I'm Waiting and Come Gather Round

Theatre of the Dales - I'm Waiting - Review

John Zubrisky writes:

A pause in Pinter is as important as a line. They are all there for a reason.  Sir Peter Hall

These damn silences and pauses are all to do with what’s going on… and if they don’t make any sense, then I always say cut them. I think they’ve been taken much too far these silences and pauses in my plays.  Harold Pinter

Local thespians Theatre of the Dales followed the advice of Hall while bearing Pinter’s comment in mind. The importance of pauses and silences can be exaggerated. Nothing was overdone in the first half of this brilliantly entertaining evening in the performance hall of the New Headingley Club, which was played for laughs at first. Pinter tended to dominate the first half of the programme – an extract from The Dumb Waiter introduced a heavier and more sinister tone after the merry banter which was part of a counterpoint strategy to balance what had come earlier. We saw an aspect of London’s underworld which Pinter knew about from his childhood in the East End.

The evening began with a series of short double-act scenes from movies, old vaudeville exchanges and a chunk of Sam Beckett’s Waiting for Godot which many would describe as comic, involving David Robertson and Will Tristram in battered derby hats as Vladimir and Estragon. The bulk of the tragedy was not there, because Pozzo and his slave Lucky were not there – that would have been too much for this compilation, which was apparently put together specially for the Headingley LitFest. How wonderful that an enterprising local literary outfit can commission items like this.

In the second half, the comedy drained away, because Albee’s The Zoo Story is pretty scary for me. David Robertson was Peter, and his New York accent was convincing even for me. I’m from California and I know they speak like that over there. Guillaume Blanchard was a Jerry (the guy that dies at the end) with a French accent – you do get those in New York. The acting was top-notch, and would have warmed the heart of any Method teacher if he or she had been there.

Now I am waiting for another shot of this stuff. Do I have to wait until next year or will the LitFest provide us with more quality drama before then?

Come Gather Round


Doug Sandle writes:

On Wednesday 21 March, Come Gather Round attracted a full house of thirty plus in an upstairs room at HEART, which was a more appropriate environment than the larger advertised Shire Oak Room. In a cosy and folk club atmosphere (although the café would have been an even better setting) poet, comedian and musician Richard Raftery and his folk group Powder Keg entertained and engaged a very appreciative audience. The programme was introduced with the title Small Towns, Hard Times and Big Dreams, and the songs, stories and one liners drew upon that theme.

The songs and music, generally of Irish and American provenance, were very enjoyable and surprise guest, Irish folk singer Seamus Markey, was a very good contribution to the evening. I was particular pleased that songs by some of my favourite folk artists were featured in a very well chosen and balanced programme that included songs by Iris DeMent, Gillian Welch, Steve Earle, Christy Moore and Pete Seeger. The story and song of the Australian Bridal Train was however new to me and I suspect to most of the audience. The background story of the American Government’s sponsored train that collected GI brides from around Australia for a one-way free passage to the United States to join their husbands was an interesting and moving tale well told.

While a couple of his target subjects might well have raised an eyebrow or two, the poems and humour of Richard Raftery generally entertained us with his Liverpudlian tones and local stories that spanned both sides of the Pennines and which were delivered in a congenial and a sometimes gently self-deprecating manner.  I was impressed when he recounted that he had worked for a time in the Big Apple – but which turned out to be more locally in Bramley!  All in all this was a pleasant night's entertainment and a success for Leeds Combined Arts and their partnership-contribution to the LitFest. 
 

Lawnswood Poetry Slam

Vivian Lister writes:

For this, Lawnswood school's fifth slam, students took the 2012 Litfest theme Lingo in order to explore what writing and performing their own words meant to them.

And, as always from these brilliant young people, there was a breathtaking range of responses, from  intensely  personal and poignant confessions of youthful sorrows to agitprop political calls for change and justice. Along the way, there were cool musings about the clarity of thought that writing can bring and the recognition of writing as a balm for personal confusion and sorrow. There was also quirky humour and sheer delight in verbal play plus strong, powerful music, sung and played with great style and fervour.

After this altogether impressive display of talent, the three judges, Richard Wilcocks from Headingley Litfest, Raftery the Poet and sixth former Toni Busby (star of last year’s Slam) had the almost impossible task of selecting three winners.

   

They gave the award for greatest personal achievement to Kane Francis for his poem celebrating the lives and achievements of strong black women like Rosa Parks.

The award for best overall performance was given to Imogen Chillington whom the judges praised for her versatility - her ‘cornucopia of talents' according to Raftery the Poet.

