Once more unto the... (Criticism & Love #13) ((identity crisis #17,962))

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 Criticism & Love essays, please sign up here: 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:

What is the point of theatre?

I mean, really?

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.

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:

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.

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.

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.

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”.

The Guardian also reported that “humanity has wiped out 60% of mammals, birds, fish and reptiles since 1970” (figure provided by WWF).

A white supremacist man opened fire in a synagogue in Pittsburgh, killing 11 Jewish people aged between 54 and 97.

Another white man was filmed verbally abusing a black woman on a Ryanair plane, later claiming, eroneously, that he is not a racist person.

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.

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.

And this is just what I've skimmed from the surface of my twitter feed.

*

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.”

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.

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.

The group wanted to make this show, Ellice says early on, to do something real. “So real.” 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.

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.

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.

*

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:

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.

The Malady of Death, written by Alice Birch, directed by Katie Mitchell, contemplating the mesh of relationships between masculinity, emotion(lessness), pornography and misogyny.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In the midst of all that, I also saw It's True, It's True, It's True by Breach.

*

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?

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.

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.

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 punch line – to a really bad joke.

*

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?

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”.

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?

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”.

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.

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.

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.

*

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?

With that, dear friends, once more unto the breach we go.

Trying to measure the earthquake inside

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.

The performance of With Force and Noise that I saw at IBT17 began with Hannah Sullivan 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 this video.) 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:

What a pity it is

to tease me to sing,

when it does not lay in my power

to do such a thing.

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.

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: suffragettes who used embroidery to communicate their demand, their frustration, their experience of prison; artists 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 LA Review of Books 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.

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.

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.

(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.)

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.

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.

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?

An hour after With Force and Noise, I returned to the same room in the Wickham theatre for FK Alexander'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.

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.

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.

In the four weeks since writing the muted paragraph that appeared on IBT's own site 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 review by the brilliant White Pube 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:

[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.

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.

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 Ellie Stamp 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.

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]

At the end of January I started an online workshop run by Scottee called Notepad Warrior. 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.

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.

(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 they too are troubled by or depressed within these systems of inequality, or recommendations for how white people can be genuine allies 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.)

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.

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 Wilkey, 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.

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.

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 People United, whose work is entirely an expression of radical kindness; and David Slater at Entelechy Arts, 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 Fun Palace, and through that has become a genuinely active participant in local civic life. Everything in Scottee's course points in the same direction.

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 Tiny Letters 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 Le Gateau Chocolat: 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.

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.

We must reclaim our imaginations. We have been limited by the patriarchal imagination, infected by it. We see only as far as they see.

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]

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.”

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.

a love letter to Anna Meredith

Here are some things that the Anna Meredith gig at the Scala reminded me of:

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.

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.

Aphex Twin. I mean, there was a moment back there when it felt like Aphex Twin was basically god, right?

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, Raising Sand, 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.

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.

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.

I first saw her 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.

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.

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, Brisk Widow: 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.

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?

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 interview with her in the Quietus where she talks sidelong about that spirit of play; I'm going to quote it in full because it's gorgeous:

[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.

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.

You couldn't ask for a better guide to living than that.

 

And here are my holiday snaps*

*title a wave hello to Selina Thompson, 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

Hadestown

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 interviewed Anais Mitchell 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

But there is. Orpheus is still singing, and dreaming of a better future. We know this, because Mitchell wrote Hadestown.

Warpand Weft

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:

How can it be so cold out here in America

Everybody is packing heat in America

Training their barrels on the city streets in America

Every bad man finds his peace in America

In America

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.

Later we played Anna Meredith's Varmints and I thought again that it's my favourite album released so far this year.

A Lotof Sorrow

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.

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 in 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.

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.

JohnOliver

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.

We spent an evening watching John Oliver programmes, and one in particular landed a horrible punch. It's a programme about drones, 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”.

Lightat the edge of land

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 Gold Pieces: Outer Hebrides 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.

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.

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?

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 CommitmentCards. 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? Megan Vaughan, 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.”

I've participated in one other Gold Piece 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.

WandaJackson

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 dolls (Dunster), shells (Margate) or fishing 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.

Abrief history of humankind

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.

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.

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.

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.

Scandinavian pain

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 Ragnar Kjartansson exhibition 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.

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:

You didn't see me, I was falling apart

I was a white girl in a crowd of white girls in the park

You didn't see me, I was falling apart

I was a television version of a person with a broken heart

A television version of a person with a broken heart. Just writing it gives me shivers.

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.

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.

Growing Old With You

Before I saw Search Party's Growing Old With You at Forest Fringe, Andy Field 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.

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 Save Me, 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 My Son & Heir, 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.

Dept. of Speculation

There's a great paragraph in a Guardian interview with Jenny Offill 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.

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 ruins.