Review: 'River Runs' at The Customs House, South Shields, 29th January 2013

It’s hard not to be taken under the spell of the river Tyne. River Runs, a celebration of the ‘big river’ in song and spoken word, certainly makes you think so.

Performed in the main auditorium at The Customs House in South Shields, a venue which, I must admit, I had my doubts about (more because of its size than anything else), the 8 performers managed the impressive feat of playing to a largely empty auditorium and drawing the focus to the front of the room so that it felt like a cosy gig in the back room of The Steamboat.*

In narrative terms, River Runs is a song and verse line for the journey of the river Tyne. From its source in the hills and valleys of Northumberland and the Borders, to its confluence (the rivers North and South Tyne meet near Hexham) and subsequent journey through various towns til it spills out into the North Sea, this show is concerned with what the river gives and what the river leaves behind.

Personal narratives overlap with common histories; tragedy overlays euphoria. How this translates into a stage show is masterful in its simplicity. The 8 performers seem to conjure the river, picking at it for stories, for anecdotes, for truths about life. Kate Fox tells us about training for the Great North Run down at Newcastle Quayside; Jeff Price remembers fights in the Bigg Market; Degna Stone worries about a Samaritans sign on the High Level Bridge; Alfie Crow remembers the smells of Wallsend; Aidan Clarke recalls his youth in the North Tyne Valley.

It would be unfair and unnecessary to dwell too long on individual stories: the performances worked so well because of their chemistry – because of the democratisation of the stage. It would have been tempting to allow ‘names’ to dominate River Runs, so it was to the show’s credit that – despite each of the performers being well-respected within their own respective artistic circles – it resisted such easy billing.

Highlights for me (which now feels slightly arbitrary), include the story of Tommy the Swing Bridge busker, a wily singer who avoided arrest by moving between the police jurisdictions of Northumberland and Durham in the middle of the river, and Simma’s ‘Hexham Song’, where he “left for Hexham with one girl and came back with two”, a song jammed full of soul but not reductively sentimental for being so. Ben Holland and Bridie Jackson bookended the other performers, showing that basic stagecraft often works the best. Wielding acoustic guitars and ethereal vocals, their folky vignettes punctuated the other performers’ works, bringing a sense of collectivity to the more introspective numbers. As Jeff Price noted, introducing his ‘sins’ poem, rivers are well known for hearing our confessions and drowning them: the personal becomes part of the universal.

Running for just over an hour, including a short interval, River Runs is a welcome addition to the canon of mythology that surrounds the great river. There were no props, no sets, no gimmicks: this was simply 8 people connecting with each other and with their audience. I hope this show gets the wider audience it so very much deserves.

L-R: Ben Holland, Aidan Clarke, Alfie Crow, Degna Stone, Jeff Price, Simma, Kate Fox, Bridie Jackson

 *The Steamboat, just over the road from The Customs House, is the best pub in South Shields [according to JC and CAMRA].

Blogging elsewhere for now

I’m properly getting stuck into my Changemakers project at New Writing North now, so that is where you will find most of my online ramblings at the moment. Uncertain Times seems to be becoming more culturally relevant as the days pass and our government announce yet more measures to shaft the general population. I’m not just using the project as a means of ranting: I’ve begun a series of posts thinking about where creative writing begins; what it is that urges us to try and sculpt our feelings into words and sentences.

I suppose, in a way, that links to my previous blog and thinking about what future my writing has. How do I take these feelings – which I’m certainly not alone in harbouring – and turn them into objective, but still emotionally resonant, expressions?

One of the ways to help do that, I think, is to come out of your comfort zone. Recently I’ve been working as a shadow poet coach, teaching primary school kids about poetry slams and how to write, edit and perform their own 12 line epics. Just last week I took the responsibility up a gear and started leading my own sessions with a class of year 5 kids. There’s a fairly cynical (but probably quite honest) maxim in TV/film production which says “never work with kids and animals.” When it comes to literature, though, I’m finding that some of these kids, as young as 9 and 10, are coming up with ideas that are so fresh, so pertinent and so alive. To get off our high horses from time to time and to work with people on this almost visceral level is really quite refreshing. It’s certainly made me think about the way I write: whether what I’m saying needs to be said in quite so many words.

The workshops that I’m organising with New Writing North for Uncertain Times will likely provide more opportunities of a similar ilk; chances to hear work in its rawest form, when all the intricacies of thinking about metaphors and line breaks and dialogue come much later, after the guts have been spilled. Please do follow Uncertain Times for a more in depth flavour of how that project progresses as it’s where most of my creative energy is currently being spent.

Being a Changemaker at New Writing North

I’m pleased to finally be able to bring you news of a very interesting writing project that I formally started today. I’m working as a Changemaker on a 5 month placement at New Writing North, developing a new, youth-led creative writing project which seeks to document the opinions, concerns and frustrations of various young people in Tyneside and Northumberland.

