From the past, moving forward, determined to live. Martina Marsha Laird

The actor Martina Marsha Laird is more than the sum of her parts. With a deep understanding that the past informs the present and the future, she speaks to us about the compassion for who she was, the acknowledgment of who she is, and the curiosity in who she will become. This ride ain’t over, folks! Join us.

Who are you?

There are no short answers with me I’m afraid. First of all, you said, “Martina, who are you?”  I often ask myself that because I wasn’t born Martina. I was born Marsha and I was renamed at three years old. I often wonder what that is, psychologically. Lately, in my life, I’ve started to (at least on social media, although it might be a bit of a paltry platform but it still is a statement) - I’ve started to put myself as Martina Marsha. That’s a start to who I am, a kind of reclaiming. I feel that, at the moment, I call my focus - my life focus - my sankofa period. Sankofa is a Ghanaian word that means “go back and get it”. It’s represented by the symbol - well two things - one looks like a kind of a heart, a particularly curly kind of heart that we’d often see in a lot of wrought iron design and things like that. The symbol is also a bird with its head turned backwards, plucking an egg or a pearl or bead off of its back. The idea being, that what you have forgotten or foregone, you can go back and claim. At the moment, I’m looking at my life (and I think this is what lockdown has given some of us), being with my thoughts and in my head and that’s a lucky thing. I know that having that space is what a lot of people don’t have in lockdown. I’m aware of that luck and privilege. What it means for me is that I am aware of reflecting on much of my life that has gone in directions that weren’t always best choices for myself or best representations of myself.

I’ve been focusing on going back -  not actually going back but preparing the thoughts and notions of what I would like to go back and reclaim. It’s easy to look back at the immediate past and go, “I’m moving forward, that’s an alien person to me now”. I know that I would be no more embracing myself by doing that than what I was doing when I allowed myself to get lost in my own morasses. The moving forward has to be taking it all with you and finding the self-compassion. The self-compassion has been a big focus as well and how far back it can extend. Sometimes, some of us need to go back to childhood and find the compassion for the child that we were and give ourselves what we would have liked to have received. It does take a lot of courage, it takes a lot of compassion that I have not previously had for myself. It’s challenging. I look at myself at different periods of my life, including periods of childhood and I find it hard to accept myself. Even looking at certain photographs, I can't bear to look at that person. It’s an ongoing journey of love.

Why do you do what you do?

Many people go into it because of a love of the craft, a love of the art form of acting and what it is. You sacrifice a lot to pursue a career, especially as a black woman who doesn’t fit into any boxes. I was going to say many but I corrected it to any! So, why am I still here? Am I crazy? I’ve asked myself what acting is for me. I think acting is a pursuit of truth, a pursuit of insight into people and the choices that they make. It is looking for compassion, for other people’s existences and stories. It’s an honouring of emotion, my emotional upbringing. My dad was English, of that generation of British man. He fought in the war, he believed in that stoical attitude to life. I mean that in a philosophical sense, in the emotional discipline sense, in that Roman stoicism – Seneca - these kinds of people. To meet life with balance in all things, so that you are not too happy, too sad, too emotional, all these kinds of things. And coming from that British background, you have to remember his parents would have been turn of the century, that Victorian upbringing, that saw being emotional as a weakness. Then I had a Trinidadian mother(!), so that should tell you everything you need to know! My mother was a very emotional person and was ruled by her emotions, in good ways and bad ways. That pull for me, the disparate calls on my relationship with my own emotions, I think, are legitimised for me within my acting work. If I analyse myself, I think that this is what I get. This is a place where you can safely explore dangerous emotions. If I’m successful having a compassionate embrace with myself, will I lose the frisson that creates art? Yes, this is the worry for every artist, isn’t it? If I’m too mentally healthy, will I lose my spark?! I’ve got to admit that all my acting heroes are somewhat eccentric, to say the least. No, I don’t think so. I imagine there’s a possibility that it will make me braver, I’ll be that much safer to throw myself into the unknown.

The Black Lives Movement, that followed the murder of George Floyd, was profound. I think the teaming together with lockdown was the recipe that created the intensity that we saw - that black people, who at the time, without us understanding why at the time, were being told that we were particularly vulnerable to a deadly virus, were still willing to go en masse to protest. They had finally come to a point where they could not be silent. I did go on those protests. What was great was that everyone was wearing masks, everyone in crowds of thousands was taking it very seriously and very responsibly. Also what was great was that there weren’t just young people there, there were kids there, also with a great sense of responsibility and purpose. In the early stages of the protesting, I got a bit frustrated because I thought - this has had the power to mobilise in an unprecedented way for this generation. Yes, we were getting all those responses from institutions on their social media saying, “mea culpa, we haven’t been the best when it comes to diversity...we’re going to do better. I’m not mocking the places that did respond because a lot of places didn’t - some surprising ones, some places that I hold a long history with, which was very disappointing. I was looking at all this mobilisation that was happening and there was nobody speaking. There was nobody saying why we, as British people, were taking to the streets because of a police murder in America and why we were focusing on this.

There were a lot of confused people, saying it wasn’t about this country but it really was, beyond the fact that the saying goes - if America sneezes, Britain catches a cold. I was sitting at home, I started to really get my thoughts together, do a whole lot of research, to make notes. I didn’t know what I was going to do with all those notes but I had to do something, to say something. I was given the opportunity by some people I know who were holding a rally. They were looking for speakers and they asked me if I would speak. My first thought - I’m not a political speaker, that’s terrifying, hell no!  Then I thought, if not you, then who?  I was sitting around, saying that someone needed to start speaking, someone needed to be pulling thoughts together and I had done just that so, I got up and did it. I gave my first political speech, which was terrifying because it’s not my arena. As an actor, I’ve not been asked to put my thoughts together and share them, especially not my political thoughts. I did it and that was my first creative response. Because of George Floyd, it took me to a place of growth and challenge. I think, what’s great, generally, is that this generation of black actor has been given a voice, at this stage. For my generation, it was a struggle to raise your voice in a rehearsal room. This generation has been given a platform from which to speak publicly because they felt that people now had to listen. The generation that were there, were ready to take up that microphone and start to call out places that needed to be exposed. We had all been, as the generations before, dealing with, individually or without that collective knowledge and power. I’m part of the previous generation and yet I spoke. It’s part of my sankofa! As a youth, I missed out on a lot of youthful bacchanal, I was not as free as one might have been. I’m now a woman. You know I hit fifty and I’m asking - is it over?  Have I missed it? Shit. I forgot to be radical. No, I’ve always been radical but you get what I mean? I forgot to live. I’m determined, I’m slowly coming together about how I might do this, I’m determined not to disappear because I’ve hit fifty. It’s interesting where you get made invisible. It’s not necessarily where you might think. Some young people can tend to make you feel invisible. It’s like, I didn’t realise I was old until some people told me I was or made me feel I was. Is it over for me? Do I not get a chance?  Is this as far as I’ll go?  No, that can’t be. Just because I missed out on my life previously... I’m here, I’m still alive.

As women, when we’re past a certain point, it’s easy to say, maybe you should just retire, enjoy your twilight years. Believe me, I know I’m not there, that’s not what I’m saying. This is my theory. Nature abhors a void. This is just a fact. Every school of science will tell you that. Nothing survives in nature without a purpose. So, if women’s only purpose was to breed, we would not survive the menopause. We certainly wouldn’t have been given, by nature, a phase of life, specifically about entering into a new life. We go through puberty, where we become a woman and we go through menopause, where - what is it we become?  We've been told that’s where it ends but nature doesn’t do that. It doesn’t give you a rites of passage, to “unfunction” (to coin a phrase) - to not function. The purpose, then, is something that’s freeing. Obviously it’s something that states that you now have a purpose, that you’ve gained over these years, that you now need to put into some kind of empowerment; that bringing forward from the past will help, in this new stage, to be visible in ways, that previously, I would not let be visible. The body is the thing through which we get to experience this world. What greater task could there be than be the conduit for the beauty of this life? Growing up, I had a terrible relationship with my body. I didn’t look like the people in my family. My body therefore, was also different because I’m “somewhat adopted”. I grew up with a feeling of shame about it, that I was big and unattractive all my life. In the past few years of my life, I did put on a lot of weight. I looked back at the me that I had been and damn! -  there was nothing wrong with that person. There was absolutely nothing wrong. I can’t believe I wasted my teens, twenties and thirties, hiding myself or embarrassed about myself. Absolutely ridiculous. So now that I’m in my fifties, I’m determined not to be embarrassed about myself. I’m determined to have a more celebratory relationship with my physicality. I’m determined to speak my mind, even though I have to learn to speak it softly. I think that’s what comes with maturity.

Why do you have to speak it softly?

I think I’ve frightened a lot of people in my life. You’re right to challenge that. I think what it is and I think George Floyd was a tidal mark for me - George Floyd happened on the back of the past few years of feeling impotent with anger and exhaustion at what it is we have to tolerate and live. You certainly get to see all of it as a black woman. You’re being disrespected and disallowed, as a black woman. Also, as an actor, you’re looking at the bigger picture as well, with the despair of the last few years and the injustice of the world that we live in. The darkness that feels impenetrable, under the last President leading to our current government...etc. I think that was part of the ill ease, the ‘dis’-ease, that was weighing me down. Also maturing within my field and finding that that garnered no respect, no dues coming, no pay off, no recognition or feeling that way. One is inclined to catastrophize when one is low. I think George Floyd threatened to make us combust. It was so much. In the speech that I prepared and gave, I showed how intrinsically linked the situation in the United States is with this country, how it was created historically by this country, in that country, how the legacy continues, the idea of reparation... When I was growing up, it seemed like an impossible idea. How could they do reparations? I discovered that we were paying reparations to the white landowners until 2015, so it was totally possible, it was just that black people didn’t get any reparations. Pure fury, inner rage. George Floyd was a point where one had to breathe. That breath was a central metaphor, for everything, that need to breathe. When I say ‘softly’, I don’t want my voice to shut anyone else up, though I want my voice to be heard. I don’t want my voice to disappear or to be made irrelevant, because it’s only about hearing younger people or a certain kind of person. That is a system of division, dividing and weakening us as a unified voice. It’s to learn to breathe, to remember to breathe through the rage and to encourage dialogue. The more you look at Sankofa as an idea, it’s not just my past self, it’s my past selves, in the sense that I’ve reminded myself over this period, that I walk proudly on the shoulders of giants, that I walk proudly on the shoulders of my region, that my region is noble, the suffering of my ancestors by whom I am still here… That somehow, through the worst of the worst, our ancestors in our region were able to create music and art, feed each other and find love, even though that’s problematic to do. They were able to be great souls.

To be proud of my legacy was also in my mind. Another theory of mine (I’m full of them), is that all that we remember of civilisations, comes to us through their science and culture. All these ancient civilisations reached a point of greatness where they were able to have people whose jobs were: culture, science and thinking. Whether it’s ancient African, through to Greek, wherever you want to go, that was your job, to think. Can you imagine? What lockdown/covid did, was to accelerate and create this kind of hot house version of that because you can only do those things when you are on pause. A lot of people, when they sat down and thought about George Floyd and its significance, they were on pause for the first time in their lives. They couldn’t be out struggling to survive. It’s a false leisure but yet it allowed for that thinking and introspection. That’s what was afforded me. That’s why the outcry was so loud and so many people got it. That and the fact that we need to thank Dominic Cummings. I have a joke that black Britain need to hail Dominic Cummings as a hero. At that point in lockdown, if he hadn’t been the idiot he was and gone on that trip, they couldn’t say too much about people going out and protesting a murder. Had he not flouted the rules, in the way that he did first and just prior to the incident - I think he gave us the freedom of the streets because of that. Dominic Cummings is a black British hero!

I hope that these days to come will be my glory days, to be able to walk into my power. I think that’s the thing about claiming something. Because it was so neglected and I’m guilty of that. I don’t know what I’m going back to claim. I don’t know. Who or what am I going to find back there? I come across things that I’d totally forgot, I feel like I’m a discovery of myself at the moment - I did used to do that, I did used to like that, I did used to get excited about that…

What would you do if you couldn’t do what you do?

I honestly can’t imagine. Maybe something like psychology. I’d still be curious about the human condition. I think I would write. I’m fascinated about what it is to be human, how big and how small we are. I’m fascinated by our flaws and our failings, perhaps more than our successes and joys, in a way. I think it would still be something that inquired and inspected what it is to be human.

Does your art inform your politics or do your politics inform your art?

I love that! I find it so intrinsically linked for me. I am political in the rehearsal room, I am passionate in my political life. I can’t understand people who separate their politics from who they are, an expression of themselves. I mean I understand but that’s not me. For me, I’m realising that politics isn’t party politics. It’s about ideals, it’s about fundamental beliefs in humanity and the right to dignity.

Who are you?

I guess I’m someone who seeks, in all aspects, to excavate and celebrate the truth in its glory and in its ugliness.

Accountability, transparency, change. Njabulo Madlala.

The South African baritone has travelled far. This interview is not about ‘arrival’ but the ongoing journey towards true equity in his chosen profession.

Who are you?

Wow, what a question. I didn’t see that coming. How do I answer this question? Who am I? Can we have a come back to that question?

It is not usually the first question I get and when it is posed, the first thing that comes to mind to say is “I am a singer.” But who is just a singer? This pandemic has done a lot to help bring some clarity. It’s been a tough period and lots of lessons learned. I have used the time during this pandemic to reflect and celebrate life beyond just being a singer. I have license now I didn’t feel I had before the pandemic. To finally drop the modesty and lift the curtain to being a lot more than a singer. A singer is just the beginning and a small part of who I am. I’ll try and answer this question as we go along if you'll allow me. 

Why do you do what you do?

Context is important. I was born in Durban, South Africa, a township called Inanda. It's north of Durban, about 30 minutes outside of the city. Only black people live there. It forms part of the many South African townships set up by the white regime, the apartheid government, to separate white people from mixing and living together with black people. Before you get to Inanda you pass Phoenix. Phoenix is a township created for the Indian community. It’s slightly better and closer to the city but away from the white community. They might have been seen by the government to be superior to black people and, although not good enough to co-exist within a white community, they somehow enjoyed slightly better living conditions.

I was born in a single parent family. My mother was a child. Pregnant at 17, gave birth alone in a hospital on 27 January 1982 after four days in labour. She turned 18 a few days later on 5 February. It was her first boyfriend and her first sexual encounter. I was mostly raised by my grandmother, the extended family members and the community. No neighbour doesn’t tell a story of having to babysit me at one point or another. My mother, her name is Joyce. We grew up together and she did the best she could. It wasn’t easy for her. After all, my arrival had caused her to drop out of school and be isolated.

The township houses provided by the government were small, two small bedrooms, a kitchen and living/dining room area. We had to share this with my grandmother whose house it was, two aunts, their children, my uncle and some extended family members who came to visit from time to time. When it was time to sleep at night, there were people everywhere. There were people in the two bedrooms, the living room floor and the kitchen floor. 

My grandmother kept the house going. She was the only one that had a job, as a domestic worker for a white family in town and later as a school cleaner when that family moved abroad. We all survived on the little she earned. Later, my mother would get a job working as a machinist for a big Indian owned company, producing clothes for export. She didn’t earn very much and they were thoroughly exploited. You could tell when she came home beyond exhausted. We grew up on nothing but had to make things work. As far as I can remember, I was very aware of the desperately crazy environment I was growing up in. Not only the poverty but the crime, hopelessness, the killings of our people whose voices had to be shut down when they challenged the racist and oppressive government. I remember the many nights when the soldiers would break down doors in the middle of the night and turn the entire house upside down searching for people and weapons. My grandmother belonged to the ANC and was often arrested for not disclosing information the police needed about certain members of our community. You didn’t do that. 

Right from the beginning I was trying to find a way out of that chaos. I knew as a very small boy, that if I didn’t get out of that place I would end up dead. It would be drugs, crime, jail or from the anger of my situation and the system of oppression. Seeing signs in town that read “Europeans only” or “Africans only” did not help. One meal a day was my daily reminder of how grave things were, of course there were days that went by without a meal. I had to get out. Singing. 

I got involved with the school choir and slowly found my voice. It became my escape for an hour or so a day. I had a teacher that loved opera and I got to hear it early. My grandmother used to collect whatever her employers threw out of their house and bring it home. Often she brought back tapes that had opera on them. When all adults were out of the house, I would play the tapes and sing along. That is how I found my voice and knew there was something there. 

A long story I know, but I hope that explains why I do what I do. I sing and each year for the past 10 years, I organise and put on opera masterclasses and a singing competition in South Africa to help young people out there born in similar circumstances as I was. I don’t sing only because I love it and I don’t help them only because they are talented. I have never sung just for the fun of it. I long for that day. I hope you understand, I do love it, I have fun doing it, I mean, I enjoy it a lot. But - I had to do it. 

I didn’t pursue singing because of talent or because of a keen parent with spare cash for singing lessons. I discovered my voice privately and it quickly rescued me.  I understood that I had something acceptable enough to get some work to help my family and improve my life. I was never encouraged by anyone to do it. There were more talented children around.  But I had to do it. My instinct told me that this was the one thing I had that could remove me from the environment. I ask myself why I still sing. It is my life now and of course now I am a poor artist in London with mouths to feed. But that is different. I have choices and education behind me to do other things. I am no longer trying to escape. Maybe I belong here. I don’t know.  

My first job at sixteen, singing in the chorus of an opera came at a breaking point. Both my grandmother and mother had lost their jobs and there really was nothing. No water, no electricity, no food…. nothing. I used every penny I earned from that job to help my family. They had done what they could to get me to sixteen. I was never not going to look out for them. I still do.

Growing up in a community like mine makes one appreciate community. We are all in the same boat there. When we went to bed without any food, it was because our neighbours didn’t have anything to eat too. If they had food, no matter how little, they would share. We were raised that way. 

When I turned eighteen my chorus job toured to London and while I was here, I visited the Guildhall School of Music and Drama and asked to be heard. Robin Bowman, head of voice heard me the very day I walked in unannounced. A more formal audition was set for two weeks later and I was awarded a full scholarship to study on the undergraduate course. Subsequently on the postgraduate course and finally on the opera course. Throughout that time, I thought of colleagues I had left behind, talented but stuck in terrible conditions. I decided then that I was always going to do the work I do to this day.

As a South African, what is it like being part of a Porgy and Bess cast?

The quick answer is that I love the experience of being in Porgy and Bess. It’s usually my chance to make a living, be on stage and experience the thrill of being an opera singer. Outside of Porgy, there is little else going on for a black singer apart from about five of us who do get to sing standard repertoire. At least when Porgy is performing I feel alive. I feel useful and I love that. With all its imperfections, it has made it possible for me to feed my child when it comes around. I have one coming up. It’s the only job I have this year. So for me, it’s thank God for Porgy. 

Are you political enough to want things to change in opera? To help it to change?

If the question you are asking is - am I political enough to say that there's racism in opera then the answer is yes. I’m political enough to say, without a doubt, that - I know - opera is racist here. All is not well in the operatic world.  Especially not for black artists. We all know that. So why then would I encourage young black singers to get into opera knowing what I know now? Opera has given me a lot. It helped get me out of a very dangerous place. Almost all the singers I help through my competition and masterclass project come from exactly the same situation. If singing opera can do the same for them as it has done for me, I'll sleep better at night. If they become stars, then great, they’ll make big bucks and all will live happily ever after. But if they don’t, at least they will have been able to change their lives somewhat. I am not a star but I am alive, I make ends meet and have a chance in life.

However, I can't say to any of them, not even one, that they'll be big stars based simply on their talent. It looks to me like it’s not really about talent and not even about hard work for black singers. There's another hurdle to be dealt with and they’ll have to figure out how to get around and make things work for them. It is doable. It will take time. With a bit more appreciation of challenges, they will be more resilient and find ways to make it work as we are doing. They'll need to focus and believe that we can overcome, that we will overcome, we will find a way.

As a student at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama I was sponsored by the philanthropist and arts benefactor Sir Peter Moores under his foundation, which had a scholarship for singers like me. British singer Sarah Walker played a major role to make this possible for me. I am forever grateful to her. She helped not only me but countless other singers get this support. 

As a Sir Peter Moores scholar, one could attend as much opera as one wanted with the main opera companies in this country for free. The foundation paid for the tickets. This extended to me even beyond my studies. I went to the opera for ten years and I never saw anyone that looked like me on stage. Now, I'm not gullible enough to be persuaded that that was just a coincidence. Or that in ten years, there was not a good enough black singer to appear in at least one opera I saw, in all that time, at least in the chorus.

Accountability and transparency is going to be important. Until then we can have as many conversations as we want to have, opera companies and festival directors and producers can continue to do the same and claim lack of black talent, itself a racist and deeply hurtful statement. To claim that in ten years of seeing opera and not seeing anyone that looks like me on stage, is out of a lack of talent, is devastating. But then we know now after all these years in the field that that is not true, so we keep moving forward and finding new ways! I stopped going to the opera. It became too much to be the only black person in the audience and see not one that looks like me anywhere on stage or in the pit. The message this was sending to me was not what I was ready to accept. I was a young aspiring singer after all. 

A lot more accountability and receipts would be needed to persuade me that race is not an issue. A lot more needs to be done. It involves having us on board and not shutting the door on those who speak out about these issues. There's a real danger faced by people who speak out. How can we not speak with everything we have seen and endured? That is simply impossible for some of us.

Is there a want?  A desire? Something at the end of the tunnel?

If black children in the poorest parts of Africa like where I came from, can find opera, connect with it, use it to change their lives like I did, then a black child in Britain should be able to do so too. We should be ashamed that this is not happening in a first world country. It doesn’t have to take black African opera singers who seem to be dominating the opera space to prove that it is possible. If you can find a black child in a township in South Africa, in absolute squalor and poverty, why is it impossible to achieve in Britain?

The status quo is no longer an acceptable position. Explaining lack of diversity by saying there is lack of talent should be strongly rejected. Collaborations between opera companies and singers of colour is going to be very important. Plenty of them are waiting to be useful. Failure to hire them in roles should not also translate into failure to invite them around the table. How many are on boards of opera companies today? How many lead projects in schools with opera companies inspiring the younger generation? How many are part of the decision making? Apart from the one time when I sang for the Sir Peter Moores Foundation and walked in to find a black woman on the panel (Allyson Devenish), I am yet to experience that again in all these years doing auditions. I am yet to see black directors, conductors, artist managers and the list goes on. Don’t merely use a few in the field to show that something is being done, go further and use singers of colour to do the real work and in a few years we may begin to see results. If this can happen one day we will see a much more diverse community. 

Who are you?

I hate injustice. I hate racism with every inch of my existence. I am a father and I worry about my child. He is a mixed race child and growing up in this world. I am a son, I am a brother, I am a friend and hopefully through my work, I am a role model to some. I am here to make a difference and stand for what is good. Whatever that takes. I do not want to be an old angry, resentful black man. I’ll do whatever I can to contribute to the change I want to see. 

The future.

Sharing the love. Sharon D Clarke

Sharon D Clarke’s many talents are not kept to herself. This woman redefines generosity. Her talent, her spirit, her love - all are gifts that are shared with no compromise. We are here to receive!

Who are you?

My name is Sharon D Clarke. I am an actor, performer, singer. I have been doing so since I was six. It’s my joy, it’s my passion, it’s my love. It has brought the most wonderful people into my life. I’m married to Susie Mckenna, so I’m a wife, a very happy wife  enjoying lockdown. It’s nice to have the time, do you know what I mean? When lockdown started, I was in the States, so this period of time we’d have been on separate continents, so to actually have this time together it’s an absolute joy. When we’re here, normally, we pass like ships in the night. It’s good to be able to sit down and to dance around the kitchen and plan our meals. We have eaten WELL, not the same thing every day, let me tell you! It’s joyous, it’s joyous.

Why do you do what you do?

Because I love it. Because I love to share it. I went to a local dance school, a friend of mine was going. I asked my Mum and Dad if I could go and they said yes. From the first class I was entranced. From the first show I did at Bow Civic Centre (I think I sang Paper Roses) - hooked, absolutely hooked. I knew that this was what I wanted to do. I loved the putting together of the show, the teamwork of doing that. I love sharing what I thought everybody else could do. My mum used to sing, so there was always music in the house. I thought everybody sang. When you find out that not everybody does that you go, “Oh, that’s quite a special thing…”. And you know people are always saying that they’d really love to be able to sing, so I consider it a real gift, an absolute gift that is my duty to share. It’s my absolute duty to share it, to share the love. When I hear other people, whatever talent it is, if it’s art, whether they draw, whether they sing, whether they dance, that exchange of that energy, that giving of that talent, that gift, is such a beautiful thing and can elevate people out of whatever situation they may be in. It can transport them, can get them to empathise, to see the world in a completely different way, can get them to affirm who they are, all of that. That’s to do with humanity and who we are as people and how we connect, how we are the same, how we differ, how that all comes together and sharing that. The more we share that, the more we see what we have in common, there is love. People sitting around and singing, not even as professional singers, just as people, in church, around campfires, at a party when a tune comes on and everybody starts to join in, it’s so uplifting, so joyous, it’s so glorious. That is something as human beings we can hang onto ourselves. It takes me to another place, it’s glorious, I love it.

If you couldn’t do this, what would you do?

I’d be a social worker. It’s what I’m trained in. I went to Ivy’s and Anna Scher’s. I’ve never had any formal training, I didn’t go to Central or Guildhall or any place like that, but I am a trained social worker. That was my parents saying – okay, we are completely one hundred, three thousand percent in with what you want to do but you have to have some kind of back-up plan. I’ve always been the girl going, “Listen, it’s just your period, you’re not dying, I don’t know why your parents didn’t talk to you about this” or “No, you really have to go home and talk to your mum about that, because that’s an issue you really need to deal with”. I’d be on the bus and some kids would be quarrelling and I’d be the one to break it up. All of this happened a long time before “Holby”, before people would be like…”Ain’t you? Didn’t you used to be…?”  That’s always been in my personality. Helping people in that way is the one thing that I thought - if I’m doing something for the rest of my days, what’s going to feed my soul? That would feed my soul. I haven’t had to do a day’s work, officially, as a social worker but it’s still quite a part of my life. I was in college, waiting for my exam results, and in the common room there was a copy of The Stage. I picked it up, went to the back of it, saw a job advertised, went for that job. Jude Kelly employed me, she gave me my Equity card and that was my biggest break. I’d known friends who had worked for forty weeks or years collecting their credits to get their provisional card and I didn’t have to do that. Mine was handed to me on my first job. So I count myself very blessed in that way. That put me on my journey - someone had that belief in me on my very first job. I left college on the Friday and started on the Monday at Battersea Arts Centre.

I’ve had two weeks when I wasn’t working and I did a courier job (the other thing I love is driving!). I got a little courier job and set off from Old Street . The first job they gave me was in Croydon. By the time I battled from Old Street across London to Croydon, I was like, you know what? I don’t think this is the job for me. It’s going to destroy my love of driving. I did it for two weeks and after that I was like - no and then a job came in and that’s been that. 

Do you think it’s unique, your position and where you are now?

I don’t know. I’ve been at it a long time, it hasn’t come overnight. It’s something I've worked at, for years. I think I’m here because I’ve worked for it and also because people have believed in me and that I’ve been given fantastic opportunities. I’ve worked with some glorious people, glorious, glorious people. That’s the main thing, I think. I’ve just taken the path that I’ve taken. I’m not really one of these people that goes, “right, by the time I’m thirty I’d have done this and then looking to go onto that”. I move through life, where the wind blows me and how it shapes me. As my mum would say, “what is for you, is for you.” That has been part of my mantra. I’m quite able to let things go. I’m not one of those, “that job should have been mine”. That happened to me once. The one job I was desperate to get, was “Dreamgirls”. And “Dreamgirls” was coming to London. Everybody was going, “you’ll be a shoe-in, you’ll get that, no problem”. I auditioned and of course then, you can hear where my voice is, I’m a low person, I sing low, I chat low. What was written on that score was far too high for my ass and in the end, Rachel Mcfarlane got it. And Rachel - joy, boom, wonderful, beautiful singer. I totally understood it. I was happy for Rachel, gutted for myself, absolutely gutted. And then the show didn’t happen. I thought you’re gutted not to have it - how much more gutted would you have been, to have got the show and then never happen? That taught me a strong lesson. My mum said, “What is for you, is for you”. And I took that on board.

