A few guidelines

Portrait of Ms Ruby May, Standing by Leena McCall

I'm on my back, I've assumed the position.

Soothing pan-Asian lift-music drifts over from the iPod by the door. 

Deep breath. Tchah. Sharp breath out.

Me

Did you see that story about the 

portrait of a woman Mall Galleries 

moved out of sight because it 

shows her pubes?

Beautician

 [laughs] 

No! That's ridiculous! Just move 
your leg slightly there.

Me

 Yeah, apparently it's 'disgusting and 

pornographic'. 

Beautician

Kind of ironic. 

Me

I know! Porn is one of the places

 you're least likely to see pubic hair.

Beautician 

Yeah. My women all do this for
 themselves, rather than...but I 
do think there's a trickle down 
from porn to 'the Hollywood.' 

Me

Mmhmm. I wonder how much of all 

that 'we feel cleaner' shtick is 

psychological.

Beautician 

It's actually more hygienic to keep 
the hair.

Me

[raises plucked eyebrow]

I sometimes feel like if I was a 

proper feminist I would go back, 
that I should grow it back... 

Beautician 

I think it's fine to have a full seventies, 
but you should still trim it - I was at a
training thing and this woman had 
a full seventies and it's just suddenly
 - boing - and it's a bit 'woah'. And I'm 
just thinking 'that poor man'.

I'm staring at the serene Buddha statue, wondering about our different uses of the word 'should'. I'm wary of sentences that contain the word 'should'. 'Should' is what someone else thinks. 'Should' is a truth handed down to you rather than lived experience.

Beautician

 ... and it turns out that the friend Cameron 

Diaz told Graham Norton she'd pinned 
to the bathroom floor and'clipped' was 
Gwyneth Paltrow.

Me 

Really? That sounds a bit brutal... 

Have you read Caitlin Moran's How 

to be a Woman?

Beautician

 Caitlin who? No.

Me

She's good on women making their 

own calls about this stuff- There's

a really funny bit about sanitary 

towels...

Beautician

I saw Cameron Diaz has got a new book 
out about women learning to love
their bodies. So she's completely 
contradicted herself. Do you want any 
more off? I've just followed the guideline, 

but we can make the strip thinner.

Me 

No thanks, that's my line.

Monsters Inc

So Rolf Harris is the latest to be declared 'a monster'. 

David Sillito reports for the BBC:

"During his trial prosecutors said Harris was a "Jekyll and Hyde" character who took advantage of his fame."

Jane Peel talks of Harris': 'Dark side revealed under court's spotlight'.

I find this gothic language unhelpful: it's another way of making abusers 'other', another way of pretending this sort of thing is down to a few objectionable individuals, rather than something our culture facilitates. It was the same with the Elliot Rodger case: a kid declares his hatred for women because not one of us had offered ourselves to him, and he goes out and shoots at people, killing six. However the news stories are of a 'virgin killer' (like that explains anything) or even more worryingly fixated on his asperges as a means of  discounting the misogynistic intent of his attacks. 

If you listen very carefully you can hear the thrumming bass line beneath this kind of reporting 'notallmennotallmennotallmennotallmennotallmennotallmennotallmen...'  

Thing is, it's much more terrifying than that: you don't have to be a monster to be an abuser, you just have to decide to do it.

On the other end of the spectrum we have Charles Saatchi, pictured throttling his then wife at a ritzy London restaurant, now hosting artistic depictions of said assault on his company's website: enacting that very capitalist tactic of absorbing the opposition in order to smother it. And if there's one thing Mr Saatchi knows, it's the role of buying and selling in defining an artefact's cultural worth.

I'm not for a second implying that the acts perpetrated by Harris, Rodger, Saatchi and their fellow abusers aren't monstrous, but I am also saying: 'nice' men harrass, groom, molest, hit, strangle, manipulate, assault: nice men rape.

I've been thinking a lot about shocking truths supposedly 'hidden' in plain sight. I've written a show that is partly about how we only see what we are pre-disposed to see. It's a show about how our misogynistic culture plays out in our intimate relationships. It's also a show about Pick up Artist forums. For the uninitiated: the Pick up Artist industry teaches men techniques and behaviours to employ in picking up women. Despite the fact that these techniques are often highly reductive, predatory and manipulative, PUAs are largely written off as losers who can't pick up girls (sad little monsters). These have spawned reactionary 'anti-PUA' sites which refute the notion that men should have to use techniques or behaviours to get sex from women: not because these techniques and behaviours are often highly reductive, predatory and manipulative, but because women are only good for etc etc (shouty scary monsters). Seen in this context Rodger's actions are the logical end game for misogyny.

'notallmennotallmennotallmennotallmennotallmennotallmennotallmennotallmen...'  

