Strength Weekly

Doesn’t time fly, readers? It seems only a year ago that I posted from the Orange Prize. That’s because it was a year ago. The introductory speeches were panicstrickenly gabbled, almost as if a broadcast media person had said to Kate Mosse “Just get through it, poppet. People know roughly what has to be said so just hurtle it. Nobody cares.” Rose Tremain got the big one so justice was done. Then back to the Taittinger. Expensive enough but starts to pall after glass five. The canapés at the do are stacked dinkily on plinths on curious little constructions comprising four clear plastic rectangles, the size of what we used to call ‘LP covers’, held apart by small inverted shot glasses placed at each corner. Yeah? The finger foods are placed on each level and you have to slip your hand between the levels to get one.

Well, I spotted a lone finger item on level three of a nearby stack and decided to get it. The item (something to do with salmon on a dot of toast) was placed to the far side of the level and, evidently, had proved too inaccessible to bother with. Unabashed, I extended my arm towards the plastic tower. Within millimetres of sliding my hand in, palm downwards, I realised that the sleeve of my jacket would catch the LP cover and dislodge it, Jenga style. It became clear to me that I must turn my hand over and go in upside down, palm upwards. Any reader who has reached for a canapé in this way will know the problem. I extended my index and second fingers, in a V shape, and pushed them at the toast dot. Soon I had trapped it and could withdraw my hand. Around me beautiful women milled, probably talking of chapters and plots. As my hand broke free I realised that the canapé was the right way up but my hand wasn’t. How could I get it into my mouth without inverting it and thereby tipping the smoked morsel onto the Queen Elizabeth Hall carpetting? (My other hand was holding the Taittinger, obviously.) I decided to twist my wrist round towards my mouth rather than rotate it around its axis. This is an unusual movement, rarely called for in the average day. The canapé, however, was not held by the tips of my fingers but by their sides, down in the V, for safety. Imagine my surprise when, as the dot drew nearer to my outstretched mouth, I stuck my fingers up my nose. Well, I said to myself, at least the hand is stabilised thereby. I extended my tongue, as if an okapi, and tried to pull the dainty delicacy in. After a few moments of ungainly manoeuvring I had the bastard. Quite pleasant, if not as amusing to the mouth as the one with yellow paste and bits of grass sticking out.

On the other hand, walking back along the crowded Embankment from the Globe Theatre towards Waterloo, minded to check out the giant can art on the walls of the Tate Modern, we entered a sudden density of people, heard roars and screams and saw men flying though the air. The Nissan Qashqai Challenge is in full swing. Mountain bikers launch themselves from a tower down a steep ramp, clear an abyss, hit another down slope, zoom up a sandbank, take off, hurtle high to the next sandbank, clear the ground again and, in mid-air, either i. do 360s in the horizontal plane ii. do 360s in the vertical plane or iii. let go of the bike entirely apart from one hand on the handlebar then remount in order, just in time, to hit the steep slope that marks the terminus of the Challenge run. The fourth possibility involves crashing out and rolling about with one’s bike in the abyss.

Gripping stuff. Rather more so than the spectacle of neo-medievalists being sunny (see previous post). The celebration outside the Tate is concerned with contemporary issues of panic, abandonment, recklessness, the difficulty of feeling mortal, the allure of danger and its pal death. Young male athletes enact a popular concern with bodies that are light - they can fly; tough - they can smash cartoonly into walls and resurrect; disposable - death loses its sting as the wider world unravels.

quotes in this post are taken from company websites

Feels like ages since I last dissed Shakespeare. As ardent readers of this journal may have noticed, I have no time for the fellow and consider him directly responsible for the complacently novelistic condition of much British mainstream theatre. (Yes, I know it doesn’t follow but it does when you hear my argument about it which I can’t be bothered to rehearse here because it’ll slow me up.) Nevertheless, we took our girls to his theatre the other day, to see Footsbarn do ‘A Shakespeare Party’. It’s not uninteresting going into the Globe because you succumb to the feeling that ‘this is how it was’ quite readily and find yourself studying the joinery with an uncharacteristic intentness. I was also surprised to find myself wondering about Elizabethan Health & Safety sensibilities (fairly rudimentary) and the extent to which the architects of Globe II had to accommodate the current mildly hystericised concern about such matters. There is, I’m sure, an easily obtained illustrated booklet that would lay my curiosity to rest. Stout modern handrails are in evidence.