I just do what I do and love the stuff that I do and it’s eclectic. I did make one decision when I first started out in telly, which was to stop going for tv auditions because I was only playing nurses. Everything I played, everything I was going for was just a nurse. And it wasn’t a speaking nurse, she may have a line or maybe three, my goodness (!) but she was never really a part. I just thought - I didn’t come into this business to do that. And I’m not doing any disservice to nursing or nurses. They are our shining glory! But I thought, every time I appear on telly, I can’t be a nurse. I can’t be the same thing every time, so I withdrew myself from telly for a while, then got more of a name in theatre. Having done that, I could go back to telly and go for parts that I wanted to see me playing – no - parts that I would have wanted to see on telly when I was a child. The people I wasn't seeing. You know what I mean? It’s been glorious. I’m getting some beautiful telly parts, some gorgeous theatre parts, I’m doing lots of kids’ stuff. I love my kids’ TV series! It just gives me so much joy! I love it.

The pandemic hit, just as you were about to start “Caroline or change” in the States.  What was that like?

Susie had come over on the Wednesday, we were doing our first dress on the Thursday, due to open on the Friday (preview). That Thursday, we got the news that Broadway was closing down. That was the day before we were about to start. Of course I was gutted but I was gutted for everybody. You couldn’t take it personally. “Look what they did to OUR show?!” Do you know what I mean? This has happened to everybody and what I really loved was the fact that Broadway decided to close down as one. That decision was made for everyone, whereas here, we’ve had the whole headless chicken thing, with people running around, don’t know what’s going on. Him who has money trying, him who doesn’t gone under… It’s been madness. I love the fact that Broadway said, let’s do this collectively, so that everybody could take it on board as one, instead of everybody struggling. Initially, it was trying to keep the company’s morale up, saying we will get through this. We know we have a show to come back to, so let’s take this time to rest and garner ourselves, knowing that we are going to come back. Initially, they’d said they thought it might be three or four weeks at the most. I was thinking – well, I can hang in the States for three or four weeks, that would be cool. Susie was due to go back home on the Tuesday. On the Sunday, the President brought in the travel ban. That didn’t look like a good sign. Susie’s flight disappeared into the ether. Just cancelled, That was a big, red flag. We got the company manager to book us two tickets out of there immediately and we left on the Monday. We think we got one of the last American Airline flights out of the States. We came back and locked ourselves down because, when the show had gotten the news, the company had gone to midtown Manhattan, in a tiny little no space, low ceiling bar, drinking. We didn’t know it was corona, we just...went out. Because we knew we’d been in New York, when we came home, we self-isolated ourselves. Then Britain locked down, so we’ve been locked down, it feels, since time immemorial.

Being home, it made me angry. It just made me angry. There was no cohesion, people are just floundering and not getting any help. It just made me angry. Being told that we should retrain made me so angry. It’s like, hang on, we bring in more money than sport, we’re educational, we deal with the community, the theatre stuff that happens in communities, not just in London, but in places where that theatre might be the only theatre. What that does, when a community loses that - none of that had been thought through. It’s not just about theatre, it’s about community programmes, just so much. Just being left by the wayside and being told that you’re worth nothing and what you do doesn’t mean anything…

What do you in a situation like this?

You go online babe! You go online. We’ve all had to adapt. I’ve said to Susie, who knew we’d be zooming like mad? That it would become a thing? That’s how we’ve been able to stay creative, stay in communication. Ten years ago, if this had happened, we’d all have been sunk. When we first had wifi and it was all bing-bong-bing-bong-binnnng, we wouldn’t be able to do stuff like this. So, the fact we have technology to help us in this time, it’s something we must use. It’s still sharing. People might be on a screen but it’s still sharing. If I’m doing something for a charity thing where they’ve asked you to sing Happy Birthday to someone, or to sing the Twelve Days Of Christmas, or to read something, it’s still sharing. It’s still giving. The audience might not be there but I know they’re there. I don’t feel like it’s just a blank screen. Even when I do telly, you play to the camera, you play to the crew, you play to the people. It’s just as valuable to me and in fact, at this time, when people don’t have access to lots of the things they used to have, even more valuable. We can still bring something to people, in some form, in some way. I had a friend say to me that she didn’t feel that she was being as productive as she could be. I said, “you’re doing the best that you can with what you have and I know that you’re working, composing and writing scores for other theatres in Europe. You’re still working. Because you’re not leaving the house every day or going to a certain place, you feel like you’re not being productive. We’ve just done a concert, I know you’re being productive!”

I think that people can be a bit too hard on themselves. Because there’s been no help and direction, people think that it’s never going to happen. But we have to find a way and we will find a way. We have to believe, we have to have hope. I know lots of people that have left the industry, driving cars, working at Heathrow, working at the supermarkets because they have families and have to do what they have to do. You have to do what you have to do. It’s as simple as that. There will be other ways and those people will be asked from time to time if they can do a charity thing for somebody because they are wonderful performers and people know them already. I’ve been lucky, my work has become voiceover work at the moment, to the point where I’ve got myself a mike, I’ve got a little booth. I’m doing narrations and voiceovers and I thank God every time something like that happens. When I’m not, there’s a spare room that needs to be sorted out, songs that are going around in my head that I need to get down, there’s other things - I’ve not had the time to do that before. Now I have the time. If it’s not to do with actually leaving the house and going into a building to work, there’s stuff that I wanted to do or people that I wanted to hook up with, now is the time. Now is the time to chat, we all have a piece of time. “How do you feel about that project? Let’s put our thinking hats on and see where we can come up with something for January.”  It’s just finding ways of being creative in that way. I’ve joined Fender and am teaching myself guitar. We have Duolingo, so we’re learning Spanish. It's just finding other ways of using the time so you’re not just sitting there like that, waiting and saying when, when, when, when. Diverting yourself and hopefully coming through with different things that you have added to your bow. That being said, I can relax well, though! I can chill in a nanosecond. I’m not someone who runs around frantically doing stuff. I do stuff at my own pace and when I want to chill or just sit down and catch a few episodes of Small Axe or Heroes, that’s what I do.

You just have to get on, you have to. Even in this business. Now don’t get me wrong, I love this business but sometimes some foolishness has happened to me because of my beautiful dark skin...but you have to get on. You don’t jack in the towel and start cussing everybody, Some fights you take, some you leave for another day because when I get you, it’ll be so sweet. Sometimes you know, if you don’t walk away, you’ll end up in prison. You choose your battles but you have to keep keeping on. You have to get used to, sometimes, being the only one representing. That’s happened to me quite a lot, that I can be the ‘one’ face. 

How has the George Floyd murder informed the work that you do and want to do?

I think, for me, it wasn’t so much about the work but what it was making me feel. I found myself in this weird place, which we all experienced, of complete and utter despair, complete anger and hope, so hopeful that we maybe might have reached some kind of catalyst that would turn something around. When the BBC started to want to have conversations about things like hair and makeup and how people feel about that, when the conversations started to happen seemingly in the way that they should have done so freaking long ago, I was hopeful. But I was despairing that people seemed to be unaware of what was going on. God bless George Floyd and his sacrifice and his out and out murder. But he is yet another black man in a long list of black men, women and children who have been murdered since the days of colonialism. For people to be going, “Now I have to do something…”  How many people have to die before people say this is a bad thing and it needs to be sorted out? How many people have to die? Maybe, because we are in this pandemic and people do have more time on their hands, more of the world has seen this and now they can get on board and that can only be a good thing. But my God, how long?

I am still hopeful but when I start talking about it and get back to how angry I am - when it’s bubbling and it’s here, it feels like a past thing. I am still hopeful, because at least we are having some kind of dialogue with people asking what can they do. Initially, the ‘how do you feel?’ and ‘where do we go from here?’ was getting on my flipping nerves. I don’t want to sound ungrateful but I felt like - don’t ask me that shit. You don’t know? You don’t understand how I’d be feeling? Do I have to articulate it to you at a moment when actually, I’m so pulling in so many directions, emotionally, that I don’t think I can emotionally articulate it. I don’t feel I can. So, feel my tone, feel my presence and get on with it because we’ve been asking for so long. I’m quite prepared and happy and joyous to walk beside you but I can’t find all the solutions for you because they’re not problems that I created. My natural instinct will always be to help where I can, to uplift where I can, to assist where I can. That doesn’t mean that I ain’t human and sometimes I need to say - Do it yourself. Don’t ask me to find that for you as well. 

The biggest bonus of this all has been time with my wife, and - on the flipside of that -  less time with the family. We are facetiming and calling and all of that but not able to squeeze them. But the joy has been having quality time with Susie. I mean we’ve been together twenty years and this is the first time apart from going on holiday for a couple of weeks, where we’ve had time to just enjoy each other’s company, truly enjoy it. “Wake up baby. What are we going to have for dinner tonight? Okay what time’s your meeting? See you for lunch? Last weekend we did ‘holiday at home’. We have a sofa bed downstairs, we pulled it out, made it up, had little cocktails and put on the programmes we wanted to watch and we did ‘holiday at home’. Because the sofa bed is there, you get a different perspective of the room and it was really nice. It was wonderful to have the time to do that with each other. That has been a big, big blessing, having the time with my wife. Hopefully, if things go well, “Caroline” will be this year, so I will be off to the States and we’ll be on different continents. It’s about soaking up as much as we can. When we get back, work is work. Susie is up to her eyes with the Kiln (Theatre), so she’s always in some kind of meeting. If I'm not in a theatre, I’ll be in my little booth, recording. We’ll do as much together as possible, have lunch, dinners, have little constitutional walk around the block, exercise together. We’ll try and hang onto this, it’s been glorious. 

Has the pandemic changed you in any way?

Only in the beginning. When I got back in March, I didn’t get any kind of work until July. March was alright because we were at the beginning of the pandemic and didn’t know what was going on. April was a  bit like - hang on, there’s no money coming in. Lucky enough, Susie was still working at Kiln. May was like - no, no, no, no, no, no. I was starting to get really worried because I understood that nothing was going on but NOTHING was going on and I wasn’t earning a cent. That wasn’t good. I had a little bit of money worries but also ,okay, Susie was earning. It wasn’t like there was nothing coming into the house. I had to trust that something would come, knowing that it wasn’t personal. It wasn’t like I was auditioning and not getting jobs because no one wanted to work with me. This was a situation where no one was working. I just calmed my ass, it wasn’t personal and trust. And then the work started to come. My agents have just been absolutely glorious, both my acting agents and my voiceover agents. I’m able to put ickle food on the table and pull my weight and it’s good to be earning again and doing the stuff that I love doing. It’s still so varied and I love that. It’s really eclectic, coming from documentaries about stately homes to children’s mindfulness series to a kids’ series about zoos, adverts, it’s wonderful, wonderful. I’m still able to feel creative and eclectic and diverse in the work that I’m doing and I’m still me. 

Stateside, they will say to you -  what do you do? I’m an actor. What else do you do? I sing. What else do you do? Over here, it’s - What do you do? I’m an actor. I also…. We were at the Kiln actually, doing “Blues In The Night” and a woman came up to me afterwards and she said she really enjoyed the show. She thought it was fantastic, great cast blah blah blah. She then asked me if I was an actor or a singer? I replied, saying she’d just watched the show and asked her what she thought. She answered that she thought I was both. So why was she asking me whether I was one or the other? For me, all the media is the same. There are different processes and ways of achieving them but ultimately, whatever we’re doing, if we break it all down, we’re all storytellers. However we decide to tell that story, whether that’s through song, dance or music, whether you produce it or direct it, create it, whatever we are doing, we are telling stories. That’s it for me, fundamental, bottom line. So let’s keep telling the stories, whichever way we need to tell them. If I need to put it onto a voice tape to tell that story, fine. If I need to collaborate with this person, if I need to sing it, if I need to act it, if I need to dance it, if I need to tap it out with my foot, the whole thing is the same thing. As long as I’m continuing to tell the stories, in whatever format that may be, however that discipline needs to be applied, then that’s how I do it. There is no difference for me. Trust and put it out there. Who needs to find it, will find it. 

How has the journey of your art engaged your voice – emotionally, artistically or politically?

I don’t know if it has. I don’t think it has. I am as I have been, going on the way I’ve been going on. Nothing has changed in that way. Some things may blossom more, some things may bubble down a little less but that’s the equilibrium of life. I’m not sure how to answer that question. I think the answer is - it ain’t - it just is. Someone said to me once and I’m very proud of this - when you sing, you heal. I took that on board. I think that’s where that comes from, how I feel about it, about the sharing of it, the giving of it and sustaining it. If someone felt that, through something that I did, then I have to keep on doing that. If someone felt that way and felt strongly enough to tell me that…  I’d never thought of it that way. I was just singing because I Iove to sing. That’s a big thing to say to someone. If that’s how you feel, then I have to. I have to heal.

Who are you?

What do you mean?! What do you mean, who am I? I’m one of God’s children, baby. We’re all here. We’re all here and we just find our place, we trust, we find our place, we find our people, we find our community and then we do what we have to do. And along the way, other people might come and guide our mission but it’s a journey of love, it’s a journey of growth, it’s a journey of challenges that once you come over them, ride through them, go around them, find people to help you go through them, the journey is beautiful. This gift of life that we have is wonderful. We must just live it to the best of our ability. That’s our one duty I think, to live our lives the best that we can, in the best way possible. To uplift and inspire those around us and pass the baton on.  

Finding the power within. Susie McKenna.

Susie McKenna is a fixer, in the best possible way. Amongst the dancing, acting, writing and directing, she remains passionate about one thing - the importance of storytelling and the power that comes with it. She talked to us about ALL of that and a lot more and it was great fun.

Who are you?

I’m Susie McKenna. I’m very happily married to the wonderful Sharon D Clarke. I’m lucky to still have my mum. These two people have been the focus of my world recently. I’m a writer, director, actress and currently, I’m an Associate Director at Kiln Theatre, having run Hackney Empire as Artistic Director for eight years. 

Why do you do what you do?

I didn’t really have a choice. My parents were in the business. I was lucky enough to have parents who were singers and performers. I come from a very working class family and singing was a way for my parents to get out, to leave very deprived areas of West London and dare to dream, as a couple. My Dad was pro - he was in ENSA (Entertainments National Service Association) during the war, (he was a lot older than my mother) and then did work for the BBC and made some sort of living post war. When they got together, they started performing in variety and by the time I came along, variety was dying but it helped them buy their first house in the Midlands. No one in the family had been able to buy a house.

I was an only child, so my world was a very adult world - an adult world of performers and pianists. Some of the other extended family were also artists, variety artists and some of the others just loved music. My mum says I tap danced out of the womb! That had always been in me. I suppose, for my parents, it was their way out. They didn’t think about school or intellect or me going to university. It was, “You, you’re going to be a star, you’re going to be fine!” That then moved to, “Well, you’re going to drama school”. They didn’t quite understand the theatre side. They were performers, so they couldn’t understand why I would work for fifty pounds a week in theatre, when I could earn two hundred pounds a night singing. “What are you doing? You could go on a cruise, you could be a cruise ship artist!”

I guess that’s why I’m in this mad business called show. It’s because of them. It’s always been my life. I ended up not going to drama school (young and foolish) and I wish I’d gone to university. We were a working-class family, no one went to university. I didn't understand how university wouldn't heed my rise to whatever that would be. I trained to sing and dance. I realised intellectually I needed to read more, with the sort of conversations that were around me and I very quickly tried to educate myself in order to have longevity in the industry; to be able to straddle different strands I needed to up my game. It’s just always been part of my life. The thrill of entertaining people was something I inherited from my parents and that is about applause. My mum listens to recordings of my dad - she has vascular dementia now, it’s not too bad yet. It was post stroke, she had a stroke last year. Recordings have been essential, so I’ve been sending her recordings and pictures and photographs. You hear my mum and dad live on stage and all my mum does is listen to the applause at the end, to see if it was okay. “Did you hear that applause? Did you hear that?!” “I heard it Mum!”  I don’t think I had a choice.

Is it possible to get that feeling when no one is there?

I don’t think it is. Performing was for the applause. Standing outside, watching as a director, seeing things that you’d made suddenly work with an audience (particularly comedy but also with applause but laughter), as a writer, as a writer of comedy for me that was - do those laughs land? You hear that audience generate this laughter. This isn’t something you can physically experience when you’re in this situation.

I've done a few (hopefully) motivational interviews with students, with graduates and indeed just with freelancers in general. As part of Kiln Theatre, we’ve been having a few surgeries, a few things where we’ve tried to keep people motivated, keeping the tentacles out to the two hundred or so freelancers that are our family, if you like. The one thing I’ve found myself doing and thinking about is - I’d already been going through this a little bit. I was performing less over the years, particularly when I had to take over Hackney Empire. All my performing just went, apart from odd things. I was having to re-evaluate that myself, in terms of what I needed and wanted to happen in the business, what I wanted to get out of it. The one thing that got me through and to be able to help other people get through was - one type of creativity isn’t the be all and end all. Being on the West End stage isn’t the be all and end all. I say that to graduates, I say that to people who are struggling in the industry who might be out of work. The one thing that gets me through is that I have to be creative in other ways.

You have to find that outlet, even to the point where Sharon and I, if we have to end up leaving this God-awful place, this country and go and live in Spain, which is the dream anyway, we will record, we will start a choir, I will record, I will find my creativity in that way. I’ve always tried to instill in people coming into the industry that putting all your eggs in one basket is no good. That’s the same within your creativity. Creating my own work gave me power, gave me power that I didn’t even understand I needed. I’ve tried to stop myself saying that I should be writing the next novel or using this time to create a masterpiece. That’s not what I’m saying. It’s more about delving deep into your soul and finding other ways of getting that feeling. I certainly don’t think you’re going to get that feeling of a thousand people cheering and clapping you at the Hackney Empire or anywhere on the West End stage. But the idea of gratification - why you do what you do and why you have to be creative… At the end of the day we are storytellers, no matter what we do we’re storytellers and those stories are so important.

The more political I’ve got, the more important it is for me to tell stories. Now, working at Kiln, I realised that had to be my next step - to tell the right stories, the stories that are not being heard. Maybe there’s something more important than applause at this moment. This pandemic has given me time to think about it. Working for Kiln, working at Kiln has been a godsend; a lifeline to be part of a building, to be part of a family and to also have as part of my responsibility to reach out to the wider family, a link with the freelancers. The same went for Hackney. I realised that Hackney wasn’t really doing that so I reached out to as many of the Hackney family that I could. I guess the whole thing made me think why I do what I do. I realised, then, that it was inevitable that the politics (and that’s with a small p), the whole idea of why we tell stories and which stories we tell, have become very important to me.

On the other hand, there’s been a part of me that’s realised how much I really, really miss singing. And I haven’t been singing for a long time, not in that way. I’ve been thinking about why I walked away from Hackney and how I walked away from Hackney and part of that was to find that performer side of me again. I’ve just been singing and that makes me feel good. How many times do you say to choirs or people singing how much better you feel if you sing, (whether that’s with a group or not), how therapeutic singing is to your soul and how you feel? I’ve been singing more around the house than I have for ages (maybe because I’ve just been in the house) but for me, it has been a shift. This isn’t forever but this is making me feel that there is a shift somewhere, within myself or within my surroundings, where I’m working. Maybe that’s about age. 

I’ve never really had this time to reevaluate things before. Both Sharon and I realised, when the lockdown happened, that we were really happy because we haven’t seen a lot of each other. We’re ships in the night and the last two years have been crazy. It was joyous, just to stop. I’d been quite ill when I left Hackney. I was told I had total burnout and I didn’t understand what that was until it hit me. I’ve never had anxiety before in my life. It was really interesting because I thought I was totally invincible. I think, strangely enough, going through that made me stay relatively sane going through this time. I so needed to do this. I should have done this a while ago. I’d started meditating and I’d started doing all the things that Sharon’s been telling me to do for the last twenty years! I don’t blame her for the “I told you so!”, not in the slightest! I found myself quite quickly going back into that cycle of what do I do? I was lucky enough to get the job at Kiln, which was amazing and made me realise that it was what I wanted. When lockdown happened, I suddenly jumped into the idea of there must be a way that I can make things better. I’d been so used to doing that, within Hackney particularly. I found myself getting swallowed up by the Freelancers Task Force and Freelancers Make Theatre Work and. Then I found myself talking to graduates and I suddenly realised that I was right back to when I was firefighting at Hackney, right back mentally with the inside anger and frustration. I was so lucky that a) Sharon said it, but also Indhu at Kiln said it - that I needed to pull away a bit. I was heading straight back to where I was in 2017. Without a doubt, that made me pull back and protect myself a little more. I’m a fixer. And not being able to fix is really frustrating, horrendous.

When we come out of this, we should be healing. Our industry has got to be about bringing people together and that isn’t the Brexit fucking festival. We’ve got to find a way of telling the stories, of doing that.

Storytelling can take place anywhere. Just because you can’t do theatre the way you did theatre, the way you’ve been making your money, the way you have built your empire and your empire isn’t quite working, just turn your head to the side somewhere or behind you or in front of you or below you, just look out there a little bit. See what else there is. I think we do have to rethink how theatre is made, how we tell our stories, what we do, how we do it. I don’t think people realise how important storytellers are to society. Any sort of arts and creativity is about holding up a mirror to society. We are good for your health, for the nation’s and society’s health. With a government like this, you’re never going to get that thinking, so we somehow have to find a way. And it is about persuading, I suppose, the people who make money in the four walls to think outside the box and go ok, how do we do this. I’ve been trying to talk about that, I’ve lost the energy for it at the moment. It comes in spurts, having the energy to make things happen. I didn’t realise how much of my time at Hackney, (from the late 1990’s) had affected me in wanting to make things happen and finding ways. The minute you’re lucky enough to have a building that’s a semi home, it’s much easier to do that.  

What would you do if you couldn’t do what you do?

If I couldn't do anything creative? I’d go and work with orangutans. I’d go and work in an animal sanctuary. I’d work with animals basically. That would be what I’d do. I’d “fix” there too! I don’t know how I’d cope with the orangutans being up in the sky, I mean, being up high and the bugs… I’d have to get over that. I’d work with animals in some way. And yes, I’d be inevitably pulled into preservation and then entertaining them(!). Elephants love music, they really do so - yeah. Entertaining the elephants, why not?! I could go do that in Singapore or somewhere. I can see that.

What was the power you achieved that you didn’t know you needed?

I’d never been asked my opinion. I trained as a dancer which means you train as a soldier. In early dance training, your expression isn’t even there, depending on where you go. In my sort of dance, where you’re learning ballet, you’re learning tap, expression is there but I was never asked to create my own work or be expressive in that way, particularly in those days. Then, it became about getting into the industry and getting the next job. Looking at the back of the stage, finding my way into becoming an actor, reinventing myself, denying I was a singer and dancer to a director so that he’d give me a job in a straight play, which he did. (And then of course, he was casting a season and two of them were musicals so I had to go and knock on his door and say actually I can sing and dance. He just laughed in my face and said how could he look at me and the way I walk and not know I was trained to dance. I walked like a duck!) There have been hurdles but I’ve never been given the space to evaluate why I was having to break through glass ceilings, why I was ‘elbows up’, trying to fight my way through. I pitched idea of doing the pantos at Hackney and I suddenly realised that that there I was, creating something, the ideas were coming out of me and that I could give people work and casting it. The power of being a woman creating her own work and how I could shift the balance in how you tell stories and how the pantomime is told, using love as the focus of the whole idea of the stories and changing those stories so that they can exist in a twenty-first century world, where they can hold a mirror up to that world… I then realised, if you had created work, people saw you differently and suddenly saw a different side to you and suddenly your opinion was being asked of something. I’d never had that. 

I suppose that’s why I ended up directing because I was a gobby actor. It was inevitable that people didn’t want to know what I thought!  It wasn’t exactly a nice, creative place to be. In a nutshell, being asked to create and being paid to create, you could make it whatever you wanted it to be. I saw it as a way of really giving opportunity, of lifting up. There was no question for me that diversity was everything. I’d seen diversity get worse. Representation was bad enough all the way through but in the rock musicals and the things I was doing in my early twenties, it was a very mixed cast. And even working class stories on TV, Alan Bleasedale, Willie Rushton, those artists being lauded, where were they? I just thought - no, we’re going backwards. Hackney had to be representative, it would have been ridiculous not to be. By ‘power’ that’s what I meant. I could hopefully make a difference but at the same time I had a freedom to hopefully spread the love a bit. I think that’s what it was, as opposed to spreading someone else’s love. With that also comes a bit more financial stability, to be honest. If you’re getting a royalty from something you’ve written, you have more stability as an artist. If you are being able to do that then that underpins buying you time and space to do what you do, to choose your work a bit more, that stability.

Can you push diversity even more?  Do you want to?

Oh yeah. You know what? It’s impossible for a white person to talk about this, with the knowledge that I know a person of colour would have, in terms of how they’ve been treated. Everyone has a story. Sharon and I have been talking a lot recently about the “talk”, having to have that with your kids and how long is it going to be before things get better? I got a bit reactionary, when people were jumping on bandwagons with Black Lives Matter and were then calling out theatres, which needed to happen. There’s no point coming out of Covid and not changing. There is no way this can’t be about change and hopefully change for the better. We’re in a fight for our lives. When I said about state run theatre, I said it flippantly but I worry about it. I think about how theatre gets funded and how many more years we have of this government. The whole point is that there will be theatres like Kiln and there will be artists that need to fight for those stories to be out there and for things to change. It’s got to be about representation on boards, better pathways, theatres providing better pathways. That then goes into Education and how you look at creative thinking. In fifty years’ time, so many of the jobs that people do now are not going to be there. Automation is the biggest enemy, not fucking Russia. It’s inevitable automation, which has been brought forward by Covid, four or five years. For me, it’s the same fight, but we also have a chance to stand up, be anti-fascist. It’s not good enough to say that you’re not racist. The fight and the mantle have to be taken up by all of us and the first fight will probably be in the ecology of the theatre industry and holding people to account. I’m lucky that I have feet in the commercial sector and it’s really interesting the difference of opinion and action against non-action or box ticking. To be honest, there are devils on both sides, without a doubt. It’s about finding ways to make sure that things will change. It’s thrown up a lot of things about institutions or producers signing up to make change. But do they ever really walk the walk? They’re going to have to and it’s people like me that can call it out. It should be people like me because actually, It’s not just a black artist fight, for christ’s sake, that’s the point. It’s time to be more vocal.

It’s also what you do and how you do it, walking the walk. The dialogue that has happened during the lockdown, the Black Lives Matter movement remerging - it’s not new is it? These conversations are not easy to have, but they need to be had and they need to continue. It’s the same with the freelance world. Seventy-six per cent of us make theatre, make art. There’s a joy to not being tied to one place, there’s a joy to being freelance but with that comes great instability. This pandemic has shown it up. There are going to be huge pressures on this government, on boards that are outdated. They don’t understand the industry and, therefore, are nervous, unsupportive and the pressure will be that they need to play safe. Presenting a show that’s a black story or something about disability - they’ll just want happy, they’ll just want entertainment. It’s about an art form being dumbed down and this is the way you do it.  It’s all going online anyway. How do we fight that one? Where people can say I can just watch it on my sofa. For me, I’ll always be fighting it but my fight will be by producing work and telling stories, rather than diving back into the place I was at Hackney, which was political and lobbying. That exhausts me and is not conducive to being creative either. The reason I left the place I loved was that it was doing my head in, other people were doing my head in and I needed to be creative again. 

How has the journey of your art engaged your voice? Personally, artistically and/or politically?

