The Look of the Thing

Sights, sounds and thoughts on contemporary artistic life: Hannah Bruce and Company

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We recently discovered that our project #SmallChoices at Hoxton Hall has been shortlisted for the Museums & Heritage Awards. Massive excitement and a real thrill.

Category Shortlisted: Innovation Project Name: The Hoxton Hall Experience: A Collection of Small Choices Company/Organisation Name: Hannah Bruce Company on behalf of Hoxton Hall

The full shortlist can be viewed online http://awards.museumsandheritage.com/awards-2017/

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Trailer for “Edgelands”, an audio journey which reframes the sounds and sights of the iconic Barbican arts centre.

Edgelands is an interactive composition, created by Seth Scott in association with Hannah Bruce & Company, and commissioned by the Barbican.

The app was developed through a University of York research grant, and supported by the Department of Music.

video credit: Minyung Im

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Part-woman, part-fox: The liberating politics of FOX SYMPHONY

Ruby Lawrence is guest blogging for us... 

Foxy and Husk describes herself as ‘a playful performance artist who likes to sing, dance and hibernate’. I had the pleasure of seeing her solo show FOX SYMPHONY at the Battersea Arts Centre in Feb 2016. Foxy has haunted me since; as I go about my daily business and observe the people of London, she keeps popping into my head. Every time I see an urban fox, peeking round a street corner or weightlessly tiptoeing along my garden fence – I think of Foxy.

Incredibly fluid and adaptable as a performer, Foxy lip-syncs with uncanny precision and charisma to the voices and stories of the Great British public. These stories are the result of interviews with a diverse range of people spanning many nationalities and cultural heritages; ‘Foxy gathers together a medley of strangers […] imagines a portrait of contemporary Britain in an increasingly globalized world.’ She offers her audience a loving portrait of Britain that resists easy categorization – in an entrancing representation of narratives spoken through a not-quite-human mouth. At times, I felt as if the multi-cultural chorus of recorded voices was ventriloquizing Foxy – in the next moment, her nuanced miming to the audio was so perfectly controlled she neatly contained her samples. This ambiguity in relationship between character and primary material is interesting; does Foxy breathe new life into the audio, or does the audio animate Foxy? I think the answer is both.

Foxy herself is a luxurious assemblage of canid/woman – decorated with fur, decadent, antiquated clothing, an endearing nose-twitch and an expressive face that gleams with the unmistakable tawny and white colouring of a red fox. She calls to mind equally mysterious ‘semi-animal’ characters in the fiction of the late Angela Carter – women who defy human expectations. Take, for example, the protagonist of Carter’s short story Wolf-Alice, a girl who grows up with very little human contact and communicates with dog-like behavior, performing and creating a distinctive identity for herself.

Foxy also reminds me of Carter’s memorable character Sophie Fevvers (from the 1984 novel Nights at the Circus), who is human save for the cumbersome wings that sprout from her back. In Carter’s classically magic realist style, it is open to debate as to how real Sophie’s wings are. Along with Foxy, these characters are united in their troubling of the boundary of ‘human’ – their adoption of (even subtle) nonhuman characteristics appears to afford them an unusual degree of liberation.

Foxy overcomes the obvious artificiality of her strange skin by delivering an utterly convincing physicality that is neither human or animal, but something quite different – something folkloric, eccentric, almost cartoonist. It is this embodiment of character that captures the attention of the watcher wholly. Frequently drawing delighted laughs from her audience, Foxy uses her unique aesthetic to celebrate the stories she’s sampled, adorning so-called ‘immigrant’ voices with the attention and splendor they are so often denied by British media.

FOX SYMPHONY is a powerfully political creation, actively celebrating a society that is wonderfully and, at times, absurdly hybrid. The piece laughs at the notion of a ‘pure’ race or culture and offers up a slice of Britain as this country really is – global.

