Surfing on a wave of something else entirely…

Posted on November 14, 2011 by debdavemason

One minute I’m at the Southside Pub Quiz following up our team’s immaculate positioning mid-leader board (no-one wants to actually WIN a pub quiz surely?) with what felt like a doctor’s surgery of visitors to our table wanting to talk about Julius Caesar.  Fine by me I’m the biggest JC bore out there this season (dinner party hosts be warned!).  I seem to recall having delivered some helpful and pithy comments to the actor playing JC (he is at his first text rehearsal on Wednesday so his recall of this may differ) and miraculously received an offer to have some of the cast tour inside the Houses of Parliament as part of their character preparation.  I remember going home on the tube.  And then, on Friday, all was vomit.

Getting gastric flu in the second week of rehearsals was really not part of my plan.

Fortunately by the time Friday came we had at least got successfully through our first text based rehearsal, just Cassisus and Brutus looking at their complicated relationship and how it develops, or rather unravels and re-ravels through the play.  Rather than just going through scenes chronologically I have decided to rehearse in ‘character based episodes’.  This makes it easier for those called to rehearsal to not be there for endless stretches in order to deliver one line at the end of a 20 page scene, it also means that we can look forward and back in a relationship between groups of people, or in this case the two central characters of the play.

Looking at the later scenes and particularly the ‘farewell, farewell, forever’ scene I felt more than ever vindicated in my decision to cast two women in these roles.  I really think it will add a whole new dimension to the play.  The emotional content is there in the words but seems to be more easily released by two women (who are old friends) playing old friends who have been through a great moral and emotional journey together.  Perhaps I have just not seen the right productions, but often Julius Caesar comes across as dry and political and lacking emotional content.  Well, after just this one rehearsal, I can safely say that won’t be the case in this production.

Sunday’s rehearsal is a little blurry for me.  Because, by then, due to lack of food and proper sleep for something like 72 hours, I was a little blurry myself.  However, the actors were kind and sympathetic and I managed to stick to the plan I had hastily written on a post it note and stuck on the front of my tongue twister book.  I should say, as an aside, that I would recommend anyone undertaking Shakespeare to invest in a tongue twister book – I bought mine from Foyles on the Charing Cross Road, but I think they also have them in French’s.  It has about 200 tongue-twister helpfully categorised.  As the scenes we were studying had a lot of ‘thunder’, ‘thrice’ and s sounds I chose something from the ‘th’ category: “Sidney Sheldon stuck six, thick, sticks into sixty-six ricks” – following on from our toe to tongue physical warm up and vowel resonator warm up – it got everyone’s brains moving as well.

We also did some work on physicalities.  This is a word bandied about in the theatre and means different things to different people.  In my case it means putting the thought into the body (not just the head).  Many actors cling to their own physicalities on stage even though their voices and faces change, even though mentally they appear to have every aspect of the character, their bodies often betray the lingering tensions of the actor.  The proscenium arch hides much of this, but in a space such as we use (where the audience see the actors dynamically moving in space from a variety of angles and often from above) when an actor is repetitive in their physicality, when too often we see the actor’s tensions, not the characters, the audience becomes weary of it.   I know this because I am one such actor – we all do it!  But we can at least try to make the change.  By using a simple exercise I hope to help the actors in Julius Caesar do so; I asked them to walk round the room as themselves and then bring in the thought ‘I want to be invisible’ bringing with it a context, a reason for the thought, then to go back to being themselves and compare, I then asked them to bring in the thought ‘I want to be the centre of attention’ and then to go back to themselves an compare and then moved them between the three states.  I should make it clear this is not a ‘mime’ exercise showing the audience the idea of ‘I want to be invisible’, I didn’t mind if I saw no change at all between the three states (although I did).  The change needs to be in the brain and the body.

As different actors arrive for the different parts of the rehearsal I have to say I did forget to do this with some of them! (I blame feeling ill but…) However we did do some more exercises later on and tried to make them more specific to the context of the scene, looking at ‘I want to be important’, ‘I want to be liked’ and ‘I want to be secure’.  It was really interesting to see what a difference it does make to eradicating small physical habits (such as putting a hand in a pocket because it doesn’t have anything to do) simply by giving the whole body something to do.  I shall definitely be doing more of this exercise!

I am also hoping that someone from Sunday will write a blog about it – then I’ll have a less blurry idea of it all.  Fortunately I also have video – I taped some of the rehearsal for my Assistant Director – who wasn’t able to make it – and will also be reviewing it for my own info!

Hoping that as the days go by I’ll be feeling more and more human and that by Wednesday I’ll be back on form for my first JC rehearsal featuring JC himself!

