I’ve been giving a lot of thought over the last few months about whose stories get told.  And about who gets to tell stories.  These are linked but separate questions, to my mind anyway.  They are, also, not questions that I have any formed answers to.

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I do have worries, very significant one, about who gets to go to University and study theatre (and that is an already narrow field that will have got even narrower in the last month or two) and about the provision for those who aren’t going to/can’t/don’t want to study but may well want to make theatre.

I wrote here about how Theatre in the Mill is, in some senses, making things up as we go along, or – to put it in a, perhaps, more acceptable way- creating an organic system that tries out ideas and measures worth/durability……  The longer I am in this job, the more confident I am, the more comfortable I become with not knowing…yet.

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Which is why we have put together a programme for Black History Month. It’s there for our audiences, to support the artists – this is all work I believe in – but also for us to watch and, most importantly, to listen.  Someone considerably brighter than me pointed out a couple of weeks ago and in the context of something completely different, that men do not notice the patriarchy.  That stuck with me and, whilst it wasn’t the motivation for putting this little programme of work together, this thinking has resonated with me in relation to this programme. As a white, middle class male, what don’t I see?

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Any venue that distributes public money has to seek a relevance to the community that surrounds it and as much as I think that the work we stage does have that – the haunting ‘Someone Come Find Me’ by Invisible Flock explored loss and how one mediates significant change – I do wonder if we have done enough to overtly say “this is for you” and if not, whether that is best served by work created by artists who come from ‘you’? I am also aware of the ‘dangers’ of putting Black, Asian, working class, disabled, whatever artists in a box and expecting them to ‘represent’ through their work.

These, and other questions that I can’t anticipate, are what I’d like to explore.  I’d like to think y’all would too. I think it opens on to fundamental questions of (self) representation through the arts; who partakes in this and how. That is not limited to a question of identity, ethnicity, class or anything else but a broader issue that affects us all

The full programme of what we’ve got coming up sits here.  I commend it to you.

This is not an academic paper.

Not biography.

It is, I suppose,…

A story.

A story about the need to find truths beneath the skin of our existence, to see, to think, to act, beyond the ordinary, however extraordinary that ordinary is. It is a story informed by an understanding of death, a deep knowledge of the processes of the undertaker, of international trade and of the many faces of grief and grieving. It is about a man who undertook to bury mobsters without question, Cardinals in pomp and firemen for free.

It is a story about dying, about a belief and a sentience that stretched far beyond mortality in a man who saw mortality in others and knew his own. Who spoke of having lived three lives and found through those experiences, that sense of the fragility of our connection with the purely mortal, a need to tell stories…. in acrylic, oil, canvas, metal, wood. It is a story of a man who abandoned place and connection for a new world, to find a new language, a new way of being, and in doing so exposed himself to the possibilities of failure and ridicule. A very biblical story, then, in shape and structure but of the modern world.

I use the word story because Matt could speak, and did, with all the fire of his Irish ancestry – with loquacity and punch and a heady love of the rough and tumble of a tale well told that a conventional schooling rarely leaves us with.

About Matt Lamb, who had the romantic conviction that the world was changeable and, as he changed himself, set out to change the world.

I met Matt for the second time in September 2011.  Our first meeting was in Mumtaz restaurant in Bradford the year before and we had a shared few words but he was tired and the company we were in was large and disparate – a coming together of a lot of people from his art and peace work, from America and England, family, friends, from within the University of Bradford and without. I had seen him speak with passion and impishness at the University earlier about his peace work rather than his art. I got a sense of the man, no more. He certainly had an aura, could hold a room, his paintings hang in the University Richmond Building Atrium, big, vibrant, narrative and dense.

Matt was an artist, peacemaker, business man, Papal Knight twice over. Connected, powerfully connected, to the worlds of real politique and the higher echelons of the art world, his work lionised by the keepers of Picasso’s memory.

Owen, our cameraman, and I flew out from Leeds/Bradford Airport to Cork with some questions but no real expectations of what we were going to do, what we would film.  Matt had been ill, had come close to dying on his flight from America to Ireland and been in hospital. Our visit was in some doubt for a while and I was, in truth, nervous about how Matt would react to our intrusion. We were, I suppose, beginning to deal with legacy, to capture something for posterity, to knowingly create something with post-mortem meaning. I didn’t know how Matt would react to that knowledge.

We were met by Sheila and Michael and Michael and whisked to the Jameson’s Distillery in Cork and treated to a tour and a lunch with that mixture of bonhomie, ease and seriousness of intent that seems peculiar to Americans.  Michael Guidry talked of Matt’s Peace Angels and the exhibition they had planned at Jameson’s both on camera and off, his excitement palpable, his belief in the power of the work and what the exhibition could do in terms of disseminating a message of peace impressive.

Matt was on the terrace outside his house, on a deckchair in the September afternoon sun and looked very frail as he looked over the bay. A frailty belied by the conviction with which he spoke.

“… the human race has been given a deed. So when this happened (Hitler’s death) everyone in power said ‘we want a weapon that’s going to kill everybody, we want the ultimate weapon of destruction’ and people, especially the Germans that were working on it, said ‘we’re close to it but we’re not positive that it’s going to happen’ and they didn’t put them in jail, they put them in Los Alamos, New Mexico. They had a consensus that it couldn’t be done, possible but really impossible. So the powers that be said ‘You have all the power, you have anything you want, do it. Do the impossible’ so they did. So we are left with this choice:  Will we be the first species in the universe to blow ourselves up? Or will we learn that there is only one thing and that’s love…”

Seemingly gaining strength with each sentence, each new iteration of the possibility of the seeming impossible. About the need for “ A new Los Alamos”, how the seemingly impossible was happening all around us, how in his youth mobile technologies were hardly dreamt of and yet here he could sit in the garden of his house in Ireland and in his pocket was a devise with which he could contact Africa at will, how if these things were possible why not a space where we could all come together? I asked him what that might look like, he said “I have no idea.” I asked if he was doing what he was doing with any idea as to what it might be? “No. It will emerge as it’s supposed to emerge” and turned to his painting for an analogy.

“I just finished four paintings that I do, I call them ‘Spirit Paintings’, I start them months before, lines come in and then I get real up close and try to get to my other dimension and just make lines and then after that I leave them for a week or so then I come back and get up and just get going.  I just finished them, now, four of them, which really will tell of the power a group can have that they have no idea of, cos there are all kinds of hidden powers”.

I wondered if, maybe, we think that a ‘New Los Alamos’ is impossible precisely because we try to imagine it, that we fail to believe in a world at peace because of the failure of our own imaginations to see beyond what we currently know.

“Well, it’s unknown to us, but it exists. I am a douser, so when I was putting a well in here, I had a dousing rod and it went (indicates the rod being pulled down), down it went and I couldn’t pull it away. Dig here. I went down about, I don’t know how far……..and there’s a river that runs right through here and there’s all this magnetic force.

I will go through my manifestations. I am in what I call the empty room. So, what is the empty room?  You go into an empty room and you can’t see anything. You say, ‘It’s empty, there’s nothing in here’ but then, all of a sudden, the telephone rings and the radio, the radio’s playing and here’s the television.  So what else is in here?  You open the window, the wind comes in, you can’t see anything. And you thought there was nothing in here.  So what do you learn from the empty room? You learn that all of the limitations you put on yourself, is in yourself.”