There is huge importance to art that dismantles the myth of an isolated, categorical quality of Britishness. Consider the cold fact that from the 6th April all skilled workers from outside the EU who have been living here for less than 10 years will need to earn at least £35,000 a year to settle permanently in the UK. On what basis is this exclusion defensible? Such a blatant equation of human capital (as if that were measurable) with financial capital is terrifying.

What absolutist notion of British identity have we allowed to grow (indeed, flourish), that has resulted in such an arbitrarily violent policy?

In a time of nationalism and expulsion, FOX SYMPHONY exists as a hopeful and generous vision to light our way.  Foxy is a truly unique performer, who you should see as soon as you get the chance.

Her website can be found here: http://www.foxyandhusk.com

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Our mysterious guest blogger, Ruby Lawrence, modelling a scarf that gives you a clue as to her subject matter... watch out for her blog this week.

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The Dance Factory, Johannesburg. Masterclass series. Dance Umbrella SA, 2016

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Dance in March

This week has seen a plethora of dance experiences for me.

A dose of the Dance Umbrella SA Festival, witnessing contemporary dance in all its multiplicity. More info about the Festival here:  http://www.danceforumsouthafrica.co.za

Young and ‘old’ dancers (the invertedness of those commas because you’re considering retirement aged 45 in this world). Male and female. Black and white. African and European.

And before I tread too far down this path, the intense bursting-apart of these binaries by the piece The Last Attitude. Nelisiwe Xaba and Mamela Nyanga providing a hugely complicated, finely crafted piece which is on the cliff-edge of repetitive but never quite going into freefall. Who better to talk about the work than Nelisiwe herself, in a fascinating interview with Jedi Ramalapa in the Dance Umbrella Gazette. Its also available online here: https://sowhatsart.wordpress.com/2016/02/28/the-imitation-game/

Sarah Roberson also writes interestingly about The Last Attitude (which of course, by dint of being a dance piece, pleasingly deals in language other than words in order to make its point): “The work is not particularly easy to watch. Why should it be? Traditional ballet has enjoyed audiences through the ages who require a neat narrative and satisfying ending. Nyamza and Xaba aren’t going to supply that. It’s not relevant to the here and now, it’s not relevant to them. The Last Attitude is slow and considered. It takes its time to give one the time to breathe it in. It’s serious. It’s funny.” http://creativefeel.co.za/2016/03/the-right-approach/

This achingly sparse work onstage creates a kind of physicality in my brain, forcing internal movement, a challenging dance of shift, spin, about-turn in my thoughts. I love this - that The Last Attitude makes my brain dance. Never still for a moment, never really comfortable for a moment. And meanwhile my sweat in the achingly hot Dance Factory venue slowly trickles; one leg slips off another, and my wild brain activity makes me acutely aware of the need to remain physically still. The etiquette of sitting in an auditorium prevails, but I’ve never been so uncomfortably aware of it as now. Fascinating. Deliberate, no doubt.

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Writing the Space

For a few years now, I’ve been writing material for Hannah Bruce and Company. But this is the first time I’ve tried to set down any thoughts about the work. That’s partly because, however exciting and challenging our different projects are to be involved in, I still find it very hard to articulate what it is we actually do! When people ask me, I stumble over phrases like ‘site-responsive’, ‘app-powered’, ‘immersive theatre’, ‘theatre/dance’, guided tour’... But I never string them together quite right. And anyway, every time we launch into something new, it seems like I have to learn the rules all over again. I have to think from scratch what it is I want to achieve and how that’s going to fit with Jonathan’s music or Hannah’s overall concept. Then we all have to re-examine what tools we have at our disposal and negotiate how to approach a commission - someone else’s brief - without losing sight of our own artistic pre-occupations and beliefs.

