In My Opinion, They Are Lying to Us
This is a reflection on performance/process and practise blog. I hope the posts are useful for fellow artists to rethink and discover, and to demystify what artist like me do, to wider readers. Or for former teachers to tut at my bad grammar and even worser jokes! It also helps me to reflect, spend time celebrating joyful members and the people along the way. To help me contextualise what I do I dip into the theory of performance and disabled politics. That in turn allows me to slip in the occasional political view, opinion and political commentary. I think I hide it well, I haven’t had any backlash yet … not that I can boast a readership that would encourage such scrutiny … however, after watching an interview by Politics Joe with Carol Vorderman (yep, spun me out a bit too, this quite random allyship), saying how the blatant corruption that is happening throughout our society is so rife, it kind of feels impossible just to stick to your area of expertise or the thing you are most passionate about. There needs to be more voices added, and reflecting on my train journey to and from Manchester, I just felt impelled to say something … however, do please feel free to skip to the sub-title below, Can We Talk About Practise now, to not give my ranty side more airtime than it deserves.
Watch most interviews on news channels or in papers which aim to put rail union bosses/allies basically asked something like this:
“but by striking you are effectively putting people off the railway. You’re putting yourself out of a job. The general public will not continue to support you will they? The turmoil you are creating by striking means people won’t go back to using the trains”
I say ask, obviously it is more like a leading line to fluster good people, stir emotions and effectively start a fight.
I think the suggestion here is that the chaos, delays and stressfulness experienced by commuters using trains is solely caused by striking. Like somehow, in the last ten years the trains have been working perfectly and it’s only because of train drives unreasonably demanding more money, people can’t get to their office jobs. This concept is thrown to nurses/doctors/junior doctors/NHS staff, even though the actual strike action has been the bare minimum in the health sector. The numbers and anecdotes prove that waiting list and danger levels of safety has just gone up and up. The front-line workers (and indeed the commissioners, the people working behind the scenes, trying to do allocate an ever shrinking budget, I have a close family member who works for NHS Commissioning) will tell you that the health services cannot keep up with health needs of our society. It is not safe nor care centred, at any time, not just in strike months.
Teachers, civil servants, barristers, border force, carers… basically all public service workers are doing more for less. However, even though all these truths are so obvious to everyone who relies on any of the vital public service, you really, really do not have to look far to see the impact on workers, who we have been told to clap for, not being able to pay bills or buy enough food week-on-week. This constant struggle to live – ie the cost of living – is terrible for individuals, families and community... The people we rely on when we are at our most vulnerable are using foodbanks more and more – how do you provide care as a hospital, when growing numbers of your staff can’t afford to eat?
So, I will get directly to my point, I don’t think it’s useful for me to spend hours exposing the impact of stagnating wages, what I want to do is directly challenge the obscene notion that striking is the root cause of these services problem, when the basic fact is that our train to Manchester and back was packed!
Going there, we were able to catch a direct train from Paignton to the beehive of the UK. There were four coaches and half an hour into the five hour journey, people were standing because there weren’t enough seats. Beyond Birmingham, you couldn’t see the floor. Looking in the windows of trains passing by, similar stories, carriages full. Both main trains and shuttle service had people bustling for seats. On this particular weekend there was a music festival which of coursed increased foot fall but literally every train was full going to and from the various cities we passed. And the tickets weren’t cheap, nor could you say they were reasonable. But still people travel by train. I think people want to, normally they are faster than road, very much more eco-friendly and offer a sense of freedom and adventure different to the car.
I should also mention, the staff were great. The train manager going up was a god send. She instinctively found passengers who needed to sit and worked with other passengers to move people around so those that needed to get a seat got one quickly. She also encouraged people who didn’t have far to go to give their seats up to individuals standing for ages. She managed to get to the disabled passengers first, re-shuffle luggage to make it as safe as possible, kept us informed throughout and updated everyone on further connections, all with a smile. There were several elderly passengers who might have really suffered if it wasn’t for Clair finding them a seat.
The train manager and all her colleagues made the journey enjoyable, despite the cramped conditions. I’m pretty sure a significant number of people would not have made it to their destinations without her support, expertise and general people skills. This train absolutely could not have been a driver-only train. It would not have been safe. No AI robot could have gotten anywhere close.
Back to the point of this section of the blog, every Sky News (other mass-media are the same) presenters ‘interview’ put to workers force to strike can be elegantly shamed by more articulate and knowledgeable individuals than I could. The context here being after another year of pay-cuts in relative terms. Let’s not forget not so long ago, the time when we were clapping nurses whilst putting a ‘pitiful’ 1% pay uplift on the table.
I just wanted to say, passengers are not being put off by the strikes. In fact, they were cross with train companies for not putting on more carriages. I would feel confident in challenging most of the bias, manipulated, and untrue coverage of strikes, but I can put my hand on my heart to say that strikes are not causing people to turn their backs on the railways – it was packed from Paignton to Manchester and the staff managed to somehow keep the trains running almost on time.
Can We Talk About Practise Now
Yes we can! I’m not going to link or tag-in the wonderful artists I connected with during the recce in Manchester. Even if many of them may have the same analysis of media coverage of striking members as I do, I totally stand by the statement that these views are my own. It has also taken time to craft this blog still and I haven’t completed the full reflection of the Another Route Belguim lab three or a write-up of the magic of Squeeze Box in Maketank last May. At least I can fully appreciate my latest Manchester trip to people that are still reading!
