Category: Personal Fragments

Arts Education: banished beyond the Debatable Hills?

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We have replaced wonder with tick-box excellence, and mystery with an impact case study.

If you collect the many dozens of articles written in the last few years about the state and future of the arts in education and place them on a pair of positive/negative scales, there’d be very little – if anything – on the positive side.

Thinking about this I was reminded of a book I read years ago, which remains one of my favourite books (it’s also on Neil Gaiman’s list of all-time favourites, so I’m in good company). The book is called Lud-in-the-Mist, written in 1926 by Hope Mirrlees. Mirrlees was a classicist, and much of her work dealt with the contested boundaries of Art and Life.

In Lud-in-the-Mist there are two countries. There is the land of Dorimare, a nation of stolid burghers, merchants and artisans. A rather prim and very proper place, where everyone knows their place, where the motto is essentially, ‘it’s the economy, stupid’ , and where the arts are relegated to activities such as needlework and country dancing: pursuits for the refinement of gentlewomen and gentlemen.

On the border of Dorimare, however, on the other side of the Debatable Hills, lies the land of Faerie, a strange, dark land full of mysteries and wonders…not all of them pleasant. The upright citizens of Dorimare so fear the land that lies beyond those dread hills, that the word ‘Faerie’ is never to be uttered.

Dorimare’s main city of Lud-in-the-Mist lies at the confluence of two rivers: the Dapple and the Dawl. The Dawl is like any other commercial river, but the Dapple happens to  flow out of the land of Faerie, and brings with it fairy fruit, that is smuggled into Dorimare.  Eating fairy fruit has a terrible effect: it causes people to start singing strange songs, to spout poetry, to dance with abandon. In other words, it turns them mad.

The plot revolves around the disappearance of a group of young ladies and the Mayor’s son who have been kidnapped and taken to the land of Faerie, and the attempt of the Mayor, a bumbling, self-important, rather fatuous man to rescue them.  As a consequence of that quest, fundamental changes are wrought – to the Mayor and to Dorimare itself.

In Lud-in-the-Mist, Mirrlees is dealing with the division of the world into Apollonian and Dionysian aspects: the homely and the wild. There is also the long battle between Classicism and Romanticism, and Freud’s theories of the conscious and unconscious mind, and the relationship between terror and beauty.

The actor Mark Rylance, in an interview, said that the arts are essentially  ‘mysterious’ which is why they frighten  politicians and policy-makers, because they can’t control them, they can’t measure them.

I imagine the educational curriculum in Dorimare’s schools is very much what like the one demanded by  Gradgrind in Dickens’ Hard Times;

“Now, what I want is Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the mind of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them.“

And if you think that’s rather extreme, consider this – handed to parents at a primary school in London in 2015:

‘The new programme of study in English is knowledge-based, this means its focus is on knowing facts rather than developing skills and understanding. It is also characterised by an increased emphasis on the technical aspects of language and less on the creative aspects.”

I was once asked, by the then German Federal Minister of Education as it happens, as we stood together in the queue for coffee at a conference on the future of Arts Education in Europe, what it was that had made the UK such a world leader in art, design, fashion, music , theatre, etc.  He was comparing the UK  with his own country and the fact that, with a few notable exceptions, Germany – with a relatively successful economy compared to the UK –  had demonstrated nothing like that level of consistent creative output over the years.

I didn’t have a rigorously researched, evidence-based answer to give him, but I did say that I thought it had something to do with our long history and tradition of non-conformity, of sticking two fingers up to authority, and our high and genuine tolerance of eccentricity. Neither of which, I suggested humbly, were common attributes in his own country.

The Minister said ‘Ah, that’s very interesting’…and moved on.

I was thinking about Lud-in-the-Mist because it seems to me we are increasingly living in a country which is becoming more Dorimare-like by the day, where the arts are increasingly banished to the equivalent of the land of Faerie, where creativity is associated with the creation of goods and wealth, where any hint of an artistic or genuinely creative spirit is dismissed as bad influence, and to be actively discouraged and eliminated.

In our education system there is now a very real danger of replacing genuine creativity with skills acquisition, wonder with tick-box excellence, and mystery with an impact case study.

So, how might we truly embrace the arts and our creative non-conformists, eccentrics and mavericks, or are we fated to banish them, their works and deeds, and their education, to that strange, mysterious, wonderful land beyond the Debatable Hills?

The final, celebratory chapter of Lud-in-the-Mist provides the answer.

Remembering Bill Mitchell

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Photo: Steve Tanner/Wildworks

Tributes have been pouring in for Bill Mitchell the director, designer, theatre-maker and inspirational founder of the unique landscape theatre company Wildworks, who passed away on the 14th April 2017 at the age of 65. Many people in the U.K. and around the world know of Bill through his extraordinary work with Kneehigh and then, particularly,  Wildworks, and there is a wonderful obituary by Lyn Gardner in The Guardian.

