London: Notes from Lyn Gardner’s keynote address
The following is an account of Lyn Gardner’s keynote address from notes taken during the event at the London offices of Arts Council England by Helga Henry of Fierce Earth. The wisdom below is all Lyn’s the errors and omissions all mine!
Lyn Gardner began by with a vivid evocation of a scene in June 2007 in East London. Something was buzzing on Woolwich High Street: in the trees, a colony of strange pulsing entities inhabit a tree. Nocturnal by nature, as dusk falls they flicker with a phosphorescent glow and emit short surges of a peculiar sound. It was Aswarm’s “Gather”: a commission by Without Walls staged as part of the Greenwich and Docklands Festival.
For that one night, something transforming happened. As young people gazed transfixed, Lyn knew that their image of Woolwich High Street would never be the same again. Just in the same way Lyn herself cannot walk down the Mall now without seeing the Sultan’s Elephant.
Sultan's Elephant by Artichoke. Photo: Matthew Andrews
Street Arts and outdoor performance is easily as transforming as Sir Ian McKellen’s King Lear or the West End’s Billy Elliot, Lyn argued, and is often unlooked for, entirely free and often in heart of people’s own community.
If, as [Chris Goode, director of Signal to Noise] said, “Theatre is the place where people gather to invent the future”, then why shouldn’t everyone be invited to that place? Outdoor performance has no barriers, or certainly fewer of them. The development of outdoor work begs the question; can we stake a claim in the performers’ space like we can in Circus?
A piece such as Punch Drunk, allows the audience to choose how they view the show: giving them a power over their experience rarely seen in traditional theatre.
We have recently enjoyed an unprecedented explosion in new work, and more and more companies understand how to take a show to an audience, which requires a high level of skill as the Street audience is the hardest audience to please. The shows make a political statement simply by being there.
Lyn spoke about Dot Comedy’s “Get Lost”; a giant privet maze where you encounter a variety of characters as you weave around their paths. These characters included figures from Greek mythology. The piece had openness and metaphorical meaning and an exploration on the issues of loss and losing your mind. Good Street and Circus work is always more than it seems.
For those who think that “fireworks are not art”, must not have seen Sticky by Improbable (in collaboration with World Famous), towering edifices of sticky tape which are ethereal beautiful and different. For those who say of jugglers, “A ball is still a ball and nothing else” must not have seen Gandini Juggling.
Mozart Glow Clubs from Gandini Juggling on Vimeo.
There is a major problem with British criticism when it comes to street and circus. A problem, Lyn argued, of the willingness of critics to be enablers of the new rather than gatekeepers of established cultural norm.
So that an emerging new writer in a pub will more likely get reviewed in the national media than major companies such as Walk the Plank or Ockham’s Razor. It was apparent in recent Tabu reviews that some critics could not see past he skills displayed to actually review the piece of theatre.
But Lyn advised that the sector also needs to help itself. One of the reasons she was at Woolwich was that she had been informed by good PR that the work was going to happen elsewhere in the UK that year. So it made more sense for a national paper to review it, as opposed to a one-off event.
And the critical landscape is changing. For The Sultan’s Elephant the audience were not lured there by reviews, they were lured by the camera phone as people took shots and sent them to friends. The camera phone became the modern Pied Piper. This was one of the first occasions of arts marketing by phone and the sector could learn from that.
Potentially 1 in 8 of London’s population experienced The Sultan’s Elephant, and there were no violent incidents, everyone was in extreme good humour and displayed enormous generosity of spirit as children were lifted onto the shoulders of strangers so the children could get a better view. The girl and the elephant took a million individual spectators and turned them into a community.
It used to be said that the society that prays together, stays together. Lyn offered a new variation: “The society that plays together, stays together”.
Theatre critic Martin Esslin once noted that “Theatre is a place where a nation thinks about itself in front of itself” and this is especially true in this sector. Street art and circus allows us to reclaim the streets from drunks and security cameras. In public spaces where the citizens are suspicious if people loiter, Street arts bring those spaces back to the people.
Joy is in such short supply at the moment. These performances contribute to levels of national happiness and celebration in the same way as for example, winning the Olympics or the Rugby World Cup.
Great Street and Circus work give us reasons to be cheerful. In this time of economic recession, money could be directed to generate more outdoor work and more happiness. Lyn invited us to imagine what a fantastic thing it would have been if Alastair Darling had decided to invest further in the arts in the recent budget instead of cut!
