Bluets, meditation on seeing the theatre production

Bluets dances with a multitude of threads. Threads that fray.  Threads that loop. Threads that splice. Threads that twist. 


One thread is a form of love story which is also a sex story which is also a blue story which is also an identity story which is also a grief story which is also a loss story. 


Maggie Nelson’s Bluets is structured as 240 numbers prose-poem-aphoristic-sentence-paragraphs.


The numbers are linear.  The threads are non-linear. 


I see within Nelson’s Bluets a kaleidoscope of threaded images. Micro-vignettes. Fractured tableaus. 


I say I see


as this is the readers’ share, the audiences’ share, the viewers’ share of the work. 


In Katie Mitchell’s Bluets I see these vignettes created into physical on stage tableaus. Images projected on screen. Images made by the performers. Vignettes shapes by the stage hands. The stage hand who cast shadow and light and absence, who cast negative space and liminal space and forgotten space. 


In Margaret Perry’s Bluets I hear the breaks the caesuras the cuts for the performers. 


All of these Bluets orbit the feminist. 


In Katie Mitchell’s and Margaret Perry’s Bluets I see no numbers. In that Bluets, the one I saw and experience in that time and space, time move forward - more or less linear - although with skips and jumps and pauses.  


Perhaps forward numbers are unneeded if time parses forwards. 


Yet this Bluets drifted in and out of kairos time. Where time flows and stops, not experienced in a line. 



In Nelson’s Bluets some words are intensely blue. More blue than the images in performance. Yet some  images in the performance Bluets transcend the text or at least derive from a world at least as deep and expressive as the words. 


On occasion the performers are lost in their image. Eyes zoned on their making on the camera on the screen and rarely the audience watcher. 


The lost moments past quickly. I see them as from a liminal between space.  Perhaps one could seem them as the space between. 


At the level of the idea these concepts swirl around me


Sex and love

Identity

Disability

Grief

Blue 


You will find more or less, and different for sure.


In Nelson’s Bluets: 


Numbered Fragments: Each fragment is sequentially numbered from 1 to 240. This numbering provides a sense of progression, even though the content within the fragments often jumps between different times, places, and ideas.


Prose Poetry: The fragments blend elements of prose and poetry, featuring lyrical language, vivid imagery, and poetic rhythm. This form is in itself unique. The structure allows Nelson to weave together personal memoir, philosophical musings, and cultural analysis


Non-linear Narrative: The fragments do not follow a traditional narrative arc. The fragments are associative and often jump between different subjects and moments in time. This mirrors the way memories and emotions can be experienced in a non-linear fashion.


Intertextuality: The fragments frequently reference other works of art, literature, philosophy, and personal anecdotes. These references create a rich intertextual tapestry, adding depth and resonance to the themes.


From the view of grief:


Personal Loss: The color blue is a central metaphor.  There is a riff on feelings of sorrow and longing following the end of a romantic relationship. The fragments capture the rawness of heartbreak and the enduring pain that accompanies the loss of a loved one.


Philosophical Inquiry: Te work it not only a riff on  personal grief but also interrogates the nature of grief itself. How grief shapes our understanding of the world, our relationships, and our sense of self. She examines how grief can be both a deeply personal experience and a universal human condition.


Sensory and Emotional Connections: Grief  connects to sensory experiences and emotional responses. 

The work attempts the paradox to  articulate the inexpressible aspects of grief.


Fragmented Narrative: The fragmented structure mirrors the disjointed and often chaotic nature of grief. (Of love, of disability, of identity). The non-linear format jumps between memories, reflections, and observations. Grief can jump and spiral like this. As can love. 


Healing and Continuity: The work is steeped in grief. Yet I see it also touches on the process of healing. Grief does not have a neat resolution. Grief can be a part of one's ongoing life. The act of writing and reflecting becomes a way to live with and through grief.


On feminism and identity


Personal Autonomy and Female Voice: The power of the female voice.


Exploration of Female Desire: The complexities of female desire, addressing themes of love, longing, and sexuality from a distinctly female perspective.


Interrogation of Gender Norms: Nelson subtly critiques societal expectations and norms surrounding gender and relationships. The audience is caught on the phrase of a passive top and an active bottom.


On Disability:


Personal Connection to Disability: There is a portrayal of a friend's (?) paralysis. This relationship provides a lens through which she explores the physical and emotional impacts of disability on both the individual experiencing it and their loved ones.


A riff on  the daily realities and emotional complexities faced by disability . 


Interconnectedness of Grief and Disability: The  onset of disability can lead to profound personal and relational grief, as both the individual and their loved ones mourn the loss of prior abilities and navigate new realities.


Philosophical Reflections on the Body: Philosophical musings on the nature of the body, its vulnerabilities, and its resilience. How disability can alter one's perception of their own body and its capabilities, prompting broader questions about identity and self-acceptance.


Visibility and Invisibility: The fragments touch on the themes of visibility and invisibility related to disability. 


Interdependency and Care: How relationships are reshaped by disability. A friend and caregiver, highlights the mutual dependence and emotional labor involved in such dynamics.


On Blue: 


Emotional Resonance: Blue serves as a symbol for various emotional states, particularly those associated with melancholy, longing, and grief…. a vessel for expressing sorrow, heartache, and a sense of loss.


Sensory and Aesthetic Appreciation: The beauty of blue in nature, art, and everyday objects, - its ability to evoke profound emotional responses. The visual and tactile allure- connections between the color and moments of aesthetic pleasure.


Philosophical Inquiry: Blue is a subject of philosophical inquiry. The nature of color itself, its impact on perception, and its role in shaping human experience. How blue can represent both presence and absence, depth and distance.


Interconnectedness with Memory: Do I see that blue is connected with memory here? blue evokes and anchors recollections - those related to love and loss. Blue becomes a conduit for accessing and articulating past experiences. 


Symbol of Desire and Longing: Blue symbolizes desire and longing - a sense of yearning, whether for a lost lover, a past moment, or an unattainable ideal. The color captures the essence of unfulfilled desires and the bittersweet nature of longing.


Cultural and Historical Contexts: the work situates the exploration of blue within broader cultural and historical contexts. Referencing various works of art, literature, and philosophy that engage with the color blue, from artists like Yves Klein to poets like Wallace Stevens. 


I note in blue there is very little (or arguably no) black.



Is Bluets the performance or the poem -  good or bad ? I can not answer that.

Should you see or read the work ? 

I think if these ideas - grief - love - sex - identity - poetic form - language form - colour - culture - philosophy - queer - non-queer - engage you or you want to be engaged by them then this is a work to be engaged with by deep thinking artist creators at the height of their powers.


Sustainability Podcast: Arts Council, Mya-Rose Craig, Ellie Harrison and Benjamin Yeoh

Artists, Activists on Climate and enviroment. In this episode, join Mya-Rose Craig, Ellie Harrison and Benjamin Yeoh as they explore what is the connection between art and climate change and how can the storytelling skills of individual artists drive structural change at a corporate level.

Featuring:
• Mya-Rose Craig - ornithologist, environmentalist, diversity activist as well as an author, speaker and broadcaster
• Ellie Harrison - artist, activist & author
• Benjamin Yeoh – playwright, investor and podcast host

Summary (via AI):

Here is a summary of the key points from the conversation:

- This is a podcast discussing environmental responsibility in the arts and culture sector. The three guests are Mya-Rose, Ben, and Ellie.

- They discuss what environmental responsibility means to them personally. Mya-Rose talks about campaigning and raising awareness, as well as encouraging local environmental action like rewilding. Ben discusses leading by example but also influencing systems change. Ellie tries to live modestly and thinks about the impact of her actions.

- When asked how they embed environmental ideas in their work, Mya-Rose talks about engaging youth from underrepresented backgrounds with nature. Ben discusses incorporating climate themes in his theatre work and engaging with companies on sustainability in his investment work. Ellie campaigns on public transport issues and divestment.