And it’s nice sitting up in the Upper Gallery, despite the price. Not only does the tiered globularity enable good views of the stage but you can study all the other tiers and the groundlings (a fiver) at your leisure. At first I rather sweetly thought that this emblematised some sort of olden days egalitarianism but then I corrected myself: wherever you sit (or stand) you can see who can afford what and assess precisely how much better or worse their view is than yours. You know where you are. In our seats, in fact, the view of the audience was excellent and that of the stage okay. I didn’t mind this.

Then the show started. But first some context (from The Guardian article by Lyn Gardner here): ‘It is a quarter of a century since Footsbarn was resident in the UK, but its name has passed into theatrical legend as a once-great British company that we somehow allowed to get away. Now based in a farmhouse in the Auvergne region of France, where its members dream of founding a theatre school, the company grew out of a meeting between student actors Oliver Foot and John Paul Cook at Goddard College in the US, a college with a strong tradition in radical theatre, at the end of the 1960s. Back in Foot’s native Cornwall in 1971, the pair set up Footsbarn (taking its name from the barn owned by Foot’s family, where the company initially lived and worked) and travelled around the south-west, setting up a tent on Cornish cliffs and Somerset village greens, and putting on theatre for local people.’

‘The company’s aesthetic was make-and-do; a magpie approach using found materials and alighting on anything its members admired in the work of theatre-makers from Grotowski to Brook. Its pick-and-mix bag of styles appealed to new audiences. In the words of company member Paddy Hayter, who joined Footsbarn soon after it started and never left, bringing up his children on the road: “We share a performance with the audience, rather than perform it for them.” When (the Globe Theatre’s artistic director Dominic) Dromgoole caught a performance of Hamlet in Somerset in the late 1970s, the audience were so enjoying the grave-digger scene played by clowns that it went on for more than 20 minutes. Dromgoole remarked on this to a company member. “This is nothing,” he replied. “You should have been here last night. It lasted an hour, and the audience still didn’t want it to stop.”‘

There are a number of British alternative performance companies who have made their bases either in the countryside or small towns. Forkbeard Fantasy, for example, have been based in the depths of Devon since 1974 and appear entirely indifferent to urban allure. Welfare State International, founded in 1968, settled for much of their performing life in Cumbria, while I.O.U Theatre, which broke away from Welfare State in 1976, are based in Halifax in West Yorkshire.

With the exception of Forkbeard Fantasy, whose work has a fevered, zany quality that sets it apart from the others, the groups produce work that, in the words of John Fox and Sue Gill, founders of Welfare State, situates them in the ‘celebratory arts movement’. Fox and Gill devised ‘fire festivals, lantern parades, rites of passage, community carnivals and site-specific theatre’.

In 2003, I.O.U, who often work with ‘giant mechanical props’, presented ‘Tattoo’ in which ‘A fuming army of petrol driven insects are in erratic pursuit of a monstrous mechanical egg factory. Venting gooey foam along the way, this towering structure ambles through the audience attempting to keep its precious crop from the clutches of the marauding swarm.’ The work of both groups is often spectacular in scale and in detail, features bizarre structures, grotesque costumes, masks and make-up and presents audiences with work that, at its best, is startling, intensely imagistic and, importantly, demonstrates that ‘celebration’ need not be civic or even especially wholesome.

The celebratory qualities of Footsbarn involve ‘transcending the barrier of language with its unique blend of visual theatre, music and magic.’ The company focuses on the work of Shakespeare and Moliere and has performed much of its work in its own circus big tops. ‘A Shakespeare Party’ features highlights from, among others, ‘Hamlet’, ‘Romeo & Juliet’ and ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, strung together in a loose but festive manner. The festive manner consistently grates and exemplifies some of the fundamental flaws in what could be called the ’sunny side’ of the celebratory arts movement.

It would be naive to assume that when playing happy characters on stage, actors themselves are happy. We are also familiar with the assumption that Cheerful Charlie Chuckles, the widely admired comic entertainer, is himself a fount of irrepressible joy around the house. We know, in fact, that Charlie is often a morose sot who comes to life on stage and does a good job. The problem with ’sunny side celebration’, as profiled above, is that we are expected to believe that, unlike those who merely perform jollity, sunny side celebrants are actually jolly and, when they lay aside their ribbons, bladders, confetti and amusing bottoms at the end of a hard day’s capering, continue to celebrate, possibly in a slightly lower key, the very fact of being alive.

The idea that there is something to celebrate, above and beyond weddings, betrothals, comings of age etc holds, unlike the bladder, little water. I recall being told, almost on a daily basis, throughout the 60s, that there was a level of consciousness, within us all, akin to bliss. While I have no problem with the idea that we are all potential ecstatics - trainspotters, for example, have mastered the acquisition of this unnecessarily occulted condition - we should not confuse ecstasy with bliss. Ecstasy is a satisfying state based on the elimination of diverting stimuli by absorption into a single, fixating stimulus, as avid television watchers have discovered. Bliss seems to be, according to its fans, a state that is simply there, if only you could get to it. Whether it’s out there or in there is a matter of resistible debate.