When we start that process, our conversations are always bracing, inspiring, and difficult. But looking back, I think I’m becoming slightly better at spotting recurring themes, at least in my own contributions to the work. So the first piece I was involved in told the story of the passage of a day across the city. The second, created for a school building in Fulham, mixed images of bricks and mortar rising from their foundations with a sense of childhood memories falling back through time. ‘The Claim’ written for the West Yorkshire Playhouse (and performed in its astonishing subterranean ‘caves’ ) was also somehow about the idealism of building - about  the dreams for the future that it represents, even as it sweeps aside the past and present.

And maybe this is a better starting point for me when trying to describe the work. Rather than categorising, or trying to explain the mechanics, perhaps it makes more sense to come back to the physical spaces themselves. To the idea that all buildings are proof of the passage of time, proof of other lives lived, and a repository of stories and memories. In part, at least, these are the things our pieces hope to reveal, in as open and unforced a way as possible.

In the writing of A Collection of Small Choices, however, another idea became equally important for me. The brief from Hoxton Hall asked us to engage directly with the history of the building, and our research led quickly to questions about the nature of the historical archive - who selects it, who organises it, what’s missing, how can it be interpreted (Hannah’s written brilliantly about this in another post)? But perhaps most significant was the realisation that this archive was not something that existed ‘over there’. Not only were we intimately involved in contributing to it - adding something to the future history of the hall - we were drawing from it too. Hoxton Hall was having an impact on our lives, shaping our own thoughts, memories and personal stories. What was going on, in other words, started to feel like a kind of exchange.  And that became a crucial element in what I wanted to convey in the writing - the sense of a building as a two-way communication. Something that offers more than the  vicarious thrill of imagining, for a moment, that you’re travelling through time or passing through ghosts on the staircase. Something that also allows you to inhabit that strange, shared space between your own life and the lives of others you maybe never knew existed.

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A Collection of Small Choices

I’ve mentioned A Collection of Small Choices previously, a project at Hoxton Hall launched this autumn (2015).  An amazing team of artists and creative technologists have been creating this with me, and I love breathing the excitement of that sentence. Never in a million years did I think I’d be able to use the term “creative technologists” in the same sentence as “with me”. (Apart from, perhaps, if I’d been hacked and had to say that ‘creative technologists were messing with me’).

Its been a piece full of challenges – creative, technical and personal – but also full of satisfaction.

Fundamentally, the work is a creative challenge (an aspirational alternative), to one of those National Trust audio guides that you can borrow from a smiley young attendant. I think the audio guides replaced volunteers, who used to take groups on tours around historic buildings, or art exhibitions. People who loved the place with a passion and tried to inspire this love of history and heritage in others. But sadly, in my memory dragging visitors round room after room often just caused wilting eardrums and varicose veins. Or an urgent need for coffee and a NT scone. (Clever sales tactic).

In our work for Hoxton, you are “guided” round the building by a young woman who is uninformed and unreliable, but full of imagination and enthusiasm. She is a living, breathing volunteer - but she is entirely disembodied. You can hear her, but you can’t see her. We use binaural technology (which allows you to hear 3 dimensional sound through headphones, so that you can hear a person breathing behind you or opening drawers in the room you’re in). And we use BLE beacon technology (so that you can travel at your own pace, and the audio only triggers when you reach specific rooms, staircases, landings etc).

And then, alongside the eager young guide, are various old, stern women who understand the need for chronology and factual information. They see how history forms patterns if only you are allowed to see it through a wide angle lens. And they have been there long enough to witness that lens, albeit tinged with their specific world-views. (Plus many of them probably rather approve of Victorian schoolrooms and endless lists of dates).

So, in effect, you start to inhabit the ghost life of Hoxton Hall, although not in a spooky sense. You hear invisible inhabitants, you identify people who “aren’t there”, and best of all, you really have a chance to look around. A chance on your own, to work out the things that interest you personally, without a critical over-informed companion breathing down your neck and looking over your shoulder. Perhaps you start to notice that the bricks are really very old, that the wood is worn, that the staircase smells slightly of institutional cabbage. And bigger still – you have to take responsibility. You have to decide which way the voice has directed you (of course we have solutions if you go wrong, but there is an element of effort. You play a role in this experience.) And hopefully, you start to measure your imagination against the place. Your memory against fact. Your sense of self, against these fictional voices.

