Normal View Dyslexic View
Commentary
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Simon Shepherd*†
simon.shepherd@cssd.ac.uk
Abstract
This contribution is a record—apparently—of a presentation about the function and effects of dramatic performance within communities. It lurched from the Covid pandemic and the British government’s ‘levelling-up’ project back, over a century earlier, to the beginnings of the municipal and amateur theatre movements. These latter produced some of the earliest formulations of the idea that participation in performance-making enables self-expression and a sense of fellowship, thus building community. But, as Granville Barker, one of its greatest proponents, warned, this same activity, where it’s not rooted in the ‘hearts’ of people is merely a professional product, not ‘vital’. Which produces a dilemma for an author asked to take a live event, shared among participants, and substitute for it a journal article, civic, perhaps, but not necessarily vital. (This article is published in the thematic collection `The arts and humanities: rethinking value for today—views from Fellows of the British Academy’, edited by Isobel Armstrong.)
Keywords
communityGranville Barkerparticipationperformanceprofessionalself-expressionThe notes for this presentation were thrown away after it was given, so what follows is a reconstruction.
A large room with high ceiling. Twenty-five people sit around a table. Turning heads catch the light of the autumn sun.
He speaks:
During the days of the Covid pandemic it became regular, on a Thursday evening at 8 pm, to stand outside the door of one’s house and express support for the workers of the National Health Service by applauding. People in flats who didn’t have a door to the street stood on their balconies and applauded.
He stands and claps his hands together, applauding. And sits.
With a basic dramaturgy that specified time, place and activity, these were rudimentary performances. They became more obviously so when neighbours could watch each other applauding. Gradually other activities were introduced. Residents on one balcony would sing for their neighbours across the street, a sort of fifth-storey open-air concert. In front gardens whole families would appear with improvised musical instruments. Members of especially artistic households formed string quartets and played in the street. A trained dancer moved between parked cars while residents on balconies watched, and applauded. It was generally felt that, at a time of social separation and lock-down, these performances brought people together.
He stands and applauds.
In March 2022, at the first evidence meeting of the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport committee investigating the role of arts in delivering the government’s levelling-up commitment, some committee members thought that theatres might be built so that low-level people could share the privilege of accessing stage performances by stars. Specialist witnesses advised that provision of theatres, libraries and such for, so to speak, unlevel places would not necessarily produce wider participation in cultural activity. Externally imposed institutions would necessarily wobble, always half-belonging to that externality. Organic and renewable participation in cultural activity, they advised, only comes about when the residents do it for themselves. And if they have no food or broken plumbing or chronic pain they might not do it at all.
He stands and applauds.
After a considerable number of weeks the door-steps on Thursday fell silent. People continued to die from Covid. But nobody sang from balconies. Where once a string quartet played an SUV silently manoeuvred. The Health Service remained in crisis. Nurses weep.
At which point we pause for breath. It’s clear that singing on balconies, playing a string quartet or even making sounds on improvised instruments is a form of artistic practice. What is less clear is what its value is, who it benefits, what it achieves, what it understands itself to be doing. But those really, on their own, are not the questions we’re asked to answer. We’re asked what the civic value of art is. ‘Civic’ is the important word, and the most slippery one.
The early-morning autumn sun glows gently on the polished table top.
To help pin it down let’s go back to what was probably the first nationally recognised attempt to enhance the quality of people’s lives by encouraging their participation in the making of art. It began with the municipal theatre movement which emerged around 1908. Such theatres started with the formation of Playgoers’ Societies, which spawned repertory theatres. These often employed local or indeed amateur actors to play to an audience that was both knowledgeable and connected to their theatre. From here, largely after the war, there was widespread formation of amateur drama clubs in towns and villages across the country. These consciously drew increasing numbers of people into acting, producing and writing plays.
This expansion of amateur drama, through all classes, was facilitated by the British Drama League, founded in 1919. The first two of its aims were to ‘further all dramatic effort … for the improvement of the art of the theatre and not solely for commercial gain’ and ‘to organize by lectures and other means the study and practice of the drama as a way of popular recreation and self-expression’. There are a couple of key words there, the first being ‘popular’. When the playwright and theatre manager John Drinkwater spoke in 1924 at the inaugural meeting of the campaign for a municipal theatre in East Ham he said: ‘They wanted a wholesome theatre, because it was the most democratic of the arts, and the channel through which art could communicate itself to the greatest number of people.’ Municipal theatres materially articulated the town’s democratic access to and participation in art practice.
Drama was felt to be democratic in part because it enabled that other key word, ‘self-expression’. But it was mainly democratic because its mode of work necessitated negotiation and cooperation between different groups of specialists arriving at consensus to deliver their project. This view of it was most eloquently put by the greatest of 20th-century English theatre-makers, Granville Barker.
In 1916 he was commissioned to write an essay as part of an English effort to win over American support in the war. Largely ignoring the brief Barker used his essay to reflect on the role of theatre in an emerging nation. Those in America looking to the future were seeking any means to build a shared consciousness among their diverse races. One method available to them was theatre. ‘We may’, says Barker, ‘rule out a few superior efforts to improve the mind of the people through the influence of Art. Such things are never vital.’ So too he dismissed both the movies which ‘lack the directly human touch and its response’ and the ‘recognised theatres’ of New York. Instead the ‘true foundations of the new American drama’, ‘the art that shall first do its small share in creating the new America’ and which ‘shall then find its less humble reward in expressing that new America to herself’ will be found elsewhere.