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Surfing on a wave of panic (2nd rehearsal)

Posted on November 9, 2011 by debdavemason

Perhaps I was just tired?  I’d got back from Venice on Tuesday, had the first rehearsal on Wednesday night, unsuccessfully auditioned for the Olympics Games opening ceremony on Thursday night, gone out for what I thought would be a quiet dinner on Friday night (interpretive dance to West End and Broadway tracks till 3am….), met a friend for the John Martin exhibition on Saturday and collapsed in front of Strictly and Merlin on Saturday night.  Maybe I just needed more sleep.  Or less.  Because I had a succession of anxiety dreams about the rehearsal on Sunday…

First up – the classic – I’m late.  I was there early, but filled the time with shopping, and then only noticed too late that it was 4pm (the rehearsal was scheduled to start at 2.30pm) – oh no – they will be so cross – will they still be there – I start back to the rehearsal but suddenly its 6pm and then 8pm – time is whirling out of control….

back to dreamless sleep

Then – I’m almost there, rushing to get there on time – I’ve left my notes at home – do I have time to go back? No! I will just have to do it without notes.  I’m OK with that….

back to dreamless sleep

Then – I’m rushing to get there on time, but others are with me also heading to the rehearsal, but I take a wrong turning, it’s a short cut, is it? It’s a beach (so common in Balham), but the tide is coming in, we are cut off! I have to scramble over the rocks and up a steep slip way, I am back in the town where I was shopping in the first dream, but now I can’t remember the way to the rehearsal…

back to dreamless sleep and then….

I wake up! In plenty of time to get myself organised, check that I do have all my notes and arrive in Balham.  I get to the rehearsal 15 minutes early.  Only two people there ahead of me.  And breathe….

I don’t feel that I rushed through the workshop, we covered every thing I wanted to do, on reflection we could have had a longer tea-break (!) and yet we finished almost an hour early.  I think some of my panic may have leached into the rehearsal.  However the bonus was that we had time and (to my great joy) willingness (the alternative was the pub) to put some of the crowd stuff into context.  With the brave co-operation of the actor playing Mark Antony we played with a scene of one speaker, speaking to the mob.  As we haven’t rehearsed any of Mark Antony’s speeches yet we used the piece from Henry V that we used in the verse workshop on Wednesday.  The results were more than pleasing.

Perhaps I don’t need to panic.  In less than 3 hours we had created a cohesive ensemble who with minimal direction from me could create a plausible crowd interacting with a speaker.  However I do have to face that fact that I am directing a 5 act Shakespeare play – with additional twitter feed – with 26 actors in only 60 hours.

But panic isn’t going to make that any easier as my dream of short cuts and rising tides perhaps foretold.  So I just need to keep on track and hope that we don’t lose rehearsal time to snow and flu.  I am also reassured that I have a smart, intelligent cast who will pick things up quickly and who also seem to understand my vision – I shouldn’t really be asking for more….

But I will ;o)

For a more detailed blog about the Crowd Workshop itself see Emma Burford’s piece on the Southside Players blog.

We also taped some of it so hopefully some footage will appear there soon.

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The challenges of a collaborative artistic process – 1st Rehearsal

Posted on November 3, 2011 by debdavemason

You can plan for a lot of things in a rehearsal process. I certainly believe in planning.  I had sent an email to the cast telling them what I expected and what to expect of the first rehearsal.  I had created for myself a timed agenda/crib sheet going through all the things I wanted to cover in the two and half hours of my first rehearsal for Julius Caesar.

Certainly I was very pleased that some of this planning paid off, nearly everyone was on time (and the two or three people who weren’t were within the 10 minute safety zone) so we started roughly on time with the traditional “go round the circle and introduce yourself” business.  There is always a moment in this when it seems to be a bit self-help/AA like – particularly when one or two of the group started confessing to eating large quantities of sweets (although I am beginning to suspect that the first person to do so was in fact making ironic commentary on the AA like nature of the exercise!).

I then did my little intro – why I was directing the play, why I was updating it and why there would be a twitter feed.  Except that I think I may have missed some key bits of info on this – possibly due to the fact that I got back from Venice late the night before and then straight into a slightly fraught 9am meeting at work in the morning.  I should have mentioned the parallels between the twitter-revolutions of the Arab Spring and the ‘revolution’ of the play.  I wanted to mention the involvement of women in generating the revolutions of the Arab-Spring and how they rarely subsequently took power as the reason I had chosen to cast both Brutus and Cassius as women.  Ah well.  There will be time between now and February 15th to get this information across.