The best poem award  was given for More than just a story - Uganda by Kizzy Jones, described by the judges as ‘a powerful, sophisticated and engaged work’. The poem is a reaction to video footage on the warlord Kony.

The judges also gave special mention to Ingi Hughes, praising her beautiful lyrics and melodic voice and guitar, and to Fatima el Jack for the passion and powerful rhythmic intensity of her poem, Motherland.

Amanda Stevenson, the Head of English, emphasised how by taking part in the slam, each student was indeed a winner. She highlighted the importance of the personal journey for each slammer and how each had gained self awareness and self esteem during the weeks of workshops and rehearsal. She congratulated the slammers not only for their sustained effort and enthusiasm but on their constant support and encouragement of each other. It was certainly inspiring to see these young people from such a range of ages and backgrounds expressing full hearted delight for each performer. And it was not only the performers who impressed but the posses of friends who turned out to cheer, stomp and clap.

Parents also clapped, whooped and stomped along with their children and variously found the slam "uplifting!", "inspirational!" and  "fantastic- it gave me as a parent a pride in the school!"

Perhaps the last word about this Slam should go to Michelle Scally-Clarke, our brilliant slam facilitator: "What we’ve given these young people is poetry and that is now theirs for the rest of their lives".

The Slammers – Winners all

All these young people attended the slam workshops and/or performed at the slam. Jervai Buchanan; Toni Busby; Nathan Chadwick; Imogen Chillington; Fatima El-Jack; Kane Francis; Keiran Gateley; Kacey Ann Hibbert; Ingi Hughes; Kizzy Jones; Jasmine Joseph; Josie Lee; Harry Loulie; Alpha Masiyiwa; Eva Moran; Joel O’Mara; Michael Quean; Gloria Sibanda; Vimbai Sibanda; Jordan Stanislavski; Inigo Webber;

Jasmine Williams; Keiran Andor Wilson; The Year 9 Class Band

Kane, Imogen and Kizzy, with Michelle Scally Clark:

Photo by Richard Wilcocks

Sounding Out in the HEART Café

Word play at its very best: Sally Bavage writes:

“I didn’t know what to expect – what a wacky, amazing, fantastic time!”  No, not me, but a member of the packed audience at the ‘experimental writing and sound works’ at the Heart Café on Thursday evening.  Wednesday evening (see blog entry) saw us considering experimental languages created by authors and Thursday saw a natural parallel in the experimental music created by words. 

Headingley LitFest was delighted to welcome, for the first time, the LeedsMet ensemble of ten students and two staff, along with their able technical support, as they performed for us just before most of them left for an international drama performance event in Croatia at 4am on Friday.  Dedication to LitFest indeed!  We wished them ‘Bog’ or 'Bok' (hello in Croatian – but see the blog from the experimental languages event on Wednesday for what Anthony Burgess made of it!) and we wished them ‘sretno’ (good luck).  The luck was ours.

The first half was a series of pieces, voices only, playing on the way we normally interpret speech and voice patterns and challenging us to listen more carefully to the sounds we hear.  A simple introduction but spoken like early computer-speak in monotonous tones was rather disturbing until your ear adjusted to the rhythm.  Would an experimental author describe it as ‘droidian’?  A two-handed piece started in what sounded like a foreign language – Croatian?  Or was it voice exercises?  Or is it the sounds a young child makes as they struggle to speak.  Or bird calls in spring?  A duet between creatures unknown? Well, it’s in the ear of the listener.  Changes in tone, rhythm, sound keep you changing your mind. Just how much of what we hear every day fits in with expectations and experience?  Is that what a baby hears before they have made the links between sound and meaning?

Other pieces conveyed simple but strong lyrics, rap rhythms, the whispered poetry of pleasure and a table used to emulate percussion – drums, marching feet, slamming doors.  Sometimes better to listen than to look so you interpret with your ears. We are so used to the cadences of everyday speech where we know what to expect.  This presentation is a delightful challenge to expectations.

After the interval we were treated to more music made by words and sounds.  A few words repeated become what - a mantra? a new language? – and the many changes in repetition and tone, discordant to flowing by turns, lead the audience to create the familiar whoops and hollers of true appreciation for the technical difficulty and skill involved. But the whoops too are sounds that make a language we understand!

Unaccompanied song, ensemble pieces and short poetry pieces culminate in a tour-de-force finale by Teresa Brayshaw, the performance leader.  Four pages from the story Not I by Samuel Beckett, learned by heart, are delivered at breakneck speed. They pull the heartstrings and puzzle by turns as the fragmented phrases and commentary unfold.  The elderly woman telling Becket’s story is seventy and mute: the very antithesis of our performers who have used their voices to such entertaining effect.  We have been challenged to rethink how we interpret what we hear and what meaning we make of the noises that we turn into sound into language.  Whoops and hollers indeed!