So, now “enter the archive”, which forms the backbone of the piece. Problematic for marketing because an archive isn’t a sexy word or idea. Hoxton Hall has the most incredible, democratic, random, chaotic and lived-in archive I’ve encountered. Originally when I started working with it, I spent time with wonderful Kirsty – who was the qualified archivist tasked with transforming vertiginous piles of dusty damp crap into “an archive”. Labelled, indexed, digitised, accessible. Sort of.

This process was both electric, and desperate for me. On the one hand, I was able to handle forgotten, seemingly unimportant historic items - a small wooden harmonica found beneath the floorboards. A fragment of paper bag with an advert for the flour milled on Hoxton Street in the 1800’s. It was a personal thing between me and that bag. I could touch it, be trusted with it – nobody had put it behind glass, nobody was watching over my shoulder (or were they). There was every likelihood that my fingertip touched a specific crease that was last touched in 1890 – that somehow my fingerprint aligned with someone else’s long dead. That is magic. That is the fire of an archive. Its when you personally find the thing, the whatever it is, that bonds you uniquely and personally. Its going to be different for everyone. It might be the building itself – at Hoxton its not just the moveable objects that form the archive, not just the documents and leaflets and letters and programmes and flyers. Its also the wooden floorboards, the stone steps, the tiles and beams and the particular creak of a particular hinge painted over and over since 1940. The air you breath.

Yet, on the other hand, we were painfully aware when creating the piece that by the time Hoxton Hall was renovated and re-launched, the archive materials would mainly have moved to Hackney Archives, and that the majority would be behind glass – reduced again to objects that you look at with a kind of distant eye. No personal thing between me and a flour bag. Instead a kind of sizing up process, an institutional respect, an evaluation. A skim-read of words through glass, not a tracing dust with your fingertip moment. Not alive and magically warming your gloved hand, but merely objects, to be admired and exclaimed over but somehow entirely impersonal.

So this is what we started to work with. How to create enough doorways for people to step one foot into the real magic. To find a tiny fragmentary moment of feeling “aliveness”. To make a personal connection (which will be different for every individual, in the same way that the hardware in every darned smartphone is a bit different when it comes to Bluetooth Low Energy Beaon technology…). To open imaginative possibility, and to leave space for a personal response. To invite you not just to look at a letter written during the Blitz, but prise open the chink to the point where that letter connects with a personal memory or sensation or emotion. That’s the alive moment 

So we were looking at this in the light of the two archetypal characters –the young imagination seeing, feeling, smelling and hearing history according to her own invention, determinedly making it live and powerful, and the woman obsessed with chronology, order, context, indexing. You need both – you need the actual, external force of the archive (the old programmes, the worn steps, or the old wallpaper fragments) alongside the imagination to directly connect those items with your own experience. This (I hope, but cannot prove!) fires your empathy, your relationship to the dead people you never met who were never officially recorded in the “book”. This creates the shiver when you see a handwritten letter that looks like your grandma’s writing.

In the piece we ended up making, we refer to a “book” which the young woman consistently fails to use. It represents an attempt to order history. It makes sense of a linear thread, it interprets and commentates on events. It presents an ordered, chronological, authoritative telling of history, and it is a guidebook that steers a path through ‘chaos’.

The archive represents multiple, chaotic individual voices and perspectives. It is an arbitrary collection which does not privilege any one voice over another. It is haphazard, simultaneous, contradictory, sensory and threatening. It is a vast labyrinth of voices, memories and materials.

We have represented Hoxton Hall via both these modes – the archive itself, and the books written about it. People’s lives are a complex combination of these two paths. We all combine a linear ‘birth to death’ narrative (our personal ‘book) with the chaos of our memories and imagination (our individual ‘archive’).

