Don’t mention the war? If you’re still waiting for the revolution, what about just quietly finding your voice?
Expo and Promo.
How do you talk about your times – and where did you learn the language? Whatever your beliefs about how we got here, it seems most of us are feeling too up against the clock to stop and think about where we’re going. So who can consider the future or what we really want? In the first performance of my new show with playwright Peter John Cooper, we faced the paralysing bad news by subversively looking somewhere else.
Do you think it’s odd? How little art is being made to reflect our times?
I know this’ll sound a lot less important than your overdue report, but roll with it a moment.
It’s a point that’s so broad and unqualified it doesn’t stack up, of course, once you start looking with intent – but, on a historic note, pausing in the mental office kitchenette this week, I had an odd sense of our times feeling strikingly different to how we think about previous big moments in history. If you think we’re kind of in one now.
Because, I mean, what comes to mind readily when we talk about the global upheavals of the first world war? ..Poetry.
We can picture some bleak paintings easily too. Images of deep trauma. And what about after it was over; in your head, don’t the 1920s sound like an explosion of vintage jazz? The second world war can’t be mentioned without the sound of forties’ swing; the American Vietnam experience without the music of the counter culture.
What is scoring the violence of our times?
You may be ahead of me here, trying to interrupt my old-mannish, Northern-Hemmish moan – Timo, these soundtracks were all applied afterwards.
Yeah, kinda. For one thing, we all soundtrack our own lives, compiling our own playlists. For another, the story of the big moments in collective history that we’re taught gets consolidated and practiced after more of the facts have come in and put together into sensible seeming documentaries. After we’re not quite living in it any more. Doesn’t mean there wasn’t simplistic propaganda being beamed at us at the time while we were hearing many of the same popular songs together, or that the simplistic propaganda hasn’t lingered in the replays. Story stuff is hard to wash out of your eyes and ears, like tear gas.
But artists tended to see what was really going on. And they had a way of turning it into 1984 or We are making a new world or Pieces of a man or The parable of the talents.
How easy is it to tune into Naath testimonies on local radio in South Sudan if you live in Southbourne and only speak English? How easy is it to tune out global pop if you live in Bentiu?
Many of my own historic references obviously come from the way I was taught history as a white southern English kid in a Queen-and-country British world towards the end of the last century. But even that world-telling had us refer to the arts quickly when thinking of turning points of the past. ..Aren’t all our traditions built on it?
We’re now in perhaps the most major collective turning point ever, so where can we find the voices creatively exploring how we feel about the events of our own times, or what we want from these massive moments?
Billionaire sociopaths ransacking social value, throwing vulnerable people to the pack wolves of billionaire-owned mass media? What are you singing along to?
Eighteen months of unimaginably dark psychology driving genocide in Israel, signed off on still by most democratic governments? What’s your latest inspirational read?
The extinction of species after species around the world, rainforests vanishing for palm oil in your hair product, nitrates overtopping our rivers? What does your Tik Tok history look like?
If we all feel better when we turn off the news for a few days, is it because there is nothing in it to galvanise a different response in us? Something that feels more empowering than hiding – hiding from how much we’re going along with it?
Is it time to just be getting on with something yourself? A new creative response.
Intuitive storyteller and dreaming woman Jennifer Lisa Vest shared a dream this week. She saw a future full of galleries and museums, and they were full of stories of our times now. Of how we overcame, and how we pictured life beyond the brutal illusions of our old ways of living.
What if our horrifying times now turned into a renaissance?
It was only two mornings before the very first performance of Putting the Y in Wryting I found myself writing the following words, all out in one hit without a single scribble-out and it turned into our opening video piece:
My head’s hollow
in the pillow;
sitting up in brief blue light,
one minute to midnight.
Doomsday clock – Tik Tok.
Immortality wants to get out of me
but all I want is to get out of my responsibility
to come up with a whole new world.
A whole new me.
Get out.
Get out of here.
Get out of now.
Get out of bed and face the crowd –
but so bloody loud is the ticking reckoning
of doing nothing.
Scrolling.
Waiting.
For mothership floodlights
or just a tiny spark.
Why should I dare
to make my mark?
Yeah. Why should I dare do that? Who am I? And who are you?
And why does this matter on Linked In?
The way we speak.
“I overheard two people talking on the bus the other day,” said Peter to me.
He’d heard the conversation begin with swapping references about a particular issue locally, both participants quickly bonding over their agreement. But as they’d stepped through the soundbites they had to hand about the issue, their shared viewpoint moved. Without them realising.
“By the end, they’d completely turned around their viewpoint and not even noticed” Peter chuckled. “It was marvellous!”
It’s all very well me pontificating from the sidelines about expressing our times more honestly, more *hopefully*, but mostly people don’t speak in philosophical dialogue – we speak in samples. What we’re literally speaking is often not the thing we’re more meaningfully saying, it’s just an efficient way to throw together an interaction with shared references when we bump into someone, so that our tired brains don’t have to stay conscious when dealing with smalltalk but can still avoid a fight.
