Capacity

I woke this morning with this question in my mind: do I have capacity?  The dictionary definition is:' the power of containing or holding', there is also the word 'room' and then the word 'capability'.  I spent yesterday evening at The Nightingale Theatre (Brighton) as part of a group of artists, producers, funders, directors who had been invited to reflect on the work of the Nightingale and propose thoughts for the future.  Each person in the room is committed to their work and each person experiences their functional capacity as stretched; not enough hours in the day, not enough income.  Last night however demonstrated a different kind of capacity, an infinite one, for generosity, for compassion, for intellectual engagement, for committment, for vision.  Each person stretching their capacity beyond the functional.  We live in difficult times and I experience, more regularly now, a clutching fear that these difficult times will prevent me from achieving my potential; living functionally without capacity for creativity, without capacity for compassion, without capacity for generosity.  The answer to my own question is Yes I do have capacity.  A further question is:will it sustain?  The answer, as long as I use my capacity to benefit myself AND my community, is Yes.

Buses I didn't take

I grew up in Brighton  Our regular bus route was the No 26 from fiveways down to the open market or staying on to go into town.  I didn't know there was any other bus route than the 26.  One day I saw a No 49 and in that seeing everything changed.  I understood there was a world beyond my own and I wanted to know where the No 49 bus went and what the people who took it did.  It was the moment I knew I could escape.  It was just a matter of waiting until I had the resources to choose which bus I got on.  I waited and planned and endured and finally at 15 I left my family home and have never returned.  When you are young escape appears to be just a matter of geography. 

There is a fascinating, dynamically complicated relationship between injury and creativity.  The challenge is how to mutate injury so that the work can embrace and reach beyond it.  The heart of this challenge is finding a form that  transcends private injury to public art.

For a long time I was unable to move beyond my self.  I wasn't capable of living the small life necessary to practise and hone the craft of writing.  All I knew was that I wanted to.  I wanted to make work, to write but I couldn't keep myself out of the picture enough to make work that resonated beyond the therapeutic.  There was no craft only emotion.

I also couldn't actually manage my self and so when opportunities did arise I wasn't able to take advantage.   There were lots of buses that I didn't take that I wish I had, a lot that left before I could get to them, a lot that were going in the wrong direction, a lot where I missed the stop........I knew I needed to find the self that would allow me to write but for the longest time I believed it was a matter of geography.  I don't anymore.  Now I think of it like a marriage: a marriage between myself and the craft of writing and I try to create the most conducive circumstances for that marriage to work. One of those being that I only get on buses that bring me home.

Lovely things

The preparation for Still Life continues apace; creatively I now have my eye in on the form of the piece and a control of what it is I want to say.  The challenge, it seems to me, when working with a real life is find a way to push along the narrative without too much clunky exposition; allowing the story and themes to emerge and merge.  Also to find a way that allows the arc of a life to be represented and respected without having to stick rigidly to the actual chronology

Found out this week that I will be on Woman's Hour on May 4th, a studio chat with Maggi Hambling (lover of Henrietta and the last artist to draw her) and Jenni Murray.  I am really delighted and excited about this as it will raise the profile of the show.

My other lovely thing is to be asked to take part in an R&D week with Vincent Dance Theatre.  This will take place at The Point in Eastleigh in the last week of July.  I am really looking forward to contributing to another practitioner's creative vision.

I am writing this on my little notebook computer as my main computer has decided to die on me.  It may be resuscitated by a man called Steve this afternoon.  I live in hope for that and am trying not to get too panicked.

I have been talking to my friend and collaborator Janine (Fletcher) from the Two Wrongies about their going to Edinburgh this August.  Most of the conversations are about the economics of such a venture and how to manage not only the budget but also the fear of taking such a huge financial risk.  I wish it wasn't like this.  It doesn't seem like the way it should be.

Finally I send out love and good wishes to all the other artists, who like me, are beetling away at their creative industry. 

One hand on the rudder....