Yes, to all three, really. Creating the Hackney Empire pantomime was the beginning of opening a whole side of me that all converged. Making theatre in a place like Hackney, that is steeped in historical politicisation, steeped in fighting the good fight - there’s no way you can create a show that can identify with that place and not find yourself being political. And I grew more political as the years went on. 2016 burst the bubble and I said ‘fuck it ‘and the next four pantomimes were very political. Once I started building politics into the story, my art, creatively, personally, I didn’t know that was in me. It was finding a power within yourself you didn’t know you had. I was told it wasn’t my place because I was working class, didn’t go to university and was a performer, so I should stay in my place. That was the power, to find the things in me that would make me change things in this industry. I will be at the table because I have to be, to make things happen. I’m not going to let that phase me.

I’ve always wanted to lift people up, that’s been a huge part of my life, especially in the last ten years or so. I’ve always worked inclusively and for diversity but are they the stories I should be telling now? Should it be this person to tell the story and then, how do I make that happen? I mean, there are some things that Sharon and I are creating together, which works well in terms of what we’re thinking of. And hopefully people will see me as a champion and I will always champion but am I the right person to direct that show? If I’m going to do that because I’ve been pulling for it since the beginning, then how do I bring someone with me on that journey, to then pass the baton on? But that doesn’t mean I don’t want to direct a show with no black people in it. I mean, what the fuck? But that’s about what story it is and whose story it is.

Who are you?

I’m obviously a fixer, as you’ve shown me. It took me a long while to say it and I only really started to say it to myself, once I started to work with younger artists about twenty years ago. I was determined to say to young kids that the minute they walked in the door, they must call themselves an artist. I found myself saying that to them because I was telling them about power and talking to them about stories. By articulating that to them, I had to be thinking about that myself and I hadn’t been. Damn it, in order to instill that into them I had to see myself like that first. So who am I now? I’m an artist, that’s who I am and I will always be - whether that’s entertaining elephants or hopefully making something with my wife, that we’re proud of. I’m incredibly blessed. I always have been. I’m not saying I haven’t fought for things but I’ve been blessed as well. I have to say that. That starts with tap dancing out of the womb from another tap dancer’s womb. That’s the first blessing.  

    Yeah, Susie was in ‘Cats’. So we HAD to include this picture…:)     

Equality vs equity John Devenish

John Devenish is the fighter we want on our side. A literal lifetime of activism informs every aspect of his life in Toronto - both the day job and the ‘night job’ (radio host at JAZZ.FM). He speaks to us about giving voice to the voiceless, being heard and the art of being subversive.

Who are you?

Aside from being Allyson Devenish’s brother, I’m an artist, a thinker, a writer, an actor, a radio broadcaster. I’m a black male living in North America. I am, in this country, considered by some, to be an African something – an African Canadian, African North American, Afro Caribbean Canadian, an ancestor of slaves. I am a rabble rousing activist. I know who I am but too many people think they know who I am and like to throw titles at me. I don’t let them stick on top of me.

What do you do?

I do a couple of things. I work in Developmental Services with people who have intellectual disabilities. I do what are called functional assessments to get them case managers. I have a politic that is all about the “social determinance of health”, which has to do with the struggles and challenges of living in poverty and having people assume that you are a certain way because of what they think you are. The spiral of the challenges faces when living in the margins of society and in poverty make getting out seemingly impossible. My work is a type of social work that’s specific to people with developmental difficulties.

That’s my full time work, that’s what I do to keep the fridge full, keep the lights on. I fell into it by needing a summer job when I was at university. I started working with a psych nursing team at a large provincial institution, learning a lot of things there, good (and seeing some not-so-good) and bad. I needed work when I lived in central Canada, just outside of Winnipeg, in a very small town. It wasn’t where I had any intention of spending the rest of my life and I moved back East. This kind of work allowed me to work shifts, in group home settings and in day programming settings which gave me the flexibility to do my arts work. It meant that I could then play late in clubs and bands if I wanted to – I could teach, take lessons, act, audition, I could do all those things and still maintain a reasonably good grounding, squeaking out a salary so at least I had a roof over my head.

So how did you become the activist and artist?

I grew up with activist and artistic parents. I grew up around educators. They were advocates for people who didn’t really have a strong voice. My mother was a Kindergarten Specialist and special education teacher, working with kids that had learning disabilities. My father was a child psychologist. When they were at university, they were members of a group that did a lot of work towards advancing the progress and opportunities for black students in North America. That kind of small politic was always surrounding us. So when the apples fell from the tree, they didn’t fall very far.

You never thought of going into music completely?

I did try at some points. You don’t really live too healthily when you try to do that kind of stuff; at least the way I was being, and had been, groomed. I had reasons that I needed for living more healthily and, along with those, came a child. It became important for me to have things like benefits, a steady income and a regular influx of things like…groceries. I was still able to teach and continued to perform. I found ways to do full-time work on a part-time basis. I did a lot of work as a voice actor, which meant I could go and record things and then reap the often far-between but good rewards afterwards. I was able to continue doing things like piano accompaniment, at other’s auditions and get work that way, too. I was able to do things like play at weddings and enjoy watching those giddy fools in their fancy gowns and clothing do their stuff, while I performed and got their money. That was how I survived, that’s how I moved through.

What I’ve been very, very good at doing is reaping the rewards of full time work without actually doing the full time work. If you know my sister very well, you know that she goes out of her way to do as little as possible for as much gain as she can possibly get. (I say that with a torrent of love!) I work in radio. I do a show that comes on nightly but I most often pre-record it in advance. That allows me to do my full time job. “Johnny Illusion”. A lot of radio is pre-recorded. It allows me to survive in a city that is unnecessarily expensive.

Why do you do what you do and who do you do it for?

The work that I do full time - I started doing it because it was easy and fun once I got the hang of it. It was a necessity, it paid fairly well for what was a lot of fun at the time (when I began). It also met a certain thing in me; a need to be subversive in my activism against establishment, to prove that there is always room for those who are in the margins. When I am actively involved in the meat of the work that I do, I really enjoy it. When it’s paperwork and filling out databases, I can’t stand it. I would rather be in my cape and tights, out there, fighting like Batman - maybe less the cape and tights - instead of sitting behind a desk.

I do the same in my arts. The theatre companies that I was involved with all had long histories and legacies of being sort of subversive, political theatre in this country – presenting plays and works involving actors, directors, producers who were instrumental in pushing underground and socially conscious political theatre out in front of the public. In some ways, I was able to merge and marry the politic across the lines. I don’t remember doing that on purpose. I think it’s something I just do and fall into. The piano playing – almost the same thing. I ended up playing in bands that were pretty much the same deal, after deluding myself for years into believing that I could be the next André Watts or a similar black classical music artist. I realised the reason I couldn’t was because there already was one. And I was in the wrong country for that, anyway. It was a country that didn’t understand the idea, almost - audacity - of someone looking like me being in the classical music world as an instrumentalist. We had, when I was growing up, two black conductors in this country – James DePriest (Orchestre Symphonique de Québec) and Paul Freeman (Victoria Symphony Orchestra). It was kind of cool that Canada had these two conductors and one of them (DePriest) was in a wheelchair - adding another exponent to the audacity. However, it wasn’t a country that was immediately welcoming and practically and I couldn’t make any surviving money doing it. So I left that, took my talents and played in bands. I got a keyboard synthesizer and hired myself out and performed. People found out about me and before I knew what was going on, I was busy. Tired and unhealthy but that’s rock and roll. I wrote to Paul Freeman when I had an interest in conducting and he told me what I would need to do and talked about some of his trials and tribulations. There were opportunities that he had had, that were not and would never present themselves to me. I know there were places I was not going to be able to get to. Reality in this country again – if you were not an opera singer, to be black in classical music was just freaking odd to too many.

There’s always an exodus of Canadians. Part of the reason is that you can spit and hit the forty-ninth parallel and you’re in the States. That massive machine is really tough on the arts in this country. The surviving arts in this country are heavily subsidised by government. It’s not a bad thing but the practical reason for subsidising it is to buffer it from the ravages of competing with the massive pool of artistic happenings in America, not necessarily better, but wildly competitive and massive in number. The other difficult thing is that it created a level of highly supported mediocrity, instead of striving for the best. That meant that a lot of people had to leave to come back; Diana Krall, Measha Brueggergosman, Bryan Adams, these people had to go to come back in order to make any kind of name for themselves. They can make wonderful names abroad but to make a name in this country - God help you.

Equally confounding in this country is the massive weight of the greatness of African American culture because it’s right there. It pervades everything; US television and radio styles and attitudes bleed across the border and excite and impress. Any concept of a black community is something you have to stop and think about what the hell you’re talking about. The majority of people in this country of any African heritage are either people who are one generation away from the Caribbean or have been here for generations or from West Africa and enclaves of East Africa as well. Others are the survival of ancestors of slaves who ran to Canada. Add more recent immigrants of the diaspora and there’s a weird mix. When ‘they’ speak of a black community in Canada, it’s not cohesive. It’s only cohesive to those who are not black. There is an assumption that if there is a black community, it’s a singular wave that moves across. All who are black land in this country and are immediately part of a black community – and the black community says this and does that, is putting this on and vote this way… it’s just not true.

George Floyd’s death – how did it impact you? The country?

It impacted me and still continues. I have spent my conscious, adult-thinking life as did my parents and their parents before them, trying to convince people that these yahoos and maniacs were/are in the woodwork. When they came out of the woodwork and people were so surprised that they wanted to be our allies and fight them, they were last people I wanted to talk to. What I was happy about (and this will sound very warped or strange) was this - here you had a person who felt so emboldened, that even when he was being exposed in real time on camera, he did not stop. That was where I was able to take my cue and point my finger right back at the people who were talking about being my ally – and I’d say “So you think you know what we are talking about when you talk about racism? You think you understand what I’m talking about racism? Let me show you something that is so heinously ugly that you can’t handle it. Let’s not think about the three or four other cops that did nothing, let’s think about the clown who had his knee on this person’s neck and who felt absolutely nothing. We’re not dealing with a human being at this point, we’re dealing with animals.” When asked why I get so angry about it, espcially by those who profess to be on my side too, well - all you have to do is look at that disgusting travesty.

I’ve been an angry black man forever. My sister will tell you, I don’t suffer fools. I don’t have time or patience for any of that kind of nonsense. People who look like me do not have societal leverage.

There is a massive difference between equality and equity. Nothing has changed. All that has really changed is that we now have a judicial system where we can at least take the issues to court. We still more often lose but we can take them to court. I keep trying to tell these folks that want to be my ally - if you want to be my ally, you can’t just be around when I’m crying, with the tears running down my cheeks. You have to be around when the snot is coming out of my nose and it’s on your cheek. That’s when you’re my ally. No matter what we try to do, or how many black opera societies we try to create, no matter how many black versions of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and those so much more aligned with the voices of the diaspora, we create, it doesn’t matter what we do, they’re still considered exotic. It doesn’t matter because we don’t have that cultural and social leverage. I’m not taking away from these wonderful things we’ve done, I’m just saying that we have to understand that its actual place is tiny when it comes to the larger scheme. I will always be an angry black man, I won’t necessarily be one that picks stuff up and breaks your front window (although if that’s necessary I might, but not today and there might be something on television…). I’ve been tired for years. Tiredness is almost a badge of blackness. Tired from constantly legitimising our existence. We are tired people.

How have you been during this pandemic?

Developmental services was deemed by the Ministry of Children, Community and Social Services as an essential service so I haven’t stopped working. We’ve been in this emergency status since March so things haven’t really changed that much. Radio was also considered a quasi-essential so I never stopped doing.

The Kensington Market Jazz Festival, a beautiful, grass roots jazz festival here, in an area of the city that is an open market area, was purposefully created to counter the large corporate sponsored jazz festivals. It caters only to local and Canadian jazz musicians with a few international stars each time around, and I’ve been MC with the festival since its inception, which was five years ago. The 2020 version was done digitally. It’s exciting to me because of its cool, almost subversive nature. The whole idea is beautifully counter establishment. I forgot another label (this is mine): proto-negro-hippy. I left that out. Even the words are all about countering establishment.

How has the journey of your art engaged your voice?

I did a degree in musicology. My growth in my art came when I realised that there were connections in the arts that included people that look like me. There weren’t these separate arts but beautiful connections, that instruments that were played in establishment organisations were instruments that had been invented by people who looked like me, that certain types of rhythms and harmonic progressions were experienced by Euro humans but have things that were very normal and common to people that looked like me. Once I learned about that sort of stuff, it became part of what marched with me. My art voice is very much what you hear me saying now. There isn’t much of a difference. When I compose or arrange something, I always try to infuse something that makes the listener say, ”Wait, what was that?” I think it’s important that we don’t have any complacency, that we force people to understand that a lot of what they think is refined art has a lot of foul smelling, stinking stuff in its background origins too.

I’m no different in anything I do – I’m no different in relationships, my arts or my full time work, pushing a cart in the grocery store, or riding on the subway – I’m exactly the same person all the time. There’s no sheen or veneer here. You’re getting the rawness of me every time. Ya dig? (I hope so, otherwise I may have to use other favourite Linc Hayes phrases, like ‘sock it to me’ and ‘solid’!)

Big Devilishly and Little Devilishly.

Having a choice. Making a change. HAM the Illustrator.

In his 27 years, HAM the Illustrator has participated in a lifetime of experiences which have created boundless energy, enthusiasm and commitment. He talks to us about the source, the development and the future of all that he has to offer in these times.

Who are you?

Hi! My name’s HAM the Illustrator, I’d like to consider myself an activist but professionally I’m an award-winning digital artist, illustrator and music producer. That’s the short answer.

Why do you do what you do? How did you get there?

I always consider myself to have three different sects as a person; you’ve got the side of me which is arts, visual arts based/ illustration, the side that is very music based/audio and the side that is very humanitarian based - politics and activism. They all work together in unity and they all started at different points. I’ve been drawing for as long as I can remember. My Dad worked in finance and used to have these massive spreadsheets, kept in a box in the house. That used to be my little drawing box. I used to go on my Dad’s Windows 95 computer, type in something like “tank” or “gun” and then print off pages and pages of collaged images and just sit there copying and copying them. It became such a routine, I was doing this all the time. As I got older, it became a way that my brain stayed alert. I wasn’t able to pay attention unless I was drawing. When teachers tried to confiscate my drawing pads, I would just fall asleep. Drawing has always been a passion. It wasn’t something I ever got to choose, it’s how I could express myself.

I was really born a politician - born into politics. My mum is a freedom fighter and in political exile.  She fled Namibia during Apartheid. When she was twenty-one years old and pregnant, she lived as a refugee and political asylum seeker. Since I’ve grown up, she’s been in the public eye as a politician. My mum was not a typical mother. I grew up in a matriarchal household. My dad is the quiet English guy and my mum runs the house with an iron fist! Mum would only watch three things on TV: football, tennis or the news, and she would binge watch news from day till night. From a very young age I’d ask her what’s going on, and she’d always explain, no matter how young I was: “In this world there is no good or bad, there are issues being fought.” From a young age I understood that people’s heroes and villains are different, so that always got me enticed in politics.

Music came from my African family (and I’ve got a big African family! My mum is one of eleven kids, so you can only imagine how many cousins that I have and a lot (not all) of my mom’s family live in the location which is the largest ghetto in Windhoek, Namibia. At family gatherings in the location, my elder cousins would hang around in the backyard by the car and play hip-hop instrumentals through the speakers then immediately start freestyling from person to person. I would just sit there in awe of them and think that this was the coolest thing I’d ever seen. See, even though many of my cousins live in the ghettos of Namibia and seemingly have nothing, to me they were like the coolest people I knew and wanted to be just like them so naturally rap became my favourite sound listening to DMX, Eminem and 2pac on repeat... Thing is, as I grew up I never really liked rich kids, I found them so spoiled. My cousins though, they had the arts. Music was always bigger than everything. If I wanted to do anything, it had to be music.

Thing is, growing up I always had to juggle. Everyone always wants you to stick to one thing and choose one path in life but I just can’t. I initially created Munkination when I was a kid, and I guess it was, in my way, combining all of these things - art, music, politics into one thing and using that to try and save the world. I had to start somewhere. I’m too impatient to just do one thing over and over, I need to explore, learn and continuously try out different things. I love the idea of jumping between different skill sets and interests. It saves me from boredom or creative block. While everyone else around me focused and specialised in one particular thing, I just expanded, bit by bit, across the board with all my skill sets.

How did you get here?

This is a bit of a long story but basically my dad is English. My parents got a divorce and my dad came back to England, which opened up a portal that I had been waiting for forever. See I grew up in three African countries - Namibia, Ethiopia and South Africa - until I was eighteen. Being in boarding school in South Africa I experienced prejudice and racism on levels that most people outside of Namibia and South Africa won’t truly be able to fathom but over time, to me, it became normal as it was the only thing I’d ever known. Over there segregation is a part of your everyday life. Even now, when I go to Namibia, black is still the lowest of the low.

It was a really dark place to be, growing up - being mixed race, a black Mum and a white Dad, not speaking my local language. I never really fit in, even though my family tried to incorporate us and love us. We were always the outsiders because they were speaking in Damara (the mother tongue) and my sister and I couldn’t understand them. When I went to boarding school, the same trends followed. I was too black for the white kids and too white for the black. There was no place for me anywhere and I really felt it. How do you value yourself as a person of colour in the environment I come from?  You’re in a boarding school made up of 80% white people, you’re constantly being bullied by white people. I wanted to get out of that school from day one. Both my parents went to boarding school so they just thought of it as the rite of passage of growing up. They said that my claims of distress were just me being overdramatic. I begged them, every day for the first two years. My dad said that if I got to sixteen and I still wanted to leave, they would take me out and when that time finally came I applied to a boarding school in England and got accepted. As I prepared to make my move, my dad called me up and told me that my mother had decided that I wasn’t going to England anymore. Apparently she wasn’t comfortable with me going that far away and wasn’t going to allow it. I felt so betrayed. I felt truly stuck in that prison, in that hell hole. I pushed through and tried to make the best out of a really horrible situation but I suffered more abuse and more violence and ultimately went through a lot. Before I graduated, I won a full scholarship to go to Rhodes University. My plans were set in stone. When we graduate in South Africa, we have a type of spring break where all the students from predominantly black schools go to one part of the country and the whites, another. Because I was in an eighty percent white school, most of my friends and schoolmates were white so it made more sense that I went to the white South African version of spring break known as Plett Rage- it was horrible. We had just finished high school so what was essentially meant to be a time for us all to come together and celebrate, in reality was actually something much more sinister. White people wanted nothing to do with blacks there and you could feel the tension. I remember talking to a white girl in a smoking area who turned out to be really lovely and friendly but just as we were getting to know each other this enormous white Afrikaans rugby player appeared, and stood in front of us. We were on picnic benches in this smoking area, surrounded by tons of people when he approached us. “Oi, what are you doing?” I said “Excuse me…?”  “You kaffirs need to stop talking to our women. Get your black ass and F$%@ off.”  I was shocked and had no idea how to respond to what I’d just heard. I turned to the girl I was with and asked her if she knew him but before she could respond the guy shouts at me: “Listen boy, I’m not going to tell you again. Get your kaffir ass and go right now or there is going to be big problems.” Staring up at this person who was easily twice my size, I decided to stay out and stand my ground but without a moment’s hesitation the guy grabbed me by my neck and immediately started strangling me. As I struggled to free myself from his grip the girl I was with immediately began screaming in panic and shock. We were in a public area surrounded by bystanders who witnessed and heard the entire thing but they just watched and did nothing. It wasn’t until the girl got more and more hysterical and things began to get out of hand that this guy’s friends pulled him off me and ran away. Gasping for air I fell to the floor in complete shock of what had just happened to me with this girl I’d just met weeping next to me, saying over and over again that she was sorry, so sorry for what had just happened to me. She was in shock as well but for me, this was the last straw. At that moment I knew I was done with that country, I needed to leave South Africa for good. Scholarship or no scholarship, I was done. I told my Dad that I was moving over to England. I had no university place, I didn’t even know about UCAS, I just came. It was such a pain, integrating back into UK education without the right qualifications but I didn’t care at that point so I abandoned my scholarship and moved over to England and started a new life here. 

There are three very strong strands: the drawing (you), the political (your mother) and the music (family). Do you think that, at one point, your focus might just be the drawing?

I did a lot of things when I came to this country, some good, some bad. After a long and painstaking process, I finally somehow managed to hustle my way into university and went to study architecture at the University of Newcastle. Architecture made sense. I was already doing graphic design, art and illustration for people and from my Dad’s standpoint, I should get a solid degree that I could fall back on and then go and do whatever I wanted. I was always strong at Maths and Sciences so it made sense to go and do either civil engineering or architecture. I like to describe architecture, illustration and music as different kinds of relations people have in their lives. See Illustration for me was the childhood sweetheart. You were raised together, have family and friends in common and everyone was certain that one day you’d be married. Architecture, on the other hand, was the arranged marriage. It made sense, it brought in the security and made my parents feel comfortable. Music was the passionate love. It’s like the love you find in your adult life, where you’ve already had experiences, you’ve had girlfriends and you’ve gone through the dramas. Now you really know who you are, where you are and you’re focusing much more on your internal feelings. Music felt like the thing that drew me most because it’s the thing I care about most. It’s also my biggest insecurity. Because drawing comes from me, it’s something that I have quite a lot of confidence in. I have no problem selling myself, speaking about it and marketing myself. But music - I don’t actually think I’m that good. I’ve got a lot to say and a lot that I want to achieve in it but I don’t have a lot of that self-confidence. Even when I became a musician, my first name was Trappy HAM then later changed to HAM the Illustrator. But under that name no one ever placed me as a musician, people just focused on my art. It really frustrated me because I never got the recognition that I wanted as a musician. That meant far more to me than being an illustrator. In my mind, music is how I can change the world. That’s my heartbeat. How do I change human behaviour? How do I change human psychology? How do I change our attitude about the way we treat the planet? How we treat each other? How we treat the animals? How we treat all living beings? I didn’t think I could do that by designing big buildings for millionaires. I didn’t think I could do that by creating some cool paintings.

Where did that feeling of responsibility to “change the world” come from?

My mum. Very big shoes to fill. I live in the shadow of a colossus. Even though she’s tiny in height, she’s gigantic in persona and attitude. My mum has accomplished more than most people can dream and survived more than most people can endure. Every year I grew older, I learnt new chapters of my mum. She didn’t like to speak too much about what she went through but there were books, there were interviews. Sometimes I’d get her on a good day and I could learn a little bit more. I also learned some from my dad and siblings. The more I learned, the more I was in awe. The only reason I have my freedoms, the only reason I have my liberties are because of the sacrifices made by people like my mum but that battle’s not over as far as I’m concerned. The baton needs to be carried on and so I feel like I have these shoes that I need to fill.

Where are you in all of this? Are you creating your own “shoes”? Or is most of this energy about filling other’s?

I’m very different from my mum and those battles. I’ve inherited a lot of skills from both my mum and my dad. My dad is often underrepresented in my storytelling but I wouldn’t be the man I am today without my dad. No matter what I did in life, my dad would always tell me I could do better. He always pushed me and I feel that the combination of both of them... my dad is more introverted, calculated and much more well thought out, and my mum is all guns blazing. The thing is - neither of my parents are creative in the way that I am. My dad works in the financial sector and my mum works in the political sector. It’s always been a big temptation of mine to go into politics, to follow in my mum’s footsteps but that didn't feel like me. I am a creative, I create. I chase this crazy dream of trying to be an artist. I’ve really gone out on a limb to fight for what I’ve always wanted and that’s to make this music thing happen. I’ve worked as a photographer and as a videographer, I’ve shot house festivals in Malta, I’ve interviewed celebrities as a radio presenter. I’ve really tried to explore my life and come up with my own kind of skill sets and figure out what really clicked for me. I’m passionate about everything. Where I come from, where I am now in all of this is that I’m not really concerned in changing the world anymore. What I really want to do is unlock human potential and I want us to change our behaviour and how we treat this planet. I want to grow exponentially in my skill sets, with the intention of paying it forward in the future to other people. I don’t want to die with all the knowledge I’ve learned so I hope one day I can create an an academy or a mentorship programme and help develop the next generation of creatives, constructing a bridge to opportunity for others like me back home. But in order for this to be possible I need to keep growing so I’m constantly going to be taking information and sharing it on.

I’m so lucky to have that tenacity. I think deep down I’ve always known that my calling on earth is to support the people that want to go on this route but don’t have that self-belief and confidence within themselves. What I’m best at and where I want to be is with that human connection. I need to invest and get the accolades that I have so that I can sit in front of people and be believable, so that I can learn, make notes along the way, streamline it and then see how many people to get to their dreams. 

Has the pandemic changed any aspect of your activity, the learning, the discovery, your output?

It made me realize that I need to level up and level up quickly. My life was just about to take off before the lockdown. Munkination had just been selected to showcase at South by Southwest in Texas, which is probably the biggest festival for tech and arts in the world. I’d been scheduled to do the opening night, which means I was scheduled to be on stage rapping alongside a world class opera singer. A couple of weeks before SXSW was meant to start I’d managed to organize to spend a couple of extra week out in Atlanta. While out there I teamed up with a bunch of producers and artists, spending most of my time there in recording studios having the time of my life. I was in a black owned city - the absolute incredibleness of it all! My career was about to take off, I was so excited. A few days before the show I got a message saying that the festival was cancelled due to the growing risk of COVID-19. The Royal Opera House called and told me that everything has been shut down. A ticket was booked to get me home and I returned. Dream over. And just as things couldn’t get any worse the UK announced a full lockdown was on the 24th March, the day before birthday. I was hit in the face, time and time again. I imagine that for a lot of people events like that might bring them into some sort of depressive state but I’ve been somewhere like this before so it wasn’t too bad. “Ha ha life! You got me again!”. Lockdown was tough. Munkination ran out of funding but I still considered myself lucky. See, I have an incredible team that didn’t stop fighting for our project. Throughout the lockdown they looked for new opportunities and avenue streams, flying through grant applications and proposals. My attitude was - whatever was going to happen, was going to happen. Life will be what life will be.

Watching all the people around me go into furlough, that was a very big hit. I was hustling every day as a freelance illustrator, trying to find new streams of income to pay my rent. I realised there was no protection for me, that when push came to shove nobody had my back. No parents, no employers, just me. I couldn’t even get income support from the government. I was working with the Royal Opera House and was the only person that wasn’t on furlough. I was a self-contractor. The only person who had my back was me. After coming out of lockdown the first time, I decided I needed to be a different tier of freelancer. At what cost will I start living the life I want? So the moment lockdown ended, I just changed. My minimum rate for drawing anything had at least doubled, any deal that was on the table was big. I wanted to go for the biggest clients, I wanted to have the biggest contracts. I wasn’t stepping backwards, I’m just looking upwards. I’m not settling for anything less because I don’t have an employer or a safety net. I’m 27 years old now. I want to get a mortgage, a house and build a future. I want to move into this world of being an adult so Lockdown really gave me the slap upside the head that I needed. It was a hard struggle but worth it.

Do you think that the George Floyd episode will make a change?

More awareness is happening than ever before and that’s amazing. Being a programatic person I tend to be on the skeptical side about actual, tangible change. Black Lives Matter isn’t new, and we’ve been campaigning for years. What’s to say that this won’t happen again in five or ten years’ time? Right now seems just like a massive social media trend but when I went to the protests and marches I couldn’t help but wonder what are the specific actionable goals or legislative changes we were fighting for? and where are the leaders that we can follow and who would fight represent us? I don’t see any of that. I don’t see any strong leadership. That’s the part that worries me.

Where is your art in all of this?

My music alias talks about colonialism, structural racism and oppression. It is about my plight, my struggle and my humanity. Not just the struggles I’ve gone through but the struggles of my people. I’m starting debates, I’m talking about police brutality and race violations, those sorts of things. I galvanize and start conversations. But admittedly, I haven’t yet found a way to bring that energy into my illustration but I’m trying to get there. I did a tribute piece to BLM and George Floyd but other than that I’m still figuring things out, at least through Munkination I’m able to combine the art and music I create and begin conversations about climate change and the impact we have on the planet

Who are you?

Honestly, I’m just an African boy who acknowledges the intense amount of privilege I’ve been given. I’m just trying to figure out with all these privileges, how I can help to make this world a better place. No matter what form it takes, I have to do this, or I’ve failed. 

