Month: March 2014

The last blog post identifies the key concept I wish to express through my piece, until now however I haven’t figured out how exactly to best portray this examination of Arcadia over time.  Last week I discovered a photograph that had gone viral over the internet:

 

This photograph, known as the ‘Shoe Queue’ was taken in Thailand last August.  The customers use their shoes to indicate there position in the line while the staff are on their lunch breaks, and then take a seat nearby until it is there turn to be served.  From this I thought, ‘what is more inherently English than standing in queues?’, and my concept seemed to fit into this image.  What if each pair of shoes belonged to Englishmen across time and everyone was waiting in line together to locate the images of Arcadia forged in art.  The piece would begin with my character joining the rear, with someone in the 1980s ahead in the queue.

This allows for the today character, who idolises the eighties as an era where British arts thrived, to inquire about how people of today consider Arcadia to be the 80s.  However ahead of the 80s pair of shoes in the queue is someone from the 50s who the former believes to have lived in the idyllic England.  The queue continues with World War 1 military boots, pre-war shoes, Elizabethan shoes and eventually cave-man shoes.  Indicating how each moment of our past have we identified a more appealing period of history we have nostalgia for until we reach a time when England never existed.

Between each time period/ pair of shoes, I will thread in pieces of poetry, literature and/or song, linking the two.  This allows me to return to the research I conducted on Pete Doherty, as his poetry describes the England lost somewhere in time.  For instance his poem “Chalky Dean” reads:

‘A cup of tea, Chalky Dean

To ease your misery

Your war, your family

Your new flat in Kilburn – been

There since 73,

Since 83, on your own

The England designed by you

Can’t be found,

And you feel so much on your own

The England life gave to you,

Is long gone away,

And you have never felt so ready

To leave and look for it.

So out you go.’

 

Or for instance in the video below in which Doherty offers his perspective on the absence of great in Great Britain:

My initial idea for my solo performance came about after in depth research of one of the most controversial figures in Britain today, Pete Doherty.  Having seen a handful of solo performances at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2013 that focused on painting controversial figures in a positive light, I considered staging Doherty’s story against the tabloid media set out to demonise him.  As well as this I wanted to link this conflict with the media to Doherty’s musical quest to return to an idyllic England, an Arcadia, free from the tabloid media’s venom.  A great deal of Doherty’s music opposes the media and how they have depicted him because “were only told the one side of the story, we’ve lost all judgement on it” (Morley, 2006).

Knaive Theatre’s Bin Laden: The One Man Show, performed at C Nova during last summer’s Fringe, attempted to humanise Osama Bin Laden from the culture of fear against him that had been created post 9/11.  The performance explains in detail Bin Laden’s rationale behind the Al-Qaeda bombings, through the use of tea, biscuits and a flip-chart.  The show “explores many Bin Ladens: those we know, those we don’t, and those we prefer not to” (Wilde, 2013).  The show presented his story, uncovering details that the audience were not aware of and using audience members themselves to characterise the other prominent figures in Bin Laden’s life.  “The show represents a legitimate attempt to swing the pendulum the other way, get us thinking about the issues from ‘the other side’” (Glenn, 2013), this being my overall objective of the piece.

I wanted to explore Doherty in a similar forum, providing refreshments to the audience upon entry, immediately removing the forth wall between myself and the audience, then proceeding to use audience members to characterise figures associated with Doherty (Kate Moss, Carl Barat et al).  Offering an opportunity, like Knaive Theatre, for the audience to see the man behind the veil created by the tabloid media, a chance to understand the artist and not the ‘junkie’.  Babyshambles band mate Drew Drew McConnell brands tabloid media as being “the death of culture” (2006).  It is because of the drama in his life that Doherty wanted to take drugs, with his private life being exposed by the media, taking the drugs became the only way he could think of to have a moment of privacy.

I felt it was important to share my initial idea for my solo performance because it offers some light on what I’m aiming to create now.  After returning to my research on Doherty I found myself more enthusiastic about his musical vision of Arcadia.  Doherty sought to shed light on a time when the image of Britannia existed, when it was the idyllic place described by poets, writers and musicians.  This now is the concept of my solo performance: attempting to place the time when we as a nation perceived England to be at its peak, to be this paradise.

By Doherty’s example it is not the current England we live in, and we must look back to the past to hope to locate it.  Doherty is compared often to his main musical influence, Morrissey of The Smiths, and since other trends (i.e. fashion, Government etc) are suggesting that the 80s are returning, then perhaps this was when England was Arcadia?

Yet when we look at the 80’s, a decade of mass unemployment, rioting and war, all with Margaret Thatcher’s controversies leading the country this was one of the darkest periods in the 20^th century.  Thatcher herself campaigned with the mantra to ‘make Britain great again, like Churchill did’ meaning that the idea of Arcady gets passed back in time again to the 1940s and 1950s.  The premise of my piece is to highlight the fact that the buck keeps getting passed along our history until we realise that we have never lived in an idyllic England that artists have portrayed in their works.  Doherty himself identified this, saying “if it’s nostalgia we are feeling for England now, it’s nostalgia for a time that never existed” (Hannaford, 2007, p. 36).

Soon I will begin devising and experimenting how best to stage this concept.

 

 

Works Cited:

Glenn, William (2013) ‘Review: Bin Laden: The One Man Show’, FringeReview [Online] <Available at: http://www.fringereview.co.uk/fringeReview/5687 > [Accessed 18th March 2014].

Hannaford, Alex (2007) Pete Doherty: The Last of the Rock Romantics, St. Ives: Ebury Press.

Morley, Paul (2006) Who The F*** is Pete Doherty?, [Film] Rodger Pomphrey dir. United Kingdom: Image Entertainment.

Wilde, Joseph (2013) Bin Laden: The One Man Show, [Performance] C Nova, Edinburgh [15^th August 2013].