Recently a very wise and very dear friend accused me of making 'middle class' art. As I baulked at this over my g'n't it clarified something for me about where I'm positioning this piece, and the media's infinite ability to be shocked by revelations of another nice man we all trusted before putting him in with all the other monsters...

Discounting is an unconscious minimisation or exaggeration of circumstance, relating to the self, others or a shared reality.
There are four accumulative levels of discounting:
1) The existence of a problem: nice men don't rape
2) The significance of a problem: ok, nice men do rape but it doesn't affect me
3) The possibility of change: ok, nice men do rape, this is bad for everybody but what can we do, it's the way they're wired, or something. 
4) Our personal ability to effect change: ok, nice men do rape, this is bad for everybody, the ability to decide what we do with who we are is what makes us human, so I'm going to...  

My answer to that last one was to write my show. 

I've had to graciously concede that I'm not making proletariat revolutionary art. In fact, it's worse than what my dear, wise friend suspected, I might even be making art for the ruling classes. I wonder whether the four levels of discounting are also mirrored in how to make 'revolutionary' art according to our class system? And for this definition of revolution I shall appeal to the etymology of the word: to revolve, to roll back (the shutters, perhaps?):
1) Make the people at the top aware of the existence of a problem. No bread you say? Let them eat cake...
2) Cause a commotion with the people in the middle that cannot be ignored, which means we cannot flick past it in the Sunday Supplement: and suddenly EverydaySexism means #YesAllWomen.
3) Let the people at the bottom know that it does matter, and it is shit and it doesn't have to be like this...
4) Revolution.

Or perhaps (and this is my vain hope) you can make something that contains enough for all four to happen, quietly and personally. Perhaps you can make something that enables one person to be shocked that nice men rape, and another to see that they can do something to effect change. I sincerely hope so, because that's what I'm spending my summer attempting to do. 

Great Aunt Joan

She wasn't religious, or married and had no children. She worked and travelled, and delighted in new discoveries. She went her own way. She was small and steadfast and strong; and her strength has become mine: galvanised by the way she lived. She was witty and wise, and I will miss her. I already miss her.

We watched The King’s Speech one Christmas, which she enjoyed ‘although, I don’t actually remember the speech they’re all going on about. But then we were being evacuated at the time, so we had other things on our mind.’ She remembered singing ‘Hark the Herald Angels Sing, Mrs Simpson’s pinched our King’. 

She went on to college and graduated as a teacher to deaf children. It was strictly forbidden at that time to use sign or even gesticulate too much so that children were forced to learn to lip-read, and she learnt to teach with her hands in her pockets.

She stayed curious and captivated by learning her whole life. There was hardly a time when she wasn't on a course, whether restoring Ancient pottery or reading Modern literature 'not really my period, I think I shall stick with my 18th century, I know all of them.'

She was stoic and private but also acutely astute and social.

Our last conversation before she went into hospital was about the trouble she was having with her iPad, which she had bought because 'as far as I can tell, if you're not on the email you may as well be dead'.

She had a smile that made her whole face turn upwards towards her eyes. Her laugh was simultaneously generous and knowing: a gleeful acknowledgement of ‘yes, I see what you did there’.

The last time I saw her was at the theatre, she had come to see me perform. At the top of the show we asked the audience to make little plasticine protestors and placards (it was a show about activism). Aunt Joan was not going to be rushed. ‘I don’t like all this pressure’ she declared to anyone attempting to badger her. I made a point of reading the placard she had given her protestor ‘No Bullying.’

She took herself to hospital during her first heart attack. On the bus. I went to see her in hospital and when I asked her what she wanted from her flat she replied 'Reading material. There's a copy of The Odyssey in the bookcase, bring that'. I laughed and asked if she wanted anything a bit lighter. 'Now's as good a time as any for Homer, don't you think?' came the reply.

I find myself wanting to use the word ‘delight’ over and over again. She delighted, brought delight, was delightful. She took pleasure, unapologetically. And was equally nonplussed about not going along with anything she didn’t want to. ‘We’re going for a walk in town Aunt Joan, fancy it?’ [Great Aunt Joan peers at the blizzard outside the window]. ‘No thank you.’ [Turns the page of her book, looks up, smiles].

She was born in Kennington, but for as long as I have known her she lived in Highgate. In a little crows nest of a flat at the top of the hill, on a clear day you could see the Eye winking from the Thames. She loved living in Highgate. ‘Victoria Wood lives in Highgate, sometimes you’ll see her out and about but nobody bothers her.’ When I lived in Muswell Hill, we would meet for lunch. She didn’t drink much anymore, ‘that’s the thing about getting old, you can’t do as many of the things you enjoy. But you must have a glass of wine, and I shall take pleasure from yours.’

She couldn’t drink proper coffee anymore either, but didn’t count instant ‘which is more of a coffee flavoured drink’.