So to get into bliss what you have to do is strip away all the layers of shit that prevent you getting into it. It’s not an unattractive idea. The trouble is it can’t be done. It’s possible that certain strong drugs or ritual privations might momentarily reveal glimpses of something very bright and extremely cheerful but this is a minority practice requiring a dedicated lifestyle. Most people seek out diversions that work okay for them. If it works it’s a psychological achievement, not a mythological transformation. It tends not to last, which is a bummer.

Sunny side celebrants are fundamentally irritating because their colourful jollifying suggests a permanently open line to that which is celebratable. When these people take off their wigs they’re still clowns! When they brush their teeth they’re celebrating the rhythms and sensuality of the operation! Even when they’re not happy they are happy!

The sunny siders move through the masses of the morose purporting to engage them in ways which will facilitate the casting-off of time-based sorrow. Gazing around the audience from my perch in the Upper Gallery of the Globe I thought I could see a simultaneous engagedness and quizzicality on many faces. A common expression involved a fixed smile that would indicate enjoyment were it more mobile and an anxious tension around the eyes suggesting the difficulty associated with the need to withstand the torrential effusiveness. I’m not suggesting that the audience members were uptight bastards incapable of having a good time, far from it. It’s just tricky, not to say burdensome, regressing yourself to the nursery level that might enable you to identify with the jollity.

When, after capering through the groundling audience playing olden days musical instruments, members of the cast present an enactment of the ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’ playlet from ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, the Footsbarn aesthetic reaches its limits. The excerpt is presented as broad slapstick with yokel vocals and much clown-based bottomwork. At one point a bumpkin sticks a sword up another bumpkin’s arse, pulls it out then sniffs it disgustedly. I thought this wasn’t too bad - clowning, after all, derives great energy from re-presenting highlights from toilet training and, in the classic spilt paint/thrown water set-pieces of the family circus, ventilates the tensions implicit in the lifelong maintenance of a suite of highly trained sphincter muscles.

The problem is that if Elizabethan humour was relatively coarse and Footsbarn wish to make, so to speak, a stab at it, then they have to accommodate their audience’s disaffection with its lack of sophistication. Again, I’m not suggesting that sophisticates don’t laugh at toilet humour but that they like their toilet humour presented within a contemporary aesthetic rather than framed by the paradoxically wholesome didactic project of ‘taking a journey into Shakespeare’s world’. In brief: Shakespeare’s humour has been shit for a long time and nothing can be done about it. About the only recourse left to a director is to entrust the comedic episodes to exceptionally skilled comic actors who might compensate for the obsolete text and its mirthless situations by the application of inordinate amounts of energy. There are a number of very assured comic actors in the Footsbarn ensemble but the company is, nevertheless, caught between two stools (cheeky!): the tendency to modernise runs up against the fact that the ‘comic’ (and proto-celebratory) texts are intractable and insufferable while the heritage industry invitation to the ‘Late Medieval World’ theme park, if it features ‘authenticity’ achieved by the minimising of sophistication, risks alienating most adults and many children.

The jollity at the Globe was reminiscent of the mania of disc-jockeys. The late and lamented John Peel - himself an exemplar of non-sunny side genial moroseness - used to tell the tale of his employment, at the beginning of his career, by a Dallas radio station whose management requested that, while on air, he speak ‘with a laugh in his voice’. Peel’s anecdote, aired more than once on Radio 1, would culminate with a pleasing demonstration of this jollified vocalisation. His colleagues were largely not sensible of the possibility that Peel’s critique applied very much to themselves and their crazed cheeriness. Radio DJ celebratory speaking styles suggest nothing so much as panic and anxiety, given that it is not possible to locate the celebratable on a 24 hour basis.

Sunny siders, despite their justifiable antipathy to straight show business culture, are purveyors, ultimately, of depression. Celebratory art, when disconnected from august occasions, generates and - can one say this unglibly? - celebrates depression. Only the depressed would wish to display their mania vocationally. Their witnesses are drawn into unwilling reciprocation: the injunction to be up is a downer.

It said in the paper that among the cheating techniques used by the recently heavily fined game show broadcaster ITV was the pre-selection of contestants based on an assessment of ‘whether they would be suitably lively on camera.’ On one occasion, ‘a winner who was already known to the production team was chosen because they were considered “bubbly”‘.