It’s a way of keeping a safe distance while connecting. Friendly signals across the fence.
It’s because you don’t always want to get into it, right? So, next time I’m too quick to mention art and emotional truth, ask me how many of us have a Paul Nash on the wall at home?
He was a painter, commissioned as an official artist in both 1917 and the 1940s and none of his output feels like cosily inspirational war effort material. It feels affected enough by the dehumanisation of industrial conflict that the War Office wouldn’t have wanted him interviewed on newsreels for very long. He died of complications from asthma less than a year after VE day and less than a mile from where I live, somewhere in Boscombe.
It’s real, his work – even though it’s surrealist. And part of a wider movement that culture historians can geek over. But it’s not mass entertainment. In 1943, people didn’t want holocausty images of undead souls hiding in the Underground, they wanted Vera Lynn, mate.
Which kind of does make my point. We’ll meet again may be comforting, but it’s precisely because it’s acknowledging the massive emotional truths a nation was feeling, facing existential crisis. And baked in was a bit of resolve. A bit of vision – of life beyond this present darkness.
Are you capable of considering life beyond this present darkness?
Do you think your kids are?
The way we watch.
Histories will always be references for futures. Their understanding of their heritage may be the main thing fortifying your kids against the regular bullshit in their daily experience right now. But, thinking as I do, as someone now committed to urging everyone to face forward, I am numbed by how numb we are to what we really want.
Who is looking at the current US administration, at the rise of Reform, at the *iron grip* of the Russian president and daring to paint Totes meer?
Who is expressing creatively what’s going on around us? The impacts, the implications, the hopes. Who is questioning where we’re getting all our unconscious conversational samples from? How many of us are building memory palaces anywhere but Instagram?
This was the starting point for my show with playwright and poet Peter John Cooper.
He’d originally asked me to join him in pitching to Bournemouth Writing Festival’s third year because we overlap so much in thinking about the future. But he is a deeply experienced storyteller, an observer of human behaviour, while I am more of a dreamer.
We’d worked together before on his fabulously conceptual piece, Death and life and everything in between, but I’d largely just tagged along in a lab coat and made a few moody drones in the corner of his intimate stage space. It was brilliant.
He talks often of The Burning Stage, of the immediacy of small productions in accessible spaces, and I’d wanted to learn more from him about the craft of telling a story. His main note to me was, politely, but insistently: “Stop preaching”.
We did preach, for an hour. But it felt more like an Open University gameshow.
And it was an invitation to think. If we’d had the Ocean Theatre for another thirty minutes at least, we’d have just been fielding a conversation with the audience. But the notes Peter guided us around were a helpful set-up for just such thinking.
How did some of the most popular works from dramatic historic times handle their context? Often by not referring to the antichrist of the day at all, but by continuing to observe how humans handle themselves in society and in private.
But we posed each other questions, from our different perspectives on the role of art in our times. Interesting to me was how overlapped we were in outlook when we began our weeks of chats over coffee and treading through ideas in the rehearsal space of Vita Nova in Boscombe, and how differing we were by the time we shared the public stage.
“It’s like you were on opposite sides, challenging each other a bit, and it made for a great format” said one learned friend afterwards.
In truth, I felt like I’d had a storytelling masterclass hanging out with my slightly elder mate so much this year. I may exhort you to dare to write speculative fiction – to express the world you really want and risk any consequences to your social credibility. I may think that this is the real subversion of solarpunk science fiction, that it doesn’t wait to have its creds together, it’s testing out new worlds already. I may preach along with many dreaming women that we have it in us to realise – literally make real – the futures we want, and that words are practically like spells to our psyches. I’m a dreamer, fight me.
But the rub of the piece that Peter and I produced together is held tightly by both of us:
When you feel a bit helpless, when you don’t know what to do in a time of crisis, you can make art. And there are some very practical ways to just start doing it. And for your wellbeing, perhaps for all our sakes and futures, you should just start doing it – it will change how you feel about the world.
The world you put in your head is the one you live in. So what might draw queues from a future generation to look around your memory palace?
With a huge thank you to Dominic Wong for commissioning the piece, for Pavilion Dance SouthWest for hosting us so easily, to Solid Imagery for all the nice pictures of our performance, to you for joining us if you could, and to my learned dear mate Peter for sharing a lifetime of doing stuff with me.
IF YOU MISSED THE SHOW, OR WANTED MUCH LONGER TO DISCUSS THE IDEAS TOGETHER, JOIN US FOR THE NEXT CLOSE-UP PERFORMANCE: MONDAY JUNE 16, VITA NOVA, ROUMELIA LANE, BOSCOMBE, 19:00 >
Tickets for this special and intimate show will be pay as you want with suggested offering of £5.00 and all money raised will go to support Vita Nova’s wonderful creative work.
For a deep dive into Peter’s centuries decades of storytelling experience, a fantastic series to read or listen through is his Blood and bones course >
And find out much more about Peter’s work at:
Peterjohncooper.co.uk >
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