In our daily lives, we constantly navigate between the two, in the way we construct ourselves, imagine our identity, and project ourselves. We remember ourselves afresh everyday.

So effectively we’re encouraging people to bring themselves to the building, to add (in some intangible way) to the archive, as much as they take something away from the experience.

 A Collection of Small Choices is now open at Hoxton Hall. You can book here:

https://www.hoxtonhall.co.uk/hoxton-hall-experience/#tabs6

You can use your own smartphone or tablet to do the journey - search for “SmallChoices” on the Apple store or Google Play. Otherwise, there are optimised devices available to borrow from reception.

We’d love to hear what you think… 

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How to reach Hoxton Hall - by Red Car, Green Car, Yellow Car or White Car. An early transport map.

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Countdown to the Hoxton Hall Experience: A Collection of Small Choices

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Lazy Technology

Recently I’ve been trying to think about this word ‘Technology’ a bit less lazily than normal.

What do I mean by it? How do I use the word?

Well, it seems I use it constantly, and I use it to cover all manner of stuff, and I use it with different meanings and implications in different circumstances. I haven’t exactly surveyed myself, but I’ve tried to be a bit more aware…

There’s the stuff I do to communicate about my work. To show people what it is that we’re up to –  social media, digitized trailer type stuff, immediate updates. This blog post. The sort of mortar I seem to cram into the spaces between bricks of time, which never seems to have quite long enough to go off.

Then there’s the stuff that deliberately and visibly integrates technology into the performance. Perhaps I do less of this – but I’m thinking of someone like the choreographer Alex Whitley (www.alexanderwhitley.com), or the company 1927 (www.19-27.co.uk)

And then there’s the stuff that supports and intensifies the level of experience the audience achieve. Its invisible (ish), and its what enables magic to feel like its in the air. This is stuff I’m really interested in. - invisible stage management - artistic guiding - a building responding to your presence - the magic of everyday technology doing extraordinary things

I suppose what I’m realizing, is that the use of the word ‘technology’ allows many of us to be lazy – and I’m lodged in the lazy category, no doubt about that. We assume that the magic word will increase access to funding, engage us with a younger audience, engage us with a wider audience online…

When I was younger, I learned that (a different) magic word did indeed increase my chances of getting ice cream, staying overnight at a friend’s house, or even experimenting with melting crisp packets into tiny doll size versions in the oven.  It wasn’t 100% successful. (The use of “please”, not the use of the oven – the crisp packets are invariably a success unless your oven is too hot). But I also now use the term “please” ubiquitously without thinking.  I’m trying to put a bit more thought into the use of “technology”.

Thoughts?

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Technology - the new and the old...

Both images were taken whilst we were installing onsite at Hoxton Hall, testing all our BLE beacon technology. I’m going to write about the project soon - watch this space...

Photos: Minjung Im

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Open Letter to CA, SA, NL, and MT

Dear Chris Albertyn, Siemon Allen, Nick Lotay, and Matt Temple,

Two months ago I began revisiting all the posts on Electric Jive and this evening I’ve just got back up to the present. Admittedly this hasn’t been a 24hr a day effort on my part, but all the same it’s given me pause to think about how much time and energy you as contributors pour into these things.

The first blog I found that held my attention for more than a nano-second was the Matsuli Blog. It was hugely helpful in my attempts to educate myself about South African jazz and popular music. Sure, there were books, and articles, but pre-Matsuli exactly how I was going to hear a lot of the musical history I was reading about escaped me.

So, sitting in the same chair where I stumbled across the Matsuli Blog I’m now also enriched and enabled by ElectricJive and Flat International more specifically Mssrs Albertyn, Allen, Lotay, and Temple.

One thing I knew but hadn’t fully appreciated until the past few days, was that working in a vacuum is dull. As the comments section seems to partially contribute oxygen for what you do, so I also salute all the folk who’ve done what I haven’t done enough of, i.e. commented publically.

