CPT – Hannah Nicklin

Posted on June 6, 2014 by Hannah Nicklin — 1 Comment

Two ways

Today I spoke at a fun little referendum as part of UK:RIP at CPT. The lovely Brian Logan hosted, and speakers were Richard DeDominici, Chris Thorpe, and Thomas Martin. They were all great. Here are the words I said in reaction to the invitation to write a provocation about the indie referendum. The picture is by Richard, who was super funny. As usual, I took it tiresomely seriously.

There are two ways to a world without borders.
One is expanding countries into unions into continents into international bodies.
The other is greater and greater devolution.
Until we reach the unit ‘a person’, and the understanding of our relationship to others
through contexts other than crossings;
the sounds our voices make,
the way we look when we do new thinking,
how we co-operate when individuals don’t fade into a superstructure of taken for granted survival
But are there in front of us, swapping us solar energy surplus for some of these fine potatoes.

At the beginning of this year I made a new piece of theatre
which involved talking to people in the street about what Britishness meant to them.
I spoke to people in London, Bradford, and Stockton on Tees.
I hope to tour this piece talking to more and more people as we go.
But as for these three cities.
London, Bradford, and Stockton on Tees.

In London two people stood out
Anastasios
quite short
wavy brown hair
dark eyes
He was 35 and he spoke to me about leaving his home behind
Selling everything, his house, his car
He left his dog
and his family
“there are no jobs, no jobs in Greece now”
A cameraman who had worked in television
he explained that he was lonely
but with a pip of optimism still in him
he said finds comfort in small things,
like he’d smiled at a little boy on the bus earlier
and someone had let him pet their dog.

Then there was the woman
whose name I never did quite catch
she talked laboriously
heavy with some kind of respiratory problem
about how she had left Sierra Leone as a refugee.
Pursued into a neighbouring country.
She sang me a song which meant
“thank god for health and happiness”
and told me that her favourite person in the world was Tony Blair.
“He was the only one who ever cared about us”
“the only one. He said ‘come over here””
Tony Blair was her hero, because our country had offered her asylum.

In Stockton it was colder.
Somehow in a country I think of as small
compared to all of the others
I never really believe 3 hours on a train
will produce much of a temperature difference
I buy me and my 2 collaborators bobble hats from a charity shop on the high street.
Then we shiver standing, trying to catch people’s attention.

One of the first people who stop and speak to me
Is a young lad called Nicky.
Nicky tells me he’s just out of the army,
unemployed.
There’s a long thin scar on the right side of his face.
He’s from a local estate and when I ask about Stockton he tells me “everyone in this town is on the brown, all bagheads mate”.
I ask him what the biggest injustice in Britain is to him,
and he says it’s the NHS failing,
Nicky’s mate, largely silent next to him, suddenly speaks.
“it’s the immigrants, isn’t it? That’s why we vote UKIP”,
They explain how Stockton didn’t used to be like this, there used to open shops, jobs,
“but then they came, and now everything is worse.”
I ask Nicky about his regiment, he was 2 Yorks,
most of his family are in the armed services.
He says “the army changed my perspective,
they teach you all sorts of things,
like how lucky we are,
I can understand why people would want to come here, they have it a lot tougher.”
Nicky’s mate, as yet unnamed, speaks up again
He wants to study, earn enough points. Emigrate to Australia.
Nicky wants to be a business man
“not for the money though, money’s not the thing,
I want to find something I enjoy, something rewarding”

It occurs to me that if I were to paint a character of this person
without having met him
I might leave out details like his understanding.

In Bradford I steel myself
It is the third week of talking to strangers
and I am in a city I know mostly for race riots
Good food, post-industrial decline,
and George Galloway.
But several conversations into the day
and somehow everyone here is more positive.
There are still difficult stories:
a Pakistani boy-nearly-man
just out of prison
who speaks out of the side of his mouth
about the way the police “pick on pakis”
And a quiet spoken boy with facial pairings
fine dark black skin and university ambitions
always off to Leeds for gigs
laughs off his white mates never being stopped by the cops
when there isn’t a month goes by he’s not searched by them.