These ideas of revelation, of things emerging, being allowed to emerge, were ones that we came back to again and again and are shaped, I believe, in profound ways by Lamb’s process of making his work.

The following day we filmed him in his studio, saw as figures appeared on his canvas, an eye here, the shape of a head there – deft or heavy daubs of a brush or a finger or a tube of paint seemingly freeing figures from inside the canvas.  Always, it seemed, in conversation or relationship with others that emerged too, creating an ongoing struggle of power and influence within the painting with one figure then another assuming a primacy that is finally superseded by the dominant figure appearing last.

I was fascinated by this, by watching the painter so short of breath that he had to sit for long periods, break off from the seeming struggle within the canvas to gasp for oxygen and just watch, muted by lung capacity, the paintings he had been talking to, coaxing, swearing at, hitting with his walking stick earlier.  It was painful to watch, yet one of the most powerful expressions of creativity I have ever seen, made manifest on canvas.

Canvasses which are prepared – are burned, exposed to the elements for months, covered in oil and paint, scraped and scratched before he goes to work so that they reveal shapes and creases and coruscations that he would work around.  Canvasses that have through a process of time and impact and corrosion begun their revelation, their process of translation.

“This is the material and this is the spiritual (holds hands apart) so what I want to do is see if I can coax some of these spirits over here. To help me in this so I don’t have to do a lot of work. I’ll be the arms and legs but you’ve got to bring your message. Therefore I work abstract, semi-abstract, figurative. I start what I call ‘the dip’ where I throw ten strong colours – I had a friend of mine whose whole world was colour and he was a genius – so he made these colours because he said ‘You really, really abuse the materials.’ I throw em in the ocean, I use blow torches, I run cars over them.  They say I torture my paintings but I really don’t, I challenge them.”

I had seen how ill Matt was earlier, had seen him on his oxygen and was aware through my father’s death, through the fact that Matt had nearly died but days before how close he was to his end before he ever spoke of it. 

But he talked openly of death and of the two ‘death’s’ that came before, of his ‘death’ at 46 where he “died but forgot to get buried”, the event that made him make the break from the world of big business, really big business, into the world of art and peacemaking. 

Of his ‘death’ but days before, where his oxygen levels had fallen so low that he should have died, tended back to life in an Irish hospital by friends and found himself, to his wry amusement, on a bed made by the company of his earliest business mentor.

Processes, connections, dialogues that formed part, I suspect for Matt, of the ongoing revelation. 

Dialogues with angels in his sleep who told him what to paint, and how, the next day.

Dialogues with the victims and the orphans of a violence that we all saw and yet fail to comprehend

Dialogues with world and spiritual leaders that led to changes big and small in how we talk to each other, what we allow in that.

Dialogues with his friend, Cardinal Bernadine of Chicago “ So when I told him I was an artist he sia ‘Well Lamb, I’ve come to your studio.  Have you lost your mind?’ He said ‘You’ve buried Cardinals and Presidents and Governors, you are the best funeral director according to the National Funeral Directors Association, now you’re doing all this?’ He said ‘Are you crazy?’ I said ‘No I’m in the spirit’, he said ‘Well fine but everybody else thinks you’re crazy, I didn’t want to tell you, I’m just bringing a message’ So anyway we were going out for a walk, as we did many times, and he comes into the apartment and he’s sitting here and I’m sitting there, and he’s now dying of cancer, and we’re talking about a lot of things and I said ‘Joe, Cardinal Joseph Bernadine, What did you learn about dying, now that you’re dying?’ and he says ‘The time for posturing is over’.

I think that, for Matt, the time for posturing ceased on his first ‘death’, his first translation, when he realised that all wealth, all position, was temporal.  On the deckchair, that first afternoon he told me a story which revealed a lot about his attitude.

“Anyway he got killed and, according to the Russians and other people that they interviewed, he never allowed smoking around.  So he was taken out and burned in an unmarked grave and the people that did it, as soon as he was burned they lit up cigarettes. So that shows you what power is.”

Remember that this is a man that knew power in a way that few can dream of.  Knew the power of big business, knew the power of political connections at the heart of the greatest superpower the world has ever known, knew the power of money, knew the temporal power of the Catholic Church,.

“About sixty years ago a cousin of mine, he was an architect and he was living in Rome with the founder of the Opus Dei movement, Jose Maria Escrivar, and I was there and I met him and he gave me this medal and he’s now a saint… so he said “Take this and wear it” and it’s very rarely taken off… now when I was travelling, all the dictatators were Opus Deii, Salazar, Generalissimo Franco, I forget the others but all that group were Opus Dei.  Now Opus Dei is one of the most powerful groups.  So I’m over in Morocco with the kids and we were all dressed like hippies and we looked like the kind of thing that would smuggle drugs into Spain, we were living in Spain at that time.  So they take us off the boat, they take the kids into one row and me into another and I met this crazy with a hat on and they are just verbally beating the shit out of me.  They had one guy speaking English, broken, and four other big guys.  So I said “Who is in charge of this? I want him to come here right now.”  They said ‘Why?’ I said ‘ I’ve got a message for him, I want him to know something’.  They bring this guy in.  A mountain of a man, a big black coat and a huge black hat and he just played the role of the inforcer. ‘You wanna see me?’ ‘I have a message for you.’ ‘ What is it?’ ‘You see this?’ ‘ Yes’ ‘Know what it is?’ ‘ No.’ ‘This was given to me by the founder, Jose Maria Escrivar, the founder of Opus Deii.  Let me tell you this Salazar is Opus Deii, they are like this (crosses fingers).  One phone call from me, they are going to take your balls off and shove them up your ass’

He knew power but chose to be crazy, as Cardinal Bernadine would have it, to be an artist.

He talked to me of his early struggle to learn how to paint, the years of working out the hows. “So now I know what everything is going to do, it’s taken me five years of study.  So then I thought, ok, I’ve gone from not being the artist to being the artist, from there to being the investigator and now what am I going to do with all this information?”

He spoke of his move from investigator to conductor – where all his paintings are the members of the orchestra and it was his job to draw all the notes together to make a whole. He then spoke of becoming the agitator in conversations with his paintings “Morning ass-wipe, what have you got for us today?” throwing materials on the ceiling and enjoying the chaos “Hey, I really fucked you guys up” and the translation to the empty room, the place where he was at that point, and the search for the hidden, the not immediately obvious. The place where one has to listen to the silence to finally appreciate that it is peopled with sounds that we cannot hear because, maybe, we choose not too or because we are so inured to the constant babble of the now, the everyday, the purely mortal that those other resonances are lost to us, will always be lost to us.

And yet. And yet. Here was the businessman as well, the man who understood (and stood in opposition to) the economics of the art world, the drip, drip, drip of supply and demand.

“Picasso… what made, what made him was that he was unique, he did exactly what he thought he should do regardless of what you said, or you said or anyone else said. He had his restrictions of how he goes based upon exactly what I believe in.  I have a talent that was given as a gift and I can have you, or you, or anyone else say ‘Lamb, I’m the greatest gallery person in the world and I’m going to sell this painting for a hundred million bucks.  Now all you have to do is that you follow what I do.  Now you make sixty thousand paintings, it would be much better if you made ten and I’ll tell you what ten to make and what to do.” And Picasso would say ‘You know, fuck you, get out. I will never make that painting again.’