- They discuss different forms of environmental action from large protests to local community projects. Mya-Rose advocates bigger changes like ethical banking as well as local rewilding. Ben focuses on influencing senior leaders.

- On why the cultural sector should take action, they agree it should lead by example and reflect these issues since they affect everyone's lives.

- They debate how to best communicate to affect change. Mya-Rose discusses effective social media activism. Ben focuses on influencing leaders. Ellie uses humor and music in her art and activism.

- For actions people can take today, they suggest political engagement, ethical purchasing/investment, storytelling, and getting involved locally.

- When asked what support would help cultural organizations, they suggest identifying environmental impacts, getting guidance to address them, and funding for climate-related art projects.

- For art that affected change, they cite nature documentaries, conceptual art exposing pollution/hypocrisy, and films spotlighting funding by polluting industries.

Transcript

Presenter: Hello and welcome to the IP Pod from the Arts Council which set out to unpack and illustrate the fundamental ideas that underpin the four investment principles. Today we’re looking at the subject of environmental responsibility. What is the connection between art and climate change and how can the storytelling skills of individual artists drive structural change at a corporate level. Before we get into it more deeply with our specialist panel we’ve asked a couple of people from the arts world to weigh in on what environmental responsibility means for them.


On a base level as a human being I guess it means carrying out our lives causing as little negative impact as possible - at minimum, even better actively trying to leave the world better than we found it both in our personal and work lives. I guess from an arts perspective we should realise the power the arts and culture has to influence and inspire behaviour change in large amounts of people and so we’ve got a responsibly to use that as a force for good and positive action but we’ve also got a responsibility to work with other industries to make sure what we’re doing is authentic and grounded in science.


Aileen Ging: The one thing artists should be in terms of thinking about or doing with sustainability is promoting the idea collective action for systematic change. For too long we’ve put emphasis on individuals actions around reusing, recycling, remaking and of course there’s a place for that but actually the change really is to send the message that we can only do so much. This is not about individual action, this is about collective action, facing up to corporations, to governments, holding them accountable to the extractive practices that don’t respect that the earth has limitations and moving away from the growth mindset. We don’t have to get bigger and bigger and this is really important actually for funders such as the Arts Council England is to send this message as well themselves. In the end it’s all intertwined, whether we’re talking about social and climate justice, the root causes are the same. It’s a mentality that thinks you can do more for less and that is extractive and that’s the bottom line.


Presenter:  That was Aileen Ging, sustainable operations lead for the Wild Rumpus Arts Organisation and Alia Alzougbi, cultural strategist, storyteller and facilitator. Now, to explore the subject further we’ve gathered together three people with unique perspectives but a shared understanding of the issue at hand. We’ve given them a pile of envelopes containing prompts and questions and the result is a conversation that is both urgent and ultimately empowering. The first of our guests is Mya-Rose Craig, sometimes known as Bird Girl who at 21 represents a new generation of artist activists all deeply invested in the future of the natural world. Mya-Rose has already turned her childhood passion for ornithology into an inspirational career and she recently published her memoir, also titled Bird Girl. Next up you’ll hear from Glasgow based Ellie Harrison who’s playful and politically engaged work takes many forms from installations to events and music. Within the diversity of her practice, Ellie has also discovered the value of hyper focus on local issues, namely public transport, via her British Rail campaign. Finally we have invaluable input from British Chinese playwright and theatre world renaissance man Benjamin Yeoh. As well as writing and directing his own plays, Benjamin sits on the board of theatre companies and develops sustainable development strategies for major international organisations in the arts and elsewhere. It’s Benjamin’s voice that you’ll hear first.


Benjamin: Great so let’s see what question number one holds for us. We have what does being responsible for our environment mean to you?


Mya-Rose: Everyone’s looking at me! I don’t know I feel like I interpret it differently because I do a lot of environmental campaigning and I feel like part of for me being responsible for nature and the environment is sort of campaigning and going out and raising awareness and telling people that there are problems and issues! But I think I also increasingly have also engaged with things on a much smaller more local level so like my charity that I run is a very grassroots project so we’re literally working with kids from the local area. I’m talking a lot to them about how they can do re-wilding in their garden or their local park and I think working to create a population who are engaged with nature and who care about nature and environmental issues is such an important first step. I don’t know, what about you guys?


Ellie: For me it means trying to tread as lightly as I can on the world, to live as modestly as I can, to produce the smallest amount of carbon that I can like just thinking about the consequences of my actions I suppose and that is difficult to do that on a daily basis. But I think that’s where I start from and trying to remain mindful of that through everything I do.


Benjamin: I have two hats or two ways of looking at that. I suppose on is my theatre making hat and another is my investment hat which have both got slightly different theories of change. So one is that personal leadership, try and know your own footprint a little bit, talk about local things, talk about what people can really do and when you think about theatre making and think about how you’re going to produce this show, are there sensible things you can do which probably 10 or 20 years you probably wouldn’t do, like why are you making your props new when you could do something which is maybe more circular? Then there is the systems impact which has been increasingly part of my work, whether in investment or in theatre making and I think in theatre making it’s often both of you who are really involved in this and it’s the stories that we tell ourselves and what are artists uniquely able to do? Well they can live their life in a sustainable fashion but they can tell the stories which change us and I guess when I was younger I was maybe a little bit more like oh you know what do movements do? What do protest movements do and things and actually as I’ve got older you can think back to suffragettes or anti slavery movements and things and you get to modern days and actually those movements have been very catalytical and those are the stories we tell ourselves. And actually it’s the same in the investment world about nudging the system or nudging the companies and so for me there’s an individual threat which is important and it’s important to live your life how you want and to show others but then actually you may not be able to do that where you are but you could still be nudging across the stories and the systems and so when it comes to making or producing it but it also might be the stories you choose to tell and things like that. So now when people ask me I think well those two bits and depending on where you are and how you’re thinking about it it might nudge to one or the other.


Ellie: Different levels of engagement from the personal to I guess more systemic change.


Benjamin: Exactly. And I think it’s partly as I’ve got a bit older as well I’ve met more young people who have got this climate anxiety and they feel like am I doing enough or I’m not doing enough or there’s nothing I can do and I feel like this for a lot of problems and challenges that humans have, the individual can only do so much right? It’s the systems and things but you can do something towards it, you don’t have to feel helpless and you can see that through an individual lens and that’s fine and that’s also fine as well because you might just be selling stories or performing or inspiring in some other way. They’re both valid mechanisms and we probably need more of both of them and you can’t do 100% of either all the time and you don’t need to get too down about it. 


Mya-Rose: I do think there’s such a split, I do see there’s two groups of people that I know and one side is the people who do very deeply feel all the environmental issues going on and are very anxious and I know lots of people who would feel incredibly guilty if they drive a car one day instead of cycling and stuff like that, down to the minutiae of their day to day activity and then on the other side of things of people who literally do not think about their environmental footprint, aren’t doing all the little things we think we need to do and I think both - obviously to different extents but both of those things are very unhelpful and I know people who do not care and I think actually creating a handful of very decisive very helpful things is much better than making people feel incredibly guilty about the nuances of their lifestyle and so for me I advocate a lot the bigger things so like switching bank or looking into where your money’s being invested and stuff like that or sort of looking into where your pension fund is being invested because so many of those are involved in fossil fuels and things where it is individual action and individual change but it’s also tackling what is a genuine systemic issue as well. 


Ellie: I think it’s fine to feel that anxiety but to use it as a force for good, to challenge it into those wider systemic campaigns. I think that’s what I do and I think you have to - for me definitely it feels important to try to live my values to a certain extent because otherwise the other activity that I’m doing I don’t feel I can do that with any integrity if I’m not trying to keep my own house in order as well but I definitely agree the two channels are important and interact and that they drive each other forward.


