Who Cries Wins // Martin O'Brien & Guests

This discussion of autobiographical performance and trauma explored a notional increase in artists making work engaging with these themes. Are there really more artists using personal stories as the basis for their work? Or is it simply that the particular qualities of this labour are now acknowledged more readily? That testimonies of trauma (particularly by artists of colour, disabled artists and those with lived experience of mental health issues) are now recognised as far more than mere self-indulgence? The artists Martin O’Brien, Mele Broomes and Amelia Stubberfield made up a panel presenting three very different but interrelated perspectives on these questions, refracting the central theme of the festival (Care & Destruction) back through their personal narratives and artistic practices.  

O’Brien is an artist whose exploration of his own status as someone with cystic fibrosis has pushed his body to the limits of endurance. Through his strategic deployment of SM techniques, medical ritual and pop-cultural mythologies (most recently the figure of the zombie, after passing his life expectancy of 30) his work challenges audience to witness the process of the body and the experience of sickness. This is very different to Broomes, whose work Grin was performed in excerpt at Care & Destruction. Broomes discussed her experience as a dancer of colour, someone whose very body troubles the overwhelmingly white spaces of institutional culture, and the pressure that goes with it. How even well-meaning attempts to engage with artists of colour can still leave the onus on them to both explain their experience and offer solutions for how it could be resolved. Stubberfield, whose piece Borderline was also part of the festival weekend, offered a very different perspective. Presenting a more narrative practice, an investement in stand-up as a form, which centres the notion of story more than either O’Brien or Broomes, they discussed how comedy might provide a vehicle for serious and honest discussion. 

Although very different practices, each artist arrived by their own route to a series of similar and related questions. Who is in the audience and does autobiography serve them? The presentation of personal testimony can be a powerful catharsis. Who gets to make the decisions around the work? How is performance dealing with the intensely personal presented, marketed, made public, and where? Each artist claimed their practice as a way to take responsibility for the work they wanted to make – the assertion of something important to each of them. And in that, perhaps, there is much for the audience, venues and cultural institutions to consider.  

-      Lewis Church

Links relevant to this diagnosis:

Martin O’Brien - BBC Ouch Podcast

About V/DA - Mele Broomes

Amelia Stubberfield

Autobiography and Performance - Deirdre Heddon

Lyn Gardner: Theatre is embracing diversity, but it’s still not enough. - The Stage

Mental Health in the arts: Are we talking about it enough? - London Evening Standard

#UKDrillProject // HighRise Theatre

PARTY IN DA HOUSE

When a performance starts with a rave, you might think of it as being quite bizarre. People were being asked for their ID upon entering, which gave off the impression that you were about to enter a night club. When you did you found a VIP section and a drinks bar at the ready. DRILL music was being blasted out of the stereos. DRILL music videos were being played on the wall, which you could put headphones on and listen to. This immersive part of the performance gave the audience a chance to get to know one another and break the ice. Whilst you were in this room you become more aware of your surroundings. It was a chance to appreciate the images and displays that were shown on the walls. One in particular was quite intriguing - not a picture per-se but a type of fact file which explained in bold letters how two DRILL rappers had been sentenced to nine months in prison because they were performing their music to a live audience.  

NIGHT’S NOT OVER YET 

As the partying part of the performance came to an end we were then led into the auditorium. Here the performers addressed the stereotyping and racial discrimination of people who listen to DRILL, and how DRILL is deemed to be a main source of street crime. Where people are inexplicably being arrested because of the colour of their skin, DRILL and the type of music they listen to is the excuse. Why it is ok to arrest an individual whom was just revising for an exam, or just calmly walking down the street? As the performance tried to show, nobody wants crime, nobody wants to see their friend being shot in front of their eyes, and nobody wants to be stabbed on their way home from school. People unjustifiably force people into one category, and have been doing so for so long that those people are then saying to themselves “if that’s what they think of me then I might as well fit their description. Maybe then they will leave me alone”. Members of the public are getting up to two years in prison and why? It’s the DRILL music, apparently. 

AFTERMATH

Society has branded DRILL (a form of expression) as a violent form that we must get rid of in order to make the streets safer. In order to really make the streets safer, Theresa May and the government need to actually listen to the youth, the up-and-coming generation, for they have the answers to how to stop gun and knife crime. If you are not listening and have already made your mind up, if you blame DRILL, then you haven’t caught the right guy, you’ve framed him.

