Stonehenge rocks at summer solstice
25th June 2011
As we climb the hill we join others moving in the same direction and soon we are at the edge of the crowd. We press on, working our way into the throng. The night is filled with laughter and the beat of jungle drums, the scene lit by camera flashes and blue arc lights.
We force our way to one of the stones. Nick finds an opening and eases himself to the ground, sitting with his back to the rock. I squeeze in beside him while Sylvia and Jeanie move further away across the grass.
At my back the stone is dry and warm, covered with tufts of scaly moss and a mosaic of lichen. A spider legs it up a thread of web and scrabbles into a crevice. Clouds boil overhead but the night is dry and warm.
Around five thousand years ago a group of people stood where I am sitting and hoisted this stone, hewn from a quarry in Wales more than 200 kilometres away, into the position it has remained ever since. It is massive, as tall as a house, as broad as a flat deck trailer. Is is just one of dozens forming a rough circle, some constructed as arches with equally massive cap stones, some standing alone, others lying where the arches have collapsed or where they were placed at the dawn of history.
I heard about people gathering at Stonehenge to celebrate the summer solstice so we have come to join the crowd and watch the sun rise on the longest day of the year.
I hoped to witness pagan rituals led by druids with long flowing beards and robes decorated with Celtic runes, to see near-naked women writhing in ecstatic trances to the haunting music of a panpipe, their bodies smeared with ashes or painted in fantastical designs. I wanted mist and mysticism.
Instead we finds ourselves at a rave. It's as if there was a text frenzy to every young person across southern England – prty @ s'henge! They've arrived with beer and groundsheets and camera phones and they are partying hard. The centre of the stone circle is a heaving mosh pit of drumming, dancing, shouting humanity. Periodically a wave of energy rises like a bubble of gas in a lava pool and bursts across the crowd in a cheer that rolls down the hillside.
The mood is festive, the drunks amiable and the police, dressed de rigeur in top-to-toe high viz, have little to do but fend off banter and tend the inebriated.
Near us a man with a Liverpool accent stands beside one of the stone arches like a night club tout. He welcomes each person who walks through the arch with a hug and some scouse wit.
“Come on, luv. Dis is de way in.”
“The way in to what?”
“To me f... house! Ha, ha!”
A woman dodges his embrace and he turns to us.
“Aagh, some people jus' don't get it. Ha, ha! Happy solstice!”
I wander off to watch a young man juggling with fire sticks. Jeanie, Sylvia's sister, is attracting attention. She wears a long calico shift on which she has painted a full length voluptuous nude woman, complete with nipple ring. She poses for photographs with young men and joins a group of dancers who cheer her contortions.
The first grey flecks of dawn appear. At the edge of the crowd a small group of bearded and costumed characters are chanting. They are more Dumbledore than druid and, warming to the crowd, break off chanting to lecture us on the British government's discrimination against pagans.
The dawn climbs up but at sunrise's appointed time the horizon is just a grey smear. A young man solemnly kneels and bows to the east. He leans forward slowly and vomits on the grass.
The sound of drums continues to swirl but we join the crowds wending across the grey fields. Looking back I see Stonehenge unmoved among thousands of tired bodies and a sea of flattened beer cans, plastic bags and burger wrappings, our offering to the gods of mid-summer.
Thursday, June 23, 2011
Gypsies at the margin of English life
14th May 2011
In a trailer park on the edge of Exeter I meet Kenny; small, sly, seven years old. He has a permanent squint that our grandparents may have called a 'wall eye', and half a dozen very white elongated teeth that protrude at odd angles from his mouth. Kenny offers to show me his most prized possession, a slow-worm – a kind of small grass snake. “I got 'im down the back,” is the limit of his response to my questions. He grins and sidles away to where his big sister is talking with Liz, the lady from the Education Department.
Kenny is a gypsy, which is to say he falls within the category known in England as Travellers, only he doesn't travel. This trailer park of about 15 sites lies in an industrial park within the rumble of the M5 motorway. It is an official gypsy campsite provided by the Devon County Council and most of the residents have been here since the 1960s. They have fenced their sites, laid out small gardens with outdoor furniture, sheds and garden gnomes. There is a children's playground and a car park.