A man to whom the drip, drip, drip was antithetical, for whom painting was an explosion of creativity and so painted in number.

A man with studios around the world, Ireland, Wisconsin, Florida, crammed to the brim, top full of work that numbers tens of thousands.

A business man who, through long years in business, understood the business of logistics, the economics of scale and international trade, who knew that systems are needed to make that move in number.  In his studio he pointed out a picture, pointed out it’s number.

“There’s a code on em. This one for example was the one hundred and eighty first picture I did in Florida in 2007 and it’s been photographed, it’s on inventory and that’s who it is.  It’s not named, it’ll be named by however adopts it. This is our control inventory, we can track it anywhere in the world…. This (Ireland) became our main studio because The United States charge us a two hundred and sixty percent tax on Chinese canvasses coming in… So I had five thousand canvasses coming in to Florida, Ireland, Wisconsin, Chicago.  I got a call saying ‘We need a cheque for about a hundred thousand Dollars sent to the U.S. government’.  So I said ‘Get em over to Ireland’.  It cost me eight thousand to get them to Ireland, so now they’re all Irish.  We set up the systems and the systems work.  How do they get from here to there?  Don’t know and don’t care, I know we have a system. Before I was an artist I was in business, working with international business, shipping stuff all over the world.  How do we get it from here to there the most reasonable way? What type, boat, truck?  So I have people that I know and say ‘We want to do this.’ And they go boom, boom, boom.”

We live in a world, an arts world I mean, that has been, still is, shaped in it’s thinking by the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.  By the Age of Reason and The Romantics, that is, in essence, agnostic because it fetishizes humankind as the maker of its own destiny and the artist as ‘onlie begetter’ of work wrung from the soul.  We question industry, we question work produced in quantity, we struggle to comprehend a man who talks to angels.  We struggle with the seeming contradictions of a man who could and did do both.

And yet. 

And yet.

And yet there seems something particularly of our times, a world shaped by the intentions, the needs, of corporations, a world that has arguably moved beyond the nation state and despite, maybe because of, that that seeks out the spiritual, turns to something else. 

If one thinks back to the sixties, to the Beatles and the Maharishi one also sees the linkage between an exploration of faith, of seeking a meaning beyond the obvious, the here and now and a business that famously described itself as ‘bigger than Jesus’ and sold millions of ‘units’ worldwide and those units were art.

It is the place of artists to explore, to deal with, the world in which they live and if that exploration takes on the shape and form, makes use of, plays games with, that it sees….  Is that not the place of art, the job of artists?

And is it not the place of artists to try to change the world, to make us see, to think, to hear things differently, to create, in ways small and large the ‘new Los Alamos’?

And so, with some finality, now that Matt has gone, I turn to what confused me in the first instance, the thing as I saw as an add on to his work as artist but came to see, having met and talked to the man, having wrestled with my own perceptions and conceptions about what art is, as the thing I have come to consider as his largest piece of art. The piece that is at once most intimate and huge in conceptual scale.  His peacemaking.

I will not write here at any length about Matt’s ‘Umbrella’s for Peace’ project, it is too well documented elsewhere, except to say that there is something very much of the man about the interconnectedness of his various lives, his ‘manifestations’ if you like, that it was his connections into the higher echelons of American political power that led the ‘Umbrellas Project’ to work with the orphans of the 9/11 attack on the Pentagon.

“It started with, like everything else in the world, it started with friends.  Somebody said ‘I need a hand’ and somebody said ‘Well, my husbands the Secretary of Defence in the Cabinet and we’re here to say here’s what do you need.  We know him (Matt Lamb) and we’ll call him, call him beforehand and then go through your event together and see if that’s what you want and if you do we’ll make sure he comes.”

It is this very interconnectedness that allowed him the access to offer children who not only lost parents but even more obscenely lost them in the full glare of a watching world, an event that almost took their grieving away from them.  That allowed him the chance to offer them the opportunity to write their hopes and fears on a simple umbrella and in a parade show the world who they were, to reclaim the loss and the effect of that loss as theirs.

It was that access, his status as Papal Knight, that allowed Lamb to gather all the religious leaders in Jerusalem – Moslem, Jewish, Greek Orthodox, Catholic, Coptic, Protestant – to meet for the first time in the most contested city in history, fought over by empires and religions for centuries, and talk peace, talk of ways forward, take steps towards ‘the impossible.

This story ends with Matt and Sheila and his ‘Peace Wave’, both art and an idea, a hope, a step towards the ‘new Los Alamos’.

“I envision that we are a Tsunami, we’re a mindless wave, we know we’re going that way but where are we going?  ‘I’ve no idea’, ‘Why are you here?’, ‘I love the turmoil, I love to ride on things where I know I’m going the right way.’, ‘Well what are you doing as you come along?’, ‘Well I’m a big wave’ and a wave picks up shit and a wave picks up diamonds so I’m surrounded by shit and diamonds… and this is how I see our programme, as we go we’re picking up everybody.  Where are we going?  Into the Promised Land but I don’t know where it is but we’re on this damned thing, let’s see if it takes us there.  What is the ultimate goal?  World Peace.  That’s honest, what else should we be on, a rocket ship to the moon? What use is peace on the moon, there’s nobody there… and this has all the power of the wave, it takes everybody, it doesn’t say ‘I don’t want to take you, I don’t like you’, it takes everybody and that’s what we’re looking for, something that takes everybody, so it’s a great analogy. I know I’m in it and I’m surrounded by all kinds of things and I think that nothing happens by happenstance, it happens by design and so.. How did this start? Don’t know and frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn. Where’s it going to end? Don’t know and frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn. Why are you in it?  Because I love it…. Right now I have a piece of art that I have called ‘The Path to Peace’, I’ve called it ‘The Peace Wave’, I called it something else that I can’t even remember but now I’m back with ‘The Peace Wave’. It is a hundred and seventy six feet long and it’s ten feet high.  It’s made up of concrete and it’s made up of panels…. It was maybe going to be used at the Chinese Olympics but they didn’t know where it was going to go afterwards and I said ‘No, I need to know where it’s going to end up’ and then it was supposed to go to that big station in Berlin, that collapsed, it was supposed to go there, in the middle, and the trains would ride by and I said ‘Who’s going to see the damn thing on a train? No it’s not going to go there.. but now I hear it’s going to Spain, to Sheila’s group in Alicante’.

Sheila took up the story.

“I think, right now it’s going to go in front of a military castle that overlooks the town.. and what going to happen is that it will be interactive art so you will be able to sign the back with anything peaceful that you want to write, or anything that you want to write at all and then when you’ve done that you go into the castle, you’re going to input what you wrote, where you wrote it on there and the date. So that will be archived and when the back is completely done it will be polyeurathened over and will be much like a book and much like The Wailing Wall, also, in Jerusalem, so that people will be able to look at it and say ‘Oh, my Mum was here in say 2011 and she wrote Peace be to God in the left top corner of the third panel’

It seemed right to leave this story with Sheila.  Now that Matt has gone it is she who has taken up the mantel, she who will take forward the mission, she who will ride the tsunami.

Matt touched many people and he did it in a totally unique way, he was a man of seeming contradictions.