-       Selen Adem

Links relevant to this diagnosis:

HighRise Theatre

#UKDRILLProject - GQ

What is UK Drill? - Red Bull Music

 Conversation on Drill Arrests - Reddit

Unkown T Interview - Evening Standard

Elephant in the Room // Lanre Malaolu

Bouncing across the stage of Camden People’s Theatre, Lanre Malaolu uses the physical to reflect the social. His movement on stage mirrors his movement through life, echoing the way his body as a black man in Britain today is seen, read, and considered by others. Taking on stereotypes but looping them, making them strange by heightening and twisting their dynamics, his athletic investment adds weight to what might otherwise be familiar representations. The characters Malaolu embodies are varied, from the inspirational football coach to someone all cocky young swagger. They are each archetypes of identity consistently played out in television, film and the media, from news reports to Channel 4 drama. He differentiates each through a discrete posture (like a slouch in a Nando’s booth), and/or a series of sparse actions (sedately trimming hair in a barbershop). 

Although distinct, within the show these different characters, both the central ‘Michael’ and the unnamed others, could easily also make sense as a single figure – one person rendered in multiple fragments. Malaolu’s shifting shows how the articulate and inspirational speech given to even younger men in a half-time huddle might itself cloak a deep insecurity, always at risk of fracturing under the pressure. Or how the wisdom of an older man might reflect a lifetime of the same pressures he now gives advice on. In doing so it makes plain how the marginalizing operations of society relies on those it puts under pressure to prop up those it will fall on next. 

As much as each set of movements, postures and different voices delineate characters, Malaolu’s performance adds one more. The body of a trained dancer, the way someone moves who has put in the time to learn his technique, is itself an embodiment of a personality. A way to exist in the world, a way to define your own body, from the mastery of steps to the poise of the stance. It controls the gaze of the audience, the way the body is seen, in a way that those young men represented here are usually denied. 

-      Lewis Church

Links relevant to this diagnosis:

Lanre Malaolu

Elephant In the Room – Guardian

‘Up My Streets’ Project – MIND

Perceptions of Young Black Men – Independent

MANDEM– Media platform for young men of colour.

100 Black Men of London 

Hymen Manoeuvre // Evelyn Mok

During her teenage years, Evleyn Mok protected her hymen with ‘a ninja-like focus’. Such candid humour effervesces throughout her show Hymen Manoeuvre. Mok weaves a multi-stranded show around her heritage, generational differences, sex, body shaming, and the personal/political intersections of institutionalised racism, classism and sexism. In the intimate setting of Bunker 1 (Pleasance), Mok losing her virginity at twenty-five is the story tussled into the foreground with plenty of awkward interaction with male audience members. Mok repeating the word ‘vagina’ or ‘my vagina’ feeling palpably radical to some.

And there it is - the discomfort that some may feel at a woman of colour speaking about her vagina a lot, giving a detailed description of her breasts out of a bra, preferring cake to her ‘first time’, shrieking a little, taking up space like she is meant to be there, being funny and maybe - more disruptive in a comedy show - not being funny…

Mok’s writing upends expectations. She critiques racist, sexist, fat-phobic stereotypes by teasing, unravelling and morphing them. More often than not, after a story that sees her bemused, abused or disempowered, her punchlines land the agency firmly back in her hands. This feminist act of claiming power is one in need of tireless repetition to counter the daily aggressors - the manspreaders, the revenge porn video senders, the stand up comedians who spill the beans to their other stand up mates about sleeping with a 25 year old virgin, these mates who then make comedy routines about it…The latter happened to Mok. Her intimacies and right over them became appropriated into someone else’s material. 

Patriarchy teaches girls to be nervous that boys will be trading secrets about them i.e. school gossip or sexting made public. Women are taught simultaneously to guard our bodies for fear of humiliation but loosen them up just the right amount for male pleasure. Mok’s is the too familiar tale of public shaming and Hymen Manoeuvre could be seen as Mok’s way of wrestling back control and making sure people hear her experiences on her own terms. 

As she hurtles us through her autobiography, what opens up is patriarchy’s messages that there is something essentially shameful about the female form and female pleasure. It seems to be only some time after losing her virginity, that Mok asks herself if she had good time. She did not. The suppression of talking about female pleasure within sex education and wider media accompanies the shame many girls and women feel about their bodies. What’s more, female bodies frequently become funny - something to draw ridicule from and, as in the case of Mok, this humour is leveraged to assert male social power. 

