Hello Seekers - as Ken Campbell used to call people.

Check out Ken Campbell. He is an original. Did things his way. Didn’t buy into the funding strategies. Anarchic. Funny. Paradoxical. Entertaining. Serious. Spiritual. Maybe a few of the qualities I aspire to but rarely achieve. Maybe not your taste but still.

I am thinking of Ken Campbell because this situation reminds me of the early 80s which is when I started work in a collective that performed and toured in schools in Lancashire. Political with a big and small P/p. A time I suppose of social and political unrest and, for me, a similar feeling to now of being out on an edge of things.  Since then a lot of creative water has gone under the proverbial bridge. Periods of nothing, small stuttering attempts, more lurching around, a sudden coherence of maybe seven or eight years as what felt like scattered dead ends met some impossible to explain purpose and found their time and place. Then as quickly disappeared. Feeling those moments ebb away has, perhaps, been the hardest work of all and maybe the last years have been some of those moments.

I am conflicted about writing anything that could be construed as advice as I feel as lost as I imagine you might, but not necessarily, be.

My only mantra really is- keep your own counsel.

And.

If you can keep your head when all around you are losing theirs then maybe you don’t understand the situation.

But no. Seriously.

Keeping Your Own Counsel is the only way I can stagger day to day through such a discrepant and confusing time and I lean more and more into the poets these days. The poets and the painters. Politics with a big P is not feeling very generative to me. Too full of a bitter kind of anger.

I don’t feel that confident of my way forward but would prefer a world that thought that was ok. Currently I can’t find the script that wants to put my best foot forward and Just Do It. That phrase used to be a Nike ad we sneered at a while back and I don’t see anything has changed much. In fact, the strap lines for ads can feel they have become todays value systems. Because You’re Worth It L’Oreal used to intone in a vapid, empty, hard sell voice. But now, apparently, we’re all worth it though I somehow have the feeling I have never been worth less. The same feeling, I get when someone wants me to fill in a feedback form. The more my opinion is courted the less I suspect it is valued apart from forming some algorithmic data to progress the system and we all know where algorithm data leads a bit more clearly now. 

I should say at this point, I have always felt like this. It’s not a new thing. In some ways I suspect this internal wrangle I have going on has fuelled my work and fuelled my choices, including one a few years ago to step back away from a system I felt was dead on its feet. I achieved the stepping back bit but unfortunately have come up with no clear alternative.

The thing is though, that all of the above also feels like a pretty good description of making a work, devising a piece or trying to put together an application. Some odd tension of self-examination, a wrangling argument with things that don’t work, and a continuation anyway in one form or another because some desire and forward motion won’t go away.

I tend to the philosophical in my view of a lot of stuff. We are all born into specific times and their given narratives, but I am not enthusiastic about the blame game or guilt trips hovering around current thinking. I suppose I always viewed theatre as a place to play, to suspend the tighter compartments of everyday life and a place to find the gentler and deeper kind of connection between people. I remain committed to that and am not so keen to bring the online bicker fest into that arena. Working for me remains an analogue kind of experience - no matter how high-tech things might get. I prefer work when the ambition is buried in the day to day doing, not the hour to hour talking.

I think I have an inherent shyness which takes a long time to get to know people. I am not able to function in quick manufactured connections and have always struggled with the fast delivery of material, generally spurning the short session formats for longer processes with people whose work I have followed over long time. For this reason alone, I am loathe to enter into policy led initiatives that often mean fast production rates that skim over the surface of personal connection. This might lead to me being viewed as resistant to change but it is more that I want the change to be real when it does and historically this process has, for me, tended to be slow.

But then again, I always remember Alistair Maclennan (a great artist from Scotland/Northern Ireland) saying, as I remember it : Never get fetishistic about your work, sometimes make something in a day, sometimes take a year. More or less that anyway. So maybe I should follow my own teachers a bit more right now and make a leap but something in me can’t quite summon up the spring right now.

My only other thing to say is the idea that nothing gets wasted. Sometimes working on stuff, I might produce something that has no apparent reason for existing only after maybe in a month’s time for it to reconfigure itself and turn out to be integral. The thing. The most important thing.

Nothing is wasted.

This is a lesson that has given me some fortitude over the last few months.

Maybe it could work for you?