Benjamin: And they definitely amplify. The way you live your life makes your message stronger, I do think that. That’s one of the things that is so impressive about Greta and a lot of activists like you guys really, the way you live your life and talk about it I think amplifies the message that you have. If you’re able to do that and that’s part of it I think that’s really great. Who’s got number two? 


Ellie: Okay. We’re onto question number two. Let’s see what we’ve got. How do you embed ideas of responsibility within your practice/work?


Benjamin: So I’ll take the two hats briefly on theatre making and then on investment work and I’ve sat on the non-exec level for a variety of theatre companies, currently Improbable, previously Coney and Talawa and over that time environmental issues have grown and part of that is stories in the work that you want to make so that’s tilted and actually it’s tilted also to thinking about young people and other aspects, you can call it diversity and things like that, a lot of that is intersectionality within this, you can’t tackle one or the other so that’s shaped the kind of work we make but also at the board level when you’re thinking about strategy and these things, other thoughts have come in. So net zero commitments and what does it mean to be net zero and that’s how you’re making your work, should we make it this way, should we be travelling so much, are there other ways of making our work which is more circular or things like that and I think both of those elements over the years has come out and then in my personal practice I do a series of what we call now performance lectures and that’s definitely been really low-fi in terms of the materials and resources that I use and one of the reasons for that has been thinking of this and one of the topics I talk about has been around climate and another is about death and health and some of that intersectionality. In investment world that’s actually got quite complicated as well but a lot of that is to do with are company’s thinking about net zero, are they prepared and planned and then a lot of my world is around companies who may be in open good faith, so you might not be talking about the most difficult actors, let’s put that to one side for a moment, and engaging with them because a lot of the real world change happens from convincing management or teams or companies who often have a lot of other stakeholders or employees or their customers wanting them to do that as well and engaging for them to go on a more sustainable path and that is also intersectional with how they might be treating their employees, how they might be thinking about diversity and inclusion, what countries they’re working on. So a lot of this is under the rubric of environmental social governance or sustainability and it’s quite complicated but one of the primary drivers there we are using is engagement because actually at the end of the day a lot of the person in the street, the lady in the pub owns an investment through their pension or through the government or through something and ultimately people are the owners of companies or businesses or they are the owners of investments and even if it’s via your work place like Arts Council, you might have a pension through that and actually through that you have that thing. So ultimately companies are beholden to those owners who are us and so nudging them down that pathway is quite an important part of what it means as well as perhaps the innovation front so trying to create the tools and things that we don’t have yet already.


Mya-Rose: I think it’s in the sphere of environmental campaigning, responsibility is quite a weird thing because I spend a lot of time in youth climate change circles and it’s essentially a big group of people trying to solve an issue who had very little to do with creating it and yet there is this big sense of responsibility in terms of if not us then who? I have people asking me a lot what gives you hope? Are you optimistic, are you pessimistic? And I feel like for me it’s not really about that, it is this sense of we must try and do what we can to try and make things better and I think especially there’s been such an increase in conversations around intersectionality in terms of environmentalism and so I think increasingly you’re seeing people from the west and from countries like the UK sort of feeling that essentially the west is very responsible for climate change and yet it’s countries in the global south like Bangladesh where my family’s from that are currently experiencing the brunt of current environmental collapse and so it’s almost taking responsibility for our colonial legacy and trying to do what we can to help those people and help those countries. But I guess on a much smaller level in terms of my charity work we’re working with a lot of kids from black and Asian backgrounds, we’re working with a lot of kids from communities who are struggling quite a lot and like one of the reasons I set up the charity in the first place was partially because as someone who is not white and spent a lot of time growing up in the countryside I want to share that with kids, I wanted them to be able to enjoy the outdoors but I was also deeply aware of just how important it is to spend time in nature and the environment. I’d see first hand the importance of mental health and wellbeing in particular and it was during this period that I set it up that the NHS started doing green prescribing and things like that. So it was also this feeling of helping kids to get outside from the communities who statistically are disproportionately struggling with mental illness the most and yeah I think that side of things isn’t discussed as much but for me on a personal level I feel like that’s incredibly important.


Ellie: It is difficult to answer without talking about some of the activities that I’m involved in because I think as an artist I definitely went on a journey where when I started to realise about 15 years ago the extent of the climate crisis that I didn’t necessarily want to be investing all of my time in art anymore and I wanted to be channelling that energy into getting involved in campaigning so I specifically started campaigning for better public transport because I saw that as a big barrier for enabling people to make more sustainable travel choices when our public transport system is so expensive and dysfunctional. So I started to invest a lot of time in that and I think in terms of taking responsibility that was central to that really, it was identifying the problem but then taking steps to actually try and address that problem and solve the problem and the problem hasn’t been solved yet! But I’m continuing and the campaigning is expanding and it’s not just about public transport as well, you’re talking about pensions funds because I have a pension through the university where I work which is USS it’s the biggest in terms of its value so I’ve been involved in the divestment campaign for that as well and I think it’s that thing again of asking the questions, realising where the problems are and then taking responsibility by actually trying to get involved in trying to address them and that hasn’t been solved yet either but I’m continuing with the campaign and I think that I used to see the campaigning and my art practice as quite separate but I’m trying to find ways to kind of synthesise those two elements a bit more so you can use more creative tactics in campaigning, let the two disciplines learn from each other as well.


Mya-Rose: Question three: what does taking environmental action look like? Who want to go first?


Ellie: I think it’s actually really interesting Mya-Rose Rose to hear more about your work because it’s completely driven from the same place but we’re tackling completely different issues, both equally important in a way and I think it’s probably something in our personalities that have taken us to these different places and I think that yeah there’s definitely something in my personality that’s taken me down this passion for public transport and the characters I’ve met along the way and I think acquiring knowledge as I’ve been going has been an important part of that as well but I think that can be a problem in a way as well because I’ve become almost a bit too specialised in this area whereas before I think I had a much broader perspective around what needed to be done but it’s got more specialised the longer I’ve been doing it I think.


Mya-Rose: I think that makes sense though. You need people to be doing individual issues because if you have hundreds of people just going we want change and not saying what that change looks like that’s obviously not super helpful. I definitely think for me my idea of what activism is and what activism looks like has definitely shifted over the years. I think when I was younger I really liked all the big protests - which I still do attend - but sort of people going out and going out into the streets and telling our leaders that things need to change now and going to Downing Street and all of that kind of stuff, that felt like that was what was true activism to me versus I think actually I think as I get older I think that still has an incredibly important role but I actually think more community based action is incredibly important. Sometimes more important in terms of actually form the ground up building things that are better and that can literally be as simple as in my rural community the public transport system changing so people can actually not use their cars in the countryside, just things like that that make a difference and so I think maybe because I spend a lot of time working with young people as well who aren’t old enough to vote and get involved in local politics and that kinds of stuff, it’s thinking of ways that people can take action because I think doing stuff, especially physically doing stuff is so important in terms of fighting the disenfranchisement and eco-anxiety and all that kinds of stuff and so I’m literally very young kids I’m telling them to go out litter picking in the local community or my charity we do lots of tree planting events and things like that and for very young kids doing something with their hands genuinely helps so much in terms of the stress they feel at the state of the world and re-wilding or guerrilla gardening or all that kind of stuff. Thinking on a more local level is increasingly something attractive to me. Obviously now the big national campaigns continue in the background but I think we need both.


