SEAS: Skegness Blog Part 5
Friday 2nd October/Saturday 3rd October
Thursday 1st October brought another superb raft of experiences in Skegness. Such an intensity of high quality artistic expression, mingled with fascinating debate on big ideas about art and its role for communities and society – indeed, whether art should have to carry the burden of having a “role” at all, beyond being “art”. I am going to publish some interviews later with key people associated with the Festival, touching on questions like that, which I think have much wider relevance than just for SEAS.
But for now, what has been going on in Skegness? Well, so much...
THE KISS AND WASTE PROJECT
A very special show was The Kiss And Waste Project at the Ex-Servicemen’s Club near the Tower, each day throughout the Festival. Norwegian artist and film-maker Anne Lise Stenseth invited women from various European countries – including Skegness – to write letters to her as if she were their mother, sister or friend. Each letter was turned into a film shot by Stenseth using different actors. The films ran simultaneously on a bank of screens in the basement of the Club.
I found myself so transfixed by one film that I could hardly pull myself away from it. ‘A Letter Home’ written by Stefana Serafina, addressed to her mother and read by a young actress in the writer’s native Bulgarian (with subtitles), is one of the most powerfully poignant and moving expositions of the complexities of exile and nostalgia for home I have ever read or seen. Serafina and Stenseth convey the weight of longing through a series of beautifully simple but telling phrases and images. Even the very act of writing a letter to an old woman with no interest in the digital age becomes a token of homage to a different epoch, a time when people made real - “heartfelt, heartspoken” - contact with each other, not through chat rooms.
The writer envisions her mother and father as she knew them as a child, “forever loving, forever forgiving”. She recalls the “exuberant scent of home”, but also the stunning impact on her parents when she followed so many of her fellow young Bulgarians in the modern era, leaving home for a “better life” in the west, in America the “secret garden” with its “forbidden fruit”.
Like others she had stayed on, to see if idealistic promises of change might yet materialise. Eventually, they realised they could not wait any longer as their parents had patiently waited: “Screw ideals! We want money”. She gives a powerful indictment of the inequality of the west, the haves and have-nots.
But she has no false illusions. There is much she loves about her new life, much to admire: “I get to live the California living. Vegan, organic, lowfat and freerange. Silicon boobs and Silicon Valley. Beauty spas, yoga retreats, and weekends in Tahoe. .. And I try to fit in.”
Californians are curious about her, in their open, friendly way: “‘From Bulgaria?’ they raise puzzled eyebrows, ‘Where was that again?’ And, ‘oh, but, honey, you barely have an accent’, they tap me on the shoulder, ‘good job!’ And I shine proudly: more American now, more like them.
“’You miss it?’ they ask? ‘What, home? Oh… do I? Not really, I’m okay now’, I say, ‘it’s been a while, you know, and, thanks for asking. This is home now’, I say and I believe it.
“But at night, Mother, when sleep looses the grip of the mind and lets it go free and far, home is where the mind returns. You are there and father, and the mulberry trees in the churchyard, and the corner bakery, fragrant from afar, and the smell of sunburned asphalt in the summer.
“What is it like,” they ask, “in Bul-garia?” And I stop, I hesitate, I search for words to tell home, I look for the this-is-what-it’s-like story. But how can I say it, Mother? How can I speak home?
“Home is where nothing is ever easy, where we have little and live large; it’s where celebration never ceases, just to prove misery wrong. Home is where voices are loud and hoarse and embraces hold strong. It is where a stranger is always welcome, fed the last piece of bread, offered the only soft bed.
“And my home, Mother? My home is all of that and more, beyond the reach of words, unmanaged by description. Home is here, where I stand: inside me, in my genes, my blood vessels, and my pores. Home is archived in my heart, in layers of being and snapshots of past time. A little storehouse I am of the DNA of my ancient people: bold-spirited, freedom-loving, centuries old.
“I am a runner for a better life, a freedom-chaser, a bird of passage. A foreigner. An immigrant. And I remind those around me, Mother, to be careful to notice my accent, to pay attention to my otherness, not to ignore my difference. That is where my home is found. Home is I. And home is you, Mother. The smell of your stew, the hand on your waist, the care in your question, the tear in your throat when I hurt, the voiceless hope that, one day, I will return....”...
‘A Letter Home’ is such a profoundly beautiful, moving and absorbing piece, I had little time to take the other films properly on board: in fact I’d hoped to go back on Friday to give some of them a longer view, but unfortunately I had to leave early to come back to Nottingham.
The Kiss And Waste Project is a hugely impressive achievement: subtle, diverse and complex in its portrayal of women’s many and varied experiences.
More of Stefana Serafina's work can be found on her blog site: http://stefanaserafina.blogspot.com/
LOCAL WORK
One of the features of SEAS in Skegness has been the involvement of local and regional work: there has apparently been a much greater engagement by local artists in Skegness than in any of the other SEAS locations around the Black and North Seas.
I took a trip out to Addlethorpe, just up from Butlins, to catch an interesting show by Malcolm Tait: In The Beginning Was The Word And The Word Was.... As you approach his studio up a rural lane out of the village, your eye is caught by an odd structure in a field alongside the house: could it be agricultural equipment, a potato harvester or something? But isn’t that a man perched on the top of it? Could it be.. yes, it is, it’s an art work.
