Dangerous Conversations

During my professional development process, one of the things I have identified as being an area of fear is my voice. Having worked in education and participation for ten years, I am used to facilitating dialogue, running workshops and standing in front of a room of people and presenting, but most often the aim of these activities is to support other people’s creativity.  At Cubitt, much of my work was about training and supporting artists to build their confidence in education and community settings, communicating with partners and funders, and working directly with people of all ages to support skills-based learning in the visual arts.

I have become aware that my presentation skills are good, and that I am able to present a coherent vision for the programme and to engage and enthuse people.  However, over time I have felt that my own distinctive voice as an individual was perhaps a little lost within the process of building a programme and supporting others.  I was less able to be vulnerable, show emotion, or communicate other narratives and personal experiences: I was becoming a professional educator and losing the artist.

As part of this an-supported professional development programme I initially planned to work in a semi-analytical way, exploring the idea of voice and autobiography with other creative professionals, but after a few months I realised that what I needed was practical support: I wanted to learn skills.

So I decided to go for singing lessons.  I found an experienced singing teacher, and took the plunge.  I never do kareoke, and haven’t sung since I was in school assemblies and so the first session was nerve-wracking: I was beginning to release my singing voice after years of non-use.

My voice sounded awful: cracked, breathless, out of tune, but the teacher was incredibly supportive, and offered great advice around breathing and posture and technique.  Alot of this technique is about providing a structure so that the voice can be released: the back is straight, shoulders relaxed, head lifted and breathing from the belly.  All of this opens the vocal chords to allow the air to move freely, opening up the sound.

I took the lessons weekly for a short time, and began learning to sing ‘Hallelujah’ (the Jeff Buckley version).  After a little while I felt like I had got stuck: I recorded myself singing and it sounded weak and unconvincing.  After a bout of negativity, thinking that I basically have an awful singing voice, I realised that the biggest problem was that I was getting in my own way.  I was restricting my own voice, I was holding back: afraid of how I might sound.  So, instead I tried to let go, to give my voice full volume, without straining, not trying to sound good, or emotional, or expressive, but to let my voice free.

The only way of doing this was with the structured techniques offered by my teacher: the posture, the breathing techniques, but once I had got to grips with those, something began to happen and my voice became much more powerful, much stronger, much fuller.  It certainly didn’t sound ‘good’, but I didn’t care: I knew that before I could work on any kind of polish or quality I needed to find this place where my voice was released: that was the path to follow.

This insight has taught me an interesting and worthwhile lesson: that what we might call self-expression, which is also perhaps about a channeling of creative energy, doesn’t simply come by enthusiastically ‘expressing’ oneself.  In order to channel that energy (in this case, literally channelling the flow of air) structure and support are required.  There is a continual balance between structure and freedom: a kind of dance between the two.

When I devised my professional development activities for this year, I wanted to focus on areas that I had been fearful of or not had the chance to explore before.

One of the things I’ve become increasingly aware of in my practice is the times in which my own subjectivity, personal history, and voice are implicated within the work as it is publicly presented.  As I have been working extensively in education, participation and socially engaged practice, my focus has often been on the creativity of others: supporting others to find and explore their voices.

At the beginning of this year, leaving my role in education at Cubitt, I wanted to return to my own practice fully.  And from the outset I knew I needed to re-find my ‘voice’, my place within the practice.  This isn’t about personal expression, but more about how and when my subjectivity and position is directly implicated, publicly.

Writing about, or from myself, was an area that I had identified as important.  When I was a child and young teenager, I wanted to be a published writer.  This was one of my most important dreams.  I wanted to write books that would be published and other people would read, and I wrote alot of fiction: most of it nobody ever read.

I decided to return to this area and attended two writing courses as part of my professional development programme.  The first was with Marina Warner, a brilliant folklorist and mythographer and author of feminist re-readings of traditional folktales.  I spent a week in a tiny thatched hut, in the grounds of Dartington Hall, in Devon, with a group of other keen writers.  We wrote together and read out our short extracts to one another.  I felt like I was back at college again, learning something fresh and new.

One of the exercises that Marina set was for us to write about an object that we considered to be personal or special.  An object that had a ‘talismanic’ quality for us.  I really struggled to think of anything- I don’t have any jewellery, or rings, or any clothes that are particularly special.  I don’t really have any family heirlooms, or antiques.  In the end I chose to write about a pen, not a particularly special pen, but the pen that I was writing with.  I began a strange tale about how the pen begins speaking and leads the person writing on a journey.