There’s clearly been no shortage of listening pleasure delivered, and I can think of no better reason for doing something; Page Views and Comments testify to this. But my last couple of months have brought home to me how an effort such as this is a profound intervention in many ways. And perhaps we’re yet to see the full fruits of this across interested communities. Some things are a slow burn (and these are the ones that keep you warm).

Maybe it will take years for the next generation of musicians to draw on the parts of this heritage that interests them personally and allow it to find expression in their original work. But nevertheless that doesn’t take away from the fact that there’s real support for artists in what you do. Writing in the Introduction to the 2nd edition of his seminal Marabi Nights: Jazz, ‘race’ and society in early apartheid South Africa (pg.2-3) Christopher Ballantine notes that:

Though urban black popular music in South Africa today inevitably carries traces of the musical styles that preceded it, it is profoundly and scandalously amnesic of its own history. While no one today listens to the extraordinary music of a 1950s ‘superstar’ group, such as the Woody Woodpeckers, for some the name will still at least kindle a distant memory…

A valid point. But even where musicians wish to, how should they address this amnesia? The only places I can find to listen to the Woody Woodpeckers are ElectricJive, and the British Library. The BL is a wonderfully rich resource, but one of little use to people who can’t travel to London (UK) to listen to the couple of sides they have.

And when we think of the ABC of South African music history (Gwen Ansell, Chris Ballantine, and David Coplan), wonderful as their works all are, must these be the only histories in their specific areas? How do we build on these foundations? How to keep responding to Verne Harris (Director of Research and Archive for the Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory) when he says ‘one telling of the story is not enough’?

Many of the musicians that Ansell, Ballantine and Coplan worked with have passed on and although SAMAP at Digital Innovation South Africa hosts the Ballantine Collection of rare South African 78s, only short samples of the recordings are available online, making a trip to the University of KwaZulu Natal necessary each time a piece of music is to be studied in depth. And no, they don’t have any Woody Woodpeckers in their collection as far as I can see…

So how will schools and universities train the next generation of historians? How will upcoming journalists get the context they need to write intelligently about South African arts and culture? If everyone must travel to the formal archive centres - whether they be London or Durban - or must spend a lifetime record digging and competing with wealthy collectors, or must travel to meet surviving musicians, then that puts a severe economic imperative on the subject. I don’t mean to disparage formal archives and libraries (or private collectors), but in short the current situation disenfranchises the very communities that made much of this art. I realise that fast internet and unlimited bandwidth are not anywhere near universally available, but these EJ uploads are a helluva start towards a solution.

And then there is the profound challenge that Kofi Agawu laid down in his ‘Representing African Music: Postcolonial Notes, Queries, Questions’ (pg.xx):

African popular music is finally music, not social text or history. Unless we give due attention to the musical elements - the notes played or sung at specific moments, by means of specific articulations, and at specific levels of intensity - we cannot hope to develop a nuanced understanding of this most vibrant of African art forms.

Right on. But how will we begin to do this if we can’t hear the music?

So this is a thank you to all at EJ for your time and efforts. And for not just keeping what you have for yourselves.

I remember meeting Prof. Meki Nzewi at a conference at the University of Fort Hare (SA). He had just commented on a presentation - I forget which one - saying that there needs to be a much more serious acknowledgement of sources and help wherever they occur. If I understood him correctly, the essence of his point was that if a researcher talks to a musician and reports on the knowledge gained this is a kind of joint authorship. Furthermore there needs to be a system for acknowledging when something is more than “a source”. Surely there will be times when the balance between “source” and analysis tips in different ways, and a laudable aim is not the same as a solution.

But I think Prof. Nzewi has a point. And with this in mind I also think about the ‘big’ histories of early U.S. jazz penned by Gunther Schuller et al. Without the hours of work put in by unpaid (and often unacknowledged) discographers we wouldn’t even know who was on those early recordings, and writing about that history would be unimaginably difficult. (And that’s not a dig at G.S.)