But I also meet a Bengali-Irish woman
who says
‘we’re all the same, all Bradford’
while her Pakistani-British husband smiles and nods.
A guy from Karachi who says ‘Bradford’s nice and bijoux’
And Fahard Ali.
Let me tell you…
Fahard Ali was a big man; round like a barrel of treacle.
He wore a mustard coloured flat cap,
aviator framed glasses,
reflective in the sunset.
I ask him what Britishness is to him.
When I get in, later, from talking to him I transcribe his words directly:
“I am british – it’s the language that I speak – […] being british is about the natural dominion of the island and the coast and the sea, the topography, the people, the struggles we’ve gone through, the literature, the architecture – Charles Barry, Lincoln cathedral – it’s not a singularity it’s a laminated effect of who we are – and let’s not forget it’s been 100 years since the beginning of the 1st world war – we’re also a product of that – we came out poorer, we lost 3 generations of men, had to rebuild ourselves, and empire and the loss of empire, the joining up of people through the commonwealth. You can be british if you’ve lived here four hours or if you’ve been here all your life – it’s about how you relate to it, and how you want to contribute to it. I feel happiest when I’m walking around the mills – those places – where things were happening – where cloth was being made. I’m happiest also when I’m bittersweet – those empty cathedrals of industry – it’s not that we were making something, it’s the hope and ambition it gave us. The people who came from the hay way into the city – it was about finding a better way to feed ourselves, clothe ourselves. There was something there – hope. I find myself happiest around industry. The biggest injustice is the loss of narrative. I say narrative over identity – because there are many identities. How we’ve got rid of narrative – become a homogeneous thing – […] we have no narrative of where we’ve come from, so we can’t tell where we’re going to. My favourite song is William Blake’s Jerusalem. Not as a religious song – the hope Blake puts in, and he identifies the english character of living on an island, and about hoping for something better – the reality is that the feet of god weren’t here, but we look forward to a Jerusalem of the mind.”

The next day
I speak to the director of the theatre I’m working in
and he says
“I think we feel together because we went through the riots”
There was a lot of healing that had to go on.
We saw this gulf in our communities
It hurt us.
it was hard. But the city is better now.

I am pro independence
I believe it will be good for Scotland.
And that is the only outcome that matters really.
But if you want to know what I think it means for England.
I think that it means there will be some people that stand on the same island, surrounded by the same sea, doing things differently.
picking neoliberalism out of their teeth
piece by piece
greater connection to Europe
positive immigration
internationalism
stronger trade
renewable energy
free education
an NHS with no private interest poison
no longer will Westminster be able to claim
‘there is no alternative’
They will be right there.

We are not losing our friends. They are still in the same place.
We still stand on the same island. Surrounded by the same sea.
They are not abandoning us to Tory rule.
Of the six Labour governments since 1945 only twice – in 1964 and February 1974 – was the party reliant on Scottish votes to help keep the Conservatives from office (my source is parliament.uk/briefing-papers/RP08-12.)

They are not divorcing us or leaving us.
The act of union 307 years ago that brought us together was built as a way of bailing out the super rich investors in the so-called Darien Scheme, and £Scots240,000 were handed out in direct bribes to ensure that act of union passed.
Sir John Clerk, an ardent pro-unionist and Union negotiator, observed that the treaty was “contrary to the inclinations of at least three-fourths of the Kingdom” [of Scotland].
If you want to use the hyper emotive language of betrayal, it was a forced marriage.

Within 100 years the clearances began, overseen by a British government,
Hundreds of thousands of Highlanders forcibly, violently and lethally ejected from their land.
We grew our sheep there instead.
Logged their forests
Took their oil.
infused their soil with nuclear experiments
We have not been nice to them.

Oh not you and me specifically
but England and Scotland are not you and me specifically.
And that’s how that kind of fucked up shit happens.

There are two ways to a world without borders.
One is expanding countries into unions into continents into international bodies.
The other is greater and greater devolution.
Until we reach the unit ‘a person’, and the understanding of our relationship to others
through contexts other than crossings;
the sounds our voices make,
the way we look when we do new thinking,
how we co-operate when we don’t have to.

I am pro independence for Scotland.
Thank you for listening to me.

Posted on March 13, 2013 by Hannah Nicklin — 12 Comments

How (can) we ask people to act?

On Sunday I gave a provocation at a Salon hosted by Coney at Camden People’s Theatre, introduced by the lovely Tom Frankland (pictured). I was invited to respond to the question ‘how (can) we ask people to act?’, and offer my own question for discussion. Here is the thing that I said.

Audiences want to believe.
Audiences want to be told.
Audience want to play along.
Audiences turn away from ‘what is’ to conspire together to hold between them ‘what if’ – what if this were true, what if this was a different place and you were a different version of you.

The word ‘conspire’, by the way, means ‘to breathe together’.

Theatre is a rip in the space-time continuum held apart by collective hands. Even if it is just me, maker, and you, participant. In that space between, that hot metallic space between ‘what is’ and ‘what if’ we breathe together.

I read that meaning of ‘conspire’ in a book called The Most Radical Gesture. In it a woman called Sadie quotes an old drunk French philosopher who said:

Plagiarism is necessary. Progress demands it.

I’m not citing him out of purposeful irony.

There’s something there for me about co-creation.