Benjamin: I agree. I think for me personally I’m really fortunate to meet quite a lot of influential people within their fields and for them it’s essentially influencing them. Perhaps if I think about theatre work, investment stakeholders and the board, non-exec type of stuff - at least in theatre work for me it’s a little bit about having those stories I referred to earlier. There’s a kind of term for it, a narrative plenitude and it’s also diverse voices and elements like that and it’s really apparent that given the scale of the challenge why are there so few climate stories, very broadly defined, and then when you think about climate stories of the global south and stories from these marginalised voices and part of the problem is when you’re not hearing that then that doesn’t weigh in. So a lot of my work around that is by trying to think about raising those stories up either through my own individual work or through the work I’m trying to support with others to do. Some of that is about then taking it to groups who might not otherwise hear it. So it was designed, I’ve done it in a couple little theatres but I took it to Aeon which is one of the biggest investment consultant insurers around, I took it to PWC, I’ve taken it to community churches, so to reach other groups, marginalised groups maybe but also other groups who might want to hear it to do that type of influence. And then in the investment world one of the other things is when you’re meeting with senior leaders who might be open but haven’t perhaps paid as much attention to this as you might have thought is making the argument to them. So part of that is just a good faith argument about why you should consider this and then one of the other steps that we do is link it to their actual stakeholders. So for instance in companies as I was saying they ultimately serve customers, employees and shareholders but actually shareholders are all of us sitting in this room, they are the people in the streets and so you have an onus to do somewhat what they are directing you to do and so this is where a lot of that comes through and closing that loop and influencing that at that level is quite important in terms of what action means for me. In a lot of organisations like this you have got this board at the top whether it’s in the charity space or in company space and they’re often three to twelve or three to fifteen people setting the strategic direction for the whole of that organisation. Say if there’s 12 if you can convince 8 of them this is a direction to go in so say they have no net zero commitment and you get them to say okay we should have a net zero commitment from the words it then starts, then the management team has got to think about what that means, set a strategy and do it. So part of my time is spent with people who sit on boards or when I meet boards or things like that saying you haven’t got a net zero, why is that? Is it something your stakeholders would want? Often the answer is yes and then maybe you should set that in place. So influencing a relatively small amount of people can actually often get quite a lot of change within that within the context because everything else around it is also pushing in that direction. In some of the podcasts I do I mix a lot of sustainability thinking with other arts thinking or maybe economic thinking. So for instance I had Chris Stark who is the chief executive of the UK Climate Change Committee talking about what UK climate policy needs to do and things like that to try and get this broad reach of actually there are things we know and there are things we know we can do and there is a gap from that and part of that gap is that if more people know them and influence those around them who might be more senior or not then that influence spreads like I guess my analogy’s always that stone in a pond and the ripple and some of that is just the conversations and stories that I have and increasingly over the later years more of those stories are broadly defined are amongst that. In some ways it’s also stories you don’t necessarily need to be… The cutting edge is a climate story, it’s actually just currently all stories are somehow climate related in many ways right, and is bringing some of those elements out in the same way that now in theatre it’s really common to have mobile phones on a stage or referenced because everyone has one right? It’s a part of things. 20 years ago it would have been really weird and now it’s not. I find it’s really weird how so many normal stories don’t have a thread of climate in it given that the thread of climate is in all these conversations. So if you just nudge those stories to reflect our own lived experience a little bit more you suddenly see that reflected in what we see and across all of those things. Alright question four, let’s see what we’ve got. We have: Why is it important for the cultural sector to take environmental action?


Ellie: Just to answer quickly I think it comes down to leading by example. I think we’ve got no choice but to take action because we do have a high profile in terms of influencing culture across society and if we’re not leading by example and again trying to get our own house in order then how can we expect anybody else to so I think it’s vital.


Mya-Rose: I also think it touched like what you were just saying about environmental issues being a thread that’s running through everyone’s lives now, I think one of the roles of the cultural sector is to reflect people’s lives and the things that are going on in the world and I suppose be a representation of that and a cultural influence in terms of that and so I think if anything it feels incredibly bizarre. It feels often like environmental issues are being dodged around or avoided and things like that maybe because it feels like it’s a bit of a downer maybe but the sector has such an important unique role in terms of communication in the way it reaches out to people and we can talk about the politics of it or the economics of it but at the end of the day the social cultural influence is probably the most important one in terms of the general public. 


Benjamin: Yeah I agree. I think if you look back in history and you look at these really big moments when humans have decided to do something, we decide laws. Laws are kind of meaningless to other creatures except that we impact them. Those laws and stories are things that humans tell each other and we believe them to be true because we’ve collectively made that belief. 200, 300 years ago we kind of collectively believed that slavery was okay but we changed the narrative of that because we came to realise that it was not and then you have women’s rights, you have disability rights, you have all of these things which really only came about through the power of culture. Now there are a lot of other elements needed to that but without that cultural change you are not going to get any of those so I think it’s uniquely the stories that we tell ourselves. As you’ve been saying what we reflect to one another - when we tell ourselves powerful new stories… We could even call them myths in the sense that humans have made these up, they’re not necessarily like physical laws of gravity that humans do to one another and when we believe these new stories which are better stories for us and for the world then change comes about and we get positive change and throughout history there are always segments which for lots of complicated reasons you never get 100% agreement between humans on anything but once you get a kind of change it flips over and now no one thinks slavery is a good thing, the vast majority are into women’s rights, disability rights, minority rights and things like that and that simply wasn’t true, even up to 100 years ago. Even 50 years ago where some of that… That’s not to deemphasise the huge battles and challenges still ahead in a lot of these things, still women’s rights and disability rights and all of those but it’s also that we’ve come some way and I would argue we’ve only come as far as we have because of the power of the cultural sector and the stories we tell ourselves, the art that we make, the activism we do, the lives that we lead in all of those aspects and if the cultural sector does not step up and play its part then I would contend that we won’t solve this challenge. I also think it’s potentially doable but isn’t doable without new stories, better stories, stories which reflect us. 


Ellie: Question five, let’s see what’s in the envelope. How do you/we best communicate to affect change? 


Benjamin: Oh… Well if I think of the individual way that I’m doing it part of it is actually with podcasts and story telling and weaving those stories which reflect us. I think that’s quite important and then actually I think it is those on the more individual basis, the things I’ve been alluding to. So when you meet more senior people in positions of influence and you make it real for them you can actually influence and affect that change and often it does come from a personal interaction. It’s someone who’s had a conversation or someone who’s listened to a podcast, someone who’s seen a piece of art, who’s gone on a protest, who’s been to an event, so it’s sometimes through that individual moment that you spark a lot of this systems change.


Mya-Rose: I feel like being an activist and a campaigner, so much of the job is communicating and I’ve heard someone refer to it as being a form of storytelling before which I absolutely agree with because you’re basically at all times figuring out the best way to package an issue to make people understand and to make people care. I spend a lot of time in the realm of social media and stuff like that which has its pros and cons but I think in some ways one of the things I find incredibly difficult is taking very complicated nuanced issues and packaging it down into like an instagram post or a blog post or a series of tweets, stuff like that. But, although I don’t think it’s the best way to be teaching people about these issues, I also think the power of social media is so unrivalled. I think the state of environmentalism and climate change campaigning today is absolutely due to social media and the influence of young people in particular and so I sort of carry on doing that sort of stuff. I think it basically boils down to everything I’m doing all the time. I always try and weave in stuff about all the things we have going on in the world in terms of the environment whether that’s climate change or biodiversity loss or species going extinct and things like that and that could be anything from radio or TV stuff to even like my book that came out last year Bird Girl like it’s not about climate change but the thread of climate change is running through it because it is something that is present in my life, especially as someone who loves nature. My way of communicating is slowly trying to drill into people’s heads that the stuff is all going on.


Benjamin: Maybe there’s no best way but Ellie?