Oppressive power structures take so much multi-stranded work to undo. In tales that continually resist collapse into any singularity, we glimpse the burden of this effort. She wonders whether by making the show she is indulging in her shame. She shares the incessant, looping questions she has about someone’s intentions when she first encounters them. At times, there is a sharpness to her tone and the room is silent. The shield of her wit sometimes slips and we as audience are sitting quietly with someone un-filtering themselves and letting us in. Maybe to be this funny and defiant, you have to cut close to your own bones. 

- Alexandrina Hemsley

Links relevant to this diagnosis:

Hymen Manoeuvre - Evelyn Mok 

The Pleasure Principle - International Woman’s Health Coalition

Bitch Media

Eight Women Of Color Comedians on Sexism, Racism and Making People Laugh - Wear Your Voice

Misogyny on Facebook: A Rant About ‘Vagina Cleavage’ - Gal Dem

MADE IN BRITAIN // Tez Ilyas

'Remember how no one got blown up at London 2012? I did that!' Comedian Tez Ilyas is referring to his Civil Service role on the Olympic security team. But he likes to leave no unmentionable unmentioned during his show Made in Britain.

Today Ilyas has left office life to pursue a career in comedy. His set explores what it means to be a British Muslim - in a post-Brexit period when anyone considered an outsider finds themselves living under an unprecedentedly critical spotlight.

Such hostility leads to long-term impacts on health and welfare. UK figures show that people of Pakistani and Bangladeshi descent experience much higher levels of some diseases, with scientists identifying experiences of racism and discrimination as crucial issues.

Nonetheless, recent opinion has shifted blame for community woes to minorities themselves. Ilyas gives short shrift to the former head of the Racial Equality Commission, Trevor Phillips, whose warning that Muslims were 'failing to integrate' played easily into the hands of a scaremongering press.

Ironically, it was the tragic Paris attacks that provided Ilyas with his first media break, a spot on BBC Radio 4's The Now Show that propelled him towards his current recognition. Now, he seems determined to use the limelight to highlight big issues that resonate individually with those who share a similar upbringing - but make everyone laugh.

Large families, parental pressures and arranged marriages are all personal experiences he chooses to talk about in this show – but llyas does not assume he is a spokesperson for the Asian community - indeed, he says there isn’t just one British Asian community. But his voice is significant in a country where research shows that direct and indirect racism damage children’s development, in ways that shape their entire lives. (RM)

Made In Britain ran at Pleasance Courtyard until August 28th - https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/tez-ilyas-made-in-britain 

Hate crime following the referendum: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/brexit-eu-referendum-racial-racism-abuse-hate-crime-reported-latest-leave-immigration-a7104191.html

Research by Yvonne Kelly, Professor of Lifecourse Epidemiology at UCL, into the impact of racial discrimination on child health: http://childofourtimeblog.org.uk/tag/racism/

PDF on UCL research into ethnicity and health: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/icls/publications/bn/ethnicity

Coverage of Trevor Phillips’ remarks about the Muslim community failing to integrate: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/04/10/uk-muslim-ghettoes-warning/

Has multiculturalism failed in the UK? Not really: article by Professor Anthony Heath: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/aug/10/multiculturalism-uk-research

WHITEOUT // Barrowland Ballet

Like so many stories of black-British experience, Whiteout begins with the six dancers shivering against an electronic pulse that seems to scream the word “blizzard”, showering them in icicles. As the soundtrack shifts, so do they, into unison movements that suggest assimilation, before individuals pull away. Once they do, Barrowland Ballet move into more personal territory, a contemplation of bi-racial relationships in which the dancers pair off and seek accommodation within their new couplings, ways to share their cultural backgrounds while maintaining distinct identities.

Choreographer/director Natasha Gilmore began this work thinking about her own experience, particularly as a mother of bi-racial children, and the tone of the resulting work is primarily optimistic. Her children appear in playful films of leapfrogging and rabbit hopping, the adults following their lead; interspersed within Luke Sutherland's restless and inventive soundtrack are folk songs chanted by Jade Adamson and Nandi Bhebhe, weaving African and British roots into a single responsive conversation.

But the group never shy away from portraying the effects on human relations of racist context, as pairs briefly fracture and individual dancers become lost in their own jagged movement. Of these, the most fraught is a scene in which one of the black males thuds and crashes about the stage, holding his head in his hands, while his partner and friends watch, confused and unable to help. It's a reminder of how depression among black men lurks unspoken and often goes untreated.

