Look Out: Shining A Light Up The Back Passages Of Britain’s Multi-cultural Society

I’ve spent a large part of this week, sitting and staring into the void, and wondering: what if?  What can I see, that no one else can see….yet?  What image can I conjure up and then work to make real?  What’s my vision?

It started with the Arts Council, provoking a veritable riotous assembly in Manchester as they opened their ‘creative case for diversity’.  I spent a long time at this particular event staring into the void.  What was heralded as something major and new quickly revealed itself to be more of a clutch bag of re-conditioned ideas and half-formed opinion, rather than the much hoped for and desired cornucopia of innovation and inspiration.

Never mind. Dreaming is good for you, either night or day…..and sometimes you just have to accept that there comes a time when the only person who should be sticking their head over the parapet and taking responsibility is yourself.  As we all know, if you want a job doing quickly and efficiently then you’re not going to pick up the phone and call the council are you?  And so it goes with the arts and diversity.

After a whole day and part of an evening of chat, the vision I had, was one of taking responsibility, picking up the gauntlet and getting on and doing it myself.  Taking my lead from Madani Younis, Artistic Director-elect at The Bush, who easily gave the most impassioned speech of the day….positively dripping red, so fresh and raw were his words.  Good for him and his youthful vision and spirit of defiance, and good for all of us who sat in semi-comatose anticipation.   So more void than vision in Manchester this week I’m afraid.

So back to London, where I was encouraged to do yet more sitting and staring.  This time it was courtesy of the London International Festival of Theatre and more precisely the bidding of a fabulous director by the name of Alicia Talbot from a company called Urban Theatre Projects.  Alicia wanted a group of us to sit around a table, and then outside, staring at the corrugated entrance to a loading bay, and then outside again scrutinising a very large car park at Canary Wharf.

Alicia’s from Australia and we’re helping her with some research for a show.  It’s actually a fascinating process of research, looking at – and looking for – what is there, but is not seen, or is never seen, or more pertinently is never acknowledged.  How much do we simply let pass us by because we’re not looking for it, or because we’ve trained ourselves not to see it?  A lot.  And how much of it is, in fact, people?  People who don’t look like us, dress like us, act like us, speak like us, live like us?  A hell of a lot.  Funny that, isn’t it?  When you start staring into the void you quickly realise it’s quite a busy and industrious place.

As we were unpacking the creative case for diversity for the council on Monday in Manchester, somebody remarked how someone else of eminence had said, in reference to the missing tomes in the cultural archive, and the history of African and Caribbean theatre in the UK: ‘if you can’t articulate it, it doesn’t exist’. We all applauded and nodded our heads to show our appreciation of such wisdom.  However, only a day later I was witnessing and having brought to my attention whole swathes of people – workers, women, men, mothers, sisters, brothers and fathers – law-abiding citizens of the capital, grafters on the minimum wage – who I could readily identify and find the words to describe and define them – but yet they did not exist. They were not visible to 99.9% of the population of London, 99.99% of the time.  They are invisible…

But we weren’t.  As we sat in the street in the autumn sunshine of the city that never sleeps, staring at corrugated iron shutters and an immaculate, matt black tarmaced car park, we instantly attracted the attention of the high vis jacketed security guards and the flack-jacketed police.  Not once, not twice but on four separate occasions.  At one point in my research I noticed a man casually carrying a jerry can of petrol down the street, the shining erection of Canary Wharf a mere stone’s throw away.  However, he wasn’t stopped.  The police and the high vis jacketed security didn’t scramble to stop him in his tracks and ask him where he was going and what he was doing.  No.  Because he was one of them.  He had a high vis jacket and a hard hat on, so he wasn’t drawing attention to himself. He was obviously a builder from the local site, going about his business. Obviously, what else could he be doing?  Besides, he looked the part.  Whereas the rag- tagggle bunch of director, actors, writers and dramaturges, sitting on the side of the road with clipboards and pens…well would you trust such a group?  Who knows what they could have in those pens?

As I said, the research is fascinating, starting from images and objects rather than the word or text.  Hence, the staring, the voids, the vision.  For me it feels like it’s been a week of looking at the intentionally invisible, going behind the scenes, getting behind the mask – or staring at the arse when the subject has spent all morning and all their money on making their face look good.  How fitting to have done this in the same week as an Arts Council launch on diversity. Should we be scrutinising the face or are we to find a lot more if we take a closer look at the behind…the dark side…the backside?  Is that when people will sit up and notice you?  Well there’s a thought and an image.  Careful what you do with your pen.

End.