rattle of cutlery and crockery that warns of impending
earthquake but the ruptures that it brings, the deafening crash of
masonry crumbling, buildings keeling to the ground; the volume rising
and rising still, the sound at once alien and familiar; a sound I
know in my deepest self, because I hear it between my ears so often,
a sound that suffocates, and might drown me, that has me tearing at
my skin as though to claw through its surface, seeking release from
its pressure, release from everything against which it roars. The
sound rises and somehow in its inescapable aggression what I felt was
relief: the relief of being known, understood, held. And then it
subsides and the hums and flickers and gentle scintillations of the
gongs and singing bowls re-emerge from its depths; there is a slow
fold into silence, and then another invitation, to take all the time
we need to return to the street and the rest of life.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">I left
Recovery wanting three things: to be hugged, to tell FK how much it
had meant to me, and to write, the volcanic kind of writing that is
all heat and light and rupture from the centre of my being. It's
probably as well that I didn't, that I've waited a few weeks,
because... why? I'm always grateful to people who turn their skin
inside out online. But they tend to be writing about life; I'm
writing about theatre. I guess it's the ways in which that sentence
is a lie that keeps me coming back here.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">In the
four weeks since writing the muted paragraph that appeared on <a href="http://www.inbetweentime.co.uk/news/maddy-costa-writer-residence-5/" target="_blank">IBT's own site</a> and writing this, FK has presented a five-hour, durational
but also drop-in version of Recovery at the Wellcome Collection as
part of the Sick of the Fringe festival. I couldn't go so this is
just surmise, but I can't imagine it working as a drop-in: it's too
carefully orchestrated, too deliberately crafted with beginning,
middle and end, not to be encountered as a whole (and indeed
holistic) experience. It's an assumption supported by the <a href="http://www.thewhitepube.co.uk/fk-alexander" target="_blank">review by the brilliant White Pube</a> duo (Gabrielle de la Puente and Zarina
Muhammad), who – possibly exaggerating – say they stayed for 12
minutes, enough time to experience something of the resting circle
and something of the cacophony, then left with some incisive
questions:</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">[Zarina:]
I am so fascinated by white spirituality & its components. Bc tbh
European Philosophy & religion r separate things (which is odd 4
me bc it's not the case for my experience... I feel like Hinduism,,,
duh they're the same... but Islam, also kinda blurrrs the line
between religion & philosophy in a way Occidental traditions
could never kinda fathom??) & the west hasn't rlly got a history
of spiritualism;,;,;,;. … when hippy culture kinda said fuk u to
capitalism n if that's a binary, does that mean there's something
about the conditions created by anglo-saxon protestantism &
capitalism that just INHERENTLY rejects the spiritual??? Does
protestant/ - capitalism represent & vibe off that part of
knowledge that is quantified & qualified (something the spiritual
kinda rejects, bc i feel it as a system of knowing and learning thru
ur body & the very f a c t of yr corporeality.??? u get me??? ) n
like... amongst all of that is the way whiteness frames meditation:
as an activity separate & cut off from any other action than
itself.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">There's
a lot here to unpack, but at a basic level Zarina just didn't have
the same experience as me: I felt totally absorbed by Recovery,
whereas she felt repelled. What I understand Zarina to be saying is
that FK appropriates eastern spiritualities to give (mostly white)
audiences a meditation experience, but one that gets no further than
a meaningless temporary escape. What I understand FK to be doing is
commenting on the ways in which the industries of, for instance,
self-help and mindfulness not only appropriate eastern spiritualities
but skim their depths and warp them from their original meaning to
create a system that deliberately numbs people, distracting them from
the actual problem – the impossibility of living within a
neoliberal economy – by presenting the problem as internal, a
question of attitude, nothing to do with external political
realities. Zarina thinks FK remakes this system; I think she condemns
it and claims the space for something else. </span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">In
thinking this I'm much influenced by discussion elsewhere: in the IBT
writing I mentioned that Recovery reminds me of James Leadbitter/the
vacuum cleaner's Madlove activism, and his shaping of “a safe place
to go mad”; that's where it seems to me useful that Recovery takes
place in a “cut off” sphere. Recovery also reminds me of
theatre-maker <a href="https://www.elliestamp.com/" target="_blank">Ellie Stamp</a> talking about how mindfulness makes her
furious, because it's designed to extinguish fury, and with it the
power to create change, by smothering it in acceptance of the way
things are. If capitalism is a system that breaks people, the
“recovery” that FK offers is a different system of knowing, of
listening through the body to everything that hurts, and
understanding that it hurts because the world is loud and violent and
bores to the core of your bones. But part of Zarina's problem, as I
read it, is that, as a white woman, FK is able to employ the
spiritualities of other cultures as her tools: an act of power
comparable to that of the white colonialists and capitalists who for
centuries have used the riches of the east to their advantage. At the
root of the difference between Zarina and me is the way in which we
see (or don't see) FK's whiteness, and through that see historical
and contemporary white western exploitation of eastern cultures. And
I have no idea how to respond to that, except by listening.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<i><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">What
if depression … could be traced to histories of colonialism,
genocide, slavery, legal exclusion, and everyday segregation and
isolation that haunt all of our lives, rather than to biochemical
imbalances? … [W]hat are the consequences for white people of
living lives of privilege in the vicinity of the violence of racism? [Ann Cvetkovich, Depression: A Public Feeling]</span></i></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">At the
end of January I started an online workshop run by Scottee called
<a href="http://www.scottee.co.uk/single-post/2016/11/29/Notepad-Warrior-Online-Workshop" target="_blank">Notepad Warrior</a>. It was supposed to last four weeks, but here I am in
the middle of March and not yet halfway through. To be honest, I'll
probably spend the next four years working on it. But for now, I'm
stuck. I'm specifically stuck on the assignments I've included here,
all edited versions of exercises set in the first couple of weeks.
I'm stuck because, in following that first instruction to list only
“things that directly affect you” as things that fuck me off,
I've collided into a concrete wall of privilege. So for instance,
threats to abortion access fuck me off, but I've never had an
abortion, and now I'm in my early 40s I'm never likely to require
one, so that's that one discounted. The treatment of homeless people
fucks me off, but I was nine when my family got evicted from our flat
by an unscrupulous landlord, we were only homeless for a couple of
weeks, and I barely remember it anyway, so that doesn't feel like it
counts either. I get fucked off by the insidious ways in which poor
people are manoeuvred into paying more for utilities, car insurance,
you name it, but that's not something I've been affected by in adult
life either, especially as my husband is a canny one for haggling a
deal. Racism fucks me off, but I've never felt its impact. I could go
on. The point is, when it came to choosing one thing from that list
and writing a rant, the object of that rant inevitably, disgustedly,
frustratedly, was myself: my well-meaning but ineffectual, privileged
self. </span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">Looking
back at the list, I'm surprised by my omissions. Motherhood isn't on
it: I suppose because I drew it up on my sixth night away from the
family out of seven, enough time that the bruises from constantly
headbutting the situations that motherhood puts me in to had faded.
(And yes, it should be parenting: I'd be fucked off about the
elision, except I'm efficiently programmed not to notice.) For the
same reason, perhaps, the national curriculum is missing, even though
I'm witnessing directly its rapid asphyxiation of curiosity and
creativity in my children. Also missing is the English language: I
suppose because, even though there is so much about this language
that infuriates me (its in-built capacity for racism; the way seminal
is used synonymously with importance and value; its lack of
elasticity, particularly in relation to gender, and ability to force
binary where multiplicity would be more natural and humane), it's
something that I can have a modicum of control over, using some
words/constructions and avoiding others. Something I can't control is
complicity: it is impossible, in this society, not to be complicit in
inequality, abuse of humans and natural resources, the systems of
oppression that, as Crispin puts it, “we inadequately convey with
words like 'patriarchy' or 'capitalism'”. Silent complicity isn't
on the list either.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">(And
now it's the morning of April 5 and all I seem to have inside my head
is the low breathy whirr of an air-conditioning machine set to
temperate. I've lost count of the number of nights I've stayed up as
the clock has ticked towards morning, struggling with these
paragraphs. If the starting of this blog was the stoking of a fire,
the flames that flared have long gone out: I no longer know what the
point is of this writing, of my writing at all. And the more I read
of people with privilege bleating about how <a href="http://exeuntmagazine.com/features/working-class-dinner-party/" target="_blank">they too are troubled</a> by
or depressed within these systems of inequality, or recommendations
for how white people can be <a href="https://theestablishment.co/welcome-to-the-anti-racism-movement-heres-what-you-ve-missed-711089cb7d34" target="_blank">genuine allies</a> to people of colour, or
even just good people [a twitter thread I now can't find], the more I hear in my own voice that bleating,
that whining, that anxiety around loss of voice, loss of power, loss
of prestige in a system of hierarchy.)</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">I
think about the possibly white people whose voices are heard in
fragments in With Force and Noise, struggling to express anger or
name a reason to be angry: how much is that to do with this idea of
authenticity, a perceived absence of first-hand experience and
“direct affect”? I feel myself wanting to evade something here:
wanting to protest that you don't have to experience injustice or
oppression directly to care. That a key component of humanity is the
capacity for empathy. And then I remember how I gave no real thought
to the rules around child maintenance, or Legal Aid, or how child
arrangement cases are conducted in family courts, particularly those
cases in which the woman is claiming domestic violence, particularly
those in which her claims of domestic violence have been overlooked,
because the evidence to prove them was assumed insufficient to bring
to trial, until I accompanied a friend to the West London Family
Court – truly a place where dreams go to die, in so many painfully
literal ways – and watched the man who had been controlling her
existence also control the narrative to get the child access he
wanted. I remember that I didn't care about the education system
until I had children at school; nor did I think about the segregation
that kicks in at secondary level (such is the intersection of class
and race that segregation is what wealth creates) until witnessing it
first-hand on visits to local comprehensive and private schools. I
could go on, again. I could talk of hypocrisy again.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">I've
been writing this while spending time in a rehearsal room with X the Derek Jarman film Jubilee. It's a punk film,
centred on a girl gang conjured up as “the shadow of this time”
by a mystic for Queen Elizabeth I, running rampage in an apocalyptic
England ravaged by poverty, unemployment, ineffectual politics and
social disorder. Something that one of the performers, the sharp and
lovely Temi Wilk<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">ey</span>, said in the first week has burrowed into me: the
young women in the film are rebels without a cause, railing at
nothing because they're so privileged they have nothing to rail
against. Whereas if they were black, they would know what makes them
angry. And it would be white supremacy. </span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">I've
also been writing this while listening to the to-and-fro argument
triggered by the Channel 4 interview with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
Reading back on the paragraph two weeks later, I realise I have no
appetite to re-rehearse what that argument entailed, and delete
everything except the first sentence. All I feel able to add is this:
there is feminism, there are feminisms, and then there is the
expectation that women, especially those who position themselves as
in any way allies to people more marginalised than themselves, must
exist in a mode of constant perfection, always saying exactly the
right thing, but also being silent and supportive. And suddenly I'm
struck by how similar these expectations are to those that attach to
motherhood.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">I
wanted to do Scottee's workshop because it says it will “help you
channel your inner art activist” and for ages now I've felt the
need to break myself open in some way, find routes towards a
different kind of self-expression, stop feeling so futile and surplus
to requirement, silence the noise in my head of constant criticism,
or at least learn to harness it or find in it something useful and
supportive, something that will guide me into the world, specifically
the world of making – making art, but more than that, making social
activity. Although I haven't finished the course, and although I've
raised questions about that listing exercise, and although I feel a
failure, because all the indications are that I'm not an artist at
all, or an activist for that matter, Notepad Warrior has been
brilliant and fantastically helpful: a challenge I keep trying to
hide from, but that follows me around like a Jack Russell, nipping at
my ankles so I never forget its demand. I write this at the end of an
intensive week of interviewing people about the “civic role of the
arts”, not words I'd choose but words I feel I instinctively
understand: people like Tom Andrews at <a href="http://peopleunited.org.uk/" target="_blank">People United</a>, whose work is
entirely an expression of radical kindness; and David Slater at
<a href="http://www.entelechyarts.org/" target="_blank">Entelechy Arts</a>, whose work re-creates models of community eroded by
urbanism, the digitalisation of existence, and austerity; and Carine
Osment, who with her friend Alexandre runs the Farnham <a href="http://funpalaces.co.uk/" target="_blank">Fun Palace</a>,
and through that has become a genuinely active participant in local
civic life. Everything in Scottee's course points in the same
direction.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">But it
also points back to writing, and its uses. Crispin's Why I Am Not a
Feminist is essentially Scottee's second week of assignments in book
form: a rant, with added expletives and colour, transformed into a
manifesto. I read its final chapter – in particular, its rallying
cry to “reclaim our imaginations” – thinking of the Department
of Feminist Conversations, a project I'm doing with Mary Paterson and
Diana Damian, the <a href="http://tinyletter.com/Feminist/archive" target="_blank">Tiny Letters</a> we're writing to the future, the many
aspirations we have for that project – and all the things
preventing us from fulfilling them, from day jobs to childcare. The
same dull stuff feminism has been talking about for decades, in other
words. Progress isn't linear: I know this, we know this. (How funny
to re-encounter that sentence after interviewing <a href="http://exeuntmagazine.com/features/le-gateau-chocolat-interview/" target="_blank">Le Gateau Chocolat</a>:
it's a line he also said to me.) Progress is slow and stumbling and
easy to push aside. But the sun keeps rising and we need to keep
trying, because living without that song isn't living at all.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<i><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">We
must lay claim to the culture, occupy it. We must remember that our
world does not have to be this way. We do not have to reward
exploitation, we do not have to support the degradation of the
planet, of our souls, of our bodies. We can resist. We must stop
thinking so small.</span></i></div>
<i>
</i>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<i><br /></i>
</div>
<i>
</i>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<i><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">We
must reclaim our imaginations. We have been limited by the
patriarchal imagination, infected by it. We see only as far as they
see. </span></i>
</div>
<i>
</i>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<i><br /></i>
</div>
<i>
</i>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<i><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">We
must begin again to see beyond the structures we've been given. The
way we order our lives, our homes, our work, our souls – our
worldviews must be reimagined in wholly new ways. This is more
important than ever before. [Jessa Crispin, Why I Am Not a Feminist,
p150]</span></i></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">On
Thursday, on a whim, I bought a new notebook. (Thank you Scottee for the encouragement.) On Friday, also
whimsical, I inscribed a paragraph from John Berger's Hold Everything
Dear on the first page. “Not all desires lead to freedom, but
freedom is the experience of a desire being acknowledged, chosen and
pursued. Desire never concerns the mere possession of something, but
the changing of something. Desire is a wanting. A wanting now.
Freedom does not constitute the fulfilment of that wanting, but the
acknowledgement of its supremacy.”</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">Already
Saturday has turned into Sunday, and the noise in my brain is of
electricity surging, crackling, dying out. What recovery could solve
this, what force could answer this, what noise could replace this?
Somehow, with all the writing, there's still so much to figure out.</span></div>
</div>
maddy costahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04929576408540749708noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8651145764236805587.post-46288117749630174292016-11-25T11:19:00.001+00:002016-11-25T11:19:18.527+00:00a love letter to Anna Meredith<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">Here
are some things that the <a href="http://www.annameredith.com/#new-page-1" target="_blank">Anna Meredith</a> gig at the Scala reminded me
of:</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">I'm
aged about 20 and I'm watching Tortoise play live in a drab room
above a pub in the wastelands of Camden. I feel like I'm on ecstasy
because I want to kiss everyone in the room, because they're playing
Cornpone Brunch – a song that sounds so tempered on record, so
constrained – and it's exploding, propelling, the four arms of the
two drummers blurring, the rhythm taut but expanding, swelling, the
melody so joyful, beaming, and I know, I know that it's impossible
for my body to feel happier, more full and flushed with the sheer
fucking rapture of being alive, than it does right now in this room.
It is one of four times I see Tortoise play in the space of barely a
week, and every single one of those shows triggers the same rush of
euphoria. </span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">It's
1996: another day, same era. The needle falls on Squarepusher's Port
Rhombus EP. There's a bubble of melody like the glint of tropical
fish just out of reach of the sun, and the febrile click of an
electronic drum pattern that gets faster and faster until it jitters
uncontrolled, multiplying, erupting, splintering, contracting into
order then accelerating again. My heartbeat, seduced by the
melancholy of the chords, responds to the drumbeat in kind; muscles
glitch in rhythm. It's only three songs but the speed of it, the
concentration of it, the sheer fucking energy of it, leave me winded.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">Aphex
Twin. I mean, there was a moment back there when it felt like Aphex
Twin was basically god, right?</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">It's
some time in 2008, and I'm working on a column called Readers
Recommend for the Guardian. Each week I choose a topic and readers
suggest songs related to it, and I choose two playlists, a top 10
which gets published in the paper, and a b-list, like a runners-up
prize, for the following week's blog. By this point I know a few
things about my taste in music that aren't going to change. I know,
for instance, that although I loved Robert Plant's collaboration with
Alison Krauss, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/2007/oct/26/folk.shopping" target="_blank">Raising Sand</a>, Led Zeppelin are repellent. I know that
death metal makes me nauseous. And I know prog rock – a phrase I
use fairly loosely to describe any ponderous music, probably made in
the 1970s, involving flutes and interminable guitar solos – is
awful. I cannot abide guitar solos. Not even when Jimi is playing
them.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">I
can't remember any more why it came up, but one week on Readers
Recommend someone suggested the song In the Court of the Crimson King
by King Crimson. I listen to it. And I'm... transported. It's utterly
compelling. Dramatic, rousing, delicate, taking all the time it needs
to develop, to tell its story not just narratively but melodically.
I'm listening to it again now for the first time in a few years, and
sure, part of me wants to claim that I was under the influence of
Grace Slick/Jefferson Airplane's White Rabbit, but another part of me
is also thinking: swoon.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">The
thing about Tortoise, Sqaurepusher, Aphex and King Crimson (King
fucking Crimson though), in case it's not already obvious, is:
they're all men. And so the intoxication, the sheer fucking elation
of the Anna Meredith gig has, somewhere in the mix, a profound
gratitude and satisfaction at seeing a woman – a woman in her
late-30s at that – in control of those rapid-fire drumbeats, those
arcs of sound, those reins of contain and release. I felt a little
sad that the song at the Scala that met with the quietest cheer was
Last Rose, sung by Meredith in a voice high and light as a helium
balloon: for sure it was restrained, a fragile tempered thing, but
that's part of Meredith's skill, the complexity and integrity with
which she balances turbulence and composure. </span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">I
<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/mar/30/anna-meredith-review-classical-composer-industrial-noise-varmints-album" target="_blank">first saw her</a> in March this year, by accident really: I was looking
for gig reviews to pitch to the Guardian, her name had come up when I
was working on texts for the new website of the National Youth
Orchestra, where she's much admired for her composition Body Parts –
no instruments, music made from the slap of hands against faces,
torsos, legs, hands, the click and thump of skin against muscle,
flab, fabric, skin – and I figured it'd be interesting to see what
a contemporary classical composer might be doing in a pop framework.
At the ICA, Meredith and her band all wore black with gold accents –
best was drummer Sam Wilson, with a huge gold-mirror dinosaur
skeleton necklace from Tatty Divine – and played like they'd found
the key to harnessing the electricity of the skies. Frantic,
screeching riffs that I'd assumed were constructed on synthesisers
turned out to be played on live cello, fingers swarming across
strings like a colony of cockroaches confronted by lamplight. Wilson
might have been both drummers from Tortoise synthesised into one.
There was a tuba – a fucking tuba! sorry, I know, too much swearing
– strident, resplendent, absurd in its enormity. And over at the
side, behind a bank of keyboards dressed in tacky gold velvet, with
drums and glockenspiel and occasionally wielding a clarinet, was
Meredith, giggling with the fun of it all, thanking us profusely –
I'm acting like it's a wedding, she said – bouncing about in a way
I'll wager she never gets to do in the concert halls where her other
compositions are performed. That was it for me: absolute, undying
love. I went and bought the album from her at the merch stall and
could barely even speak.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">That
gig was great: the Scala gig was even better. I stood almost at the
front, hairs on both arms fizzing, ribcage ruptured by the weight of
the bass, beaming and basking. Six months of playing together has
made the band harder, faster, stronger: Meredith composes tight, so
every track stays true to the recording, just with the voltage
emphatically cranked. What's startling about the arrangements in the
instrumentals – that is, the more vigorous and invigorating music –
is how rhythmically unstable it is: she'll start in one tempo but
will surreptitiously slip in another, forcing the rest of the
instruments to adjust to the shift, and then she'll do it again, each
time creating a lurch, a dissonance, but also the pleasure of pattern
slipping into place, of a Rubik's cube suddenly resolving. And while
in a, let's say, prog-ish setting her instruments might be given
individual spotlight attention, here they are embedded in the unit;
there's a lot of fiddly business on the guitar but it's always
integral to the texture, the warp to the cellos' weft.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">If I
were trying really hard to be critical (ha!) I'd wonder if the
exactitude of the playing might have a downside, a lack of
improvisatory spontaneity, but Meredith is smarter than that, too:
she knows just how to transform each each gig into a unique event.
Her Scala show began with her and Wilson on stage, all but shrouded
in darkness, and a second drummer similarly concealed ON THE BALCONY
ABOVE THE AUDIENCE and I'm using capitals because in what, 25 years
of dedication to live music I don't recall seeing the like: Meredith
extracted a ticklish, skitterish drum track from her computer, which
Wilson intermittently interrupted with a clatter on his drums, the
light momentarily illuminating him then instantly flicking over to
the second drummer (Chris Brice) who gave a clatter on his. And so it
continued for a good five minutes, the three of them playing with
dynamics, with anticipation and surprise, the whole thing fiendishly
intricate, the flash and lunge of a sword fight translated into light
and sound. (I discover later that this is one of Meredith's
“contemporary classical” works, <a href="https://soundcloud.com/aldeburghmusic/brisk-widow-live-quad-stereo" target="_blank">Brisk Widow</a>: as if we didn't
already know that the distinctions are arbitrary and pointless.) In
the middle, Meredith did the same little advertisement for the merch
stall that she gave at the ICA, only this time the band performed a
faintly sleazy, 1970s cocktail lounge soundtrack behind it, gloopy as
an orange lava lamp. And then at the end, they stomped their way
through a raucous version of the Proclaimer's 500 Miles and it was
like that moment late in a wedding party when the DJ drops something
stupendously, ridiculously obvious and everyone loses their shit on
the dancefloor, the Scala crowd yelling along with the chorus in a
vocal equivalent of dads pogoing to Parklife. </span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">At the
ICA the ludicrous cover was a scuzzed mutation of Jennifer Rush's
shoulder-padded time capsule The Power of Love. And this is the other
genius thing about Meredith: how liberal she is in her love of music,
the evident absence of snobbery in her tastes. She will flirt with
bombast, embrace bad taste, risk embarrassment, because she knows
that's all nonsense: what matters is how a song sounds and so makes a
body feel. If it sounds bewilderingly like Queen, Dizzee Rascal,
Metallica and the Field Mice all playing their way at once, but makes
the heart pump undiluted bliss, where's the bad in that?</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">I'm
doing it again, framing her within references to men. And at the risk
of repetition, although fuck it, this one bears repeating: it means
so, so much (to me, but also generally) that Meredith is a woman, in
her late-30s, the time when women conventionally are being told to
listen out for their biological clocks and get on with the business
of making babies, casting off every possible shackle of expectation,
labelling, convention, to play. That's what she's doing, not just
playing music but playfulling music, so that it's as light and silly
and borderline pompous as it is fierce, rigorous, punctilious.