  HAM the Illustrator  

Still standing

Congratulations.  We’ve made it this far, and we’re still standing.  The trials and tribulations of the past months have presented us with the most unpredictable situations. We have ducked and dived with panache, gusto and elegance. 

It’s one hell of a situation that we’re in.  The fault firmly lies with _____________ (fill in with glee).  The question we’d like to put forward is – what needs to happen now in order to provoke the change we’d like to see?  We (Devilishly + Grand) have no answers.  Actually, that’s a lie.  We have lots of answers, which we will happily divulge after the required number of cocktails. 

Helpful suggestion…

We made it to the end of the year.  We’re tired, still a bit overwhelmed, a tiny bit emotional and more than ready for a break.  It would be fantastic for the world to just stop for a wee moment, so we can catch our collective breaths.  None of this is easy.  Now (and always) is the time to hold hands and play nice.  To each other and to ourselves. 

 Take care, stay safe.  We’ll see you after Brexit.

Our gift to you…

Ingredients:

1 shot vodka,1 shot Chambord,1/2 shot Lemoncello,1/4 shot Grenedine, Club soda

Turning on the tap

Clement Ishmael does pretty much everything. The composer, music director, conductor (and now - producer) has carved out a wonderful career by, essentially, falling upwards. He tells us how he learned to stop saying ‘no’ and about the satisfying flow of creativity.

Who are you?

That is not an easy question! I’m Canadian British, a musician, composer, conductor. That’s who I would say I am. I started my education in England, came to Canada and had my formative life in Canada which was high school and university. I went to the Faculty of Music in Toronto and studied Composition and Conducting. Then I came back to London and studied Composition and Conducting at the Guildhall (School of Music and Drama). 

Why do you do what you do? How did you get here?

The only thing that’s been a constant in my life is writing music. As soon as I could play, I was writing. I’ve spent my whole life writing music. It's funny, I didn’t consider myself a composer at all - not formally - because writing music just felt a part of me. Even after I graduated, I didn’t call myself a composer, I just said I write music. I did a course in music for film and I asked a colleague there what she did. She said she was a composer and I thought “What do you mean you’re a composer? Who are you to say that?!” That was the first time I really considered who I am. Maybe I am a composer as well. It just didn’t occur to me. If you read books, do you call yourself a reader? No, you just read books. You read, you like reading. I’d never thought of it before until I was confronted by her statement. She was so confident and confident in the way students can be. “This is who I am!” And me, with all my nervousness and worry about my career, I was reticent. “ Yeah, maybe I am as well…”. It took a while.

What would you do if you couldn’t write music?

I had always wanted to be a foreign correspondent, believe it or not.

I started playing the piano from an early age. I was the young black kid on the block that played piano, one of the rare black kids that could play classical music. I turned seventeen, eighteen and was going to University and the last thing I wanted to do was what everyone was expecting of me, so I thought, let me look around and see what else I can do, I also liked Maths as well. (We’re going back a long way because in the first year of University, you could do anything, you didn’t have to specialise.) I took Psychology, Maths, English and Music because I thought I was good at it, so I should take it. In the second year I thought about what I’d done really well in and that was English and Music, so I did Music with an English minor. It was out of rebellious resistance to my family who were automatically assuming that I would be a musician. I thought there was more to me than just that. I wanted to prove them wrong and I ended up doing music anyway. They were right! You know what it’s like, seventeen, eighteen - don’t tell me what to do!

What I’m doing now, I fell into. Every step of the way I just fell into it. The conducting wasn’t an idea because, believe it or not, I’m a very shy person. Standing up in front of people and telling them what to do  - I like the power, don’t get me wrong, but it’s quite nerve wracking for me. I was still at University and I was playing for an operatic company, based in Brampton. The conductor moved away and they asked me to take over. I said “Wha???” I hadn’t dreamed of doing anything like that before. I had my own groups that I played for and conducted, little tiny things that I did myself. I thought, ”Why not? Just do it!” It was partly Clifford Poole who was my piano teacher at the time. He said, ”You must do it, you must.” So I said, “Okay.” And I was nominated for a Juno for best conductor. That was my very first gig. I thought, if I’m going to do it, I’m going to do it properly and that’s when I started taking conducting. Initially I was doing a Music Specialist degree but then I took on Conducting and Composition. I was also singing at Hart House and the conductor, Denise Narcisse-Mair wanted me to be her associate for the choirs. I started doing more choral conducting and stuff like that.. I fell into it really.

What is that Shakespeare quote? “There is a tide in the affairs of men.” It’s all about taking opportunities as they present themselves, whether you think you can do it or not. I’ve learnt that sometimes, even though you don’t think you can do it, find a way to do it.  That’s been my modus operandi. It’s taken me a long time to get to that place, I have to say. I’ve learnt even though you’re not quite sure how you can do it, you should just go for it and learn how to do it. If someone has asked you to do something, they have confidence in you.

With the pandemic upon us, as the Music Supervisor Supremo (!) for The Lion King, how has it affected your position?

I'm the only creative that works out of London, I don’t get any money   I’m self-employed. Even though Disney furloughed me and I get my majority of work from them, I’m not entitled to anything in this country. If I were in America it would be different.  

What have you been doing in this pandemic?

For the last fifteen or so years, I’ve been working like a chicken with its head cut off and flying all over the place. I am so happy and thankful to be home. Basically, all I am doing  is writing music. I’m one of the lucky ones in that I’d saved up money to fix the house and buy a car and all that stuff, so I had some savings, which will go in a year or so, but that’s okay. Hopefully by that time I’ll be back at work. I’ve always said that I wanted the time to write and here it was. So I wrote.  And I’ve written forty something songs, I’m working on a choral piece right now. I’ve written some piano stuff and I’m happy about it, very happy about it.

Was it solely lack of time to do this, or enough distraction to stop you doing this?

That’s a fascinating question. I sat down, a couple of days into the lockdown and thought to myself, ”well, here you are, you’ve got the time to write, so...write.”  I’ve always been writing but it’s been snippets, here and there. I did my concert last year, with twenty or so songs that were all mine plus choral stuff, so in between all of this I have been writing but not substantially. It was like somebody had turned on a tap creatively and I couldn’t stop. I couldn’t stop, it was just unbelievable. I was writing three songs a week. It was so gratifying and exciting. Maybe the stuff I was writing was crap, but honestly, I’m really proud of the stuff I’ve written. It’s just come pouring out. During this lockdown I’ve realised that maybe I need to balance my life a little more. Maybe I need to do less running around the world and start balancing my life so that I have time to really write. I also formed a new company - BENNU CREATIVE HOUSE. The manager for the concert said that she had three colleagues that were all trying to do the same thing - trying to put something back into the artistic environment and enable people to achieve what they want to achieve. There are so many people who we see, who we meet, who have great ideas and nobody to facilitate them. I thought, “why not?” She suggested I talk to Shelley (Maxwell). And I was talking to Celise (Hicks) and she was talking to Michelle (McGivern). The four of us got together and formed a production company, just to do that. To provide people with the space and the expertise to fulfil what we think they might possibly achieve. You know what’s really interesting about it? We’ve done a couple of projects and we have a lot of things we want to do and put together but it’s in the conversations, like we’re having now, that we find out what people want to do and what they want to achieve. There are four people saying yes and  that these things are possible. It’s affirming. People go away from the meeting and say, “Right. I just needed someone to tell me that it’s possible, that it’s a good thing”. We have a lot of ambitious plans and ideas. Watch this space. 

I got into music theatre but was not what I wanted to do, at all. Music theatre was way down the totem pole for me. I was a classical musician, I was a classical composer, blah blah blah… I was teaching and a friend of mine was doing Ain’t Misbehaving. He got really ill and he asked me to do it. They were on tour in Oxford and at that time, I was saying yes to everything so, I said. I spent hours and hours and hours practising the bloody thing, God it was hard! Clarke (Peters) saw it and said he was doing a new show in Stratford East and did I fancy being MD of it. I was teaching and I said I didn’t know but at the same time I was asked to do Carmen Jones at the Old Vic with Henry Lewis. And I knew that Wayne (Marshall) was doing it. And they wanted me to be the other conductor. That’s the field that I wanted to be in - classical. But, I was teaching and that was very long term and Five Guys was only going to be five weeks. I did Five Guys and of course it just blew up. One thing just lead to another.

I did Ain’t Misbehaving at the Tricycle, which then transferred into town.  That’s how I drove myself into music theatre, I guess. I got all the black shows, of course. I was doing Smokey Joe’s Cafe, twenty one years ago in town and was asked to be the associate conductor of the London conductor of Lion King. My agent told me to go to New York and see the show. I went and thought...not bad (!).

That’s what I mean, you fall into these situations. 

The reactions to George Floyd, the frisson in the arts world that changed in some way, the very careful tiptoeing about diversity in the arts. What did it do for you?

Disney has shows everywhere. I’ve had many conversations from companies all over the world. It was the conversations with the Americans and the British that were very raw. There’s Lion King in New York but there’s also a tour. You can only imagine what those kids have experienced on tour in middle America, in Trump times. The stuff that came out was not unexpected but very hard to hear. It made me feel...I’m in a creative management position, I’m not going to be silent anymore.  That’s what’s changed for me more than anything else. When I see things that are unjust, I have a responsibility to myself and everyone around me. I haven’t done that enough in the past, to be completely honest. We see it, know what it is, but don’t say anything. The times that we’re in now make me feel that I need to be bold, say this is what it is and not tolerate it. I have nothing to lose right now at this point. In music theatre, I’m going out on the biggest show ever. If I don’t do another show for them, that’s okay, it’s fine. Lion King is a black show, really, but there are only three creative people of colour not on stage. There are hardly any behind the scenes. It’s something that needs to be addressed. My experience with Disney has shown me this. The States are different from here. If they think you are talented and we need you to make money out of, that’s fine. In this country, they can know that you’re talented but they would rather have somebody else.

There are battles of course. I only get involved in the final auditions. Only in South Africa do I do everything. But every single country is really different. I have a global perspective now on race, which is really interesting. They are all very different and all have problems. I’m one of the privileged because I come with the badge of Disney. I’ve been treated badly too but as soon as you show the Disney badge then you’re kind of ‘home free’. I’ve had problems, a lot of problems because of how I look. Travelling through America and on planes. I haven’t talked properly to the powers that be but now, they kind of know. It’s time they knew what is happening to the people that work for them, in whatever capacity - people of colour who are from diverse ethnic backgrounds.

Do you think that music theatre is freer in its attitude to race than classical Music?

I think, in a way, it is. I think it’s about both race and class. The type of people that go to opera are traditionally from a particular class, and a particular class that don’t feel the need to mingle and mix with people who are not of their class. My experience, in classical music, has not been unexpected but very racialised. Even at the Faculty of Music in Toronto, I was the only black person there. I always felt like an interloper. They would always look at me. ”Who is this person? What is he doing here? Why is he doing classical music? It’s not his music, he should be doing something else.”  I actually do think it’s worse. They expect black people to be doing popular music, not to be singing opera as such. I want to see black people in Carmen, Magic Flute, everything under the sun, why does it have to be Porgy and Bess? This is why opera is behind music theatre, to be honest. Music theatre was the same, years ago. At one point, years back, when I was doing all the black shows, there was a moment when Ain’t Misbehavin, Five Guys, Hot Mikado, Mama I Want to Sing - all were on at the same time. We renamed Shaftesbury Avenue as Blacksbury Avenue. After the shows, everyone would congregate at a local pub and everyone was there because everyone was in town. And we all knew that, in a year, everyone would be gone, never to return. It was a specific moment in time. But what happened in music theatre was that John was played by a black actor in Miss Saigon which became the norm and Eponine in Les Mis etc. They’ve been infiltrating, much more than in opera. I could be completely wrong but that’s what I think.

When I go to a show, I always check how many people are in a show and how many black people are in the audience. Black people in this country have been performing for years but they just don’t get the platform. It’s beyond a tick box exercise.

I don’t want to wait for people to hire me anymore. Furthermore, I’m going to be the one to say that I like your project and we’re going to put some money into it and find a way to get it done. Because nobody else will.  The amount of goodwill for that is incredible. People have been so generous and said that this is what they need and want. Once it’s monetised, the money will go straight back out to projects, for the people that don’t get a leg up. What we’re interested in is talent. I’ve also discovered that in talking to people, there’s a side to them that I never knew existed. What? Really? This is you? In this pandemic, you find you have so many facets, so why stick to one? There’s the one that you’re successful in, so you stick to that one - but what about the other things that you thought and dreamt about? It’s taken a long time to get to the place where I can do what I want to do. If we can help people find what they want to do, they find that they’re generally good at it. People don’t have that time to explore. Everyone has to make a living. The decision to have a family was huge. It definitely changed the trajectory of my career.

The stuff I’ve written now is who I am. I’m only who I am because of the experiences I’ve had - politically. The stuff I’ve written now I couldn’t have written twenty years ago. I would have written something but it would be different to what it is now. If it had been in my twenties and thirties, it would be young and full of life and energetic. Now there’s a bit of, I don’t want to say – somberness - in my work now. I don’t know.  Even when I’m supposed to be writing something uplifting, there’s always a tinge of darkness, I don’t know. Have I written a happy song recently? Hmmmm… It’s difficult to write something carefree when you’re in the middle of a pandemic and people are losing their jobs. You can’t, as an artist, not be affected by it.

Who are you?

At my core I’m simply a composer, who’s trying to write music that he feels and is reflective of the society in which he lives. 

The art of disguise.

Sasha Hails writes. Sasha Hails creates. She tells us of the never-ending need to do both; to tell her stories and to tell ours. We also talk about how to hide in plain sight…

Who are you?

I know I’m Sasha Hails.  I know who my parents are.  I think that the best thing about life is that you never really know who you are.  I think that goes hand in hand with being an artist.  With the kind of work I do, I’m rediscovering what I want to say and who I am, alongside whatever is happening in my life at the moment.  You have one person who you know that you’re going to be with throughout your life, one person who you can’t get away from and that’s yourself. I quite enjoy having a bit of mystery.  I quite enjoy the fact I don’t actually, completely, fundamentally know who I am and I can surprise myself.

It’s like Shakespeare says – a man plays many roles in his time. I’ve been a mother, then there were the student years, the young years.  I’ve played several roles in my life, but I’m always excited to find out who I am and what I need to say and who I’m becoming.  I think we’re always in transit.

How do you do what you do?  How did you get to where you are?

I started out as an actress.  That was always my dream. I was working professionally since I was 18.  Three months out of the traps of drama school, I was pregnant with my first child  and then I had three more in my mid-twenties (which is an odd choice for a performer to make and it was a choice!) I wanted to be an actress and I had these three kids. I was really desperate to be a mum.  Obviously. But, I never stopped needing to create. As acting became harder (because we didn’t have much money at that point.), I started to write. I started to write for the children.  I was writing stories for kids’ telly, stories for radio.  Any time they were asleep, I would feel that absolute need to write, to create.  I kept acting as long as I could and I do still occasionally do it.  But, strangely, the need to perform and to connect, viscerally, with an audience (which I had as a young woman) sort of was replaced by my daily life and my love for my kids.  They were my audience.  They were what I could pour all of my absolute need to connect into.  So, I was able to sit down and write in a way that I was wouldn’t have been able to before I became a mother.  I could pour my creativity and my need for connection to people and for - I guess – translating and processing of the world, into writing.

Now my kids have grown up!  Although the writing is going really well – lucrative but also, artistically fulfilling – without the girls there at the end of every day and the family life, I now find I need to connect again.  So, who knows what will happen next!  I’m missing that personal, visceral connection to people and the world.

I did act with my children.  I was one of those mums.  For me, mothering was a hugely creative and necessary experience and I did pour my creativity into it.  When I could, I took my girls with me.  I did a film with my first baby (“Regarde La Mer” by François Ozon). I performed on stage, pregnant, a lot at that time.  My second child was on The Bill with me.  I took the three girls on a tour.  We performed “A Winter’s Tale” together, with a wonderful director called John Dove.  I played Hermione and the girls play Mamillius.  We toured England for six months.  For me, that was a dream fulfilled.  It was like the real old travellers lifestyle.  There I was, with my three girls, rocking up in my old Volkswagen Golf, them helping to set up the set, on stage at night, being loved by the actors, performing Shakespeare outside.  For me, that was the dream, the travelling family, the travelling players.

Having children was not a barrier.  There was no decision to make.

For me, there was no decision.  I kept trying to act.  Partly, it’s financial.  Partly, it’s what you can afford at the time.  I think if I’d been massively rich, I probably would have hired a nanny and carried on acting.  For me, to mother those kids and to find something to do that wasn’t on the stage, was stronger than to leave every night at to perform at bath time - or take off on a film set for months.  But that’s just me. And I judge myself for it.  Part of me thinks – why?  I just presented the highlights of creativity and motherhood to you.   There were days when I sat there, thinking “what have I done?”  I think what drives me is my creativity. It took me about ten years to get a career going in writing that could actually support me properly.  The thing about writing is that you can do it at any point - alone.  But then there’s that need to share it with other people, to share the stories, and to get recognition.  There were days when I’d written something I thought was wonderful, but no one wanted to read it or it was rejected.  There were days when I thought “what have I done?” and my friends, who had set off on the starting blocks with me, were getting accolades here, there and everywhere and having their work recognised.  Of course, mothering is fantastic and I love my girls, but (I thought) I’ve totally not fulfilled that other side of myself.  Luckily, I stuck with it.  I need to continue to express myself so much.  Slowly, slowly, things worked out.  There were great times, but there were really tough times.  Turning up to acting auditions with breasts leaking, when you’re supposed to be playing the ingénue…

I hadn’t really thought of myself as a writer because I wanted to act so much. Although improvisation had been the base of a lot of my work.  It was just that need, when the girls were asleep at night, or when they were in bed or if I was sitting in the park. I would just start writing.  Initially, I think, to just write things for myself to perform.  And then I started making extra money on the side, doing script reports for people.  Reading these film scripts and TV scripts and thinking – I could do that! When I was young I was the kind of person that couldn’t sit still. But I got tired – as you do when you have kids. Suddenly, I found that I could sit still, for hours at a time.  And, actually, that meant I could write.  That was the gift.  I wrote a screenplay (that’s never been made, but became a brilliant calling card that people loved), I wrote a radio play that was never made, I wrote a stage play that was never made.  These three things that I started to write, I put out in the world.  I started to win little competitions.  I then started hiring myself out to write for other people.  So, very quickly, I found myself on a radio show called “Westway” and would write regular episodes for them. The girls were growing up and I needed more money.  I started to write for Holby, Casualty and Eastenders.  They were wonderful shows to write for and it was brilliant for technique.

But - I was lending my voice to others.  I feel that I am still emerging.  When you say “who are you?”  I feel really quite lucky to be here, because it’s quite an exciting place to be.  I still haven’t quite expressed myself or been able to share my absolute vision.  I’m getting the opportunity now, but people haven’t seen these things. I feel that I’m actually writing me and what I want to say. It’s very exciting, finding out what that is.

My daughter is a writer.  She’s twenty-five and writing her own plays. I look at her and I think – wow, your voice is there.  That’s you.  I always hid.  I hid behind the characters of Eastenders, the characters in Casualty.  Malory Towers.  I do adaptations of things.  I feel very happy investing myself in others and communicating parts of my experience – in disguise, I guess.  Which, perhaps is like acting, because you’re in disguise when you act.  And I feel that, right now, I’m on the cusp of saying – this is what I want to say and this is who I am.  Who knows if people will really like it or not!  But I’m finally being given that opportunity.  I finally feel that life has given me space enough to myself to go – who am I?  What do I want to say?

The forced hiatus – the “magic” – of the pandemic has made the performing world pause.  What has it done for you, as a writer? Have you, or did you stop at all?

I find myself alone, for the first time in my life.  That’s both frightening and exhilarating as I have always had to do my work alongside the craziness of family life.  Suddenly I don’t and it’s quite amazing.  It feels like a test but it’s also quite extraordinary to have that time to consider things.  I thank the lockdown for that because, when the world locked down, I said to myself – this is a huge global changing event.  If I can’t change my own life as I’ve been wanting to for some time – if I can’t do that, at this time of change, then who am I?  I’m not someone that I want to live with for the rest of my life.  I have to make a choice.  Will my next twenty-five years be more of this?  Or am I going to have the courage to step out?  And the pandemic gave me courage.  If we’re going to be forced to look at ourselves like this, I need to look at my own life.  And I need to have the courage. The pandemic gave me time and it gave me courage.  It left me with myself.  I think I have often run away from myself.  Hiding in other characters or plays or something I’m writing, hiding in my children. Suddenly, I thought – time to re-think.  I’ve spent time with myself, perhaps for the first time since Sunday afternoons as a child.

Do you have any idea (yet) how this might affect your writing – not only for others, but for yourself?

I’m hoping, that if I discover enough pleasure and excitement in the writing – I always believe that’s what transmits or transfers to readers or an audience. 

Pre the pandemic, two amazing things happened in the world which have totally re-calibrated my attitude to ‘who are you’. If you’d asked me that a few years ago, I would have answered “I’m a mother, I’m a sister, I’m a friend, I’m a writer, I’m an actress”.  A list of things that are attached to other people.  I think the two amazing things that happened were #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter.  Also, at this particular moment in time in our industry, there was a massive shift.  We TV writers signed a petition demanding that there was more diversity, and also more space for women, as TV writers and artists, and it actually feels as though that was listened to.  I know for sure, that a couple of jobs I’ve got recently are because I am a woman.  I am an older woman and a diverse woman.  I ‘pass’ for diverse because my granny was Indian and my mum’s Jewish.  I never really considered myself that, but other people tick that box for me, I’m not going to complain.

Before, I might have shied away from writing about myself because I might have thought it wasn’t interesting – I feel that these subjects, right at the moment, have been validated by the world.  Or at least by our cultural world in the UK or the people who are employing us – me. They are saying, “no, we do want that story. We do want a story about how you didn’t know you weren’t British and what it was like to be brought up, thinking you were a white, English girl when, actually, you weren’t quite and what that might have meant for you.” I wasn’t really interested in that before, but if you are – actually, it’s quite interesting!  I’d hidden that from myself because it wasn’t. 

Is this about permission?

I guess.  Permission and validation, in a strange way. What I find interesting is what I need to express, what I need to say. I think – why do I want to say that?  Why do I want to tell that story? What I write is not necessarily my story.  It’s not autobiographical. I’m in everything but it’s where imagination meets experience. (I don’t know who said that – that’s someone famous, that’s not me…!) 

Do you ever think “this bit of who I am” is strong enough to take over the story, to BE the story?  Is that interesting enough for you to feel that it is interesting enough for us?

Definitely.  But in disguise!  Definitely.  There are things where I feel – yes, we really need to talk about that, but I would put it into other characters.  Partly because I feel that I can be freer with it in disguise.  It makes it more accessible, in a way.

How has the journey of your art engaged your voice – personally, artistically, politically?

Becoming a mother politicised me.  Struggling as a young-ish mother and not having much money, just absolutely awoke me to what other women were going through, how difficult life was. Spending a lot of time with my kids, in the local community – yeah – it really politicised me.  It made me want to fight for women. 

My writing has slowly more and more become political.  Now, I would say, everything I’m writing is quietly political, but it’s very much to do with women’s politics or feminism.  Even Mallory Towers (we’re on our 3rd series on CBBC) is about a quiet feminism shown through the prism of these 1940s girls finding their identity and voice. I feel as though a lot of my work is about the female struggle and what we choose to do with our lives. I’ve always written mostly female characters without thinking about it because that was my experience.

The MeToo movement triggered an empowerment for women and that I found very exciting.  It feels like it opened the possibility for women to tell their stories and for that to be recognised.  What began as women telling their stories about being aggressed by men has turned into women telling their stories and giving permission and showing interest in what our stories are.  It just feels to me that women have been silenced for so, so long.  There are so many exciting stories. It’s about equality and finding an absolute balance.

Who are you?

I’m still Sasha Hails.

Inherently political

LUNG is the wave we all need to catch. This campaign-led verbatim theatre company gives voice to the unheard, the overlooked, the hidden. We spoke to the co-artistic directors - Helen Monks and Matt Woodhead - about telling these all-important stories and the lure of addiction…

Who are you?

M: LUNG is a theatre company that started seven years ago, when we were students at the university of Sheffield.  It was a response to cuts in the arts and secondary school provision of arts.  We would deliver workshops for people in secondary schools who weren’t having theatre companies coming in anymore.  Every so often, we’d rent out the local community theatre and then we’d invite the young people to come to see. We did a musical once.  And a dodgy production of Lord of the Flies (we used a real pig’s head and it ended up with us in the car park having to wrestle the pig’s head off a dog!)  That kind of sums up that process!

H: I think that sums up every process!

M: The young people were saying that the workshops were far more interesting than The Lord of the Flies and the other things we were putting on stage. We then did our first show, The 56, about a fire that broke out at a football stadium in Bradford.  It was a story that could be passed on to a younger generation. We started by interviewing some people for that and forging some strong links, bonds and connections with some of the football fans who were there on the day and saw the impact that the work was having.  that was the birth of us starting to want to do more grassroots, verbatim theatre.

H: I feel like, then, we did a lot of studying about what verbatim theatre actually was.  So, the form happened first and then working out what it was happened second.  Since then, we’ve always made people-led verbatim documentary shows.

Then we did a play called E15 which was working with a group of young mums in Stratford, Newham, who had been evicted from a mother-and-baby hostel and they weren’t offered alternative housing in London. We spent two years joining their campaign and following them around, going to housing occupations and protests and recording interviews as we did.  It was a real collaboration between us and them.

When Matt started the company, I thought verbatim was really boring!  And then I got involved and I realized you can make it alive and active and intense.  Sometimes it can feel a bit reflective.  But with E15, it was about being there, as things were happening, talking to people in ‘live’ time and then replicating that on stage.

M: We’ve done lots of other stuff since then, but to me, it always comes down to the privilege that we have to be storytellers and the privilege we have to be able to work with people to tell a story.  And I think, wherever possible, it’s about amplifying voices that need to be heard.  It always varies from project to project. We did a project called Who Cares, that was with young carers in Salford. They were really involved with the casting, looking at the design elements, the parents were interviewed for the show, sometimes, they interviewed their parents.  It’s about unpicking the artistic process as a whole and being comfortable to lead it, but, sometimes, I think the most interesting and exciting work happens when power is devolved and distributed a little bit and then comes back together.

If theatre is storytelling, how did it become important to you to tell these stories this way?

H: I think that people just always say it better than you’d write it.  The actual process of creating something with people is so amazing, because they can really have ownership over what they’ve written.  It’s also a bit scary, because the way that we work is that we always allow to people to change and to withdraw things, right up until the very last moment. You want people to feel like they’ve got complete control and ownership over what they’re saying. It makes the best and most interesting work, to give people free agency over their own voice, within the show.

The actual process of making it and also all of the stuff that happens around it is also kind of part of the point.  The show and the audience coming to see the show is just one element.  Going on that process with people, of exploring and talking about – either things that have happened to them, or things they feel really passionate about – that’s why all of our projects take a really long time.  I think the average is about three years.

The company, and we, are just inherently political. What I love about theatre spaces is that they’re one of the only unregulated spaces left where you can say things and you can have real freedom of speech.  Therefore, like Matt said, there’s such a privilege that comes with somebody who works in the industry of theatre and the power of that space and who you allow that space to be given to or share that space with.  It’s a political act, even if you don’t realize that is.  We’ve always tried to make sure that that space is taken up by voices that are kept out of more regulated spaces, like the press or mainstream media.

M:  Theatre’s secret weapon is – people in power don’t value it…!

H: That’s our secret weapon as well!  People don’t realize what we’re doing!

How, as individuals, did you get here?