‘Was it the years of drinking too much coffee when you were teaching that has stopped you drinking now?’

‘Yes’ and then after a pause ‘and all the gin’.

 

Have I said she was small? She was the size of a grande latte, which meant losing her in a crowd was almost guaranteed. I turned around for one minute in the British Museum, and that was it, she’d disappeared. ‘I don’t much like that photograph taken with your father, your Gran and I look like a couple of smurfs.’

 

But she was also a giant. If you try and follow her footsteps now you will see, by a trick of perspective, that in fact you can never span the full breadth and length of the imprint she left on the earth.

One of the last voicemails she left me was in typical Great Aunt Joan form. She didn’t want to make a fuss ‘we’ll revert to Plan A, I’ll give you a wave and then disappear.’ 
And then last week, she died. Suddenly, and without fuss, she disappeared.

There is a time for many words, and there is also a time for sleep.

- Homer, The Odyssey.

On you go Great Aunt Joan; I’m following right behind you, with my face turned upward to the sky.

Going off-script: real life ad-libbing.

In the show I’m currently touring we open by asking members of the audience to make a plasticine version of themselves as they enter the theatre. Last night in Alnwick a gentleman came up to me during this initial pre-amble to protest that he ‘comes to the theatre to be entertained by the performers and not the other way around’. On leaving he let it be known that he still prefers ‘plays with a script’, which we took as a gratifying compliment. Thing is, we do have a script, but we’ve also got carte blanche to meander from it according to whatever is happening in the room during each performance: heckling, phone calls, stage invasion - all actions are gleefully incorporated into the show. We’ve done our jobs well when even the scripted bits feel as if we’re improvising.

Yet again I find myself comparing this experience to the theory around life scripts. This weekend on my psychotherapy course we explored our own life scripts [meaningful face]. The psychotherapeutic counselors among you will be familiar with the ‘this is your life as a play’ exercise, for the uninitiated: essentially, you imagine your life as a play.

To envision the First Act of our life play we are led by the course tutor to imagine the stage onto which our life is set. What kind of play are we watching? Who are the main characters? What is the atmosphere? Act One ends with the beginning of adolescence.

The theatre maker in me was already on guard for any Chekhovian weaponry adorning the flats. (Anton Chekhov’s remark about playwriting that ‘if there’s a gun hanging on the wall in Act One, it must be fired before the end of Act Three’ is one of the oft quoted golden rules for making theatre, along with Aristotle wanging on about time, and if you’re going to tour a show, three is the biggest cast you can fit in a van). Of course because life scripts are by definition ‘unconscious’ it might not have helped the exercise that I was cognitively analyzing my life script with such professional interest. I found myself resisting the reflex to imagine a proscenium arch stage with obligatory red velvet curtains, yet despite the fact that I can count on one hand the times I have performed on such stages in my career, this stereotype is what sprung to mind when asked to ‘imagine a stage’. In a small way this is an example of how life scripts work: an inherited idea with which, despite present-day resistance, we are compelled to comply.

The Second Act of our life plays took us up to present day. After the fight-dance choreography item of my late adolescence I found myself turning to the box and asking for the house lights to be switched on and the red velvet curtains taken down. I stood on the lip of the stage, conscious of being higher than the stalls and not wanting to be, conscious of ‘being in a play’ and not wanting to be. As we took a break to notice what we had conjured in our respective life-plays my mind wandered as I wondered about the connection between my desire to break the fourth wall in both my ‘life play’ and work in general.

So much of the theatre being made now that excites and engages me enacts this deconstruction of inherited convention. The artists I look up to are the ones you don’t literally look up to from the stalls – they’re on the threshing floor with you, in this moment, in the same room, and they’re talking to you. Not yesterday’s audience, not the audience they imagined in rehearsals, but the living-breathing-right-here-now audience. In a sense, the theatre I’m interested in making is theatre that is interested in breaking it’s own inherited script.

I’m thinking of Steiner’s assertion that life script is ‘a life plan which is rigid and unchangeable. Like the lines of a play, a life plan expects to be followed word by word from beginning to end and allows for little improvisation. A script is written by somebody else and like actors in a play we feel bound by ourselves and others to act the part to the bitter or happy ending’ (Steiner C, 1979, Healing Alcholism).

Far be it for me to contradict the man who brought us ‘Warm Fuzzies’ but there are plays that allow for a bit more than ‘a little improvisation’, in fact there are plays that allow some of the script to be created live each night. I happen to be in one. I concede the ending is always (necessarily) the same, and to that extent it is absolutely scripted, however the care taken to make it feel like it might not be, speaks to the desire to ‘break script’ and act according to the moment, to be truly ‘live’. It is pleasing that the same language when applied to breaking life scripts describes people who are wholly a-live.

