Blog - Du?ka Radosavljevi?.

A Visit to the Performance Ensemble

October 2023

Part 1: Selby, 07/10/2023

Alan, Tamara and I take a train to Selby to imagine a new version of Wings of Desire – a show to be based on Wim Wenders’ famous film, set in 1980s Berlin, about an angel falling in love with a trapeze artist. Alan has already created theatre versions of this show for Newcastle and for Copenhagen in the early 2000s, and has dramaturged an open air circus version of it in Birmingham in 2014. The new one is being envisaged for the Selby Abbey as part of the Arts Council’s ‘levelling up for culture’ strategy. Ideally, the show would be made by Alan Lyddiard in 2025, in exactly the same way he has always worked on making art: with members of the local community performing side by side with the professionals, in this case The Performance Ensemble – a new NPO-funded ensemble based in Leeds, consisting of performers aged 60+.

Now in their 70s, choreographer Tamara McLorg and director Alan Lyddiard still have a spring in their step as they embark on a mission to bring the arts into the community and the community into the artistic work. The two have known each other for decades and this shows in the subtle ways in which they have endless patience for each other, they chuckle at each other’s familiar flaws, they share shortcuts, unspoken signals and irresistible in-jokes. It’s not dissimilar from watching two teenagers banter, the main difference being that when a name of a person or a place is mentioned, their eyes glaze over and there is a palpable weight of memory behind it, a larger load of meaning that inhabits the gaps in the conversation and stretches the mind further back into the mists of time.

As we settle into our set of table seats on the train, some conversation trail leads us towards the 1960s, so I want to know how the two of them met. It was in a show, they tell me, about the poet John Clare, made by EMMA (East Midlands Mobile Arts) company in Loughborough in 1977. Alan played John Clare, and Tamara played his muse Mary, which was a dancing-only part. It was directed by Andrew Manley who had brought Alan to EMMA from Keswick to act and direct for the company. The EMMA Theatre company used to work alongside the EMMA dance company which was led by Gideon Avrahami, a choreographer who later went to Israel and joined a kibbutz. And sometimes the two branches of EMMA worked together.

‘I mean, I was part of the EMMA theatre company, and I used to go to the pub and play darts, and I used to think dance was just stupid. “Why are these people prancing about in their funny costumes”, I thought it was ridiculous. They’d be talking about it and I’d be nodding and rolling cigarettes, and doing working class plays by Steven Poliakoff.? But one day I went into the rehearsal and I saw this piece, I think it was Ladylove that Tamara had choreographed and she was in, and I just thought “That’s just really beautiful, really amazing!” So I suddenly became a convert to dance’.

And when they both later left EMMA, Alan directed Tamara’s solo show, and they have worked together on and off ever since.

As floods of stories pour out – about theatre and dance shows, individuals’ and companies’ names from all around the UK, parties and projects, training schemes, travels and tours, chance meetings and fallings out – a young woman comes along to say how she couldn’t help overhearing, but she is a theatre student, and they seem like they’ve had amazing careers!…

Pleasantly surprised Alan pulls out his business card to give her, but as we leave the train he and Tamara conclude maybe we were a little too loud? Maybe it’s our hearing that makes us speak a little too loudly… Or maybe the conversation got a little too exciting as we got to the part in the recollections about the decadence of the 1960s British rep theatres, and the wild East London parties, the all too familiar hopes and carefree promises of youth that any person in their twenties can still relate to.

As we walk the streets of Selby on a sunny and warm October morning, we notice passageways and interesting looking restaurants, a Roma flag flying on one of the windows, a boy filming us from an open window. In a second hand shop Tamara spots a teddy bear she needs for a piece she is making in Beeston, and so we gain a new fluffy companion on our travels. There is a wonderful amphitheatre in the city centre that never gets used for live performance, and Alan has ideas how to use it. Then we call at a miniature bookshop that Alan had visited before. He remembers hearing about some local interest stories there and maybe we can find some books for our research; maybe we can find out something about a potential local celebrity that can play the Peter Falk character in the Selby adaptation… But no luck this time, the nearest place popular culture celebrities from Yorkshire come from is Leeds.

The most famous Selby celebrity might be Benedict, the 11th century French monk, who had a vision about three swans in a bend in a river marking the place where he should build an abbey in England. That is how the Selby Abbey came to be in 1069. Over a thousand years of history makes for a brimful of stories, but we are focusing on the space itself. Tamara is feeling the walls with her hands, leaping up gently to nestle her body into the alcoves, imagining moments of choreographed movement. Alan is whizzing up and down the aisles, counting the seats, planning the ways in which the audience gets to experience an equivalent of the worlds conjured up in the Wenders movie: the black and white, turning into the technicolour one. His vision for the opening is a choir of children entering the church, looking up at the angels.