After getting off our delayed train (oh, did I tell you we went up by train) we made our way to the Longsight Art Space. It was a relief to see Chi, Sarah and Chris’ smiling faces. After a warm welcome, there was time to properly soak in this creative, humble yet ambitious space. A converted shop front with wooden floors and artwork on every wall. There is currently a rich, vibrant and absorbing exhibition by Samir Salim in the Longsight space. A mix of collage and paint, using image creation to explore and critique eastern and western influences on artwork. The images popped out all over the wall space and took you on a mesmerising journey of colour, symbolism and connection.
It is always exciting to step into a space which welcomes possibility. The curators of Longsight Art Space, the organisation Proforma, can move walls, get chairs and tables or leave the space empty. Maybe not a massive amount of room, but the three white walls combined with a whole window front allows for art, culture and community to collide in really interesting and fruitful ways. Chi was chatting to me about the evolution of the space and how they want to play into the culture of a shop front. Adding further identity to this amazing space, they’re going to set-up a checkout area near the window and sell home grown plants and crafts. The wider community may not quite get a space that is an art gallery one week and a performance space the next – and quite often both at the same time! Therefore, installing a permanent till and leaning gently into the known ritual of a shop might ground the space even more.
This is a perfect workshop space and I am so looking forward to facilitating conversation workshops in there on the 8th and 9th July. Indeed, this space is perfect for most things applied and with a cosy, but practical storage/chill out space and a kitchen area, I can see all manner of performance happening here. I think the may vibe is visual arts and arts and crafts and it will be interesting to see how we combine a performance-based workshop to co-exist with hands, mess and paint language. Maybe the idea of conversation will find a way of using the best of both disciplines? If you are around at the weekend, please do check out the website!
Afterwards, a new experience for me in something called a Wagamama and then excitement really built for UNDERSCORE by Lisa Mattocks, Lowri Evans and poet Molly Twomey, with the support of Quarantine. As the sun sets, the company started to project statements onto the front of Manchester Central Library. Some pre-written, but much of it captured by three generations of women as Manchester approached midnight.. Their joy, fight for equality, observations of their city, fears of what’s keeping them awake at night, and dreams for the future, are all projected onto this ancient building, with the inner fury of how this structure was of-course designed/built by men.
A sense of risk that is truly held by Quarantine. It felt like a off shoot of 12 Last Songs – redefining what is a durational and how do you draw everyday folk into quite experimental ideas. The work has three chapters, punctuated by Karaoke-like, song lyrics. Someone about 20 yards behind me started softly singing along to ‘girls just wanna have fun’. Soon, twenty or so people were trying to keep in tune with each other. It was pretty magical actually! A transformative juxtaposition of lyrics without music being projected in bold on this grey, pigeon poo covered structure, but still sparking a sense of music and play.
Stayed the night with my brother – thanks as always Laurence and then we found ourselves back at Longsight for a painting workshop with a delightful collaboration twist. The workshop, Painters Passing Paintings, was created and warmly led by Joe O'Rourke, through 3 rounds of layering artwork. With various material, paint, pencils, pastels, magazines for collaging, ink and scissors to mix it all up, we set to work creating a background on 5 different a4 sheets. Round 2 we swapped artwork and added our own take to the work created. Round 3 organically merged into what we were doing and some really detailed, rich and dynamic images appeared. Young and old were part of this workshop and really got me thinking about the old ‘what is quality?’ conundrum. I can feel there could have been a heightened tension at the fact that there wasn’t massive numbers there and this could well affect future funding for space and artists alike. However, using energy to worry about audience numbers would have been detrimental. One of the beauties of this workshop is that it could work with pretty much any number. I gathered Joe had a ‘ideal’ narrative for this workshop, where everyone would create 5 new pieces, the round would be timed perfectly and each participant would engage in different ways of making… but workshops aren’t ideal, that’s the whole point actually!
A conclusion to this might be that the measurement of a ‘good workshop‘ is how much is it allowed to go ‘wrong’ and still allow the participants to feel they are making a meaningful contribution. In fact, with this one the finished artwork kind of took a backstep, I was aware that there was 25 or so amazing new pieces but didn’t really take the fact that we had completed something. This was an A-star example of applying practice. Originally, the context of co-working on painting was a collaboration between visual artists, including Joe, over the lockdown period. He explained how they would post work to each other and this eventually created an exhibition. This professional practise has inspired a day workshop for university students and then shrunken further for us. So, what we were doing in a community setting was taken directly from a commissioned process. This total demystification added so much weight to the engagement that the 2 hours flew by.
Hats off to Joe you nailed it!
What didn’t fly by was the train back to Paignton that we couldn’t for love nor money get a taxi to the station, ended up missing not 1 but 2 trains. We then had a really slow, delayed and multi change journey… but I would never write a blog complaining about these things, that would be boring to read!
The delays were something to do with a well renowned music festival with thousands of youngish people partying all night to. Why didn’t you get tickets to that, people are asking back in Paignton…. Give me a site specific, experimental work by Quarantine and an engaging in community led workshop at Longsight anyday…