To imagine one’s Third Act is to contemplate the type of ending you feel your life play is heading toward. ‘Ah’, I thought, as I returned to the mind-theatre I had just flattened at the end of Act Two, what to do now then? Make it about the audience, I supposed. Let some of the audience onstage. Go and sit amongst the others. ‘What happens next?’ Well I have no idea - it entirely depends on who else is in the room. ‘How does it end?’ Well I guess I’ll leave, at ground level, probably through a fire exit, I might afford myself a Hollywood-esque backward glance, perhaps I’ll sight a space once called ‘a stage’ filled with people getting on with stuff. Maybe I’ll have played a part in starting that.

[Curtain]

On why I owe Sam West a pint...

If any of you are within elbowing distance of Sam West, give him a little nudge for me, and tell him Beaumont owes him a pint.

In May 2012 I packed my bags, and everything else, and left London by mistake. The flatmate was headed to the seaside and I thought I might stick my stuff in storage, gan hyem for a few weeks, and then head back to the smoke for Round 3. 

My stuff is still in storage. 

Albeit a different storage unit in a different city, but there are still pairs of shoes I haven't seen since before the London Olympics, and to be honest, I haven't really missed them.

Thing is, a couple of days after I got home for my unintentional-life-change-that-I-thought-was-just-a-holiday, Sam West re-tweeted 140 characters that would 
*cue swell of bathetic music* get me a job, in the first instance. (Life change is gradual, stop getting ahead of yourselves).

Some lad from Middlesbrough who seemed to have a bit of a thing for milk, wanted to meet artists with links to the North East for a show he was making about demonstration.

'I've got links to the North East' I thought, 'I can be an artist when I concentrate. Climate change? I'm against it, in the main...' I mused, as I clicked on the link...

Nearly two years later, the show we started making that summer got me through the door of three regional theatres, up to Edinburgh, and back out on tour: we open in Norwich tonight.  (It's called How to Occupy an Oil Rig, it's for anyone who ever wanted to change anything and you get to play with plasticine). 

In between times I've got in the habit of playing Geordie lasses; so convincingly, that I think I might have become one. 
And thanks to that particular Edinburgh community and one very particular regional theatre I think I might be on my way to being a proper artist as well.

My first solo show will preview this July (almost exactly 3 years after that fateful retweet). And as I step out to say what I want to say to an audience, in my own distinctive mash up of northern vowels and expatriate consonants, I'll have finally come home. 

Yeah. Sorry, I know this is really twee, but when you spent your whole childhood thinking home was more of an idea that an actual place, the possibility of having an artistic home (I'm looking at you ARC) is pretty fucking special, and I'll have all the John Williams orchestral interludes I like, thank you very much.

*cue Cello solo*

And I am looking for an actual home too. In Gateshead, as it happens. I'm putting down roots on the same bus route as me Nanna and Granda's auld hoose. Turns out that dreaded old question 'where are you from?' is just as much about where you are going. 

Speaking of which, here are our tour dates http://www.danielbye.co.uk/how-to-occupy-an-oil-rig.html, come along if you want to know how to change everything. 

Change gets a bad press, but I strongly recommend it.

These are the places I will always go

If there's a theme tune to the trip to Oban - this would be it. The piano hammers bouncing harder the higher we climbed in our borrowed car, further and further into the mountains and away. Hearts lifting and lightening with every mile. The weather level: Scottish. We laughed in the face of gale force winds, we cackled at snow-rain-sleet. We were going on holiday damn it, even if it killed us. Those were the kind of giggles ringing round the metal and then out the window into the wind; swooping over lochs and bridges, and down into the valleys.

Weather. I'd already vowed to buy plastic trousers by the time we'd swam across the carpark at motorway services outside of Ecclefechan. 

I went to the wild West (of Scotland) for new year, with one of my wisest, kindest, lucky-to-know-her friends from way-back-when. And we chugged into the mountains, and ate cheese sandwiches by the loch in Luss where the river path was more river than path.

We pressed on, further than we'd ever been before, under clouds that trap red and yellow light on the snow-capped mountains. We chased a triangle of blue sky all the way to Oban. Which, by the way, is something to behold. The A85 ripples over one final hill before she reveals the treasure cove below. By the time we got there the town was full of glittering lamplight allure. It had finally stopped raining.

The next day we walked. Into the town and then out of it. The light. The light under Scottish skies sings colours. The light clangs against your pupils and makes your head ring like a bell.

Unlike the whisky. Which, when taken correctly, as prescribed, will cure all matters physiological and philosophical. 

New Year's Day meant walking boots, two castles, one mystical rock, nine miles over beach, hill and road, dodging children on quad bikes, acres of air, only a bit of rain, and two blisters. 

And then crash-bang-wallop we're back in the car and heading South, but not down, because these are the places I will always go - later this year when reality bites back, these are the places I will always go. I am on my way. I am on my way. I am on my way back to get things started...