Gypsies have lived in Great Britain for 500 years - a proud, independent and wilfully marginalised community. For much of their history they were the caravanning fortune tellers and tinkers, the field labourers and horse breeders of these islands. Their dark skin and decoration made them slightly exotic and, therefore, not to be trusted.
In the past 50 years the network of traditional camp sites has been swallowed up by expanding towns or buried beneath motorways. Seasonal labour that sustained a traveling life has dried up or gone to new subclasses of Poles, Bulgarians and Chinese. Many gypsies, like Kenny's family, have been corralled into Council sites on the urban fringes. Others have bought small plots of rural land and retreated to them, sparring with local authorities for planning permission to erect buildings and instal services. Others remain obdurately itinerant, parking illegally on strips of private land or public byways, in a constant round of evictions and community malice.
But even when settled gypsies remain marginalised. Like Jews in the ghettoes of Russia and Poland they draw their culture and traditions tightly around them like a coat, a shield. They remain almost invisible to mainstream society.
Invisible also to the education system. Liz, from the Devon Traveller Education Service, has played a 20 year game of cat and mouse with gypsy families; coaxing, couching and corralling them into a way of learning – and a way of life – they recoil from. In every one of the 5 or 6 campsites we have visited today we have met school-age children. All the families know Liz and accept her with varying degrees of warmth. Me they regard with outright suspicion. At every site they trot out well-rehearsed reasons for their children's truancy; “his shoes got wet,” “we been at the doctor's,” or, the clincher, “we been travelling.”
Liz's job is not helped by the reluctance of many schools to accept gypsy children. In New Zealand a school cannot refuse entry to any child within its catchment area. In England schools work to maximum rolls and can reasonably claim to be full when new children turn up. Sadly, many schools are 'full' to gypsy children but not to others.
Their unenthusiasm for gypsies is not just prejudice. Gypsy students have high absentee rates. Schools in England have strict attendance targets which a failure to meet brings down the wrath of government inspectors and a thrashing in the local press. One secondary school principal who wants to do well for gypsies says he restricts his efforts to include them because he can't afford his school to become a magnet for high needs and low performing students.
Liz believes the situation is improving. Younger parents are beginning to value education as the way forward for their children. A few gypsy students are completing secondary education and a handful progress to university. Most however remain like Kenny, with wet shoes, a crooked smile and a slow-worm.
14th May 2011
In a trailer park on the edge of Exeter I meet Kenny; small, sly, seven years old. He has a permanent squint that our grandparents may have called a 'wall eye', and half a dozen very white elongated teeth that protrude at odd angles from his mouth. Kenny offers to show me his most prized possession, a slow-worm – a kind of small grass snake. “I got 'im down the back,” is the limit of his response to my questions. He grins and sidles away to where his big sister is talking with Liz, the lady from the Education Department.
Kenny is a gypsy, which is to say he falls within the category known in England as Travellers, only he doesn't travel. This trailer park of about 15 sites lies in an industrial park within the rumble of the M5 motorway. It is an official gypsy campsite provided by the Devon County Council and most of the residents have been here since the 1960s. They have fenced their sites, laid out small gardens with outdoor furniture, sheds and garden gnomes. There is a children's playground and a car park.
Gypsies have lived in Great Britain for 500 years - a proud, independent and wilfully marginalised community. For much of their history they were the caravanning fortune tellers and tinkers, the field labourers and horse breeders of these islands. Their dark skin and decoration made them slightly exotic and, therefore, not to be trusted.
In the past 50 years the network of traditional camp sites has been swallowed up by expanding towns or buried beneath motorways. Seasonal labour that sustained a traveling life has dried up or gone to new subclasses of Poles, Bulgarians and Chinese. Many gypsies, like Kenny's family, have been corralled into Council sites on the urban fringes. Others have bought small plots of rural land and retreated to them, sparring with local authorities for planning permission to erect buildings and instal services. Others remain obdurately itinerant, parking illegally on strips of private land or public byways, in a constant round of evictions and community malice.
But even when settled gypsies remain marginalised. Like Jews in the ghettoes of Russia and Poland they draw their culture and traditions tightly around them like a coat, a shield. They remain almost invisible to mainstream society.