And very impressive it is, The Quest of Alanso Quijaro in the post-modern: escape from the guardians. Like Anne Lise Stenseth, Tait draws on texts submitted by others, in this case favourite poems, songs and other forms of writing chosen by friends, posted round a square stage, where a human figure vaults on a scooter, overseen by a watch tower. Pages from Encyclopedia Britannica are strewn all around. References to The Great Escape, Don Quixote and much else abound: the post-modernism is perhaps laid on just a little too thickly. But this is an interesting and striking installation, by a significant local artist. There is more work by Malcolm Tait inside his studio.
And so, back to Skegness, seduced by siren calls from the closing session of the SeaScape conference and another evening of astonishing performances....
GLORIOUS DEATH
At 8pm, Glorious Death at the Sea View Pub. In 2007, Swedish director Dritero Kasapi came to Skegness in anticipation of SEAS, and was struck by just how many elderly retired people live in or visit the town. The result is a moving piece imaginatively constructed around the untimely death of Gloria, an enigmatic, solitary old lady who has choked on a peanut at her favourite Chinese restaurant. The actress playing Gloria sits in the bar, in front of three wide digital screens portraying the testimonies (filmed in the bar where the performance took place) of those who knew her – her sister, a young man she regularly met walking their dogs, an older man with whom she had enjoyed a passionate relationship during the last ten years of her life and the owner of the restaurant where she died.
In the bar, alongside the screens, a young Turkish counter-tenor sings beautifully in oratorio style of her life, her broken dreams and the lives she left behind. Through an intense but subtle exposition, we learn that she had chosen self-imposed exile from her homeland, to avoid her conventional family’s shame at the fact that she had a child by a Turkish man, a child her father literally tried to beat out of her.
The play deals with so many issues – exile, racism, growing old, death, loss and memory amongst them – yet is not a play about “issues” at all. The subtlety of the director’s methods is utterly extraordinary: a very moving experience. At one point, the singer breaks off in the middle of an aria to listen to what is being said on screen; for a moment, it seemed he had started at the wrong time, but it is soon clear that interaction between actor, singer and screens is a key element of the play. In other sequences, the Turkish singer takes the role of Gloria on screen as she dances with her ex-lover to their favourite song.
It transpires that the singer is her son. We hear the painful, imploring letters written to his lost mother over many years; he begs her to make contact with him, and when she fails to do so, he says that he wishes to hear nothing more from her. But that is not true: as in ‘A Letter Home’, the call of home cannot be silenced. The letters are re-discovered after her death by her lover, who has to accept that there was “someone else in her life”. Yet another enigma in the story of a lady who never truly disclosed the full range of her self to anyone.
The performance was almost stalled by an unfortunate and potentially tragic piece of irony – the first of two strange cases of unplanned audience participation during the evening! About half way through the play, a man in the bar choked on something he had swallowed and for a few moments seemed genuinely to be in danger of death. Amidst suppressed horror in the room, and while the play continued, someone stepped forward quickly and confidently and applied pressure to the poor man’s stomach, releasing the obstruction. He was able to walk falteringly out of the room, but we watched the rest of the play unsure of his fate. At the end we were assured he was fine, but the frisson of witnessing a potential tragedy while watching a play about exactly the same thing was perhaps just a bit too much like life imitating art to be comfortable.
After the play finished, I walked up to the Bollywood restaurant to join some of the Festival regulars for dinner. My companion on the walk was Dr Dragan Klaic, a Serbian academic based in Amsterdam who chaired the SeaScape sessions. In ten minutes, I was treated to the clearest, most illuminating exposition of the origins, failings and destruction of the Yugoslav republic that I am ever likely to experience. SEAS provides many such extraordinarily European moments!
BEER TOURIST
After dinner, a big crowd gathered at the Marine Boathouse Bar for a late night performance by two actors from Dutch company Wunderbaum of Beer Tourist. Beer Tourist is a worst nightmare view of the British abroad, spelt out through the interaction of two Man United fans in Odessa for a Champions League away leg. I suppressed my inner football supporter’s urge to say, ‘Why Man U? Why not Chelsea? And who do the Dutch think they are? Jealous, of course..!’, and instead squirmed at every piece of mind-blowing, depressingly accurate but very funny conversation. A brilliant show, but not for the faint hearted. The Dutch attempts at English accents were quirky – ending up more Afrikaans than Mancunian: reminiscent of some of the mock-Mancunian of Daphne’s family in Frasier. But the message was sadly clear – hilarious, but shocking in the context of a Festival which has largely celebrated the interaction of cultures around the edges of Europe.
Another bit of audience participation - amusing this time. The play was performed in the downstairs bar at the Marine Boathouse, overlooked by picture windows from the semi-open air upstairs bar where a disco was in full flight. Just as the characters topped each other with drunken boasts about what they were going to do to as many Ukrainian women as possible, a group of Skegness girls gathered at the window, transfixed. They would have joined in if they could, no doubt, and one very nearly did as she pressed her chest against the window. You couldn’t make these moments up...
What a great way to spend an evening: pan-European culture and Indian food. Midnight by now and a drink or two and a chat about art facilities in Lincoln later we made our way back to Butlins. My last involvement in SEAS as I had to leave early on Friday morning.