Pieces were performed by Steve Atkinson, Hannah Butterfield, Corina Cristea, Emma Fawcus, Lisa Fallon, Joely Fielding, Louise Hill, Rochnee Mehta, Tom Quinn, Adam Sas-Skowronski, Jess Sweet and Noel Witts, led by Teresa Brayshaw.  Technical support was provided by Matt Sykes Hooban, Mark Flisher and Debbie Newton.  

Experimental Languages - Elvish and Newspeak

Richard Wilcocks writes:

Perhaps some scholars are still attempting to discover the divine language, the ultimate language. It is difficult nowadays to snatch new-borns from their mothers and lock them up in dungeons with mute nurses to find which language they will develop, or to muster much credibility for a new project to recreate the language of the angels in the apocryphal Book of Enoch, but not that difficult to write a thesis or give a lecture on James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, which has been pored over by great linguists, extensively annotated, shortened and been the subject of innumerable lengthy articles in slim journals. It still sells steadily. Not bad for a work of comic fiction published just before the War.

Watch this YouTube clip of Joyce reading (in 1929) the Anna Livia Plurabelle section. All of his work should be read out loud!

A Shorter Finnegan’s Wake, edited by Anthony Burgess and published in 1966, sold more than the original though. More people had time for that. Dr Richard Brown began with Burgess in Headingley Library yesterday evening. He arrived with student Julia Tanner, who read an extract from A Clockwork Orange beautifully. In fact she went on to read from Orwell, Tolkien and Joyce equally impressively. Burgess’s use of transliterated Russian words was explored (Bog for God, moloko for milk) and his admiration for Joyce was mentioned. Dr Brown pointed out that Russian was a fresh and fashionable language for many in the fifties and sixties. The story of the disaffected, ultra-violent Alex and his murderous droogs, fictional predecessors of the Baader-Meinhof terrorist group perhaps, sold well and was made into a film which was banned. It brought to my mind Ross Raisin’s God’s Own Country (meet the author on Saturday afternoon) in which the disaffected Sam uses words which are taken from Yorkshire dialect, some of them made-up.

Orwell’s Newspeak from Nineteen Eighty-Four was scrutinised next. Predictably (this is a literature festival after all) we did not see the beauty of this ultimate language. I thought of North Korea’s version, the special trick there being to insert the name of the dear leader (Kim Jong-Il or a member of his dynasty) into every other sentence, but someone else pointed out that Newspeak was often used by our own politicians. Those present apparently preferred an elaborate, extensive lexicon.  Wordsworth’s views on poetic language were not mentioned. No time. Charles Kay  Ogden was mentioned though. He was the designer of ‘Basic English’ (BASIC = British American Scientific International Commercial) in which complex thoughts could be conveyed using just 850 words.

Then it was Tolkien and Elvish. On a handout, we saw the great man in a group photo taken in 1921 – members of the University of Leeds School of English standing and sitting on chairs, the women in white blouses and ankle-length skirts, hands clasped on knees. It was difficult to spot a blurred Tolkien. We looked at a photograph of one of the houses in which he had a flat (in Darnley Road) and thought about him travelling down the Otley Road every day to the university, an academic philologist on the tram, ninety years ago, with Sir Gawain and the Green Knight on his mind. A blue plaque is needed.

Elvish, Dr Brown made clear, is a far more scholarly linguistic experiment, not really intended to be a speakable language outside the community of the readership. It contains vocabulary from Old and Middle English, and from Welsh and Finnish. The fact that the language has a definite script adds depth. The diacritic marks on the script indicate the vowels: influences from Arabic calligraphy as well. The language has been extended by various Tolkien societies, so that it is now speakable, and interest in it has burgeoned since the success of Peter Jackson’s film version of Lord of the Rings. I am waiting for the simplified version before I learn it.

We finished with Joyce, who never lived in Headingley, as far as we know... and whose only reference to Leeds was punning (as different as York from Leeds/as different as chalk from cheese) and whose Ulysses will be unsolemnly read on Sunday in Muir Court. Bring your own copy. Julia Tanner proved that she can read Esperanto as well as Joycean, another cause for our admiration:

Gothgorod father godown followay tomollow the lucky load to Lublin for make his thoroughbass grossman’s bigness. Take that two piece big slap slap bold honty bottomsside pap pap pappa.

-       Li ne dormis?

-       S! Malbone dormas.

-       Kia li krias nikte?

-       Parolas infanetes. S!