When it came to reading out our work, most of the others in the group had written something very personal, and in some cases quite striking and moving.  My reading came out very flat and uninteresting in comparison.

The exercise was very useful for me.  It helped me to reflect on the role that creativity- both writing and art practice, play in my life and sense of self.  I realised that I chose a pen, not because it would reveal something about myself, but because it could help conceal me, it is a tool to weave a web, a story, a fictional realm.  I could hide behind the pen, because the pen was telling the story, not me.

I don’t think that this is a problem in itself: I don’t necessarily believe that making art provides an authentic insight into our ‘selves’ because those selves are continually being produced.  But sometimes perhaps we need to be willing to show our hearts, to offer our vulnerability, in order to connect with others, and to create something worthwhile.

As part of Dangerous Conversations, a process of exploring my practice as an artist through the themes of risk, fear, and change, I attended a series of workshops with Florence Peake the brilliant dancer, choreographer, visual artist and teacher, at Space Studios.

Over a period of four weeks we explored the body, the voice and sound, collaboration and solo improvisation.

Despite having worked with lots of dancers through Unknown Empires, I hadn’t worked performatively with my own body since I was a teenager.  I have been drawn to dance over the past few years, particularly through the work of choreographers like Deborah Hay, Trisha Brown, Hofesh Shechter, and the collaborations between Merce Cunningham and John Cage, and so I wanted to continue this exploration of fear and risk through my own body.

The first session was focused on improvisatory movement: gradually building up free movement by shifting the focus from one part of the body to another- the upper torso, the head, the pelvis and legs.  Florence led the group very gently and step-by-step in an atmosphere of openness and warmth that encouraged risk-taking.  After an hour and a half I found that my movements were becoming incredibly loose, and my body itself was taking the lead: I didn’t have to think so much, and in fact, the more I thought about what I was doing, the harder it became.  There was a kind of possessive quality to the experience, as if I was beginning to plug into or release an energy and my role was to channel it, or to let it flow freely with as little constriction or conscious interruption as possible.

This session, and the others that followed it, helped me to begin thinking about the role of body-knowledge in the production of my creative work.  For so long I have been conceptually driven in my approach to making work, and it’s very easy to stay on a rational-linguistic level and forget other kinds of knowledge that are within our experience.  I wondered what extraordinary stories my body has to tell me?

Image: still from Violin Fase, Eric Pauwels film of Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker dancing to music by Steve Reich (as seen at CGP London)

Earlier this year I went on a week-long retreat as part of the process of exploring fear and risk within my practice as an artist.  I stayed in a small wooden hut in Epping Forest.  It had running water but no bathroom (an outdoor bath that could be filled from the kettle) and an outdoor composting toilet.

The journey there was a two-hour cycle from my home, laiden with enough food and supplies to last the week.  The hut is in a forgotten corner of Epping Forest, just inside the M25.  It is a public woodland but there are no car parks, pubs or popular walking routes, and so it’s very off the beaten track.

I wanted to take away all of the things that surround us every day- the comforting sound of the radio or music, distractions of the internet, and the pressure of projects and emails.

I decided to spend a week in the hut with no expectations of any creative outcome from the time, and no specific projects to work on.  I would be allowed to write, draw, make sound recordings and take photographs, and otherwise I would have no access to the internet, TV, phone, music or books.

It was a transformative week.  The woods all around were full of fallow deer. They must have been descendents of the fallow deer that were kept in Epping Forest when it was a royal hunting forest.  But they had proliferated without any other predators and barely any human interaction.  Walking through the woods, at every turn there would be deer, startled at my approach.  And at times I saw them all together, a herd of maybe a hundred deer or more, grazing in the fields.

As I walked in the woods every day I noticed that the deer spend alot of their time in the woods, hidden beneath the trees.  The best grasses and greenery to eat are in the fields, but out in the fields they are exposed.  They will cross this edge, between the wood and the field, nervously and cautiously, and in a herd for the protection of numbers.

I wondered about this nervous crossing from the familiar, hidden spaces of the woods, into the open, into dangerous territory.  Just spending time observing the deer gave me insights into my own fears.  How sometimes the blank page or the empty stage can feel like an open field.