Blog 20.16 #7: Soundsystem Gonna Bring Me Back Up (right)!

I’ve never arrived to a demo so early that the road’s were still open.

We navigated perplexed taxi drivers as we swarmed into the London street and we steered the Protest Trolley into position.  It slipped past the usual People’s Front of SWP, Socialist Party, Worker’s Liberty, Green Party and Others stalls peppering the route.  We found a spot, stopped and prepared for the march.

This was another People’s Assembly march, the annual leftie outing for the country to descend upon the capital.  I’m always slightly cynical about these marches, the route is generally closed off to the public for most of the way, it’s hardly reported in the news and has no threat to the politicians who are committed heinous crimes against the poorest in society across the UK.  They’re probably having a day off in their second home.  Their second homes with the skins of disabled people for curtains and fine wines infused with the blood of steel workers.  Chateau de Sheffield.

But, it’s always important to feed into these marches.  For your own sanity, it’s a reminder people across the country are feeling the same rage at this oppressive system.

This was the first march I’ve been on where we’ve provided the soundsystem.  The night before, I’d spent all evening carefully calculating a playlist of punk, ska, hip-hop and reggae, only to have my Generic MP3 Device die on me before the march actually started.  Drained of life, like the orphans Osborne keeps plugged into The Mechanism in his basement (read:  dungeon).  Suddenly it became a juggling job of switching between the phone of a marcher from Thirsk (mostly hip-hop) and my phone (a limited array of punk & ska).  But wonderful things can happen when you’re limited, you get creative.  Fight For Your Right To Party was suddenly the perfect crowd-pleaser, whilst the Star Wars Imperial March outside Forbidden Planet dedicated to the Evil Empire totally made sense.  My only regret is I couldn’t play X-Ray Spex, as one woman has a patch on her bag, and it was painfully clear most songs we played were by men.

Playlists is something I’ve always loved creating, but that’s usually to make people entertained between band sets, not necessarily keep them angry on a 90 minute stomp round London!  With help from people lending their phones and suggestions, I’d say we still managed to create a buzzing atmosphere from tracks as diverse as B.Dolan’s Which Side Are You On, The Skints, ONSIND, Operation Ivy, Captain Ska, Akala and Lowkey.

The highlight was playing Dear Mr Cameron by Richie Blitz outside Downing Street.  Who’d have thought that when Richie brought out that song back in June 2011, 5 years later it would be a rallying call.

It was a privilege to march alongside trade Unionists, disabled people, young people, students and folks from across the UK.  It’s empowering to stand (or rather sit) alongside Sisters Uncut and anarcha-feminist black blockers, to listen to the grievances of the National Barge Traveller’s Association.  As much as their chant:

1-2-3-4 where are we supposed to moor?
5-6-7-8 how we going to navigate?

Was amusing, one gentleman said to a Police officer “I’ve had my lifestyle outlawed three times” it shows the diversity of targets the Tories abuse.  There is only one way of life:  Theirs.  Rich, greedy and stinking of a Born To Rule hierarchy so out-dated the calendar needs to be tossed out.

Currently myself and director Natalie Quatermass are making a new show about punk, politics, protest and dinosaurs.  It’s about how music, specially raw DIY music, matters and inspires.  It’s called Whatever Happened To Vandal Raptor and ready for touring in 2017

Normally, people chant a bit, but without and audience, it becomes a bit of a trudge.  With a soundsystem, we could create some energy and life in the centre of London and the march.  We got people bouncing, singing and dancing.  That seems a great gift, so thanks to Graham from York People’s Assembly for providing the Protest Trolley and asking me to help put some tunes together.

Without music, the revolution is just trudging.

20.16 Blog #6: The Pinterverse

The Pinterverse

I can’t remember my first introduction to Pinter, but over the course of my Gap Year I devoured his plays and entered Uni with him as my favourite play-wright.  Thanks to some ace tutors who were experts in the area, I spent a good few modules unpacking Pinter’s famous pauses.

What was it about Pinter I loved?  As a language boff, I loved how power games are played using only words, and little action.  I loved his political undertones, and how in later years his political activism was a beacon for writers and artists everywhere to not only write about, but grapple with, right-ring and tyrannical systems.

In The Caretaker, the figure of Davies is problematic in 2016 as a scrounger.  He’s a down-and-out, his he’s a shirker and manipulator and, sympathetically a lost soul, but it’s also too easy to brand him as lazy against the brothers Aston and Mick.  Worrisome where the government and the press whip up paranoid against the working classes as scroungers (not that many working class folks were in this matinee performance at the Old Vic).  Spall at times cartoon-ished the chracrter, playing for laughs and gibbering, compared with David Bradley’s a few years ago who was a more threatening menacing presence.  There never seemed much danger on stage, and while it was a very funny production, it has the feel of a sitcom rather than a text from the birth of ‘theatre of menace’.