I left him, however, understanding that what seems is not what is that everything he was and did added up to a whole, that there was both a rigour and a coherence to everything he did, everything he made.

I left him believing, as many, many others have done, in the possibility of the ‘new Los Alamos’, believing more in the power of the human spirit to make a difference and that is as fine a legacy I can think of.

Iain Bloomfield

Head of Arts

University of Bradford

April 2012

 As Artistic Director of Theatre in the Mill I see more new theatre than is, frankly, reasonable and if that has taught me anything it’s that, currently, theatre is at a tipping point, caught between the binaries of buildings /work, funding/flexibility, artist/collaborator, form/content and right in the middle of a bun-fight for your time.  In other words, theatre is in as interesting a place as I can remember.
Chris Goode, former Artistic Director at Camden Peoples Theatre and currently incarnated as Chris Goode and Company, is in my opinion the most original voice in British theatre, as fine a barometer of where we are heading as anyone I know.  He will be visiting Theatre in the Mill in May (9th-11th at 7.30pm) with his new performance piece ‘God/Head’ – a piece co-commissioned by The Oval House, London and us and part made here in Bradford.

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Chris Goode ‘gets’ that what makes theatre particular is the ongoing attempt to balance Apollo and Dionysus, the god of order and the god of chaos, – it’s ‘liveness’: “For a few years I’ve been thinking about what that might mean and I think, for me,  at the moment, it’s about using the presence of the audience – taking things that can’t be controlled or predicted and giving them some sway, some kind of ormative presence, in the room…. To allow the audience to experience this importance and the ways in which theatre is a medium that is social, that’s about different kinds of community, about being able to think quite specific ideas about how we all live together. The big challenge to me is how can I create an open a space which anyone can walk into and change, potentially, but at the same time for me be able to craft the space. How can I make a really beautiful crafted piece of work that at the same time has chaos in it?”

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And in there you have the other key to his work, that for Chris Goode, theatre is not about taking time out from existence  “I’ve never been satisfied with the idea that we come here to escape….. let me say that in a more nuanced way….there is a kind of escapism that theatre does make possible but it’s an escapism out of the weird fictions that we live inside and into a kind of reality.”

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But about “the politics of space, the politics of community, the politics of collaboration – not just in terms of wanting to make more interesting or innovative theatre, as if innovation were pure or good of itself… There is something interesting about how we create temporary models to live within, that we can create those spaces which at least allow us to glimpse how else we might live. We all kind of know that we can’t live like this anymore, that – to put it in terms I’m comfortable with – capitalism isn’t working – that we are going to have to think through how else we might do this. We do know these things, we just don’t have a safe space in which to know them. The fact that theatre can give us that feels not just important but critical and I don’t think it felt critical ten years ago.”

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So political theatre then but (and it’s a huge but) just as the Occupy movement is changing the face of politics – free flowing, multi-faceted, fleet footed in it’s expose of the hypocrisies of ‘late state’ capitalism – so political theatre is redefined in a radical, communal direction by artists like Chris Goode, using post-dramatic form to explore a post-‘political’ world.

“People, people we are the same
No we’re not the same
Cause we don’t know the game
What we need is awareness”

Fight the Power, Public Enemy 1990

It strikes me that ‘Protest: Fight the Power’ is a perfect distillation of the meaning and purpose of ‘Arts on Campus’ and why, on the University’s founding, arts fellowships were established at a primarily STEM University.  It is the place of education to feed enquiring minds, to stimulate original thinking and encourage fresh perspectives.  So it is with art but with that thinking linked to the emotional, the spiritual… to other resonances.

It also strikes me that now, more than ever – as we are bombarded by ever more news channels, ever more e-linked social networks, ever more images with an ever greater world reach – an exhibition that explores the political significance and nuance of the image is of huge value to us all if we are to make informed choices about the world in which we live. As I write this NATO planes are bombing Libyan ground forces, questions are being asked about the media coverage of the 26th March TUC march in central London, radiation leaks in Japan are reported hourly.  The significance of the image and it’s political meaning could not be in starker relief.

It was hugely interesting to me, therefore, that there were complaints about the exhibition on it’s opening – now let us not get this out of proportion, they were few and outnumbered by the support it received – it was proof to me that, in touching nerves around the politicisation of the image and, further, connecting with an emotional response, the exhibition was doing exactly as it should. That we were pushed into covering some images up and removing one other added, in my opinion, to the power of the whole.  The arguments around censorship versus freedom of expression are meaningful, ongoing and crucial to definitions of who we are and what we want to be as a society.  And by society I mean both the University of Bradford and the wider world in which we live.

The exhibition covers a huge range of political and social material – from election posters to pregnancy advice, advertising to consciousness raising. It invites us by the sheer volume, by the political, social and geographical diversity of its content – whether it be Obama as Batman villain or a pregnant man – to seek the meaning, the message, that lies behind and asks us to consider that all published images are the result of deliberate choice and to in future question what those choices are.

*This also appears as an article in the University of Bradford ‘News and Views’

The Arts Council England, again like many other areas in receipt of public funding, have taken a substantial cut in their government settlement.  Whatever the rights and wrongs of the situation (and those of whom who know me know exactly where I stand on current policy) it has led to a major re-thinking of what is funded and why.  The Arts Council thinking and strategy for the future lies here.

It has also led to arts organisation large and small giving real in-depth thought to what they do, why they do it, how they do it and with whom.

This is my two-penneth in regard of Theatre in the Mill.

Some beliefs for starters:

• We believe in artists, their vision and thinking

• We believe in artists who do not fit easily into the mainstream, who question and explore form and meaning in their work

• We believe that now, more than ever (as vulnerable communities are affected by the withdrawal of support and services at local and national levels) we have a responsibility to engage with the people that surround us, to explore and give voice to their experiences – to create dialogues and interactions.

Theatre in the Mill is fortunate to be part of a University that has been a significant leader in social inclusion through programmes like Widening Participation and the Programme for a Peaceful City, which has made a significant impact on the city of Bradford since the riots of 2001.  The University of Bradford’s strengths lie in technology and the social sciences, we engage easily (and encourage the same in our artists) with a broad range of thinking within a critical community. This is crucial.

We are also fortunate that we have history on our side: The theatre provision at the University of Bradford has always been a radical and inclusive one that had at its centre an understanding of the civic responsibilities of artists. We helped facilitate the shift from T&A journalist to leading playwright for David Edgar, we supported Howard Brenton stage work in the city ice-rink, more recently we supported Alan Lane to make an amazing piece over a bank holiday weekend in the Moghul Gardens in Lister Park. This radicalism laid a bedrock of adventure and achievement which has meant that the Theatre in the Mill has been able to punch above its weight since 1976.

As importantly we support a diverse range of artists, methodologies and interactions. We support the work artists make, the ways in which they make it and are developing a broad range of interaction between ‘audiences’, artists and work – creating a ‘critical’ mass. As well as championing diversity of practice we believe in broader, social, diversity. The search for ‘other voices’ is absolutely central to our mission and methods.  We are greatly assisted in this by being part of an international campus, one that has long recognised the importance of diversity and has in place long-standing programmes of support.  We take great pride in and actively work towards the diversity of our front of house and support teams and believe that this, alongside a broad range of engagement work both on campus and in our local communities serves and influences our artist development in profound ways. This is crucial.