There's an <a href="http://thequietus.com/articles/20027-anna-meredith-interview" target="_blank">interview with her in the Quietus</a> where she talks sidelong
about that spirit of play; I'm going to quote it in full because it's
gorgeous: </span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">
</span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">[S]inging
was a bit scary, and it's definitely a step on from anything I've
ever done before. But there's a real accountability thing with this
album. I wanted it to tie in with it feeling like I've done
everything on it, and I also always want to push myself. I can't
think of anything – in a musical sense – where I've ever said:
"Oh no, that's too much for me." Or, "I can't do that,
it's too scary." So even though I definitely do not have the
best voice, it is my voice, and that's what this whole thing is
about. It's honest. It's not very polished. But that's how I sing –
like a squeaky five-year-old boy [laughs]. I've made that work for
me. I've got loads of amazing singer mates that I could have used,
but I wanted not to make it seem like anyone else. I really wanted to
make it clear that there was no one else behind the record. There's
not some dude behind the scenes who's actually doing all the stuff.
This has, from start to finish, been my thing.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">And
when I've done everything, start to finish, I think it's important to
point that out. Hopefully it's also a good role model for younger
girls, to feel that they can do it. Whenever I'm teaching teenage
girl composers, the one thing I always say is don't be too daunted by
stuff you don't know how to do. Because, having dipped my toe into
this whole world, I've realised that there are as many factions and
preconceptions and problems and rules [in pop] as there are in
classical music. Someone, somewhere will always tell you what they
think you should be doing. But all you should really be doing is
working out what you want to do, and what you can do for yourself.</span></div>
</blockquote>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">You
couldn't ask for a better guide to living than that.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"> </span>
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maddy costahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04929576408540749708noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8651145764236805587.post-51250118174485296672016-11-11T12:57:00.000+00:002016-11-11T12:57:18.495+00:00into the shadows<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">It's
two months now since I saw <a href="https://www.belarusfreetheatre.com/" target="_blank">Belarus Free Theatre</a>'s Burning Doors,
months foggy with autumnal despair, through which my mantra has been
a single line of its text: You have nothing to lose but your fear.
The show itself did make me afraid: afraid for the people whose
stories it told, artist-activists who have experienced prison, who
remain imprisoned, because they had the temerity to challenge their
government. Pussy Riot's Maria Alyokhina is one of the performers,
and that flesh-and-blood presence makes more tangible the distant
bodies of Petr Pavlensky, whose actions of protest have included
sewing his lips together and nailing his scrotum to the pavement in
front of Lenin's mausoleum, and Ukrainian film-maker Oleg Sentsov,
deemed a terrorist by the Russian government and punished
accordingly. The whole show strives to convey the physical stress
experienced by those bodies; performers are pummelled, pulled into
the air with rope, dragged back by cords, pushed under water, and
those are just the images most immediate in my memory. I found the
reviews on the <a href="https://www.thestage.co.uk/reviews/2016/burning-doors-review-at-soho-theatre-london/" target="_blank">negative side</a> of the <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/1b84cf9c-7415-11e6-bf48-b372cdb1043a" target="_blank">spectrum</a> bizarre, because they
all complained of a lack of articulacy in the choreography of the
show, as though only text could communicate fury, disgust, or the
attempt at human degradation practised by the Russian authorities; as
though muscle and skin lack a language of their own.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">By
contrast it was the text segments of Burning Doors I struggled with
most – no, wait, that's more emphatic than I mean it to be.
Political fervour aside, the show was thrilling for its theatrical
fluidity, shifting in approach and style to present each scene in the
form most suited to its content. (Come to think of it, that fluidity,
or flexibility, or responsiveness, is integral to its politics, too.)
Sometimes the form was satirical, sometimes poetical; sometimes it
was an on-stage interview, and sometimes it was wordless. The more
abstract, the more lyrical, the more it asked of the imagination, the
more it held me in thrall. The pause in which the audience could
interview Maria was difficult, lacking in nuance, her English too
mechanical to attempt more than the most cursory answers to
thoughtful questions. And the satirical material was my least
favourite, not least because the characters created to deliver it,
two wealthy Russians with plenty of influence and almost no
conscience, were so objectionable that I just wanted them out of the
room. One of my favourite twitter acquaintances remarked after seeing
the show that “British theatreland [was]
<a href="https://twitter.com/jaynescarlett/status/771476753239998464" target="_blank">schooled</a>”
by it, and I can see why: it's rare to see such multifaceted
presentation from a British company, such disregard for stylistic
cohesiveness. Burning Doors' variety made it singular and its
singularity made it emphatic: do something, do anything, it cried
from its core, but don't just sit there doing nothing. Take what you
feel in this room and use it to fight for other humans.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">A big
question this year for me has been: what does it mean to fight? I
fear I've already reached the point of diminishing repetition on this
blog, circling the same arguments like a dog chasing its tail, but I
keep working through the question because my answer is always
changing. A few months ago, <a href="http://statesofdeliquescence.blogspot.co.uk/2016/06/songs-for-women-with-hope-in-their.html" target="_blank">writing about</a> Melanie Wilson's Opera for
the Unknown Woman, I was on the side of “protest, collaborative
reasoning and the occupation of space”, framing these as peaceable
activities. Whereas Andrew Haydon, in <a href="http://postcardsgods.blogspot.co.uk/2016/06/opera-for-unknown-woman-lawrence-batley.html" target="_blank">his review</a>, dismissed
“peaceful protests” in favour of “armed revolution”,
expressing this in part through an idiosyncratically pedantic (I say
that with admiration!) unravelling of the title of Audre Lorde's
essay The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House:
“Look at anything that's been simply screwed together,” he
remarked, “and you'll probably agree that using a screwdriver isn't
the worst suggestion for taking it down. And so it may prove to be
with neoliberalism and armed resistance.” His words have stuck with
me, melding with the line from Burning Doors, “you have nothing to
lose but your fear”, and with all the encouraging remarks of the
female activists who tell their stories in the book Here We Stand,
women who stood in front of buses, scaled buildings and lay in the
path of bulldozers to force power to shift its position. All these
things are a challenge and an incitement and entirely contrary to my
generally acquiescent personality. I struggle to complain if my food
is lukewarm at a restaurant: pit me against an irate (or frightened)
policeman and absolutely I will crumble. </span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">Two
days after seeing Burning Doors, I started another book telling
stories of activism, Canongate's updated imprint of Rebecca Solnit's
<a href="http://www.canongate.tv/hope-in-the-dark-paperback-canons-edition.html" target="_blank">Hope in the Dark</a>. I've needed these books so much this year: needed
the reminders of continuum, of ongoing and accumulative struggle;
needed the belligerence; needed the optimism. Solnit, too, is on the
side of “protest, collaborative reasoning and the occupation of
space” – but with a clear understanding that power, from whatever
point on the political spectrum, will surge to crush these things,
and so you have to be ready to fight, even if that's not what you're
actively seeking. As I started writing this, I was reading a little
of the <a href="http://time.com/4548566/dakota-access-pipeline-standing-rock-sioux/" target="_blank">Dakota access pipeline</a> protests, of police in riot gear
spraying mace and firing rubber bullets at anyone who had the
temerity to stand up against the devastation of Sioux land and the
shared environment being wreaked by an energy company working with
the acquiescence of local and state government. “What was once the left is
now so full of anomalies,” Solnit writes, that the old distinctions
of left and right are worthless: better to “give up the dividing by
which we conquer ourselves”, and work to create “coalitions …
based on what wildly different groups have in common and differences
can be set aside”.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">Early
in the book, Solnit shapes a suggestive metaphor, imagining “the
world as a theatre”:</span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">The
acts of the powerful and the official occupy centre stage. The
traditional versions of history, the conventional sources of news
encourage us to fix our gaze on that stage. The limelights there are
so bright that they blind you to the shadowy spaces around you, make
it hard to meet the gaze of the other people in the seats, to see the
way out of the audience, into the aisles, backstage, outside, in the
dark, where other powers are at work. A lot of the fate of the world
is decided onstage, in the limelight, and the actors there will tell
you that all of it is, that there is no other place.</span></div>
</blockquote>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">Maybe
it's impossible to work in relation to theatre and not take this
literally. On the one hand I think of my work with Dialogue, and
particularly of Theatre Club, where the invitation is very much for
the audience to turn their gaze upon each other, to see the work
through perspectives otherwise kept in the shadows, peripheral to
artist intention or professional-critical response. On the other, I
think back to what my friend Simon Bowes wrote me after reading John
Berger's essay <a href="http://mreadz.com/read-263194/p102" target="_blank">The Theatre of Indifference</a>, his anxiety that “the
experience of performing or of watching a performance is a way of
divesting ourselves of real participation in politics by creating a
simulation of it”. So much of my time is given to working out what
theatre to see, booking tickets, travelling to and from the venue,
writing about the work afterwards. Where else might that energy be
directed?</span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">The
same passage about theatre from Hope in the Dark was quoted in a show
I saw at the end of October, <a href="http://www.accidentalcollective.co.uk/" target="_blank">Accidental Collective</a>'s Here's Hoping: a
show that keeps the lights on, mostly, and invites its audience not
only to see each other but to imagine what might be in their minds.
It's a show without solutions, only suggestions and questions: what
are you hoping for? How similar or different might that be to what
the others in this room are hoping for? And, in the undertow, how can
we work with that, with each other? Although simple in construction,
it's also a show of emotional complexity, dimming with Pablo Pakula's
admissions of dejection that drifts into depression, seeking
possibility in the stories of people who cope in the most extreme of
circumstances, Daisy Orton describing a teenage boy in bomb-wrecked
Aleppo building a model of his reconstructed city, or the orchestra
in Leningrad who defied Hitler's siege to perform the premiere of
Shostakovich's revitalising Seventh Symphony. In between, they ask
the audience to picture hope – our group offered blue skies,
woodland walks, mostly natural images – and for each response they
placed a seed on the floor, promising in their programme note: “The
seeds used in the show will be planted out in the world – as little
surprises and defiant reminders.” What a gorgeous action. It
reminded me of a children's book I read last month, Home by Jeannie
Baker (originally published as <a href="http://www.jeanniebaker.com/book/belonging/" target="_blank">Belonging</a>): 20 or so illustrations looking out of the same window, the
scene in each shifting incrementally from a distressed and obdurate
cityscape, empty shops and graffiti on cracked concrete and cranes in
the far distance, to a softer and more prosperous town, but one in
which nature is paramount, those cracks in the concrete planted with
trees and flowers, the scene growing more green than grey, until the
final picture is one of lush verdancy, neighbourliness and play.
Meanwhile the objects on the windowsill declare the passing of time:
the occupier of the room grows from a little girl to a teenager,
heads off to university, gets married, and then, in that final
picture, we see her outside in the garden, holding her own swaddled
baby. That's how long positive change can take. </span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">Time
preoccupies me, and the value of actions as small as planting a seed.
There's a poem I know, <a href="https://lookingforastronauts.wordpress.com/2012/09/13/small-for-georges-perec/" target="_blank">via Andy Field</a>, a nursery rhyme really, about
a house in a street in Paris where a bird lives in a cage; the bird
knocks its egg, which knocks its nest, which knocks over the cage,
which tips over the table, the room, the house, and before you know
it the whole of Paris has fallen down. Each action, however small,
has a ripple effect, that maybe cannot be traced. And so, what are
the small actions that each of us might take that could, eventually,
bring the entire fucking Tory government down? Would we know our
actions had contributed? Would that even matter?</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">I
happened to read the edited highlights of Ed Vaizey's speech about
left-wing bias in the arts (on which, Haydon is at his idiosyncratic
which includes pedantic best, both in his response published in <a href="http://postcardsgods.blogspot.co.uk/2016/11/the-stage.html" target="_blank">The Stage</a> and, majestically, in a blog post titled <a href="http://postcardsgods.blogspot.co.uk/2016/10/the-death-of-west.html" target="_blank">The Death of the West</a>)
on the same day as seeing High Rise's <a href="https://www.cptheatre.co.uk/production/merryville/" target="_blank">Merryville</a> at Camden People's
Theatre. Merryville is pretty much the definition of what Vaizey
thinks the Tory government and all who sail in her are up against,
and makes very clear why massed establishment forces are doing their
utmost to circumscribe and destabilise artists, whether by limiting
funding (of course people making art ask for money: how else can they
pay their fucking rent?) or curbing access to non-conventional art
forms within the academy (see, for instance, the erosion of
Dartington College's exploratory, speculative and indeterminate
performance art/writing courses since it was swallowed up by Falmouth
University, by more concrete and, crucially, money-spinning degrees
in acting): art is, or at least can be, a space of dissent, and the
likes of Vaizey want that space to be drained of sun and oxygen so
all that lives there withers. So yes: Merryville is one of the most
explicitly anti-Tory shows I've seen this year, and I loved it, LOVED
IT, loved it so much that I want to relive it by describing it in
minute detail, but also want to hold my tongue so that when it comes
back – and it will, it must – I haven't spoiled all its surprises
for people yet to see it. </span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">It's
set in 2020, which is already a poke in the ribs, because it's far
enough away for it to be realistic that a fair amount more damage
could have been inflicted on our already worn and torn society, but
not so far that we couldn't do something about it, if only we get on
with it quicksharp. The London it's set in is an exaggeration, but
only just, of the one we live in now: most of the poor people have
been evicted and rehoused in other cities (an unexpected by-product
being that there's now a kicking grime scene in Norwich); supermarket
food is no longer affordable; and – a step too far, this one,
judging by the audience's gasps – Sadiq Khan has been caught in the
war-on-terror crossfire. The MC/performers, Dominic Garfield's Dr
Green Fingers and Gerel Falconer's Dustin Roads, cling to the city as
their birthright and their beloved: the show takes place in the
basement of Merryville, “the last 'affordable' housing block in
London”, to which they've retreated to perform their grime gigs,
having been slapped with a public disturbance order after getting on
their soapboxes at Speaker's Corner. This show, in fact, is a grime
gig, characters and narratives emerging more through rapid-fire
tracks than the bits of chatter that connect them. Be still my joyful
heart. </span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">Joyful
is the word for the whole show, really: for all that the London of
Merryville is relentlessly grim, there is a brightness and bounce to
Garfield and Falconer's performances, a buoyancy to their rapport
with each other, that makes sharing a room with them a thing of
laughter and pleasure. And yet, their lyrics are perspicacious
enough, abrasive enough, that often what they say will provoke
wincing: in my absolute favourite song, they offset a list of things
going up – from rents and prices to fear and racism – with a
concomitant list of things going down, whether maintenance grants or
NHS provision or cultural diversity. It's brilliant because it's
scathing of austerity politics and gentrification, but also because
it's melodically flawless, a tune I can still hum a week after seeing
the show. </span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">So
far, so strong, but the thing that makes Merryville
transcenfuckingdentally exhilarating is a sudden schism between
Garfield and Falconer, in which one takes arms and heads out on to
the streets, while the other advocates writing, conversation, art, as
the tools of a gentler revolution. As in Here's Hoping, I could hear
in the flux of the text all the contradictory dialogue that otherwise
pulses in my head. Like Falconer's Dustin Roads, writing is what I
do, engaging with theatre is what I do, imagining another way of
living and sharing those thoughts in public space is how I combat the
reality of austerity Britain. Except it's not really combat, is it?
It's too diffident, too feeble, too easy to ignore. I do it because
I'm frightened to do anything else. Because, for all I keep writing
about this, I haven't lost my fear.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">Since
August, I've thought often about the UK Black Lives Matter <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/aug/05/black-lives-matter-protest-sparks-heathrow-traffic-chaos" target="_blank">road shutdown</a>, cherished the mental image I have of the M4 at a standstill
(pretty easy to conjure up, to be honest, but so much more
invigorating when it's not just humdrum traffic). It feels to me that
this is the work that needs doing now: not writing, not making
theatre, not waving baseball bats in people's faces either, but
getting away from all our everyday motions, and joining in one
protest after another after another, even if it's not a matter we
“want” to protest about. The way <a href="http://www.sistersuncut.org/2016/04/08/in-support-of-the-carnegie-library/" target="_blank">Sisters Uncut</a> have been joining
library protests, embodying the “vital ways in which many different
people work together to keep public services that benefit the
majority”. The way Black Lives Matter went on to join forces with
(white) environmental groups to shut down City airport, putting on
the front line the bodies least vulnerable. The way Solnit describes
environmental activists and ranchers bypassing their disagreements to
collaborate in protecting the land they love (with the caveat that if
all of those people are white and racism is among the disagreements
they're bypassing, that's a problem). A constant state of shutdown,
of filling streets with bodies, responding to the negatives of
austerity, neoliberalism and inequality with another negative, a
refusal to live any longer on those terms, a refusal to contribute to
this society at all. Of course it's ridiculous, flamboyantly stupid
in its idealism. But what does a double negative make if not a
positive? And what is hope if not a flame of positive thinking amid
the ashes of our dreams?</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">I
wrote that paragraph sitting at a sturdy wooden table at <a href="http://selinathompson.co.uk/" target="_blank">Selina Thompson</a>'s house, while she – amazingly, with a
generosity I don't deserve – cooked up mulled wine and a great
dinner, told me about the book she's writing, and stitched a quilt of
argument with me, patches of our reading lined up side by side,
creating clash but also pattern. I love her because she challenges
me: in response to some of the above, for instance, she imperceptibly
raised her eyebrows and pointed out the importance of challenging
friends and family and working closely with local community and
existent grassroots groups; exposing, that is, the impulse towards
grand performative gesture and replacing it with slow, patient, real
actions. This acuity means I leave every exchange with her kicking
myself, but also grateful, immensely grateful, for her patience in
the face of my white-middle-class-ness, and the ways in which she
enables me to sift my own language for wheat and chaff. Some of the
chaff in Tuesday's conversation was the evident laxity with which I
use the word “we”; some more in the inevitability with which I
will air the melancholy of the privileged, the thin end of the wedge
that thickened this week into Trump's imminent presidency. I write
this with that vote cast, iron, inexorable. And once again, I'm torn:
what is the point of all this theatre, all this writing, in the face
of that violence? In making these products, might we, or “we”, be
complicit in the inaction, the silence, the distraction that enforce
Trump and white supremacy? And if we are, what are we going to do
about it? Carry on? Or really change?</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">I have
no ending for this, because I'm still afraid, and while the world
keeps turning so does the internal debate, moving in eddies,
unceasing. I'm aware, too, of attempting to hog a moment on stage, of
limelight. And so to the shadows, to the others working there: to
these words of <a href="https://harrygiles.org/2011/02/10/giveupart-a-twitter-essay-for-sota-flashcon/" target="_blank">Harry Giles</a>, another set of complications, another way
of unknowing and unbeing.</span></div>
</div>
maddy costahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04929576408540749708noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8651145764236805587.post-66522873811118502182016-10-20T23:53:00.003+01:002021-07-10T00:17:29.838+01:00dancing through the gloom<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">I'm
writing this in recovery from falling off my bike, a spectacular
vault across the handlebars that has left me with a split eyebrow, a
swollen cheekbone, a bruised lip and grazed knee: looking, that is,
how I've been feeling for weeks, beaten-up and blue. Work –
commissioned, paid work – dried up some time in June, apart from a
single precious long-term project (bless you, <a href="http://www.unfoldingtheatre.co.uk/puttingtheband.html" target="_blank">Unfolding Theatre</a>)
whose deadline isn't until February<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">. <span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">[Correction added later: th<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">ere was also <a href="http://orangetreetheatre.tumblr.com/post/150306634160/not-just-a-local-theatre-or-a-london-theatre" target="_blank">this piece </a><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;"><a href="http://orangetreetheatre.tumblr.com/post/150306634160/not-just-a-local-theatre-or-a-london-theatre" target="_blank">for the Orange Tree</a>, <span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">a <span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">brief </span>flashback to <span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">journalism days<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">; <span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">and of course the week at <span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">the Edinburgh festival with <a href="http://thesickofthefringe.com/" target="_blank">The Sick of the Fringe</a><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">.<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;"> Apologies to both for forgetting.</span></span></span></span></span>] A</span></span></span></span></span></span>nd while I could have spent the
beginning of the school year wisely, seizing the opportunity to
stretch out as a writer, or return to abandoned pursuits, X or overhaul my web
presence to accentuate my brand (puke), what I've actually done is
spiral down into a salt-stained gloom. A sense of failure is dismally
self-fulfilling: you think you're not good enough, so you don't even
try, which proves you're not good enough, for anything. And the
problem runs deeper than self-pity (in which I've been triumphant: no
failure there): once again I'm suffocated by a sense of
pointlessness. I've fought the urge to dump this in the bin with
every word. And no, I don't know why I say any of this in public,
except that other people's accounts of anxiety and self-loathing help
me, often, and I saw Jamal Gerald perform <a href="http://exeuntmagazine.com/reviews/review-fadoublegot-at-contact-manchester/" target="_blank">FADoubleGOT</a> this week and
was touched by the invitation with which he begins: this is me
telling my truth, and I hope it encourages you to tell yours.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">So
here is something true: magic <a href="https://medium.com/@meganvaughan" target="_blank">Megan Vaughan</a> getting a job at the Live
Art Development Agency earlier this year gave me the courage, for the
first time since attempting to shift how I write about theatre, to
apply to take part in the Agency's <a href="http://www.thisisliveart.co.uk/opportunities/diy-13-2016-project-list" target="_blank">DIY programme</a>. I participated in
two: the first left me a wreck; the second, unprofessional class, run
by dancers <a href="http://www.standard.co.uk/goingout/arts/jamila-johnsonsmall-i-don-t-want-to-do-any-more-explaining-to-any-white-people-about-the-horrors-a3361546.html" target="_blank">Jamila Johnson-Small</a> and Mira Kautto as their
collaboration <a href="http://www.immigrantsandanimals.com/" target="_blank">immigrants and animals</a>, might prove the beginning of
rehabilitation. Ordinarily I'd never have applied for a dance
workshop – I've never been to any dance classes, and amid the
panoply of failures it's a source of particular shame that every one
of the dances I've choreographed for the <a href="http://www.actionettes.com/" target="_blank">Actionettes</a> has been
performed by the others under a kind of duress and quickly forgotten
– but there was something about Jamila and Mira's <a href="http://www.thisisliveart.co.uk/opportunities/diy-13-2016-immigrants-and-animals" target="_blank">invitation</a> that
told me this would be OK. “we want to share our practice which is
basically fucking about for ages in a room, getting tired and calling
it work. we think that dancing on a stage need not look different to
dancing in a club, kitchen or bus stop”, all of which are things I
do; “some dancing that is a gleeful waste of time, a resistance to
capitalism and the development of cultural capital (or capital of any
kind) or function or product; non-practical bodies dancing towards no
particular purpose or end”, all of which I believe in profoundly. </span>
</div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">There
were five workshops and I was invited to two (not, sadly, the one
that took place in the pre-Raphaelite room at Tate Britain where they
danced to Kate Bush). In my first, Mira and Jamila shared the tasks
and music that form the basis of their show Pony, and invited each of
us to interpret them for ourselves; we ran through them once for
practice, and then performed for each other in two groups, which
might have been excruciating (the performance-for-critique aspect
being what broke me in the other DIY), except that Mira and Jamila
held the space so generously: there were no wrong answers, wrong
movements, wrong versions, only ways of moving, each as radiant in
possibility as the other. For the second, they invited us to dress in
“formal attire, whatever that means for you”, and serenaded us
with cheesy pop – <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSq8ZBdSxNU" target="_blank">the kind</a> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izGwDsrQ1eQ" target="_blank">of songs</a> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGEubdH8m0s" target="_blank">played at</a> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AAZQaYKZMTI" target="_blank">a wedding</a> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfI1S0PKJR8" target="_blank">or adolescent disco</a> – with barely any instruction for how we might
respond to them. That they didn't know the words a lot of the time,
that their voices quavered on the high notes, that they giggled at
themselves and the struggle of the song, all contributed to the
atmosphere of permission. Did I pick up any new techniques or moves?
