The term black theatre might conjure up images of a niche and very 20th century concept, but from Ira Aldridge playing Othello in Covent Garden in the 1830s to the 1990 production of Amani Napthali’s Ragamuffin and to grime star Bashy in a rap opera a couple of years ago, the genre is historical and diverse – if lesser known than its mainstream counterpart.
A youth-led film being premiered at London’s Royal Court theatre today, Margins to Mainstream, seeks to demystify and tell the story of black theatre in Britain. Made by young people in west London and Birmingham, in a partnership between London’s Octavia Foundation and Nu Century Arts in Birmingham, with funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund, its visual treasures include forgotten plays and landmark performances.
Those who appear in the film include playwright and broadcaster Kwame Kwei-Armah and Pat Cumper, director of the Talawa Arts Centre. The film was shot at locations including Theatre Royal East, London Southbank Centre, Royal Court Theatre, Old Vic and The Tabernacle.
The cross-city project allowed young people in London and Birmingham to learn and develop skills in media, research and film-making and is the latest in a series of innovative community filmmaking initiatives from the charity.
Zakiya, 18, a sixth form student studying photography, media and sociology and a tenant of Octavia Housing, adds that working on the project has inspired her to see more theatre and be more creative: “I didn’t really know anything about black theatre before, or theatre in general but it was really great and we saw some good productions…this project has helped build my experience in the field – I’m studying media, sociology and photography and want to be a photographer when I’m older. Seeing the finished film and knowing I’ve been a part of it is incredible.”
After the premiere in London the film will be screened at venues throughout London, Birmingham and the rest of the country and made available to theatres, arts and community groups and other interested groups later on this year. You can find out more about the screenings here.
Tom Spicer is wearing a huge pair of headphones and an expression of mild anxiety.
Backstage at the Honda Centre, Anaheim, California, at one of the world’s biggest rock gigs, Tom is about to find out whether he will fulfill his 15-year-dream to meet his idol, Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich.
Tom is now 40, and this scene took place two years ago. But this was not just a tick on a “things to do before 40” list – it was an unprecedented achievement. Tom has fragile X syndrome, the most common cause of inherited learning disability.
Bladerunner, a sculpture of champion sprinter Oscar Pistorius by John Buckley, exhibiting at the Bloomsbury Art FairThere are 20m people across the world who need a wheelchair and don’t have one, according to the World Health Organisation, and the average life expectancy of a paraplegic in a developing country is far shorter than in the western world.
At this year’s event in July there is more than a nod to the Olympics and Paralympics (one of the pieces in the exhibition, Bladerunner by John Buckley, is pictured above). Organisers are hoping to draw bigger crowds and funds than last year with works as diverse as Sophie Morgan’s beautiful drawings and Olympic and Paralympic sculptures from Art At The Edge.
Flowers, by Jo Oakley, showing at the Bloomsbury Art Fair
All profits from the Bloomsbury Art Fair will be donated to three charities, including Motivation, which support people following a life-changing injury. In its inaugural year last year, the event drew more than 3,000 visitors and made more than £60,000 for its chosen disability charities.
Another beneficiary is Southern Spinal Injuries Trust supports the Duke of Cornwall Spinal Treatment Centre in Salisbury and people living with a spinal cord injury in the South and South-West of England. Funding donated from the 2011 Bloomsbury Art Fair is currently being used to build a pioneering rehabilitation garden in the grounds of the centre.
Walking With The Wounded supports young military servicemen and women who have suffered injuries and will also benefit from the art fair. Money raised will finance new qualifications, courses and further education for people who are seriously injured, enabling the blind, burn victims, amputees and people with other long-term injuries to rebuild their lives and to return to work.
This year’s event also features a creative arts programme and live music and sculpture demonstrations in the courtyard of the exhibition venue Goodenough College. Among those returning to this year’s fair are artist Sophie Morgan, photographer David Constantine, sculptor Ian Edwards and The Helium Foundation, which will be showing works from artists such as Nick Walker and Damien Hirst.