The next part of the evening was the bit I had planned for, but also hadn’t planned for!  In setting up the context setting exercise I had simply imagined that the information I got back would somehow be what I expected back (although in some cases I wasn’t sure what I expected) and this assumption was clearly ill founded and, on reflection, perhaps not even desirable.

In the context setting exercise the actors got into ‘relationship’ groups – these might be romantic/familial/employment/friendship relationships – but all where there is an existing (or might be an existing) relationship before the play opens.  Where the actor was playing more than one part they were told which part they were focussing on in this group.  I asked them to think about who they were in the modern context, what was their job, what was their relationship with the other people in the group – if they were a ‘servant’ what did that mean in the modern context (secretary, body guard, housekeeper, etc) and asked them to think about their past history together and also what their daily lives were like.

As this progressed I went round to see different groups and explain things and discuss things with them.  The results were both extraordinary and encouraging!  Actors had found, even within the smallest roles a rich and imaginatively worked out character – some may have come prepared but some created this on the spot – for example the minor character of Artemidorous – who has barely a page of a scene – is now a speech-writer for one of the conspirators (and therefore privy to inside information) but also an obsessive stalker of Julius Caesar – keen to pass on her information but also giving Julius a keen motivation for ignoring her – genius!

Many others came out with equally well worked out back stories and characterisations. I hope – I think – for those who were more tentative in settling on the specifics of their character this will be encouraging and they will see that within the confines of the text there is also a huge freedom for imagination and creativity for the actor.  Perhaps the audience will see it – perhaps they won’t.  What I do know is that they will sense it – it will be a deeper, richer production for the fact that each plebian has a name, a job, a reason for being where they are, an opinion (no matter how swayable) and a true relationship to the context and plot of the play.

All this fantastic creativity came out of just one hour’s work – we have many more hours in which to refine it, change it if need be, in the rehearsals to come – but what a great start.  I won’t see some of these actors for rehearsals on actual scenes until later in November. But the work we did last night means they have something concrete to work on, knowing that they have agreed a framework with both me as director and with the other characters in their scenes.

The last hour was taken up with a verse and text workshop.  I largely cribbed this from the brilliant verse workshop we were given by RSC Open Stages Skills Exchange – led by George – at the Questors Theatre in September.  I added to this a few other classic iambic pentameter ‘tips’ and called it a night.  Well apart from the traditional trip to the pub.

 

 

 

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Sometimes talent really isn’t enough

Posted on October 19, 2011 by debdavemason

.. to get you the role you want.

Which, with my actor’s hat on is rather reassuring.  With my director’s hat on I find it slightly sad!

Last Saturday I saw nearly 30 people at auditions for the Southside Players’ production of Julius Caesar – I’d seen two a couple of weeks before, and I’d contacted two people to play a specific role (although one of these turned up and auditioned anyway).  Technically I could cast everyone! The great thing about amateur theatre is that you aren’t paying anyone so you don’t have to worry about the actors’ wage bill – also as I’m setting it in 2012 I won’t be overtaxing the costume budget either.  Also Julius Caesar has 37 named parts and lots of crowd scenes so there is a line for everyone to say! Of course having a cast of 30+ people presents its own directing challenge (especially considering the size of our rehearsal room) but it was one that in the end I was prepared to take.

I think one of the unique features of amateur theatre is that it is as much about the enjoyment of the people doing it (the actors, the backstage crew) as it is for those watching it (the audience).  In the professional theatre,  if you aren’t really enjoying being Plebian number one (with your 4 lines and no direction to speak of) then it’s tough – you are getting paid and you are opening doors (theoretically) to other opportunities.  Not so for Southside Players, if you don’t enjoy it, you may just not turn up! No pressure on me then…

So yes, I cast everyone. But that doesn’t mean to say that everyone is happy with the part I gave them.  Nor does it mean that everyone was equal in talent.  Clearly some people have more experience, some people have less experience but more talent and some people just get so nervous at auditions that if they are new to you you just can’t tell what they are really going to be like after a few rehearsals and on the night itself.  Even people you know really well (and since I’ve been with the Southside for 20 plus years I know lots of people really well) can get nervous.  But I did what I could to make the auditions pleasant and un-intimidating.