I think there may be some tips available here. While it’s clear that ‘bubbly’ is a gendered quality I see no real reason why men should not effervesce in their own manly way. It is obviously better to bubble than be an ill-dressed, hesitant, soup-flecked party whose intellect and accompanying non-aspergised (see previous post) knowledge specialisms have depth and texture that would enable them to sweep the game show floor. It may be the case, however, that some readers, while drawing a line at identifying with the soup element in the profile submitted above might feel, nevertheless, that all that has hitherto lain between themselves and nationwide small screen exposure is a deficit in the outgoing department.

It would be good, then, to be able to imitate bubbly even if one were essentially saturnine. It may be that one would say privately, to oneself, ‘I poo poo bubbly’ but this need not stand in the way of its affectation. To do it well we must work on our body image. Not what the body looks like but how it is seen in the mind. If, say, one often thought of oneself as a wad of damp, abandoned fabric being passed peristaltically through a dark, interminable tube made of insufficiently greased asbestos then it should be possible, and cognitive behavioral therapists will support me warmly here, to tweak the image so that it becomes something upbeat. Even the word ‘tweak’ has bubbliness and we’ve barely begun!

What do I feel when I bubble (apart from fabulous)? Well - currents of joie, for one thing. They tinkle along the arms and legs, pixillating my very fibres and inducing a slightly jumpy and erratic muscular activity which translates as shrugging, eyebrow raising, eye widening and the delicious like. It’s a force, really, and when you let it flow it shows people how alive you are. The bubbles actually shape the way your lips move so that, like a goldfish, words escape encased in bubbles that force your mouth open gradually then allow it to close smoothly over the receding curvature.

Some people say that bubbly is a form of depression. What do they know? A friend told me that she had been chatting with a man who worked as a fitness trainer for a prominent chain of health clubs. The company had been taken over by another well known and tentacular company so the latter had to give all the staff new uniforms in a different colour and retrain them so that the logos on their mental imagery reflected the vivacity of the new parent. The staff were instructed to attend a retraining day in a big hall. On stage were a small number of uniformed boosters, wearing the tee shirts that would soon be given to the massed employees. Lively pop music was playing as the trainees gathered. It was known that the boosters were looking for new people to work as managers of various teams in the clubs.

Most of the employees were depressed and resigned because that’s what spray-on ebullience does to you, so they stood around looking interested and trying on various versions of alertness. There then bounced into the hall a young woman in shorts,tee shirt, a peak cap and spotless sneakers. She too, like the sullen figures around her, was a staff re-trainee. The young woman, to the despair and fascination of her colleagues, proceeded to dance around the room to the beats of the popular upbeat music. She emitted small but excited yipping noises and smiled continually.

The boosters invited her up onto the stage and told her she had exactly what it took to be a team leader. And lo, she became one.

The Guardian runs a piece about the rash of current imported US TV series featuring the adventures and misfortunes of nerds. Bryan Fuller, the creator of Pushing Daisies feels, according to the article, that “…in America, we need heroes. There is a lot of powerlessness given our current administration.” An inverted logic suggests, it seems, that an administration by the powerless would therefore be preferable. Peter Sellers, in Hal Ashby’s Being There (1979) plays Chance, a gardner whose blank simplicity is mistaken for elliptical wisdom. He ends up being President. Bush’s simplicity has intermittently elliptic qualities but it is clear his inscrutability is not an effect of wisdom. Neither Bush nor Chance are nerds, however. Nerds know a lot about certain things and bring to their knowledge a great precision. Their characteristics may even be locatable on a continuum that features degrees of Asperger’s syndrome, wherein knowledge and interest are focused on unusually narrow topics, such as railway timetables or historical cricket scores.



Were one affected with just a hint of Asperger’s one might fail to detect it in others and think to oneself “My - if his grasp of the ways of humankind is as developed as his knowledge of petrol-driven lawnmowers then he’s the man to lead us out of the current shit!” When leaders expatiate in abstractions the air grows thin and dangerous. With a nerd, however, you get two for one - they’ll get the trains running on time because they love trains plus they get agoraphobic in the presence of abstraction.

The pressure on the non-Asperger individual to aspergise is considerable - the consumer, for example, must resist the Argos catalogue of everyday life by acquiring expertise in matters of classification and specification. The more you know about mobile phones the less likely you are to get stiffed by those who would (virtually) mobilise you. The internalisation of such data brings the satisfactions of mastery and distinctiveness. Ballard felt that in the 21st century the most successful psychological type would be the psychopath - it may be that the backlash features the rise of the nerd.

Leake Street, round the back of Waterloo Station, Sunday after London votes for a clown. Thousands enter Banksy’s tunnel for the Cans Festival.