She felt it was high time we started producing our own elephants and spiders: while there has been a shift at the Arts Council in funding productions there has to be some greater long term funding in skills and infrastructure.
We often think that companies in Europe do the large scale spectacle better, but often they are just better resourced. Lyn reminded us that we, in fact, did it first.
To see how well UK circus does it she urged us to see Tabu, the follow up to Immortal by NoFit State Circus, a riposte to those who say circus is a skill and not an art, a piece where idea and form perfectly matched. A work which is a metaphor for life itself.
Lyn observed that the idea that Street and Circus is just eye candy is prevalent amongst mainstream commentators or practitioners. They borrow from the genres when it suits, but are reluctant to acknowledge its place in our theatre culture. Particularly a theatre culture which appears obsessed with text and the classical cannon.
Lyn recalled Vesturport version of “Romeo and Juliet”, an aerial show by an Icelandic company which demonstrated such swagger and confidence from younger theatre cultures which is less well developed. Lyn suggested that sometimes the past can be a burden.
But, Lyn warned, while it’s good to look back, better not to stare too much or will turn to stone.
Lyn agreed with producer Bill Gee that Street and Circus were something of a Cinderella sector, allowed out to the ball when there’s an Olympic moment or a ball but then sent “back to kitchen duties”.
When people became aware that there was likely to be an increase in the allocation of Arts Council money for the theatre, and that street and circus money would be funded from the theatre “pot”, the quality of the work went up a notch even before the increased funds were allocated. The aspirations and amibitions of the sector had been raised.
In the past some Street and Circus companies chose to work on the outside, but surviving on the crumbs from the table rather than having a place on the table leads to survival mentality and lack of self-criticism. As with some children’s work from 20 years ago, practitioners can get caught in a cul-de-sac on their own.
There is an issue of quality. There is lots of fantastic work but many companies are unable to develop work, especially on a larger scale because of relative scarcity of funding. Those that do, end up being more expensive to buy than EU well-funded counterparts. When we do it, the results are spectacular. But we have to invest in it – just as we invest in new writing or Royal Opera House. Even in France Royal de Luxe – the company behind the Sultan’s Elephant - is the exception rather the rule as regards state support.
But sometimes an increasing technical competence is not matched by artistic vision, Lyn gave an example of World Famous and their piece “Full Circle”, which, while beautiful to look at and awe-inspiring, lacked narrative structure.
But unlike theatre, Street and Circus work takes a while to develop and this is worrying when 2012 is just around the corner.
We have to make a special case for street and circus. It is not like theatre. It can’t just find a room and set up. This issue is pressing. The recognition of art forms has a great deal to do with critical mass. Lyn suggests that we need dozens of young circus companies because that’s what is required in order to get to have a company on Olivier main stage at the National.
Sharing and collaboration really important, Tabu was great but the script was weak. Lyn couldn’t help but wonder whether it would have been very different they’d had sufficient budget to work with a dramaturg.
There has been some limited exchange between theatre directors and circus artists, there is a need for more of those schemes. Wouldn’t it be great to commission a writer of the calibre of Mark Ravenhill or David Eldridge to write for Bash Street Theatre? A great number of Street and Circus companies use text in radical and different ways. And provocatively, Lyn suggested that those writers would get bigger audiences in one performance on the street than in a whole season at a playhouse.
Lyn was aware that there was some upset in funding re-allocation last year, and the belief that theatre is a new writing culture is being challenged by street and circus arts. The picture has changed dramatically, critics, funders and programmers are behind what is happening with circus and street arts and with audiences.
Lyn also proposed that mainstream buildings could be encouraged to collaborate meaningfully with other companies. For example, the National Theatre has now embedded puppetry in its cannon through doing “War Horse”. She suggested making the mainstream houses, through funding agreements; collaborate with other sectors including Street and Circus in order to see the difference it will make.
In conclusion, Lyn left a clarion call ringing around the room:
“Small amounts of money have made a change. Large amounts could cause a revolution.”
ENDS
Lyn went on to write on her Theatre blog on the 28th April: ‘Theatre should get serious about circus’, which up to today has had 38 comments and has stirred up some mixed opinion!
Were you at the London event? What were your thoughts on Lyn’s speech? How do you see the future of the sector?
Please use this posts or any related posts to make comments generally or about the event, speakers and themes that emerged…make it a place for discussion!
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