Like what? Well letting people have the audition piece in advance, not keeping them waiting too long by giving people time slots, getting them to audition in pairs, not sitting behind a desk, in fact I think I spent most of the day standing up! I also have a ‘panel’ – again not sitting behind desks – I think this helps both me (when it comes to making decisions) but also the auditionees – as the panel of me and three others were spread across a reasonable area –  it meant the auditionees weren’t forced to focus solely on me and also had something that looked more realistically like an audience!  As an actor I’ve always hated the unreality of having to deliver a ‘performance’ under distinctly un-performance like conditions – so I approach auditions as a director expecting them to be more like the first rehearsal – an opportunity to explore and try things out.  This means that everyone gets a second chance at doing the piece, and I got them to do some of it very naturalistically and then for the second exercise to stand on a chair each and deliver a speech in a very oratorial way.  This produced some interesting results.  Particularly in those who were most nervous.  Something about the unexpectedness of my request ‘ now stand on a chair each’ and the exercise itself, seemed to take them out of their nervousness.  It also helps to still people’s physical ticks! If you are trying to balance on a chair, arm waving and pacing become much less practical and stillness much more instinctive.

And what did I learn from all this? Well the first thing I knew, as the last audition concluded, was that I had enough talent to cast at least another two shows! But that I would have to squeeze it in to what I could offer.  My main challenge was casting the part of Cassius.  Having said that I would consider a male or female Cassius I was then faced with about 10 people who could have done the role.  Of these I simply discounted those who had under-prepared for the audition (and therefore not done themselves justice) or whom I wanted for another role (already you see that talent was not enough), leaving me with 3 main contenders, of these when I checked their preferences for roles one had said ‘small parts please’ so that took her out of the mix.  Of the two left I struggled to make a decision – they would be very different in the role and in the end I opted for the one that more closely matched my preconceptions.  What does that say about the person who didn’t get it? They had the talent, they’d done the prep, they’d shown they had the commitment, and yet they didn’t get the part.  So did I give them the next best part they were suited for? Actually no I didn’t.  I could have cast this person as Caesar, but I didn’t.  Why not? Because it would have unbalanced the play – by this point I had a female Brutus, a female Cassius, a female Octavius, if I’d cast Caesar as a woman it would have begun to look like my intentions were to create a feminist version of Julius Caesar (rather than just a modern one).  I may live to regret this decision, I hope not.

So actors, if you don’t always get the job you want, it’s not that you didn’t deserve it, not that you didn’t have the talent, simply that a cast is like a jigsaw and you belong in a different part of it (or sometimes just a different puzzle!).  As an actor I find that reassuring – knowing that when I thought I’d done a great audition, but didn’t get the part, it really wasn’t because I was fooling myself.  Sad though, because if talent and dedication aren’t enough, it can make you feel a bit powerless to make your own success.  I think you just have to keep going for it.  Eventually you will be the right bit of puzzle in the right jigsaw and you will have your chance to shine.

I can’t wait to get to work with my cast.  I think they will be brilliant.  The fact I am able to have so much talent in the smaller roles will just deepen the whole play.  I also hope that we will all have fun with it and that the experience for both actor and audience alike will be a good one.

The production is part of the RSC Open Stages project (supported by Esme Fairburn trust) and is being put on by Southside Players (www.southsideplayers.org.uk) on 15-18 February 2012 at 7.45pm at Chestnut Grove Drama Hall, Balham (5pm on Saturdays).

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Democracy or Dictatorship a Directing Dilemma

Posted on September 13, 2011 by debdavemason

I am about to embark on a very exciting project – directing Julius Caesar for Southside Players as part of RSC Open Stages.  We don’t perform until mid-February but on Friday we had our first production meeting.

My aim for the play is to create a completely relevant 21st Century context – a twitter revolution Julius Caesar, complete with projected live twitter feed, audience engagement, maybe even some characters and elements being presented ‘virtually’.  My inspiration for the production was Paul Mason‘s blog piece ‘Twenty Reasons Why It is Kicking Off Everywhere’.

For me the production is part of an ongoing thought experiment – can you use cultural engagement to create political engagement by attaching political themes to the cultural mechanism.  These themes should be thought provoking but not instructional, educational or polemic.  The idea is that by putting them into a cultural imaginative context you encourage creative thought around political ideas which might in the long term produce creative political ideas which are then disseminated virally through the population leading to real social and political change.  Well it’s an idea, let’s see.

In the meantime my first meeting brought me an interesting challenge.  How do I direct a play in which my message (although perhaps not Shakespeare’s) is that dictatorship is bad and democracy is good -without either turning into a dictator or totally losing the plot?  Sometimes what democracy needs is strong leadership (certainly my message in JC) but then I have just heard Carne Ross talk about leaderless democracy (a and pretty much agreed with most of what he said athough haven’t had time to read the book yet) so even if not a dictator, do I sacrifice democracy for leadership? Or try to create the kind of peaceful anarchism (not anarchy) that Carne advocates?  What a fix? A director of a play normally assumes the role of a benevolent tyrant and when I suggested to the production team that I might be approaching things in a more democratic way some of them were horrified!