M:   I kind of want to say “by accident”.  I don’t come from an artistic family.  I’m a bit of an attention seeker.  The 56 project that we did, we did it when we were students.  It was amazing to have the faith of some of the people that we worked with.  The project started to become something that was bigger than us.  We’d graduated and then we went off to the Edinburgh Festival and it evolved into a tour and then it evolved into another tour.  and then it evolved into another project.  I always have the the age of 30 as when “I’m done”.  But, the legacy of the projects can become quite addictive.  The relationships you have with everyone are so different, but you suddenly become quite invested in the people that you work with.

H: I come from a theatrical family.  My mum is a director and my dad is a children’s playwright.  When I was growing up, they ran a little theatre company called Hoopla that put on children’s shows, so I was always around it.  I met Matt at university, and like he says, got addicted to the thrill of verbatim!

The tradition of verbatim is long and old and the plays of their time.  I wonder what will happen to our stuff because we’re writing incredibly responsively to what’s happening right now.  It’s very present-tense.  You have to keep making the next one.

Do you think your plays wouldn’t last forever?

H: My dream is that the things that we’re writing about at the moment and the current political climate is temporary and that the issues that people face now, in 2020, they (fingers crossed) will not face in twenty or forty years’ time.  Hopefully things will have gotten better. There are so many current references because it’s their current lived experience.  They (plays) might date, but we’re not making them to be something that people look back on.  It says something about right now.

M:  Hopefully that can be a record of how we lived in 2020 - that could be a powerful thing for someone to pick up.

Would you be able to work with/direct anything that doesn’t have this immediacy and political nature?

M: I’ve been for a couple of those gigs in the past, but I never get them.  I remember one interview where after discussing all kind of things, I was told “so – basically, you’re a social worker”.  I think maybe they had a point.  Maybe my heart wouldn’t be in a Chekov.

H: I have a slightly different hat on because I’m an actor as well as a writer and being involved in the theatre company.  I do comedy outside of the company, which I really enjoy.  I’ve always done that and that’s pre-dated meeting Matt Woodhead and never leaving!  What’s interesting is that it’s impossible to separate the two.  When I go to do anything I always bring this big “what are we saying?”  That doesn’t mean that you take away from the comedy, it means that you try to make the comedy more complex in anything that you’re doing.  Sometimes that really winds people up because people just want to clown around and be funny. I think it’s made me better in that field. I really like the other hat that I wear but the two definitely feed into each other.

If you couldn’t do this, what would you do?

H:  We have this conversation two or three times a week!  The thing is, for me, this is such a privilege.  I can’t think of a job where you’re not, in some way, complicit in all of these systems in the world and all that they bring.

M: What I like about the company is that we have three strands.  Good art transforms lives.  Engagement, work, empowering people to make their own stuff as well – is good.  And also, campaigning.  If there’s another job that is the Venn diagram between the three of them…If it wasn’t theatre, it would probably be something that is still quite small scale and can achieve those things. I used to work in a burger van – maybe they’ll have me back!

What would you do if this all went away?  At the beginning of the first lockdown, that was the panic – “Theatre is going to die.  If the buildings can’t survive, then theatre will die.”

H: That’s bollocks.  I think the thing that is really crap at the moment is that there are more working class artists – or young artists – who haven’t got the money in their bank account to afford to be freelance at the moment.  I just worry that we are losing lots of brilliant voices from the industry and only people who can afford to are able to stay. It’s not right about buildings because art finds a way.  We need it.  We need the expression.  We’ve all evolved and adjusted and it’s been amazing to see that things have not stopped, they’ve carried on.

M: You said this the other day – all of these articles flying around asking ‘when we return, if we return, how will we return?’ Is that the right question? “How can we return to normality?” I think the question should be – “how can theatre spaces be adapting and changing? What are the roles of arts venues?” During the pandemic, have arts venues made a case for themselves? Will theatre go back to how it was before?  Probably not.  Is there a hopeful conversation to be had about – is it time that arts venues re-calibrated their ideology and policies?  Maybe.

What has the “magic” of the pandemic – this forced hiatus – brought to you?

H: We’ve written a musical. That’s so scary!  My favourite thing about theatre is that it’s based on risk and we’re all complete risk addicts.  All of it is risk, from financial to if people are going to like it - it’s like an assault course.  This has been the biggest risk.  Here we are – theatre is ‘dead’ and we’ve just spent the last seven months writing this new piece of theatre, just hoping and praying that theatres will re-open.   Normally, we would be writing it on trains or in the evenings or around everything else that’s happening.  It’s given the most amount of focus, for me, that I’ve ever had, to write. I’ve never allowed myself to really get into a story, because you always feel like the world is so loud and busy  and there’s something else that you need to be doing or somewhere you need to be going to.  I would never, ever have allowed myself to just sit still for this amount of time.

M: It’s given an opportunity to reflect on what we do and how we can do it better.  It’s afforded us the time to do that as well.  The young carer project started in 2015.  We’ve always been look at what the legacy of that project is.  We’ve been able, during lockdown, to start up the Creative Makers project.  In four different areas, we’ve launched a Young Ambassadors Scheme where the young carers are learning to become artists and develop their skills.  They’re facilitating workshops with other young carers in their area, online.  They’re doing a sharing on Young Carers National Action Day in March.  Online has these young carers connected up.  Hopefully, we have empowered a group of young carers to try out being artists and see if it interest them.

It’s offered space.

H: Because we’re so ‘project to project’, we’ve never really put proper infrastructure in the company before. With this time, we weren’t suddenly moving on to the next project and it’s allowed us to write a business plan and think about what’s really important to us as a company.  As a result, the engagement arm has become much bigger and more robust.  What we do accidentally, now we can formalize and make a real part of the company.

M: It’s been a chance to watch other artists and be inspired by other art forms.  Just cutting out the hour and half to get to work, you’ve bought yourself so much more time.

Is there a separation between LUNG and Matt and Helen? 

H:  The reason that we made the company was in order to be able to do exactly what we wanted to do.  The two are hard to separate.  The values of the company are our values, the methods of the company are our methods of working. 

And if there was no LUNG?

H: The Venn diagram of the campaigning, the engagement and the theatre – if the theatre was to go away….  We would just continue to do either the engagement or the campaigning.  I do think those three things are equal within the company.  We would continue to run the youth groups and we would continue to run the Who Cares campaign and we would continue to facilitate discussions.  Just remove the art and do the art in our spare time!

Is this personal responsibility, artistic responsibility or political responsibility?  Or all three?

H:  I think it’s all three.  It started off as the political responsibility.  The personal was the best way to talk about the political. The personal stuff is always important but there is always a big aim to the project that is a bigger ‘P’ of political stuff.  Equally, I don’t think you could have the big P without talking about the human impact. We both believe that the best way of doing this work is through theatre, through storytelling.  One hundred per cent.  It’s why the answer is definitely all three because there are already people doing the campaigning, there are already people doing the personal work. It is the theatre element that makes it unique and unusual.  And challenging.  Theatre is the thing that allows space for change.

Tell us about the new musical.

H: Since last September, we have been running this youth group in Hornchurch, Havering, with children in the care system.  The offer to them was to come and help us make a musical about the UK care system and what it means to go through it.  It’s been led by them. We discovered about half way through the year, that there was to be an enquiry into the care system – a government review.  The young people spoke about how they didn’t think it would do a very good job because it wouldn’t be listening to the voice of young people; it would be looking theoretically at the system.  This is the ‘alternative’ enquiry that is led by them.  It tells the story of their experience of the care system but it also calls on other witnesses and looks at the different political things that have had an impact on the UK care system and how we’ve ended up where we are today. It’s a musical and it’s been made with this amazing band – Kudu Blue – Clem and Owen have written the music and Allyson has been the MD.  We have a sharing on the 26th which is a celebration of the process that we’ve all been on together.

Who are you?

M: The answer to this is that we’re a product of the Blair education system because we need you to tell us the answer to that question so…

M+H: …we can get an A*.

CAPTION THIS!

Helen Monks & Matt Woodhead photo: Alex Powell

Instigate, collaborate, invigorate

Anna Driftmier designs. But, for her, ‘design’ is an umbrella term. She really does so much more. She talked to us about choices made, helpful mistakes and slowing down to catch the poetry.

Who are you?

That could either be a really simple question or one of the deepest questions that I am asking myself. There are two questions swirling around my head recently, “who are you and what do you want?” So, to answer, my name is Anna Driftmier. I’m an American who has lived in a lot of places. I’m a scenographer and production designer working in live events and film. In terms of my profession, I don’t identify myself with solely with one genre or one type of art form, I jokingly say that I have a lot of practical and creative skill sets which allows me to take on board anything that sounds fun and interesting and challenging. My selection of projects is not really based on the medium but more based on the collaborators and the spaces. The term ‘designer’ for me is an umbrella term that allows me to manoeuvre and transfer my skill set between different areas. I work in opera, I work in dance and installation, I work in plays, I do post dramatic, experimental work but also a bit of Shakespeare.

Why do you do what you do? How did you get here?

I always wanted to work in the arts. My father was a professional musician, my mother is a painter and a fine artist. That choice of moving into the arts was always natural and encouraged. I started off wanting to be an actor. I was constantly trying to be an actor but not being very good at it, I never got attention or much acceptance. I auditioned for every single show in high school and didn’t get into any of them. I tried to help out backstage but they wouldn’t respond to my emails. So I hightailed it out of there when I could and moved to Italy. I lived in Rome and, while there, I found one poster that I could read in the high school there. It said, “TEATRO GIOVEDI.” “Wait, I think that says ‘theatre’ and I know the words for the days of the week - that’s Thursday!”. So I ended up joining the theatre group. I didn’t know what I was doing, I didn’t speak Italian, so they let me hold the curtain. I did end up having a speaking line in the show at the end of the year. I went off to University for undergrad, originally to do a double major in Classics and Theatre, but because I decided to go to Edinburgh (who have a wonderful Classics department but also because of the Edinburgh Fringe), I ended up minoring in Theatre...which meant I could pretty much do what I wanted! I went there with the thought that I wanted to act. It was then I realised that acting didn’t come naturally to me. Designing did. Working backstage and working in production was a much more natural process in the way that I had hoped acting would be. By the end of that year I had done three shows at Edinburgh Fringe and was involved in all the theatre programmes. I came back to the US to finish my degree and asked myself what I had done by doing a degree in Classics. I remember calling my mother telling her I’d made a huge mistake. Little did I know I had made the best mistake as that education has been an incredible foundation. I’ve always been good at a lot of things; I sang, I did seven years on the classical double bass. However, I’d never known what it was to be driven, having been good at all these things. Suddenly I had found something that humbled me every single day with how much that I still didn’t know. For the very first time there was this challenge; as soon as you open a door and you think you understand what’s going on, you open another door and realise you were only in the first room. I found that with Design, that’s what it provided for me. That’s what I was really craving. And maybe it was instinctual but, when I made that choice at the end of my first degree, I felt that something sort of clicked. It just felt right and I haven’t doubted that direction since then.

I ended up designing the main show at the end of my undergraduate degree and I just knew it wasn’t very good. I always have loved that saying, “You develop your taste before you develop your skills.” So, I thought I’d better go get some training - I didn’t want to just be a practitioner but I wanted to deconstruct the form. I wanted to be an innovator (which is a lofty term to throw around). I’m still trying to figure out what that is and sometimes I feel like I’m wading through weeds. “Am I really doing this? I don’t quite know, but I’m going to keep on moving forward.” I realised in order to deconstruct a form, you needed to know how to build it from the ground up, from the very foundations. That’s why I ended up applying to the Guildhall (School of Music and Drama). I needed to know how to paint a set, how to build a set, to find out how these spaces are created before I go on and study Design. The entire time I was there they told me I was in the wrong programme, that it wasn’t for Design, but I knew that and that I was there for the foundational skills. After two years of that, I ended up transferring over to Central Saint Martins for my Masters in Performance Design and Practice because I liked the institution’s spirit of innovation. It’s interesting now to see how that mixed background informs much of what I am moving towards.

What do you do with all these threads, do you keep mixing and matching or will it ever hone down? Do you want to hone down or are you happy playing with everything?

While I think the more you know the stronger you are, what you’ve asked is one of the fundamental questions that I’ve been asking myself this year. I have been sifting through a lot of these forms and trying out new mediums, technology, playing with form and looking back at the practice. Right now I’m looking at the practice itself and the cultures surrounding them. Who do you want to associate yourself with? What communities do you think will help you flourish and support you as an artist? You can appreciate and understand what they’re doing but realise it’s not supporting you in the way that you need in this continual growth. I think there is a desire to hone it down because I think honing it down will only strengthen it. Still, there is something to be gained from this constant expansion. I don’t think that we change as humans, I think that we expand. Life is a constant expansion from that initial core and the seed. What we preserve of our memories, our selective memories, shows us that we haven’t really changed as individuals but expanded. There is a benefit and a danger in too much expansion where you don’t take the energy and time to hone things down. And to find a stronger foundation in that. Our work is entwined with our identity and self-worth - to hone down would build a stronger core around that, that would help then propel yourself forward.

Has this forced break made any difference to your “collecting”?

Yes, it really has. I think - no, I know I’m a better artist now than I was in February.

Prior to this time, for both professional and financial reasons, I would get so excited the potential of everything and where it could go. I don’t bite off more than I can chew but I do take on just enough. But I think I take on so much that sometimes when I walk away I feel that I haven’t fully committed to that project in a way that I think I should. It all comes back to Latin. In my translations I would jump into a paragraph and just blaze through it. I say that everyone should learn Latin and Greek, not just for the literature but the methodologies around the grammar and syntax. It teaches you that, in order to full realise the potential of something, you have to work through it systematically. One word will inform an entire paragraph. If you just blaze through it, you’ll understand what’s going on and you’ll understand the translation but you won’t catch the poetry of it. Over the years, I’ve realised that’s how I actually approach a lot of things in my life. My passion and enthusiasm brings me to blaze through and I don’t slow down to systematically work through things. Pre pandemic, many of us were rushing, rushing, rushing. Now there is time to really (in the pre, making of and post production) work through things in a systematic manner and give it the time it deserves. It’s made me realise how much time it actually takes to really create a great piece of work.

How does that sit with you now?

I think it’s also a reckoning in terms of our relationship with regret and feelings of regret. In trying to not look back at past work with a feeling of opportunities lost; but, instead, to see them as opportunities of lessons learned. 

I have a couple of smaller projects in the works right now but now that this bigger opera has ended, I have more open time. I’m excited for the next project that comes my way. You’ll get the full me having thought about all of this.

When we come through the other side of the pandemic, will you go back to blazing through or will you be able to continue to breathe and take the time? Will you take that forward?

I want to say the latter, even though I know the former will happen more than I might want to acknowledge. I think, with our relationship with time passing, how easy it is to go back. It’s going to take a lot of discipline to not go straight back into where it was. I do have that discipline but being such a creative junkie, the potential for that creative hit will be so intoxicating. There’s no reason why the two things can’t work together. In collaborations, when there are two different options, most of the time I come into the room and say “we should do both.” It’s never a choice of one or the other. I try to collaborate with myself all the time.

I’ve also seen how just how stubborn I can be. So now, when I have to do things that are uncomfortable, I like to think of the process as similar to taking myself to the kiddie pool and get used to the water before moving to the deep end. It goes something like: “Anna, this is how we deal with you. This is how we get you to normalise these new practices and normalise this new mindset. We don’t throw you into the deep end but wade you in so that by the time you get to the deep end, you didn’t realise you’d got there at all…”

You’ve just finished design on a big production. How did it work during all things Covid?

We just finished the last showing of The Threepenny Opera with City Lyric Opera. It was a blending of lots of different mediums, with live and pre-filmed content, with recorded music, blended together with post production FX that are blended in with a live, interactive audience. Covid informed every moment of it but the idea behind the production was that when you watch it the show embraced the challenge of digital mediums to be innovative and exciting and that it wasn't just trying to replace the void left by live performance. Because of the small team, and due to the fact I work as a production manager, I had to organize and oversee a lot of the production logistics. I had to work with the team to design and build plastic recording pods with clear plastic so that singers could see each other and the musicians could see the conductor. All the costume fittings were done virtually, which involved shipping costumes out to performers and then everything else was done via zoom. In the venue we had to organise cleaning schedules of dressing rooms, rotations of dressing rooms, spray downs, bagging and steaming costumes, designated touch zones, prop cleaning and overall overseeing of the actual recording/filming space. After that there were all the zoom rehearsals, with performers that I never actually met physically and, on top of that, the collaborative process. We called it lateral collaboration. We realized, within Covid, in order to achieve ambitious things, everyone needs to truly commit. Instead of the traditional hierarchy within the space, there has to be a much more lateral collaboration and the willingness to try new things. It was a very intense process but overall very fulfilling.

Through this process I came to realise that even though I try to focus on both the performer and the audience’s experience, I never had never put as much though into just how much we make space for other artists. I walked away knowing that I had singers and performers that hadn’t performed in six or seven months and after that first day of rehearsal in that space, I had created that space for them. I didn’t really anticipate the impact that it would have. It makes me emotional now to think about it. We create the spaces for other people to create. Hopefully we can take that forward and the new feeling of teamwork in order to make these things happen. It opens up a new world of responsibility and hopefully will be able to continue with physical proximity with people in the room.

Who is it all for?

I think, ultimately, it’s for my collaborators. I think I learned all these skills because it allows me not only to build spaces for them but also to help realise and expand their ideas and their knowledge of what is possible. I sometimes say that my career is an excuse to engage in amazing conversations with incredible people all over the world for the rest of my life. What I get in exchange are the conversations and the process. For me, my profession is almost an excuse to play. I remember once when I was in Cornwall running around the woods, collecting all these giant sticks I actually had a flashback to when I was making fairy houses when I was seven years old in the woods of Washington State. And I’m there in Cornwall, in this beautiful forest saying, “I can’t believe they're letting me do this…” 

How has the journey of your art form (to this point) engaged your voice - personally, artistically or politically?

Four years ago with the election of Trump I listened to a podcast which offered some words of advice that really spoke and stuck with me: “Well, what can you do now? What as individuals can we do now? What are our responsibilities now? What are our responsibilities now as artists? How can we as an individual make an impact?” This is paraphrasing, but the idea was that we should try and do what we can to the best of our ability. In the podcast there was the question, “If not politically engaged, how can we, in our everyday life, be responsible?” And that can boil down to: be as strong and efficient and as good at your work that you can be and see that as a sign of leadership and mentorship. I’ve started to take my responsibility as a leader and a mentor quite seriously. I’ve had people come up to me and say “I saw you doing x, y and z and you gave me some advice and the week after I decided to apply for my Masters degree like you did.” I hadn’t realised that the conversation we had had inspired and supported that person enough to go off and apply for something they hadn’t considered before.

Who are you?

I’m just me. 

Anna Driftmier

The not-so-quiet revolutionary

Tunde Olaniran has achieved what we all dream of - having fun at work. “I don’t want to be bored”. We’re in complete agreement. We spoke about revolutionary roots, connections and awakenings.

In association with the University Musical Society at the University of Michigan

photo: Jordyn Belli

Who are you?

I am a person who is really creative and has a Nigerian name that defines a lot of my life in ways that I didn’t expect.  So my full name is Babatunde Bamidele Olaniran.  I’ve always gone by Tunde.  That’s just what I’ve always been called – I don’t even think of it as a nickname.  I live in Flint.  Flint, Michigan is an interesting place.  It’s the birth place of the labour movement and I was raised by revolutionaries.  I didn’t realize it, but I definitely was.  Living in poverty, being raised by revolutionaries, has given me an extreme sense of class consciousness.  I identify very strongly as a working class person, a working class artist.  I think that’s really important to say and for artists to get used to how that sounds for their own life. And I’m a night owl.

A “working class artist”.

I am an artist that doesn’t have the means of mass distributing my art.  I don’t own a record label, I don’t own a radio station.  I don’t own the companies that pay artists to put music in car commercials. I don’t own a car company that would hire or pay for a song.  Like most people, I don’t own the means to production in my industry. That is changing, and there are many incredible musician cooperative models that are shifting the landscape, but none of them are at a global scale that I know of just yet.

For me, that’s been really helpful.  In Flint, to this day, if you say that you’re an artist, people say “Oh!  You play the trumpet?  What do you mean?”.  It’s because the arts, unfortunately, haven’t really been nourished in a way where people can conceive of themselves living a sustained life through their art, as opposed to other industries in other cities. You know, if you live in London, you may not be the richest person, but – you could conceive of yourself being a stage actor, or being an actor, for example.  Somewhere, in the country or in the city, there’s someone who’s done that.

I was never under any illusions that I was going to be rich and famous doing art.  I just knew I really liked it and it was like any other job or any other career or passion – as long as you can pay your bills, there’s nothing to be ashamed of, if that’s what you’re doing.  (And you’re not Beyoncé!)  I think that can really throw a lot of people.  My mum said – “you have to get a degree.”  She wanted me to get a doctorate.  I got a masters – that was as far as I went.  She is a lover of the arts but she also said – “you can’t be caught out here without a safety net.  Unfortunately, we don’t get one built into our society at this point.  So you have to have something - you have to have something to fall back on.”  On the Nigerian side, it’s – you’ve got to be a doctor or something that lets them say: “this means power and wealth and access. Good.  You’re succeeding.” I had to form this identity to make sense of the world I was in and also to not beat myself up over whatever I might see as success or failure.  But, I feel that with the arts, we have these weird expectations.  If you say “I want to be a plumber when I grow up”, no one says “I really hope you follow your dream. Don’t give up on your dream”.  It’s not that deep!  For whatever reason, with the arts, it’s “good luck…” For me, it’s been a journey to help reframe, for other people as well as for myself, an understanding that being an artist can and should be like any other work, any other career.  Potentially.

Is that the “revolutionary” part?

No, but it feeds into it.  Flint was the site of the first auto workers sit-down strike.  From that point, working class people – working class black communities – grew an extraordinary amount of wealth and social stability.  Flint had the first community school model in the country.  It had one of the first sex-education programs in the country.  When people who aren’t super rich have a little bit more stability – look what happens?!  That leads you to think more radically about labour and power.  It attracted a bunch of people from all over the world to come to Flint and put up roots.  Flint has a university (University of Michigan-Flint) and that’s where I went to school.  It exists for a few reasons but one of the reasons was to give working class people access to a world class education.  So many things in Flint have been built by working class families to make their lives better and less punishing.  I feel that, sadly, it’s been stripped away over the past several decades.  My mum, my aunties – when I look back, I think “these people were revolutionaries!”  They were the ones leading marches, they were the ones organizing working class people to demand that the state treat them with care and dignity and respect, or demand that resources were allocated a different way.

With the graduate degree as a safety net, was the revolutionary act going off to do what you wanted to do?

Yes and no.  I actually got a job that was directly related to my degree.  I was making decent money.  I could progress in this career.  I hated it.  I was depressed and didn’t realize it at the time.  At the same time, I was kind of doing music a little bit in the city and was thinking “I really like this”.  I would play three hour shows and I loved it.  I really enjoyed making music.  I really enjoyed the feeling of writing a song and performing it.  I was increasingly becoming less and less satisfied at my job.  I was really stretching my mental capacity – working full time and having a semi-full time music career.  I was burnt out.  Then I got a really great commercial that paid a lot of money.  I thought – this could be my parachute.  I could jump and actually survive and not be evicted…!  That was 2016.  It was practical.  I thought – I have another safety net now.  I can try this.  I’m happy that I have the degree but I could at least convince myself that if this doesn’t work, for whatever reason, I can get a job somewhere, somehow, with this degree.  

I think the revolutionary part was the form that the art took, rather than the decision to pursue it.

I remember being in a meeting and my boss saying “Tunde – you didn’t tell us you were in Rolling Stone”.  I didn’t tell anyone.  No one knew that I was an artist.  I realized that I didn’t feel like a whole person there.  I didn’t care to share my art.  Was I embarrassed?  Do I not want to share that I have this other ambition or passion?  I was just very shut down at that job.  In a lot of ways.  I thought – this is weird.  I would sit in my car for a few minutes before going into work and stare at this lawn and not want to go in. (We actually shot a video about all of this – “I want to be in that car, staring blankly in the morning!”).  That was every morning.

That’s huge.  You were able to recognize the discomfort of one situation that pushed you into the comfort of the desired situation.

I think I got to the point where I was saying – this (the art) makes me deeply happy.  I’m not going to examine the shit out of it.  I just know that this makes me deeply happy.  I started in a band and, at a certain point, I wanted to do more than what the band wanted to do.  I started doing a few solo things and I had a few bookings and I was trying to add to it with things like light-up drumsticks and cute shit like that.  I wanted to dance, so I finally decided to bring dancers into the equation.  That was the point when I decided that I want to have fun on stage and it doesn’t matter what else is happening as long as we’re having fun.  We’ve had shows where there’s nobody there – we still have fun!  As long as I can pay my bills and be happy with what’s made.  It’s not for everyone, but as long as it’s enough to sustain a career…  Then I started getting messages from people who were affected by the art.  I can’t make it specifically for that, but aren’t these the things that are supposed to happen?  You’re good at it, you like it, it seems to have some usefulness – at least for some people.  All these things are together – I’m not going to over-examine it.  Just go with it.  That’s where I am.  I think, right now, because some things are out of the equation, like touring, live shows, being able to travel and be in different studios – I’m still feeling creative.  Which is a good sign.  The challenge is how do we do this remotely, virtually and still create?  I actually really like not being ‘perceived’.  Having an audience is great, especially when everything clicks and you’re having a great time. But it’s actually nice not to have to drag myself off to a photoshoot or a bunch of stuff that I would have had to do.  And even for the new single – I don’t have to be in the cover of this or that.  I don’t feel pressured to post selfies!  That’s a nice feeling and it’s re-enforcing that thing of ‘creating’ feeling really, really good.  So – why fight that?

I made a conscious decision to not do any shows this year, because I don’t know if we’ve got best practices figured out across the board.  The idea of having an audience makes me feel a little uncomfortable at this point.  It might be a bit weird, if, at some point we’re actually in front of an actual audience.

I think, too, that so many things are not going to survive the next two years.  Right now, if nothing changes, the vast majority of mid-size music venues are not going to exist.  Most of the big live promotion music companies are going to gobble up every other small promoter.  They’ve already been aggressively doing that.  Now, because of Covid, no one small or mid-size is really surviving.  That’s already strange, but I think the relationship, the vulnerability between artists now – we’re in danger.  And I think audiences are burned out and at the same time, craving something connective.  Now – you see everyone in the audience.  Maybe that’s better?  The audience shouldn’t be a mass.  We’re all people, in the chair, on stage.  It’s good to re-examine our relationship and our view or perception of an audience.

We speak to people about the “magic of the pandemic” in terms of the unexpected things have shown up in our lives.  What has it brought you?

I feel like “magic” isn’t the right word.  I think there are definitely lessons and challenges.  People change through everything.  Whether you have a good day or a bad day or nothing happens, you’re not the same, at the end of the day.  I would say the pandemic has uncovered a lot for me and other people.  It’s taught me some lessons about how fragile everything is – even more so than what I thought it was.  I’ve had people die from Covid. It really feels like an utter waste and so pointless.  There was no reason for this person to die.  So, for me, it’s felt like – damn, we’re really disconnected and that’s helping the state and the ruling class kill us.  The fact that we don’t know our neighbour, the fact that we don’t know each other and we’re scared of each other.  The conversations I have with people in my life and people who are coming into my life – we talk with less bullshit.

I think I’ve finally learned to create comfort for myself in my home. I have furniture and some things but I was in and out and I wasn’t here for long stretches of time. I thought – okay, if I don’t have pleasure in this space, I won’t be able to function.  I think everyone has realized that they have to learn new ways of caring for themselves.  I’m also unpacking things with people – things that I never examined.  We’re talking about race.  I’m having conversations with non-black friends that I am very close to.  I’ve never had any issues with them, but hearing them have revelations… Or them having their workplace suddenly become horrible in the pandemic, suddenly they’re labour organizers, when before, they were ‘happy capitalists’ – “I’m just happy to get mine.”  No girl, they are happy to let you die in the street if it means their profit margin goes up a few percentages.  Straight up.  I think a lot of people are becoming radicalized in ways where I want them to just keep going.

Have you been surprised by any of your white friends and things that have happened during the pandemic and the George Floyd incident?