One of those around the table reads:
look to the so-called Neighbourhood and Community Playhouses (again to the simplest of them, where art, if it is mentioned at all, has no capital A), unpretentious little places to which gather, their day’s work done, the butcher and baker and candlestick-maker and amuse themselves by singing and dancing, by staging and acting little plays.
He speaks:
The making of little plays, Barker believed, is self-expression by a community. Since both play-making and play watching necessarily involve shared work the process brings into being, makes present, communality.
The reader continues:
For first and last, and in general and particular, it is by this co-operation that the drama lives. Pipe we never so wisely, the souls of our hearers will not dance unless the sense of drama is living in them too. And the need for self-expression—personal, communal, national—is a need that must be filled if democracy is not to be a byword for the fooling of the people, if the voice of the people is to be anything more than a parrot-cry. Now in the theatre, that common meeting-house of sex and class and creed, where an epitome of our world gathers for an hour or two to recognise some epitome of our life—in that social solvent that the theatre at its best can be, there is to be found, if we will, some fulfilment of that need.
He speaks:
Given Barker’s view of the benefits of drama it is no surprise that he was an early champion of the municipal theatre movement. Welcoming the new Playgoers’ Club in Manchester in October 1908, he said that the formation of such societies was
Another around the table reads:
a very interesting and hopeful thing, because it meant that the theatre was ceasing to be a mere professional preserve. There could be nothing more dangerous to an art of any sort than that it should remain a cult of mere professionalism—something not rooted in the hearts of the people.
The late afternoon sun catches her paper as she folds it away.
He speaks:
Now arguably, where ‘civic’ denotes the whole public life of the town, theatres that are a professional preserve are rather valuable in that they draw in audiences, help to support related hospitality businesses and provide employment. By ruthlessly programming whatever sells, they ensure an income stream that usually keeps them alive a lot longer than anything more experimental. But their mode of work, and what they perform, were—or are—in Barker’s terms not ‘vital’. Like perhaps the libraries and theatres built in order to level up, commercial theatres were not rooted in the hearts of people, not, we might say, enabling them to be participatory civic beings, indeed citizens. It’s the same basic artform, apparently, but what we might call the professional civic is not the civic heart.
He stands and applauds.
But, because the artform is apparently the same, slippage is easy between one pole of the binary and the other. Take the discussion at the Village Clubs Association in March 1924. The meeting was concerned about the exodus of labourers from villages. Penelope Wheeler, speaking on behalf of the British Drama League, suggested that drama can help prevent this by ‘encouraging self-expression and developing a sense of fellowship and corporate life’. Participation in the fellowship of a drama group can give someone a reason for remaining in a village, thereby satisfying perceived local needs. And in turn served official policy imperatives for the rural economy.
More conspicuously useful to officials was the use made of Wheeler’s own drama group. During the war she had famously established a repertory theatre in Le Havre working with soldiers. Immediately after the war soldiers in the Harfleur Valley rioted over food shortages. Wheeler’s company was sent to go and perform a play, to use their participatory art to calm what we might think was justifiable anger. One pole of the binary slides into its opposite.
Which brings us back to the image of people performing applause on their door-steps. One of them lived at an address in Downing Street, Prime Minister Boris Johnson. He was supposedly in charge of the arrangements which might prevent the spread of deaths during the pandemic. But it seemed he didn’t really know what he was doing. Nonetheless, with commendable punctuality, every Thursday the man who became known as Bobo the Clown stood and applauded.
He stands and applauds.
Bobo’s clapping gestured towards his participation in a shared national response to crisis. And thus becomes difficult to separate from those people on smaller doorsteps or balconies. Because whether it was self-expression—or indeed a simulacrum of self-expression—it didn’t demonstrably have the democratic purpose of the BDL nor a sense of how to progress beyond what it was doing. Art, with or without its capital, has to be compelled to come clean, to ensure that it’s actually communal, vital, democratic, even—what shall we say—civil.
It is no accident that the notes for this presentation were thrown away. They aimed to provoke questions rather than supply answers, to have their fulfilment in discussion. Thus they sought to script an event which felt, in a very small degree, like shared thinking, and valuable because shared, taking pleasure in each new articulation around the table. It follows from all this that the event cannot properly be recuperated in a single-authored printed text. And what’s written here is an unreliable account, some of it clearly fictional. The act of throwing the notes away intends to mark a separation between the event involving other people and a printed object. That printed object sets off on a trajectory of its own and might acquire value, of some dubious sort, in its own right. The event lives on in the memories, if not hearts, of the people who were there. These notes as they stand form part of what we might call professionalised product. One way in which you, the reader, can insist on the primacy of the vital event over the incomplete and ephemeral record is to carry out the instruction at the top and bottom of these notes.
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Acknowledgements
The thumbnail image that accompanies this article is by Cottonbro Studio on Pexels.
Cite
DOI: 10.5871/jba/012.a33
Published on: 19 September 2024
Volume: 12
Issue: Issue 3
Article view count: 86
Article download count: 4
Copyright statement
© The author(s) 2024. This is an open access article licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International LicenseCite this article
Shepherd, S. (2024), ‘Tear here’, Journal of the British Academy, 12(3): a33 https://doi.org/10.5871/jba/012.a33Crossref
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Received
October 2022
Accepted
May 2023
Published
July 2023
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