Partly it is difficult because I have a strong creative vision for the play and I don’t see any point in changing that – if someone sees the play differently they are welcome to direct their own version of it! On the other hand I think if you are going to work with 30 or so equally creative people then you might as well collaborate with them fully and get all that extra brain power inputting into the production.  But how far am I prepared to compromise MY vision for other people’s even if they are part of it?  My experience of the production meeting – when we weren’t distracted by wine and millinery – was that I need to fabricate the building blocks, create some structure, but also build in some flexibility.  I basically need a Julius Caesar Lego kit – it may end up as a Lego planet or it may end up as a Lego Death Star* – but whatever ‘it’ is it will still be made up of the blocks I have created and will be limited to a design that fits with their design.

The production meeting was incredibly creative, I came away with some amazing ideas (not my own but offered up by the team) that solve all sorts of problem and enhance ideas I already have.  There are some ‘fixed points’ (Lego) but only when the cast are in place will I really see whether my process works.  Auditions start in the first week of October… watch this space!

*Yes Lego fans I do know that that isnt’really possible but I think you know what kind of analogy I am creating here so let’s not get picky!

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Are We All Zombies Now?

Posted on August 19, 2011 by debdavemason

I’m not an economist and have only recently become interested in economics – mostly because I am interested in the dire political situation we find ourselves in – reinforced by recent riots but also by reports of rising unemployment, closing businesses, threats to welfare and services.

Reading Newsnight economist Paul Mason’s blog I was alerted to the concept of Zombie Economics – a bit late to the party as it’s been around for a while!  I also was made aware of the idea of Zombie Households and Zombie businesses and it made me wonder whether perhaps there were also Zombie Politics and Zombie Citizens – and if so how would they be characterised and how could we rid ourself of this Zombie plague?

In case, like me, you are ignorant of the whole world of Zombie-isms that don’t exist in horror or comedy-horror genre culture – here’s a brief guide:

Zombie Economics – Economic theories of the last 100 years have been tried and failed and repeatedly tried and failed many times. Despite the fact that the ideas are frequently consigned as ‘dead’ they rise again – they are ‘undead’ – they are Zombies.  We are currently in a period of Zombie Economics where all the alternatives are ‘dead’ but face Zombification – mostly because there seem to be no viable ‘live’ ideas to replace them.

Zombie Businesses – Businesses that survive simply to survive. They are so heavily burdened by debt that they survive merely to service the debt, they can’t borrow more and grow, they can’t do less – they’d break.  The banks continue to support them in order not to face losing their lent money.  Effectively the business is dead but doesn’t know it.  It’s a Zombie.  Usually the preserve of smaller businesses we are increasingly seeing larger businesses and institutions becoming Zombified – maybe even countries – hello Greece!

Zombie Households – Like Zombie businesses these households survive just to survive – wage stagnation, rising prices and travel costs balance against low interest rates -but these households teeter on the brink – (economist Guy Standing has dubbed them the ‘precariat’)  those of us who’s financial and social stability is never assured – there is no cushion of savings, no job for life or pension certainty – if we own our own properties then interest rate rises could see the end of that ownership or a miring down into ever greater debt. We aren’t free – we are trapped in the market – shuffling along – hungry – looking for brains – preferably the sort that can come up with a solution to this mess!

But how did we get into this weird Zombie Nation?  Could it be we were led by Zombie Politics?

Zombie Politics like Zombie Economics is a world full of dead ideas, ideas that have been around so long that some can be traced back to at least the 16th Century (if not before)!  A lot of the ideas are based on the Zombie Economics – so that doesn’t help.  The ones based on ‘morals’  – for example the deserving versus the un-deserving poor have been around for ever – and solutions still aren’t forthcoming!

I can’t have been alone in thinking at the last election “ this party is putting forward an idea that clearly didn’t work last time, oh – actually so is the opposing party – oh – and this one, and this one”.   Commentators on the recent rioters have been quick to point out that they were not ideologically motivated (unless you count those non-ideologues the Anarchists) perhaps because young people (whether educated or not) are shunning dead politics and ideologies as pointless.  They see no solutions to their own Zombification and therefore embrace it.  The difference between the educated disaffected young and the unedcuated is that the educated protest (peacefully and not-so-peacefully) in a structured way, and the uneducated ‘protest’ in an unstructured way – unaware perhaps that they are protesting.   We see the rise of the Zombie Citizen.