With such a diverse range of mediums and pieces (prices range from £50-£25,000) and a huge array of galleries, dealers and artists (and by huge array, I mean established and emerging artists as well as able-bodied and disabled), it promises to be a fascinating event.
* The Bloomsbury Art Fair runs from 6-8 July 2012 at Goodenough College, London House, Mecklenburgh Square, WC1N 2AB. Ticket information is here.
Ever considered what someone who’s homeless wears to a job interview?
If you’re trying to get back on your feet and into work or training, whether you’re homeless, long-term unemployed or disadvantaged, what you need is smart clothes, but what you make do with is mis-matched separates in the wrong size or style.
Charities, night shelters and hostels receive donations – from food to clothing and practical kit like sleeping bags – and there are plenty of great schemes that support people into volunteering, training or work (that’s if there are jobs to come by and employers willing to hire). But while someone might have the skills and experience for employment, what’s often missing is the confidence-boosting garb to help them look and feel the part.
So I was interested to hear that the second annual Suit Amnesty launches next month and lasts throughout May. The aim is to help homeless jobseekers back into work by encouraging people to gift their unwanted suits.
More than 2,000 suits were collected in last year’s campaign, going to 22 different charities. Sian Thomas, marketing officer at Newcastle charity The Cyrenians describes last year’s donated suits as “perfect for our back-to-work projects which are all about getting people off the streets and preparing them for working life”. She adds: “Owning a suit makes a massive difference and will help our service users achieve their full potential.”
The scheme works with charities like The Cyrenians and Manchester’s Booth Centre that run back to work schemes.
Businesses can take part, acting as drop off points, and boosting their social responsibility profile in the process (apparently some of the firms that took part last year reported up to 14% increase in web hits during the campaign).
Accessible drop-off points include a variety of businesses including The Marketers’ Forum in London, the Malmaison hotel in Newcastle,retailer T.M. Lewin in London and various health clubs, hotels, bars and banks. More information on the Suit Amnesty website.
By coincidence, as I was reading about the project, I also came across a great scheme, Undergarments for Everyone, started by University of the West of England student Ed Tolkien to distribute new underwear and socks to homeless people in the Bristol area.
Last December, Tolkien collected and redistributed hats, scarves and gloves to local people on the streets, but he says many told him the hardest thing to come by was underwear.
Cash donated via collection boxes at the university and at two Salvation Army charity shops in Bristol, will be spent on new pants and socks and given to two Bristol homelessness charities, St Mungo’s and the Julian Trust night shelter.
Sometimes the simplest of ideas can have a big impact.
It’s an uphill struggle for those with so-called invisible difficulties (people with conditions on the autistic spectrum, for example,) to achieve mainstream representation or indeed capture the attention of broadcasters, newspaper editors, politicians and the public.
So imagine the challenge for those with more visible differences.
If you see facial disfigurement in movies, its usually a handy hint just in case you have trouble figuring out the baddie (think Nightmare on Elm Street’s Freddie Kreuger and just about every Bond villain). Trying to see if I could disprove this theory, I randomly remembered Liam Neeson in Darkman – scarred, with a grudge, ultimately fighting for justice – but then looked up the tagline” “hideously scarred and mentally unstable scientist seeks revenge against the crooks who made him like that”. Ouch.
Movie memo to kids (they might not know Freddie Kreuger but you can be sure they know Batman’s The Joker or Harry Potter’s Voldemort): look bad on the outside, and you’re bad inside.
Today, Changing Faces, the charity for people and families whose lives are affected by appearance-altering conditions, marks or scars, launches a nationwide film campaign. Please watch it, it’s powerful, elegantly produced and only a minute long.
You might already have spotted the charity’s poster campaign not so long ago which aimed to stop people in their tracks long enough to make them think (instead of simply staring). Today’s Face Equality on Film campaign, it is hoped, will go some way towards tackling the prejudice and crass assumptions experienced by people with facial disfigurement.