This mixture of strong artistic practice integrally linked to critical thinking and meaningful, ongoing and targeted engagement within a culturally diverse city and an international institution makes us pretty unique.

We’ve still got a hell of a long way to go in getting all of this right but I do believe we are laying the foundations for something genuinely powerful and, as importantly, sustainable.

We’re pretty radical here at Bradford Uni regarding the arts and always have been.  Three Fellowships in the Arts established at the Universities founding (1966) at  a Science, Technology, Engineering and Management based institution was radical even then.  To have hung onto them through the vissicitudes of the last 45 years is also pretty radical!  The project outlined below is but a wee sliver, a minor outcropping, of that artist engagement, they are the kind of thing that makes this University such a unique place.  It ain’t always easy but, and it’s a very big but, it has stuck around.                          

As I’ve banged on about here before I’m quite a political artist and the idea appealed to me.  As did the fact that it seemed to reflect a growing radicalism and engagement from the student body that I’d not seen for a while – wanting more than beer, slides and landfill indie.  It also chimed with things that I’ve been picking up across the city, with venues like Bradford Playhouse finding their radical soul once again (god bless you Eleanor Barrett), the Westfield artists protest and our dignified response to the recent EDL march in the city.  It also offered an all too rare opportunity to ‘get right in there’.

At about the same time I was approached by Abdul Bassit Ali, The Student Union B.M.E. Officer who also wanted to put together a celebration for BHM.  I pointed him in the same direction as Joanne and a joint bid was submitted which proved successful.  Excellent. We had a show or two.

Not being a noticeable expert in black history I drew in Alicia Campbell, an artist and theatre worker with whom I have worked on a number of occasions to support me periodically.  Between us and the group we worked with we decided that what we would explore would be current experiences of being black, to question rather than provide answers and to capture confusions and inconsistencies in thoughts and attitudes rather than smooth things out.  For me ‘what does all this mean?’ is very powerful.

I was also sure that I didn’t want these reflections to come from Afro-Caribbeans alone.  So we sent students out with video camera’s to get their fellow students to answer three questions:

1. ‘How do you identify yourself?’

2. ‘What is Black?’

3. ‘When I say Black, what do you see’

We turned the resulting interviews into three short films which were shown as part of the performance.  We also set my regular collaborator ‘The Guvnor’ on to creating us an aural soundscape using student vox pop, political speeches and music of all sorts.  The outcomes will in the very near future find thier way onto the Theatre in the Mill website.

We also worked with a load of students, Black, Asian, Greek, Swiss on the making of a theatre work.

Below is what they came up with, in their own words.  I like it.

WHEN I SAY BLACK WHAT DO YOU SEE?

Film 1: answers to the question “How do you identify yourself?”

Marc: Why, ladies and gentlemen, does a toilet have the shape it has?

Why do you drive on the left side of the road in this country?

If I want a proper chat, I go to a pub whilst my African friends cook dinner and my continental friend’s go to a restaurant: Why?

To try to explain these differences, we use big words that none of us really understand:  words like “culture” or “society”. But what do they mean?

You have to understand that you have ideas in your heads that you are not even aware of having. Unknown knowledge if you like.   A cultural memory of how things are and it’s not just learned at our parents knees but is seen and accepted by us a thousand times over.

These learnt ideologies are innate in all of us.

Do we know how the world works, or rather, do we make the world work according to what we have been taught to think?

6.14% of White British women work in health care. The figure for Black British women is 17%.

BUT: does that mean anything at all? And, why are there even statistics for that?

Looking at the statistics a Caribbean Male is twice as likely to work in a sports or fitness occupation as his white counterpart but he’s also twice as likely (per capita) to be a corporate manager.  An African male is 8 times as likely to work in an elementary security occupation but a white male twice as likely to work in construction.

Zigela:           The word Negro was used in the English-speaking world to refer to a person of black ancestry or appearance, whether of African descent or not, prior to the shift in the lexicon of American and worldwide classification of race and ethnicity in the late 1960s. …

The word “negro” means “black” in Spanish and Portuguese

The usage was accepted as normal, even by people classified as Negroes, until the Civil Rights movement. One well-known example is the identification by Martin Luther King, Jr. of his own race as ‘Negro’ in his famous speech ‘I Have a Dream’.

During the American Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, some African American leaders in the United States objected to the word, preferring Black, because they associated the word Negro with the long history of slavery, segregation, and discrimination that treated African Americans as second class citizens, or worse.

The term black people usually refers to a racial group of humans with skin colours that range from light brown to nearly black.

Negro was a term used by Portuguese and Spanish people during the discovery period to describe red Indians. For black people the term ‘Piece from Guinea’  or ‘Gentile from Guinea’ was used instead.

Negro first was used to designate people from Africa around XV century

Jeffrey:          What’s that about when you’re filling in an application?  At the back of it you have the equal opportunities sheet asking whether you’re White British, Black British, Asian British etc.

                        Honestly, what difference does it make?

                        Is my ability to do a job dependant on my race?

Why is a certain way of life associated with skin colour? He is black and he speaks the Queen’s English so he’s white.  He is white but he dances like a black person.  She is black but she listens to classical music so she’s a cocoanut.

Genetically race does not exist. “Race” is just a way to describe someone’s skin colour.  Culture is a way of life.  Culture does not have colour. If a white child grows up in Nigeria he will have a Nigerian accent, a Nigerian mentality.

Racism doesn’t make sense.  Amongst white people there are differences – ginger hair, blonde hair, brown eyes, blue eyes.  Black and Asian, some have lighter complexions than others.  The discrimination is in our minds.

There is no point applying for this job.  I’m black so they won’t even look.  I believe that charity begins at home, so once we stop subconsciously seeing ourselves as second class citizens then maybe the limitations we feel we have will be broken.

Joanne:         The gollywog image was a major anti-black caricature of its time, which kinda lead me to the blackface image which was used in minstrel shows, were white people used to dress up and burn cork, rub it on their faces, with exaggerated lips and woolly hair and white bulging. I mean the darky iconography, googly eyes and inky black , this is how black people were depicted. There’s even  arguments that these images were a form of endearment? Apparently there’s still even a darky day in Cornwall were they dress up as black people in jest.

The most potent line, i just cant get over, i kept reading it over and over again. Is that the ‘darkies’ in the minstrel shows were displaying what they thought was innate qualities on blackness, which was inherent musicality and athleticism.. i mean What’s scary that  how different are these perceptions  the ones held about black people in  today’s society? Why after so many years is it seen that that’s all black people are good at, music and sports. its not a thing about colour, its not genetic. Its not that black people aren’t smart enough or we are not able because what is blackness, being black anyway? I mean its a colour. So what,  how does having a large amount melanin in my body mean I’m not able?. How does this pigmentation effects a persons mind, or ability to think and function as well as there white counterparts. I don’t think its an issue of being black, because at the end of the day being black, the skin , its just a pigment.

 Film 2: answers to the question “What is Black?”

Marc:              Everybody wants to belong.

We all want to belong somewhere, to some group.  And within our groups we understand ourselves as diverse, as individuals, because we do not see ourselves as a group from within the group.

I couldn’t explain to you what the stereotypical white guy would be like, but Chris Rock can.  And if I feel that way I’m pretty sure that it must be hard for a black person to talk about stereotypes too.