Ellie: I think as I was saying earlier I’ve tried different tactics whether I’m working as an artist or an activist. I think with my art work humour has always been an important element of it that I’ve wanted my art work to be accessible  on lots of different levels and to contain quite important political messages but there’s something to hook your audience in before they get hit with that. So I talked a bit about trying to synthesise my art and activism together a bit more over the last few years and I’ve specifically done that by creating a musical about bus regulation - Bus Regulation The Musical - which is touring three different cities, Glasgow Manchester and Liverpool in collaboration with local public transport campaigns and that’s been a really good success because it’s been really appealing to lots of different age groups. Behind the music and the rollerskating there is an important history about how our public transport policy has changed over the last 60 years and how that’s left us with a really fragmented and expensive system as a lack of regulation over the bus network and giving solutions so the final  act is kind of looking into the future and projecting a vision of the future where public transport works seamlessly and the buses are all perfectly coordinated. It’s very upbeat and I think that’s really important as well because people can leave feeling inspired that change is possible and being connected to a local campaign where they can channel that.


Benjamin: Sounds like roller-skates are the key!


Ellie: Yeah the rollerskating is fun!


Mya-Rose: Yeah, I do think we need more stuff like that though because obviously I’m more in sort of the traditional campaigning sphere and it is all very traditional still. So much of the communication is literally almost the Attenborough style of voice to camera like we need you now to sign this petition to do that and do that and I feel like people are bombarded with things that are going on all the time and sort of going like this desperate plea and I think actually we do need more hope and we do need more optimism and I do think there has been a shift away from this already but sort of the trend of just constantly telling people we’re all doomed and it’s all terrible, turns out it doesn’t work very well and it just makes people feel miserable rather than ready to create change.


Ellie: I’m an optimistic person, I think that motivates me and I think just reflecting about what you were saying about the young people that you work with and the litter picking and stuff and how that can be really good for wellbeing and creating a sense that you can actually see change unfolding in front of your very eyes because you’re picking up the litter and you’re recycling it or disposing of it and then it’s no longer there so I think just being able to see that tangible change can also create hope and drive people forward to think that change is possible.


Benjamin: Let’s see what’s in six.


Mya-Rose: Number six, yeah. What’s an action that we can all take today?


Benjamin: So I’m probably going to quote Chris Stark on this. He would essentially say one of the things you need to do is use your vote or use what you’re thinking about politics. He even went as far as to say I’m not telling you how to use it but if this is important to you then that is one of the levers that we use as a system - as we’ve reflected today when I talked to some of my peers I tend to say where are you spending a lot of money? One or two of the items you’re spending a lot of money on, you should think about whether that’s sustainable because very broadly the more money you’re spending on something probably the larger impact it has. So that’s things like are you on a green tariff because that’s probably thousands of pounds in terms of your energy bill or a few hundred or if you’re buying something like a washing machine which is going to be a big cost, you don’t have to do it across every item but where you’re spending something big you should think about it and actually as both of you alluded to that’s where you often come to investments because you might not think about it but that’s probably one of your largest if not the largest pocket of money you’re directing so there’s that. So one would be use your vote or think about how you’re doing that politically both local or big and then there’s thinking about spending your money and then the last one at least on the cultural one would be just the stories that you tell, so that’s what comes to mind.


Ellie: And do we mean we as in us three or our listeners? 


Benjamin: You could do either! I hedged my bets!


Ellie: Well I think we should stay in touch! I’m all about that about like keeping communities going and building on connections with people that you meet. What can we all do today? Just get involved in a local campaign, channel your anger, channel your anxiety into a positive direction. I’ve found it really inspiring over the last few years while I’ve been working more locally in Glasgow just getting to meet people through activism and building a sense of community and that’s vital for actually being successful. Get stuck in if you have the time. What about you?


Mya-Rose: I would really really agree about getting involved in community projects and things like that. There’s probably something that is a bit of a pet peeve of any listener that actually there’s probably a campaign, go and get involved whether that’s public transport or stuff to do with your kids or stuff to do with housing locally, people will be talking about it so go and find those people and I really want to reiterate that where we put our money is so so important. I do rail against the idea of these issues being very individualistic or that any one person can either save or destroy the planet, all of the above, but I do think lifestyle choices are the only ones that I’ll mention is meat which I won’t go on about too much but it is really really really bad for the environment and I’m not advocating for everyone to become vegan or whatever but just reducing consumption of things that are bad for the planet is really helpful. I think people think you have to be the perfect environmentalist and go from 100 to 0 and actually going from 100 to 50 or 40 or 30 also really helps. I know I also said it but I also really advocate for people going out and just doing something with their hands. If you have a garden plant up some native species or put out a bird feeder or it’s going to be getting warm so put out some water. I have a friend who’s very into hedgehogs so maybe cut a hedgehog hole in your fence so they can roam around or do guerrilla gardening in your local park. I’m just such a big believer that doing something physically with your hands is so important in terms of feeling hopeful for the future. 


Benjamin: So we have on this question what support would best help artists and cultural organisations meet their environmental responsibilities? That’s quite a tough one. What support would best help artists and cultural organisations meet their environmental responsibilities? Well I can go first having looked at this both as an artist and sitting on a board. Broadly speaking of how I’ve explained it is that you can make a statement like a net zero commitment and that’s kind of your easier first step but then you need a support to make it into action and so I think some of the things you can do is there are resources for smaller organisations to essentially do a kind of carbon footprint so they can see where they are having the most impact so they can look at maybe not doing all of it as Mya-Rose Rose was saying you don't have to go from 100 to 0 but let's see these are the two or three things and you might end up, it’s often in your building or heating or your transport or something like that and then when you have identified that then help for that element. So if it is transport well, can we do something that is going to help them take transport, help them rent a bicycle or shift our location or work so that you’re not having to use a car or you can use public transport and actually there is a couple of organisations which will help you do this, like Julie’s Bicycle and the like but then you will need a little bit of support to put policy in place, particularly if you’ve never thought about how are we going to do our transport, then something like heating where you’re not in control of the building which doesn’t have a heat pump or whatever and there a little bit of help would be like well can we organise something to convince the landlord to do this. Or maybe food waste or whatever it is is in your impact in that and you can just deal with the three and the top of your list. But identifying where you’ve got a gap and then some help to sort of say well how do we lower that gap? But then I do think there is a whole other element where there could be if you’re very interested in this some sort of funding nudge on if we want to have these stories that we want to tell maybe that’s a competition or prize because I think a lot of these are already out there, maybe they’re not getting to people that you want or the stories which are not heard but if you want to do that some overall nudge of that. You’ve got some big innovation, you’ve got earth shock prizes and climate prizes and things like that, I haven’t really heard of that many prizes for climate inspired art or performance art or a campaign or a campaign of art or theatre piece or dance or wherever it is. But essentially some sort of prize or something like that where you know you can go for something would also be an idea I would have.


Mya-Rose: That was so thorough! No I agree with everything you just said so strongly. I think also maybe a shift in how we tell environmental stories as well but maybe it’s more about distribution maybe I’m just not seeing the more interesting pieces of art and culture which are being created. I don’t know, but everything you just said I’m like yes!


Ellie: I think having got funding from Arts Council England last year and been through that process, I actually think that we’re kind of going in the right direction in terms of changing value systems in the arts so it’s less about international Biennale’s travelling around the world and how we measure success in an artist’s career or this person’s shown in this far flung place and that far flung place and all the rest of it so they must be very successful and I felt there is a real focus on thinking globally and acting locally. Funding more community projects, funding very inclusive projects of different age groups and backgrounds can get involved in and I think that is all really important because that is going to have a knock on impact on the environment as well. 


Mya-Rose: Final question: Can you think of a piece of art or culture that successfully created a shift in public perception? First one that comes to mind immediately for me is I guess the obvious one that is all the Attenborough stuff that he’s been doing the last few years which obviously that’s very very mainstream media but Blue Planet was a very big moment for the environmentalists because suddenly everyone was talking about plastic pollution and saving our oceans. I think the Wild Isles programme that’s coming out at the moment is going to have a big shift in terms of the conversation around biodiversity loss in the UK. I think in terms of engaging the everyday person in the street with these big issues going on in the world is so important that we do have these really big beautiful programmes talking about the struggling side of things as well.