No. Did I manage to slough off self-consciousness for a couple of
hours? Absolutely, and that is precious – the more so because each
room held a performer I look to with awe, <a href="http://52portraits.co.uk/home/2016/2/15/gillie-kleiman" target="_blank">Gillie Kleiman</a> in the
first, <a href="http://www.lauradannequin.co.uk/LAURA%20DANNEQUIN/HOME.html" target="_blank">Laura Dannequin</a> the second. When Gillie told me that she'd
enjoyed dancing with me, I brushed it off, told her I'd just been
doing nonsense; but inside I was so grateful, to her and to the
opportunity, not only to think through dance but to remember that the
hierarchies of art that feel so real are just another social
construct designed to oppress and harm. </span>
</div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">Here's
something else true: when I watched <a href="http://danceumbrella.co.uk/event.php?ref=gala#.WAlHLbMu61s" target="_blank">Jerome Bel's Gala</a> at Sadler's
Wells, it felt like a continuation of unprofessional class, not just
because I could imagine myself part of it but because Mira and Jamila
could so easily have shaped that performance and stepped up to that
stage. I arrived there a mess, limbs aching, blood seeping through
the skin splints holding my eyebrow together, but I had an inkling
that being there would make at least my insides better and it did.
Gala is glorious. There's an acid-bath article about it on the New
York site <a href="http://www.culturebot.org/2016/10/26305/please-fuck-off-jerome-bel-or-a-50-year-old-french-white-man-makes-an-all-bodies-matter-dance-and-i-hate-it/" target="_blank">Culturebot</a> by dancer/thinker Lily Kind that dismisses it as
“cliche, gimmicky, dull, cowardly, and exploitative … presenting
bodies traditionally underrepresented in dance and theater [but]
presenting them as interchangeable, as check boxes for their
particular brand of otherness instead of as their actual, unique,
individual selves”. And there's a less furious but equally critical
<a href="http://thinkingdance.net/articles/2016/09/14/Jerome-Bels-Utopia-in-a-Box" target="_blank">comment elsewhere</a> by another American dancer, Gregory Holt, which
describes it as “reactionary rather than transformative”, adding:</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">Bel
created a sentimental mirror that affirmed our desire to be open to
diversity without challenging the basis of access to the festival
space, funding space, cosmopolitan art space he is working in. In
this way, he narrowly exploited ‘diversity’ to cement his own
cis-white-male voice without sharing in the political and artistic
risks facing marginalized artists who are also trying to show their
dances.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">All of
which I appreciate (it is, after all, Bel and not immigrants and
animals behind this work), without emotionally agreeing. Such joy
suffused me in the room that I spent half the show crying,
helplessly, snottily, partly as a release (of the pain of the fall,
of the pointlessness of being alive), but mostly at the ineffable
beauty of humanity, the ways in which limbs can move, awkward yet
proud. A joy so serious that the laughter in the room unsettled me,
especially that directed at anyone whose gender expression wasn't
binary; too often it sounded like the clanging, judgemental, ugly
laughter of enforced marginalisation. </span>
</div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">Admittedly
it took me a while to warm to Gala: the opening slide show of
differently shaped theatres and stages just bored me, as did the
exhibition of ballet pirouettes and jetes. The switch came with the
three-minute collective solo improvisation in silence; because this
was the flashback to unprofessional class, and because within the
muddle it was possible to see the dancers as individuals, each with
their own quirks. This is what I loved about Gala: the ways in which
it underlined the point that “dancing on a stage need not look
different to dancing in a club, kitchen or bus stop”. In this it
reminded me of another beloved work, <a href="https://krissimusiol.wordpress.com/" target="_blank">Krissi Musiol</a>'s long-term
project <a href="https://longlens.wordpress.com/2016/03/22/the-dance-collector-by-krissi-musiol/" target="_blank">The Dance Collector</a>, in which she visits public spaces –
cafes, whenever I've encountered it – and chats to anyone she
encounters there, asking them to give her a dance move which she can
incorporate into a bigger choreography of place, to be performed in
the same room a couple of hours later. Some people gift her stories
of meeting their spouses in a dance hall in their youth, but far more
give her the instant response, “oh no, I don't dance, I don't have
anything”, and it's only through kind and patient conversation that
Krissi will discover the movement they can give her, whether it's the
dance of the football terraces when a goal is scored, the dance of
wringing out the dishcloth when the kitchen is tidied, or the dance
of reaching for an item on a high shelf in the supermarket. </span>
</div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">I
guess I trusted Gala in a way those American writers didn't; trusted
that it gave its dancers the same freedoms – not just of movement
but from criticism – that Jamila and Mira gave me. I trusted that
the Company/Company section, in which one individual after another
steps forward and leads the group in a dance of their own devising,
really did feature solos of individual and idiosyncratic devising,
from people who are specialists in their own way. I saw a specialist
in being a little girl, tossing your long blonde hair around to <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=My2FRPA3Gf8" target="_blank">Miley Cyrus</a>; a specialist in adapting the movements of breakdancing to a
body twisted by cerebral palsy; a specialist in juddering hands to
the beats of techno; a specialist in – possibly my favourite –
effervescent hula hooping. (That last performer, a black woman with
amazing candy-pink braids, reminded me so much of <a href="http://www.hotbrownhoney.com/" target="_blank">Hot Brown Honey</a>,
the ways in which they are clearly virtuosic but wear that talent so
lightly, at the same time scouring off cliches of beauty to present a
more complicated feminine identity.) Behind each of these
specialists, the rest of the group followed their leader with total
commitment, no matter what flailing and floundering it produced. What
Gala celebrates is unprofessionalism – or, as <a href="https://frieze.com/article/j%C3%A9r%C3%B4me-bel" target="_blank">another writer</a> online
so insightfully put it, the true meaning of amateur, its etymology in
the French and Latin for lover. </span>
</div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">I love
dancing, but I'd never call myself a dancer. I love painting but I've
never let myself be a painter. I had a love-hate relationship with
playing guitar that petered out and still aches with the pain of
unrequitement; I love singing but rarely sing in public, only if I
feel camouflaged. Introducing myself to a group of strangers
recently, I noted aloud that I write, but always use the verb to
describe that: not until I've published something of imaginative
scope, of actual invention, of worth in the world, and ideally not as
a vanity project but as sanctioned by a third party, could I call
myself a writer. So much of my innate sense of failure lives in this
lack of professionalism. Politically, I am part of the chorus
fighting against this: the blog I kept as part of Fuel's <a href="https://newtheatreiyn.wordpress.com/" target="_blank">New Theatre in Your Neighbourhood</a> project articulated a lot of that, and I read
the most recent blog post on the <a href="http://64millionartists.com/placemaking/" target="_blank">64 Million Artists</a> site murmuring
over and over, true, true, true. Jo Hunter (I'm assuming it's her)
writes:</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">There
is creativity happening everywhere in the UK. Yes there is inequality
and poverty in this country when we use the measures of money or
formal cultural provision. But there is richness too, in every place
– musicians and writers and dreamers and cake bakers. So let’s
start by celebrating what’s already there rather than panicking
about what’s not. Let’s champion the brass bands and the grime
artists and the felters and the am dram and the pumpkin carvers,
alongside the professionals and the existing infrastructure.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">I can
cheer these things in other people. It's what I'm loving so much
about the project I'm doing with Unfolding: that, too, is a
celebration of unprofessionalism, of playing music “as a gleeful
waste of time... towards no particular purpose or end”. I just
can't find a way to celebrate or even accept them in myself. My salve
this week has been to wonder if anyone can, whether the affirmation
that makes it possible for others to work as artists comes not from
within but without: from the partners they collaborate with, the
community that surrounds them, the organisations that say yes, we
want to work with you. In some ways I have those things, but four
straight months of no commissioned paid work can very much make it
feel otherwise. In that absence, it has been altogether too easy to
turn inwards, to pummel myself from within. I've been telling myself
since I was a teenager that I don't have anything perceptive to say
about the human condition; two decades later that truth is so solid
within me it's unbreakable. (Writing about theatre is the only way
I've found to evade that, because it's the makers being perceptive,
not me, but even that isn't working any more.) And as I mop up the
orange gunge oozing from my knee, I wish I could as easily cure the
infection in my soul.</span></div>
</div>
maddy costahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04929576408540749708noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8651145764236805587.post-25424204593025566932016-10-06T12:30:00.001+01:002016-10-06T12:30:46.124+01:00French connections (2): a return to the Travellings festival<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">Sometimes,
life just throws you a gift. Sometimes that gift is a friend buying
you cake and sometimes it's A PERFORMANCE FESTIVAL BUYING YOU A
RETURN TICKET TO MARSEILLES FOR THE WEEKEND. No strings, no
expectations. I looked really hard for the catch, double-checking the
invitation email for the small print that said “oh and you have to
write about us or we'll have the flight and hotel costs back”, but
never found it. I don't have to be doing this. But I want to, because
the Travellings festival does a lot of things I want all performance
festivals to do, with heart, consideration and a genuine approach to
experiment that takes failure in its stride.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">This
was my second year at Travellings and the two festivals were
surprisingly unalike. Not in the basics: Travellings is curated by
<a href="http://www.lieuxpublics.com/fr/" target="_blank">Lieux Publics</a>, a long-standing French organisation that supports
multi-disciplinary outdoor performance, and takes place within the
same former industrial complex where Lieux Publics has its offices,
which happens to squat across the road from a sprawling housing
estate. And it coincides with an annual meeting of the <a href="http://www.in-situ.info/en/" target="_blank">In-Situ</a>
network, an EU-funded collaboration between 20+ arts festivals, each
of whose artistic directors attends, bringing with them an artist or
collective, someone whose work they want to share with the rest of
the group. So Travellings has to perform multiple functions, creating
space for the In-Situ network to conduct some business, but also
creating an informal atmosphere of sharing and discussing
performance, and doing this not in a closed way but opening out to a
general public, not just the culture aficionados unfazed by the
rickety journey from the centre of Marseilles, but also the people
who live on the estate opposite, for whom performance – even
outdoor performance – might be an elitist and inaccessible thing.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">Where
the two Travellings differed was in structure and atmosphere. Last
year (which I wrote about <a href="http://statesofdeliquescence.blogspot.co.uk/2015/10/french-connections-report-from.html" target="_blank">here</a>) there were panel discussions in the
mornings, and the meetings between artists and artistic directors
took place over lunch tables with a scrupulously organised seating
rota, and the public programme of work was by artists unconnected to
the In-Situ meeting, mostly “finished”, and stretched across two
days. This year, the panel discussions were dumped and the lunches
free-form, while the performance programme was condensed into a
single four-hour period and entirely featured the artists engaged in
the In-Situ meeting, presenting work in synopsis or various states of
unreadiness, followed by a party shaped by local group Rara Woulib.
Neither structure is perfect: what this year gained in informality,
it lost in comprehensiveness; I had frustrations last year, I had
different frustrations this year. But Lieux Publics' willingness to
rethink and remodel is highly appealing.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">My main problem this
year was time. There were 17 works on offer, some durational, some
with set start times, and lasting between 15 and 60 minutes. At the
beginning of the day I was arrogantly declaring that I'd see all of
them, but within a couple of hours queues were defeating me,
overheated rooms repelling me, and motivation flagged. In the end I
saw just over half the work, a result that made the competitive idiot
in me balk.</span></span></div>
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<br />
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<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-decoration: none;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Of what I did see, I'm
going to focus on the most positive. <a href="http://www.lukejerram.com/" target="_blank">Luke Jerram</a>'s Museum of the Moon
is 100% brilliant. BRILLIANT. He has all sorts of different settings
planned for it, and the one at Travellings was probably the simplest:
the moon was suspended from the ceiling of a massive shed, deckchairs
were arranged along one edge of the room, and in the background a
soundtrack played, a tidal collage of static and recordings of the
Apollo landings and classical music and more. The moon itself is just
a gigantic beach ball, but over its surface is pasted, as declared on
the project website, a “120dpi detailed NASA imagery of the lunar
surface”. And it's illuminated all the way around: what you see on
first entering the room is the far side of the moon, the bit usually
hidden from earth. That's a thing of wonder in itself.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Looking at the near
side, our side, I scanned the pock-marked surface for the faces so
easy to project from earth, but its shadows denied anthropomorphism.
Proximity afforded new ways of looking, of dreaming and reaching. I
circled it, tracing patterns in its craters; lay directly below it
and through the air molecules felt its weight. And then a lonely
piano played and I wished there were someone I could dance with, or
that the room might flood with old people, gliding the floor in a
foxtrot while singing silvery tunes.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Jerram, it turns out,
is the man who first started putting pianos in public places: in his
version – <a href="https://fierceearth.wordpress.com/2008/10/31/%e2%80%98play-me-i%e2%80%99m-yours%e2%80%99-sao-paulo/" target="_blank">commissioned as part of the Fierce Festival</a> in Birmingham
in 2008 – they're decorated by local community groups and bear the
inscription Play Me, I'm Yours. He's based in Bristol (which means he
also saw the Fake Moon that was suspended over College Green in 2013
as part of In Between Time; I loved that too, but it was piffle
compared with this one), and initially trained in sculpture and
performance art, but soon decided that he didn't want to make
small-scale work that played to the curator and a handful of industry
people. So this is what he makes now: not just big sculptures or big
spectacles but big possibilities for gathering people into a fold.
Works for me: Museum of the Moon is coming to the Norwich &
Norfolk Festival in May 2017 and already I want to be there.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">From seeing the moon to
the feeling of walking on it: designed in collaboration with an
architect, Intraverse takes an individual audience member up several
flights of stairs before inviting them to buckle on a harness and
abseil down again. That's already a massive spoiler so I'll avoid any
others, but for me this was a profoundly philosophical work, one that
invited participants to contemplate the leaps in life that seem too
scary to undertake, and with that the possibility that the place they
take you to could be as calm and safe and banal as the habitual
already known. Which somehow went beyond how the makers – Vektor
Normal and Balint Toth from Hungary – presented it, despite the
multiple ways built in to subvert and play with perception.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Of the three games that
make up You Are Not Alone, by Italian group Urban Games Factory, the
one that articulated perception and snap judgements was by far the
most fun and effective. To start, participants are split into two
small groups and separated into different rooms. Round my table were
four women (two French, one Bulgarian and me, aged roughly 30-50),
and the first game required each of us to take turns posing a
question, to be answered by the others. There were childish questions
(how many brothers and sisters do I have? what's my favourite
fruit?), personal questions (how many people have I slept with?) and
personality questions (what's the first thing I'd do if I won the
lottery?), and with each round we were able to shape our answers with
a little more knowledge and consideration. The winner of each round
was the person closest to the correct answer, and at the end the
overall winner was given a box of biscuits. Really, what more do you
want? </span></span>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">The rest of it was less
developed; another game invited us to reflect on anger, friendship
and happiness, while the third united both groups and sent us on a
treasure hunt, which ended with us attempting to fly a banner reading
“you are not alone” that proved to be too heavy for the balloons
tied to it so had to be truncated to “you are not”. That's work
in progress for you: risky.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://www.saffysetohy.co.uk/" target="_blank">Saffy Setohy</a> and Bill
Thompson's light and sound installation Light Field suffered from
this fragility: most people I spoke to dismissed it as unformed, but
they'd also spent only a minute or two in the room, when really it
needed 10 or 15 minutes to get something out of it. It's still in
flux, and I had a lovely chat with Saffy – a choreographer usually
– about the various ways in which she's staged it so far and what
might be the optimum setting for it, but in this iteration I loved
the quiet rhythms of the movement, the ways in which humans gathered
unselfconsciously in flocks, scattered and clustered again. The room
is dark, but on the ground are a few wind-up torches; the invitation
is to carry them around the space, whirring the handle to stir the
atmosphere. I did this for a bit but then sat in the corner and
watched as the lights brightened and dimmed, drifted and gathered.
The simplicity of this unintentional, spontaneous choreography really
appealed to me; and to another of the writers, Joris van den Boom,
who stood against the wall and successfully startled another
participant when they shone a torch into his face.</span></span></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-decoration: none;">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-7QXXgtK2444/V_YzWWb0HxI/AAAAAAAABOo/BQlAJ4G31DAfA8DazmQN9oLbdonxWDo1gCLcB/s1600/travellings%2Bsaffy.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-7QXXgtK2444/V_YzWWb0HxI/AAAAAAAABOo/BQlAJ4G31DAfA8DazmQN9oLbdonxWDo1gCLcB/s320/travellings%2Bsaffy.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">Even
with all that goodness, my afternoon ended on a note of
disgruntlement: I saw a couple of not great things, and missed the
work everyone else said was super interesting, an
installation/lecture by <a href="http://www.waldencollective.org/copy-of-start" target="_blank">Collectief Walden</a>, a company from the
Netherlands comprising an actor, a philosopher, a dramaturg, and a
biologist/musician, which is my new favourite model for what a
performance ensemble might be. So I joined the “evening with”
<a href="http://rarawoulib.org/en/" target="_blank">Rara Woulib</a> in a discordant frame of mind. Based in Marseilles, Rara
Woulib are an amorphous group of musician-performers who take their
name from Haitian music and carnival traditions, essentially shaping
the same in urban settings. I missed them in London in 2014 when they
brought Deblozay to Greenwich;
there's a <a href="http://matttrueman.co.uk/2014/06/review-deblozay-liftgreenwich-docklands-festival.html" target="_blank">glorious review</a> of it by Matt Trueman, savouring its “power
and excitement and possibility”. So grumpiness was also woven with
expectation that at first wasn't met. </span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">The
“evening with” at Travellings was slow to start, slow to
coalesce; slow to draw the network and festival public across the
street to the Aygalades housing estate, slow to convey a sense of
purpose in doing so. As its inhabitants looked down from balconies
and windows, I felt an uncomfortable prickle, that we were invading
their territory, unasked and unwanted, swarming their landscape with
our puffed-up ideas about art. It's a discomfort Rara Woulib
acknowledge, I think, and in other ways heighten: our journey took us
into an unlit subway, crammed with people and noise, alarming to
anyone who experiences even a mild claustrophobia or fear of the
dark; walking through it was a kind of scouring, ready for anything
that might come next.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">What
came next was anodyne: a gathering in a higgle of grass festooned
with lights and dotted with ramshackle bars serving fruit cocktails.
Here the real fun tried to begin, but its rhythm kept faltering;
singers surged through the crowd, stamping and swirling and chanting,
but then their voices fell silent and a vague sense of boredom
returned. It wasn't until we were lured to another clearing, where a
long wooden table was set up, </span><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">laden
with fruit and vast trays of sushi, which were carried out to the
crowd, while a black woman dressed in a raggedy gown stamped along
the table's length, incanting a story I couldn't understand literally
but thrilled to emotionally, that something began to click into
place. A sense of ritual. Of a different necessity. Of communing
beyond self, beyond rationality, beyond purpose.</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">From
here the performers – the women dressed now in white lacy frocks, a
chirm of mismatch brides – led us along</span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">
another path, flicker-lined by candles, snaking further into the
Aygalades</span><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">. As
the growing crowd drifted in the wake of their distant music, I
realised I'd been to another performance exactly like this in 2014:
the Good Friday procession through my mum's village in Cyprus. It
starts at the church, once night has fallen; led by priests and the
epidaphion, a funeral coach decorated in flowers, bibles and pictures
of Jesus, the entire village amasses to re-enact the journey to
Christ's burial place. At least, that's the impetus; how it actually
plays out is that a bulging line of families and friends gossip and
chatter as they meander through their streets, occasionally being
offered a splash of holy water and catching the call to chant Amen.
The Rara Woulib procession followed these particulars until it
reached another clearing, much bigger this time, edges glowing with
more flaming torches, half the space set with benches and trestle
tables, bowl-plates and cutlery and cauldrons of soup. In two of the
corners industrial barbecues crackled, and at the centre, a band
began to play. The ritual had reached its zenith in what was
effectively an old-fashioned village wedding – and everyone was
invited.</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">That
everyone was now a huge number of people: all the festival-goers from
earlier in the day, but also teenagers and families and elders of
Aygalades, drawn in by the hubbub and now sitting down to eat
together. It was gorgeous: a genuine moment of expansive community.