Joanne:       Its no secret that Young black males do statistically worse in mainstream education than their white counterparts but why? When i was younger and the grime scene was really coming up, young black boys were spitting bars, practicing for hours on end. And i remember my school just couldn’t understand it, they even tried to link it to gangs, it was like, what are these black children doing?

But then one teacher took the time out to actually listen to the words that were coming out of these young black boys mouths, and the content of their raps and he realised it was poetry, intelligent poetry, they were referencing historical and current affairs , with complex storylines, its just amazing. But then you hand them a book or some Shakespeare and suddenly they can’t decode it and it begs the question why, because they aren’t stupid. Then my school started to look at maybe its the format we are trying to deliver this information, maybe it’s how we treat them, trying to make them to the ideals they have created instead of celebrating individual difference and culture. Racism is institutional and i think its gonna take some time to weed out.

 Zigela:           I have some questions.

Why do we assume that success for black people lies in the areas of sport or entertainment?

Does the media influence the way we think?

Why do we assume that by becoming successful a black person is more white?

Is success white?

When will a successful black lawyer just become a successful lawyer?

Can we change our mentality around the word black?

Are we using the freedoms our parents fought for well?

Can we really fight racism if we don’t believe in ourselves?

Nonga:          Black History Month, I believe, should not be a time where we just discuss all the great Black people who have walked the face of the earth.  In fact we should understand why they did what they did.

                        A great man once said “Death kills us once, but fear kills us over and over again” – what he meant by that was when you are frightened or feel intimidated and let that fear have power over you then and only then are you defeated. 

Fear is powerful, it can stop a great man achieving his goals.  If Martin Luther King had been afraid to go on stage to make his famous “I have a dream” speech, in fear of his life, in fear of the corrupt system in which he found himself – then many people too would have been robbed of the courage he showed.

I believe we should not celebrate the accomplishments of Black people but rather their capacity, their courage to rise above fear.

The fear I am referring to is the fear you feel when you go to work, the fear you feel when you switch on the television, the fear you feel when you are approached by a policeman.

The fear you feel when you forget that you have been born free, not born into bondage, not born a slave.

I think that this is what Martin Luther King realised, and Rosa Parks, Malcolm X, Muhammed Ali, Tupac to name but a few.

We, as a nation, need to break these invisible chains, stand up for what we believe in, in that moment, the moment when the fear arises.  You have to free yourself from that fear.

It is written “For god has not given us a spirit of fear but of power and of love and a sound mind”.  Let us stop pretending people, whatever label they have given you – Black, White, Yellow, whatever.  Understand that the change starts in you and I can tell you this from my own experience:  When you believe in yourself, have good intentions, a strong faith in god, believe me, then anything is possible.

Joanne:         Growing up in my end of east London, there is a gang culture. I mean E7, E9, e13, postcode wars and all sorts and they kinda coined it as a black problem. I mean there’s a whole division of the metropolitan police dedicated to black on black crime in London Trident.  And its scary cos i look at my little brother and he’s sixteen and this weekend gone, a 16 year old boy was gunned down five minuites away from my house and for what? Wrong place, wrong time, or some one from his crew had done something and this was payback. And it makes sence to them, there rules and regulations as to how it all works , you take out someone from our crew and well take out someone from your, it doesn’t necessarily have to be the person who pulled the trigger or stabbed the person but so long your associated thats you!  And its scary because what happens it they try drag him in, if he does hes in trouble, if he don’t he aint kool. And they have coined it that its a black problem, its a black issue and its not, it a gang culture, it’s got nothing to do with their colour. They’ve made it seem like there’s something wrong with this kids, like there just incapable of acting right and its because there black, bit its not! A gang is a gang, whoever or wherever it is. It’s because of the social-economic circumstances there living, its because of the state of housing, education, they got parent working shift trying to put food on the table, its like a recipe, you put those situations together and its high possibility that you will have a gang, wherever it is. I mean look at Manchester, you don’t hear that it white people are killing white people, no, it just a gang, its called violence, crime, but when black people do it, its different, there must be a deeper reason. Its a gang culture, they need to look past the colour.

Nonga:          Chanelle Sasha Jones 17 Aberaeron 02/08/09 Stabbed

Tigela:           Adam Paton 17 Angus Montrose 24/04/08 Stabbed

Jeffrey:          Jessica McCagh 17 Arbroath 25/04/09 Other

Marc:              Laura Thomson 18 Ayr 01/06/08 Stabbed

Nonga:          Michelle Stewart 17 Ayrshire Drongan 14/11/08 Stabbed

Tigela:           Boris Reavey 19 Bedford 15/11/08 Stabbed

Jeffrey:          James Murray 19 Belfast 05/12/09 Other

Marc:              Ashley Horton 16 Birmingham Kings Norton 27/03/08 Stabbed

Nonga:          Sabrina Larbi-Cherif 19 Birmingham Ladywood 15/09/08 Stabbed

Tigela:           Stephon Davidson 19 Birmingham Ladywood 05/08/08 Shot

Jeffrey:          Amy Leigh Barnes 19 Bolton Farnworth 08/11/08 Stabbed

Marc:              Nathan Ridler 17 Bournemouth 24/02/08 Other

Joanne:         All the young people mentioned there are not black and were killed by people of their own race but we do not talk about white on white violence.

Film 3: Answers to the question “When I say black what do you see?”

End

I want to take this work further, I want to work with these young people for an extended period of time. We staged the show as part of a bigger event where I saw some of our young people here spitting poetry that knocked me sideways and so I want to link it with the nascent Northern Spoken Word Forum that is beginning to take shape, I want to pick up the idea that Joe Kriss and I were talking about of having an inter University poetry slam, I want to talk to people like Jonzi D further about him making some work with us.

I short, I got REAL excited!

Last year Theatre in the Mill was commissioned by The Schools Linking Network to work with Titus Salt School and Grange Technology College in the creation of a performance project that would explore cross ethnic relations in the City of Bradford with reference to the political and humanitarian crisis in Gaza . 

The Network was established after the publication of the Ouseley Report and it’s description of ‘elective apartheid’ in the city’s schools with the aim of allowing young people in the city to know and understand each other better.  There has been considerable work done in which the University of Bradford, with it’s specialisms in conflict resolution, has been to the forefront.

I was interested in this both as a process and as a subject having in a previous incarnation worked with young people (not in a school setting) about personal and political issues on pieces such as Just Before the Rain – For Peshkar Productions/Contact Theatre.  There is a thoughtful review of the piece here.  

Angie Kottler of the SLN asked me if I would consider working with Ben Yeger on the project.  Ben is a fascinating and wonderfully talented man, a former paratrooper in the Israeli Defence Force, theatre maker (based in Sheffield) whose experiences of serving in the Lebanon conflict led him to join an organisation called Combatants for Peace, which brings together both Israeli and Palestinian former soldiers in an effort to forge greater understanding and to push forward the peace process.

Ben’s practice differs significantly from mine, having at it’s heart, I guess, a therapeutic intention.  I was very interested to push myself and my own making process so I was more than happy to have Ben on board.

Having sat down and discussed the project at length with the SLN, Ben and teachers from both schools we set ourselves two main goals: To explore ideas, knowledge and experiences of conflict in relation to self, family and friends, society, the world and war. To stretch the students understanding of contemporary theatre practice as a means of developing a broader vocabulary of self expression.