Invisible also to the education system. Liz, from the Devon Traveller Education Service, has played a 20 year game of cat and mouse with gypsy families; coaxing, couching and corralling them into a way of learning – and a way of life – they recoil from. In every one of the 5 or 6 campsites we have visited today we have met school-age children. All the families know Liz and accept her with varying degrees of warmth. Me they regard with outright suspicion. At every site they trot out well-rehearsed reasons for their children's truancy; “his shoes got wet,” “we been at the doctor's,” or, the clincher, “we been travelling.”
Liz's job is not helped by the reluctance of many schools to accept gypsy children. In New Zealand a school cannot refuse entry to any child within its catchment area. In England schools work to maximum rolls and can reasonably claim to be full when new children turn up. Sadly, many schools are 'full' to gypsy children but not to others.
Their unenthusiasm for gypsies is not just prejudice. Gypsy students have high absentee rates. Schools in England have strict attendance targets which a failure to meet brings down the wrath of government inspectors and a thrashing in the local press. One secondary school principal who wants to do well for gypsies says he restricts his efforts to include them because he can't afford his school to become a magnet for high needs and low performing students.
Liz believes the situation is improving. Younger parents are beginning to value education as the way forward for their children. A few gypsy students are completing secondary education and a handful progress to university. Most however remain like Kenny, with wet shoes, a crooked smile and a slow-worm.
From yawn to outrage in London's theatre world
11th June 2011
Sadler's Wells, 'London's dance house', is the scene of this summer's most controversial show as twenty men, stark bollocking naked apart from flowing blond wigs, cavort across the laps and in the faces of a startled audience. It is a scene from a dance cutely titled A Little Tenderness, For Crying Out Loud! except the title is in French and the company is Canadian.
One reviewer described a tug of war as a naked dancer tried to wrest notebook and pen from his grasp. When that failed the dancer calmly removed the reviewer's glasses, gobbed a hefty mouthful of phlegm onto them and handed them back with a sneer. This reviewer considered he'd escaped lightly; less fortunate patrons were exposed to sustained assaults of close-range willie-wobbling and backside-baring.
The show caused an outrage on Twitter and business is booming. But it raises two questions. One: is this art? Two: don't theatres have rules about climbing on the furniture?
Defining art in London is as complex as the city's Underground system. Nowhere is it more obvious that art in the modern world serves two masters – aesthetic and financial. The city's artistic community strains for large 'C' creativity. Every actor, painter and dancer sheltering within these walls, every hobbledehoy with an ounce of wit, has only one desire – to become the Next Big Thing, to create the Next Big Movement, to establish the Next Big Brand.
But in London art is always – always – tempered in the crucible of hard cash. Art is an industry: the theatres, galleries and concert halls are the draw cards for millions of tourists and millions of pounds of investment so, at the end of the day, art must make a profit.
The force that mediates creativity and profit is risk. A few days ago the new director of the Institute of Contemporary Art was interviewed on BBC Radio 4. The ICA, at one time the most avant garde space in the galaxy and launching pad for Damien Hirst, Yoko Ono and the Pop Art movement, is on the ropes. The director was asked how he intended to revive the ICA's fortunes in a crowded market place. “We are going to take more risks,” he replied.
What he didn't specify was who will take the risks. Is it the artists, the investors or the audience, like the unsuspecting punters who went to see a nice evening of dance at Sadler's Wells?
In London's art world taking risks appears to be more about crossing boundaries of taste than about exploring new creative directions. Shock, sensation and outrage are invited, not as preliminaries to serious artistic debate (although that does happen, usually in the form of commentators lobbing opinions from fixed positions) but to attract the headlines and cyber-buzz that will secure the balance sheet.
For all that, the bulk of London's artistic output is determined by money-men and, like investors everywhere, they tend to stick with the familiar. West End theatres offer a conservative diet of musicals, drama and comedy. Old favourites are dusted off and given a fresh coat of paint; new shows follow the same undemanding formula. The big drawcard in the West End this summer is a centenary revival of the plays of Terence Rattigan – whose work had long ago fallen by the wayside, where it should have remained.
The major concert halls, opera houses and galleries follow the same pattern. Here are Mozart, Verdi and the Impressionists to delight the conservative and the novice, whose trip to London would be incomplete without taking in a 'show.'