And although as the evening progressed the architecture of the whole,
the dramaturgy or arc of movement and energy, became more focused and
impressive, essentially Rara Woulib's tools were the most basic: meat
and bread and vegetable soup; rambunctious music; limitless
generosity. The singers included not only members of the group but
women from local choirs; the band featured men in costume alongside
men in everyday wear, drawn from local bands. The sense of symbiosis
was exquisite; so was the kindness of the gesture, the openness of
the invitation.</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">It
felt like a wedding; it felt like a village gathering; it also felt
like a slap in the face of certain modes of thinking about culture.
Earlier in the day, a Greek journalist also invited to Travellings
had asked the staff of Lieux Publics: why here? Why not by the docks,
somewhere central, where the people of Marseilles can more easily
take part? It infuriated me, because this is exactly the value of
holding the festival in and alongside Aygalades: the reminder that
its inhabitants, too, are the people of Marseilles, easily forgotten
or misrepresented or belittled, subject to prejudice and assumption.
(To be fair, the Greek journalist appreciated all this later, too.)
The evening reminded me of the writing, endlessly inspiring, of
<a href="https://regularmarvels.com/completed/a-wider-horizon/" target="_blank">Francois Matarasso</a>, a specialist in participatory and community arts,
whose <a href="https://regularmarvels.com/downloads/" target="_blank">free-access books</a> on amateur theatre and rural touring, among others, are
luminous with curiosity and compassion. Working from the basic
assertion that “everyone has the right to create art and to share
the result, as well as enjoy and participate in the creations of
others”, he draws a distinction between culture as “how we do
what we have to do” – the example he gives is how we choose what
to eat, how to prepare it and how to share it – and art as “how
we do all the things we don’t have to do. How we sing, dance, play,
tell stories, make things up, share dreams, frighten ourselves,
arrange objects, make pictures, imagine and all the rest.” This
felt so pertinent to this evening with Rara Woulib, where the tools
of culture were used to make art – an art in which everyone could
participate equally, whether by eating, dancing, or just sitting
beneath the stars.</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">For
most of our time in that great green square, Rara Woulib gave the
evening to their audience. And then, in the final section, they took
it back. The band stopped playing in concert formation and shifted to
a new position, at the heart of the informal dance space. They began
to sing a final song, a murmur at first, building in volume and
urgency, until it seemed to play not from the strings of instruments
but the sinews of the bodies held in thrall. A song so Dionysian that
satyrs might have clattered among us, stamping out its beat. It grew
and grew, surged and crested, and then subsided; softly they began to
walk, still singing, shaping a path with their bodies, the audience
walking between as their voices scattered like confetti a song of
farewell. And so many people refused to leave, clinging to the spell,
that eventually they just had to say out loud, goodbye, and still an
old and toothless man turned his face to the strangers around him and
danced. Power and excitement and possibility. Pleasure and joy and
love.</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">In
the midst of the party, I emailed my friend <a href="http://www.thisisunfinished.com/" target="_blank">Leo</a>, who also makes work
from the tools of food, ritual and generosity, wanting to make him a
part of it too. In the midst of the party, I laughed with an American
called Jay, who told me he'd never wanted to get married, but now
understood why people did. In the midst of the party, I drifted and
danced alone and unlonely; I watched a child reach his fingers
towards the flame of a torch, guarded by his mum, and cursed the
British health and safety laws that would never let that pass; I
jostled for ice-cream and was bitten three times by mosquitoes. In
the midst of the party I knew I was at the heart of something
perfect: a necessary antidote to the violence and inhumanity of
socio-political machinations beyond this square of grass. And I was
happy.</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
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<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-2yR2niYy11c/V_Y0_TXBgyI/AAAAAAAABPA/8O6o3cDtMAc5OD5wcDd5XAe_7bgFIq14gCLcB/s1600/Rara%2BWoulib%2B2%2BTravellings%2B2016-gregoire-edouard.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-2yR2niYy11c/V_Y0_TXBgyI/AAAAAAAABPA/8O6o3cDtMAc5OD5wcDd5XAe_7bgFIq14gCLcB/s320/Rara%2BWoulib%2B2%2BTravellings%2B2016-gregoire-edouard.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">All images by and copyright Gregoire Edouard, and used with permission. (For a change.)</span></span></div>
</div>
maddy costahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04929576408540749708noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8651145764236805587.post-56192783822833101182016-09-14T10:51:00.000+01:002016-09-14T10:51:02.985+01:00on a road to nowhere (come on inside)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">Nowhere</span></b></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">Andrew
Schneider's <a href="http://andrewjs.com/work/youarenowhere/" target="_blank">Youarenowhere</a> is a sex and drugs show: euphoric,
pulse-quickening, a thing of abandonment – not his, he's steely
with self-control, but mine, of any other thought than what strange
new joy is this, now this, now ////. A nerves responding from reflex
not thought show, an eyes resisting the urge to blink show, a
blissful transcendence of all knowing beyond the moment of its
happening. It doesn't yield its pleasures instantly; there is a
tantalising foreplay of strobe-effect action, Schneider flitting
about the stage, body illuminated then plunged into ////////, no
connection between these movements beyond their intended effect<span style="color: white;">:
the accumulative tingle of surprise and excitement</span>. There is a
lecture, of sorts, on quantum physics and perception, but Schneider
speaks not only of but at the speed of a moving train: his words blur
as they hurtle past, clarifying only when they're gone. I have a
vague sense of irritation that all this energy is being expended to
talk of un/likely im/possible love, but then something happens so
unexpected, so astonishing, that all rational thought is consumed in
jangling awe.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">I
don't know anything for true about drugs but I've had some sex and
while each time it's basically the same there are nights that linger.
Not all positive: there is the sex of feeling </span><span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">nothing,
or feeling chafed, or </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">torn,
or used. But then there's the sex of feeling drunk when stone-cold
sober, the sex of floating weightless, the sex of ////// /////// and
enchanting strangeness and can this be forever please. Each time is
individual, if not in essence different, and there's no guarantee of
feeling the same thing twice. </span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">Now
here</span></b></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">Sometimes
I think I'm addicted to theatre</span><span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">,
sometimes it's just that I married it</span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">.
Each time it's basically the same, and yet... Sometimes I try to feel
the same thing twice, but seeing something a second time changes how
I watch: the quality of attention might be more deliberate or more
yielding, more focused or more forgiving. And inevitably that changes
the feeling.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">But
theatre being ephemeral, one shot is usually what I get. And how much
I remember of a work depends on its impact. </span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">The
impact of Robert Lepage's <a href="http://lacaserne.net/index2.php/theatre/the_far_side_of_the_moon/" target="_blank">The Far Side of the Moon</a> was seismic. I'm
not sure I'd seen anything like it before: I was barely 26 and had
been watching theatre seriously for less than five years. When I read
<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2001/jul/12/theatre.artsfeatures" target="_blank">Lyn Gardner's review</a> of it from 2001 I'm aware I remember almost
nothing she describes. Only the moment when the window of a washing
machine door became the porthole of a rocket looking towards earth
from space. ///////// //// ////. </span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">What
remains instead is the feeling of astonishment. “The entire evening
is a marvel,” Lyn wrote, “like discovering that the party
conjurer is actually a real magician.” That's what I remember:
shiver after shiver as story and staging shifted and stirred. There
was an esoteric quality to its sequence of wild coincidences and
brain-sparking connections, but also an emotional tenderness. Most of
all there was wonder. All the wonder of the universe, and of
humanity, there on the stage, more vital and real than my own skin</span><span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">,
which might as well have melted away</span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">I've
seen other Lepage shows since, and mostly felt disappointed, no
matter how adroit they were. Seeing <a href="http://lacaserne.net/index2.php/theatre/needles_and_opium/" target="_blank">Needles and Opium</a> at the Barbican
in June I felt more hopeful than usual, knowing it's an earlier work,
and more rewarded: staged in a suspended, rotating cube, it had the
flexibility of a gymnast, stretching and somersaulting as it moved
between the story of a heart-broken actor holed up in a Paris hotel
room, the same hotel room once inhabited by Miles Davis and his lover
Juliette Greco; the story of that thwarted love, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kjNkrlLiJQg" target="_blank">Juliette ravishing</a>
in period film clips, Miles played by a silent actor, who leans from
the cube as defiant of custom and conventional gravity as the music
he played; and the dry wit and playful texts of Jean Cocteau, spoken
as his body floated among stars. But I never reached full hypnosis,
and I wondered if maybe I've seen too much theatre now, and know too
well of its tricks.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">Nowhere</span></b></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">Sorry
if I've said all this before, but every time I choose to go to the
theatre, I'm choosing not to be with my kids</span><span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">:
not to help them with homework or play games or run their bath or
tuck them in for the night</span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">.
Generally I'm quite scathing of the concept of family, at least
extended family: if I wouldn't choose a person as my friend, why
devote time to them because of an accident of birth? There's
something in Slavoj <a href="https://beanhu.wordpress.com/2009/12/07/zizek/" target="_blank">Zizek's provocation</a> regarding the violence of
love – a text
Schneider delivers in the early part of Youarenowhere, at speed
again, choppily, constantly interrupted by static – that appeals to
me in this regard. “Love, for me, is an extremely violent act,”
he ruminates. “Love is not 'I love you all.' Love means I pick out
something, and it’s, again, this structure of imbalance.” I'll
happily reject that structure of imbalance when it comes to cousins,
uncles, even // ///////. But I can't inflict that on my children. </span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">Except
by going to the theatre. Each time I go it is a specific rejection of
their longings and demand: sometimes I leave with the seven-year-old
shouting through the door for me to come back. What am I sloughing
off each time I do this? What world or self am I trying to reach?
What oblivion do I seek?</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">Now
here</span></b></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">I left
Youarenowhere thinking that it was like nothing I'd ever seen before
with the possible exception of two things: The Far Side of the Moon,
and a work-in-progress by <a href="http://andytfield.co.uk/" target="_blank">Andy Field</a> called, if my email headers can
be trusted (um...), This Show Was Born at the End of the World, which
played at Battersea Arts Centre for two nights in 2010. It started as
a kind of game, a let's pretend we're sitting in a building called
Battersea Arts Centre, and that we're an audience, and let's pretend
the apocalypse has struck, but somewhere in the middle it made a
couple of shifts, one of them physical, bringing two sets of audience
together, the other mental, from (according to my email) “fantastical
to real”. And this is the half I remember and cherish, because it
was unwonted and beguiling, and that other audience was so near so
far, and there was a moment – so simple, but I don't think I'd seen
it before – when they were instructed to hold up their illuminated
mobile phones to shape a new constellation. It flashed in my mind in
the hours after seeing Youarenowhere like the face of a person I once
met on holiday // ////// / //// //// ///, and it struck me again how
bizarre it is, to feel so close to a thing so ephemeral, so
intangible, that lives on only in the mind.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">Nowhere</span></b></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">It's
funny, reading back on the email conversation I had with Andy about
that work, because one thing he specifically wanted to avoid in it
was “a cheap bit of sleight of hand”, and in the aftermath of
Youarenowhere, that's all I could think about: sleight of hand</span><span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">,
the magic that Lyn named</span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">.
Flash the lights and suddenly there's /// // Schneider; flash the
lights and suddenly he's not talking but dancing</span><span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">
– to Robyn, of all things, <span style="color: white;">Call Your Girlfriend</span></span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">.
Flash the lights and it's as though he's slashed a subtle knife
through the technicolor curtain concealing the parallel universe from
this one; flash the lights and we're teetering at the edge of / /////
////. Every so often when I take the kids to the theatre there'll be
a bit of stage business that they can't get their heads round and
they'll say to me: how did that happen? And my reply is always:
because theatre. It annoys the shit out of them. Youarenowhere was
the first time in a long time that I couldn't get out of my seat at
the end, because I was trying to figure out: how the fuck did he do
that? WHAT JUST HAPPENED? And though to some extent I could work it
out, for the most part the answer that contented my brain was:
because theatre. Theatre made that happen.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">Now
here</span></b></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">There's
no technical wizardry in <a href="http://www.stacymakishi.com/" target="_blank">Stacy Makishi</a>'s Vesper Time; at least, no
technology beyond the humble projector screen and a pair of plastic
boots. But I got the same buzz of bedazzlement from it as I did from
Youarenowhere, because Makishi is expert in theatre's other wizardry:
the ability to unite people, however temporarily, into an idea of
community. She is stealthy in her movements: in a typical dramatic
arc, she first introduces herself as Hawaiian, and then teaches us a
few phrases from her homeland – aloha, obviously; ai-ya, “I
belong” apparently (apologies to Stacy if I haven't used the same
phonetic spelling) – and later happens to mention, in a
self-deprecating way, how much she likes the Tracey Chapman song <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTIB10eQnA0" target="_blank">FastCar</a>, and eventually persuades us to cast off inhibition and sing
along with her the chorus: “I, I had a feeling that I belonged, I,
I had a feeling I could be someone.” My god the abandonment of that
moment in the room, the joy unleashed by it, the eye-watering
hilarity of realising we'd been tricked, that the “I, I” of
Chapman was the same “ai-ya” of Hawaiian phraseology, that she
was making a point about human connection with equal parts pathos and
bathos, that she had transformed the song into a mantra for lost
souls everywhere, encouraging a sense of belonging by creating one
for us.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;">I've
been questioning lately this marriage to theatre</span></span></span></span><span style="color: white;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;">,
and whether it's time for a period of separation</span></span></span></span></span><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;">.
I want my commitment to it to be more than addiction, or the quest
for a certain kind of dazzle or buzz; I want to feel there's genuine
purpose in writing about it, while being aware of the
self-centredness of that desire. In another glorious rainbow of
Vesper Time, Makishi talks about her father, who left the family when
she was young, and a figure called (something like) Uncle John, who
for a few years held that place surrogate; and how, as an adult, she
wondered whether she should get in touch with Uncle John and let him
know that she still thinks of him fondly and that he meant a great
deal to her, but decided not to, because he wouldn't remember
insignificant little her. And then it's too late, she hears that he
died, and she realises her mistake: to tell him these things would
have been an act of generosity, a communication not of her own
importance but of his. And it seems to me that this might be the
purpose of this writing: to tell the people who make this work, that
makes me feel so much, torn sometimes, used sometimes, but also drunk
or weightless or enchanted sometimes, tell them that they meant
something to someone, and that matters, they matter.</span></span></span></span></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-decoration: none;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-decoration: none;">
<b><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Nowhere</span></span></b></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-decoration: none;">
<span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">/////'/
/ /// / want to write, //// / //// ///'/ //// ///. //'/ // // ////
/// other song that appears in Youarenowhere, Ricky Nelson's Lonesome
Town, in particular this ache of a verse:</span></span></span></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-decoration: none;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-decoration: none;">
<span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">In
the town of broken dreams</span></span></span></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-decoration: none;">
<span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">The
streets are filled with regret</span></span></span></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-decoration: none;">
<span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Maybe
down in Lonesome Town</span></span></span></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-decoration: none;">
<span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">I
can learn to forget</span></span></span></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-decoration: none;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: white;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;">And
I want to say something about /////// ///// // //////// ////: the
place I go to forget. /// ////// /// //////: that oblivion I
mentioned before. But it's a disjointed thought, not least in its
relationship with the actual lyrics, too fanciful perfectly to fit.
I've tried to delete it, believe me, but something is resistant.
Maybe it's the memory of the show, an entity in its own right now,
not wanting me to edit but striving to shape itself instead.</span></span></span></span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<i><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;">[Quick
note of double thanks to Andrew Haydon, for including the Zizek video
in <a href="http://postcardsgods.blogspot.co.uk/2016/06/youarenowhere-lift-at-shoreditch-town.html" target="_blank">his review</a> of Youarenowhere as I had no idea myself where that
text was from, and for the trick at the end of <a href="http://postcardsgods.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/reformation-9-yard-hackney.html" target="_blank">this review</a>, which
influenced me here.]</span></span></span></span></i></div>
</div>
maddy costahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04929576408540749708noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8651145764236805587.post-45544544906954898052016-09-13T13:49:00.000+01:002016-09-13T13:49:07.218+01:00Demolition plot (slight return)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">Back
when I was reading Rebecca Solnit's A Paradise Built in Hell, there
was a passage about the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zapatista_Army_of_National_Liberation" target="_blank">Zapatistas</a> that shone so suggestive a light
on Dead Centre's show <a href="https://vimeo.com/149319169" target="_blank">Chekhov's First Play</a> that it sparked me into
<a href="http://statesofdeliquescence.blogspot.co.uk/2016/07/demolition-plot-extended-play.html" target="_blank">writing about it</a> (this is a postscript to that text). In a chapter on
revolution, especially the social revolutions that have taken place
in South America over the past few decades, Solnit talks about
carnival and the idea of jubilee, a Biblical notion of social renewal
whereby once every 50 years liberty from work, ownership and
exploitation is proclaimed “throughout all the land” (now that's
a religious tenet I can stand behind). It leads her to celebrating
the Zapatistas, and to a discussion about their literary figurehead,
Subcomandante Marcos. She reports how, in response to journalists'
speculation as to his identity, Marcos wrote:</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
“<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">Marcos
is gay in San Francisco, black in South Africa, an Asian in Europe, a
Chicano in San Ysidro, an anarchist in Spain, a Palestinian in
Israel, a Mayan Indian on the streets of San Cristobal, a Jew in
Germany … a pacifist in Bosnia, a single woman on the metro at
10pm, a celebrant of the zocalo, a campesino without land, an
unemployed worker … and of course a Zapatista in the mountains of
southeastern Mexico.” This gave rise to the carnivalesque slogan
'Todos somos Marcos' ('We are all Marcos')...</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">So
much of Chekhov's First Play is concerned with the possibility of
social revolution: of smashing down hierarchies and all the
structures that (up)hold them, of replacing the cult and the claim of
the individual with the selfless anonymity of the collective. When
the wrecking ball falls, the stage picture shatters with carnival
energy, and at the centre of that chaos is Platonov. Plucked from the
audience, Platonov could be anybody – in the same way that Marcos
could be anybody. </span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">In his
confusion, his hesitant movements, his inability to keep up with the
action, the manifold ways in which he doesn't fit, Platonov radiates
the imposed powerlessness of the outsider, no matter how much the
characters on stage are magnetised by his presence. And again, that
not-fitting makes him one with the ostracised whose identity Marcos
so joyfully adopts, whose presence is a problem to authority, and yet
who can, through persistence, through simply continuing to be,
challenge their surroundings and even change the script. The slogan
that Platonov inspires, the line that every character repeats in
turn, is: “You made me nobody.” Once they've said that, they fall
silent: the final vestige of hierarchy – language – demolished as
surely as the country-house set.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">That's
pretty much what I intended to say when writing about Chekhov's First
Play the first time, but it wasn't the only thing, and somehow in the
(general indulgence of the) writing I forgot to say it at all. And I
might have carried on forgetting, except that I'm now reading another
Solnit book, Hope in the Dark, and again there's a bit of writing
about the Zapatistas that reminded me of Dead Centre. There's a
beautiful line, also quoting from Marcos, on facing the future with
bravery and expectation of change: “With our struggle, we are
reading the future which has already been sown yesterday, which is
being cultivated today, and which can only be reaped if one fights,
if, that is, one dreams.”</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">Solnit
picks up on this because it supports her reasonable and reassuring
thesis that political despair is a drain on human resources; that
while fatigue is understandable, and temporary loss of faith a
natural response to disappointment, the defeatism of long-term
despair is unacceptable: “even an indulgence if you look at the
power of being political as a privilege not granted to everyone”.
Despair rejects the slow, patient and repetitive work required to
bring about social change, and replaces it with inactivity and
maudlin doom-mongering. It's necessary, she argues, to believe in
other possibilities; even, quoting F Scott Fitzgerald, “to see
things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise”. </span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">This
argument for an embrace of the unknown is exactly what she
illuminates in Chekhov's First Play. Despair in the play is figured
in the character of the “director”, who seems perky enough at
first, but gradually reveals his self-doubt and crushing sense of
failure. He shoots himself out of proceedings, only to return at the
end, still “tormented, without anything to believe in”, but now
aware of the need for hope: for “courage … to keep on living”.
What might happen in the future he doesn't know: he just has to
continue – and do so reaching outwards. When he speaks his final
word, hello, he's no longer the “director” but a single being
with Platonov, their identities merging just as “todos somos
Marcos”. </span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">Our
relationship with the unknown was a central concern in another work
by Dead Centre, Lippy – but there they undermined their own
proposition, maintaining a sense of visual mystery in the staging
while chipping away at narrative ambiguity in the text. Chekhov's
First Play similarly (but with less self-contradiction) shapes its
dream of the future even as it professes uncertainty: the other
slogan repeated by each character in turn, just before the “You
made me nobody” sequence, is: “Is this mine? I can't imagine
owning anything.” This is the politics of anti-capitalism, of the
Zapatistan maxim quoted by Solnit: “Todo para todos, nada para
nosotros” – “everything for everyone, nothing for ourselves”.
And the word “imagine” is crucial: it suggests not a physical
shift, but a mental one, the same as Solnit advocates in her book.
All the social and political transformations we've witnessed in the
past century and that are yet to come have one thing in common, she
says: “they begin in the imagination, in hope. To hope is to
gamble. It's to bet on the future, on your desires, on the
possibility that an open heart and uncertainty is better than gloom
and safety. … To hope is to give yourself to the future, and that
commitment to the future makes the present inhabitable.”</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">Dead
Centre plucked Chekhov's First Play from the past, tore it and
transformed it into a commitment to imaginative hope. No wonder I'm
still thinking about it.</span></div>
</div>
maddy costahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04929576408540749708noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8651145764236805587.post-68256333352053812932016-09-07T15:14:00.000+01:002016-09-07T15:14:03.502+01:00And here are my holiday snaps*<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">*title
a wave hello to <a href="http://selinathompson.co.uk/" target="_blank">Selina Thompson</a>, who sent me an email at exactly the
moment I needed a voice from home brimming gossip and love and a
knowledge of my other self</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<a href="http://www.nytw.org/show/hadestown/" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">Hadestown</span></a></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">It
turns out that a full-scale theatre detox – an entire month of
seeing next to nothing – is simultaneously healthy prep for the
annual Edinburgh fringe binge and a major mistake: within 24 hours of
seeing work again my brain was fizzing from the excess of stimulation
and I couldn't talk only gabble delirium. The thing that stood next
to nothing was Hadestown, a show I've wanted to see for a good five
years, ever since I <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/2011/jan/13/anais-mitchell-bon-iver-interview" target="_blank">interviewed Anais Mitchell</a> and added her to my
pantheon of living-by-their-own-truth role-model women. For the not
yet obsessed: Mitchell is a folk singer who created a wonky,
sawdust-strewn rewrite of Orpheus and Eurydice to be performed as a
community opera with her neighbours in semi-rural Vermont; later she
released the songs as an album featuring Justin Vernon (Bon Iver) (be
still my heart); and now she's worked with the Team's director,
Rachel Chavkin, to transform it into an off-Broadway musical. I love
the Hadestown album to distraction. I paid $99 to see the production
at the New York Theater Workshop, more than I've spent on a single
piece of theatre in years. I went girded for disappointment. But oh.