No.  Thankfully, there have been no white people close to me who have responded in a confused way.  It’s interesting – blackness in the UK and the US are so different.  Conversations with black British family members, especially Gen Z/millennial are very different. Awakenings are different. Experiences have been different and experiences of oppression have been different. It’s funny how the idea of being ‘exotic’ means you’re not black and that’s prized.  Black Americans are rare, statistically, in the world. We have a rare experience, but I’ve noticed that in the UK there is often still a national identity that has a link. Maybe your family is from Ghana or Nigeria and that’s a strong connection that you have outside of being British.  But it also mixes, and I’m sure that’s generational, especially if you’re second or third generation. In the US, so much of Black people’s ancestral or ethnic identity has been erased, there’s a more common ‘something’ happening.  Conversations with one of my black family members living in the UK – their awakenings took me aback.  But at the same time, I get it.  Class is very different in the UK, too compared to the US.  You could be told to work hard and get off welfare and it could be black people telling you that as well.

I feel that, no matter who it is, there is some awakening, in some capacity.

There’s an undiluted honesty to your lyrics.  Is that planned or just who you are?

I think, because I didn’t have training as a musician, my approach to making music was initially half-emulating everything I like and half trying to entertain myself.  Hopefully, every person continues to grow and change and evolve. At this point, my approach to songwriting and creating music is – I want to enjoy this when I listen back to it, I really enjoy the format of certain kinds of music (those formats are really fun for me, how can I play in that), I want to create stuff that won’t bore me.  I never want to say something that isn’t true.  I never want to say something in a song that isn’t actually real or true or a different person to what I am.  Because I’m quite a silly, goofy, all over the place person.  I’ll be thinking about lots of different things.

I’m always really happy and excited when it connects.  I’m really fascinated with forms that work in music.  I’ll get really picky and technical in terms of, say - what’s the tension?  I guess it’s like anything – writing a play or directing a film.  You definitely want to study everything that’s happened before you sat down to do it, at least enough to get a feel for it.  And if you’re with a classically trained person who’s writing, it’s interesting, because they go for something that makes sense.  But for me, sometimes that is “technically correct” is not always interesting.  What’s enough to make people go – “Huh!!” and not “Uh-uh – turn this off!”?  I’m not always successful, but I’m trying to play that line of what’s enough to be a little “oh – what’s that?!” but not be totally alien.  I don’t want to be bored when I listen to this.  I don’t want to be timid, but I want this to be listenable. That’s a hard thing to balance, especially when pop music, contemporary music – it’s all about feeding into an algorithm so that somebody doesn’t skip your song on their Spotify playlist.  Your song performs better when it blends into every other song that’s playing.  So, you’re battling that because you want to get playlisted.  It’s a constant back and forth, a constant discovery and rediscovery.

What is the voice that you found when you were finding your voice?

A strong one.  The first music I made as an artist was in a band.  I had answered an an and they said they wanted it to be a metal rock thing.  I said okay, and then I just started taking over and started writing stuff.  I didn’t know I could write music.  Then we were playing shows in a city where you’re at a bar and people are just trying to go about their day and you’re having to get their attention and having the stamina to sing for three hours and perform – I realized that my voice was way stronger than I really knew or thought it was, physically.  Probably getting into recording my own solo stuff and then writing more intentionally without anyone else’s influence – I found emotional frequencies that exist that your body can generate.  I was thinking about the ways you can change reality with the sound and texture of your voice. I didn’t really discover that until I started working with a great vocal producer and we would do forty takes of something and then examine and put things together.  I have a strong voice and very flexible voice that I didn’t really know existed.

So, who are you?

I would say I am a person, trying to be creative, trying to be kind, trying to change the world around me and the reality around me to be more pleasurable and comforting for myself and others.

Tunde Olaniran photo: Breeann

WDWHI released 13/11/20. Listen here or here

Many parts, one whole

Community: searching, creating, celebrating. The multi-faceted, multi-talented Sarah Taylor Ellis talks to us about how the sense of community informs her work, her place and her life.

How did you end up here in the UK?

That’s a great question. I studied abroad in the UK three times when I was in undergrad and I fell in love with London’s theatre scene. I kept coming back because I was seeing a different type of theatre, a more experimental form and style, and lots of support for new writers and new works. I had always had on my radar that London would be a great cultural city for me to end up in. My husband and I started coming here twice a year after we got married (he’s also a composer) and we consistently saw some of the best, most expansive and thought-provoking theatre of our year in London. We turned to each other at the end of Part One of The Inheritance and decided that we had to find a way to live here. The election had just happened and that was a huge motivating force as well, to try and hopefully move to a country that was more supportive of arts and culture. I have been here two years now, and I personally have found more opportunity and fewer hierarchies in the UK theatre scene. In the US, if you want to have a conversation with an artistic director, you have to find some sort of fancy connection to get you there. In the UK, if you want to have a conversation with someone, their email is often on the website; you can reach out to them and they will have coffee with you. I have had many amazing collaborative opportunities over the past two years that I never would have had in the US. The UK has been a mixed experience overall, to be honest, but the cultural aspect, which was the reason that we moved, has been a great gift.

Why do you do what you do? What got you to this place of theatre?

I grew up in a small town in North Carolina called Albemarle. I started playing piano from a young age, I was an assistant dance teacher at my local dance studio – I was really passionate about that. The arts weren’t a priority in my public school, and I spent every lunch period reading in the library. I was very much an outsider longing for a place where people had similar interests. I’d never actually done anything with theatre before undergrad. I always had an interest in it, but I think I had only seen one stage musical and one play in my life before going to Duke University.

Duke had a programme that workshopped new plays and musicals before they premiered on Broadway, and they workshopped the musical Little Women my freshman year. There were five dollar student tickets, so I went every single weekend, watched this new musical develop (I was obsessed with the process), and realised that this art form was the perfect fusion of my passion for literature, dance and music. I have always been interested in the multifaceted nature of the musical. It is such a hybrid form, with singing, acting, dancing, design, so many divergent parts coming together. The same is true of opera. We often talk about these art forms as if they are fully integrated, but I think the excitement comes from the difference, from luminous moments and performances that snap out of the story to surprise and captivate us. I was drawn to this genre and started working as a musical director in the student theatre scene at Duke, and from there I started composing. I especially came to value the ensemble aspect of making musicals.

What does musical theatre do for you?

For me, musical theatre can provide a lens into a different world – perhaps even a rehearsal for a better world. Musical numbers can feel like expansive utopian moments. They can offer an open sense of possibility and a visceral sensation of different ways of being in the world, different ways of constructing of identity and community. As a kid, that was especially important to me and gave me a foundation for dreaming myself to a place I felt I belonged. Now, it provides a structure of community, one that I probably wouldn’t have otherwise. I don’t know if opera does quite the same thing for me personally, although my own music does often straddle the borders of musical theatre, art song and opera. I think that opera can generate a ‘transcendent’ or ‘utopian’ experience, but I feel a bit less at home in opera because of the white male structures that still dominate the scene. Musical theatre is very guilty of that as well, but I think the musical has moved on to embrace more diversity than the opera world.

So how are you moving forward?

Right now I am orchestrating a hybrid musical/chamber opera of The Trojan Women. We are aiming for a production this coming April at Columbia University, directed by MFA candidate Rebecca Miller Kratzer. Given the pandemic, we are remaining flexible as we make plans and building safety into every aspect of the performance. Another one of my musicals, These Girls Have Demons, may have a digital workshop in the spring. That would involve a Zoom setup, which is challenging as the piece has a lot of dense harmonies – but producers are being incredibly tech savvy and making the most of the current circumstances. The pandemic has been a heartbreaker as I was actually on the verge of having my first professional show at the National Theatre when we went into lockdown. I had written music for a production of Hamlet for young audiences, and we got to tour for several weeks to local schools, which was amazing; kids are the best audiences. But we never made it into the Dorfman Theatre. Hamlet felt like a real launching pad, a significant moment for me. For so many people in the industry, work has been put on pause, and the pause feels indefinite to a degree. There’s only so much you can do digitally.

If this is an indefinite pause and we have those digital options, do you see this as a way of working in the future?

This is the complicated thing, isn’t it? I write for live performance; I don’t really write for recorded performance. For now, my attention has turned more to my academic writing; I am finishing a book for Methuen Drama. I want to get back to composing for live performance as soon as it is reasonable to do so, but I am less invested in the digital possibilities at the moment. I don’t think there’s the same communal experience online.

Why do you write? Who do you do it for?

It’s for a community experience. I’m always happiest when I’m writing for a specific group of people, or for a show that will bring together a specific group of people. As an example, with The Trojan Women, we wanted to pull together the most amazingly diverse, unique blend of music theatre and opera performers – all ages, all races and ethnicities, all different backgrounds and musical experiences. We wanted to tell a story that felt significant and timely. I don't feel that it would be the same if we weren't all in the same room, collaborating together. These Girls Have Demons is a rock musical about a group of teenage girls who get possessed by demons that enable them to express all the rage, sexuality, and sheer feeling that they’ve been taught to repress as well behaved little girls; there are a lot of dense choral moments, a lot of harmony, a lot of sisterhood, and that doesn’t operate in quite the same way when you’re not together.

Fundamentally it feels like I write for an ensemble, I write for community. My favourite part of the process is when I get to hand over the pieces of music to the people that will be performing them. Yes, I could write all day by myself at my house, but I don't feel any purpose in that - the purpose is the bringing together. I think that’s why I enjoy teaching so much, too. It’s always about the process and the bringing together. In some ways I’m trying to create an experience for the students like the one I would have benefited from when I was growing up, using the arts to bring together a community of people in difference.

Suppose we never have “live” again? What then?

I don't know the answer to that immediately. I think I’m clinging to the hope that eventually we’ll return to a state where we can all be together and create together safely. On a day-to-day basis, I’m learning to adapt to the new digital reality, but writing for it has not excited me yet. My immediate solution is that my husband and I are moving to Berlin. We’re seeking a place where we will be safer and maybe have even more creative possibilities than in the UK. We didn’t anticipate moving again, but I resigned from my teaching job just before the start of the school year due to health and safety concerns. Losing my work visa meant rethinking what we valued and where we wanted to live. I think the pandemic has forced everyone to reexamine their lives and priorities. Culturally, London has been such a wonderful fit but the handling of the pandemic has been horrifying. I am such a logic driven person – very linear and organised. Looking at what both the US and UK have done (and not done) in response to the pandemic has been traumatic; the governments’ responses fly in the face of science and value the economy above human life. Berlin was never on our radar as a future home until recently, but we have never received such a warm welcome to a city before. It’s been an unexpected, winding journey over the past few months, but I do think it’s leading us to a new creative community where we’ll be happy and grateful to be.

I’m eager to be back making music and theatre live and in person, but I know I’ll return to the rehearsal room with important differences after the pandemic. Black Lives Matter has urged institutions and individuals to deeply examine who they’re working with, who they’re making work for, and how they can be more open and inclusive in every step of the process. I have been especially inspired by how my students have led the way in these conversations. I’ve always emphasised hiring a diverse cast in my work, but that diversity hasn’t always extended to the creative team. I want to ensure that my rooms are fully inclusive moving forward. I hope that both institutions and individuals hold to these commitments when the world begins reopening. There’s no going back to where we were before this moment. That’s a really positive thing.

Who are you?

I think who I am is always changing and evolving, and I’m made up of many different parts. Americans often define themselves by their careers, so I am used to introducing myself as a multi-hyphenate composer/musical director/dramaturg/teaching artist/academic. I don't think that’s who I really am. Maybe, rather, I am just a person who cares deeply about other people and community, and that has really come to the forefront during this pandemic.

Sarah Taylor Ellis

We did say she was multi-talented…

An act of self-love

In our conversation with Sèverine Howell-Meri, it became very clear that this young woman is sure - of her past, her present and her future. Join us in this recognition and celebration of self.

What have you done since the beginning of the pandemic?

At first, nothing. I took a break. When lockdown first hit, it was a really scary thing because nobody knew what was going on. At the same time, it felt a little like a blessing in disguise for me, because I was exhausted. I had done panto over the holidays, took a huge break in January and had started getting auditions again in March when the pandemic hit. At first, I didn’t do anything. I was offered a job and literally two hours after I got it, it was taken away because the country I was going to was put on lockdown. I didn’t even have a chance to miss it. So, I thought I’d sit about for a little bit. Then I moved and moving was quite difficult because a lot of people were scared and there was a lot of fear going around. I’m now living with my partner in this wonderful flat which I’m really grateful for. That was a distraction as well, because we were building up our home, our little safety nook, away from everything.

Then, as the weeks turned into months, I started to think about if I wanted to go back to work and what kind of reason would I give myself for doing so. I started to have a proper think about why I do what I do. Why am I an actor? Why am I a creative person? Why do I sing? Why do I do all of that? I started taking workshops with really amazing creatives, one of which was Rikki Beadle-Blair. He talked about reinvention and finding your purpose in the arts and when I did some workshops with him, he posed some really, really interesting questions and simple exercises. When we did them in depth, I figured out why I did what I do. Once I’d done that, I started writing because I couldn’t be acting. I’ve been doing a lot of writing and really enjoying it. I’ve also started my Youtube Channel over lockdown sharing advice to actors during this time and I adore it. Taking full ownership of my work in that way and providing free advice to others like the advice I received has been very rewarding.

Why do you do what you do?

I do it because I want to prove that somebody like me, who hasn’t done three years of training and who was fairly young when she started working, is able to do the things that she has dreamed of, since she was very young. I want that to be an example to other people who are going to do it, too. And I really want to prove to people that, if you’re really frustrated at not seeing exciting stories for you or yourself represented in the stories that you watch, you can create your own. I want to create my own stories, I want to write really exciting characters for myself and my loved ones, so that we are doing the work that other people told us that we couldn’t do. I want to do what other people have said is really difficult and not possible and do it really well.

Were you told it wasn’t possible? Did you experience barriers?

Yeah, there have definitely been barriers and people have told me I’d only do certain things because of the way that I look. I remember someone told me that I would only get cast in roles because of my appearance, not for my acting. People have definitely said not-so encouraging things. But, I enjoy that because it’s a challenge and it’s like “ok, cool, I look forward to exceeding your expectations of me". I enjoy it when people underestimate me because then it gives me a reason to work really hard. However, I like working hard for myself first, above anything else. I’m trying to move past those feelings of wanting to please other people and please myself first instead.

I’ve always wanted to perform. I’ve always loved performing. It’s the one thing that has never felt like a chore and that’s something I’ve held onto from when I was really, really young. Before the pandemic I was getting very caught up in the industry side of things, thinking about money as well as exposure and popularity. I was starting to prioritise those over the craft and the creating. I had to take step back and look at myself. I didn’t want it to become a chore, something to do to pay the rent. I mean, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that and many of us have had to go there and that’s ok, but I have to love everything that I do or it will become really difficult for me.  I did have these thoughts before the pandemic but Corona has also forced me to think about it this way.

I think I was getting there before lockdown. I was making more decisions about what jobs I took before the pandemic. Now I feel like I’ve had a bit of a restart, a bit of a reboot. I’m going to start looking at my scripts with the same excitement that I did when I first started a couple of years ago. Before lockdown, I found myself getting bored at the theatre but now I’m excited about it again so I’m really grateful for that. It’s reminded me why I love it.

“Bored before lockdown”.  What would have happened if there were no lockdown?

Ooh, that’s an interesting question. I definitely would have carried on. I’m working on Hanna Season 3 at the end of the year, so I would have been doing that sooner than we’re about to and I love being a part of that show so much. If lockdown hadn’t happened... I wouldn’t have quit but I would like to think that I would have eventually started asking myself these questions because I was feeling frustrated by the kind of work I was doing before anyway.

I think what was frustrating me was the kinds of stories I was seeing for the black and brown people in the industry, as opposed to the actual job. I really do like looking at scripts and bringing them to life but I was frustrated at the lack of detail for some parts, especially for my darker skinned friends who were put up for roles in similar shows. As a mixed-race woman, I have a lot of privilege, in the sense that the industry kind of sees me as a “more acceptable” version of blackness sometimes. I have a really hard time with that. I think with lockdown and everything that happened this summer, people are beginning to think differently, which is great. It’s about time, but it’s great it’s finally happening.

Are these changes a window of opportunity or are they here to stay?

It’s really difficult to say. I think we’ve seen a lot of performative ally-ship over the summer, which is disheartening because that does make it feel like a window. I think people are inspired to tell stories that haven’t been told before and that makes me think it’ll have much longer lasting effects. I have to think that they will stay, otherwise I’ll go crazy. I have to think it’s not just a “moment”.

What was different about this moment?

What was different was that it was happening during a global pandemic. It forced people to pay attention to it. Everything else has to stop but amongst a pandemic, racism is still happening. It made people pay attention in a way they haven’t before. Some of my white friends didn’t see why it had to happen when it wasn’t safe to protest in large groups. My reaction was that there was a bigger lens on it because of the pandemic but essentially, it was the same conversation that had been going on for a really long time. It was just amplified by the fact the world had come to a stop.

Is it now your responsibility – your job – to educate?

I don’t think it’s just my responsibility but I do have a responsibility to ask questions about the way things are done now, particularly as someone who is new and coming into it, because that’s part of my learning. I learn through asking questions. In that way I’m very lucky to be working with Amazon Prime and doing shows with them. And now, given that I’ve built relationships with lots of people that work there, for me - I just want anti-racism on set to be a normal conversation. That’s all I ever wanted, so I do feel like I have a responsibility. For example, if I’m the only person of colour on set (which I have been), no one else is going to bring that up but me.

You said you always knew you wanted to perform.

I remember when I first started to learn to play the guitar and sing in shows that I did at music school on weekends - it made people feel very happy when they heard me play music. I like making people happy and making people smile.

Do you need to see the responses of others? If you couldn’t see their joy, would you still do it?

Yes. It’s not just that it makes people happy, there’s another side. What makes me happy is the accomplishment, particularly with singing. With singing I go into more detail than I would with acting, the work is harder maybe because it’s more muscular for me. The voice is muscular, you have to keep it working to keep it going. Even if no one were watching, I would feel very proud of myself when I’ve learnt to sing something difficult. There’s a huge joy when I make a noise I couldn’t make two weeks ago, when I hear what I’m capable of through time and practice. It’s the discipline of it that I love, which is difficult, but the results are rewarding to myself. It’s a bonus it makes other people happy. It’s an act of self-love, in loving myself and loving what I do. Then I can offer that to other people. With acting there’s a similar feeling, especially if I’ve had to learn an accent or delve into someone that’s very different from me. It’s the study of it all and applying it in person. When I watch Hanna for example - the first time I watched it, I felt really self-conscious (which is quite rare - I’ve gotten used to watching myself back because I have to do it all the time). When I watched it with my family I felt really proud of myself because I had worked hard on constructing this person from scratch and felt privileged to be given the role.

The only TV roles before that were guest roles on Casualty and Doctors. On Casualty, I was only in for one day but it was incredible. The level of detail they went into was amazing to film only one scene. Doctors was the complete opposite! I was a guest role named part throughout the episode. I was in for two days but it was so quick. For actors who haven’t had three years of study, it was such an education, two completely different ends of the spectrum. It was such a great learning experience for me. Because I did more theatre before I did Hanna, I was really nervous. The camera picks up everything. You cannot hide – there is no lying, no covering up. In theatre, you are very vulnerable but onscreen you are for a different reason. Right now I prefer onscreen. After filming Hanna, I went back to theatre. I did panto and I was terrified. It is a different kind of discipline. They are two very different practices and I love them both for different reasons.

Tell us about your writing. Is it for yourself, others or for both?

Both I think. I’m collaborating with Rikki. I’ve contributed to monologue anthologies that he’s writing for three underrepresented groups: LGBTQ+, working class and ethnic minorities. I’ve written one for the ethnic minorities anthology and am currently drafting one for LGBTQ+ anthology. The one for ethnic minorities is based on my own experience and it’s called “Locs". It’s a mixed race child, Jules (any gender) talking to their black mother who has told them that she doesn’t like her child’s locs. When I did faux loc extensions on my hair, my mother said she didn’t like it and we had a conversation about it. I’ve based this character on that experience and made it applicable to anyone. Anyone with a protective style could do it but I made it specifically about locs because I don’t know any monologues about them! Also, locs are permanent and have a lot of historical meaning and I wanted to incorporate these reasons. You tend to write what you know and then change it around.

You’ve mentioned not doing the “Three Years" (drama college). Why is it so important?

For a long time, I wanted to go to drama school and be an actor. I thought drama school was my ride or die and that it would be the only way that I could do well. Now that I haven’t gone and I’m doing things differently, it takes me by surprise how much value and importance I had put on drama school before. There was a big conversation about British actors versus American actors and why lots of Black British actors were getting cast in Black American roles. One argument that was put forward was that people here have a very different approach to performing, drama school being a big part of that and part of the theatre culture here.  That could be why. Also - initially, lots of people told me I should go. And then I didn’t get in. Then when I did get in, I turned it down - it wasn’t the right school for me. Having spoken to black and brown recent graduates from that school, I knew they didn’t have enough texts, either written by or featuring black and brown people. Also, I had done a foundation course at drama school and when I left, I did another course called Alt. Actor Training. When I was at drama school, I was one of five out of forty-seven. When I did Alt., there was one white actor out of the sixteen present. I learnt more about myself in the three months of that short course than when I was at drama school for six months. Being surrounded by people that look like you who also love what you do makes a huge difference.

What does the future look like, not just for you but young actors, non-white kids that would like to do this?

I get really excited when I think about it. I see so many people creating their own work with platforms like Instagram, posting short films on there and submitting them to festivals and the bigger side of the industry. The way that lots of people use the tools that are available to us now is really exciting. It’s people taking ownership. When I think a lot of the generation who are in school now, they’ve been through so much. When I was at school, people didn’t talk about racism the way they do now and that was only a few years ago. I get excited about the kinds of things they’ll create because they’ll have less tolerance for bs, even less than those who came before them.

I went to see START at Theatre Peckham. It was their Young Company, 16-25 year olds who were essentially doing their showcase. It was written and directed by Toby Clarke (who also directed me at Alt., so I went to support) and also devised by the Company. Everyone was socially distanced, the seats were in pods of twos and fours. I spoke to some of the cast and Toby about how the rehearsals were and how, because of the safety measures, things have to evolve.

And what happens when there’s nobody (or almost nobody) there with shows?

I don’t think theatre is the same without an audience. I can love the act of reading a script or singing a song without an audience - that’s where my joy starts, but I don’t think theatre works without an audience. I love that some shows were shown online. The National Theatre putting all of their performances online, Hamilton coming to Disney plus was incredible, the accessibility was amazing. But bringing theatre online is not the same kind of replacement. I’d love it to be both from now on - how theatres will be able to manage that, I don’t know but it would be wonderful if that could happen. The way that theatre has moved online has been refreshing because it’s new, but without the audience, it’s not the same thing.

Who are you?

I am Sèverine. I am a daughter. I am a girlfriend. I am a sister. I am a singer, writer, actor. A Youtuber! I am a creative person. I’m a Taurus. And I really love what I do. I love what I do. 

Sèverine Howell-Meri

Subtle radicalism

There was no doubt that writer/director Laura Attridge knew what she wanted to do from an early age. She talks with us about clarity - of both vision and intent.

Photo: Benjamin Durrant

Who are you?

What a question! I am a human being who makes art and tries to connect with people through that art, tries to empathise through that art. I went into my line of work to make things and to empower others. I had, at a very early age, aspired to be an opera singer. When I finally got there, I discovered that I took much more pleasure in sitting in an audience and saying “I made that happen" – whether that be a piece I’d written or a performance I had directed. It was a sort of revelation to me to discover that. I was much more drawn to and, I guess, validated by this and drew much more of my artistic power and felt more of my artistic self - making things happen - than I did performing them myself.

How did you transition from singing to writing/directing??

I had previously done an undergraduate degree in English Literature, with the intention of going to Conservatoire straight after. I was doing a lot of theatre and a lot of poetry. I tapped into the creative writing scene when I was doing my degree and singing became very compartmentalised during that time. I didn’t apply for Conservatoire when I left. When I graduated, it was the height of the recession 2010 and I went into a West End administrative job for one of the bigger companies for musicals. I was so miserable. Someone said to me, “Why are you doing this to yourself?” I thought I’d do something sensible, sort of in the area I’m interested in, to see where it takes me – I need to make a living and be ‘sensible’. “What do you actually want to do?” “I’ve always wanted to be an opera singer.“  “Well, why don’t  you?!”  I spent two more years in administration, which were a wonderful foundation for my freelance career now, but eventually at age twenty-five, went to the Royal College of Music as a singer. It was there, during that year, that I directed my first opera. I had previously done a lot of ambitious theatre direction at school and alongside my undergraduate degree, with the wonderful theatre society at my university, as well as some small freelance things after that. I’d also always written - mainly poetry - but it wasn’t until that year at the RCM that I first directed an opera and wrote the libretto for another and my mind was blown. I was supposed to go back and start a Masters, having done a year of a Foundational Diploma. I called them, apologised and didn’t go back. That was just over six years ago. I went into freelance directing, writing -  primarily opera but also a bit of theatre. I also continued with a bit of poetry and I just haven’t looked back. I don’t miss singing at all.

You spoke of directing in your undergrad years when you were doing English Lit. What made you think that you could direct? Are you that kind of person who says, “That looks cool! I’m going to try that!”?

I was that kid at school! I was in the privileged position of being in a school where there were two school productions a year, including one led by a Sixth Former. When I got to year 11, my GCSE year, there was no production. I said,” This is not on, this is absolutely not on!” I went to the Head Teacher said that I would like to put on The Importance of Being Earnest, produce it, direct it  and wanted to play the part of Algernon please. And they let me do it. I so enjoyed the experience I then in Sixth Form went to a different school, did lots of performing but also made the effort to say that I wanted to direct something. I went to University and joined the thriving Theatre Society, waited a couple of terms and then pitched a play I wanted to direct.

The kernel was there early. You did a sideways dance to singing and then came back.

I’d always been singing. I did my grades at school, a lot of choral singing, recital singing but decided not to do undergrad singing. I wanted to keep my options open. I was very able academically and I wanted to do something academic, meet a broad spectrum of people and be a bigger fish in a smaller pond in terms of performance opportunities. But I think it started a lot earlier than that - the kernel was probably there from my childhood. There’s a really embarrassing home video of me, aged around seven, and three or four of my little friends and we’re all dancing around the living room to an old recording of the Ugly Duckling. Thirty seconds in I go, “HOLD ON, HOLD ON – let’s start again because we should make a group like this and I come over here and then you do this". Everyone is still dancing and I’m  shouting, “STOP DANCING! WE NEED TO START AGAIN!”. I run to my Dad who’s filming and shout,  “STOP FILMING! WE NEED TO MAKE A PLAN!” I think I was probably a director from then.

What would you do if you weren’t doing what you do?

All my school career tests said I should be a barrister or a librarian. I think I’d probably be a high powered lawyer or some manager of a company -something really high powered. And I’d probably have an ulcer from working far too hard. Something high powered, scary and power suits.

We’ve been recently speaking to people about the enforced hiatus that “magic “of the pandemic has given us. What has been your experience?

I’ve been reflecting on this a lot. The summer was a very specific experience. I had been lucky enough to escape from London to the countryside of Devon with my partner. I had several commissions on the go as a writer, a specific amount of time and a set parameter. I moved house at the end of August, away from London and more work was postponed or cancelled. (I should be at Glyndebourne right now. )We’re in this big sea of indefinite… I don’t know how to describe it. I’m really valuing the time to think about what matters. I’m also doing a lot of reading and listening, research into scientific studies of both well-being  and happiness - what actually makes us happy, what makes us human, what brings well-being, life satisfaction. With a secular eye, I’m looking at some of the teachings of Buddhism and teachings about mindfulness, about how we think about the world. I’ve been doubling down on my yoga practice, (I liked yoga before it was cool!) on and off the mat. I feel like, if I get nothing else out of this time, I may well have sown the seeds for a lifetime where I see myself as a human being in a totally different way, see my place in the world and I how seek happiness. With another six months of this or however long it takes, I’ll continue my practice and study of these ideas both scientific and spiritual. I’m laying a foundation for a big shift in the way I live my life.