Benjamin: Yeah I think having gone on about how there needs to be more climate stories they have started to appear in more recent years across all of our forms and I think that is - I know there’s a lot of individuals who have been affected by that and we must be aggregating to a wider audience. I have a slightly different story which rings in my head which just goes back a generation for again it’s a more intersectional fight but I think about this because when you think about oh does it need to be an event which changes everyone’s minds and sometimes you’re just changing one person’s mind. So there was a white Texan lawyer, many decades ago, who saw a gig that Louis Armstrong was playing and he heard that gig and he said I’ve seen genius in a black man and I think the most important thing now is to fight for the rights of black people and he became a key part - in fact the most important legal part of Martin Luther King Jr’s legal team which actually then gave rights to that and so in a way that whole system change happened - and obviously there was a lot of other bits to it - but it actually sparked from a piece of individual change in this one lawyer. So yes sometimes it’s a big thing which affects everything and sometimes it’s that one snowflake or avalanche. And you can’t really tell where it’s going to be. Maybe you stopped at the bus stop and you had that one conversation and it was that person or maybe you’re a school kid and you sit outside your parliament and you start a movement. So sometimes these small things lead to big things as well as all of that and I think that humanity is too complex and random and beautiful and stupid to exactly know. So actually you can get some of these sparks of change from all of it but it tends to have started from something that a human has done - either for good or for ill within that. That’s the story I think about from a moment of artistic genius to a whole minority rights movement.


Ellie: Brilliant. Can I give my example? I think as an old school conceptual artist I don’t know if you guys known Hans Hack, German artist? I’m very inspired by him. One piece in particular from the 70s is called Rhine Water Purification Plant which was based on his experience of looking at the Rhine river and how much pollution was in there and the affect that was having on the fish and lots of fish were being killed and so he brought some of the water into a gallery space with the fish in it. The fish died in the water but because that was visible, taken out of the context where it was happening on a massive scale and put under a spotlight of course people thought what he was doing was really unethical but he was just throwing a spotlight on what was happening on a massive scale in the world. I think that that was a really powerful piece of work that affected change but some of the other stuff he did after that around looking at funding of the arts in America and particularly about how the tobacco industry was funding lots of art galleries and he did a lot of work to expose the hypocrisy in that and affected change. It was quickly seen as quite taboo to accept funding from tobacco companies in the arts and that struggle goes on and I think all the campaigns around fossil fuel funding in the arts have been really inspiring and really successful - particularly the Liberate Tate campaign. And most recently I’d say the most inspiring thing I’ve seen is the film about Nan Goldin All the Beauty and the Bloodshed which is about her campaign against the Sacklers and all the funding that they have put into the arts over the last 30 years or so to legitimise the pharmaceutical companies and she was amazingly successful. I think that’s a lesson to anyone who’s got a high profile is use it for good. 


Benjamin: Cool. That’s really good to chat with you all.


Mya-Rose: A nice conversation.


Benjamin: Nice to chat.

Dickie Beau: Re-Member me

Dickie Beau is a “physical performer and intrepid drag fabulist”. Beau is re-staging his 2017 performance piece - Re-member Me - meditating on Hamlet, playing Hamlet, the transmission of acting knowledge, the start of Stonewall and queer rights (and some of its history); and death (and how HIV impacted this community); also running (is life a race?), mortality, regret (to not playing Hamlet, or Lear); and the fleeting nature that is performance arts (or human life).

All this through a meta-structure (see blog on American Born Chinese) where Beau lipsyncs the interviews of those who have played, or watched various Hamlets over the years. His personification of these interviews is astonishing..

The 2017 piece was at the Almeida on the set of the mainstage’s version of Hamlet adding an extra layer of meta-structure that the Hampstead perhaps staging lacks.

I saw Beau perform in New York (Blackouts, 2017). I find his performances extraordinary. The drag and related arts are not directly my art practice, I find the performance arts aspects compelling. Now I find myself playing versions of myself in my performance lectures, I pay more attention to this.

There are elements which will resonate stronger the closer you are to theatre arts (I recognise the conflicted push-pull of gaining a critics review and being immortalized in such a review that Ian Charleson so wished for and gained from John Peters - in fact, I have learned that Peters established an Ian Charleson award partly in response to Charleson’s Hamlet performed as Charleson was dying and in the last few weeks of life).

We are our stories. We are others’ stories too.

At Hampstead theatre until 17 June, London.  

Lehman Trilogy review: gripping in places, but missing elements

“The Lehman Trilogy is a three-act play by Italian novelist and playwright Stefano Massini. It follows the lives of three immigrant brothers from when they arrive in America and found an investment firm/brokerage  through to the collapse of the company in 2008.”


As a playwright and equities market participant I should have made time to see Lehman Brothers earlier. I think logistics and its length had put me off. 


I’m glad I went. In part because I certainly feel there is room for more plays about financial markets. 


My arguments would be that financial markets as a human construct reflect much and enable much  of what human society does… the good, the bad,  the ugly; the sublime, the silly, the pointless and that markets are powered by people and people are all of that. 


Dramaturgically, it was insightful to observe that the vast amounts of expositional story telling - performed well written sharply - was often gripping to many. 


(Not all, as some were switched off; and not at all moments - perhaps the difficulty of the story). 


In many ways, the direct to audience story telling is a technique I use in both my latest shows - and stand up comedy uses it as its major technique - but I’ve sometimes been cautious as to how well it will hold. 


I’m now convinced that good writing and performance can hold it well. 


The live music provided emotional and dramatic counter point.  I found those aspects of the  theatre instructive.  (Although I have minor quibbles with some aspects of  the performative story telling; a little too much one note shouting in places; not enough use of the quiet). 


In terms of finance and economic history, or even the cultural history of persons then I  learned new things in the first act about immigration, Jewish culture, slavery, cotton and the civil war.  I could even draw some links even when there were not overt references. 


You’d still learn more from a history book if the time or on economic history by listening to my podcast with, for instance, Mark Koyama (!). 


These ideas weakened in act two and were very slim in the last act. 


The play tackles the financialization (money!)  of real goods (eg cotton!) with a passage about words which hints of the truth. 


The Lehman brothers trading in the words of cotton.  There is no cotton but the word cotton. There is no coffee but the word coffee. 


This abstraction is true and not true on many levels and I liked it.  Mathematics is a language that seems to describe properties of how we perceive the real world. Mathematics is not the real world. A contract on coffee is not coffee, but it represents how coffee will trade. 


Financial market contracts or the words between men - are a human language construct that allows the movement, trade and manufacture of real goods like cotton to be turned into shirts - which people can buy for a promise (a money note) - to wear to keep them warm or to signal their desirability. 


They are a language of trust. They are not - mostly - a description of the “real world”. 


But I bring my views to that. The play touched only lightly on what financialisation of goods might mean and how it comes about. 


That was even weaker in the third act suggesting that computer magic - buying numbers low and selling numbers high - was at the heart of trading - the universal language of computers.  


I think you could argue this - I would not buy this but there could be an element of truth that trading is this human construct - but the play did not - more stating it as the truth of what these financial players were doing. 


I was disappointed but heartened to find this lacuna - because it means there is still a play for me to write.


The other disappointment in particular into act 3 is the increasingly perfunctory treatment of the personality and characters. 


I think liberties with the timelines for dramatic effect would be reasonable. Robert - Bobby - Lehman died in 1969  and wasn’t dancing, right to the end of Lehman Bros.


The most famous dancing metaphor was given by Citigroup CEO/Chair, Chuck Prince around 2007. 


"As long as the music is playing, you've got to get up and dance. We're still dancing."


One small example on the characters:  


Pete Peterson was given one short main scene - one that was mean to represent an internal political battles. 