Sonly all in your imagination, dim.

Dr Brown talked about Joyce’s Italian-speaking household in Trieste (Trst) between the wars, Italian being (only just) the dominant language at the time in the city, closely followed by Slovene. He nearly became an Italian author. He certainly thought that it was possible to translate (recreate) some passages of Finnegan’s Wake into Italian.

We were also shown an extract from Jacques Derrida’s famous Two Words for Joyce.

We could have continued for another hour, but it was not possible. No time. This academic contribution to the LitFest was most welcome. We appear to be establishing a tradition here. Let’s hope Dr Richard Brown returns in 2013, if not before.

Dr Richard Brown with English Department student Julia Tanner:

Not the Booker Winner - Michael Stewart, author of King Crow

Alison Millar writes:

When publisher Kevin Duffy was asked how he decides what to publish he replied, “I pick a good story” and if King Crow by Michael Stewart is anything to go by he is an excellent judge of a good story.

Michael spoke about his debut novel, which is a mixture of bird book, thriller and romance. He read extracts from different sections and talked about what inspired him to write it. The book has received a number of accolades including winning the ‘Not the Booker prize’ from The Guardian as well as being the only new novelist nominated by one of the authors on the World Book Night Giveaway books. It is also described by novelist David Peace as "brilliant".

The audience enjoyed interacting with Michael and there was a lively Q and A session after the talk. He gave us a teasing description of his next book, which will be published next year, and shared with us the news (received by text while he was on the way to Leeds) that he had just been commissioned by the BBC to write another play for Radio 4. 

Kevin Duffy from Bluemoose Books, an independent publisher based in Hebden Bridge also answered questions on the publishing business and why he re-mortgaged his house to pursue the business. He gave a very interesting insight to the big publishing houses and also the big literary awards.

The event was very enjoyable and both Michael and Kevin spoke passionately about books and writing. I wish them further success with King Crow, it certainly deserves it.

The Lingo of Food at the Heart Centre

June Diamond writes:

This joint event between two creative-writing  groups, both tutored by poet Becky Cherriman, marks the third year of collaboration between the Osmondthorpe Resource  Centre and the WEA.

And it was quite an event. Around me the audience agreed that this was a deeply moving celebration of creativity and cooperation. As Carl put it, getting off to a rousing start, it was, “a chance to try”. We shared Carl’s dream, to live by the sea and eat fish and chips, with freedom and with choice. What more could anyone want?

Siobhan entertained us with an account of the food she was given as a child when she was poorly - butterscotch Angel Delight - and Suzanne evoked real suffering, and the nectar of the first food taken after a blinding migraine. Their group piece on starvation was a searing critique  of the modern world.

In the second group David Newton entertained us with a clever piece on the ironies of food and  the rules set down by religious groups. Fabian  moved us with the story of how he had got to be here, and the deliciousness of green bananas, and Michael gave us a great account of a meal in Dubai that was intensely memorable in many ways, including economically. Jane described  graphically to us a  stomach-curdling meal in Hell. 

Howard took a different line with a poem entitled Soul Food. If music is the food of the soul, then happiness for Cliff Richard is performing to a room full of look-alikes.  Again, the group talked about starvation with compassion and empathy.

In the next group Adrian read Jenny Jones’ very funny piece on the aspiration towards vegetarianism.....if it weren’t for the temptation of bacon butties, sausage sarnies and corn beef hash. Robert gave us a lovely description of eating fish and chips with his brother, and Richard and Elaine eulogised chips together. Julie F led us to imagine the bliss of ice-cream at any time of the day. 

A couple of clever poems in this group reminded us that food has feelings too. Linda represented the cappuccino as a gorgeous Italian lady (arch-enemy, tea). In Metamorphosis Adrian cleverly drew us into the experience of the pear becoming pudding, and the pleasure and pain of transformation. This session ended with an ode to greed by Richard and Linda.

Chris reminded us of the transformation wrought on ordinary food stuff as it becomes stew. Howard gave a clever wordplay on seasonal food. Vivian reminded us, unforgettably, that food does not come from supermarkets, and that every bit of it is valued in the rural economy, using time-honoured skills. Chris and Howard produced a graphic metaphor in  Full Sky.

The final group began with a deeply-felt reflection on starvation. Julie B reminded us vividly of the deliciousness of pie. David Maccoby  related a memory of a meal – all wanted, all delicious, and reminded us of where it goes. Angela gave the amateur cook’s point of view with an ode  to Delia, and a cry of anguish when somehow it never comes out like it does in book or on telly.

The presentation ended with a final piece by Jane and with fervent thanks, and of course applause.