I make community theatre. For some reason people insist on calling me a ‘digital artist’ but as far as I’m concern you might as well also call me a ‘water drinking artist’.

I make community theatre. Communities online and off.

3 years ago I collected stories of kissing in the rain online and wrote a soundwalk around them, designed to be listened to under a white umbrella in Piccadilly Gardens in Manchester. Incidentally that’s the only time I’ve been to Manchester and it didn’t rain).

In The Umbrella Project – yes umbrellas are a thing for me – 250 umbrellas were released into the wild of York with a number on them which when called, depending on the time of day, asked a different question; Tell me about York at night; Tell me about an encounter with a stranger; Tell me about a journey.

I also collected stories in person, and made 3 sound walks for different times of day, with each question’s answers as source material.

For Northern Big Board I spent 4 weeks in residence in a swimming and diving pool in Shipley near Bradford. The pool was suffering under government cuts and at the time were facing huge staffing upheaval – where, for example, 4 people with over 80s years experience of both working there and with one another were being interviewed for only 2 posts. And being interviewed for it by a friend.

I listened. I asked questions. Of both pool users and staff. Questions like ‘what does this place mean to you?’ ‘if you could have a plaque put up to you anywhere in the building where would you put it’ and ‘tell me about a time when you were the best of yourself’.

Dave told me about what it feels like to rip a dive – a perfect entry off a 10m platform – like silence he said.

Gee told me about looking up as he was administering CPR to someone who had had a heart attack to see his full team standing ready to take over and said ‘they were the best of me’.

Angie spoke of a place she had worked for over 35 years, the people she had seen grow up, have their own kids. She said ‘we’re like a family’ and that the cuts were like ‘a death in the family’.

I made 7 different interactive and non-interactive installations with their stories.

I set out to find common voices in these pieces – common experience, a common city, a community. But what I found – the overwhelming thing I found when I asked people for stories was the answer “oh, I haven’t got anything interesting to say.”

In York I asked a man with a zimmer frame – tell me about a journey – and he replied ‘oh, I’ve nothing to tell you.’ I reframed the question a couple of times and then he said ‘well, I have sailed around the world single handedly.’

No joke.

He told me ‘you can’t fight the ocean, you’d never win, you have to move with it.’

In Shipley people lit up when they saw their words on a plaque in their favourite place in the pool. They ran around trying to spot them all – came to me afterwards and asked if they could keep them. Their own words.

In Shipley when I asked one woman ‘tell me about a time you were the best of yourself’ she burst into tears at the idea that she might ever be worth enough to have an answer to that question.

Capitalism has stolen our stories.
It sells them back to us, like bottled water.
They are never about us.
They never listen.

Audiences want to believe.
Audiences want to be told what to do.
Audiences want to play along.
They turn away from ‘what is’ and carefully pass ‘what if’ between them.

I think the beginning of asking audiences to act is to make something they aren’t afraid to break. You’re not afraid to break things when you know they can be fixed. How they’re put together.

Something that doesn’t say ‘believe’ but ‘look’, that doesn’t tell, asks. Not ‘play along’ but ‘construct’ that in turning await from ‘what is’ turns us towards one another, within ‘what if’.

The work I told you about – my part in it – was constructing a mirror. Unimportant. The important part, I’ve discovered is the asking questions – in listening – but crucially in a way that tells people that they will be listened to. The work is the device that says ‘I heard you’.

The last thing I want to share with you is a definition of community I read in a different book. Another french dude – Jean Luc Nancy, in fact.

For Nancy community is not defined by space or proximity. No material communality – community – he says – should not be ‘productive’ infact it is impossible, indescribable, unavowable.

The clearest examples of community he talks about is that between lovers, and between the person dying and their companion. It is in the inability to truly accompany someone to their death in the knowledge you will take the same journey alone.

It is in the thrusting together ourselves together as we continue to do because we can never truly be close enough. The way I love you, this ache in the place I know in my head is not my heart is- is- this is- never enough never enough.

Community is the space between. Th space between what is – me – and what if – you, with your alike agency.

It is not the characters capitalism makes us to one another.
But hot, metallic possibility.

I am not you but what if
That has not happened to me but what if
I have not made that action but what if

In short; empathy.

These, I suggest, are the components of audience action:

Knowing that you will be listened to
Thinking you have something worth saying
Listening to other people.

We cannot ask people to act. We can only offer them a space where they might recognise their being in the world, their being together with others, and their implication – the effect they might have upon that nexus. A space for action. A space of community.

We can offer them the community found in the in-between – in between possibility; in between you and me; in between idea and action – and we can offer them the ability to play with it without worrying it might break – by making it with them. Knowing that our coming together is impossible. Knowing the point is we try.

So, I have a question for you:

When was the last time you let someone change your mind?