Whiteout is built as much from a symbiotic relationship between dancers and composer, movement and sound, as it is from thematic idea; yet almost every moment opens up a question. What does it mean when the black female dancer lifts the white male; when the white female dancer stands apart from the group, when the black male dancers square off against each other? It would be easy not to notice the movements that suggest these questions, or to think they had no import, and that in itself delivers a subtle comment on the ways in which racism is dismissed as a matter of perception, rather than a fact that people of colour have to live with. Underlying everything is a sense of longing: that its most positive pictures of racial harmony might be only a few steps away. (MC)

Whiteout is on at 17.00 at ZOO Southside until August 27th. Wheelchair Access, Level Access, Wheelchair Accessible Toilets - https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/whiteout

On the stigma of depression within the black community: https://www.artefactmagazine.com/2016/03/19/why-is-depression-stigmatised-within-the-black-community/

And the taboo specifically among African-American men: https://www.lucidatreatment.com/blog/mental-health/african-american-men-depression/

On systemic racism in Britain, how it affects black communities and how to challenge it: http://leejasper.blogspot.co.uk/2016/08/racism-is-dividing-britain-and-denial.html

Poet Claudia Rankine on racism and perception: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/dec/27/claudia-rankine-poetry-racism-america-perception

Academic Sara Ahmed on racism and perception: https://feministkilljoys.com/2014/02/17/the-problem-of-perception/

HOT BROWN HONEY

First impressions of Hot Brown Honey are misleading. There's a merchandise stall selling earrings made of guitar plectrums, a honeycomb of beige lampshades forms their set, the show begins with a noisy hip-hop call and response: all the signs seem to point to an irreverent, high-octane, low-content pop video of a show. But then DJ/MC Busty Beatz does three things: she declares it time to “heed the mother”, shouts “fuck the patriarchy” and soberly reads out a feminist statement by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Those first impressions are overturned, the assumptions underlying them challenged, the tone of radicalism set for the rest of the show.

Based in Australia, Hot Brown Honey are a collective of all-sizes women of colour on a mission: to deliver “black feminist truth” and “cultural awareness training” while subjecting received white feminism and unconscious colonial-supremacist thinking to close interrogation. That they do all this using the tools of irreverence and high-octane pop culture ensures that their message can reach further, to a general and age-diverse audience who might not even be fans of Beyonce, let alone poet and activist Audre Lorde. The group take a historical approach to burlesque, which was used to lampoon modern politics before it mutated into a general word for striptease. Bodies definitely appear almost-naked and sexuality is rampant, but there is always a clearly articulated political purpose behind this flaunting: one that bypasses individual parties or leaders, and instead digs to the very foundations of capitalist-patriarchal structural oppression.

At the lighter end of the scale, there's a song about black women's hair that goes through a number of musical styles before finishing with thrashing, head-banging hair metal. At the most poignant, there's an aerial routine which uses the bondage of looped ropes to inspire empathy with the women silenced by their experience of domestic violence. In between they debunk romanticised fantasies of the African motherland, condemn the ease with which white holiday-makers vomit entitlement over other countries, and reject the hollow chatter of those with “two cents to put in but not common sense”. Throughout, erudition and entertainment are kept in balance, with quotes from other key black feminist thinkers, including Indigenous Australian Lilla Watson, demonstrating the group's respect for and solidarity with their intellectual foremothers. Hot Brown Honey's work might never be catalogued in the library of feminist academia, but as long as the female body – especially the body of colour – remains objectified, their expression of radical politics will be no less essential. (MC)

Hot Brown Honey are on at various times at Assembly Roxy until August 28th (not 22nd). Wheelchair Access, Level Access, Wheelchair Accessible Toilets - https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/hot-brown-honey

Excerpt from 'We Should All Be Feminists' by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: http://www.feminist.com/resources/artspeech/genwom/adichie.html

Excerpt from Audre Lorde's 'The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action': https://iambecauseweare.wordpress.com/2007/06/26/the-transformation-of-silence-into-language-and-action-excerpt-by-audre-lorde/

A potted biography of Lilla Watson: https://lillanetwork.wordpress.com/

Beyonce's Formation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WfMlFxrMb18

Dita von Teese's brief history of burlesque: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/features/a-brief-history-of-burlesque-471288.html

A basic reading list on race and racism: http://citizenshipandsocialjustice.com/2015/07/10/curriculum-for-white-americans-to-educate-themselves-on-race-and-racism/

On the hideous whiteness of Brexit: http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/2733-on-the-hideous-whiteness-of-brexit-let-us-be-honest-about-our-past-and-our-present-if-we-truly-seek-to-dismantle-white-supremacy