We spend the rest of our visit searching for the Tiny Treasures. These are miniscule embroiderings made by the local artist Serena Partridge and hidden in the nooks and crannies of the abbey’s walls – tiny depictions of swans and martyrs, maids and saints tucked into the stone crevices. We hear stories of a high profile Korean pop star booking the abbey for his wedding (he had wanted the Westminster abbey initially but this was the more easily available back up) – and then, strangely, we actually bump into a lone Asian woman in a wedding dress, running around the abbey’s grounds looking for a photographer… All this brings the thought of treasure trails as a dramaturgical structure, a way of creating the equivalent of a cinematic close up for an audience on a kind of pilgrimage in the Selby version of Wings of Desire.

Not really realising the incidental dancing connection, we wind up in the downstairs café of the River Mills Ballroom – a place Alan declares the best restaurant in Selby. Here I am beguiled by more stories of Alan and Tamara’s journeys through the arts world of late 20th century Britain, and more specifically its margins, its nooks and crannies that have been sometimes referred to by the chroniclers of that time as British ‘alternative theatre’ (Sandy Craig 1980), ‘radical performance’ (Baz Kershaw 1992), and less fortuitously, perhaps, ‘community arts’.

When I get back to my hotel room, I google the British dancer and choreographer Royston Maldoom, another key former collaborator of Tamara and Alan’s. In 2004, aged 60, Maldoom became a top celebrity in Germany thanks to a film called Rhythm is it! Which was made to document his and Simon Rattle’s community arts project using Stravinsky’s ‘Rite of Spring’. In it they collaborated with 250 school children and the Berlin Philharmonic, to prove the simple conviction that art and creativity belong to everyone, not just the professionals, and that, as such, they can transform lives.

Based in Germany, Royston Maldoom is an OBE, but he cannot get a British publisher interested in publishing his autobiography.

?Part 2: Leeds 09/10/2023

There is a guy called Garry in the Chapeltown area of Leeds, who cures people’s aches and pains with art. If you have a frozen shoulder, for example, you can go to him to make your shoulder out of ceramics. He crafts it carefully according to your detailed specifications capturing the way in which pain sits in it – and then he smashes it. The act of smashing the frozen shoulder – as you’ll find out in a few days time – takes the pain away. No one knows how this works but it does. He has also invented a card game for such medicinal purposes (https://garrybarkeronline.com/project/votives/) getting men to open up over a pint about their ailments.

In an Open Space symposium on Creative Ageing organised by The Performance Ensemble, artist Garry Barker has called the question ‘How can we establish meaningful relationships through art?’, and his story about curing frozen shoulders has stopped me in my tracks though I had originally intended to rotate around all the groups.

‘How is this work funded?’, I ask.

‘It isn’t’, he says, ‘I do it voluntarily through other sources of income as an artist.’

Having lived and worked in Chapeltown for a long time, Garry is embedded in the community and he engages people because they know him already, or through word of mouth. ‘It is a familiar story from the history of humanity’, someone observes, ‘all societies have had a form of a healer, although the multiple functions of this sort of individual might have fragmented into the separate domains of medicine, art and alchemy over time.

Having spent the last few years watching fledgling – often culturally displaced – artists hoping for instant fame in the global mecca of London as they prepare for their career take off, I have been painfully aware of their problem number 1 being how to find an audience. I marvel a little too loudly at this revelation of contrast and well-earned privilege that comes from being a local artist with deep roots and long-held trust of the community.

Sue Gill, who also happens to be in Garry’s open space group, proffers more evidence of how this works in her community of Ulverston where she officiates, often at the request of her local community, at alternative wedding and naming ceremonies, designed bespoke with and by the celebrants themselves. Sue is the second half of Welfare State International, the ‘engineers of the imagination’, the very company that graced the covers of my university coursebooks in the 1990s, as the prime example of the 1960s radical theatre.

I am slightly in awe of Sue Gill and John Fox who are also present here today, invited by Alan Lyddiard to add some ceremony to the opening of the Open Space event. And so they did, by bursting some balloons to cover us in glitter, some impromptu accordion-playing and reading from their beautiful new book titled Eighty-Something (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Eighty-Something-Lifetime-Conversation-Sue-Gill/dp/0956858341/). Though age has crept up on their physical bodies, they are bursting with energy, still dazzling with articulation, inspiration and mental clarity. Sue has a quirky story in response to every question. John has an ease of verbal expression that he tends to speed up so ‘not to take too much time’, as he says. They both have a love for and a belief in humanity that is infectious.

There are more dispersed conversations in the room, definitions of elitism, redefinitions of diversity, attempts at envisaging improved access and ways of reaching those who are difficult to reach. Diverse voices are present in the room, different cultural perspectives, different interests in arts and cultures and although this is energizing for everyone present, Alan is thoughtful. I later find out he is not sure how this will translate into constructive action, what will happen next, and how?… But I think this is good because, knowing Alan, it is bound to lead somewhere.

If nothing else for today, there is a guy called Trevor from Bradford who takes to the stage at the end to revel in the newly found enthusiasm of this accidental community, and in the promise for creative ageing he has found today that goes beyond quotas, free public transport, and the mere ticking of boxes.