OH.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">In an
ideal world I'd have seen this with Vernon singing, or at the very
least Taylor Mac, who joined Chavkin for R&D work on the show.
But it didn't matter that this isn't an ideal world, because
Hadestown is a thing of such perfection that it transcends its
performers: lyrically, musically, but also narratively and
politically. I say this with authority, having witnessed Martin
Carthy sing the role of Hades for a gig performance at Union Chapel
apparently drunk, missing his cues and forgetting the words. And
anyway, Chavkin's performers were pretty much phenomenal. Plus,
Mitchell herself worked with Chavkin (and dramaturg Ken Cerniglia) on
the additional material, and her composer collaborator Michael
Chorney is a vital presence in the theatre band, so hyper-sensitivity
to stage change had its balms.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">The
bare bones of the story are this: Hadestown opens with pragmatic
Eurydice grilling her poet-musician boyfriend about how exactly they
might survive if they got married. He spins her a golden yarn about
nature providing, as though they were hunter-gatherers in a time of
Eden; but the fact is, they live in (Depression-era) America, where
“times are hard and getting harder all the time”. When she hears
the lonesome whistle of the underground train to Hadestown blow,
she's lethally tempted: its tycoon despot offers work, money, warmth
and security in place of harsh precarity. Orpheus, recognising that
she's lost her soul (and, it's implied, her body) to capitalist
exploitation, attempts to save her – but Hades, altogether too
cognisant of the weakness of humans, inevitably thwarts them.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">That's
the skeleton: what makes Hadestown exquisite are the feathers and
jewels with which Mitchell, Chorney and now Chavkin adorn it. In some
ways that's the wrong metaphor, as attested by Chavkin's rough-hewn
aesthetic: working with designer Rachel Huack, she stripped the
theatre back to a wooden floor, installed a homestead amphitheatre of
mismatched wooden chairs (a smart nod to the pioneers and Puritans of
America's past, and its constitutional commitment to rugged
individualism), and set the action in an open circle overshadowed by
the gnarled branches of a single, wintry tree. The sparseness
brightened the gleam of Mitchell's peripheral characters: bold and
swaggering Persephone (exquisitely played by TEAM regular Amber Grey,
crackling as she twisted her body into jagged origami); the
glittering chorus of Fates, watchful, teasing, never judgemental; and
Hermes, gossamer on record but in Chris Sullivan's performance
stomping and robust, a railroad man with a touch of Charon in his
crepuscular gaze. Like Chorney's orchestration, a tapestry of
American sounds weaving jazz, country and more, Michael Krass's
costumes criss-crossed the decades: 1950s bobby sox and dirndl for
Eurydice, a 1930s embroidered slip for Persephone, patchwork silks
and leathers for the Fates. Everything on stage felt thrown together
yet intimately cohesive, simple in a way that belied its complexity.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">For
Orpheus, love is simple, and so is life; he's a sentimental romantic,
but he's also, as Hermes so tenderly puts it, an artist who “sees
the world as it could be, not how it is”. Mitchell and Chavkin are
unsparing in puncturing that romanticism while committing absolutely
to its promise: Hadestown really is hell, overheated, overlit,
over-policed and over-provided, and while Mitchell had plenty of
gated communities to draw on when she conceived the notion of a
workforce committed to constructing the wall that separates its own
wealth from its fear of the poverty and jealous need beyond, that
imagery has all the more bite with Trump's Mexico manifesto (and, on
our side, the appalling Calais action) poisoning the air. Any hint of
a middle-class or left-wing sneer at the “stupid” working classes
(the criticism levied as much at Brexit voters as Trump enthusiasts)
who unthinkingly follow-the-leader is quashed by Mitchell's clear
differentiation between people and structures. People are moulded by
the context that contains them: Hades himself is built by the system
he builds, his humanity and happiness compromised by it. In
Eurydice's shoes, the Fates demand, what might we all do the same?
When Orpheus looks back, Mitchell and Chavkin open the possibility
that it's not an innate emotional weakness at fault but some trick of
structural oppression that ensures even the most strenuous of
opponents will ultimately be crushed. This is what makes Hadestown
emotionally devastating: not the fact that Orpheus loses Eurydice, as
the myth declares he must, but the deeper loss of the collective
human soul to capitalist inequality, from which – no matter how
hard we might try to stride into a different future – there seems
to be no escape. </span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">But
there is. Orpheus is still singing, and dreaming of a better future.
We know this, because Mitchell wrote Hadestown.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<a href="http://bellaunion.com/artists/laura-veirs/" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">Warpand Weft</span></a></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">Laura
Veirs shares the left-wing politics of Anais Mitchell, and her
earnestness of expression, too; but whereas Mitchell's solo work is
more straightforwardly me-and-my-guitar folk, Veirs' collaborations
with producer Tucker Martine pack the musical references of Hadestown
into erudite pop songs. It took me a while to click with her, but
since 2010's July Flame I've been a devoted fan. We played Warp and
Weft as we drove across Indiana, and it reminded me of listening to
PJ Harvey's Let England Shake while driving through the Cotswolds,
those placid rolling hills suddenly muddied and seething with the
ghosts of dead soldiers, insurrectionists, men. Indiana is basically
flat; I'd guess it's desolate in winter, but it's verdant in early
August, field after field of thriving maize. Veirs' circumspect songs
made that landscape churn with alarm at what America has become and
what it's built on:</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">How
can it be so cold out here in America</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">Everybody
is packing heat in America</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">Training
their barrels on the city streets in America</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">Every
bad man finds his peace in America</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">In
America</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">No
shootings were reported while we were in the country, but I did read
of the Black Lives Matter action shutting down the M4 back home and
glowed with admiration and a sense of possibility. Ever since Theresa
May glided into her premiership that's what I've wanted to do: just
sit in the middle of roads, bringing cities to a standstill. Instead
I sat in our hired car for hour upon hour, contemplating the spray
contraption that looms over so many field, maybe distributing a fine
mist of water but more likely showers of pesticide, noting how many
billboards advertise litigation lawyers, wondering how houses that
don't have garden fences around them can suggest so much hostility
towards the unknown stranger. Laura Veirs sang and her words ploughed
the land, churning to the surface its lack of care.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">Later
we played <a href="http://bellaunion.com/artists/laura-veirs/" target="_blank">Anna Meredith</a>'s Varmints and I thought again that it's my
favourite album released so far this year. </span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<a href="http://www.alotofsorrow.com/" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">A Lotof Sorrow</span></a></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">I'm
honestly embarrassed by how much I love the National. Looking at them
in the film of A Lot of Sorrow, installed at the Art Institute of
Chicago, I was overwhelmed again by shame, that these middle-aged
white guys, with their suits and wedding rings and thinning hair, are
so capable of turning me to putty. And yes, I'm ashamed of my
superficiality in judging them by appearance: me, a middle-aged white
woman, with my own wedding ring, constantly reminded by the queer and
feminist art with which I align myself of how essentially straight I
am; ashamed, too, of the craven lingering adolescent desire to be
different, other, strange. My embarrassment at loving the National is
a nugget of a more general shame I feel just being me. </span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">But
maybe the National are embarrassed in a similar way; or rather, my
feeling is that its members, especially Aaron and Bryce Dessner, use
this middle-of-the-road rock behemoth to finance all the different,
other, strange art they want to make. (Thus Orpheus entered
Hadestown, proud even in his submission.) A Lot of Sorrow is a
fascinating intersection of those two impulses: a continuous
performance of the song Sorrow, from their 2010 album High Violet,
over and over, non-stop, for six hours, in a white-walled room <span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">in </span>the
Museum of Modern Art, New York. I saw at most 16 minutes of it on
film, and not even consecutively, but it was enough to get my pulse
racing at the intricacy of detail: the jitter of exhausted fingers,
the crack of voice, the decision to switch to playing guitar with a
violin bow, the pause to gather resources, the slipped note, the brow
that furrows with effort, the snatched snacks for sustenance. Their
bodies are entirely at the mercy of the song: it plays over them,
through them, and so plays through me; for days after its words spill
out of me unbidden, no matter that they're sunk in cliche. </span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">Those
few stolen minutes in front of it are every night I've huddled in the
dark listening to the same song(s) over and over: listening to Cat
Power so obsessively that the person I was staying with told me I'd
ruined What Would the Community Think? for them forever, listening to
Godspeed as though they could realign the stars, listening to
Interpol's NYC, a song that haunted me this holiday (“got to be
some more change in my life”), listening to that National album I
was reviewing for the Guardian stupefied by how out of sorts it left
me. On all those nights I was alone, but watching A Lot of Sorrow in
Chicago I was with my son – my funny little boy who likes his music
gentle and melancholy, has a penchant for Debussy, and was as
mesmerised by the film as me. I twined my arms around him, grateful
for this lifebuoy of love.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<a href="http://iamjohnoliver.com/" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">JohnOliver</span></a></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">The
friend we stayed with in Chicago is a fascinating combination of
socially Democrat (that's how she votes, too) but economically
Republican (a committed believer in success rewarding hard work,
adherent to the American Dream). She's white Scottish, her husband
black Chicagoan, and their political engagement – both donated to
the Bernie Sanders campaign – gifted plenty of lively conversation
in their house about disappointment in Obama's leadership, lack of
belief in Sanders' revolutionary agenda, and the dire prospects of
the upcoming election. The thing that took me by surprise was their
admission that they get at least half of their political news from
watching the plethora of satirical programmes that screen in the US.
It's not a healthy state of affairs, they said, because what's needed
is cultural balance, a space in which people can actually speak
across the political divide, rather than hurling snark at each other.
But the thing is, I can't remember the last time I engaged with any
news-related programming on the BBC without wanting to punch people
for allowing so much inanity so much airspace. If we're going to ape
American programming, can we at least import the acute with the
vapid.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">We
spent an evening watching John Oliver programmes, and one in
particular landed a horrible punch. It's a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4NRJoCNHIs" target="_blank">programme about drones</a>, in
which Oliver shows a clip of a young teenager from Pakistan, talking
about the sky: grey days are good, he says, because that's when his
head feels clear of anxiety. Blue skies, by contrast, fill him with
fear. And people wonder how Muslim children might become
“radicalised”.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<a href="http://petermcmaster.tumblr.com/" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">Lightat the edge of land</span></a></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">Peter
McMaster's blog was my holiday firefly, bringing flashes of natural
wonder to a fortnight of preying architecture and obsidious concrete.
I harbour a deep and quiet love for Peter and his work, and the
attempt at a different way of living, thinking, making art and
opening up to the world represented by <a href="http://petermcmaster.tumblr.com/post/146694925938/direction" target="_blank">Gold Pieces: Outer Hebrides</a>
reminds me how much and why. The work takes the form of a two-week
cycle tour, marking in gold leaf upon land's edge a line to which, at
a conservative estimate, it's anticipated water will rise as
human-accelerated climate change affects sea levels. The gold is
ostentatious but the action anything but: it's a humble attempt to
reckon with environmental destruction, a lament for what might soon
not be, a movement towards a different sense of value. It's art made
for no money or purpose other than to notice, to acknowledge, to
witness – not what's before us, but what's unseen.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">There's
a beautiful thing Peggy Phelan says in her forward to the Tim
Etchells book Certain Fragments, identifying “the essential nature
of witnessing itself: to continue a conversation that without your
intervention would cease”. Gold Pieces: Outer Hebrides continues a
conversation between human and land, one Peter still dominates
(painting rock with gold is “an unsympathetic defacing”), but in
a way that's diametric to the domination humans generally exert,
plundering earth's resources without care. His journey coincided
exactly with mine to the US, a piquant synchronicity: while he
cycled, camped, measured and gilded, I visited the Natural History
museum in Manhattan, Prospect Park zoo and the aquarium in Chicago,
and in each place fretted at the ethics of human-animal relations,
the cruelty required to give children a glimpse of wild nature, and
the extent to which cities diminish and even eliminate opportunity
for children to commune with a greater outdoors. </span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">Peter's
blog posts continue another conversation: with the unseen audience.
When Phelan writes of the witness, she's thinking of course of the
audience, and I value that sentence so much for its suggestiveness
regarding criticism or writing about theatre. To me it presents a set
of open questions: is it enough to be a silent witness? Is
documentation essential if the conversation is to continue? Is it
possible to engage in the conversation as critic/critical
writer/whatever without overbearing? I don't know. But there was a
warmth for me in reading Peter's posts and recognising in the
scenario an echo of when I first met him, at Battersea Arts Centre,
when he was thinking similarly but in a different context about
masculinity, privilege, and solitude, environment and the spiritual
possibilities of a closer connection to nature. There is a longevity
and depth to our conversation, but also a scarcity, privately as well
as professionally: I rarely see him; I've seen much more of his work
than I've written about. And so how might it register if I stopped
being witness, if the conversation ceased? Would it matter?</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">It was
such an unexpected gift, a few days after I got home from Chicago, to
bump into Peter at Forest Fringe, where he was performing another
variation on the Gold Piece strand, a one-on-one called <a href="http://petermcmaster.tumblr.com/post/149502023388/forest-fringecommitment-cards" target="_blank">CommitmentCards</a>. The work is exquisite in its shape and generosity: Peter
begins by offering tea, then asks what you're yet to say no to.
Gently he guides the conversation to an invitation to commit to
something, with him as witness. Work like this galvanises but also
disquiets me: it's so open that it inspires openness, and how much
must the artist then absorb of human anxiety or insecurity as
participants unburden? <a href="https://synonymsforchurlish.com/been-to-edinburgh-51372ca78b27#.alp8cn2m2" target="_blank">Megan Vaughan</a>, writing about her interaction
with Commitment Cards, describes Peter as “a reassuring therapist”,
and Peter himself says in his blog post about the evening that he's
“not afraid of the idea of art-work being therapeutic” or “to
embrace the sensation of therapeutic experience”. I worry because
he doesn't have a therapist's training or safety mechanisms; that
these things aren't required for one human to give their ear to
another is a useful and inspiring thing to remember. As Peter says in
the blog: “I was moved by witnessing someone open up for the
benefit of both of us, for the creation of a bigger idea of
self-expression and compassionate communication being allowed to
exist in the world.”</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">I've
participated in one other <a href="http://www.petermcmaster.org/gold-piece" target="_blank">Gold Piece</a> with Peter and cherish it
precisely for its compassionate communication, achieved without
speaking at all. Based on the Japanese practice of kintsugi, the root
Gold Piece invites its participant to mend a piece of broken china,
gluing the pieces together then painting the cracks with gold dust.
As I did so, I felt Peter was silently forgiving me for every stupid
or thoughtless or mistaken thing I'd ever done. Kintsugi is a
philosophy as much as a practical art: it values the imperfect,
honours its scars. There's another thing I want to write about it
(especially since my brilliant friend Anna spotted a reference to
kintsugi in Beyonce's Lemonade) so I'll shut up now, but this strand
of Peter's work feels so important to have in the world – not just
in spite of its minimal reach, but because of it. </span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<a href="http://www.wandajackson.com/" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">WandaJackson</span></a></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">The
Rock'n'Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland is so bizarre: a small-town
museum in everything but pretensions, closer in spirit to those
ramshackle rooms devoted to <a href="http://www.dunstermuseum.co.uk/" target="_blank">dolls</a> (Dunster), <a href="http://shellgrotto.co.uk/" target="_blank">shells</a> (Margate) or
<a href="http://www.hastingsfish.co.uk/museum.htm" target="_blank">fishing</a> paraphernalia (Hastings) than the more grandiose cultural
houses that its architecture evokes. I loved it, the more so for
being ridiculous. Highlights: the Elvis display, which I wanted to
bring home to my mum; the drawings by Jimi Hendrix; the absurd
attempt to claim Cleveland as the epicentre of the pop universe; the
fact that the area devoted to the history of hip-hop is only slightly
bigger than the area devoted to outfits worn by Beyonce. Best of all
are the listening booths that people – locals, I'm guessing –
have claimed for karaoke, each one packed with friends singing at the
tops of their voices, not caring for the lack of closed doors. I
didn't buy any memorabilia because I'm going to make it instead: my
own version of a dress worn by Wanda Jackson, with a panel of gold
sequins down the front and red fringing down the sides, something to
fill a dance floor with flames.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<a href="http://www.ynharari.com/" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">Abrief history of humankind</span></a></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">There
are things generally known, at least by the people I surround myself
with. It's known, for instance, that humans are humans, regardless of
what country they're from or what colour skin they have. It's known
that humans have affected and accelerated ecological devastation.
It's known that story is vital to human culture and existence. Yuval
Noah Harari's Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind repeats these
known things, but places them in a depth of field (as he puts it,
scanning “millennia rather than centuries”) in ways that are
surprising and transformative. I'm prone to hyperbole I know, nothing
I say can be trusted, but I'm only two-fifths through and already I'm
changed by it. Or rather, he's brought to light and forced me to
acknowledge a whole lot of weak thinking in my brain and challenged
it in necessary ways. </span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">It's
an incredibly depressing book, because page after page asserts the
same argument: that it's actually impossible to change the culture in
which we live, because the story of it is too tenacious, too
embedded. In no way is he saying that we are by nature neo-liberal
acolytes of the free market, but that all societies coalesce through
story, and the stories that dominate now have been in place for
thousands of years. This bit in particular is devastating: he's
talking about how difficult it would be to shift inter-subjective
imagined orders (the examples he gives are “the dollar, human
rights and the United States of America”) because to do so would
require “simultaneously chang[ing] the consciousness of billions of
people”, and to do that would require creating “an alternative
imagined order” even more powerful than the one you're attempting
to change. And so, he concludes: “There is no way out of the
imagined order. When we break down our prison walls and run towards
freedom, we are in fact running into the more spacious exercise yard
of a bigger prison.” The book is full of statements like that and
every one stings. </span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">But.
BUT. He's affirmed my belief in feminism as the story with the most
potential to create change. His chapter on the patriarchal structure
is brilliant, because it comes right out and says that its
“universality and stability” is bewildering. He presents all the
key arguments for masculine supremacy and steadfastly exposes them as
arrant nonsense. There's a glorious butter-wouldn't-melt tone to this
writing: a swallowed amusement that no one will admit that the real
reason men dominate over women is that, in general, they are selfish
shitbags who chanced to seize an opportunity for power and never let
go. The feminist story struggles because it is disparate and scratchy
with argument and riddled with its own damaging hierarchies, but
there is hope in its tenacity, its adaptability, its ongoing
refusals, its compassionate communication (such a useful phrase). It
is the story in which I have most faith, and which gives me the most
strength.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">He's
also made me feel better about the idea of living in a bubble. If the
imagined order at the macro scale is so impossible to change, why not
collectively imagine a new order on a micro scale and live within
that instead? At some level that's the ultimate in white middle-class
privilege, of course – the same line of argument that builds walls
and gated communities – but I don't, I hope, mean it that way. My
alternative world is populated by makers of story, theatre, art,
music and more, by feminists and activists, by people who don't
retreat from the bigger world but comment on it, rewrite it, work
against it. Each fuelling the other, giving each other purpose and
sustenance, and making life in that bigger system possible.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<a href="http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/04/11/ragnar-kjartansson-on-repeat" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">Scandinavian pain</span></a></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">We
went back, me and my funny little son, to A Lot of Sorrow, because –
and, dozy as I am, I had to go to Chicago to find this out – the
film was also screening in London over the summer, as part of the
<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/jul/17/ragnar-kjartansson-barbican-review" target="_blank">Ragnar Kjartansson exhibition</a> at the Barbican. And then I had to go
back a third time, because there were chunks of the exhibition deemed
unsuitable for children (translation: he missed out on seeing a
hilarious film of a dog running round and round a swimming pool as a
woman swam lengths because it was next to a video of a couple having
sex), and because he was tired by the time we reached the Visitors
room and two minutes in there was 58 not enough. </span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">I
realised something, watching A Lot of Sorrow that third time,
laughing as Kjartansson brought out burgers to the band, ribs
crushing and convulsing every time Matt Berninger rumbled the opening
line. There's a National lyric that's key to the whole exhibition,
but it's not from Sorrow, it's from Pink Rabbits, an absolute
humdinger in a song full of them:</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">You
didn't see me, I was falling apart</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">I was
a white girl in a crowd of white girls in the park</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">You
didn't see me, I was falling apart</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">I was
a television version of a person with a broken heart</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">A
television version of a person with a broken heart. Just writing it
gives me shivers.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">Kjartansson
is fascinated by the interface of performance and personal, the
effects of external culture on internal emotions, the ways in which
people make stories which inform human behaviour, the Mobius strip of
mirror and mirrored. In the accompanying text for the multi-video
installation Scenes From Western Culture, he talks about the
pervasiveness of certain atmospheres, certain settings and moods,
wanting to jolt the brain into seeing them and maybe even resisting
them. By using repetition, he invites audiences to look harder, give
better attention: to seek out the difference between the television
version and the person. </span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">But
it's the broken-hearted bit he's particularly incisive with. My son
had zero tolerance for God, in which Kjartansson dresses up as a Rat
Pack crooner and, accompanied by a cruise-liner swing band in a
pink-satin room, warbles the words “sorrow conquers happiness” on
repeat, and to be honest I didn't bother returning: the minute I saw
felt off-kilter compared with the fine balancing act of A Lot of
Sorrow and in particular The Visitors. There's such subtlety to the
permutations of melancholy in both of those: the performers wallow in
it, luxuriate in it, step away from it so easily that one person I
know complained on twitter that he “smelt the faint whiff of
vacuous”, saw only “irony on loop”; but there's also a fine and
solicitous appreciation of how intense and real and consuming
melancholy can be, how weird and jolting it is to feel like shit and
yet sometimes be capable of laughing or noticing beauty, how
excruciating it is to know somewhere deep down that the melancholy
that is so overwhelming might also be something you're performing (a
question Selina – waving hello again – asks of herself in Salt).