The Zombie Citizen accepts the most general mores of the culture they are presented with: capitalism, consumerism, state controlled welfare – whether they are high-rolling, champagne drinking city boys and girls, or estate dwelling drug-dealing doleys (to give two nice extreme stereotypes) they accept the status quo that money is good, low-taxation is good, buying things is good, the NHS is good, holidays and affordable travel are a right, celebrity equals respect and so on.  They do not, though, engage with culture or society any further than that – they are not interested in political debate, they may not even vote – they don’t perhaps understand why they should – they aren’t interested in helping to make better those things they perceive as ‘wrong’ – they simply complain about them.  They are alive in the sense that they are functional/dysfuncational units of society, but dead in the sense that they take no part in it, make no effort to engage with it, and have little interest in the future of it unless it relates to a loss of a  part of the status-quo that they are particularly attached to – even then the engagement required to do more than simply complain and grumble might be too much for the Zombie Citizen.

But how are we to rid ourselves of this Zombie Plague? Having led myself down this massive analogy with Zombies I am now faced with finding ways of getting rid of them that doesn’t require a mass decapitation of all politicians, economists and most of the population!  So lets assume that somewhere, someone is working on a cure, a vaccine against this Zombification.  I’m no scientist but I predict that part of that cure will be political engagement by ordinary citizens – like you and me – a shaking off of the burden of consumerist culture – a long hard look at what politics ought to look like – a closer engagement and assessment of our politicians (how many of us regularly write or email our MP about anything that isn’t a personal matter? How many of us can even name our own MP?) – a real assesment of what really matters to make society a place where we can all live happily (surely the ultimate aim) rather than wealthily.  What can I say? “Zombie’s of the World Unite – give us some braaaaaaaaains…”

 

These are some of the articles, blogs and info I looked at in writing this blog:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-14579710

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/10/15/five_zombie_economic_ideas_that_refuse_to_die?page=0,5

http://zombiecon.wikidot.com/

http://press.princeton.edu/titles/9270.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zombie_company

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/finance/edmundconway/100000592/the-rise-and-rise-of-zombie-households/

http://www.xperthr.co.uk/blogs/employment-intelligence/2011/08/the-uk-economys-walking-dead-2.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/jul/03/western-economies-japan-lite

http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2010/nov/28/happiness-cameron-welfare-cuts-bentham

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Precariat-New-Dangerous-Class/dp/1849663513

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/newsnight/paulmason/2011/05/

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Art is more important than science

Posted on February 24, 2011 by debdavemason

Art is more important than science for the future of the human race
 
It’s provocative I know.  Scientists everywhere will be tapping out responses furiously – or they would if anyone ever said this in a more public forum – or if it was taken up as a statement by arts practitioners.
 
I attended an excellent event last night organised by The Jericho House called “What is the Point of Art Now?” – in the beautiful surroundings of St Ethelburga’s we listened to the eloquent and educated ex-culture minister, Chris Smith – give his opinion on why arts, and arts funding was important.
 
The arguments were measured, the debate good tempered and generally everyone agreed with one another or disagreed so politely it was difficult to tell the difference.  There was some talk of the ‘value’ of art to society and whether it was measurable.  But should we be looking for measurable value or simply accepting the intrinsic value?  Does is matter at a time of crisis?  Should we not be looking for all possible weapons to fight for our right to be artists, writers, theatre practitioners, film makers?  For the right of future generations to be taught about the arts? Can we really sit back politely and accept our relegation to something not useful enough to warrant funding the teaching of in higher education? Are we really so useless compared to science, accountancy, law?
 
I will not debate here the means by which the government could raise more money and not have to cut arts and education funding (scrap Trident, raise corporation tax, crack down on tax-avoidance).  I won’t go into depth the reasons why cutting education funding is effectively increasing the health and benefits bill for many years into the future – you can go and visit www.marmot-review.org for that information.  But what I do want to say is that we cannot, without a fight, allow ourselves to be relegated to a second class of thinking.
 
Creative thought, imagination, the practicalities of making and creating with your own hands, mind and body are all things which society cannot do without.  They are the primordial soup out of which all other kinds of thought emerge.  There would be no science, no philosophy without art.  Cutting funding for arts teaching in higher education, raising university fees, cutting funds to arts bodies, schools projects, initiatives to bring and create more cultural products for excluded and marginlised communties are a direct attack on our freedom.
 
If we slowly kill off creativity, if we stifle culture, we will be a stagnant society, one with little interest in anything other than the status quo. Mindlessly consuming imported culture and losing anyone with talent to other countries.  We will soon lose our excellence in other fields too, because culture is the food of all thought (regardless of whether you know you are consuming it, or consuming it willingly).  It isn’t the stuff of minorities, we live in it and with it.  Chris Smith highlighted the fact that more people went to the theatre, or went to art galleries and museums than went to football matches. Football is seen as popularist, arts and theatre as minority. It isn’t the case – but it soon might be. 
 