But Peterson went on into government and then on to found one of the biggest and most influential private equity firm in the world today.  He became a billionaire and a major billionaire philanthropist- in that other grand graduation. 


the strong links between finance and politics - foreshadowed by Herbert Lehman in the 1930s - and even before in the links of the civil war, north and south - New York - Alabama - 


were absent into Act 3 - 


If people think this is the modern day story of finance - with politics absent - then people are missing  a major piece of the stroy.


The play makes the arguments in Act 2 that banks were going to fail before the government would step in to help the stronger remaining banks to survive.  This was in 1929


This same echo happened in 2008 


Some of the players were the same - Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs -


Similarly the politicians involved - were surrounded by ex-finance people.  Look them up.


There would have been a very true and lovely ellipsis pattern to this history if it had been more fully explored. 


Dick Fuld and many of the 2008 players are still alive so perhaps that makes it harder.


Still for someone who had lived this history and see within it the echoes of a longer arc of history (and even echoes with  today's bank runs) it was unsatisfactory.

That said, much of the play is narrated in a gripping fashion and it does bring some character to a world which really does bring the money for the rest of the world to function.  So I think it’s recommended viewing. 

ThenDoBetter Grant Winner: Fan Shen

I’ve awarded a grant to Fan Shen. She writes:

Creation has always been my passion, my way to interact with the world around me and I have been writing ever since I could remember things. I grew up in China in an era when drastic changes were constantly happening with a widening gap between the rich and the poor. My working-class family background and my gender have made me one of the marginalized with less access to social resources and less visibility in society. But writing has helped me to find my voice, the voice of the marginalized.

 

At the age of 10, I was sexually assaulted. This trauma brought me years of depression and having been exposed to the very dark side of human reality and emotions at a very young age, I once again found my strength and resistance in creation. I taught myself to paint as a way to let out my anger and grief. Because of this, painting has since then become a way of expression and healing for me.

 

Creation through writing and painting has helped me to understand myself, and the world around me. At first, I wrote about my own experience and reflections, but gradually I started to write about human conditions, the shared human experiences of pain and love, convictions, darkness, and transcendence. I want to grasp the truth of our time, to reflect the reality of society and human conditions in it. I care specifically about how political powers invade private lives, and how private individuals make their daily resistance to the power.

 

Luckily, my creation has not just offered me self-healing, but also attracted external recognition of my creativity. I was admitted by the Royal College of Arts in the UK because of my painting. At the age of 18, I was awarded the national first prize in the New Concept Writing Competition, one of the most prominent writing competitions in China. As a result of this award, I was offered to choose to study at any top university in China. Quite fatefully, instead of choosing the highest-ranked comprehensive university, I made my choice for Shanghai Theatre Academy. I was expecting something that would channel my passion and light my life.

 

And I was right about my expectation. Theatre turns out to be the art format that is closest to my heart. I see theatre as the deep dialogue of souls, the most intensive and emotional format of story-telling and expression. Theatre reveals the most essential and painful issues of its time, and it attacks and embraces the audience in the most drastic way. In theatrical creations and performances, I can transcend myself from merely a victim, a survivor, one of the oppressed, to someone who has grasped her situation and the world around her, and more importantly, has the agency to change fate. There is somehow a redeeming nature in theatre that my mind resonates with.

 

During my undergraduate education, I read and watched theatre extensively. My undergraduate thesis was on Edward Albee’s theatre work where I discussed the reflection and critiques of theatre works of his time when people were pursuing social status and wealth at the cost of alienation and neglect of humanity. I am particularly in love with modernized theatre works, because they are much more decentralized, telling stories of the insignificant and depicting the absurdity of reality. Rooting deeply in the concerns for social problems, modernized theatres carry so much more power to make an impact on the audience. The boundary between the audience and the performers can be blurred, and theatre, therefore, becomes a resistant action toward social and economic injustice.

 

With this view about theatre, I found Lars Norén’s work particularly interesting because he made such a detailed observation of the everyday life of the impoverished. His take on living theatre and his focus on family and personal relationships created such powerful stories and emotions that I can truly relate to. I have also found a lot of inspiration from reading the works of Ingmar Bergman and Susan Sontag. Bergman has inspired me with his inexhaustible curiosity and compassion for humanity, whereas reading Sontag has helped me liberate myself from my past traumatic experiences. I feel that strength as a creator, and that I share that passion to create works that can truly connect with the audiences.

 

During and after my time at Shanghai Theatre Academy, I have actively taken many internships/projects in theatres and film companies where I have become experienced in taking many different roles in theatre creation. In collaborative projects, I work closely with the director to help decide on many factors for the play. I also work as a team player with other production staff and actors. Mostly, I would hold leading roles in collaborative creation projects, both as the playwright and as the dramaturgy. For example, in the original play *White-tailed Crow*, I wrote the script and also sorted out the themes, rhythms, cores, and expressions of the play from a critical and creative perspective. This award-winning play is currently being performed in Shanghai as I am writing this cover letter. I have had several solo productions and exhibitions as well.

 

On one hand, I seem to be a budding young creator in the local theatre scene, ready to devote myself to theatre creation, on the other hand, I do struggle a lot with the limitations in the world I live in. In my mind, theatre is about sincerity, actions, queries, and resistance. My background and experience have facilitated me to see from different perspectives on very complex situations, and I love to keep using theatre practice to interfere with social problems, being a voice of resistance. But the resistance has been so restricted by censorship in China. I have been longing for freedom in the creative environment for a long time. This is why I am preparing for the application of theatre master programme abroad. I really want to try to live and study in a performance art environment in the real world’s social, political and economic conditions.

 

I am very excited to receive the grant and have the chance to chat with professional theatre maker. I have made a play which will show on stage at Shanghai soon. It is a drama about human insecurity and existence. It is about an old lady, who leaves her previous life to build a new one in the middle of a desert, after she has made her move. The story gathers a group of people who are an intellectual, a peasant. a dumb girl who and some merchants who are angles. They are lost. At the end of the story, when death takes everyone, there are no concrete answers to whether these people are saved, but the audience can get that in listening the old woman has unwittingly saved these disturbed people.

 

It was because I had felt a great wave of unease and loss these years. There is no hope, no security, no way back for creators, yet theatre has always been rooted in my soul again, and I feel that what I actually want to do is to appeal the hope. I’m calling for a power to listen, to see, to understand others. I think that in the midst of the modern spiritual crisis, listening itself contains a great power. What I am calling for is also communication, listening, the substance of love.

 

Now, several of the plays I am working on are about:

-Pneumoconiosis workers in China;

-The voguing dance of underground transgender people and its power to create families;

-One of my previous novels, which is being censored, is about a woman who hangs herself for a pearl and benevolence.

-A work about secretly ill children, a group of children who committed suicide in the internet corner of the millennial, and another group of people who witnessed the suicide of children.

-A work about micro-society and political experimentation, the whole society is the inner externalization of a person in power, about an extremely mediocre person who is held up on the altar by the times, and his heart will provoke feedback in every corner of society.

With this said, I truly thanks to Mr.Yeoh, and I hope to complete those works and get in touch with theatre makers. Please feel free to contact me [BY: I will pass on any messages]

Shape of Friendship

Shape of friendship. I went to my friend, David Finnigan’s, performance piece at the Barbican Theatre, last week.

I took my 10 year old. From what I could tell, there were no other young people in the audience which was a shame in many respects.

A shame because this form of theatre is more relevant, more exciting, more dramatic than, say, a standard piece of Shakespeare performed in a standard type of way.

A shame because if we want to engage young people in live performance, we are still an art form where liveness and vividness counts.

You can observe this in the music gig scene which is still strong.

I also think you can engage young people in serious, fun and thoughtful art from a very young age and that’s better for everyone. In a world where rich nations are - in part - moving more digital and remote, then the importance of liveness and vividness increases.