This is an excerpt from a letter that Vincent van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo in 1882:

...one is afraid of making friends, one is afraid of moving, like one of the old lepers, one would like to call from afar to the people: Don't come too near me, for intercourse with me brings you sorrow and loss; with all that great load of care in one's heart, one must set to work with a calm, everyday face, without moving a muscle, live one's ordinary life, get along with the models, with the man who comes for the rent, with everbody in fact.  With a cool head, one must keep one hand on the rudder to continue the work, and with the other hand try to do no harm to others.

I am moved by these words, as I am by any that try to express the relationship between the self, the work and the anchoring of those within our everyday life; how do we, as creative practitioners, keep one hand on the rudder?  How do I? 

 Earlier this month I took a holiday week to a quiet and secluded village in the north of Lanzarote. One of my favourite quotes (as proved by its presence on my facebook page) is 'Your mind is like a bad neighbourhood; don't go there alone'.  This is very apt for me as I can easily wander into endless suburbs of near madness, roaming about, getting lost, never quite being able to ask for directions but hoping to bump into a friendly guide to enable my return home.  I was nervous about holidaying alone, but didn't want to be defeated by that.  There was also the desire for some sun on my back, so off I went.  I arrived on a Friday and the initial exhilaration of arrival, of driving in an unfamiliar landscape in an unfamiliar car, of sitting on a sunlit balcony, of swimming in the sea that buoyed me through the weekend.  Then, on Monday, bump, I met myself again; the landscape became all too familiar, Lanzarote disappeared and I was back in the 'bad neighbourhood'.   I had brought with me lots of books (of course), even though this was a holiday I had an essay deadline to meet and planned to begin writing while laying in the sun.  However once the dreaded suburbs have been entered, all becomes dislocated. There is a constant mental dissonance, as if a radio is being tuned, re-tuned and tuned again.  Thoughts fracture and splinter making the act of writing feel both impossible and the only activity that will save me.   The initial din is so loud that all I can do is go back to basics which is to write my journal; something I've been doing since 1978.  The journal is the 'friendly guide' that will lead me back to myself.  Journal writing turns the initial roar into a low-level hum, the low-level hum is tolerable enough that I can once again read and think and so a fragile peace is found.  I am returned.  The fragile peace is strengthened by establishing a routine and sticking to it and so I eat breakfast, chip away at my essay, lay in the sun, swim, eat dinner and then sleep. 

Although it feels very fragile, I can now maintain a continuity of self even under duress.  Maybe I can do this because I am older or maybe all those years of therapy are finally paying off ....I don't know.  What I do know is that this self holds maps to the landscapes of all my varied internal landscapes and is able to journey within them and between them, creating stores of imagery and journals filled top-line to bottom full of words.  She is the self that needs both protection and exposure, silence and noise, loneliness and companionship.   She is the self that has one hand on the rudder.

NB: with special thanks to Lisa Wolfe who gave the diary that has the van Gogh qute within it.

Well Done

The Shortcut evening at Nightingale last night.  I performed an excerpt of my new piece Still Life: An Audience with Henrietta Moraes and it all went rather splendidly.  I love that theatre so much, I love the physical space, I love the ethos of it being centered towards the needs of the makers of work and the work itself.  It is the nearest thing Brighton has to a producing house.  Because I live so close by, I experience it as an extension of my home or rather I can extend my creative capabilities from this desk to down the road without any thought process being broken or lost.  Steven Brett has this extraordinary capacity to value, truly value who you are as a person and the creative endeavour you are undertaking. 

After the show and chats and drinks, I came home still adrenalised and, of course, a little drunk.  Living alone has its challenges in finding ways to pack away the performing self and calm down enough to sleep.  I am like my dog when she is trying to settle; she circles and circles, pawing at the bedding and then finally plumps down.  There is a wonderful thing in Greek tragedy about the role of the Chorus and how this huge energy is created on stage just by their sheer numbers.  This energy is, of itself, incredible but it also serves the purpose of creating a vibrant and alive space for the Protagonist to step into; the dramatic power of going from many to one.  From many to one can be exhilarating but also, sometimes for me, a little bit difficult to manage emotionally...I overcome this by sending texts to chums and getting back little messages of 'well done' and 'good night'.  There is nothing lovelier than knowing you are being thought about, that you are in someone's mind and the simple, beautiful energy of 'well done' should never be under-estimated.