This growth - how does that relate to your work?

I don’t have a straightforward answer to that yet as I feel that I’m at the very early stages of this journey. I had a late start in theatre. I’ve gone past the point of berating myself for not starting earlier but I think I’m a better artist for it. All the instincts that I’ve had thus far to respond to our society today. Opera is a weird profession to be working in if you want to respond directly to “now”. But as a director and a writer, directing canon work, bringing a new perspective to that and writing new work, I’ve become more and more aware of always wanting to be socially engaged, challenging to an audience. There are artists and directors now, who take the perspective (rightly or wrongly) of the only way to do that is to deconstruct something or raze it to the ground and create something that “resembles" the original piece. I value that sort of experimentation when it’s done with a knowledge and respect for the art form. I want to take it out of its chains of the patriarchal and capitalist - the systems that created these particular conditions that this art was made in. I find it hard to quantify my work, it’s subtly radical. It’s completely radical! I’m learning to figure out, maybe come to terms with, the way I work.

You say radical and subtly radical. Which one are you?

I find it really hard – maybe it’s a female thing or an early career thing. I find it hard to talk about my work because I don’t talk about it in big brush strokes.  I think I’m a subtle worker.

There’s a way I aspire to direct that it should feel so simple, so straightforward, so clear, that you’re able to have immediacy, accessibility in a way that lets you access all the different layers you might understand as an audience member, that you bring your own story over to it. In the rehearsal room, I talk about clarity all the time. I aim for clarity in storytelling which includes depth, which includes a feminist message most of the time, which is usually saying something pretty darn radical! A reviewer came to my Don Giovanni two years ago and said “I was really worried from all the publicity that this was going to be a big, feminist lecture and it wasn’t.  It was a delight in storytelling and there were these little feminist aspects that told you about a woman’s experience.” My thought was that they had been slapped around the face with a feminist message but they had gone away thinking about it in a way that is much more insidious and much more subtle than if I’d  said ,” I’m deconstructing Don Giovanni so it’s  unrecognisable.”

I’m a reasonably strong willed, intersectional feminist. I’m not perfect but I’m doing my best. It’s something that I care deeply about - it’s just the way I see the world. I don’t sit down with a piece and wonder how I can get my agenda into this, how can I make it a feminist piece? I bring myself and my story to how I direct and the way that I write. One of my favourite philosophies about making art is from Declan Donnellan, who differentiates between originality and uniqueness. And for me to trust in my own uniqueness is enough for me to come to a piece, new or old and bring my artistry, my perspective, myself and my story, as opposed to striving to be original.

Tell us about the Isolation pieces. How did they come about?

I’d spent the first two months of lockdown feeling decidedly uncreative. I had mixed feelings about what was being produced online very rapidly. I couldn’t and didn’t want to contribute to the noise that was going on. I was feeling disconnected, helpless, powerless, passive – forced to be passive. Two months in and I thought that maybe I should do something, make something that responds to this feeling because it wasn’t just me. I went on a series of walks in the countryside with my partner and there was one walk when the spark of something came to me, and I kept asking, “Is this a thing? Is it an idea?”. Essentially I came up with a plan, took it to my regular collaborator, Lewis Murphy and asked how he would feel about the project, the idea being that we commissioned ourselves for a series of songs, for a series of performers where we brought to life their experiences of lockdown. In these miniatures, we were aiming, not only to showcase their talent, ability, artistic output but also to showcase their unique humanity and humanness as well as their human and artistic experiences of lockdown, capturing in both words and music. We set up a series of interviews with the artists and made an extraordinary discovery. Three or four interviews in, I noticed that every single conversation, no matter what they were going through or the difficulties in their lives, at three-quarters of the way in, they started talking about a moment of joy, of hope, optimism, of something wonderful that had happened or the thing that was keeping them going. This was it - the common thread that best showcases the humanity in all these people. That shift in everyone’s demeanour and everyone’s storytelling was so profound and so beautiful that these were the moments I wanted to focus in on. It was an extraordinary discovery and for me, solidified why we were doing the project and why it was so important in this time of division and fear and also physical division. The final aspect of that was that we asked each singer to nominate a charity to champion with their song because as well as their artistic feelings of helplessness, of their identity crises, it could give them a moment of feeling that they were doing something real in the world.

What was your ‘moment’?

I think it might have been on that first walk where I turned to my partner, thinking that maybe I had an idea.

Where are you in this work?

I feel like I’m in all of it - the text, the relationships with the performers, the liaising with them. I sent the scores, they fed back on all the texts and I’ve seen it through from beginning to end and helped as much as I could on the video content. I think at the heart of my work is a desire for connection and empathy, of reaching out and storytelling, human to human. I think empathy is radical and it is as powerful and extraordinary to create connection as it is to create an explosion.

So what has the magic of the pandemic brought you?

I think it’s made me more certain that I have something to offer and even if I don’t know how to talk about it yet, that it is as valuable as the voices that might be louder, or more declamatory than mine, in terms of the work they or I make. My instinct is to help, empower and that excites me.

Who is Laura Attridge?

I am an empathetic storyteller, maker, empowerer of others. I think ‘storyteller’ is the best one and I know that encapsulates empathy and all the power that storytelling brings.

Laura Attridge

Photo: Jamie Wright

Hearing, feeling and a vibration in the soul.

Rob Birch, vocalist for the Stereo MCs, talked to us about all things performing, communicating, giving and receiving. Good gigs, good audiences, good music. Enjoy.

We spoke briefly, just after your first outdoor gig, which was sort of like a drive-in.  What was that like?

We got there and the sound check was really good and I really enjoyed it. It was great to be on a stage and I thought – this is going to be really good.  It had been such a long time since we’d played, probably the longest period of no activity for almost twenty years. The sound check was so exciting but the weird thing was that the gig was a real anti-climax.  You knew that there were some people out there, but you couldn’t really see them.  Something in you was trying to reach out to something, but it wasn’t really responding.  It was a mental battle to see if I could get through to the end of the set and still feel – sincere about what I was doing.  I think there’s an audience out there but I don’t know how many there are. I was saying to the people “come on, honk your horns, flash your lights.  Let us know that you’re feeling it.”  I wasn’t really getting a great deal of that.   This knocked my confidence because I just didn’t know what I was dealing with. 

I don’t know what people thought of it. I didn’t really come over the way I wanted to and I don’t really feel I gave my best shot there, at all. I felt that about both of the gigs.  I made mistakes that I never normally make, playing songs that I’ve played for years.  I thought – what’s happened to me here?  Has something happened to me in this weird gap?  It’s like I’ve been taken apart and I’ve put myself back together again.  It’s like I’d been through a time warp and something got into the time machine and isn’t quite right.  I don’t know if it was because we were surrounded by cars.  The sound – it was just different.  How you hear things is really important.  And to a performer how you feel and hear things is very important, because it gives you a vibration.  It lets you know that the energy is right.  All I can think is, when it came to the actual gig, it was just very unnatural.  And, for a band, where you need to connect with people but you’re deprived of all the necessary ways of communicating and visual communication – you couldn’t hear them. 

The audience is the gig.  Without the audience, it’s a rehearsal.  The audience, really, is the concert.  If you’ve got a good audience, it’s going to be a good gig.  Even if you play badly, it will still be a good gig.  Because, if they’re a good audience, they want to get down.  And they’re going to get down.  They haven’t paid they’re money to get in and have a bad night.  They’re going to find a way to have a good time.  You’re just going to have to find a way to bear with it and if you’re feeling a bit rough, just hold tight.  It will be okay.  I just couldn’t figure it out. Maybe I shouldn’t overthink it.

Do you have more of these coming up?

We’re meant to.  Things get put back and put back.  I mean, if they’re not going to allow people into football stadiums til March, I can’t see them allowing gigs.  But, as all the footballers say, how come you’re allowed to go into the pub and watch the game but you can’t come into a stadium?  I mean, that doesn’t make sense to me.  You can sit in a sweaty pub watching a football match but you can’t sit outdoors in the open air watching a game.  I don’t get it.

Did it occur to you that this period of inactivity was going to go on?

In the back of my mind, I tried to be logical about it from what they were saying about the pandemic and how they wanted to handle it. If they don’t want people to get together until they’ve got a vaccine…   who knows how long it could be.  In the front of my mind, I was hopeful and thought – well, we’ve got gigs booked for December, you never know.  But that soon fizzled out – who knows?  They’re saying March, they can go back to football stadiums. Maybe we’ll get some gigs then.  I hope so, because I prefer the little club gigs.  I love doing the little club gigs.  If we can get some more of those, it would be great.  We can get out there playing again.  It is a bit of a drag.  It does take a bit of the purpose out of life…!

So why do you do what you do?

I’ve been enormously fortunate. I left art college – well, photography, film and TV college (well, they kicked me out) - because, really, I wanted to be a musician.  That’s what I wanted to do since I picked up a guitar at the age of twelve.  I’ve never had to have a normal job – a 9-5 – in the whole of my life.  I’ve had ‘jobs’, but it was more cash-in-hand, cloak-and-dagger jobs, where I needed to get some money.  I worked at washing up, demolition, the hotel, cleaning toilets or whatever, cleaning people’s rooms to buy gear and survive.  That was all great motivation for me to want to succeed.  At the back of my mind, I thought, there’s no point going out and trying to get a proper job (not that I could anyway) because you’re just trying to walk it 50/50.  You know, if you really want to do what you want to do, then prepare to be poor. You’re in this place and you’re looking at this disgusting wallpaper, day after day and it motivates you and you go – I’m going to work harder.  I’m going to stop being stoned all day and watching TV and I’m going to get my shit together!  One way or another, I’m going to find a groove where I will, at least, have a journey and not be a sad figure for the rest of his life. It changes you.  I’ve been very lucky because I’ve never had to get a proper job.

I do what I do because I love doing it, making music.  I love that feeling of inspiration when you make something and you think – that’s great, I really love that. Some of the feedback that we’ve had, that I’ve never expected from things that we’ve done, has been unimaginable.  We were sitting in a little flat in Battersea and we’ve recorded this music in our front room that reached all the way across the other side of the world.  This thing that we made here, they listen to it all the way over there.  It affected them.  They got something out of it.  And it made them feel a certain way.  You know, people have said things to me about our music and what it did for them.  That just makes the whole thing worth it.  That’s why you do it.

If I didn’t get up feeling excited about turning on my gear and listening to grooves , then, I’d say I shouldn’t be doing it because I’m not feeling it anymore.  I still feel that feeling.  I’m excited about it and that’s the important thing.  It’s the same thing I was feeling when I was twenty – that excitement about what you’re doing, that excitement for music.

Now, with this forced “break”, what are you creating?  And why?

For a start – we’re running a label (connected), releasing afro-house, somewhere between that and techno.  We release a lot of young artists – it’s quite difficult for musicians these days because you can’t make much money out of producing music.  The input of music has been enormous over lockdown.  We’ve had more releases on our label than we’ve ever had.  We were almost putting out a track every week. I don’t think people’s creative output has been stunted by any of this.   You make music because you live in the world and this creative energy needs an outlet.  That’s why you’re a musician.  Over time you might find that you’re making different sounding music or maybe you feel that your purpose within this role has changed slightly. It’s the belief that good music will last.  People are still going to play it.  People will still stream it.  People will still buy it.  

It’s a weird time.  You have to maintain your mental strength and mental shape.  If you’re not surrounded by a little community of like-minded people where you can all thrive off of each other’s buzz, it can be a little tricky and you can start to go a bit – your envelope starts to shift.  It’s a bit odd out there.

I live out on the coast – I’m pretty much on my own here apart from when my kids stay.  It can be pretty weird, being on your own and not really talking to anybody for a few days.  You do start to feel like ‘this is a bit odd.  I’m feeling a bit weird about this’.  There are periods where you have a really good creative streak and it’s important to stay on it.  If you come off it, you start to think about stuff and it’s not healthy.  I try to look at it as – I’ve been given this time to try to develop myself.  A lot of positive things have come out of this. 

What would you do if you couldn’t do what you do?

That’s a weird question.  I’ve never really entertained that concept to be honest.  I’ve always winged it through life.  My partner in music is very together and it allows me to not be together.  To a degree.  I need to not be together.  A little bit.  I need to have a non-schedule.  I like to be able to go – ooh!  I’ve got a feeling about something – rather than feel like I’m slaving away at something, like a job.  I want to make music when I feel like making music.

You talked about never having a “proper job”.

I say “proper job” because that’s how it’s always been put to me.  People look at it and they think you’ve got a breeze of a life.  I’m not knocking my life.  I think it’s a great life and I’m grateful for it but it does have its ups and downs.  It doesn’t mean you don’t work hard. I work as hard as anybody.  I think, if I couldn’t do this, I’d like to teach somebody. I don’t have any degrees in anything, I don’t have a musical education.  I can’t really play an instrument apart from guitar.  I use all these instruments and I know how to get things out of them, but I couldn’t play somebody else’s song.  I’m not that sort of a musician.  I’m right down at the basic element of music where I want to make something and I figure out a way to make it.  So, I don’t know how I could teach anybody anything, but if there was anything out of my experience, I could teach, I would like to be able to give it to somebody.

If another opportunity to do a drive-in- gig came up, would you do it?

Initially, I thought, you’ve got to be very grateful for any gigs at all.  If everybody else said – yeah, let’s do it! – maybe I would, because I want everybody to be all right and everybody needs a gig. All the back line guys, the others in the band – everybody needs to do something.  And some people are having it harder than others – not just financially but mentally.

I’d still probably do it again.  In a way, it’s feels like something I want to conquer.  I’d like to beat this.  Maybe it’s a mindset that I’d like to figure out. I need to figure out how to use any skills that I might have got over the years from performing and navigate through those channels. For me, it was un-navigated territory (a drive-in concert).  

If we had another opportunity at it, I’d probably take a far more meditative view and concern myself more with my own performance and not worry so much about the audience.  The more I tried to draw people in, it almost had the opposite effect.  It’s as if I was treading on ground that was a little bit sensitive.   Normally I like to talk to people when we’re playing.

So – who are you?

Now?

Who were you – before lockdown? And who are you now?

It’s an emotional question.  I can’t help feeling that I’m a different person.  I feel a bit like I’m a Rubik’s cube that was taken apart and then put back together. I’m feeling a bit different. I’m still essentially the person that I was.  But I strive to be Rob B The Man on the Mic.  As long as I still have my marbles, I will strive to be that person.  I’ll come down and I’ll turn on my gear.  And I’ll try to get down into something.  Life has been difficult.  For many people, for many different reasons.  Some people have problems which are – BANG – right in front of their face.  My problems have been different.  Lockdown left me no room to escape from them.  Normal, pre-lockdown would have allowed me to escape them.  This dark cloud rested over the mountain and, unfortunately (or – fortunately) wouldn’t go away.  

It’s a time to look deep into yourself.  What can you do?  You either give into all of this or you look deep. Try to find that bit of compassion for yourself and people around you.  There’s not much you can do about anything else.  What will be there for you at the end?  That thing you’ve got inside yourself.  And that little moment in time which is the present, will be there with you at the end. 

Right now, I’m trying to live in the present.  I’m trying to be present-moment-Rob. I guess I’ll figure that one out.

Staying well, being well, making music.

Lea Cornthwaite directs choirs. Lea Cornthwaite directed choirs. Now that this coming-together-to-make-a-joyful-noise has stopped, we spoke about the impact on the health of communities and what the future might hold.

Who are you?

I’m Lea.  I am a singer, a choir leader, an animateur, and dog controller.  Well – was.  Until recently.

Why do – did - you do what you do?

Singing?  Well, it’s a nice thing to do, isn’t it?!  It’s a pleasurable thing.  I went to music college, I did bits of performing - opera, song, that kind of stuff.  I didn’t do a great deal of that after I left, because you needed a fair bit of money to carry on doing that and I didn’t have it.  Eventually, I started doing work that was with other people -  which I actually enjoyed far more than singing myself.  I do enjoy singing.  I quite like singing in a group – singing in a choir or an ensemble – more than singing solo.  But I got a bit more out of working with other people, to help them sing. So, I went from singing myself and gradually got into working with kids. I did a lot of work in the opera world for the major opera companies, working with non-professionals, children, adults, preparing them for staged productions, mostly.  In the last few years, I’ve been MD-ing choirs of various kinds, from people with mental health issues (in the community  and in a secure hospital) as well as “London’s coolest choir” ™ - Some Voices.  I’ve worked with them for five years and done several of their gigs.  They are amazing, doing their own arrangements of mostly pop, funk, hip-hop – all sorts of stuff.  I get a great deal of satisfaction in helping people get to where they want to but don’t necessarily have the background to do it. That’s what I’ve mostly been doing for the last twenty years, really.

Here we are in a pandemic.  What are you doing now?

That’s a good question.  Nothing, really, is one answer.  When it dawned on us that the whole thing was going to stop, it just seemed obvious that there would be nothing for a while.  Everyone started trying to think of ways around it and the only thing was the whole zoom thing and the only way of performing was recording separately and someone trying to mix it all together.  The lockdown was announced and immediately, all of the choral stuff that I was doing (working towards three gigs in London and Newcastle) just stopped dead.  I did some sessions for Some Voices on zoom, but they stopped pretty quick – it just didn’t really work the way we wanted it to.  I did a project with Garsington Opera, which was working with stroke survivors and also with the Garsington Adult Community Company, who I’ve worked with for about seven years now.  We discussed how that might work and we ended up doing that over zoom.  It was good for the participants, I think, because it got them to see each other.  In the end, we put together a piece (it will be a film, I think) but it meant they all had to record their parts separately and I took the tracks and mixed them into something.  It was a lot of work, in that respect.

For me, on the musical side of it, the thing that’s wonderful about being in a room of people is how they grow and develop and bring a performance to life.  That’s just not there.  It’s just a bit like screaming into the void.  The way we were having to work, you’d have to mute everybody.  You can’t hear them sing.  You can’t feel the power of the sound or have the satisfaction of hearing them hit a certain harmony.  You can’t hear any of that.  It’s almost like you’re performing the “teaching”.  You can’t really teach anything.  You can go through it but then you have to stop and ask everybody individually how they got on with that.  It’s not feasible in an hour or an hour and a half session.  You can’t hear them.  You can see them.  There’s no way of knowing how people are getting on.  If you’re a workshop leader or a music director, you’re constantly reading the information that’s being given to you, in real time, so you can see and hear what’s going wrong, what they need to look at.  On zoom, you can’t see any of that. I found it a colourless, slightly depressing thing to do.  I get that it is really important for the participants and I think they got something out of it. I didn’t get a lot out of it, myself.  It did make me realize that it’s important when you’re leading something, that you get something out of it, as well. But the virtual thing - you’re not talking to people, you’re talking at them.  I’ve not seen any of the films that we made, but I’ve seen a lot of the same kind of things that were produced.  There’s no difference between watching that performance and any old video.  There’s nothing special about it.  There’s no live-ness about it. And it allows people to hear themselves singing together (even though they weren’t).  It’s got something, but it’s a very, very different experience to actually singing together, in a room.

I did a few of the zoom things, but it’s not for me, really.  Hell!  What am I going to do?!

What are you going to do?

I don’t know! Being a music director, working with people - especially working with kids (but not just working with kids) – takes an awful lot of energy.  That’s another thing – I found zoom sessions, even though they were much shorter than an actual rehearsal, were far more exhausting, for some reason (I’m not quite sure why that is).  I found them very, very draining, without any of the boosting energy you might get in a live rehearsal, when things are going well. I’ve been thinking about how I might move on and whether it’s in a musical direction or not. I’m in a fortunate position in which I can take some time to think about what that might be.  Also, I’m not twenty-four, anymore…  In the last twenty years, that’s all I’ve done. Lots of different aspects of it, but nothing else but music and it might be that that’s not really sustainable.  Even if things go back to normal, whatever normal is, the future is very cloudy, how it will all turn out.  Professional opera singers might go back and perform.  They might be performing live, online, which to me as an audience member – you might as well just watch any YouTube video.  And why is that different to the other 7,000 other live recordings?  I don’t understand that, but that’s just me.  I’ve just worked pretty solidly for twenty years, so suddenly stopping also meant – “ahhh – I’m just going to chill a bit.  Because, you know, it will only be for a few weeks, before we all start again…!”

Now we know that it’s not “for a few weeks”.  And now we know that, of all live performance, singing is the one that is, potentially, the most dangerous.

Singing and specifically, “amateur singing”. Professionals can go back and sing in their socially distanced – whatever.  Until the middle of August - the government changed the rules to allow, potentially, non-professional singers - of which there are many hundreds and hundreds of thousands in the country (people like the London Symphony Chorus to the smallest group who meet in the church hall – ten people) to meet. There were very onerous guidelines about risk-assessments. And then, in just the last couple of days, they’ve given new guidance, which has thrown it all up in the air again.  It’s damaging to what is a very strong and important tradition of music, of community music.  And that’s the kind of music that I’ve been involved with, as a professional, for a long time. I’ve seen, over the years, many people rely on those groups for personal expression and also social activity.

Years ago, I was involved with a choir that was explicitly built around well-being.  In recent years, research has suggested that the social aspect of being with other people is, at least, as important as making music.  It was very important for a lot of people.  Some never sang.  Some would just come and be in a room with other people.  For them, that was a massive step and a very important thing.  To suddenly take that social aspect out of it means it’s not going to work for a lot of people.  The social aspect of that sort of community music making, especially for people who might suffer from bad mental health or are isolated…  I’ve heard so many times “if I didn’t come here to this session, I wouldn’t see anyone else”.  And that’s not just in choirs that are based around mental health.  We’re social animals and that aspect of music is about being with other people.  It’s really important that that’s not left out.  And it has been left out.  The quality might not be the same as the BBC Singers, but it is important to the musical life of the nation.  It’s important to the people who are making the music.  We’re not made to just be consumers and passive listeners.  We’re musical people.  Everyone is, to some extent.  That part of the nation’s musical life has been devastated.  Just shut down in one go.  No clarity about when it might start again.  It’s hard to see football matches going ahead and team sports going ahead and not their own thing.  It’s more than just a hobby for some people.  it’s actually helped them stay well.  That’s being taken away.

Singing with other people can really boost your confidence. “Oh, you’ll be alright.  You’ll be back to your lovely hobby at the end of six months…” No.

What can we do to get back to some version of this social experience?

This might be one of the big problems.  There’s very little that we can do.  I’ve seen on social media a lot of choir directors scrabbling to try and make something happen for the people they work with and trying to get their heads around the every-changing guidance.  It just makes everything that much more difficult.  When you’re having to do a risk assessment for ten singers, masks, covid-secure – it just becomes so joyless.  I can’t see, within the strictures of the present laws and the willingness of local councils, how any of this will change.  So much is out of our control.  There is concern for people like me, who lead the groups.  But I don’t think there is concern about the people who do it.

If that comes back, some of it might be the same.  I imagine it’s going to be a lot different to how it was before.  I’m not sure I want to be involved with that new, different way.  You see lots of posts of people saying “yeah, we’re going back to our choir rehearsals”, all wearing these special singing masks.  Up to thirty people.  I don’t want to be standing in a room, faced with that.

You’re not interested in working in this way.

I don’t think so.  All of the things that are a personal interconnection, that is the bedrock of any kind of choir group, any musical ensemble -  all of these barriers are being put in. For instance – the rules that you’re not allowed to mingle in any way – that’s such an important part of being human, especially as a musician of any kind, from the top professionals, down.  That interpersonal thing.  I don’t think that would be for me.  It would be like a zoom session in real life.  All of of those things would be the focus, rather than the people in the room.  But that’s just me. I’ve got no desire to go into that kind of situation.

Then what will you do?

I don’t know.  Before I did music, I did a lot of things that are really lovely but are useless to make a living out of.  Before I did any music, I did a foundation and a BTEC in art with the intention of going to art college and not making a living that way!  I was probably much better at doing music in the end, because I managed to make a living out of it.  Not doing it is not something I’ve even considered for more than a nanosecond in fifteen years.  It would take some time to just think about what I can do that will  to pay the mortgage.  I think it will end up being more of a mixed thing.  I’d still like to keep some of the artistic relationships I developed over the last few years, like Garsington and places like that -  places like that who really understand the importance of working with the wider community. They absolutely get why it’s important and what they and people get out of it.  Things like that, I would definitely consider continuing.  Things like commercial choirs (by ‘commercial’, I mean people come and pay to be part of it), I’m not sure how that will pan out in the next year or two.  It’s hard to make any plans.

You spoke about the ‘mingling’  - would you miss that?

I would.  I do.  Before the lockdown happened, I was in London, doing stuff with the choir there.  We were gearing up to a performance, it was a good deal of fun.  The sessions are normally full of good vibes.  A lot of people are there because they want to be somewhere, do something, they’re learning, the arrangements are great.  I do miss that.  I was gutted for them (and for my income, of course.  Let’s not pretend.) when that suddenly stopped.  And also, it does make me worry about the long term effects for those organizations.  You know, the Southbank Centre – yes, they’ve lost this, that and the other, but they always get their central funding.  The Royal Opera House – the same.  But all of the dynamic, ‘roots’ organizations, they don’t have that luxury.  So, what the arts scene will look like – the music scene will look like – in two months’ time, is anyone’s guess.

Yes, I will definitely miss that aspect of it.

I quite like ‘making’ stuff. I’ve always made things.  I’ve sewn things and painted things.  So – there may well be something there.  It will be a mixed economy.  I’m quite happy with my own company, my own thoughts.  I enjoy being with other people.  I also don’t mind being stuck in a room, in front of a frame or a canvas.  The big answer is – I just don’t know.  I’ve got the luxury of not having to rush too much to find out.  Maybe I should have spent more time during the lockdown thinking about that.  But – I didn’t.  I’m enjoying the days and the garden and the little front yard and the flowers that are blooming and hearing the birds.  Simple things like that.  It sounds like a cliché.  Like a lot of people, we don’t know what’s happening now. I might be pushed financially.  Of course I will be.  But hopefully I would have thought about it by then. I could probably go back to all the stuff I’d been doing, but there’s no guarantee that that’s going to happen.  If you work in opera – especially community projects – they’re all planned for years in advance.  As far as I know, I’ve still got stuff ‘happening’ next year and, obviously, I’ll keep all of those.  But there’s no guarantee as you get towards three weeks before it’s supposed to happen, there’s another local lockdown.  It’s impossible to plan your life in that.

Are you okay not planning anymore?

We live in our diaries.  I’ve not even looked at a diary for months.  Everything that was in there has gone.  I was supposed to have done some corporate stuff but, because people are changing the way that they work, I don’t know if any of that will ever happen again.

You might find me in a year’s time on the checkout.  I doubt I’ll get the job, though because they’ll say “you’re over-qualified.”  Or too old.  Or not quite old enough.  I’m guessing I’ll be doing some of the long-term musical projects that I’ve been involved with.  And some ‘making’ of some kind.

So – who are you?

I don’t spend a lot of time living in a space thinking that because a part of who you are depends on the day.

Who are you today?

I’m just someone who is enjoying company.  And someone thinking “so what am I going to do with the rest of my life?”  I’m the same person as I was before the pandemic.  And will be the same person up until the day I die.

Lea Cornthwaite

Engage. Exchange. Replenish. Renew.

We talked with the artist Adébayo Bolaji for just over an hour. We spent that time doing exactly what it says on the tin (see title…) Challenging, thought-provoking, entertaining and always generous. Enjoy.

Photo: Amoroso Films

Who are you?

Who am I. I think it’s better to say –who am I becoming, rather than “who am I”.  On one hand, people call me an artist. I make things. I make paintings, I make sculptures, illustration, theatre and film.  And poetry. Those are concrete things that I do.  I don’t really like to use the expression – “I make things”, because I feel like I discover things and I feel like they are two different notions.  “Making” feels a bit more concrete, as if I always know exactly what I’m going to do, whereas I’m discovering what I am always going to do.  And that’s more exciting. I would say I’m an explorer.  I like to explore creative things.  No – I like to explore things and through exploring, use creative ways to find out what I’ve explored.  And they seem to come out in painting, sculpture, direction for film and stage.  But I’m generally just exploring.  It’s a constant state of curiosity.