I was slightly depressed by the lack of willingness in the audience of last night’s debate and of Chris himself to bravely say – Arts matter – arts matter as much or as more than science.  We lack passion, we try too hard to be balanced.  We don’t want to have to justify our art – we believe in its intrinsic value – but we must fight for it – and that means boldly claiming its value, boldly stating that we will not be demoted.  That we matter.  It may not come easily but if we don’t fight we won’t win.

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Why We Shouldn’t be Afraid of the Alternative Vote

Posted on February 18, 2011 by debdavemason

On  May 5th we are asked to decide whether we should change our parliamentary voting system from ‘First Past the Post’ to ‘Alternative Vote’.

I would hazard a guess that, like me, many of us don’t really know what that choice means. What is an ‘Alternative Vote’? Alternative to the current system? Alternative to the person we actually voted for? Here is what I’ve found out – and a bit later on – what I think about it.

First Past the Post – It’s very simple and usually produces a clear result – a winner – a loser. It is therefore popular in emerging democracies and is a lasting legacy of our imperialism in many Commonwealth countries.  The Seats are allocated geographically to constituencies. Each constituency has only one seat/member of parliament. Each voter has only one vote and votes only in his or her constituency. The candidate who has the most votes in each constituency is then elected to parliament (and by the way in England under the current system if the votes are exactly tied after the second recount – the recording officer decides on the toss of a coin!).

The party with the most seats/members is then asked to form a government by the monarch.  That is assuming that they have more seats that the other parties combined. If they don’t they will have to come to some agreement about forming a coalition or attempting (unlikely) to form a minority government.

The Alternative Voting System – The Seats are allocated geographically to constituencies (as now). Each constituency has only one seat/member of parliament (as now). Each voter has only one vote but this can be transferred to their second preference candidate if their first preference is eliminated – they will still only end up with one vote per voter per constituency.  How does this work?  The voter will be asked to mark the candidates on the ballot paper by preference.  If at the first count a clear winner with the most first preference votes is achieved (they must get over 50% of votes to do this) then that person is elected to parliament.  If there is no clear winner, then the candidate with the least votes is eliminated and their second preference votes are allocated to the other candidates. This process goes on, eliminating the last on the list until a candidate emerges with over 50% of the vote.  The government is then formed in the same way with the party with the greatest number of votes being asked to form a Government, or with no clear winner, form a coalition government.

This is not the same kind of proportional representation that is used in most European countries.   Most European states use a mix of different systems where voters vote for party lists – and then seats are allocated to candidates chosen by the party. Or by a mixture of ‘constituency’ type alternative voting with additional seats chosen by party lists. Depending on the mix this can lead to hugely divided voting – eg Belgium where there is still no government after 250 days of coalition negotiations, or strong majority governments such as in France.  The version proposed for the UK is unlikely to produce either of these extremes or to give undue representation to extremist or fringe parties.

The chief advantage of AV over FPTP, and the reason I personally think it is a good idea, is that it gives voters a greater chance of making a difference and having their vote count.

In the 2005 general election in the UK 52% of the votes cast were for losing candidates (a further 18% were ‘wasted’ in unnecessary extra votes for candidates who had already achieved their majority). That meant that only 30% of votes cast actually made a difference and brought in the winning government.

Whilst the AV system is unlikely to favour extremists the main criticism is that it would create a greater number of non-majority governments, forcing parties into coalitions and that in the coalition the smaller party or parties would have a disproportionate influence over the larger one in a way that doesn’t necessarily reflect the electorate. However if you look at my example from 2005, above, a majority government voted by FPTP doesn’t necessarily reflect the electorate either.

Think what we could be facing in terms of cuts and concessions to bankers if this was a Conservative majority government? Or, for the sake of political balance, think what a Labour third term might do to the economy.  Even from a position of political weakness the Lib Dem’s have, as part of the coalition, provided a brake on some of the policies of their partner.  Their supporters have been empowered to vocally and actively address their MPs and party in a way that indicates they feel more responsible for having voted for them than perhaps Conservative or Labour voters do. 