The campaign calls for balanced portrayals of people with disfigurements on screen and the film, which will be shown in 750 Odeon cinemas, invites audiences to challenge their assumptions about Leo Gormley, a man with burn scars. It also stars Downton Abbey actor Michelle Dockery.
As a teenager in the ’80s, my first foray into the mind-boggling world of skincare and “beauty” products involved a desperate desire to cover barely perceptible blemishes, inspired by the seemingly zit-free stars on my Smash Hits front cover. But since, then the concept of “beauty” has become even more extreme, and digital wizardry can clear imperfections in the blink of a heavily-made-up eye.
I’m conscious that my seven-year-old daughter, for example, is growing up in a media environment dominated by images of identikit, airbrushed, photoshopped lovelies projecting an unobtainable and flawless version of “looking good”.
In a world where older women are elbowed off the television news because their faces, rather than their news judgement, start to sag, what hope for those whose features even further removed from what is deemed be aesthetically pleasing? Changing Faces has already worked with Channel Five news to shatter such stereotypes.
But if women, ethnic minorities and people with disabilities are under-represented in television, then people whose differences are more obvious are, ironically, even more invisible.
And if facial differences feature on television, they do so in a medical capacity, in documentaries that present abnormality as something to be gawped at or “put right”. While the concept behind The Undateables might have been well-intentioned, it was the title of the show that put me off.
As Changing Faces’ chief executive James Partridge said in response to that Channel 4 series: “TV series with derisory titles makes life just that bit more difficult – it’s so unnecessary and it’s unfair. Very good factual and sensitive documentaries on disfigurement-related topics are frequently spoiled by offensive titles such as ‘Freak show family’, ‘The man with tree trunks for legs’ and ‘Bodyshock’. They are contrived to attract audiences but actually label the human being in the film in a sensationalist and voyeuristic way, treating him or her as an object rather than a person.”
At the risk of getting sidetracked down this road, I remember gritting my teeth a few years ago to get past the utterly ludicrous title of The Strangest Village in Britain. It was, was in fact a sensitive portrayal of life at Camphill’s Botton village which featured much of the good support that has made a difference to my family’s life – not that you’d know that from the objectionable title.
Back to today’s campaign launch; a YouGov survey of 1,741 adults commissioned by the charity last month found that bad teeth, scars, burns and other conditions affecting the face are viewed as the most common indicators of an evil film character. According to the poll, ethnic minorities, bald and disabled people are all thought to be portrayed in more diverse ways than those with disfigurements.
Responding to the poll, 66% said people with bad teeth mainly play evil characters and 48% said that people with conditions altering their appearance mainly play evil characters. Meanwhile, 30% said that bald people mainly play evil such roles compared to 13% who felt those from ethnic minorities mainly portrayed bad characters. Interestingly, 6% said that people with physical disabilities (in a wheelchair or have missing limbs) mainly play evil characters.
Partridge adds of today’s campaign: “It would seem as if all the film industry has to do to depict evil and villainy is apply a scar or a prosthetic eye socket or remove a limb and every movie goer knows that it’s time to be suspicious, scared or repulsed…Freddie Krueger, Scarface and Two-Face are just some of the names that our clients get called at school, on the street and at work. They have to put up with people laughing at them, recoiling, running away or staring in disbelief that they can and do live a normal life.”
* You can sign the charity’s online petition demanding an end to the stigma reinforced on screen.
Government is passing down an unprecedented austerity drive to local government. In the perfect storm of cuts, rising unemployment and ageing population, the budget failed to throw much of a lifeline to local government.
But as the Treasury resigns councils to choppy financial waters for longer than predicted, how far have authorities grasped the notion of prolonged austerity? Can they handle what needs to be done long term and to put it bluntly, how bad can it get?
One of my biggest regrets is that I didn’t take down more of my mother’s stories before her slide into dementia accelerated. I would have liked to know more about her brief engagement to a Vietnamese diplomat, or the time she visited Benidorm when it only had two hotels, or what more she could tell me about her older brother who was killed in the war.