For those of you who don’t know, Changemakers are a fantastic national youth leadership charity who happen to have a base in Newcastle. I got involved with them in September after successfully applying to work with and be trained by them. Changemakers organise leadership development modules alongside placements at host organisations, helping young people to gain real-world experience. New Writing North, who I’ve had involvement with in the past, are one of the hosts this year. The Changemakers mission is simple: “To create a world in which young people have the confidence to lead in employment, public life and society at large, and everyone understands that we need them to.”

So, what am I actually going to be doing? Well, in a nutshell, I’m hoping to collate a collection of creative writing by 15-25 year olds that deals, first-hand, with their experiences of ‘being a young person in uncertain times.’ As a young person who’s directly been effected by societal change and uncertainties, I think that the project is incredibly timely and has huge potential to open up a dialogue for, by and between young people and their peers within their communities and in the wider world. On the eve of George Osborne’s Autumn Statement, when we expect him to announce that austerity measures may have to be carried out until 2018, and with news of arts cuts in Newcastle over the past fortnight, I think this project has potential to become incredibly pertinent and I hope that it can bring young people’s concerns on these and other matters to the wide audience they deserve.

I’ll blogging as the project develops, but using a separate Tumblr site, which you can find here: www.uncertaintimesnwn.tumblr.com

Fifty Cuppas

 

50 Cuppas is a new project, drawing attention to, via a chat over the nation's favourite tipple, all the brilliant people living and working in Tyne and Wear. If you want to get involved, please do get in touch!

The Hardest Battle

"A poet is somebody who feels, and who expresses his feelings through words. This may sound easy, but it isn’t. A lot of people think or believe or know they feel — but that’s thinking or believing or knowing; not feeling. And poetry is feeling — not knowing or believing or thinking.

Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know, but not a single human being can be taught to feel. Why? Because whenever you think or you believe or you know, you’re a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you’re nobody but yourself. To be nobody but yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.

As for expressing nobody but yourself in words, that means working just a little harder than anybody who isn’t a poet can possibly imagine. Why? Because nothing is quite as easy as using words like somebody else. We all of us do exactly this nearly all of the time – and whenever we do it, we are not poets. If, at the end of your first ten or fifteen years of fighting and working and feeling, you find you’ve written one line of one poem, you’ll be very lucky indeed. And so my advice to all young people who wish to become poets is: do something easy, like learning how to blow up the world — unless you’re not only willing, but glad, to feel and work and fight till you die."

– e.e. cummings

Careful Observers

I said a few months ago that I wanted to take some ‘down time’; to reassess what I’m doing – what I’m hoping to achieve – as a writer. I quoted other writers and sources of intrigue – The Dark Mountain Project, Sam Riviere’s 81 Austerities, the Occupy Movement etcetera. – saying that I was – am – bored, frankly, of several things: chiefly the malaise of being an unemployed graduate, but also other things, such as 24 hour news feeds, Twitter, blogs, poetry itself, the me-me-me culture.

Reading this fascinating dialogue, between the poet and journalist Paul Kingsnorth and Doug and Kris Tompkins, former big business owners, I realise that my anger, confusion and hurt stems from not yet having a fully-formed worldview. I suspect that, being 24 years old, this is perfectly normal. Indeed, the above article implies that some of the most ‘successful’ entrepreneurs in history, including Tompkins’s former friend Steve Jobs, have not, or did not, find or attempt to find any such thing. (For the record, this makes a lot more sense in light of having read the whole conversation.)

Reading the latest reviews of my pamphlet, I was heartened and reinvigorated to hear that people I don’t know had recently found merit in poems which I have grown quite cold about. My publisher and other, experienced writers have told me that these feelings are completely natural: that poems written 2,3, 4+ years ago are always going to feel a bit incongruous; a bit jet-lagged, if you will. Nonetheless, being patted on the back is always going to feel good. I may have lost all desire to read a third of the pamphlet ever again, but that doesn’t mean others feel the same. This is the great thing about poetry: published in 1912 or 2012 – it can still win over hearts and minds, as long as it’s convincing.

That in mind, I’m sure you’re now hoping that I will go on (briefly) to link an environmentally-minded conversation to the misgivings of an unknown British poet. I probably won’t do a good job, sorry. It’s not important. If I’ve felt detached lately, it’s because I don’t know who I am. Don’t worry: I’m not going to go all Taking Back Sunday on you here, nor begin firing Nietzsche quotes your way, I’m just stating it as plainly as I can, for myself. I don’t know. I may know parts of it, but I don’t know it all. The quest probably isn’t to do so, though. I doubt there’s a holy grail, in a religious, spiritual or lazy metaphor sense.

I said in a previous blog that I want my poetry to rise to Adrian Mitchell’s challenge; for it to connect with those it portends to satisfy. For it to begin doing that, I think I must first spend more time – years, I expect – getting to know what the ‘it’ I mentioned above might be made of; what I believe and feel and want and need. There will be many wrong turns and dead-ends. Secondly, and (for now) I hold on to this, I think it must embrace fallibility and contradiction, especially my own. I don’t know what the results will look like, but I feel that I’m just beginning to get to a position where I want to write again; where I have that urgency. I’m excited and I’m terrified. I’m waiting as a careful observer.