So every time EJ shares a deleted record, alerts us to a recording few knew existed, lists the personnel of an uncredited jive outfit, or digitises and collates hours of 78rpm recordings for others to listen, search and build on, my cap is doffed.

Viva EJ. Hamba EJ.

Yours, JE.

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A prezi we put together explaining some of the ideas we came up with during our RnD week for our Hoxton Hall commission. Don't hold us to it all - things develop - but you'll get a fair sneaky peak.

[Use the arrow keys on your keyboard to navigate, and if it's a bit small the icon on the bottom right takes you to full screen mode]

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Equality and talking

I find as I’ve got older my opinions have started to mimic my hair. Grey rather than black/white, and curling all over the shop rather than sleek and streamlined.

So I’ll precurse this (?!) by a request that you bear with a slightly rambolic approach to this writing. (Indirect, and certainly not presenting a black and white argument. No beginning middle end here.)

Over the last few weeks, three prompts have led me to feel confused, unsettled. Not angry – anger is a clearer emotion than I’ve been able to identify. In fact I consistently find anger, or exuberance, or extremes, harder to reach as time goes by. The fine line between opinion and judgement, is the little repeating loop in the backburner of my mind.

And alongside all this, as my first blog entry, I’m navigating what feels like a close shave between a diary entry (naval gazing) and having something to say. Wondering what on earth a blog really is.

The space and time needed to steer through hazardous, nuanced and complex waters seems to become evermore evasive.

So I’ve decided that this toe-in-the-water really is about gathering some interlinked ideas and signposting you to a few people who I think have really interesting things to say. And also, trying to do what Selina Thompson does so beautifully in her blogs, which is make you feel that I’m actually talking to you, and talking as me, and not just writing at general interwebness.

http://selinathompson.wordpress.com

Anyway, back to my three prompts.

1) Lyn Gardner’s article on looking at gender equality in the theatre industry http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2014/sep/22/theatre-female-figures-gender-gap, alongside Emma Watson’s UN Women speech #heforshe

2) The controversial #ExhibitB by Brett Bailey opening (and closing) @BarbicanCentre

3) Hearing that Graeae’s #accessstowork has been cut by 70%, and reading how both Jenny Sealey (Director of Graeae) and Rebecca Dawson (Director of Candoco) responded to the campaign earlier this year:

http://www.theguardian.com/stage/theatreblog/2014/jul/29/disability-arts-cuts-access-to-work-theatre

and

http://www.candoco.co.uk/2014/08/disability-arts-left-hanging-by-a-thread-a-response-from-candoco/

So yes, throwing a huge amount of information at you. This perhaps mimics my feeling of ‘overwhelm’.

Three prompts - quite a list of labels – gender, race and disability. Clearly my general theme here is Equality. And how we talk to each other.

I can only really empathise personally with one of the “labels” that my own summary of “headline prompts” throws at me – I am a woman. I am not black, I am not disabled. But the nuance again undermines me here. In my strongest most optimistic moments I think its a joy to use labels in order to be able to defy them, but in my less hearty moments (the majority it must be said) I get so weary of the entrenchment that labeling achieves.

[An aside, sort of: I once asked a South African I was chatting to at a high powered university’s 'social BBQ evening’ where in South Africa he was from. He immediately became a snarled-up mass of jangling affront, with my whiteness and his blackness suddenly becoming a gulf which I was toppling into without knowing why it had happened. And what I realize now, is that the seemingly innocent question from me contained in a nutshell a lifetime’s assumptions, attitudes and labeling which he had had to contend with – align himself to, and defy - in order to navigate through the polarized world of South African education.]

So – where was I. Labeling. Defining. One or other versus spectrum. Lines crossed, or uncrossable. Black white and grey.