I first encountered Bill when we were both studying theatre design at Wimbledon School of Art in the early 1970s. Although I was a year ahead of him, students often worked together across the years, and I was fortunate to work with Bill. His creativity and imagination, as well as his great sense of fun and play, were much in evidence even then. A few years later, in 1979, I joined Bill and his partner Sue Hill in the TIE/Community theatre company Key Perspectives, based in Peterborough. (One the founder members of the company – who had left by the time I joined – was Colin Hicks, who now sits on the Wildworks board).

Key Perspectives was operating in what was TIE’s heyday, and we were just one of many such companies operating around the UK, supported by local authorities and the Arts Council. We were committed to creating and producing high quality theatre and drama-based educational programmes in schools and commmunities, working closely with teachers and students and with the communities in and around Peterborough in which they lived. Bill’s personal and creative engagement with people, place and community that became such a distinctive characteristic of his later work, can be traced back to that early work.

One my clearest and fondest memories of Bill was when we were working on a children’s Christmas show called ‘Oddbod’, which we were creating for the main house at the Key Theatre. Peterborough was then an ancient small city attached to a fast growing new town, and the infant and primary schools, particularly in and around the newly built estates, were full of children who had recently arrived from other towns and cities. Though we worked collectively, Oddbod was very much driven by Bill’s directorial and creative vision and his passion to reflect, truthfully and imaginatively, the experiences of those very young people.

We visited a number of schools, and we listened to and collected the stories that the children told and painted about ‘Oddbod’, about being a ‘stranger in a strange land’, about displacement and arrival, about feeling alone, about making friends, etc. Under Bill’s directorial and visual eye we took all the drawings and pinned them around the walls of our rehearsal space, which we filled with as many pieces of costume, materials and objects that we could find. We then started to use the drawings as starting points with which to create characters and improvise situations.

I remember that Sue Hill was attracted to a particular ‘Oddbod’ painting which consisted of a large oval black blob with a head-like smaller blob attached to it. Above it hovered another large and rather ominous looking black blob. Wrapping herself in a large black blanket, with a large black hat, Sue created a brilliant, funny character that was terrified of everything and anything, whose only utterance was “Any minute! Ooh, it’s goin’ to happen! Any minute!”. Sue reduced Bill and the rest of us to helpless hysteria and, needless to say, Any Minute became one of the ‘stars of the show’.

My particular memory of Bill was when, with our designer hats on, he and I went to buy some large fishing weights which we were going to use to assist in lowering a huge painted backcloth for the final scene. Fishing was ‘big’ in Peterborough and in the surrounding Fens, and Woolworths, in the town centre, had a large fishing section, but the particular half-pound conical weights we needed weren’t on display. So we approached one of the sales staff and asked if they still had any in stock. He went off to the storeroom and then came back saying “Yes, we have some, but we can’t sell them to you because it’s out of season”.

Bill: “But we don’t want them for fishing, we want them for a children’s Christmas show!”.

Salesperson: “You’ll have to speak to the Manager. I’ll get him.”

The manager arrived and Bill explained what we wanted, and the manager repeated that while they had them in stock they couldn’t sell them to us because it was out of season and that it was Woolworth’s policy.

At which point Bill, who was over 6ft and who, with his gold earring and gold tooth, could appear quite fearsome, went into full-on, John Cleese, dead parrot mode:

Bill: “This is a shop, yes? A shop that sells things to customers, yes? I am a customer, yes? I wish to purchase something with this [waves money in manager’ face] that you normally sell and which you currently have stored in a box in your storeroom. I understand that it is not the fishing season, but I don’t want them for bloody fishing, I want them for a Christmas show for the children of this city. Now are you going to allow me to purchase them or not?”

Manager: “How many do you need?”

* * * * * * * * * * *

Wanderer, your footsteps are the road,
and nothing more;
wanderer, there is no road,
the road is made by walking.
By walking one makes the road,
and upon glancing behind
one sees the path that never will be trod again.
Wanderer, there is no road –
only wakes upon the sea.

                                                   Antonio Machado

Nice, July 2016 and remembrance of things past

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Family holiday, Nice, July 1959

A Madeleine biscuit did it for Marcel Proust, and the horrific events in Nice did it for me. As soon as I heard the news and saw precisely where that truck of death had finally stopped, by the Palais de Mediterranean just past the Hotel Royale, virtually every detail of the holiday I took with my parents and younger brother in July 1959, when we stayed at the Royale,  fell into my head.

Our high ceiling rooms overlooking the Promenade des Anglais; the beach; me being ill with what turned out to be Whooping Cough and going to the doctor for pills…and suppositories,  which my mother couldn’t believe: “What? For his chest?”; my mother teaching me to play gin rummy, then leaving me in the care of two kindly, gin rummy obsessed  ‘grandes dames’ who sat on the shaded hotel terrace all day while  my parents and brother enjoyed the sea and sun; eating at Poznanzky’s Restaurant in the Old Town; visiting the old walled ‘artists’ town of St. Paul de Vence and remembering what I now know was the distinct and overpowering smell of old sewers and rat poison;  the drive along the high Corniche to Monte Carlo looking down at the blue bay and all the yachts; and the flower parade when thousands of people lined the Promenade des Anglais to watch dozens of neon-lit, horse-drawn floats pass by, each decorated with hundreds of pink flowers, accompanied by what, to an impressionable 8 year old, seemed to be extraordinarily glamorous and exotic women also dressed in pink, who smiled and waved and threw petals in the air.

