Last week I was invited to judge the poetry collections for the Koestler Trust Poetry Awards. These collections of at least ten poems are all written by people aged 18 and over who are serving a prison sentence, or a prolonged stay in a high security hospital.
It’s an absorbing and rewarding task and I feel privileged to read the work and gain an insight into lives very different from my own. There are familiar themes – much about life in prison, the hopelessness of it all, the sense of futility – sometimes written with a victim mentality, sometimes full of remorse for past crimes. Then there are the love poems, mostly written by men idealising their wives and girlfriends and tormented by a sense of loss, loneliness and jealousy. Often written very simplistically and with forced rhymes these poems sometimes make heartrending reading. But when the writer looks beyond his or her grim situation there are moments of sheer genius quite unlike anything I’ve come across before. In the case of poetry written by Offenders, good work doesn’t seem to emerge when the poets write what they know as is so often advised for novice writers, but when they write what they imagine. In the sheer monotony of prison life the imagination fires brilliantly and the best poems, even in their naivety, are full of character, pathos, humour, eccentricity and wisdom. I sat in a room without my fellow judges, surrounded by files of poetry, with the sun streaming through the window and a view of Wormwood Scrubs outside, and felt moved both by the work, and the lives of these writers behind bars to whom poetry can give such hope. The 2013 exhibition of visual art, poetry and music opens on 24th September at Festival Hall. I recommend it.
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Today I walked and thought about a conversation I had with my cousin about how uplifting really good writing can be, even when the subject matter is bleak. We were discussing the book I’ve just finished reading, ‘The Heart is a Lonely Hunter’ by Carson McCullers. It’s amongst the books that have moved me
most, with a set of the strangest characters, almost Grotesques, so vividly created I feel as if I know them – oddly appealing and sympathetic. Essentially the novel is, for me, about loneliness and longing – absence of love or absence of the loved one. It centres around Singer, a deaf mute, and four lonely individuals – a young girl who’s passionate about music, a negro doctor, an itinerant drunk, and the owner of an all- night cafe. All of them are attracted to Singer, visit him separately and tell him things they’ve never shared with anyone else. In his silence they read the answers they want to hear, and create him into a kind of wise being, a saviour. Meanwhile Singer loves someone else entirely, the oddest choice, who is equally lost to him. There’s that essence of loneliness we see depicted in Edward Hopper’s paintings, and more particularly in Pina Bausch’s dance work, Cafe Muller – choreographed so many years later in 1978. Cafe Muller is likewise set in a cafe full of bizarre sad characters, all of them lost, lonely, sad – trapped in dreams of their own creation. The work is equally beautiful and strange despite its bleakness. Is it something about the oblique look at humanity that creates a depth to these works that’s both memorable and uplifting? There is much about movement and gesture in Carson McCullor’s writing that reflects the wonderful observation in Bausch’s choreography - somehow capturing nuance of character and emotion; gesture that seems true to character and speaks volumes about the darker side of human nature, and the longing for transcendence or redemption. Last week our Flamenco teacher announced that he’d no longer be teaching us from the end of June. We’ve worked with him for over a year and it’s been a wonderful experience - rigorous, insightful, great fun, and a privilege we’ve all valued hugely.
He arrived in Derbyshire in September 2011 without knowing a word of English, and ended up staying through two of the worst winters in years, and making a living teaching dance all over the county –and seems to be staying for the foreseeable future. We all sympathised with the fact that he felt burnt out, struggling with too many classes, a new language and endless snow. It was understandable that he needed a break, but nevertheless we were all upset. Yesterday we heard that he’d relented – at least for now. He hadn’t realised how much we all liked his class! In the pub we found ourselves talking about what it was exactly that we’d miss without our weekly Flamenco. Several things; the opportunity to learn from someone who’s grown up with it, lived and breathed it all his life; he’s beautiful to watch as he dances; we’ve all worked hard and achieved a lot over the months, and he’s an excellent teacher. For at least two of us there was something else – the discipline of his approach. Here we are – a small group of middle aged women ranging from those trained in dance to those with very little dance experience. But every week we are treated as if we are dancers, not just a group of women coming out to have a fun Flamenco class. In that hour and a half we work with discipline, attention to detail, and rigour. We are expected to take and apply corrections and act professionally. It’s this that I love and value so much. It doesn’t matter that I have no hope of achieving a professional standard - the teaching is professional in every way, the demands the same, and that gives me a huge sense of something accomplished. There’s a commitment to the form. I’ve discovered that it’s rare to find amongst teachers of many dance classes I’ve attended. We also talked about how hard it is for our teacher as a professional dancer, finding himself far away from his culture and his equals in Flamenco. As a dancer he feels he’s expected to devote his whole life to his discipline – how impossible that is in rural Derbyshire. Should he then give up rather than compromise? I can appreciate that point of view, but at the same time I’m irritated. If I can’t become a monk should I stop praying altogether! The luxury to devote life to art is a privilege bestowed on very few people. Does it have to be all or nothing? What feels vital and essential is that for a short time every week we can devote ourselves to Flamenco - we can work with rigour and discipline and taste something of that world. There is always more to learn and to accomplish, for everyone, in any form. Back in the seventies I was one of the first teenagers to take an ‘o’ level in ballet. There were only three of us and we were the first Hammond School girls to sit the exam. Every Saturday afternoon we’d arrive for our
history lesson, taught by one of the senior students who must have been all of eighteen years old. Sitting on an old sofa behind the studio, with our notebooks on our laps, we wrote pages of notes on the history of ballet from Sun King to Swan Queen. There were many lurid stories of quarrelling ballerinas, jealousies, love affairs and fatal accidents – but the most memorable must surely be the opening night of The Rite of Spring in the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées Paris 1913, a hundred years ago last week. We fourteen year olds tried to imagine the elegant Parisians enraged both by Stravinsky’s music and Nijinsky’s choreography -shouting, stamping, whistling – and the fighting that broke out between two opposing factions of the audience, creating such mayhem that Nijinsky had to shout instructions from the wings to the beleaguered dancers who could no longer hear Stravinsky’s impossibly difficult music. Sixty years on we couldn’t find anything in the music with its haunting melodies and powerful rhythms that might provoke such a riot, nor could we really understand how choreography could shock just because it deviated from traditional ballet. It was just a great story, an example we believed, of how dangerous art can be, and that’s how I always remembered it. It was only years later on reading ‘Natasha’s Dance – a Cultural History of Russia’ by the historian Orlando Figes, that I recalled we’d also learnt how Diaghilev - ever the showman - actually manipulated the audience response in order to gain publicity for the Ballet Russe. The audience had been primed to expect something truly shocking, and the polarisation of opinion about this new work was welcomed by the great impresario. And what of the audience – what did they really make of it all? What did they fear it would bring about? If they could speak a hundred years on what would they remember of that infamous night? What would stand out as important? Little over a year before the outbreak of World War 1, it must have been fun to express moral outrage about something as relatively insignificant as a work of choreography. The Rite of Spring certainly revolutionised music and ballet– but is art dangerous? I was once convinced that society could be changed for the better through the arts, and I spent several years working in arts and health to this end. Experience has cured me of such idealism. On the brink of Hitler’s rise to power, choreographer Kurt Jooss was well aware that his much acclaimed ballet The Green Table wasn’t actually going to prevent a war despite the bleak picture it portrayed. But this doesn’t detract from The Green Table’s powerful ability to reflect the human condition and the state of the world at the time, as well as its sense of prophecy. Dictators are dangerous, not artists. |
AuthorTricia Durdey dances, writes, and teaches Pilates. Archives
October 2017
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