That’s why I was fascinated to meet David Clegg, the man behind an inspirational project dedicated to collecting the life stories of people with dementia. His Trebus Project has collected a huge range of stories, some of which have been published in two books and collected on a record and some of which have formed the basis for a Radio 4 series, produced by Paul Whitehouse and Charlie Higson. He’s now working on a short film.
The prime minister is due to announce a major funding boost for dementia research, reaching £66m by 2015, from £26.6m 2010. He is due to say that “the quiet crisis” is one that “steals lives and tears at the hearts of families”
David Clegg’s Trebus Project is about revealing the fascinating and rich histories of people with dementia; it is about celebrating the lives that appear to have been lost.
Trebus began after Clegg closed down the art gallery he used to run and began working on art projects with care home residents. The very first person he met happened to be a woman with a fascinating tale to tell: she’d once been the girlfriend of the notorious acid bath murderer John Haigh.
“Nobody knew it,” he recalls. “They saw to her needs – it took two people to get her into a hoist for example, but they didn’t know anything about the fact that she was bohemian beyond belief. She would have given William Burroughs a run for his money – she’d hung around with Princess Margaret and made her way back from the south of France wearing only a fur coat and high heels.”
Sheila, one of the Trebus "storytellers" in her extrovert younger daysSheila socialising (note she's standing in front of cricketer Fred Truman)Sheila at her care home, in front of a portrait of her younger self
Clegg is full of anecdotes about the people he’s spoken to. One of my favourites comes from an elderly gay man, who remembered celebrating VE day in London. “I asked him: ‘Did you go to the Palace and see them on the balcony?'”, Clegg says. “He replied: ‘No I was in the toilets – I got off with seven soldiers that day and one more in the tube.’”
It’s a perfect illustration of Clegg’s point that far too often we try to sanitise the lives of people with dementia. “A person with dementia is presented as someone fading away, leached out, who’s a shadow,” he says. “But many of the people I’ve worked with are not shadows – they are trying to make sense of their lives in difficult circumstances. They are not any less as people – they can be as funny, vibrant, passionate and randy as they ever were.”
His is a refreshingly unsentimental view of dementia. “We need a new story on dementia. We either present it as a global epidemic or a tragedy,” he says. “But we have got to get the message across that these are people who were not always old, who have lived lives that were full and eventful. Sometimes we might disagree with what they did or the opinions they held but dementia care needs to grow up and embrace some of the complications.”
Clegg, who did a stint working as a carer to see what it was like, plays down talk of being an agitator for the human rights of people with dementia. “I go in and listen and keep coming back,” he simply says. But his project does shine a light on the appalling way older people can sometimes be treated.
A striking shot from the Trebus Project, this time of Marianne, another storyteller
Take the story of John, a man with no living relatives, who when Clegg first saw him was lying on a bed staring at the ceiling, in a completely bare room without even a clock to mark the passage of time. When care home staff were asked by Clegg to bring him a clock they did – but then fixed it on the wall behind his head.
Clegg says the vast majority of care workers do their best, reserving his ire for the lack of resources to stimulate residents and the managers or directors who only want to fill their beds – and who have sometimes banned him from their premises because they were nervous about what he was doing.
His main motivation, he says is to collect words that would otherwise be lost. In the process, he is putting together something incredibly powerful: stories that are sometimes funny, sometimes moving, sometimes, as he recognises, almost like a Samuel Beckett play in their bleakness.
The Trebus Project provokes you into looking behind dementia stereotypes
It also, says Alison Wray of Cardiff University, has very real benefits for the person with dementia, putting them at the centre of the process and allowing both them and their carers to reconnect with their identity. In Clegg’s recent work, he has been doing less editing to give the stories a traditional narrative structure. Instead they are presented as fragments. Says Clegg: “It can show what dementia is like from the inside.”
To buy the publications or to donate to support the work of the Trebus Project, go to the website or email information@trebusprojects.org
Louis Tickle, freelance journalistAs a journalist writing on social affairs I often wonder if my articles make any difference or whether this kind of journalism is essentially exploitative. The dilemma isn’t original. Journalists and photographers struggle with it all the time. Mostly I ignore it. But it niggles.