I think this is something that Exhibit B threw in my face when I saw it in Edinburgh. It basically spoke to me of being white, and full of crippling shame and disgust with my heritage and the way that I was identified by the work, purely by dint of my skin colour. So, a neat turning of the tables – nice twist Brett Bailey. I am judged, and I am made voiceless, because I am white. I have no right to respond. Neat trick. But what more? How does this debate move forward now? Black and white come out of that exhibition labeled, sickened, frustrated. One party re-objectified, the other party silenced.

Compare with Emma Watson’s approach through the #heforshe campaign.  “Men, I would like to take this opportunity to extend your formal invitation. Gender Equlity is your issue too.”

And Rebecca Dawson’s powerful and articulate words: “Disability and illness are not the same. These notions take us back 20 years, before it was importantly and admirably recognised that disability is not a ‘deficit’ related to the individual, and that exclusion is created by institutions, infrastructure, attitudes. The idea of reasonable adjustment was born – what can we as organisations, institutions, society change in order to ensure equal opportunity for people to fully participate in all aspects of life?”

And Madani Younis, Artistic Director of The Bush: “In less than 20 years, 50% of all young people in London will be of dual heritage.
I hope over the next 20 years that these buildings [theatres and arts buildings] don’t become spaces for a chosen few… that the leadership of those buildings also reflects the diversity of the men and women in terms of race, gender, class and where they come from within the regions”.

So how about this woman thing? In relation to my list of prompts above, as Erica Whyman says in Lyn Gardner’s Guardian article, “It absolutely has been my experience that, disregard it though I may, the fact that I am a woman keeps bouncing back as a question mark, a fascinating fact about me and something that ought to be talked about.”

Having the privilege of working on the ground-breaking production “Puffball” at The Roundhouse was a journey I’ve only just embarked upon in relation to gender identity. Men and women – its not that simple, and again there’s a spectrum.

But that’s another blog.

The only way I know how to define my woman-ness, is relational. It is shaped (and supported and threatened) in relation; in how I interface; in my collaborations. In how much voice I have; in the approach other people take in listening to me. In what is reflected back at me. (And of course in how I limit/empower myself and what I choose to read between the lines.)

I’ve counted myself lucky to work with inspiring women recently – Hayley White and Lorna McGinty at Hoxton Hall, Frances Mayhew at Wilton’s Music Hall, Amy Letman at West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leila Jones at The Roundhouse. But they’re all them, not me.

In October last year, theatres participating in Tonic Theatre’s research into gender equality in the theatre industry were all encouraged to look at their own practices and examine how, in creative roles such as directing, writing, commissioning and acting, they were failing to adequately represent women.

Each theatre chose a question to ask of themselves – for example identifying and addressing the gender-specific implications of touring. I’m considering what questions I might ask of my work, my approach. Of practical use rather than the naval-gazing variety. Answers on a postcard for what you’d ask of yourself… 

Diversity. It’s a word we use a lot, and perhaps don’t think about as much as necessary. I fall back here on quoting a dead white man - Walt Whitman – in his Leaves of Grass poem

“I contain multitudes”

[thelookofthething]

Vineeta Rishi whispering sweet nothings to the indomitable "Beryl"!

Last week we had a discovery-packed few days of R&D, testing our script with binaural elements. "Beryl" has a head made at the same density as a human, with realistic ears, so that the microphones in her "hear" in the same way we do. When listening back with headphones, it sounds as if Vineeta is really whispering in your ear. An amazing tool for our work.

[thelookofthething]

Creativity is the power to reject the past, to change the status quo, and to seek new potential. Simply put, aside from using one's own imagination - perhaps more importantly - creativity is the power to act. Only through our actions can our expectations for change turn into reality, and only then can our purported creativity build a new foundation, and only then is it possible to draw out human civilisation.

From Ai Weiwei in the Chapel at Yorkshire Sculpture Park (24 May 2014 - 2 November 2014)