The breakfast ritual

I've just started a creative writing course. In lesson one we learned about free writing which basically means you just keep writing without stopping to think. Interesting exercise that ended with a paragraph about how much my hand was starting to hurt after 5 minutes of non stop scribble. 

The homework was to write 1000 words on the subject of 'Rituals'.  It had to be started using the free writing method and then edited down. Mine edited down to a paltry 500 words but here it is anyway. 

Rituals

Apart from weddings, christenings and funerals, I don't do rituals except breakfast. I'm lucky - my partner gets up much earlier than me so I wake up and smell the coffee every day.

I get up, go downstairs, slice the bread and put it in the toaster. I pour the coffee into the same mug. Then I butter the toast and spread marmite on one piece and marmalade on the other. I go to the kitchen window where I sit on a stool, sipping and munching and staring out into the garden. 

Every day I see some, or all of the following: goldfinches, chaffinches, nuthatches, woodpeckers, blackbirds, robins. Blue, coal, great and long tailed tits. Sometimes a thrush, a bullfinch, a goldcrest. Wood Pigeons, ring-collared doves, magpies, jackdaws and the inevitable squirrels. 

I also see fifty shades of green emerging from the grey silence of winter. Then watch fifty more, dappled in breezy sunlight, become part of the falling spectrum of autumn rain. 

I see human rituals mirrored from that window - a constant stream of marriages, births and deaths. Some of the deaths natural, some accidental or unexplained and the occasional cold-blooded murder. 

I’ve read that crows and other birds hold roadside funerals for their fallen comrades. Sometimes, when a crow is killed by a passing car, a murder of fellow crows will descend and walk circles around the dead bird for 15 to 20 minutes.  The crow’s close relative, the magpie, holds similar services and has even been seen placing tufts of grass alongside the departed. Is this a ritual or is it only humans to which that word applies? 

As for the marriages, there may not be a formal ceremony with invited guests but birds pairing off can be preceded by violent competition, acrobatic aerial courtship and virtuoso musical performances. Then comes the explosion of chicks from early spring to late summer often accompanied by behaviours that look a lot like love. I often wonder if that first trip to the bird feeder with the parents is an avian coming of age ritual. 

My experience of the human rituals is that they provide families and friends with regular opportunities to remind themselves and each other that they are part of something larger. There is a collective unity in celebrating together, grieving together and marking time. Recognising change and its impact, not only on yourself but on those who are a fixed part of your life.

Having managed to remain a romantic, I like the wedding ritual but the births are obligations I could do without. Funerals, on the other hand are getting much more interesting as I get older. Partly because I am no longer just a spectator but often have some role in proceedings and funerals have changed. They are now equally as likely to be celebrations of a life, as a mourning of a death. It is still as painful whatever you call it. 

Marriages have also changed and can have counterpoint divorce rituals now, although I am not sure that the guests at the first party will all be attending the second.

My breakfast ritual won’t change. Not for a while at least. I will still wake up and smell the coffee. I will still look out of the window, fixed in the present and be reminded that the cycle of nature is eternal, that birds never waste time and that squirrels are fucking geniuses. 

Coastal Currents 2019 - 'Dance Movies' at the Kino - Review

I like cinema. I like dance. I like music. So the three for the price of one ‘Dance Movies' at the Kino-Teatr as part of this year's Coastal Currents, was an absolute must. It not only motivated me to leave the house, but it also made me want to write a review.

The event was split into two halves. The first half contained three, very different short films in which performance was either the main, or integral, part of a wider visual and narrative composition.

The first film I Am Weather (Rebecca Marshall/Nichola Bruce/Clare Whistler) was a triptych projection filmed at the Library of Water in Stykkishulmur, Iceland. 

The triple screens alternated between close-ups of fast moving water or spray, and dancer Clare Whistler viewed through a lighthouse lens. It appeared as if it had been filmed in an empty room in a tall glass building with a distant view of an urban skyline. The remarkable effect was to capture the dancer in a way that distorted her body, elongated her limbs and finally made her physically disappear altogether as if melting into the floor. The water sequences, that seemed different each time, provided an intense soundscape. It was a wonderful combination of the free flowing and the confined in a meditative union of shades of grey and elemental hydro-sonics.

The second film Klipperty Klopp 2 (Andrew Kotting/Yumino Seki) was also a split-screen and shades of grey affair. Funnily enough the last thing I reviewed was Kotting’s ‘Lek and the Dogs’ so it was very interesting to see this much earlier and now reinvented work.