It was also decided that the teachers from both schools would be actively engaged in the making process.  They were:

  Heather Graham, Lauren Bowley and Kate Metcalfe from Titus Salt School and Dave McKay from Grange Technology College.

In addition we have had significant input into the shape and conceptualization of the project from Professor Donna Pankhurst,  Senior Lecturer in Peace Studies at the University of Bradford and Chair of the Governors at Grange Technology College.
The pupils we worked with were selected for a variety of reasons by the schools themselves and came from across the age ranges from 11 to 18 – a vertical grouping out of choice.  We only asked that the pupils had an existing interest (but not necessarily experience) in theatre, had something to say and were not compelled to attend.

Specific tools introduced we introduced to the group:
• Improvisation skills- accept and develop, trust your own ideas and spontaneity.
• Space and body awareness
• Listening skills
• Working as group
• Still image (sculpt) making
• Movement qualities (elements as a reference for movement)
• Instant story making/telling
• Complex and overlapping narrative structures

We were asked to review the process mid way through.  This is what we wrote:

Comment from the Artists
“The process so far has been very rich and the students are showing a very positive and enthusiastic attitude to the work. It seems that they enjoy the games we have been introducing and that they are also interested in finding creative ways to express their ideas and understanding around conflict and resolving it. There is a wide spectrum of abilities present in the group and this means that the output is varied in content and style. This will probably mean that the project will be able to remain diverse and therefore interesting. The students have responded well to using sculpts as a means of showing the ideas they come up with and when asked to develop these ideas they have come up with some very rich material. It feels that we are on the right track and when we have a full day together we will be able to bring together some of the strands we have been exploring so far. It feels very important to find the right balance between the y peoples personal response to the word conflict and a wider view point- so that we can reach beyond just the young people’s experience so to enrich the overall learning.  In terms of form- I feel that it is important to continue to build the Young people’s capacity and knowledge of the different ways they can express narrative, feelings, thoughts, information about the subject matter.  We have found a bit of structure in terms of 4 areas of conflict-
 1. Personal/internal
 2. Familial conflict
3. Societal conflict
4.World conflict/war”

First Understand yourself.  Secondly understand your surroundings.  Thirdly explore the world with a deeper understanding.

Comments from Staff
“I don’t think I’d be stepping out of line to suggest that we’ve all
found the project to be a high energy, creative and overwhelmingly
positive experience so far. There seems to be a real developing
friendship between the kids of both schools and I personally think this
has been aided tremendously by the vertical nature of the grouping. This
has worked so much better than last year’s project with Salt’s where all
the students were Year Group peers.” Dave McKay, Grange Technology College

“The core of students still working on the project are all working well as a group – friendships are forming between the schools: it would be difficult now to spot who belongs to which school because of the way they are mixing. In fact one of our girls now constantly hangs out with the Grange girls when they are together. I am constantly impressed with the way the students are working – some of the ‘scenes’ they did on Monday made the hairs stand up on the back on my neck, as they were so well ‘acted’. “ Heather Graham, The Titus Salt School

The end, performed, result ‘In My Life’ was performed here at Theatre in the Mill.  The young people talked really profoundly about their lives, the pressures and the worlds that surround them.  They created a performance that moved it’s watchers to tears and started a myriad of further conversations about how both the methodologies and the practice could continue.  There was a universal consensus that these young people had made something that would significantly effect their lives, their behaviours and attitudes as citizens, we saw our investment pay off. And despite the recent news about cuts in arts funding it will continue, we have the wherewithal to ensure that it does.  We believe in investment  you see.

It worries and saddens me, though, that as a small organisation we can only do so much and that there are many, many, young people out there who, through the cuts announced in the Comprehensive Spending Review, will be denied these opportunities.

Having had a small amount of blog constipation (largely due to my wider responsibilities) I was inspired to say summat else by spending some time with Rita Marcalo the other day.  She performed her piece ‘When Night Falls’ at TiM on Monday night (11th October 2010) and we were having a smallish debrief about that and then went to give some feedback to the second development stage of Rachel Dean’s ‘Nativity’. 

Rita is an amazingly inspirational artist whose work never fails to intrigue, disturb, to challenge and question.  She plays in quite profound ways with the relationship between audience/spectator/artist.  Questions that are absolutely vital to notions of performance in the mutli-media/multi-platform/multi-possibility 21st century.

Lucy Barker, who worked with Rita on ‘When Night Falls’ described it thusly: 

“Initially, the participant walks into a darkened room and must surely feel a little disorientated.  They are told to not speak and not leave the room until all the candles are out.  They are given a lighter.  When they leave the room, they enter a third chamber where they realise the previous participant has been watching them on a monitor and has named the piece they were in.  They are invited to observe the next piece and name it, creating a continuous cycle.

In the space, Rita is nude, laid on the floor, with a large pair of metal wings on her shoulders. A grid of tea lights is laid out on the floor.  She pulls herself along the floor to each tea light, blows it out and carefully pushes it aside.”

The questions that Rita is asking about audience/artist relationships and narrative are being explored elsewhere in different ways – companies like Slung Low locally, Chris Goode, Punchdrunk and many more nationally (all with less or more concern for a ‘significant’ platform and nowt wrong with that) are exploring similar ideas in their work – indeed these are questions that have history behind them – Jerzy Grotowski moved into Para-Theatrics after his Teatr Laboritorium in the 70′s, visionary that he was.  But they are absolutely crucial if we want theatre to be alive and offer something unique. Something not televisual, in and of the moment.

As is clear from above Rita’s current practice is exceptionally pared down and challenging – work that explores her own epilepsy and it’s drug control or concepts of guilt – and is often available to very few people (When Night Falls played to 8 people in total at TiM – it was all she could physically sustain). It will not be everyone’s cup of tea quite frankly. It is mine.

So, when faced with the question, “How will this pay?”* I respond with the question “What is subsidy for if not to support the difficult, or one-off, work and to support the challenging, inspirational artist? How can we afford not to subsidise such artists?”.   Industry knows well enough that research and development are crucial to new ‘product’.

Be sure that this work will eventually influence the mainstream:  without Grotowski there is no ‘Lion King’…….

That shouldn’t matter….. but it does. 

Nowadays.

*We do a huge amount of project work at Theatre in the Mill to ensure that it ‘paying’, here, does not matter as such and that artists can make the work they want to in the way they want to.

We spent the first day on the conference (and a rather lovely evening meal) interviewing attendees and soaking in the fascinating key note speeches and workshops.  We then worked overnight to create a piece of performance ( our reflections on the first day) which was shown at 10 am on day two.  Rather bleary eyed we were when it came to perform…… the next section is some of what we came up with:

 “The thing that grasped me most from yesterday  is the image, the idea, of the allotment.  I can picture it clearly.  I have a very precise image of what it looks like and I have that because that word, that idea, that ideal speaks to me.

I guess it would speak to a lot of people gathered in this room as well. If I were to ask you to close your eyes and think for a brief moment about an allotment, to picture it, to fill in, swiftly, without too much thought or effort on your part – I am aware that we were mostly up a bit later than we intended last night – I would put a fair amount of money on the table that you would, by now, have a fairly rich image.  You would have detail. Specific detail, colour, shape…..  Your picture would be filled with specifics.  And it would be yours, not mine.  But it would still fill the intellectual, emotional space we assign to the word ‘allotment’.  I would recognise it. We have a common, if ill defined, idea that we can all subscribe to, I would suggest.