Nothing about A Lot of Sorrow, or The Visitors, or Take Me Here by
the Dishwasher felt ironic to me: there's a grain of playfulness in
them, even in Dishwaster a dash of cheerful stupidity (in this one,
Kjartansson has isolated three minutes of a soft-focus Mills &
Boon movie romance, in which a woman in a pink maribou dressing gown
has a tryst in the kitchen with a man in plumber's uniform, and
projects it on a wall while young male musicians loll about the
partially decorated gallery space strumming at guitars and droning
the dialogue from the film on repeat). But the questions these works
ask about how we see or feel or differentiate between the real, the
imagined, the fantasised, the performed, and how our ability to do so
is affected or conditioned by the art, film, theatre, music, TV and
books we consume, are serious and rigorous and give Kjartansson's
work its vitality. </span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<a href="http://www.searchpartyperformance.org.uk/current/growingoldwithyou/" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">Growing Old With You</span></a></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">Before
I saw Search Party's Growing Old With You at Forest Fringe, <a href="http://andytfield.co.uk/" target="_blank">Andy Field</a> texted a warning: “your heart is going to BREAK”. I braced
so strenuously that for most of it I was steel. But then Pete lay
down on a table and Jodie began to cover his body in salt. And that
was it. Snap.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">Search
Party are just about my favourite theatre-makers in Britain
(inevitably that's a long list in which everyone is joint first). I
love them for <a href="http://www.searchpartyperformance.org.uk/current/saveme/" target="_blank">Save Me</a>, the semaphore show, in which they stand at
opposite ends of a public thoroughfare and communicate messages given
by passers-by to each other; with patience and grace and infinite
charm it makes visible the fragility of communication and the ways in
which people speak their truest selves to strangers. I especially
love them for <a href="http://www.searchpartyperformance.org.uk/current/mysonandheir/" target="_blank">My Son & Heir</a>, the parenting show, in which they
speak so honestly of the strains and anxieties and competitiveness
and compromises and horrible absurdities of bringing up children that
I wept almost non-stop through it. And now I love them for Growing
Old With You, the all-of-our-lives show that they're going to make
new versions of every 10 years. At Forest they performed the first
instalment, and because it's already a few years old, it feels like
an act of nostalgia as much as documentation and assessment. The
scene in which Jodie covers Pete in salt felt, in the moment of
watching, overwhelming in its romance and longing: for youth to be
preserved, for the intensity and joy of falling in love and getting
married to never be lost. But on reflection, its complexity is
unfurling. I see the futility of that attempt to control time, and
also the limitation of it: where's the room for growth or change? I
see Pete lying still on the table like a corpse: that time is already
gone, fleeting as the life of a butterfly, and nothing can ever bring
it back. Above all, I see that while you can't argue with perfect
being, maybe you can't live a full life either.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<a href="http://jennyoffill.com/" target="_blank"><br /></a></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;"><a href="http://jennyoffill.com/" target="_blank">Dept. of Speculation</a> </span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">There's
a great paragraph in a Guardian <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/feb/28/jenny-offill-dept-speculation-underdog-personas-not-going-to-fly-any-more-interview" target="_blank">interview with Jenny Offill</a> from last
year in which she talks about her admiration for visual artists who
“take an everyday thing and somehow make it, by accumulation, into
something much bigger”, and in particular her delight that British
reviewers of the book understood its humour, “all these moments
which are really meant to be kind of a joke about what it’s like to
be depressed”, which tells me she's probably a big fan of
Kjartansson. I'm finding her novel Dept. of Speculation painful to
read, because it's like she's poking needles into my brain. I had to
put it down for two days after this line: “Some women make it look
so easy, the way they cast ambition off like an expensive coat that
no longer fits.” The paragraph in which the narrator, a woman of
“crooked heart”, describes her happiest time as “a time you
were all alone, in the country, with no one wanting a thing from you,
not even love” made me choke. I feel exposed by it, the more so
because I so desperately wish I were smart and brave and gifted
enough to have written it and it's lacerating to reminded page after
page that I'm not. </span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">The
thing is, I never make room for other kinds of writing in my life,
because I'm always writing about what other people make. Holding up a
mirror to the mirror, an endless loop, shoring fragments of feeling
and experience against my <a href="http://www.bartleby.com/201/1.html" target="_blank">ruins</a>.</span><br />
<br />
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maddy costahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04929576408540749708noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8651145764236805587.post-37218170784097272522016-07-15T00:15:00.002+01:002021-07-10T00:13:05.191+01:00Demolition plot (extended play)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">There
was a time when I wrote a diary. Not every day; intermittently, for
about four years. I stopped when I realised that a) I was only
writing it when I was miserable, b) I was repeating myself, c)
writing it changed nothing.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">There
was a time when I thought Chekhov, if not the most boring playwright
in the history of theatre, certainly in the top 10. </span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">I'm
sorry if you've read these things before here.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">Remember
that last sharp day of winter we had? At least, it was the last sharp
day London had: Tuesday 26 April, 2016. I stood at the kitchen window
and tried to work out if those slushy white flakes were hail or snow.
A few days later I stood in the same place and realised I was looking
at the first sharp day of spring: green leaves so defined against a
bright blue sky they seemed extra-dimensional. And I had a thought
I'd never had before: this means nothing to me. The spring, the
brightness, the green, the blue. Time turning, age grinding,
unremarkable repetition, and a slow, inexorable deadening.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">This
is the emotional voice in my head that listened to Chekhov's First
Play and heard its echo. </span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">But we
won't start with either of those.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">Let's
start with Dominic Dromgoole. </span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">In
2000 he published an “A-Z of contemporary playwrights”, The Full
Room, written with such irascible passion that with every dip I come
away scalded. On Phyllis Nagy: “I'm sure she's terrific, but for me
it always sounds like someone being a writer, rather than someone
writing about being.” On Lee Hall: “Somehow he manages to keep
many thousands of hungry mouths happy with a few loaves of a talent.”
That the witticisms emerge from a forensic scrutiny of the actual
plays gives everything he writes an air of justice, despite his
protestations in the introduction that he's not here to judge, and
regardless of whether or not I agree. But if he's ruthless in
exposing flaws or inconsistencies, he's also intemperate with
admiration: in the heat and light of his praise, his subjects glow. </span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">He
also writes with a strong moral compass, whose true north is Chekhov.
In the entry on Anthony Neilson, he notes approvingly: “As Chekhov
could dream of a better world in time to come, without providing some
glib programme of improvement, so Neilson looks four-square into the
heart of our sexual darkness, and allows himself to dream of a better
world.” And in the entry on Patrick Marber – “a brilliant
boulevard entertainer” – he looks in vain for “a real wish for
good. With a Chekhov, with a Brecht, with a Beckett,” he explains,
“you see a brilliantly realised and brutally honest vision, behind
which there hovers the ghost of a better, fairer, more beautiful
world. With Marber … beyond what we see is a chaos filled with
violence, sexual desire and sexual disgust, and endless mutual
loathing.”</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">I
think about this chapter on Marber a lot, in particular for what
Dromgoole says in the final paragraph:</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
“<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">Chekhov
wrote volumes of work, built schools, opened hospitals, interviewed
ten thousand prisoners on Sakhalin island, kept his family, kept his
patients alive, held hundreds as they died, spent fifteen years
coughing his own life away, and still managed to keep hope in balance
with despair, still managed to love life and its mad optimism.”</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">The
leaves, drunk on chlorophyll, radiant and meaningless.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">*</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">The
“director” of Chekhov's First Play (warning: a frenzy of spoilers lies ahead) has read a biography of
Chekhov; he knows these facts and knows that, by comparison, he
himself is failing. I put “director” in quote marks to
differentiate him from Ben Kidd and Bush Moukarzel, who co-directed
<a href="http://www.deadcentre.org/" target="_blank">Dead Centre</a>'s production, not because they didn't genuinely read the
biography, but because I left the <a href="http://mayfestbristol.co.uk/" target="_blank">Mayfest</a> performance stupefied by an
adolescent crush on Moukarzel, who also wrote the adaptation and
plays the “director” on stage, that heard everything he said as
soul-dredging confession. I need the quotation marks to remind me
that this is a character, that the voice that is speaking is a
performed voice, that when the “director” begins berating himself
as “a fraud”, when he says “I don't know what I'm doing” or
that “I haven't been feeling myself lately. And by lately, I mean
ever”, what I'm hearing is a fabrication. Never mind if it's the
words I hear in my head all the time.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">But
let's avoid that voice a little longer.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">It's
hard to avoid the “director's” voice in this production. Once
he's delivered his pitch-perfect introduction – light as a meringue
and yet ominous, not just because he wields a gun, but because he
makes visible something I (and likely others in the room) had never
contemplated before: the audience member's temporary legal ownership
of their theatre seat, its status as “private property” – he
retreats to the wings and talks around, across and over his actors,
commenting on their performances, his own choices, the themes and
subtexts of the play. Of course, some of his own text has a subtext:
when he says, close to the beginning, “I love real life. The
detail”, there is an underlying irony that is quickly exposed when
he begins to berate the actors for moving in the wrong way and
forgetting their lines, in other words being real people, but also an
undertow of pathos whose emotional pull operates more slowly.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">What
he particularly wants to draw our attention to is the reflection –
no, continuation – of Chekhov's world in our own. Some of that is
to do with unchanging human nature: as he notes in his introduction,
all Chekhov's plays “ask the big questions: who am I? What kind of
a society do I want to live in? What do I want?” But some of it is
to do with the ways in which Chekhov thought about “the kind of
society” that surrounded him, his attitudes towards privilege and
work, property and debt, social stagnation and the possibility or
imminence of change. These attitudes, compassionate, socialist and
challenging of orthodoxy, have a pliability that the best directors
(and playwright-adapters) seize as gleefully as children do playdoh. </span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">I
didn't think any of this until I watched Benedict Andrews' production
of <a href="http://postcardsgods.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/three-sisters-young-vic.html" target="_blank">Three Sisters</a> (Young Vic, 2012): it spoke so precisely to the
frustrations of my own life, and to the stuckness I've been able to
name since reading the Ann Cvetkovich book on depression, that I
heard more vividly the play's address to society at large. I felt the
same wonder and excitement watching Katie Mitchell's production of
<a href="http://matttrueman.co.uk/2015/02/chiller-chekhov-the-young-vics-cherry-orchard.html" target="_blank">The Cherry Orchard</a> (Young Vic, 2014): as adapted by Simon Stephens,
it wasn't a play about privileged (albeit poor) people for whom I
felt no sympathy, but the complex relationship between class,
capitalism and environmental devastation. Robert Icke's <a href="http://www.artsjournal.com/performancemonkey/2016/03/all-in-the-acting.html" target="_blank">Uncle Vanya</a>
(Almeida, 2016) was the least convincing of the three, in that a lot
of the staging choices were fucking annoying even if they did make intellectual sense, but as a portrait of people damaged by the basic condition of
being alive, holding down the lid on their hopes, desires,
frustrations and anger before inevitably boiling over, it was
exemplary. </span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">I'd
seen all of these plays before, sometimes in pretty good productions,
but my general idea of Chekhov was sealed early on by a Cherry
Orchard played in a wealthy suburb of London, by actors with plummy
accents wearing white lace and linen suits, that left me wanting to
punch every person on stage, for their entitlement, apathy and
mediocrity. This was the problem of Chekhov's First Play for me: when
the curtain rises, it looks like just such a traditional, tedious
production. And that's a lie. The directors, Kidd and Moukarzel, know
that it's a lie: they know they're working within a “German
theatre” aesthetic, but they pretend not to be for dramatic and
comic effect. To be fair, it works: the jokes teasing conservative
theatre, in which the “director” complains about the actors and
lets slip the sexual shenanigans going on behind the scenes, easily
win the laughs they chase. OK, I sound like a miserabilist. But
Chekhov's First Play does something incredibly powerful politically,
and for me that could have been more potent still if Dead Centre
hadn't settled on the chocolate-box image of a sprawling country
house as the site for that action: an image that distances more than
it implicates. </span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">In
other ways, Chekhov's First Play is rigorous in implicating. It makes
explicit reference to Ireland's recent history, first with jokes
about its flaccid economy, but gradually becoming more serious about
the spiritual effect of debt. (Something about the way it compacted
gravity and sickly unease into comedy reminded me of John McDonagh's
film <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/apr/10/calvary-review-gleeson-mcdonagh-peter-bradshaw-film-of-the-week" target="_blank">Calvary</a>.) It talks about the central character of Platonov as
someone “over-educated but useless, unnecessary”, typical of a
generation who have “let go of ideals”: people who know that
there is social inequality, rising poverty, ecological catastrophe
taking place, but are comfortable enough themselves never to do
anything more serious to challenge it than mouthing off on social
media. (I'm very much describing myself here.) It spends its entire
first half insistently arguing that we can't wait for someone else to
save us. And then. And then.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">Two
months on, I still feel giddy and breathless just thinking about it.
Because the hinge point of Chekhov's First Play unleashed all my
wildest fantasies of what I'd like to do in the political world. It
drops a wrecking ball from the flies and proceeds to demolish
everything: the physical set, but also the metaphysical structures
that hold the characters – and us, the audience – in place. That
wrecking ball smashes at property, at family, at propriety and
expectation. When it falls, the women stop talking in a vaguely
dissatisfied way about lacking a sense of purpose and start naming
their specific hatred of “my marriage and capitalism and my student
loan and how the modern consumer society separates us from ourselves
… normality and monogamy and gender normative privilege”. Being
idealistic about wanting these things to change isn't enough. You
have to get out there and actively fight them. You have to live the
difference you want to see.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">To
do that</span></span><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
takes courage and verve. It takes a willingness to make mistakes,
look awkward, feel out-of-step with everyone else. It takes quick
thinking and attentive listening. And Chekhov's First Play shows us
how. It pulls someone out of the audience, someone prepared enough in
advance to be wearing a particular red denim jacket but no more, and
gets them to play Platonov. I've since read the playtext (THANK YOU <a href="https://www.oberonbooks.com/" target="_blank">OBERON</a> for replacing the copy I stupidly lost) and
understand a lot more about what happened in this half of the
production, but I'm going to be truthful about the experience of
watching and say that there was much that I didn't hear or that
didn't feel clear in this section. It didn't matter: chaos was part
of the point, the necessary correlative of destruction. </span></span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Through
most of this, the “director's” voice is absent: he's silent
because he shot himself, unable to bear the disparity between what he
wanted the production to be and what he had actually made. Implicit
in his adaptation is a question – what does it take to be
extraordinary, and actually change the world? – and a recognition
that it's the wrong question, playing into patriarchal notions of
singularity and genius. Far better to be a nobody: but a nobody
genuinely dedicated to the cause of helping other nobodies, enabling
them to escape the bonds that tie them, enabling them to cast off the
pressures of keeping up with life as shaped by neoliberalism.
Platonov is that nobody: he's just a stranger, plucked from the
auditorium. It could have been any one of us. And because of that,
it's all of us. </span></span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Such
was my intense sense of identification with this Platonov that I felt
quite upset when the staging required him to point a gun at his own
head. It felt wrong, an unethical ask. Reading back over the text, I
wonder what it means to have a character repeatedly described as
useless and unnecessary, and then have him played by a member of the
audience. I worry that if I pick at the wrong thread of Moukarzel's
adaptation, the whole thing will unravel.</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">What
holds it all together for me, allows me to live in its
contradictions, is that voice, the “director's” voice, which is
also Platonov's, and mine. That voice caught between idealism and
pessimism, hope and depression, knowledge of the work that needs
doing and terror of actually doing it. The “director” seems so
confident when Chekhov's First Play starts, but it's all bluff. He
lacks faith not only in himself but in theatre as a medium: “It's
so aimless,” he mourns, as his characters sing People Ain't No Good
in Russian. The song returns in the final scene, when the “director”
returns, head bandaged, for a speech that devastated me:</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
“<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">This
gun. At least let me explain one thing right. Chekhov's first play
had a gun in it and his second, and all the rest had guns in them in
one way or another, until in his last play … it was gone. It's like
he got over it. He wrote away the gun.</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">He
realised his characters have to do something even harder than dying.
They have to go on living.”</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">I've
lost count of the number of times I've thought those last two
sentences in the <a href="http://www.chrisgoodeandcompany.co.uk/all/the-possibility-of-death-in-impossible-living/" target="_blank">past few years</a>. The accuracy with which they echoed
my inner voice – the inner voice that the “director” explicitly
acknowledges in his opening speech – meant that the words that
followed reduced me to a puddle. “I don't know who I am, what it is
I want, why I'm alive. But I need to have courage,” his voice, my
voice, said. “I wonder will this voice ever stop? … This
commentary, commenting on everything. Will it ever go away?” Not
just my inner voice but the voice I hear speaking to a counsellor, a
weirdly out-of-body experience. “Where would I go, if I could go,
who would I be, if I could be, what would I say...?” These are the
questions that consume me at night, lying awake in my too-hard bed.