Part 3: Newcastle 10/10/2023

Paulette wants to be known as a ‘seasoned’ performer, rather than ‘older’ or ‘ageing’ one. She wants us to find new words to talk about growing old. And then she gets hold of a microphone to tempt the audience into a moment of shared joy through musical call and response.

The Performance Ensemble member Paulette Morris and I are taking part in a panel at the National Conference of Creative Ageing in Newcastle upon Tyne, where we make a brief presentation about Sinfonia, the piece by the Ensemble performed in May in Leeds. Paulette offers an insider perspective, while I try to contextualise it from the outside, by reference to Alan’s previous work that stretches all the way back here in Newcastle where he had founded and ran the Northern Stage ensemble, and where I worked with him as the company dramaturg. In Newcastle, Paulette, Alan, Tamara and I are also joined by current co-chair of The Performance Ensemble’s board/ former priest and Leeds councillor/current performer with the company, Roger Harington, and also by Newcastle-based actor Alex Elliott, another co-conspirator who has followed Alan from the Northern Stage days all the way to the current project in creative ageing in Leeds. It is a motley crew that nevertheless shares values which run deep and strong, values that have the capacity to bind together across various kinds of difference and to keep people together, long term. What else is there when it comes to growing old, but being surrounded by those you can still sing together with, no matter where you come from? I don’t get to say that at the time, but these are the thoughts crystallising for me now, as I think back to it all.

Being back in Newcastle, it is hard to resist a flood of memories; it’s hard to contain curiosity and wonder about how the place changes over time, layers and layers of skin shedding or eroding and being replaced with new glossier ones. Added to this is the bonus of unexpected re-encounters, hugs with old friends, colleagues, acquaintances, jubilant reconnections with those one has lost touch with. This conference on creative ageing actually turns out for me to be a party, fuelled by the joy of connection in the place of any other stimulants. Already at the opening keynote I have the pleasure to text a friend in London that their show has been name-checked by the chair of the Arts Council. I get to run around introducing people from different parts of my life to each other: Alan, who once lived in the Philippines, to a former student of mine, a second generation Philippina Londoner who is about to move back there to live in her grandmother’s house. My long lost friend Kath and Paulette happen to hit it off on their own anyway over their shared ancestral connection to the West Indies. And at the end, as Roger, Tamara, Paulette and I scramble out to the railway station for our 5pm train, the great Jackie Kay, the former Scottish Makar – who had just triumphed with her conference-busting off-the-cuff sit-down comedy routine about ageing gracefully as a minoritised member of the society – runs out with us to give Paulette a hug, and indulges me with a moment of reminiscence about our shared time at Newcastle University.? ??

I spend part of my train journey back to the airport nestled next to Paulette, the conversation artist, the poet, musician, all-around amazing human and muse, listening at close range as she whispers stories about her life into my phone. How her dad, a former preacher and steel pan teacher (whose name graces a blue plaque in the Marrion Centre in Leeds) came over from Saint Kitts in the 1960s, and how music was always a big part of their family life. How she went to schools in Chapeltown and Headingly and how rife and traumatising racism had been at the time, but how she drew confidence from her father’s work to resist and fight and raise awareness where she could. And how she wanted to be a dress designer, but how she started writing songs and teaching music in her daughter’s school to deal with a confidence crisis, and how a song she wrote in the 1980s hit the top of the reggae charts and propelled her and her sister Annette’s double act Royal Blood to a national and international fame. How in the late 1990s, she worked with the performance poet and playwright Khadijah Ibrahiim to start Leeds Young Authors, a programme of creative activities taking a multitude of young people from Leeds to slam poetry competitions all over the United States. How they won countless awards, propelled multiple young people to international careers, and how they were even used as an example for the sort of work the Arts Council should continue to fund at the time when they had not been funded by the Arts Council at all but by the local community arts initiatives instead. And how nowadays, Paulette adds to her range of inspirational work, that is always unfailing in its commitment to the community, her ‘conversation work’ in prisons. How she uses spoken word and music to get through layers and layers of attitude, trauma, alienation, self-protective silence, peer pressure, and fear, in order to get young people on her side. And how then she helps them develop their creative talents so they can create artistic career alternatives to the trajectories that had got them into prison in the first place.

This ultimately is a story of how getting ‘seasoned’ over time is not about loss or decline, but about gain and enrichment. It is an insight into growing one’s own wonderful layers of brilliance and self-protection, rather than putting anything on. And then how those riches one gains with ageing, in order to be fully savoured, must be given back and wrapped around the bare and vulnerable youth, like a necessary layer of love and care and understanding. And how then and only then, new songs for the future can be heard.

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Du?ka Radosavljevi?

Du?ka Radosavljevi? is a writer, dramaturg and academic. Her books include Aural/Oral Dramaturgies (2023), Theatre Criticism: Changing Landscapes (2016), The Mums and Babies’ Ensemble: A Manual (2015), Theatre-Making (2013) and The Contemporary Ensemble (2013).

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