So, I’m commissioned by a children’s charity to interview a single mum it’s been working with. She’s got five kids; black mould spreads thickly across her kitchen ceiling and down the back wall. One of her daughters, a little girl with asthma, sleeps in a pink bedroom so icily cold I feel my skin shrink when we look in. A single photograph of a baby lost to cot death is unobtrusively placed among the many pictures of her other children displayed in the front room.
There’s a housing association building site at the end of the terraced row, but this woman can’t get hold of the £400 she needs to secure one of the warm, dry family houses that will soon be available.
I write my piece feeling angry and hopeless. My fee is more than the money she needs for that deposit. I wrestle with the thought that I should give it to her. I don’t.
A year on, I still wonder if I should have done. This is hardly war reporting, but these are people living on a front line. They’re who I write about. And then I disappear off, my notebook full, my deadline pressing. I rarely see them again.
Does this kind of journalism change anything? I don’t know. It’s what I do, what I can do, what I have time to do. I know it’s not enough.
Though what’s playing out in the Leveson enquiry means that rotten practices are being dragged through the mire, the level of underlying suspicion about journalism saddens me, because it’s based on a misunderstanding of what any kind of serious journalism is about.
I don’t do this job because I want to stiff as many people as possible in the name of selling papers. I do it because stuff goes badly wrong in certain bits of public life, and in the small way that writing articles allows, I want to ask why – then persuade, cajole, flatter or embarrass people into giving me the answer.
The judgements I make in writing a piece may be taken fast, but they aren’t taken lightly. For instance…
I’m constantly examining the ethics of how I go about writing a piece. Particularly if an interviewee is vulnerable or not media savvy, I know that I can’t get across their tone of voice, or give every bit of background about their situation, so which quote I pick really matters.
I’ve written a fair bit about young single mothers. Asked why they got pregnant, why they chose to keep the baby, how they manage. And sometimes you’ll get a teenager replying along the lines of: ‘Some girls do get pregnant to get a council house, yeah, absolutely.’
What do I do with that? I know those words will make a strong headline. But if I use them rather than the less instantly “good value” comments, I don’t do this young mother’s entire situation justice. So I will think very, very hard about how to treat that kind of quote, and whether to include it at all.
Occasionally, I do stuff I know an editor wouldn’t like. National news organisations do not give interviewees the chance to see or approve copy before publication. There are practical reasons for this – deadlines, for example – but mostly, it’s about retaining editorial independence. Otherwise people ring up and say, “actually, I’d prefer it if you didn’t write about such-and-such a thing I told you about, it’ll make life really awkward.”
That, I’m afraid, is tough. If you don’t want me to write something, then don’t tell me, or alternatively, negotiate when you want to go off the record carefully and in advance.
But when a charity puts me in touch with someone struggling to rebuild their life, and they talk frankly about the hell they’ve been through, I’m aware a clumsily phrased comment about their situation could knock their confidence at best and make life even more difficult for them at worst. So sometimes I will read back quotes to an interviewee to make sure I have accurately reflected their views and they’re happy to go public with them.
On one occasion, I spent an afternoon with a young recovering drug addict who had spent four years on the game to fund her and her former boyfriend’s habit. She’d had her eldest daughter taken from her by social services: now pregnant again and with a new partner, she was on track to being allowed to keep her baby.
Given what she told me about the horrors of her previous lifestyle and job, I don’t know how she’d found the strength to kick her habit, but I was damned sure that nothing I wrote was going to set her back. The finished piece was written entirely in the first person; the risk of misrepresenting someone when you do this is real, no matter how good your intentions.
So I sent her the finished piece to look at. In this specific situation, editorial independence wasn’t going to trump her right to have her life described accurately and in a way that wasn’t going to put her recovery at risk.