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Parade des Fleurs, Nice, 1959. I and my family are somewhere in that crowd.

Perhaps even stranger than the crystal clear vision of that holiday appearing in my head, the next day an email appeared in my inbox. It had been sent from a mobile phone number that I (and my contacts list) didn’t recognise. I opened it carefully,  fully expecting to delete it as spam, when I noticed the actual message.

“Terrible news from Nice. Do you remember us at the flower festival many many years ago with our families? Hope you are well,  Jenny”

Jenny? Jenny who? But of course I already knew. Back in 1959 we had met and become friendly with another English family who were also staying at the Royale. They had two young girls, about the same ages as my brother and me. And one was called Jenny. She is on the right of the photo of us all sitting in the sea, sitting next to my brother. Like me, the news from Nice brought back the memory of that holiday and she had found my email by googling my name.

On that night of the flower parade 57 years ago we all stood together on the Promenade des Anglais, somewhere between the Hotel Royale and the Hotel Negresco amongst the crowd in the photo above,  watching the magical procession if not on then certainly very close to where, last Thursday night, dozens of bodies lay broken, dead and dying in the wake of that horrific, murderous, barbaric rampage.

Back then, in those days of relative innocence, people of course still died in tragic accidents or by purposeful hand,  but on the Promenade des Anglais that night it was inconceivable that someone would drive a 19 tonne truck at high speed into packed crowds of people, driven by an overwhelming, maniacal desire to kill as many as possible.

It was also probably inconceivable to the many thousands who thronged the Promenade last Thursday, enjoying the fireworks. But, objectively,  we know only too well that there are inviduals and groups for whom such acts of barbarity are not only conceivable but also achievable.

After the death – from natural causes – of our baby, I became and still am acutely aware of just how thin and fragile is the fabric of everyday normality, and how easily that fabric can be torn and ruptured in the space of seconds. But we cannot live our lives, or be forced to live our lives, in perpetual fear: that would be a victory for barbarism. So I take some comfort in the wise words of the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh:

Fear keeps us focused on the past or worried about the future. If we can acknowledge our fear, we can realize that right now we are okay. Right now, today, we are still alive, and our bodies are working marvelously. Our eyes can still see the beautiful sky. Our ears can still hear the voices of our loved ones.

 

On the loss of a child and the kindness of strangers

Twenty nine years ago, on a bright, blue, cold winter’s morning, I walked out of the maternity hospital in the city where we live, and headed towards the registry office in the centre of town. I went there to register the birth, and death, of our first child, a baby boy who had been born and who had died a few hours previously. I had to be there in order to complete the paperwork that would allow us to bury him within 24 hours according to Jewish custom.

I remember, in that rather dark, forbidding wood-panelled waiting room, sitting next to a happy young couple who had come to register the birth of their new baby, who lay sleeping happily in his mother’s arms, and opposite a family, all dressed in black, grieving for a close and dear relative. I also remember, with immense gratitude, the kindness of the official who carefully and sympathetically took down all the necessary details. She was only doing her job but doing it in a way which make me feel – for the moment at least – a little bit easier with myself and with the world.

Now, twenty nine years later, though the number of years is wholly immaterial, amidst the hurly burly and complex logistics of daily life – juggling home, work, family, friends – rarely does a day go by without something or someone causing me to think back to that cold, blue morning.

The death of our child made me acutely aware of just how thin and fragile is the surface covering everyday normality, and how easily the fabric of that covering can be torn and ruptured…sometimes in seconds.

In particular I’ve come to understand the real importance of small acts of kindness. Those spontaneous, generous, unselfish acts that help to maintain that fragile fabric. I’ve learned – though sometimes it’s still a struggle – to give people the benefit of the doubt, to try and be more tolerant, to try and listen more. I’ve learned that others, too, may have large cracks and holes in their lives, and they – like me sometimes – are relying on that fabric not being torn in order to just get them through the day. The smile, the greeting, the welcome, the thank you, the helping hand, the small talk before getting down to business are all, in their way, small acts of kindness that bind us together and strengthen the fabric of our lives.

But before I am accused, in the face of a harsh and sometimes brutal world, of a utopian let’s-just-all-be-nice-to-each-other idealism, our baby’s death, conversely, made me less tolerant…of arrogance, ignorance, triviality and sheer stupidity. If there’s one quality we need, sometimes desperately, to develop, it is an active, rigorous tolerance, which is not the same as prejudiced silence or passive indifference. Understanding and respect for others grows out of a willingness to engage actively with the world. But it also means knowing, recognising and, importantly, doing something positive about not only those things that will make the world a better, happier place but acting to prevent those things that make it worse.

May the support of friends and family, and the kindness of strangers bring some comfort to you at this sad time.

(This is an adaptation of a piece written for BBC Radio and first broadcast in 2000. At the time we received wonderful support from Sands – the UK charity that provides support for bereaved parents and their families, which we now, in turn, support.)