On the left screen was Kotting’s original 1984 film of a man energetically running round a field in Gloucestershire pretending to be a horse. On the right this had been re-created with dancer Yumino Seki, more of whom later. The two films mirrored each other although the original was filmed almost completely in the rural environment, whereas Yumino Seki’s re-enactment also brought in some urban grit. This included segments in which she was quite brilliantly placed in front of a wall with the legible graffiti reading 'Take your poo…'. Given the slapstick speed of the characters and the original narration about the funny/crazy man and his horse, there was definitely humour. However, the tension between the absurdly humorous and the reality of two people running in marked, repetitive and seemingly futile patterns while negotiating relationships with their accumulated detritus, was also quite uncomfortable at times. The whole thing ended close to home with Yumino Seki on Hastings beach, barely able to hang on to her wildly flapping metaphor in the fierce wind. I so wanted her to just let it go.

Film three was Experiments with a Danse Macabre (Nichola Bruce/Patricia Langa/Daniel Hay-Gordon). Another film that dealt with confinement, Patricia Langa danced out the tension of being within ever decreasing walls, amidst a world of projected images. From a painterly perspective this film was lovely to watch. The layering of images, colour, texture, dark and light and movement made the film an ever changing and beautiful visual spectacle. The subject of death, or the ability of the dancer protagonist to inflict it at great personal cost, was told in the manner of a fairy tale. I accepted the artistic license in the telling of the tale and the beautiful package it came in, right until the last clichéd line: “we are all equal in death”, at which I sighed, possibly audibly. I'm afraid we are as equal in death as we are in life and that is not very equal at all.

The second half was just brilliant. Exspira Machina/Kwaidan AI was a combination of live music, dance and film. Afrit Nebula provided the music, Yumino Seki the dance and Mark French the visuals. The description of the pieces as ‘a ghost in the machine trapped by a scanner, unable to escape her own memory’ doesn’t come even remotely close to communicating the astounding amount of stuff that was going on here.

Musically it was a multi-layered fusion of jazz, rock, world, sacred, experimental - in fact there are all sorts of genres you could try and define this trio with but really, really good is probably best. There was a lot to it, both instrumentally and vocally, and it was very tight.

The visuals in this part of the evening ranged from a kind of ambient, spectrum loop to a mesmerising film of industrial machinery. A Victorian pumping station (I think) working a continuous and massive, rhythmic sequence of power and painted ironwork. Hard to believe this was normal less than a century ago.

From the left Yumino Seki appeared slowly and silently and the combination of music, visuals and live dance completely took over. The interplay between the three was superb. At first it was hard to know what to focus on but after a while there was a kind of emotional and sensual absorption into the whole. It was a wonderful experience.

On a personal note, I spent most of the 80s living in Japan and it was magic to see a butoh trained dancer for the first time in about 30 years. In Hastings! 

The Artists

  

Film Makers  

Nichola Bruce - https://www.nicholabruce.com/projects-in-development/

Rebecca Marshall - http://rebeccaemarshall.com/filmmaker/

Andrew Kotting - http://www.andrewkotting.com/

Mark French - http://shootonsite.org/index.php/mark-french

Dancers & Choreography  

Yumino Seki  - https://yuminoseki.webs.com/

Clare Whistler - http://www.clarewhistler.co.uk/

Daniel Hay Gordon - https://www.danielhay-gordon.com/

Patricia Langa 

Musicians

Afrit Nebula - http://www.afritnebula.com/

Venue and Host

Kino Teatr  - kino-teatr.co.uk

Coastal Currents - http://coastalcurrents.org.uk/

Images
Images for 'I am Weather' and 'Klipperty Klopp' found in public domain. (Was unable to find an image for 'Experiments towards a Danse Macabre' (or a website link for Patricia Langa). 
Images of Afrit Nebula and Yumino Seki courtesy of Neil Partrick.

Shit Happens

As was apparent from my last post, living in a village does not make me the happiest bunny in the world. Ironic really given how many bunnies there are around here. Yes the house is beautiful, the garden is beautiful, there's a separate annexe, a summer house, a garage, a drive, two garden sheds, a vegetable garden and a hexagonal greenhouse. There is an extra piece of land where I've started a small sculpture garden. This is just across a path to the station where I can easily get on a train back to my beloved. (I.E. London). So what  am I complaining about?