My idea, ideal, I suppose, of ‘allotment’ is tied into my childhood, my father and grandfather. These were deeply practical men.  My father, a master mariner, my grandfather, a wheelwright amongst many other professions – these were men who could and did improvise, make what they could with what they had to hand.  So my allotment is filled with bodge and fix, the bricolage that Peter talked about yesterday morning.  The random object that has been re-used, re-fashioned, changed in meaning and purpose by being used as a planter, the 7 doors that become a shed, or in my grandfathers case the Anderson shelter that had become a garden tool store – about as great a change of use, of meaning, of resonance as I can imagine

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There is for me a power in this, a meaning beyond the simple fact of growing fruit and vegetables.  I have a, I was going to say horror but it is not that…exactly, of the B&Q garden, the off the peg ‘solution’ to all your gardening needs – and maybe there is a kind of inverted snobbery in this – but that to me seems to defeat the point, it smacks to me of faddism, a phase ‘we’re going through’ rather than something that has been turned over in hands, looked at, pondered on, re-thought and re-used.  It seems to me that this time, this contemplation, this act of improvisation or transformation is every bit as meaningful as the process of planting and growing, no….that is not quite right: it is in many ways the same thing at heart.  It is what separates the cottage from the factory, the artisan from the mass-produced, what is sustainable from consumption culture.

Allotments are also and this, for me, is a connected point – places of conversation, of shared tips, shared experiences, common purpose, places where experience is valued and knowledge recycled – where ‘failure’ is a random yet constant possibility that can be used and learned from season to season, year to year and yet have to be adapted, considered in terms of the particularities of aspect, shade, proximity of water source.  A thousand variables that must be considered in a dynamic, changing situation that will not wait on us as nights fall and suns rise, season upon season. If we were to think about it too hard the sheer complications would boggle us but they don’t, do they? Because growing things is easy is it not?  This endlessly wondrous miracle has been made easy by contemplation, shared knowledge and experience. 

So why, then, is it, or maybe I should say can it be then so difficult for us to find the time to eat with each other?  If we can make the wondrous things easy why do we make the easy things hard, put barriers in the way? As Christine will attest developing an understanding that shared picnics were a worthwhile, meaningful, activity in the workplace was not easy.  Such a simple thing.  A thing that allows us space to share conversation, tips, experiences, common purpose.  A ‘green space’, or is that too fluffy?

Maybe we find this so hard because it is the nature of institutional working that we build walls around ourselves and call it professionalism, this acts as self protector, as a shared masonry, a nod, a wink, a funny hand-shake that signals to each other that we are inside the walls looking out.   Universities are by their nature word based, we generate more words than I can deal with and it is words, the language of academia, that we shelter behind. This is not to say that that language is not important, in context it is vital.  But maybe, maybe, also limiting when we try to step beyond our walls or operate in ways that lie outside our norms?  Maybe it is our language and the ways of thinking that language engenders that holds us back from the simple pleasures of a shared picnic?

I wonder if we shouldn’t change the ways in which we think by changing the language of our discourse.  Returning to the analogy of the allotment one final time, maybe we should seek to find the bodge and fix, the many languages, the different ways of speaking and thinking lying higgledy piggledy on top of each other, not want the B&Q solutions…………and see that allotment ideal as a blessing because it changes the resonance of what we say. 

In that spirit, I offer you this:

The soil she tills
tends to hardness,
broken with stones
and glass from an
abandoned greenhouse
that leech through the earth
at a semi constant rate.
It is set on a hillside
below a wood
that sucks the
earth bone dry.

But she will carve,
in this unpromising place,
through tender care
and constant watering,
a garden,
a place of peace
to sit as
evening comes down
and look beyond the house
to green hills.

She will fill this garden
with jasmine,
night scented stock
and camomile,
with aromas that brush
warm summer air.

She will watch
children play
with cats,
slo worms,
frogs
and will know
that contentment can be
nurtured from the least
likely of soils

If the above makes the performance seem a bit po-faced it’s only because the bits that weren’t written down (devised by Ellie, Matt and Natalie) were hilarious.  I have been happily re-creating them for friends in pubs around the Saltaire area ever since.  If you find yourself around Shiptaire buy me a beer I may well do so for you.  Which now makes me sound like I’ll dance for beer….. Oops!

*Oh and btw Bricolage: Peters definition is french for all the bits and bobs you can put to use in a garden and so, for the day, we were bricolleurs…

It would be fair to say in the race of life I am the tortoise not the hare.

I can clearly remember that at primary school I didn’t really have much of a clue what was going on having been recently uprooted from the post-colonial heaven that was Singapore in the sixties.  …… it certainly wasn’t heaven except from a child’s eye view.  I only really developed any ambition or vision well into my arts career, I bumbled along quite happily and there is value in bumble – just as long as it is not a forever characteristic.

Anyway, I have now been at Theatre in the Mill, at the University of Bradford since 2003 and Head of Arts (taking in Theatre, Music and the Visual Arts) for the last two years.  It’s only just now, really recently, that I’ve started to get in any way happy about what we are up to, crystallised our meaning and purpose as a venue, as part of the University, as part of our community, as part of the arts ecology of the region and beyond.

In doing that we had to change a fair few things.  Re-invent ourselves in some quite profound ways.  The University agreed to extensively refurbish the venue and at the same time we worked very hard with resident and associate artists to re-work what we are and how we do it.  We explored blind alleys and time limited possibilities.  In the end (and to this I am indebted to many conversations with and the thinking of Alan Lane) we simplified things.  We returned to the the thinking of Ted Edwards the first Vice Chancellor of the University of Bradford – the point of it all in the end is to have artists on campus, offering new perspectives on the world in which we live.  So we put artists first, moving away from the receiving house towards a commissioning house, one that allowed artists to make the work they wanted to make and through ‘Open House’ to experiment with new ideas or new practice.

That in place we have worked hard to re-invent our relationship with the University.  If our programme was much more tightly focused we would be leaving gaps and so, thanks to my boss Alison Darnbrough, we have found a sum of money and created a ‘Cultural Fund’  which allows members of the University, staff or student, the opportunity to make the work they want, in the way they want to make it.  Decisions are not yet in from the panel but the take up has been amazing – proposals have come in for carnival, tea-parties and circus, a student animation festival, a student devised play about the black experience, an art exhibition, the list goes on.  We are working with more (and more diverse) students than ever before – and it’s all coming from them. We are also, seperate from the Cultural Fund bids, talking to the Student Union about the development of a ‘LivingNewspaper’ theatre project, which will allow student issues to be aired in less conventional ways.

Furthering this widened involvement we’ve done a whole raft of work this last year through staff training and conferences that allows us to take the role of jester – with licence to question, support and satirize the institution and the way it works.  I will return to this in my next post.

Finally our community, we’ve made a step change in how we work – pushing hard to create really high quality challenging work with young people around the district, work that challenges them politically and personally as much as it does artistically.  We are planning to spend about 9 months in Residence at Grange Technology College and are exploring how we can follow up on the Schools Linking Network project from this last year. Again, I will return to this at a later date.

We’re doing good, I reckon.  And I hope we’re going to do a whole heap more over the next few years.