And as I sat in my theatre seat – my own private property, which
holds me in place, in which I always behave with absolute decorum,
just as I do in the world outside – I knew exactly what was coming
next, but still felt an intense sense of gratification when
Platonov's final word is: hello.</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">*</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">For
such a basic word, hello is really hard to say. </span></span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">On
Friday 1 July, I visited the <a href="http://www.sistersuncut.org/2016/06/29/summer-of-action-south-east-london-sisters-uncut-occupation-on-rye-lane-peckham/" target="_blank">South-East London Sisters Uncut occupation</a> of a disused shop in Peckham. I'd planned to get there
early and sit with my laptop, writing about the room, but also maybe
writing this, or about Ria Hartley's work, or maybe about what it was
to grow up in Thatcher's Britain as a way of reflecting on the terror
and anxiety but also weird sense of euphoria I felt in the first week
post-referendum, when it still seemed vaguely possible that there
might be a left-wing resurgence (excuse me while I wring my hands
with despair). Instead, I found all sorts of excuses to delay leaving
home. There wasn't going to be wifi in the building. I had some
scraps of food in the house that I ought to cook for my lunch. And so
it was 1.30pm by the time I arrived, giving me barely an hour in the
space before the school run. </span></span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">The
people on the door were immediately friendly but the usual shyness
consumed me so I rejected the offer of a tour and had a look round on
my own. The main room was welcoming, warm and light, despite having
few windows and no carpet on the concrete floor. It was the warmth
and light of generosity and political fervour. The occupation was
staged to draw attention to the lack of provision for women living in
Southwark who experience domestic violence, particularly black and
minority ethnic women following austerity cuts. Along one wall was a
huge banner bearing the group's slogan: how can she leave if there's
nowhere to go? Along another, lively posters detailed previous
Sisters Uncut actions, in photographs and clips from less than
sympathetic media. There were sofas and a large children's play space
with toys and a wendy house and drawing materials, and a stack of
food with an invitation to all-comers to help themselves. Scattered
around were copies of the excellently thoughtful safe space policy,
and reminders that the space was open only to people who identify as
female or non-binary. It was beautiful.</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Looking
around gave me the courage to go back to the people at the door and
say hello. This is how I met Sita X. When a friend of Sita's arrived I
continued the conversation with Becca, asking about how the
occupation was going, and about Sisters Uncut generally. When I had
to leave, I felt like an idiot: I hadn't had enough time. I wished
I'd been there all day. </span></span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">I
asked Becca why Southwark in particular and she patiently told me
about its appalling record of failing women who come to the council
seeking help in escaping abuse situations. We talked about the
council's bristly, patronising response to the occupation, that
“statistics don't tell the whole story”, and the blog Sisters
Uncut planned to <a href="http://www.sistersuncut.org/2016/07/01/se-london-sisters-uncut-occupation-in-full-swing/" target="_blank">publish in reply</a>. I asked how they managed to get
into the building, and Becca told me about laws related to squatting
and the mechanics of the occupation, how everyone involved was taking
time off from work or study to be there. I've always been terrified
of this kind of direct action – and there was a moment when the
Sisters gathered at the door, worried that an aggressive man might be
seeking entry, that reminded me why – but talking to Becca and
Sita, it felt possible. More than that: necessary. </span></span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">I
can't imagine not writing about theatre but nor can I carry on as I
am, advocating in the abstract for social change without doing
physical work to bring it about. In the time it's taken me to write
this post, I've been reading <a href="http://www.honno.co.uk/dangos.php?ISBN=9781909983021" target="_blank">Here We Stand</a>, a glorious, invigorating
book of interviews with and texts by female activists, that is
nourishing me and encouraging me and giving me a way forward. There's
one woman in particular, Mary Sharkey, that I'm clinging to because
she was in her early 40s before she became politically active: what a
relief to encounter her, and recognise that there's no point berating
myself for wasting time and not doing this sooner (that voice again,
commenting on everything) because – as she says in the final line
of her interview – it's never too late to start. She has an
excellent motto, too: “Behold the turtle, who makes progress when
she sticks her neck out.” Perfect. </span></span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">So
I've been inhaling that, and also <a href="http://kimyadawson.com/about-kimya/" target="_blank">Kimya Dawson</a>'s album Thunder
Thighs, which I deeply regret missing on first release, if only
because it would have done me much good to hear her sing “now I'm
37 and I'm glad that I'm alive” when I was 37 and really not. There
are so many best-friend songs on this album: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LXLHYAqHBTA" target="_blank">Same Shit/Complicated</a>,
which trumps me for ultra-earnest expression; <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omGr59xpPNo" target="_blank">Utopian Futures</a>,
which to the letter describes the place I want to live; <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_RPiZBe2Cc" target="_blank">Zero or a Zillion</a>, a piquant fuck you to the art accountants out there. But I
think my favourite is <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XIhO5WoZe6s" target="_blank">Miami Advice</a>, in particular the chorus that
closes it:</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">You
think I'm preaching to the choir</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">But
I am not</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">I'm singing with the choir</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">This
is such a key point made by the women of Here We Stand (a book, it's worth noting, <span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">that was recommended to me by <span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;"><a href="http://marypaterson.tumblr.com/" target="_blank">Mary Paterson</a>, <span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">w<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">ith whom I've</span> been <a href="http://somethingother.io/#/blog" target="_blank">w</a><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;"><a href="http://somethingother.io/#/blog" target="_blank">orking</a> for a couple of<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;"> years and in that time has taught me so muc<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">h about <span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">collaboration and <span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">political engagement)</span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span>: the real goal
isn't individual action but collective. “What we create are
ripples,” says Liz Crow, “where the work of many peoples combines
to make change.” And collectivity starts with saying hello.</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">*</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Five
years ago, I started writing a diary again. It's going OK: I'm doing
better at turning to it in different moods, and trying hard
not to repeat myself. I still know it doesn't change anything, not
materially. But it does something my old diary never did. It says
hello. I know this because you're reading it now.</span></span><br />
<br />
<br />
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maddy costahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04929576408540749708noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8651145764236805587.post-16430086166035701492016-06-18T02:05:00.000+01:002016-06-18T02:07:09.534+01:00songs for the women with rage in their hearts<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">Every
work I've seen by Melanie Wilson – <a href="http://statesofdeliquescence.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/fraying-at-edges.html" target="_blank">Autobiographer</a>, <a href="http://postcardsgods.blogspot.co.uk/2013/11/landscape-ii-bac.html" target="_blank">Landscape II</a> and
now <a href="http://www.fueltheatre.com/projects/opera-for-the-unknown-woman" target="_blank">Opera for the Unknown Woman</a> – has been a fight against falling
asleep. Each one is also high up in the list of the most galvanising
things I've ever encountered. That sounds like a ludicrous
contradiction I know, but in my head both are direct responses to the
meticulous quality of her work. Slow, deliberate, patient, it acts on
me like a mesmeric charm, and what it inculcates within that mood of
hypnosis is an increasingly radical feminist politic. Any frustration
I feel as my brain begins to lull and drift is with my own difficulty
calibrating to her work in the room, my own failure to meet its
demand. Within the general culture this failure would be framed as
Melanie's alone, because demanding work is seen as anathema to the
accessibility, entertainment and instant gratification deemed
necessary to attract and placate audiences. But I resist that, and so
does she, committing herself instead to sculpting new forms for
performance, and creating space for different stories about women.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">Watching
Opera for the Unknown Woman at the Wales Millennium Centre (and I
guess someone will want me to disclose that I was there on the
invitation of Fuel, Melanie's producers), I felt the usual
somnolence, but also more than usual excitement. There is a sense of
urgency to it, if not in pace then in theme, that I haven't felt from
Melanie before: I'd name it a call to arms except the libretto itself
argues against the militarism implied by that phrase. It's certainly
a song for action, though, for global feminism to unify against the
patriarchal structures that are relentlessly destroying life on
earth. That destruction registers individually and socially, in
poverty, military aggression, and xenophobia in all its
fear-of-the-other guises; and it registers ecologically, in the
depletion of resources and degradation of land and atmosphere. You
know this, I know this, there's nothing new being argued here, but to
quote Audre Lorde – which Melanie does in her libretto, too –
“There are no new ideas, just new ways of giving those ideas we
cherish breath and power in our own living.”</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">*</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">Lorde
is one of those writers I might have read years ago, if only I'd been
less white-centric in my approach to the feminist library. I feel I'd
be a better person if I had. There's quite a lot of repetition in
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sister_Outsider" target="_blank">Sister Outsider</a> – a collection of essays first published in
small-press periodicals and speeches first delivered at academic and
feminist conferences across the US, events so distant in geography
that in each instance her message was probably received fresh – but
it's a repetition I find useful, because everything she argues for is
fundamental and yet as rare to encounter as it was when she was
active, in the 1970s and 80s. On 24 February 2016 I was reading
“Learning from the 60s”, a talk delivered at Harvard University
in February 1982, and feeling nauseous at how similar the world she
described is to our own: </span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
“<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">We
are Black people living in a time when the consciousness of our
intended slaughter is all around us. People of Color are increasingly
expendable, our government's policy both here and abroad. We are
functioning under a government ready to repeat in El Salvador and
Nicaragua the tragedy of Vietnam, a government which stands on the
wrong side of every single battle for liberation taking place upon
this globe; a government which has invaded and conquered (as I edit
this piece) the fifty-three square mile sovereign state of Grenada,
under the pretext that her 110,000 people pose a threat to the US. …
Decisions to cut aid for the terminally ill, for the elderly, for
dependent children, for food stamps, even school lunches, are being
made by men with full stomachs who live in comfortable houses with
two cars and umpteen tax shelters. None of them go hungry to bed at
night.”</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">I can
date the reading because I was on my way to the Royal Court to see
Caryl Churchill's <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2016/jan/31/escaped-alone-caryl-churchill-review-royal-court" target="_blank">Escaped Alone</a>, and Lorde's words shifted my entire
sense of the show. Escaped Alone is another meticulous and hypnotic
work that had me struggling against lethargy yet sent me out
electrified, and I scoured reviews to find someone who had the same
reaction to it as me but no one did. To recap: Churchill sets the
play in an elderly woman's “backyard”; in this production she is
white and English and her garden a microcosm of a green and pleasant
land, lawn neat and borders maturing beneath a bright blue sky. Three
women gather within its high wooden fences and a fourth,
eavesdropping as she passes by with her shopping, is invited in to
join them. Their conversations are elliptical, words flitting through
them like butterflies, most sentences starting in the middle and
halting before the end, but accumulatively they make a rough kind of
sense: one day they talk about their children and grandchildren,
another about a TV series they're all watching; they get exercised
about the disappearance of local shops and the relative merits of
visiting the doctor or the hairdresser, and gradually,
surreptitiously, they plumb their deepest secrets: the depression
that keeps one slumped indoors, the phobia of cats that has another
scurrying about the house enacting obsessive-compulsive rituals to
make sure none has snuck in, the six-year prison sentence served by a
third for manslaughter. Their afternoons didn't make much sense to me
at the time of watching; it was like looking at the back of a piece
of needlework and seeing only loose threads and random knots. It was
only on turning the text over since it ended that I've been able to
see the intricacy of the stitches, not one of them out of place. </span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">Interspersed
with these seemingly placid scenes are speeches delivered off-set by
the interloper of the group, Mrs Jarrett, the only one of the four to
bear a husband's name and speak about him regularly, too. I say that
still not knowing what its import might be. Those off-set speeches –
delivered in James MacDonald's staging just outside a framed
rectangle of sizzling copper light, the size of a cinema screen –
have a flavour of Hollywood apocalypse about them, disease and
destruction and death coursing through them like poison. They seem
far-fetched and yet each contains a sentence so blandly familiar that
Mrs J could be describing our immediate tomorrow:</span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">Water
was deliberately wasted in a campaign to punish the thirsty.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">Gas
masks were available on the NHS with a three-month waiting time and
privately in a range of colours.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">Commuters
watched breakfast on iPlayer on their way to work.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">Buildings
migrated from London to Lahore, Kyoto to Kansas City, and survivors
were interned for having no travel documents.</span></div>
</blockquote>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">Watching
Escaped Alone through the lens of “Learning from the 60s”, it
felt clear to me that the sense of global political and ecological
catastrophe that Churchill anticipates in these speeches from Mrs
Jarrett isn't new, that this anxiety reaches back decades, and always
it has been a legitimate response to the same thing: the abusive
power of men, whether presidents of countries or companies, leaders
of armies or representatives of religion, to twist shared resources
(human or natural) to personal advantage. The three women Mrs J
encounters in that back garden – I'd argue – are in their own way
damaged by the attempt to live within even a supposedly “developed”
society because it remains conservatively patriarchal. </span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">Where
Churchill tightens the radical-feminist screw is in the closing
moments of the play. Everyone except Mrs Jarrett has had a moment in
the spotlight in the back garden (a bit of staging I didn't
especially like) in which the air seemed to chill momentarily as
their thoughts unspooled, and when she has hers this happens: she
sits on her chair and repeats the words “terrible rage”, just
that, 25 times in the printed text, the voice of the actor (Linda
Bassett, exceptional in her anorak of mundanity) thickening like a
storm cloud with each repetition, growing in force and crackling
energy as though it were attached to a dimmer switch and the voltage
were being inexorably increased. My god it was fucking extraordinary;
by approximately repetition 19 I was simultaneously nauseous, in
tears and ready to stand on my chair shouting along in solidarity.
This, this is what simmers beneath the surface of women, what courses
through Audre Lorde's writing, what historically has been dismissed
as hysteria; this terrible rage, poured down the sink with the dirty
dishwater and wiped away with the shit from a baby's bum. There's so
little time or space for that rage once you're a mother or a
grandmother; motherliness is synonymous with fondness, nurture,
shelter, protection. At any age rage is deemed unfeminine, an
unacceptable form of expression for a woman, because expressed that
rage inevitably challenges the status quo.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
“<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">Every
woman has a well-stocked arsenal of anger potentially useful against
those oppressions, personal and institutional, which brought that
anger into being. Focused with precision it can become a powerful
source of energy serving progress and change. And when I speak of
change, I do not mean a simple switch of positions or a temporary
lessening of tensions, nor the ability to smile or feel good. I am
speaking of a basic and radical alteration in those assumptions
underlining our lives.”</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">Lorde
knew a thing or two about anger; that quote is from a keynote speech
delivered at the National Women's Studies Association conference in
1981 called “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism.”
Among her uses of anger is a challenge to each woman to “see her
heelprint upon another woman's face”, to comprehend the
complexities of intersectionality and that anyone who benefits from
the status quo in a “developed” western society does so at the
expense and exploitation of invisibly poorer women in the same
society and elsewhere. There is nothing of that in the idle
chitter-chatter of the women in Churchill's backyard, hardly anything
you'd recognise as an overt feminist articulation: their rallying cry
is a (glorious) close-harmony rendition of a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqgtsai2aKY" target="_blank">1960s girl-group popsong</a>. And yet there is this rage – and there is a
recollection of its use. The woman imprisoned for manslaughter killed
her husband, in their kitchen: it was accidental, she says, “kitchen
knife happened to be in my hand”, but the owner of the backyard has
her suspicions, that the retaliation (“when I hit back”) wasn't
instinctive self-defence but revenge unleashed against sustained
domestic abuse. Watching Escaped Alone through Lorde's exquisite
anger, I saw that accidental stabbing as a microcosm of feminism's
relationship to patriarchal structures: is Churchill putting forward
– mildly, affably – the possibility that feminism as a movement
might one day find itself, knife in hand, finally snapping at so many
centuries of injustice, slicing into the arteries of how-things-are,
severing the tendons of history?</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">*</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">On the
train to Cardiff to see Opera for the Unknown Woman I passed the
Daily Mail building and, not for the first time, wanted to throw a
bomb at it. The idea of insurgency terrifies me, I know I wouldn't
want to live it in reality, but the romance of it is strangely
alluring. With her habitual clear-eyed composure, Melanie Wilson
offers protest, collaborative reasoning and the occupation of space
as better courses of action. Her Opera itself enacts an occupation,
of a codified and elitist art form historically the province of male
composers; in a <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2016/jun/08/why-women-take-centre-stage-new-opera-for-the-unknown-woman-melanie-wilson" target="_blank">brilliant column for the Guardian</a> she wrote: “Opera
can challenge its sexist evolution, once diverted from being used as
the mouthpiece of a male narrative, which has driven so many of its
best-known examples in the past. The goal now is to repurpose the
tool for our needs, making the journey from a female voice that
suffers to a female voice that speaks up and out.”</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">There
are 11 female voices speaking up and out in Melanie's Opera, with
very little instrumentation – a pulse and patter of percussion, a
satin ribbon of cello – to distract from them. The music instead is
made from their voices: gorgeous ululations in Arabic, multi-vocal
refrains, and the aural texture found in the variety of accent and
intonation of the performers, each from a different culture and
country, drawn from every continent. The set-up for this global
gathering is simple: it's 2316 and humanity is exhaling its final
gasp, as carbon dioxide begins to overwhelm the atmosphere, surging
seas drown coastlines and forest fires rage inland. An outer-galaxy
committee convenes a taskforce of women in 2016 and entrusts them
with averting this destruction. The sci-fi landscape is established
in the first three minutes of the libretto and understood from then
on (Alistair McDowell, with your clunky exposition in <a href="https://www.newscientist.com/article/2083397-the-play-x-will-have-you-clock-watching-but-in-a-good-way/" target="_blank">X</a>, please take
note). What's less clear is the action the women should take, or even
what they should seek to save. Their discussion, sometimes tense and
argumentative, doesn't just campaign for collaborative reasoning: it
embodies it.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">As if
having 11 women on stage weren't panoply enough, Melanie includes
other female voices too: some of them silent but expressive, in
photographs of women finding solidarity with each other during the
Arab Spring uprisings; some of them in the form of quotes, from
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Fd8bwsf_BQ" target="_blank">Kathleen Hanna</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christine_de_Pizan" target="_blank">Christine de Pizan</a>, and of course Audre Lorde (other
inspirational women are credited in the programme, including <a href="http://vandanashiva.com/" target="_blank">VandanaShiva</a>, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/13/chinese-police-free-three-of-five-feminist-activists" target="_blank">Wei Tingting</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shelley_Jackson" target="_blank">Shelley Jackson</a>, <a href="http://www.dorislessing.org/" target="_blank">Doris Lessing</a>, <a href="http://www.msafropolitan.com/" target="_blank">Minna Salami</a>,
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVQjGGJVSXc" target="_blank">Nina Simone</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valentina_Tereshkova" target="_blank">Valentina Tereshkova</a> and <a href="https://www.malala.org/malalas-story" target="_blank">Malala Yousafzai</a>, and I want to
see the Opera again for a multitude of reasons, but mostly to listen
more closely to the libretto in case I can hear their words woven
into it). Lorde's line is repeated twice; taken from a paper
delivered as part of a “lesbian and literature” panel in 1977
called The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action”, it
states: “Your silence will not protect you.”</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">It's
so, so easy to be like the women in Churchill's play, wittering away
in one's own backyard. Lorde demands more than that, and so does
Melanie's libretto. There was a bit of me astonished by its blatant,
unapologetic articulation of feminist and left-wing politics: where
was the BBC-mandated counterbalance of climate-change scepticism?
Where was the toning down for people who don't want to feel preached
at? She is invigoratingly forthright in this piece: environmental
catastrophe is real and it's here and we don't have time to wait for
someone else to deal with it. That sense of urgency can be a source
of fear on the one hand, depression on the other, but there's a
wonderful line in the libretto that says (quoting roughly): saving
humanity is the work of a generation. The hope in that line is
heartening.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">Lorde's
essay speaks directly of opposing silence in the face of racism, and
there's a bit of me anxious at the expedience of a white feminist
appropriation of her words: Melanie's in the libretto, mine in
writing about it. Similarly, I felt ruffled watching the Opera by the
decision to have one of the black women raise the possibility of
violent action against government/military/capitalist cartels: the
other women reject this as perpetuating masculine aggression, and I
felt uncomfortable watching them disagree so vehemently with the
black woman, would have felt better if the suggestion had come from
one of the white characters. </span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">But the discussion across difference in
Melanie's libretto feels both vital and true to Lorde's spirit. In
another speech, from 1979, “The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle
the Master's House”, specifically taking women in academia to task
for their lack of “consideration of lesbian consciousness or the
consciousness of Third World women”, Lorde speaks about
difference as essential to creative political
thinking: “As women we have been taught either to ignore our
differences, or to view them as causes for separation and suspicion
rather than as forces for change. Without community there is no
liberation, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between
an individual and her oppression. But community must not mean a
shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretence that these
differences do not exist.” Melanie's opera forges community, both
within the group on stage and with the real-life women who inspired
the work. The voices of those women resound across centuries –
Christine de Pizan was writing 600 years ago – and remind us that
our history as feminists is long and nourishing. What is being called
for here – the slogan on the badges handed out at the end – is
“affinity and resistance”: and that's what Lorde was looking for,
too. I love the openness with which she says, in “The
Transformation of Silence...”, that “I am myself – a Black
woman warrior poet doing my work – come to ask you, are you doing
yours?”, because she doesn't specify what she thinks your work
should be: are you working against racism, capitalism, ecological
disaster? It's all good.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">And
it's all connected. This, for me, is the correlative of
intersectionality: a recognition that all the different oppressions
have systemic exploitation as their root cause. Earlier this year, a
man in Stockholm told me that we don't have time to fight against
capitalism: the urgent crisis is eco-catastrophe, and we have to
focus all energy on that. I found I wasn't able to answer him, and it
was the silence of non-comprehension: I couldn't understand how he
doesn't see that eco-catastrophe is the result of capitalist
exploitation, just as racism is, just as poverty is, and so on and so
on, and that battling one requires battling the other. Opera for the
Unknown Woman attempts exactly that cohesion of battle,
idealistically but so valiantly, and is all the more inspiring for
it. </span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">*</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">Shortly
after I wrote that bit about my dream-theory of feminism stabbing the
patriarchy built into Escaped Alone and wanting to bomb the Daily
Mail building, the news emerged of <a href="http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2016/06/a-day-of-infamy/" target="_blank">the murder of MP Jo Cox</a>, by a
white man who, it's been emerging, had consorted with
neo-Nazis. My own words have gnawed at me since. I say the romance of
insurgency is strangely alluring, but – like any romance – that's
so naive, and ignores the truth of violence. I've been reflecting
since on how my entire existence, as a white middle-class woman, is
one of allowing myself to ignore the truth of violence, whether at
the extremes of experience (refugees struggling to leave a war zone)
or on my doorstep (endemic racism in British society). This week,
with <a href="http://mirandayardley.com/the-orlando-pulse-nightclub-shootings/" target="_blank">the shooting in Orlando</a> closely followed by Cox's murder, that
truth has been impossible to ignore, and amid the tumult of things
I'm feeling is a volcanic sense of rage. Terrible rage that our
“democratic” choice has been distilled to different flavours of
conservatism. Terrible rage that people voting to leave the EU are
also in the majority climate-change sceptics. Terrible rage at the
powerlessness of the left. Terrible rage at my ineffectuality and
unforgivable privileges. Terrible rage terrible rage terrible rage.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;">What
to do with it? Lorde's counsel, in "The Transformation of Silence",
is clear: “For those of us who write, it is necessary to scrutinize
not only the truth of what we speak, but the truth of that language
by which we speak it. For others, it is to share and spread also
those words that are meaningful to us. But primarily for all of us,
it is necessary to teach by living and speaking those truths which we
believe and know beyond understanding. Because in this way alone we
can survive, by taking part in a process of life that is creative and
continuing, that is growth.” I look at my writing and want to erase
from it the language of violence. I listen assiduously to voices both
known (Harry Giles and Selina Thompson, people of such wisdom and
empathy that knowing them makes me want to work much much harder) and
unknown (among them <a href="https://twitter.com/AyoCaesar/status/743481534678695936">Ash
Sarkar</a>, <a href="https://mediadiversified.org/2016/06/17/britain-has-confused-social-sociopathy-for-economic-debate/">Chimene
Suleyman</a>, <a href="http://robertsomynne.blogspot.co.uk/2016/06/the-whistle-and-dogs-when-being-racist.html?m=1">Robert
Somynne</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/HamHambreen/status/743480671440633857">Sam
Ambreen</a>), and begin to share them. I work to transform silence,
knowing that Lorde was, remains, right: silence will not protect us.
I acknowledge that the work is also not to sink into the hopelessness
of thinking nothing will.</span></div>
</div>
maddy costahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04929576408540749708noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8651145764236805587.post-38479119468266774462016-06-08T11:38:00.000+01:002016-06-08T11:38:13.801+01:00Showing you the money: a commission from/conversation with Paula Varjack<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="color: blue;">There
was a plan that Paula and I would publish this writing
simultaneously: <a href="http://showmethemon3y.tumblr.com/post/144648131033/in-conversation-with-maddy-costa" target="_blank">her on the terrific blog Show Me the Money</a> connected
to her performance of the same name, all of which I explain further
down, and me here (which isn't as obvious as it might seem), but on
the day she posted I was on a very delayed train home from Norwich
and time has been running away with itself ever since. I'm as
grateful to Paula for the lengthy email conversation we had about the
ethics of me doing this writing (some of which extracted below) as I
was for the commission. Writing this made me aware of just how much
of a stranglehold certain capitalist beliefs have over my brain: I
have so much work to do to sort myself out.</span></span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="color: blue;"> </span> </span></span>
</div>
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<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">The
quandary</span></span></b></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">18/12/2015:
From Paula</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">I
have been thinking it would be really great to have some critical
writing on this preview I have in March: a genuine critical
reflection from someone well-versed in the forms and content I am
exploring. I haven't budgeted for this but could afford 100-200
pounds. Would that be fair?</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">30/12/2015:
From Maddy</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">I've
been involved in quite a few conversations over the past year to do
with the ethics of artists asking/paying for writers to write about
their work. Most people I encounter have a much bigger problem with
it than I do - !!! - and yet, my initial reaction to your email was:
for you to pay me to review your work would be inethical. So that was
weird. I think I might feel most comfortable doing [something
interview-based], rather than a review. And, at the risk of sounding
greedy, is £200 OK?</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">31/12/2015:
From Paula</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">To
be honest, before I first contacted you I would not have considered
approaching anyone in this way. But I was advised that it was
important for the future of the show to have some critical writing on
it, and as a one-off preview of a work by an emerging artist this was
very unlikely to happen. Finding a mid-point that seems ethical for
both of us is a good idea. Maybe an interview-based work is that. As
the money would be coming out of my own pocket, it would help me a
lot for it to be 150.</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">3/1/2016:
From Maddy</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Your
email was super useful: that thing about how bloody hard it is for
emerging artists to get their work written about – or even seen –
is so true, and usually I'm the first to advocate the culture shift
that makes critical dialogue possible within the making (as I type
this, I realise how far removed I am from my own idealism). In terms
of actual cash, I'm really fine with £150. I don't know if you've
had a thought about where it should be published. Will talk to Exeunt
about publishing there.</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">4/1/2016:
From Paula</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">The
Exeunt thing was a bit of a trigger, as much as I would love to be
featured in Exeunt, paying for it really didn't feel right. I need
the writing, there is not a market for reviewing a one-off preview by
an emerging artist, I am making a piece against unpaid work, I don't
want you to work for free. My idea is to pay you to write something
to be published on both of our blogs that explores this quandary. </span></span>
</div>
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<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">The
'review'</span></span></b></div>
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<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">My
first encounter with Paula Varjack is in spring 2015, at an industry
gathering at Ovalhouse in London dedicated to questions of artist
development. Paula's presentation is one of the high points: it gets
across everything dubious about scratch culture (the expectation that
artists show work in an early stage, for little or no pay),
juxtaposing criticism and provocation with a witty powerpoint display
that brings laughs with its lightness of touch. In that 15 minutes, I
decide Paula is **interesting**. Translation: next time she's
performing, I want to be there.</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">That
impulse is confirmed when I start reading the <a href="http://showmethemon3y.tumblr.com/" target="_blank">companion blog</a> to her
new work, <a href="http://www.paulavarjack.com/projects/Show-Me-the-Money.html" target="_blank">Show Me the Money</a>. Part-diary, part-resources log,
part-political commentary, it uses newspaper articles, photographs
and links to other people's writing (there's some spitfire material
from Scottee) to contextualise and open up Paula's argument: that art
is work, graft and craft, and the people who make it should be paid
accordingly. In doing so, the blog transforms the show from a single
event to an ongoing, far-reaching discussion. This, I like.</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">So
I arrive at Rich Mix for the preview performance of the show itself
with heightened anticipation. But whatever I'm expecting, I'm soon
surprised, and charmed, by two things: firstly, Paula's framing
confession that most of the choices she has made in life have been
guided by money and a desire for security, because I've done that too
(and loathe myself for it). Secondly, it turns out she's not 24 or
28, as I'd thought, but 37. 37! If you don't appreciate how
delightful this is, then clearly you're not yet the wrong side of 35.