Unlike many ‘important’ people who cavil at tiny bits of phrasing, this woman didn’t ask for a single change. And when my editor told me to go back and ask her a question – how much did she charge for each particular “service”? – (something I regard as the low point of my journalistic career) she didn’t get offended or slam the phone down. She told me. And, as I was finishing the call, she said thank you.
I loved doing that piece of work. The access and insight journalists get is central to why I am still entranced by this job.
But returning to my original question, does this kind of journalism change anything?
Well, that piece was published in The Times. A lot of people would have read it. The charity that supported her would have got some publicity.
What they really needed though was money to support more girls as they tried to get off the game. Maybe the piece helped them twist a few funders’ arms. Whatever it did, it’s nothing in comparison to the work done by dedicated experts at the coalface of disadvantage, poverty, suffering and violence.
When I try to answer the ‘does it make a difference’ question, I feel a bit like when you donate to charity online. Do you pick £2, £10, £25 or a bigger sum that means you won’t be able to buy that dress you had your eye on? Whatever you put is something, but it’s probably not as much as you could have given, and it’s certainly never enough.
Whose pants do you pop on? Whose name’s in your knickers? Who’s behind your briefs? Who styled your smalls? And just where is this intro going?
Enough already. While retail guru Mary Portas last night kicked off her pledge to reignite the UK clothing industry with a range of 100% British knickers, one campaigning social entrepreneur in the south of England has slowly, steadily and rather stylishly been making ethical underwear since 2009.
Becky John in the Who Made Your Pants factory, Southampton
Who Made Your Pants is based in Southampton and run by Becky John. Each pair of pants is sent out with a tag which allows you to find out who made them. There’s something of an interactive knicker-namechecker where you punch in the date on the tag and check who made your pants.
The organisation’s quirky name belies its strong, pro-woman campaigning zeal and while it’s less bra-burning and more pants-producing, the ethos is simply “amazing pants, and amazing women”.
The business is a women’s co-operative which employs seven women, mostly refugees. From the fabric that goes to make the underwear (recycled from end of season lingerie stock sold by big companies that would otherwise go to waste) to the working conditions in the small factory, the company is ethically-run.
The women are from Afghanistan, Somalia, the Sudan and potential workers come via refugee support agencies (although the firm now has a waiting list for employees). There is training and support as well as a computer suite for the women to use email and the internet, so the factory is something of a social and community space as well as a workplace.
While ethical clothing ranges are nothing new (and neither, for that matter, are undies with a social conscience), the Southampton women’s co-op commands attention as a small but perfectly formed community-based drive to make a difference.
Some of the UK’s most inspiring performers are taking part in a two-day disability arts showcase that kicks off in Leicester tomorrow.
Embrace Create Connect, 15-16 March, is a national conference for performers with a learning disability and for those who work with people who have a learning disability.
Movers Theatre Company (pictured here performing The Sorting Office, 2009) feature in the two day arts extravaganza
The event, which takes place at Embrace Arts, Leicester University’s arts centre aims to share learning and present the huge and rich range of learning disability arts work, connecting performers, producers and promoters.
A scoping document for the event, Written by Andy Reeves, artistic director of the Leicester-based Speakeasy Theatre Company (I featured the participatory arts company’s great work here) describes the East Midlands as “an interesting region in terms of performing arts and disability” because activity from the sector has learning disability, rather than physical disability, as its primary focus.
Anna Pearce and Hanna Sampson in Shadowed Voices, part of StopGAP Dance Company’s trainee programme
As Reeves acknowledges in his scoping report, while there is “a wealth of interesting learning disability practice happening nationally and regionally”, connecting up this kind of work “is much trickier”. Tomorrow’s unprecedented event will, buoyed by the strong vision of the companies and artists in the region, kickstart a learning disability performing arts network in the region.
The term black theatre might conjure up images of a niche and very 20th century concept, but from Ira Aldridge playing Othello in Covent Garden in the 1830s to the 1990 production of Amani Napthali’s Ragamuffin and to grime star Bashy in a rap opera a couple of years ago, the genre is historical and diverse – if lesser known than its mainstream counterpart. 