Since the war the differing ideologies of Conservative and Labour have converged and yet political battles are still fought as if they were on opposing sides of a Cold War wall.  Somewhat disingenuously / hypocritically Ed Milliband writes (in the Guardian 17 Feb) of “exaggerating disagreement in order to create false black and white choices under first past the post” – I am forced to agree with him – it is these false black and white choices that are no longer appropriate to our social and political landscape. Continuing to cling to old ideologies will lead to more of the same and we will be stuck in an Escher drawn game of snakes and ladders forever. For a new politics to emerge – one that will be capable of taking us forward as a country (not back into some Victorian capitalist/philanthropist dystopia) the nature of political thought has to change.  By bringing smaller parties into the mix, by more truly representing people we can get a greater engagement by the public with politics and the changes necessary to make things work.

AV allows us to make a greater difference with our vote. By accepting that we have made a difference to the make up of the government, we are also forced to take responsibility for the government we get and for the implementation of its policies both at local and national level.  The more involved we are in our own society the greater change will be possible.

I will be voting ‘Yes’ to AV on May 5th.

More information on different types of voting systems and who uses what around the world can be found at good old Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_of_voting_systems_by_nation

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Is Culture the Way Out of the Capitalist Cul-de-sac?

Posted on February 15, 2011 by debdavemason

I was going to say the ‘consumerist cul-de-sac’ but then realised that there is no way out from consumerism.  We must do it to survive; we must have food to eat, clothes to protect ourselves from the elements and fuel to keep us warm and provide us with light when it’s dark.  In evolutionary terms we then go on to require healing (or magic / religion), entertainment and – unfortunately in terms of its comoditisation – sex.

But do we need to buy in so completely to a comsumerist/capitalist world view, where even our relationships, our thoughts about ourselves and our lives are coloured by the notion of buying and selling, of commerical exchange?  We talk about no pain / no gain when we go to the gym.  We say ‘you get out what you put in’, we talk about ‘give and take’ in a relationship.  All these are considered positive normal mind sets rather than aberrant ones.  These ways of thinking are the produce of growing mercantilism, secularism and capitalism over many centuries – they aren’t just about the now.  Our problem as a society is that we have reached a point where we cannot sustain the momentum of this thinking.  We cannot endlessly consume and be consumed we now move so fast and consume at such a rate that we cannot keep up with ourselves (let alone what we are doing to the resources of the planet).  And yet we haven’t been unaware of this problem and its growth.  A variety of movements have come and gone which have attempted to tackle the ‘capitalist menace’.  And yet none of them work. Socialism has failed except as a sort of ‘capitalism with kindness’. Communism has failed – even Cuba has virtually admitted defeat. All the varieties of hippy / eco /alternative lifestyles are only valid as anti-capitalism on a tiny scale – as soon as they move anywhere near the mainstream they enter the consumerist spin cycle.  

Is it that our mind set is now so firmly (and in many cases comfortably) within the cul-de-sac that we can’t understand how to get out? Do we need to fundamentally change our thinking before we can think of a solution?  I would not be posing the question if I didn’t think the answer was ‘yes’.

So how can we change our thinking, stop seeing ourselves, our lives, our relationships with others and with ‘stuff’ as an ongoing transaction?  I think culture holds the key. 

Reading books has always been more about the experience and thought process of the reader and writer than about the object – the book.  Whilst many people hold onto their books passionately as ‘objects’ it is not for their intrinsic value but for what they represent in terms of thought, emotion and ideas.  Books are one of the things that it is fine to just give away – randomly by putting them out on the street, at book swaps, bring and buys or to friends, back-packers and gap year travellers will be familiar with the well thumbed library of books that have passed through many hands.  Libraries provide this in an almost pure form – there is no charge to join, no charge to borrow, a simple trust that the borrower will be honest enough to bring back the book – in fact a friend of mine lost his library book, agonised for a while about what to do, eventually bought a replacement and confessed at the library, only to be told that someone else had found his lost library book and returned it for him!

Art is one of the most highly priced and prized commodities in the world and yet it can also be enjoyed freely and with no desire to own or purchase.  Many modern artists now create ‘experience’ – I loved Anthony Gormley’s Cloud Chamber and his Event Horizon – could I, would I want to, own them?

Theatre is also increasingly about experience, about being there in the moment, not about the comoditisation of stars and franchises – although there is still plenty of that about!

Subconciously the conservative (and unashamedly capitalist) goverment has cut the only real threat to current politics – the arts.  They have cut funding for teaching of the arts, for libraries, for arts organisations and through the perversion of Educational policy into a factory system for producing accountants, lawyers and bankers (and through its failures the people who sweep their floors and serve them coffee) they have laid the foundations for decades of cultural decline.  What they do not realise is there is no way out for them.  That eventually all economies based on this system will decline.  There will be an increasing divide between rich and poor.  The poor will get sicker and thicker and the cost of keeping them happy will get higher. 

A government that thinks art and culture and education are optional extras is one that will bring us all to ruin.

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