From the outside it looks idyllic. Factor in that old chestnut of British, or is it more English, cultural aspiration and it looks like I've really made it. I have the detached house in the countryside and in the kitchen I even have that marker of contemporary, middle classness - an Aga. I'm a success. I'm a pleb made good. I can now wander off into the rural sunset content in my coloured wellies. I can drop all that complex baggage of background, class and family trauma. If it isn't visible to anybody else why draw attention to it?

Aye... there's the rub.

People from poor backgrounds, especially women who escape their still rigidly predictable class trajectory, become very good listeners and quick and comprehensive learners. They ask questions in order not to have to answer them. They learn how to blend in by not drawing attention to themselves. They move with stealth, make sure they are good at whatever job needs to be done to keep them moving, and are usually easy going and fun at parties. Strategically, that last one helps a lot. 

Having negotiated an adult understanding of the pain of being perceived negatively in formative years, and having learned how to swallow that anger, means they are not generally judgemental themselves. They are fluid and discreet and very few people get to know them very well.

The first legacy of a poor background comes when you realise how much knowledge you have not been exposed to and thus your ability to communicate is severely curtailed.  You cannot talk confidently about what you know because that will expose you and you know from experience that your reality is best kept obscure. The second legacy, of an often chronic lack of confidence begins here.  It is compounded as you move through life and find that your view of how things are is so different from your majority, middle class counterparts that you believe you must surely be wrong.

So here I am in the countryside looking like a success story and feeling utterly miserable. For the first time in decades I am revisiting some of those class insecurities. I am back in the vicinity of my birth - a place I never wanted to return to. I am not here because of a considered decision about being tired of my international city life or wanting to signal my achievements with that detached house in the country. I am here because my brother took his own life and then, somewhere in the profound, emotional chaos that followed, I lost mine. 

I am here. Isolated. Bored. Anxious. However, I seem to function and from the outside it seems as if I've blended in here too but I feel nothing. I do nothing. I cannot get any traction. Everything moves slowly and often does not move at all. Three decades of international urban life - my life and all that contributes to the person I think I am -  is irrelevant. It's as if the life between leaving and returning to the same geographical space never happened. I feel like a stranger to myself in a compensatory property. 

It would of course be easier with children and grandchildren. Being childless is particularly tough in a village where conversation, connection and belonging revolve so much around family life. Tried blending in with a dog for a while but that was disastrous. Rescue dog + rescue human was never going to work in this case.

I'm increasingly concluding that I'm just not cut out for life in a village. In a city you can be anybody, or nobody, just like everybody else. There are beautiful strangers and the strangest beauties. Numerous, spontaneous and random moments of humaness. There is movement and colour, life and surprises. Most of all there are possibilities and there are people like me. 

I will never be tired of London but I am often tired of life these days. Will someone please buy me a flat in a London postcode. Any postcode will do! I'm not fussy. 

Crowhenge - A Community Art Project

It is an unavoidable fact that I am a bit morose living in a village after 3 decades of international city life, however, the drive to convince myself otherwise has at least resulted in a project. So ladies and gentlemen I give you.... CROWHENGE! 

The project began as an adjunct to the Crowhurst Neighbourhood Plan (NP) a community strategy which emerged over the past 3 years to give the village influence in how local housing development quotas are managed. In an earlier attempt to convince myself I belong, I volunteered to build and manage the substantial NP website. In the lead up to what was a very successful NP referendum, I was asked to submit ideas for an art project to represent the village and reflect the community ethos that had underpinned the NP. 

This was the basic proposal: 

Crowhurst sits in an area of outstanding natural beauty in which trees are one of the dominant features of the landscape. 'Crowhenge' will use local woods to create a 7-piece structure linked to key elements of village life: Community, Environment, Heritage, Youth, Business, Farming and Sanctuary. All community groups, businesses and organisations in the village can then contribute something that represents them.  

One of the woodland trusts in the village RSPB Forewood generously donated the wood for the project. I had Oak, Sycamore, Silver Birch and Hornbeam. Stage one was trimming, shaping and sanding. 

The project began in March and was installed in July. It is ongoing in the sense that people can still add things to it at any time. It is the first time I have done a project of this nature from concept through to completion on my own. It was tough but I am pleased with how it turned out in the end. It was also great to meet people like the 92 year old master carver in the village who created the title sign and to work with the school and various other youth groups in the village. Working with kids is great. They have none of those adult insecurities about 'art' so you don't have to constantly reassure and cajole them into getting involved and then (often) have to do it yourself anyway. 

Full details of the project and how it unfolded are on the website and the Crowhenge Facebook page so will just post some project images here.