I'm so far the wrong side I'm almost 41. </span></span>
</div>
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<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Age
is a subtle strand in Show Me the Money, as it might be coming from
an “emerging”, “early career” artist who confutes the
simplistic assumptions attached to that labels. When making it, Paula
travelled the UK interviewing other artists about their relationships
to money, security, ambition and place; people at various stages of a
career, working across multiple disciplines, some of whom are
comfortable, some surviving, some barely scraping by. Their voices
are useful: what could feel self-absorbed, as Paula describes her
shift from behind-the-scenes producer to on-the-stage performance
artist, becomes instead a portrait of an industry. And she uses the
film footage conscientiously, not to confirm everything she thinks
but to interrogate it, complicate it and expand it. There's a piquant
section in which she intercuts Scottee, fulminating on the lack of
transparency in theatre-venue finances, with some candid quotes from
Annabel Turpin, chief executive at ARC in Stockton-on-Tees,
explaining why that lack of transparency might be necessary. </span></span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">This
conversation with the film footage gives the show a documentary feel,
but Paula's deftness with multimedia disrupts that easy
classification, and introduces a whole lot of fun. The dread inspired
by Arts Council England is cheerfully conveyed through a youtube
montage of office scenes and an electro-pop funding application. She
adopts Iggy Pop as her alternative god, paying worship by paying
royalties. But while all this activity gives the show brightness,
sadness prickles beneath its surface, that to work from a place of
love should also be so difficult and limiting. Among Paula's pantheon
of inspirations is an uncle who carves wooden birds: she always
admired him for following his passion, but eventually noticed the
sacrifices he made for the sake of art. What will that sacrifice mean
for her? Not having children? Having to leave London, her home? </span></span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Following
the argument, I'm intermittently torn. Part of me is sympathetic;
part of me wonders whether these questions about sacrifice are
indulgent. One of the people Paula interviews is Dennis, who works as
a cleaner at Rich Mix, and in another building: between the two, he
has a 70-hour week with one day off. He does this because he hates
the insecurity of not having a regular paycheck and not having
savings in the bank for every eventuality. On the blog, Paula points
out that the dichotomy between “cleaner” and “artist” is a
false one: many people she knows finance their art work through
cleaning jobs. But is making art arduous in the same way that
cleaning is arduous? Why worry about artists' survival when so many
people are barely getting by? (And that's just thinking about the
working classes of the UK, who are thriving compared with refugees
attempting to live here.) Might the access to making art and the
platform it brings be privilege enough? </span></span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">The
'interview'</span></span></b></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">The
word privilege crops up a lot in Show Me the Money, and Paula is
upfront about her own. Background, education and a modicum of
financial security made her decision to become an artist possible:
she owns her flat in London, having bought it back when she was a
salaried employee and prices weren't astronomical; her parents
enabled her to study at university; even now, her family could help
her if she were ever desperate. She shares this information
willingly, and would gladly give more: during a Q&A section,
we're invited to ask for any further detail we want. This leads
straight into what is, for me, the highpoint of the show: a
ferociously delivered, meticulous breakdown of the costs of making
it. Every penny is accounted for, including what she's paying for
this piece. I love it, because no one publicises their finances in
this way, and that secrecy creates the conditions for pay disparity
and prevents the general public knowing what it actually takes to get
a performance work on the stage. </span></span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">And
yet, at the end of the budget breakdown, Paula glares at the audience
confrontationally, as though affronted that we've had the temerity to
want to know this stuff. It confirms a nagging sensation I've had
throughout the show, of being in some way chastised. If artists have
a problematic relationship with money, she says, it's down to three
things: precarity, anxiety, and in particular, a lack of
transparency. It's easy to get the impression that everyone working
as an artist in the UK is supporting themselves fine – but dig
deeper and all the hidden support systems emerge. This person is
financed by their partner, that person has savings backed up, this
person owns their own home, that person supplements their art career
with other jobs. But I'm confused: not all of these are privileges,
and even if they are, how blameful are they? </span></span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">It's
the main thing I want to talk to her about when we meet a few days
after the performance. The note of confrontation at the end of the
budget breakdown was, she admits, a mistake: “While I was in it, I
was thinking that energy doesn't make sense. It came out of the fact
that when I did a scratch at Battersea Arts Centre, one guy was
really angry and gave me a feedback form that was all black spiky
capital letters; on the back he had a whole list of questions, like
how much was your grant, how much did you pay for dah dah dah. To be
honest, I was kind of traumatised by it, because his main attack was
that the show hadn't been developed enough – but it was a scratch!”</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">As
for the things I'm hearing her classify as privileges, there's
something I'm misunderstanding. “I know a lot of people that seem
to just be surviving on this, and I was really upset about that: what
am I doing wrong? But then when people admit, oh, of course I'm not
surviving on it either, that's not really about privilege: that's
about people not being honest about having other income streams. The
fact that we as a community are not being honest enough makes me feel
really angry, and that's something I think is bigger than the
artistic community.</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
“<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">If
I'm really crude and reductive about it, there's a thing that's
ironic looking at the American ideal, the Dream, and English
cynicism. One side basically says: everything is a meritocracy, it
doesn't matter where you come from, you just have to work hard enough
and you can fulfil the dream. And the other says: it doesn't matter
what you do, everything is decided, and anyone who has ever achieved
anything is only there because they've got it all laid out. Both are
really unhelpful. It's good to be aware that people do have privilege
and access that other people don't have – but so many people have
said to me that they won't apply, for instance, for public funding
because they don't have any ways in. But if you don't even apply!
Both are not useful attitudes to have.”</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Paula
has this dual outlook because her early years were split between
London and Washington (her father is British, her mother Ghanaian);
she's also pretty clued up about economics because, as it emerges
during the show, her father worked for the International Monetary
Fund. What this background hasn't given her, however, is much direct
contact with the British class system, its entrenchments and
resentments. “I thought I had an understanding of it: I don't have
an understanding at all. </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>At
all</i></span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">.
Having that realisation when making a show on this topic was
terrifying, but maybe it's also a gift. For me, literally everyone is
on exactly the same level, and because I genuinely don't judge
anyone, I think I was able to have conversations with very different
people, people who would offend each other if I allowed them to be in
the same space.”</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">And
yet, what was that nagging feeling I had of being chastised during
the show if not a feeling of being in some way judged? After we speak
in person, I email Paula a frank breakdown of my own privileges –
the university education, the house I own, the husband with the
full-time job and salary and pension, the nest-egg savings, all of
which make it possible for me to take on commissions like this one –
and the equivocal feelings I have about them, especially set against
my upbringing, with working-class, poor, immigrant parents. I want
the conversation about privilege to be open to such equivocations and
confusions, I tell her. But the more we talk, the more I realise that
what I'm actually doing is performing the outrage of the privileged
at having their privilege called out. Paula isn't judging me. I'm
judging myself.</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">To
ask whether art is as arduous as cleaning, or whether we should care
about artists' survival when there are refugees to worry about, is
typical of a class-based, capitalist mindset that classifies and
judges, too. Paula is attempting to dismantle this by asking her
audiences to think about “the human cost” of making art: the
“time and energy and effort” involved. Hence the emphasis on
transparency – or, as she phrases it within the show, “full
disclosure”. And she's doing that in a context specifically
resistant to such disclosure. “Obviously England is not the only
culture where people are not fully open about money, but there is a
very particular awkwardness and anxiety about money here. I asked
everyone [I interviewed] what their salary was, and what their
outgoing payments were, and most of the time that question was
incredibly awkward. You could tell they didn't really want to answer
– or when they answered, they seemed OK, but afterwards they'd
contact me and ask please can you not put in how much my house is
worth, or the fact that I own a flat. Especially in London: no one
wants to admit they own a flat in London any more.”</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Is
there even a relationship between these financial figures and an
understanding of the “human cost” of making art? Arguably, yes –
because of the connection between precarity and anxiety. Anxiety is
one of the key human costs of working in the arts: I know this
because I live it. Since making the switch from a relationship with
writing about theatre/performance that was fundamentally journalistic
to a relationship that attempts to exist within art's own frameworks,
my salary has steadily dropped; I don't yet know what I earned in the
financial year that just ended, but in 2014-15 it was less than
£10,000. What Paula anticipated to be a half- to full-day job has
taken me at least 22 hours, if not more, stretched over six weeks. I
juggle commissions with being a mum, and worry constantly that I'm
neither working hard enough nor present enough for my kids. It's a
privilege to do this work. It's also self-exploitation.</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">The
point of unity</span></span></b></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">We
could, of course, give up. I could stop writing, Paula could stop
performing, we could all get regular jobs. Except maybe it's not that
simple. In another striking sequence in the show, one of Paula's
interviewees, writer/performer Femi Martin, talks about trying to get
a job outside of the arts and meeting only rejection. “That's the
ironic thing,” says Paula, “even if you get to a certain point
where you think, this was a nice idea but enough now – which I'm
very much feeling – it's not so easy, because suddenly you're in a
situation where no one wants to fucking hire you any more.” </span></span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Instead
of giving up, Paula argues, our impulse should be to fight. “Artists
are actually in service: even if we're making something that is
escapist or experimental, we are in service to society and we can do
things that the media can't. I really strongly believe that austerity
[as a solution] is a lie, and there's a lot of economists who agree
with me on this, and having a conversation that says it's the NHS or
the Arts Council is the wrong fucking conversation. First of all, the
amount of money that the arts get in the overall budget of local
councils is so tiny. And every business sector gets support: the arms
industry gets support, the automobile industry gets support, most
businesses get some form of support – and they get much more
support.</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
“<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">I
wanted to make a show about a national question, which is: how do we
value art and what is the human cost of art and what does paying for
the arts and funding for the arts say about how our society values
art and artists? I think art is really valuable for society.” It is
that fundamental belief which drives her to call for better pay, and
me to join my voice with hers. Is it inethical for her to pay me to
write about her work, when there is so little space within the media
where this can happen, and so few paid opportunities? Is that the
right question to ask?</span></span></div>
</div>
maddy costahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04929576408540749708noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8651145764236805587.post-65997476394330802432016-06-01T01:37:00.001+01:002016-06-01T01:37:06.688+01:00Three things that I made when not writing about theatre<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">This
first one isn't really something I've made, at least not in the most
literal interpretation of the words. It's a poem by Harry Giles, and
he wrote it for me in return for me starting to <a href="https://www.patreon.com/harrygiles?ty=h" target="_blank">give him money viaPatreon</a>. I'd been meaning to do so since he emailed me about this
“scary money experiment thing” in February 2015: I love him,
despite having very little contact with him, and think he's all good
things in the world, so of course I want to support him. And yet, it
wasn't until January 2016 that I actually made that support
financial. I still feel weird that there is now this financial
element to our relationship. </span></span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">At
the time, Harry wrote <a href="https://harrygiles.org/2015/02/11/the-crowd-the-community-and-patronage/" target="_blank">an excellent post</a> laying out his own arguments
for and against asking for patronage, which I found really helpful.
Like him, I worry that “it’s so clearly all a part of the
neoliberalisation of arts funding: the expectation that artists have
to become solo entrepreneurs” – and, the correlative of that, the
expectation that art is something to be funded by its consumers, and
not in common, as a basic provision of healthy civil society. More
positively, like him, “I like making it clear that art is not
something that just happens, is not something that other people
decide to make happen, but rather something that we all have a stake
in making happen, and in making happen in more radical ways.” </span></span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">In
an email, I admitted to him that the relationship between giving on
Patreon and giving to registered charities confuses me. In a
nutshell: “if I give £5 a month to Shelter and that's to help ALL
the homeless people in the UK then to give £2 or even £1 a month to
a single person so they can make art kind of doesn't add up; but
then, I can spend twice as much on a single ticket to go to the
theatre as I do on a monthly donation to Unicef which is supposed to
be helping ALL the children living in poverty and plight around the
world, and I could just as effectively give that ticket money to you
in £2 per month donations”. In the event, that's pretty much what
I decided to do. </span></span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">The
thing that makes me most uncomfortable with Patreon is exclusivity:
the idea that, because I have some funds at my disposal, I can get
stuff that other people don't get. That's how capitalism divides
people and I want to resist it. But Harry's gift to all new patrons
is to write them a poem, on a subject of their choosing. I decided
that I was only happy for this to happen if it could be a poem that
we made publicly accessible, and he agreed, in an email that also
contained a gentle reminder that maybe the key problem of capitalism
isn't commerce but exploitation. The word that was stuck in my head
at the time was “longing” (it quite often is, to be honest), and
this is what it inspired Harry to write. I like to think that his
poem reflects the many conversations we've had together about class,
and capitalism, and togetherness, and making; that, although it isn't
something I've made, it has a specificity rooted in our relationship
that means I have, in some way, made it happen – and not just by
giving money.</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b><br /></b>
</div>
<b>
</b><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">THE
LONGING FOR ONE THING INSIDE OF ANOTHER</span></span></b></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">by Harry Giles </span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">There
was a world where tokens were exchanged</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">for
food, and when a token met your hand</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">a
spur extended blandly into your palm</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">to
take a sip of blood. This payment kept</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">the
tokens bright enough to check your hair in,</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">cool
enough to glide from purse to purse.</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">And
in this world there were two friends who made</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">assemblages
of wood and steel: stairways,</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">sunshades,
simple things to see through, things</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">to
pause on, things to touch. They worked apart,</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">and
then from time to time they met to look</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">and
say, "This works", and say, "This doesn't work."</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">One
day one friend came with a gift, a question.</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">They
bought some time discussing techniques, and then</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">they
said, "I heard your purse was light. I saw</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">your
building shed was empty and your tools</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">were
sore for oil." And they held out their hand</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">with
sixteen hungry tokens free to take.</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Now,
both these friends were just the kind of folk</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">to
argue far too hard about the way</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">things
are on other worlds, or could be, or were,</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">and
how to cross between them without snapping</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">painful
laws of space and time. At times,</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">they
held that wood and steel could build a bridge</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">to
where a body could eat without blood.</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">And
so they laughed as they watched the sixteen tokens</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">pass
from palm to palm and felt the prick</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">and
wiped the reddish smears on the handkerchiefs</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">that
all folk carry tucked in their back pocket,</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">the
depth of the dye declaring the force of the flag.</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">*</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">This
second one started as a whim but became an act of love. At Devoted
and Disgruntled in January, a tall man with sandy hair wearing a
checked shirt voiced a request for “someone with sewing skills to
help a 6'5” drag queen”. I tweeted in response that I might be
about to find my calling, and a couple of hours later I was fixing a
date with <a href="https://twitter.com/robertjamesbeck" target="_blank">Robert Beck</a>, aka the Marvellous Miss Mimi Martini, to talk
frock-making. Our first meeting was spent sharing images: Rob emailed
me a few pictures that had given him some tentative notions
(floatiness, a big split up the front for showing off shapely legs);
we scanned google for drag queens and <a href="http://fashionmuseum.fitnyc.edu/view/people/asitem/items$0040:5573/0?t:state:flow=07f208ad-2d40-4873-8b84-835fbd62350d" target="_blank">Adrian of Hollywood</a> dresses,
and flicked through my Schiaparelli paper-dolls book (pause to sigh
with pleasure that such a thing exists in the world). By the end we
had a few sketches, a vague idea to make a dress with a ribbon of
chiffon around it like the pink line twisting through a stick of
rock, and a plan to go fabric shopping. </span></span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Fabric
shopping changed everything. To be honest, it was so exciting that
after an hour I had a violent adrenaline crash. Luckily we'd already
found Rob's dream fabrics: a hot-pink satin and a chiffon dyed
fuchsia at one end and electric blue at the other. To show off that
colour shift, we switched patterns to something more like a Greek
gown (showing my roots, dears) with chiffon floating around the skirt
and rippling over the bust before swooping off the shoulders. It took
two fittings to get the pattern right, and a third for tweaks with
the actual fabric; there are all sorts of things about it that I wish
I'd done better, or differently, or more professionally, but at the
same time I recognise that it's one of the most ambitious things I've
ever made, and not too bad for it. Here it is on my dressmaker's
doll: her figure isn't quite as buxom as Mimi's, but you get the
general idea. </span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-CtwbuLFV77k/V04syGOII7I/AAAAAAAABG4/W0leIeGC4TMA_Er1OcN5hLAYW2jLK3NEQCLcB/s1600/rob%2Bmimi%2Bpink%2Bfrock.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-CtwbuLFV77k/V04syGOII7I/AAAAAAAABG4/W0leIeGC4TMA_Er1OcN5hLAYW2jLK3NEQCLcB/s320/rob%2Bmimi%2Bpink%2Bfrock.jpg" width="180" /></a></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">I
rarely sew for anyone other than myself, and doing so was just
delightful. As in, I genuinely got teary when Mimi's frock started to
come together: the magic of sewing never ceases to amaze me. I
already have heaps of ideas for other things I'd like to make for
her: things I'd never dream of wearing myself, but would love to
construct, to bring into being. And I would so love to do this for
more people. So if there are any other drag queens out there looking
for someone with sewing skills... </span></span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">*</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">This
third one I made in the way I make most cakes or puddingy things:
somewhat haphazardly, from scratch and imagination and vaguely
retained memories of endless reading of recipes. It was for my lovely
friends Andrew and Marta, who were coming to my house for dinner
before flying off to Poland. I had bought tickets for the double bill
at the Yard that night, and so prepared a meal then left my husband
to serve it, thinking they were only going away for a couple of weeks
on holiday. I found out on my return, at 11.30pm, with everyone
heading for bed, that they were leaving at 8am and planned to stay in
Poland for several months. Indefinitely even.</span></span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">I've
been feeling a lot lately that I have my priorities all skewed. Going
to the theatre as much as I do means I'm almost never home to give my
kids a bath, read to them at bedtime, tuck them in with a goodnight
kiss. It means that I rarely have proper conversations with my
friends, rarely even see them, because I put seeing theatre first.
Sometimes that theatre is nourishing, joyful, inspiring; it makes me
feel like I'm levitating, like my brain has expanded, that I want to
write and write like it's the only thing that matters. Sometimes that
theatre is <a href="https://catherinelove.co.uk/2016/05/20/ophelias-zimmer-royal-court/" target="_blank">Ophelias Zimmer</a>: technically impressive but gruelling,
draining, an act of intellectual violence. Either way, the strongest
relationship I have at the moment isn't with a human being, it's with
the collective human act of theatre. And I don't know if that's
right. </span></span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">The
shows I was seeing at the Yard that night were by people I know and
admire and enjoy chatting with; people I would love to call friends,
were our encounters less transient, or insecure. It felt important to
see their work, to support them in some way, knowing that for each of
them it was a leap and a challenge to make this performance. But I
feel sad that I sacrificed this other night of friendship for it. I
feel sad that so many of the choices I make in life feel like the
wrong choice. I'm writing this tonight, having been meaning to write
it for three weeks now – I finished Mimi's dress on 7 May, and
Harry sent me the poem on 10 May – because at 9.01pm this evening I
made the decision not to watch Hannah Nicklin's <a href="https://www.cptheatre.co.uk/production/equations-for-a-moving-body/" target="_blank">Equations for aMoving Body at CPT</a> but to come home and work. I've felt a twist of
nausea ever since: guilt at not being there for Hannah, not
supporting her. She is another person I admire and enjoy chatting
with and would love to call a friend; this was my only chance to see
the show; the audience was small; it would have been a kindness to
stay. I've made the wrong call again, but in the other direction.
Sometimes it feels as though the thing I make most productively in my
life is worry. </span></span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Anyway:
Andrew and Marta emailed me from Poland to ask for the recipe for
that dessert, and as it came out quite well I thought I'd post it.
Apologies to Nigel Slater if it turns out to be one of your recipes
that I've unconsciously memorised and am now claiming as my own. </span></span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: blue;"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Pistachio
and chocolate tart</span></span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Stupidly
I didn't write down what I did at the time, but I'm pretty sure this
was it: first I ground 150g shelled pistachios with 50g caster sugar
in a blender, adding some dried orange peel towards the end (in
season, I'd use peel grated from a fresh unwaxed orange I think).
Pretty sure I picked up the blending nuts with sugar trick from
Nigella: it helps to soak up the oil that comes out as they're
ground. I then melted 40g butter in a saucepan, and stirred that
together with the nut and sugar mixture, a sprinkle of cinnamon and
another 50g caster sugar in a bowl until it was all nicely
emulsified. I lined a 20cm flan or sandwich tin with greaseproof
paper, smoothed over the nut mixture and pressed it down so the
surface was flat and the mixture as tight as possible, then baked it
for what I think was the equivalent of 15 minutes at about 150C or
gas 2 (my oven use is never as simple as that, hence the uncertainty
here. Basically: nuts burn easily, and that makes them bitter, so
keep things quite gentle). The base has to cool after that for a bit.
</span></span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Next
step is the chocolate ganache topping, which is pretty simple: pour
300ml double cream into a heavy-bottomed saucepan and warm over a low
heat until nearly boiling point, then stir in at least 150g dark
chocolate (that's how much I used, but I wanted more – I reckon
250g would be good). I used 72% cocoa solids: you need that darkness
to counter the cream. Once that's melted, take the pan off the heat
and beat the mixture with a whisk for as long as you can be bothered
– the more time you give it, the smoother the mixture will be.
Pour that over the nut base, smooth the surface, then leave in the
fridge until ready to serve – the chocolate mixture firms up in the
cool temperature. We didn't have it with raspberries, but I bet a few
on the side would be bloody delicious.</span></span></div>
</div>
maddy costahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04929576408540749708noreply@blogger.com0