Is the journey part of the result?

It’s the whole thing.  Process.  I remember Peter Brook saying that the beautiful part of making theatre for him is in the making, in the discovery.  And that when he had found it, he was done.  Then he wanted to go back again. I realized, when I was acting, I loved rehearsals and I loved process. For me, the joy was in the process.  I think a lot, I’m asking “why does…?”  “Oh, that’s an interesting discovery – what can we discover next?”  So, my joy is – wow – the earth is filled with so much richness, do we not want to understand how everything works?  The human mind is filled with so much richness – don’t you want to understand how people think? I think that’s why I love conversation because, in conversation, you can find out why someone thinks the way they do. I’m less concerned with what’s just come out.  I’m more concerned with – why did you say that?  What’s making you move?  Why did you do that?  That’s why I pick up materials when I paint quickly, because, they’re just the means.  They just happen to help the process. I’m definitely looking for something.  And I don’t even know what I’m looking for.  I think I just wake up in the morning and I’ll say – “okay – what can I learn today?”  I think I’m asking that subconsciously, it’s not even that those exact words are in the forefront of my mind.  It’s almost like, if I dig deeper, I’m asking – how can I grow today, how can I be better than yesterday?  And everyone is probably looking at what I’ve done yesterday and I’ve left that….  People always come to my studio and I say “oh, this is an old painting” and they’ll ask how old.  When I say “last year”, they’ll say “that’s OLD???” it is to me.

When have you done enough “digging”?  When have you explored enough?

I don’t know.  It’s like cooking a meal.  You’re improvising and you put salt in – is that enough yet? And you taste – needs more.  You put a bit of lemon in and everything just goes – boom, bam, bam.  That’s one way of looking at it, where for you and your senses, everything just hits at the right spot.  If you go over, it’s a bit self-indulgent.  It’s nice, it’s still flavoursome, but it’s going to be a bit too much.  If it’s under, you’re not courageous enough and you can’t put that extra, little bit more.  It’s just an instincts thing.  With some pieces, it can be purely instinctual, a real feeling.  If the painting is completely abstract, I feel that in that abstraction, I’m exploring some kind of existential idea that is multiple questions.  I’m not deliberately going in and questioning x/y/z.  It’s just a feeling of all sorts of stuff.  and then they all just seem to merge and we’re done with that question.  I can feel it.  If it’s a figure, I could stop at one stage and someone could go – oh yeah, that looks like her.  But, there will be something about you that’s vibrating in me and I’ll feel that I haven’t reached that point yet.  It’s an instinctive thing where all the flavours hit. And I go – that’s it.  That’s what I want you to eat today.

Is it the same process when you’ve directed theatre?

That’s different.  David Mamet said – “you understand drama and storytelling because of an audience. You understand how boring you are or how interesting you are when you have an audience.”  When you have a moment in storytelling, when the audience ooh and ahh, you have them engaged.  Like Brook said, theatre is not complete without an audience.  To me, a painting is complete without anyone.  It’s just me and the work.  Then you just leave it out there.  But theatre is this continuous circle where there’s an exchange and an engagement – an immediate engagement, as well.  What you’re constantly doing is being responsible for how each moment affects the next.  You become more consciously aware of ‘plotting’ and having a real understanding of cause and effect.  With a painting, I’m not necessarily thinking about the plot.  I’m capturing a moment.  That moment will be something different for every single person.  The way they will experience, where they experience it, will always be different.  Theatre is a completely different experience.  Also, there’s a collaboration between me and the writer (if I didn’t write it), if there’s music in it – with the composer, with lighting – with every other kind of medium. There is now a collaborative effort to bring all of those sensibilities and ideas together to serve the plot. There is something that I am deliberately serving.  With painting, I’m serving what is going through me, in that one moment.

Were these two art forms entwined at all? Is there any loss, now that one can’t happen?  Has the visual taken over and defined you?

I don’t perform, in the classical sense, anymore.  That was a conscious choice.  I only make theatre.  So it hasn’t affected me in terms of looking for acting work.  I stopped doing that ages ago when I decided that I was a full time visual artist.  If anything, because I own my own theatre company – I think about the following regarding everything I do:  the first impetus is not money.  I have ideas and I want them out.  When they come out, I’m thinking how are they going to be experienced.  How will I eat?  How will I make money?  Thankfully, I’m able to make money from my work, so that affects how I eat.  But who’s going to want art when all they want is bread and water?  Who’s going to want something on their walls?  However, I don’t stop making because that’s not why I’m making.  I’m making because I’m breathing.  I also use my social media, not to market, but to engage.

Funnily enough, I’m actually making a musical with a composer at the moment. Because of the pandemic, I have the time and the space in my head to consider this idea, which came to me, almost gushing.  With the time that we have, I’ve thought – let’s not worry about where this is going to go on.  Let’s just make it.  I feel that if something is coming to you, it believes it has a home.  That home may not be now, this year, but it’s definitely coming to me for a reason. If it’s coming to me, it’s coming to me for a reason.  One thing I’ve learned along the way is to listen.  If something comes again and again – if I ignore it, I feel sick. You have to be open to the fact that an economy of some sort will still exist because people are existing.  An exchange of some sort will still exist, so ride the wave, because the wave might be – we’re going to start communicating differently.  Just keep listening.  We may not be in physical galleries anymore or physical theatres any more.  That doesn’t mean that what’s coming through us stops. 

“I just want to make music”.  I say – make it.  “I just want to be a singer and my career is over.”  No, no, no – what you want to be is famous. You can go to a park, right now, and sing and have people around (if you are talking, intrinsically about the joy of singing).  You can do that anywhere. What you’re talking about is not having the recognition that you feel you deserve.  That’s absolutely fine, but be specific about what’s annoying you.  The actual art of expression – you can do that anywhere. But saying that you can’t sing anymore?  Because they don’t recognize me?  That’s what it’s about. I say it with passion because I had to have that conversation with myself.  Why does another human being give me intrinsic worth?  What the heck is that?  They breathe just like me.  What’s this ‘I can’t do this anymore’?  Says who?  Who is telling you that?  Who are they?  Why is their opinion better than yours?

Where did that recognition come from?  Was it instilled in you?  Was it always there?

It’s been instilled by my parents, from day one.  Especially from my my dad.  I grew up in a very spiritual and faithful home, so they would quote and say things to me.  But even those things – they don’t register.  They are good to hear, because I think they are seeds.  They are like rain, trying to water ideas. I’d get stubborn and try to push them away, because of fear and lack of self-esteem.  After a while, you start to learn and you start to go – you know what?  I hate feeling like this.  I hate feeling like I’m not worth anything. I know, deep down that I am. I know I am, but I’m still giving people power. If I take it away from them, then they don’t have it.  So – I’m taking it away from you and I’m going to keep the power with me and my work.  Then I have people telling me “ahh – you’re so free!”  What do you mean I’m so free? I’m just doing me.  I didn’t ask for permission.

In light of the George Floyd incident and what has happened since, how has that rippled into you and your thinking?  Has it informed your art and your digging and exploring?

My work, objectively, does pretty well – it will see growth.  But there was one week when it saw extreme growth.  What was happening was a “Support The Black Artist Movement”. I don’t have a problem with the phrase ’black artist’.  There are friends of mine who want that title because they are expressing a statement and an experience. I am an artist and I am black.  That’s who I am.  I’m an artist.  You don’t go to a white man and say ‘white artist’.  You don’t do that.  Why am I being objectified?  There were people who had seen me before but didn’t look at me properly.  Now you’re looking at me and now you love what I do, you’re sharing and reposting – “5 black artists you need to follow” – and I can see they think they’ve done a really good thing. It’s all well intended. But all I could see was a sort of positive discrimination in a different way.  Do you really like what I do?  Or is it “I really like him”? I was being shared a lot but not followed. It was as if they were just sharing it to clear their conscience about supporting black people and putting it on their Insta stories.  But do you really know what my art work is about?  And just because I paint bodies that are black, to exemplify and amplify the beauty of black skin, sometimes it’s metaphorical.  It’s not about race.  It’s because I like that colour.  But now, I’m falling into what you think is ‘black art’. 

How do you pull yourself out of that hole?

When I have consciously tried to pull myself out of that hole and any type of hole – that’s when I’ve been very controlling about how I’m perceived.  I do very much manage my own ‘branding’.  If you want your career to go in a particular way, you manage it, you’re strategic. For example – I was being pushed into African art, which is another whole thing.  “You’re an African artist”.  Am I?  What is that?  First of all, Africa is a continent and has many different countries in it that are very different.  What do you mean when you say ‘African artist’?  Do you mean someone who is responding to their environment?  Or responding in the way that an artist typically does?  Because their environment might, by default, be African, they are an African artist? What does it mean? Here’s the dividing line – I feel that there are people who understand what they mean when they say ‘African art’.  There are African stories that are typically African and are being told.  That is African art.  The people that don’t understand that, they just see that you’re black, your name is Nigerian, so you must now be doing African art.

I think you miss the mark when you have an agenda.  Either your agenda has to do with a need to be loved – you want people to like you, or you want to make money.  With the first one, you’re always putting yourself at the centre and you’re supporting your friends or you’re going on riots or you’re doing marches, you’re finding new companies, saying that you want to help society.  But at the crux of it, you want society to love you for being a good human being.  You are helping people, you are doing nice things but it’s always led by your need to be loved rather than a genuine need to help the people who need to be helped.  Because if you really want to help someone who needs to be helped, you just listen to them.  You don’t study them.  You listen to them because, then they can tell you what they need.

How do you deal with the agendas?

I don’t any more.  The work has grown and there’s only so much management control you can do.  Even on a very small level – if you make a piece of art work and you put it out on a table, you cannot control what people think about it.  You have to leave it.  All you can do is say – this is what I intended, this is what I feel about it.  That’s it.  Some people are going to get it and some people are not.  Ideally, we would love for everyone to get it but that’s not reality.  As my dad says, when you die, people still talk about you.  You can’t control it. On Instagram, people would comment and accuse me of things, say horrible things.  The first time it happened, I would start getting into discussions with these people and defending it. I was empowering them. I can control it by just deleting it, blocking it or not replying.  Replying was feeding it. The fear is “what if people believe what this person has written?”  Well, you can’t control that either.

We refer to the “magic of the pandemic” – time to reflect and see the world differently. What has been its effect for you?

When the pandemic first started, I started seeing everything, come onto the internet. I’m not going to knock it. If your circumstances have changed, respond positively to it, so I’m not going to knock it. Where do you expect people to go?  They’re using what’s closest to them and I actually think it’s a good thing.  It’s a way for you to just be yourself and connect with the world.  It’s beautiful.

I thought – I’m just going to paint.  I tried.  I didn’t want to paint. It was just hanging around me.  I thought – what do I want to do?  Let’s start with the thing that makes the work – my body.  Me.  What are things that I need to change?  What are things that I don’t do?  What’s the planet saying?  What’s god saying?  What is being said to me that I should listen to and respond to?  I said – I’m going to go for a walk.  I rarely go for walks.  Because I’m always on the move.  I LOVE WALKS.  I love the park.  We were blessed with good weather!  It’s almost like someone is screaming at you and you’re not listening.  Look at the simple things.  You can have a conversation with a friend or family member that you didn’t think you could have.  You don’t have to spend loads of money. Look at how beautiful the world is around you.  I started retraining, I went and got fit again.  Let’s look after me. Let me find some time to do some reading. Let me just learn some new stuff.

I was still connecting on the internet, but I was probably sharing old things at first - stuff that people hadn’t seen for a while.  The, I thought – hold on.  I’ve always wanted to do sculpture and I just threw myself into that.  Why not?!  And it’s opened up more opportunities.  It ignited the other part of my brain.  It pushed me to do other things.

I was meant to have an exhibition in New York.  I couldn’t.  That went online.  I always make sure I’ve got content to engage with, so I have that on the side.  But opportunities were opening because I was exploring my craft a lot more.  Also – people had time to sit and look. This is why I say – do not sell.  Engage.  Make engaging content.  Yes, people can be bored and look for things to buy.  But right now, people have the time to read your stuff and look properly.  I think the background of theatre helps for platforms like this, because it is an exchange.  I don’t deny myself or deny my own ideas, but I like people and I like getting people involved. I like to know what people think.

So you think that now that the world is trying to normalize, that people will still make that time?

Not everyone.   I think some people will.  That’s not judgement.  We all have different teachers.  This could be the right teacher for you and then for someone else, it’s something else that teaches them.  I had to say to myself – don’t forget what you’ve learned.  The phrase “renew your mind”.  Replenish.  When something is gone, you put it back.  When you eat, your body gets rid of it so you have to put it back in.  Replenish. 

Renew.

Tangerine Dreams

Even with the safety net of a career in engineering, Laura Hudson took the leap to pursue what was true to her heart - singing. Quietly (actually, not that quietly…) she worked her way up and then a little thing called Covid-19 stopped things in their tracks. She talks to us about choices and the passion that drives her.

What are your days like now?

My days are like they used to be when I first decided to be a singer. They have got a nice routine, whereas it was panicked at the start of the lockdown. It's now into that 'start of career' feel that I used to have fifteen years ago, (obviously that little bit later in life) in as much as I've done a lot of stuff and I'm going through the whole "I don't think I'll ever sing again" anxiety. Fifteen years ago, I’d apply for all the things and do this, that and the other. It's that kind of anxiety. But in the other hand, now I've made my mind up about where I'm going to be living and everything, in the last few weeks it's become more about "Ooh...think about all the exciting projects I can do without having to rely on the established industry" - now that's exciting.

Why the change from engineer to singing?

I chose engineering because I come from a background and culture where singing or any form of the arts weren't a career choice. It was something you did for fun. I went into Engineering because I was good at it. It's chemical engineering - it's lots of chemistry and maths and stuff and I loved it. But I was always singing on the side and in the end, I was leaving for work early in the morning, doing a full day, then going to rehearsals after work and getting home at about 11pm. Next morning up at 5.30am and it started again. 5 days a week. I did get some nastiness - you know what this industry is like - someone saying something derogatory about people that hadn't studied full time not being as good as people who studied when they could.

I went for an advice audition at the Royal Northern College of Music and I quote "Bloody hell, your voice is big, it could be bigger than Jane Eaglen's"...I knew what Jane Eaglen looked like and all I heard was "You could be bigger than Jane Eaglen…”!
I did the audition, got in and thought ," Sod it, I'm  going to give it a go" . So I did. I went back into engineering after finishing my studies because I ran out of money and once I’d built up the savings again, I left engineering again (early retirement - I was in my mid-thirties!)

What difference did it make, knowing you had a security blanket?

When I started pursuing it, because I was ten years behind everyone else, I couldn't do things like Young Artist Programmes. I was massively excluded from a lot of stuff like that, so I felt that I was fighting losing battle and I also didn't have the support, the home support. I was self-financed. I felt like I was more manic than some others that might have been doing it. I felt that I was fighting against time and the geography of where I was living at that time. I was living on Merseyside and very much felt that I had to be in the South East to get anywhere, to form those networks, or move to Germany and I couldn't afford to do that. It did feel a bit manic and it's only after  moving to London and being in London for five years that I'd made those networks and contacts. Maybe it wasn't THAT necessary.

What is it that made you feel “I don’t really need to be here?”

It's  actually been lockdown that's made me realize it. The world has changed. You felt like you had to be here to be working with people, to keep those networks going whereas we were forcibly isolated from each other in lockdown. That's  when you realized you didn't need to be living in each other's pockets and it was okay.

I'd already decided that London was killing me. About 18 months ago I was run over - that tipped me over. I'd already decided that London was too hard a place to live and get by as a singer, so this lockdown made me realize the world's going to change and you didn't need to be in London.

Not being “in each other’s pockets” – has this spurred creativity that you might have put aside?  Do you have free reign, now?

So I was working at least 6 days a week, ridiculously long hours just to pay the rent, whereas being free of that gives me time to do creative things and to think about creating your own projects. There's also the fact that we're seeing other people doing stuff which has forced ideas in my brain. Example - we take six weeks to rehearse. The first week talking about character and development , we could do that on zoom instead. That's a week less hiring of rehearsal space, rent. It's little things like this that can really move forward with how we create work together, communicate. We’ve learnt to do this during lockdown, and we can use that to create more stuff and get it out there into different parts of the country, not just into the South East.

“I might never sing again”?

You're kind of like - okay, what's going to happen next? Will they want me when things start up again? You're always aware that every year another 100 singers come from the conservatoires and they're really good and have just as much right to a chance as everybody else. You’re aware that it's a dwindling market - I'm on the edges of it already. If it's all gone quiet for however many months, does that mean I'm not coming back into the market?

It's the professional part. I'm never going to sing the sort of stuff I used to sing. We saw, with the NHS Thursday clapping, that we would sing. I know I'll be doing that sort of singing. I'll probably end up singing in old folks homes and community singing will carry on but the big rep I used to do - will there ever be a chance for me to sing that sort of Verdi and Wagner repertoire again? From a career point of view, before lockdown had happened, I didn't know whether that would happen again but then lockdown did happen. Are we ever going to be able to afford to do it, to want to do it? I don't know.

Why singing?

Singing made me feel better than who I felt I was when I wasn't singing. It's all to do with acceptance of who you are and where you fit in humanity. I was looking at some pictures that a friend shared on Facebook and it's one of the earliest photos you'll ever see of me in a production. I’m dressed up as a tangerine! I'm one of the youngest kids in that photo but I take up the most space. That's the thing, I loved doing theatre and music theatre but was always told I was too big and there I was, in the world of opera. Not only was I not too big, but they really, really liked the fact I was a noisy bugger! And I made noises that made people very excited and noises that made me tingle. It was everything. Suddenly I had a place and that's something you can't let go of, I know in my heart of hearts I'll  always be noisy.

What happens if you can’t sing anymore?  What happens to that sense of place?

That's the thing that makes you very, very upset when you think about it.  Where do I fit?  Especially when I've heard about where singers fit in all of this. All dramatic voices said "We'll never sing again". No, it means you don't sing with your full dynamic range or you don't sing beyond sixty percent. It's not about the decibel level, it's about their dynamic range. I think I will sing, no matter where I am in the world. If you put me at the South Pole, I'm sure I'll find a flock of penguins somewhere. I've had little fantasies of singing to plants if I have to. Singing has been with me in every career I've tried to follow. It's part of me - it is me - in the same way I've got brown eyes and dodgy red hair.

Moving forward, there’s a new way to make things work for me, doing more recitals and plotting more programmes, sorting that out in a part of the world where you're not fighting to get a performance slot in a church in the City of London where there's  a long waiting list. You know, things like that. Sorting out your own performance projects, all of that sort of stuff, that's the world I'm going to have to create for myself. Lockdown has kind of recharged my batteries enough to be able to face going out there and doing it again. That's a positive out of lockdown for me.

We’ll put the beginning at the end – who are you?

I'm a noisy bugger. I knit and I talk to my cat, Zorro. How do I say who I am? There are twenty million parts of me: Laura the ex-engineer, Laura the ex-rugby player, Laura the ex-bouncer, Laura the usher, the dramatic soprano, the history buff. There are twenty million different parts you can use, but noisy bugger's the easiest, isn't it?

Zorro.

There’s always digging to be done

Education, conversation, participation and a bit of a challenge. This is what you get when Peter Brathwaite performs. He talked to us about singing and his all-important re-discovery of black portraiture.

Who are you?

I am a son, a brother, a partner, an uncle, a godfather, a pupil, a colleague, a friend.  Those things are my jobs.

It’s strange, because everything has been redefined.  In some ways, life hasn’t really changed that much.  I’ve always done the work of my “job” in the house and then gone to a contract or concert.  Learning the notes and all of that stuff, I do here.  That’s continued.  But without the prospect of immediate work, it’s a bit different.  I’ve had to find other ways of structuring the day and making sure that I have an existence that is balanced and that I’m getting out enough.  I’ve been getting out into nature, but not as much as I used to.  I’m getting to know the house a lot more…!

I’ve been doing my portrait recreations.  That started in April and they’ve become a fixture. I’m down to one a week now.  At the start, it was one every day for 50 days – recreating portraits that feature black sitters.  It went down to every other day, then three a week, more recently once a week.  I can start to try and get a bit of balance back in terms of singing and writing and trying to get more of a routine.  I thought there was a routine during lockdown, but it was kind of erratic.

Why do you do what you do (the singing)?

I’ve just now been for a walk and before the walk, I’d had my first singing lesson post-lockdown.  That singing lesson was the first time that I’d felt – “Oh! I’m who I am again! This is strange!” I went on this walk to the woods and was trying to work out why the lesson made me feel so happy and how habituated I’d become to the act of singing.  Not just singing, but being taught and being a pupil and that interchange.  Having a master teach you.

I’ve been doing this since I was seven years old. It’s been a constant in my life for such a long time.  Most of my life has featured singing and performing and today felt the closest to performing than I’ve felt in a very long time. Leading up to the lesson, I ate my lunch earlier than I would normally, I had a very considered warm up routine.  I was actually quite scared of opening my mouth for the first time, for someone to hear me. Thinking about what I eat, or what I like to eat before I sing, not realizing that maybe I wear a certain thing before I have a lesson.  It’s nice to have a step towards a routine and get back into that.

Had you missed these habits/routines? Did you notice that something was missing – beyond the singing?

Yes, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on what it was.  I’m not very good at just sitting still and not doing anything.  I’m always trying to create something or think of something new to do and I’ve been doing that during lockdown.  But, alongside this, I felt the despair that everyone has felt and that loss of - something.  You can’t really replicate doing a performance or having a lesson with somebody.

And I suppose that’s where the portraits have come in, because they’ve been an outlet that has allowed me to imagine performance.  I see them purely as performance.  That’s been the closest I’ve got to it, in terms of preparing myself, curating the objects, scenes, making the props and the scenery.  Even down to using scissors and pulling gaffer tape - ripping it.  All of that becomes a meditative act of routine.  And then it builds to the moment of when I step into the scene and then “I’m ready!”

Others we have spoken to for this blog have talked about the reciprocal nature of live performance – what the performer and audience give to each other.  If the portraiture is performance and it’s online, what is the nature of the relationship with the audience?

What I love about this project is that the medium of social media means that, while people say that they love this or they “like” that, a lot more has started to happen. For example, the young boy in Harlem in elementary school who decided to recreated the portrait of The Gardener by Harold Gilman (the Garden Museum) I’d done that the week before and I’d got a little notification saying that someone had tagged me and it was his mum and it was this picture of this boy who was about six, with the perfect pose – “inspired by Peter Brathwaite”.  These little things that spiral off and the conversations with people saying “I’ve just discovered this artist”.  The one today – Bisa Butler  -  people are saying that they didn’t know about her.  When I discovered her about two weeks ago, I thought – wow, this is amazing.  I have to put it in the project. (here)

All of that feels like performance.  When I’ve been doing my Music That’s Been Banned by the Nazis - suppressed music – a lot of that is about introducing a small part, the tip of the iceberg and then people going off and discovering worlds for themselves.  They’re discovering a piece of history.

How much, for you, is performance educational?

 I’d say it’s most of it.  It’s not necessarily having to teach the audience something, but asking yourself – what do you want to say?  Who are the audience? Why are you saying it?  Is there something that you want to change in people’s minds?  Whether I’m doing the most traditional piece of repertoire, I’m always trying to think of those things.  Also, I really like the idea of the audience being nimble and agile and ready.  They want to be challenged.  I’m demanding something of the audience - it’s not a passive thing for them.  The experience is live and there are conversations that rise out of the performance and the dialogue that you’re having with the audience as well.

I knew, at the start of lockdown, that I wanted to do something.  I didn’t really know what it was going to be.  The Getty Challenge was unexpected.  It came at a point when I’d found out that the majority of my work had gone.  It looked quite fun and I’ve always enjoyed dressing up, so I thought – what can I find out there?  I’m not sure whether I can pinpoint the moment when I thought I want to do a black sitter. I can’t identify whether it was because I wanted to show a painting with a black person in it or I wanted to find someone who looked like me.  I found that first portrait – “A Black Servant in England” - and it seemed interesting – the juxtaposition of the glass and the boy’s skin and the dog.  What I liked about the challenge is the natural humour because you’re using whatever you have to hand.  After I did that one, I realized that I’d entered into a contract with this body of art that has been marginalized and forgotten.  It coincided with family research as well.  I was getting sick to the backteeth – I wanted to find a likeness with one of my black ancestors.  I was going further and further back with information about who they were but no images. It doesn’t feel right that there’s been this silencing throughout history and you see it so plainly.  So – it became a thing.  Wanting to find more and more.  Some of them I knew, some of them I’d seen but hadn’t really engaged with that much.  That’s why I chose to say “Re-discovering Black Portraiture”.  At the very start I was looking at things I’d already seen before and then you have to dig a bit more.  Then you have to start to put terms into search engines and library websites – your gut tells you that that’s how they’ve been catalogued – if they’ve been catalogued at all.  My fourth great-grandmother is recorded as being a “free mulatto”, so I used that term in the search engines to look for portraits.  It came up with a whole body of work by an artist called Brunias, who was in the Caribbean in the 1780s.  He was painting real people and specifically, mixed race people and his version of what it was to be mixed race in the Caribbean was what defined people’s ideas of what life was in the Caribbean.  The sexual allure of being mixed race exoticised the nature of life in the Caribbean.

Mixed in with re-discovering and giving a platform to these marginalized works is identity and my identity as well, my British identity and all of the concentric circles of that.

What effect did George Floyd’s murder and the subsequent reaction(s) have on your art – planning, creating, performing?

I was about to wind down.  I thought I’d approach 50 and finish.  But when that happened, I didn’t really know how to respond.  I knew I wanted to respond artistically, in the way that I find comfortable and comes naturally to.  There was this element of persevering with this message – that seemed important at that moment. It’s very easy for these things to be neatly packaged and wound up and people think – oh right, that’s done with.  It was an effort to show that these things don’t go away.  They’re here, hidden in plain sight.  I can show you that this body of work exists and I’m going to keep going and see how long I can carry on plugging the message - in a way that is mixed with humour and allows people to step into a world that maybe they have a fear of engaging with and this feels like an accessible route in.

There’s also a lot about perseverance and visibility because it coincided with all of the horribleness of all black people – black men -  being disproportionately affected by Covid-19.  That’s very difficult reporting to take but it suddenly felt like this huge pressure.  The nature of inequality and those conversations and what was being revealed as the lockdown unfolded and the pandemic worsened – it seemed as though visibility was at the core of that.  (As well as education and understanding – all of those things.) This seemed like a way of continuing the conversation.

Do you think that, your voice is now being heard in a different way?

I think that people who thought of me as one thing have possibly changed their perception.  It would be interesting to know what people think of me now – just because this has become such a prominent feature of what I’m doing.  What I’ve learned from it is that I have to use my art to answer questions and fight for things that we’ve always been fighting for.  Music and visual art and culture are such useful tools.  They are very powerful.  Hopefully, people will see that I’m not suddenly doing something very different.  It’s just a different means of articulation.  I’m really longing for the time and opportunity to come to allow this to manifest in a performance that draws on all of these elements. The portraiture – I feel like I’ve been banging on the same drum.  The diversity within the realm of this work is so great that I feel like no matter how long I carry on, there’s always going to be something new and there will always be stories that need to be told.

Do you think you’ll ever stop doing this? If so – when and how?

I need to stop soon, just because I feel like it needs to be handed over so that people can use it and actively participate in it.  Obviously, I’m not going to stop looking at black portraits.  I’m always going to curious about finding new ones.  It will stop.  There’s this idea of getting to 100!  But at one a week, that is quite a challenge.  My other half worked out that if we carry on doing them at one a week, it will end on January 1st 2021!

To complete the circle – who are you?

I’m a digger.  There’s always digging to be done.

Still Life with Peaches and a Lemon - Juriaen van Streeck

Peter Brathwaite