The Barbican is a living piece of visual and performing art history. Considered a brilliant example of Brutalist architecture, it was considered by the Queen in 1982:

“...one of the wonders of the modern world”

The Barbican is built from and atop ruins from World War 2, atop ruins which stretch to Roman times, atop ruins which stretch back further.

The site is within a javelin distance of where a Roman Amphitheater used to be. There is history that stretches back and back…

Performers and audiences on occasion are sensitive to this history. I have worked in and around the Barbican area, on and off, for 20 - 30 over years.

By no means, do I see even a small sliver of everything at the Barbican but the space has held some of the most profound pieces of human expression that have occurred in modern times across music, dance, theatre and arts.

And so into that space we walk.

David is a friend and we have collaborated. You can listen to us/read on podcast here and below.

It’s a privilege then to see how a show develops (I saw it in one of its earliest incarnations) and live with its creative’s hopes and fears.

Shows performed by friends then have a special resonance. You can not watch them as strangers any more than you can watch friends kiss differently from strangers arriving at a station.

This echo plays into the lives of those who create – and we all create – so plays into all our lives.

My son can have a level of emotion and experience richer for knowing David. Especially in a piece such as this which plays to stories in David’s life.

The show I saw might well be the last time the performance is ever staged.

Certainly, it is the last time it will be staged in that time and place and audience (and so we can suggest all performance is fleeting like this). There is an aphorism which comes about in Open Space and UnConference that people in the room are the ones that matter and thus we can only have the conversations we can have.

Live performances have these lives and these lives are mostly short-lived.

There is a sensation joyous and deep in experiencing live and vivid art with other humans in a fashion never to be repeated.

At its best an urgency and richness which changes you and leaves you changed forever more.

Unlike books or even visual art, performance is not an object to last, performance is a shared experience.

Books and paintings, arguably, are not completed without a reader or a viewer but they can have a life of their own.

Performance lives when experienced together. Anything else is mostly only rehearsal.

Perhaps that is partly why performance through storytelling or dancing seems to have been around before writing and likely at the dawn of homo sapiens.

There is a sadness as well for events that can not be replayed. There is a part of us that wishes to capture part of that dream and bottle the feelings as keepsakes.

Therein lies all the countless visual snaps and videos of live gigs and events hardly ever to be viewed again. The liveness was in the moment and – if we were to be honest – never to be captured again. Live performance shared is a singular experience. Those video snaps are wasted. (Be like the lady at the top photo).

I am both happy and sad then to be part of a final showing. There near the beginning of its journey. There near its end.

David is a newer friend. We first met in the tail end of the last decade. I cherish being able to make new friends and create experiences together.

I cherish that we collaborate deeply in making art.

But, we also tell ourselves the myths that all our types of friendship last forever. Relationships form and crumble. Made and re-made.

Some burnout due to their intensity, others fade due to accidental or intentional neglect. We can be sorry for these things too.

I still have friends from school, but I think I have lost many more. That is not to devalue the friendships when those relationships are alive.

And like that – friendships also are like live performance – they thrive in shared experience, they can end in sadness and in joy, they can go on long lifetime journeys.

We can fool ourselves about them too because someone always dies, and shows always end. 

Still – we can and should nurture and celebrate them where we have them.

Tend, repair and grow – and dare I say perhaps prune – like flabby parts of performance – parts which are already dying

But, if possible, in full recognition of the joy they gave while alive.

What are the shapes of our friendships and relationships? Pocket-shaped, world-shaped, love shaped?

We would not think to measure and manage them.

And so… my tangent into “ESG” - these are the intangible (though sometimes tangible) often difficult, sometimes impossible to measure parts of business, they have a shape and importance, but exactly what that shape is… well perhaps like the shape of friendship.

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Reviews are weird things for theatre makers.

Reviews are weird things for theatre makers. We give them an oversized space in our brain partly because they become (if we are “lucky” enough to gain one) the comment of record. Partly - we must admit - from some human sin of vanity. There are few pieces of journalism I remember over the years, and perhaps to my dismay, theatre reviews are some of them! I think on this as Arifa Akbar - now chief theatre critic at the Guardian - wrote on how her opinion on a play changed over time.*


In 2003, I watched one of my first plays, Lost in Peru, almost every single night and if you count the rehearsals this probably took viewings over 40 times which eclipsed the viewing of everyone else, even the director. (The actors counting differently.) Performed at Camden People’s Theatre with the sound of traffic drifting through.


On one level, without the play, I would not have met the love of my life (who came to watch the play), it also impacted at least some of the audience who came to see it, taking them places and challenging them to think about matters (in this case torture survivors, also love) they had never thought about in such ways.  This is probably the better measure (and not a measure we can really count), if we should or can measure this form of art at all; and also the development of the artists involved (for instance, designer theatre maker, Mamoru Ichiguru, actor Lucy Ellinson, director,  Sarah Levinsky, who have all gone on to create extraordinary art). But, the play’s most notable written record is a 2 star review in the Guardian by Lyn Gardner. You can read it still*. Why on earth do I remember this, 19 years later?  And am I still  the person she wrote of:

“But, goodness, it is great to see a young writer reaching out beyond his own experience.” 

Perhaps, she reached the truth of it, as I am certainly still reaching out although no longer young.


I think I watched the play so many times for many reasons. I am/was fascinated by the art of live performance, how it changes with audience, performers, time and yourself. How - even as the writer - I discovered new aspects to my own work. Do visual artists ever speak about finding the same - a painting revealing new insights to them as they view their own work over time? And because, underlying I sensed I might never produce theatre work again [I have an intense “day job” managing pension fund money]. And certainly never see this work again.


I was incorrect on not making theatre as in 2007, I adapted a Noh play, won a prize and had Nakamitsu performed at the Gate Theatre.  Here I remember, to the positive, Sam Marlowe’s review* in the Times which probably remains my “best” review still with the quote:

“Rare and Riveting”

Although blogger Travis Seifman* probably produced the most insightful review* [Travis has now been blogging 20 over years, and thus is one of many archives of lovely insightful essays hidden on the interweb] and my blogging friends, Westend Whingers, one of the more fun reviews*.


Nakamitsu sold out and probably touched perhaps 500 to 1000 people maximum. On one level, making fringe theatre a minor art, although quite possibly the impact it had on some of those people may have been great. I reflect that now a single podcast episode* I make is likely heard by more people than who will ever see Nakamitsu.


Marlowe and Gardner are still reviewing, and I am sure artists are still remembering. I happen still to be making theatre! My work still plays to tiny audiences. Thinking Bigly: How We Die has been seen by 80 people [and in some elliptical fate was performed at Camden People’s Theatre* where Lost in Peru was shown - but this time minus the traffic sounds], but I’m told has heavily impacted some.  I may only perform it a handful of times more, or maybe never. At least, I feel I am almost over never having a critic see it. 

The record of note will be in the thoughts and dreams of others.

Below, Sam Marlowe’s review in the Times, as no longer on the internet except in archive.

Arifa Akbar on changing her mind on a play: https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2022/may/03/theatre-criticism-views-change-and-so-do-plays

Travis Seifman blog: https://chaari.wordpress.com/2011/05/12/nakamitsu/

You will see a slice of Japan if you follow Travis, and discover ideas and art you never knew.

Lyn Gardner’s 2 star review of Lost in Peru: https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2003/apr/14/theatre.artsfeatures1

WestEnd Whingers review of Nakamitsu (in general don’t get friends to review your work, I think!): https://westendwhingers.wordpress.com/2007/06/08/review-nakamitsu-gate-theatre-notting-hill/

(last review by Phil was Dec 2020, I hope one of the last blogs of the golden age of theatre blogging still goes on…)

Bigly at CPT in March 2022, 19 years after Lost in Peru: https://cptheatre.co.uk/whatson/Thinking-Bigly-How-We-Die

Podcasts: https://www.thendobetter.com/podcast