Happily, between yawn and outrage there is a fertile strip of creative soil in London's art world, and after watching a ho hum production of The Cherry Orchard at The National Theatre recently Sylvia and I set out to find it.
On successive evenings we stumbled upon an Irish smorgasbord of family conmanship and, in a little walk-up theatre in Soho, a peculiar exploration of youthful awakening by four actor/musician ingenues. Neither show was flawless; both over-reached and under-performed, but we were inspired to debate their merits and messages all the way back to our hotel.
It is likely the creators of these shows see them as merely a springboard to bigger things. But if they are hoping to make the shift from Soho to Shaftesbury Avenue they should be prepared to become either more sensational or to be rubbed smooth to fit a low-risk commercial mould.
11th June 2011
Sadler's Wells, 'London's dance house', is the scene of this summer's most controversial show as twenty men, stark bollocking naked apart from flowing blond wigs, cavort across the laps and in the faces of a startled audience. It is a scene from a dance cutely titled A Little Tenderness, For Crying Out Loud! except the title is in French and the company is Canadian.
One reviewer described a tug of war as a naked dancer tried to wrest notebook and pen from his grasp. When that failed the dancer calmly removed the reviewer's glasses, gobbed a hefty mouthful of phlegm onto them and handed them back with a sneer. This reviewer considered he'd escaped lightly; less fortunate patrons were exposed to sustained assaults of close-range willie-wobbling and backside-baring.
The show caused an outrage on Twitter and business is booming. But it raises two questions. One: is this art? Two: don't theatres have rules about climbing on the furniture?
Defining art in London is as complex as the city's Underground system. Nowhere is it more obvious that art in the modern world serves two masters – aesthetic and financial. The city's artistic community strains for large 'C' creativity. Every actor, painter and dancer sheltering within these walls, every hobbledehoy with an ounce of wit, has only one desire – to become the Next Big Thing, to create the Next Big Movement, to establish the Next Big Brand.
But in London art is always – always – tempered in the crucible of hard cash. Art is an industry: the theatres, galleries and concert halls are the draw cards for millions of tourists and millions of pounds of investment so, at the end of the day, art must make a profit.
The force that mediates creativity and profit is risk. A few days ago the new director of the Institute of Contemporary Art was interviewed on BBC Radio 4. The ICA, at one time the most avant garde space in the galaxy and launching pad for Damien Hirst, Yoko Ono and the Pop Art movement, is on the ropes. The director was asked how he intended to revive the ICA's fortunes in a crowded market place. “We are going to take more risks,” he replied.
What he didn't specify was who will take the risks. Is it the artists, the investors or the audience, like the unsuspecting punters who went to see a nice evening of dance at Sadler's Wells?
In London's art world taking risks appears to be more about crossing boundaries of taste than about exploring new creative directions. Shock, sensation and outrage are invited, not as preliminaries to serious artistic debate (although that does happen, usually in the form of commentators lobbing opinions from fixed positions) but to attract the headlines and cyber-buzz that will secure the balance sheet.
For all that, the bulk of London's artistic output is determined by money-men and, like investors everywhere, they tend to stick with the familiar. West End theatres offer a conservative diet of musicals, drama and comedy. Old favourites are dusted off and given a fresh coat of paint; new shows follow the same undemanding formula. The big drawcard in the West End this summer is a centenary revival of the plays of Terence Rattigan – whose work had long ago fallen by the wayside, where it should have remained.
The major concert halls, opera houses and galleries follow the same pattern. Here are Mozart, Verdi and the Impressionists to delight the conservative and the novice, whose trip to London would be incomplete without taking in a 'show.'
Happily, between yawn and outrage there is a fertile strip of creative soil in London's art world, and after watching a ho hum production of The Cherry Orchard at The National Theatre recently Sylvia and I set out to find it.
On successive evenings we stumbled upon an Irish smorgasbord of family conmanship and, in a little walk-up theatre in Soho, a peculiar exploration of youthful awakening by four actor/musician ingenues. Neither show was flawless; both over-reached and under-performed, but we were inspired to debate their merits and messages all the way back to our hotel.
It is likely the creators of these shows see them as merely a springboard to bigger things. But if they are hoping to make the shift from Soho to Shaftesbury Avenue they should be prepared to become either more sensational or to be rubbed smooth to fit a low-risk commercial mould.
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