Swimmer out of water
General | Georgina Lock | 14.04.08
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by Andy Barrett
Andy Barrett is a Nottingham based playwright, director and performer. His work has been commissioned by a wide range of bodies including the Nottingham Playhouse, Leicester Haymarket, BBC Radio, New Perspectives, Amnesty International and the Church of England. He has also written over thirty community plays and with Julian Hanby produces large scale site specific community performances across the East Midlands.
Last Halloween I was one of over eight hundred people following a ghost story through Bramcote Hill Woods. There were sixty local people of all ages performing the show which was loosely based on the history of the area. As the audience walked along a leaf strewn path they saw scenes erupting from the darkness, some way off in the distance and some right in amongst them, causing them to find space to stand on soil banks, stepping over tree stumps and to duck under branches upon which could be hanging dead rabbits. These sixty local people became men going over the top of First World War trenches, maids appearing both underneath and high up on the branches of a colossal cedar tree, a ghost of a Crimean soldier emerging from a shower of sparks, poachers, musicians, butlers and servants populating a 1920’s country house that was replete with furniture and potted palms.
I think it’s fair to say that just about everybody in the audience was amazed by what they saw. For many they had come along to show support for a friend or a family member who was involved. My guess was, (particularly as for a large number of the cast this was their first go at performing), there was an anticipation of something that was going to be enjoyable but probably a little bit shambolic; with the ‘get up and have a go’ ethos being what mattered. But it wasn’t. It was a show with a fully professional production team working on something incredibly ambitious. (You couldn’t do it with professional actors, the wages would be too much). It was a great big surprise, hidden in the woods. It was a realisation of how people can work together and create things of wonder and beauty and scope. And that is about as exciting as it gets.
I write plays for a variety of stages, but nothing is as interesting, or ultimately as good as the work that I do when we go out into towns and villages to put on a show. (By ‘we’ I mean Hanby and Barrett, the company I work with – although actually it’s just me and a mate sitting in a pub dreaming up new ideas). We’ve set castles on fire, let off fireworks in churches, (and almost blew the windows out of Leicester Cathedral), performed on a Napoleonic Blast Furnace, and had a convoy of tractors drive through Oakham market square. We’ve done plays in villages with a population of sixty two and have taken over Nottingham train station, to the bewilderment of those passing through, (especially the good advice being proffered by the old lady via the tannoy system – ‘never trust a man with brown shoes’ or ‘always get trashed at parties’). And every single one of these shows has been a community arts project. That is they have involved people from the places in which they have happened, some of whom have never performed, or made props, or danced, or proffered good advice before. But – and for me this is a key definition – they have been obviously more than ‘projects’; they have been events. Things that have tapped into a sense of communal experience because they have been so flamboyant, extravagant and playful. There used to be events like this all over the country; customs and activities that were specific to local culture and which created a space for some form of community madness, where everybody came out to play and for a night or two, or maybe longer, tried to blow away the social structures that shaped and inhibited their daily routines. But they rarely happen now. The insurance costs too much.
We live in a world where the glue that kept our communities together has been steadily losing its stick. In some places – a lot of places – there’s none of it left at all. People don’t know what to do. They set up wine tasting clubs and local history societies in their local village but still the Post Office and the local school closes down. In their panic the government have increasingly looked to the arts, in the hope that by doing a lantern parade or some drumming workshops that the notion of community can be reinvented and all of the social ills attached to its demise will go away. But it doesn’t. Community art has never been about solving social ills, however much artists are increasingly called into the field just as post and milkmen are asked to snoop for social services. Community art is about reclamation. It is, or should be, Utopian; a collaborative act of imagination, of realising how much energy can be created when people get their heads together and do something that on their own they wouldn’t begin to contemplate doing. And through doing it realise that it can be done again, and again and again.
And it’s always this that I enjoy most in our work. The saying farewell and the knowledge that there is a possibility that something else will happen in that town or village, (sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t). The realisation that through this project something has changed. That there has been a slight molecular shifting. That things have been added to.
It’s time to create more events; to sing the strengths of community art, to make sure that being called a community artist doesn’t have the same resonance as ‘local writer’, (I’m both, my God how do I live with myself?). Villages are becoming bought up by those who want to experience the rural idyll and in doing so destroy the very thing they’re after; and there are ever fewer reasons for those in towns to meet up with others that share their geographical community. But let’s not make do with more lantern parades and drumming workshops; let’s do crazy stuff, stuff that really fires the imaginations of the participants, that brings people together to embark on new conversations and reminds them how much fun life can be. It sounds simplistic but in many ways it is. And the thing is this – that once people have had a go then they usually want to do it again.
I know I do.
Posted in General | Andy Barrett | April 3rd 2008 Comments so far (0)
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