But I think my favourite aspect of Pinter’s writing is the theory that all his characters exist within the same shared universe, just like the shared universes of DC, Marvel, Star Wars, Quentin Tarintino and theoretically Pixar.

Ben and Gus in The Dumb Waiter work as a pair of hitmen just like Goldberg and McCann act as interrogators and kidnappers in The Birthday Party.  There’s no real hint these two are gangsters, or even criminals.  They don’t seem to question the legality of their actions, only Gus is challenged by the morality.  Police are never mentioned.  The organisation is shady, could it be the same organisation that Nicholas works for in One For The Road?  Could Stanley in The Birthday Party end up like Victor in OFTR?  Are the characters in New World Order, Party Time and Celebration also high-ranking officials?  Do their governments institute the camps in Mountain Language?  Do they run The Hothouse?  Was Aston from The Caretaker in The Hothouse?

The fact is, Pinter loves presenting characters in power, and it would be easy to say that his plays all explore the people pulling the strings, but with the exception of Mountain Language and OFTR, we never really see the characters suffering at the bottom.  The inhabitants of the Hothouse are never seen, the to-be-deceased of New World Order have no presence.

Or do we?  His world is littered with tramps, from Davies the tramp to Riley in The Room.  The Birthday Party’s Stanley is something of a person living off-the-radar, the stranger in A Slight Ache.

But the working classes do suffer a total break-down of language and control.  The ruling classes, from day 1, have been twisting language.  How can the working class ever change their world when they don’t understand the language of their world?

Victoria Station features the total failure of a simple day-to-day situation, Last To Go shows total disconnection, The Basement a circular piece of combat, A Slight Ache defining and redefining a stranger, Family Voices shows a home without a heart, in The Homecoming the characters are locked in a struggle with their masculinity, in Precisely the speaker has nothing but bitter memories. 

Where do the ‘memory play’ characters of A Kind of Alaska and Betrayal fit in?  Doctors and publishers.  Doctors who define medical conditions, publishers who define text.

No Man’s Land, though Pinter’s most self-referential play and far from my favourite, is perhaps the greatest insight.  The two writers.  One a great writer, one struggling.  Are they happy? Not really, but that’s not unusual for Pinter’s characters.  But the world is a No Man’s Land of language.  We can’t get anywhere.  We have been trapped by powers who rephrase, rework and retool meanings. It constantly shifts, and yet remains the same.  Pinter’s locations, characters and plots change, and yet remain the same.

Avoidance.  Evasion.  Radical.  Extremist.  Domestic.  Contracts.  Terms & conditions.  Safety.  Scrounger.  Red Tape.  Education.  Value.  Reform.  Ban.  Welfare.  Unemployed.  Modernising.  Nimbyism.  Markets.  Assets.  Worker.  Disabled.  Nationality.  Relevant.  Quality.  Democracy.  Who owns, controls and (re)defines these words?

I’d like to make one further interjection.

20.16 Blog #5: Trailers & Trigger Warnings

Trailers and Trigger Warnings

The trailer for Hail Caesar looked ace. It still looks ace. An all-star mega mystery and a cartoony noir thriller wrapped in a nostalgic retooled package of a bygone era.

But I wanted to like the film more. I wanted to love it. I wanted it to be my top film of the year. But aside from the subplots which never quite got tied together, I felt like it wasn’t funny enough. And yet the trailer had been so quirky?

The answer, I believe, was all the punchlines were in the trailer. Whenever a scene came up, I knew the gag that was coming. When two characters met, I could predict how the scene would end up. The worse was the big punchline at the very end of the film, where Cloony’s Whitlock fluffed his line. The note that ends the film totally given away in the trailer.

The answer, kids? Don’t watch trailers! It’s quite simple, I suppose, but I don’t think I’d have gone to see Hail Caesar without a engrossing trailer, so I suppose that’s the price you pay for being hooked in. You take the bait, but you might end up on a platter. Or something.

Of course, I have watched the Captain America: Civil War trailer a good number of times. I’m pretty confident between this, a deep knowledge of the comics and a basic knowledge of how action films work, I can predict the entire film. I’m still gonna see it, I have a fraught relationship with super-hero films, and I’m hoping Civil War can heal the wound as it rips apart the universe.

There is a certain level of expectation with super-hero films. If it’s the first movie, we get an origin story, we get a baddie and we get a showdown at the end. There’s usually a bigger villain hiding behind who we presume to be the baddie. Heroes will put aside their differences; anti-heroes will come good in the end. They might throw a curveball with a death or two, but just like a top secret underground lab-lair, there’s a formula.

Recently I’ve been thinking about the criticism of Trigger Warnings that pop up often online, in articles and general conversation. I have a huge amount of support for them, and I dislike the utter unnecessary contempt some people seem to have for Trigger Warnings, and the frank and casual dismissivness that comes with that criticism.

Trigger Warnings appear before something which is potentially upsetting, shocking or hurtful to someone whose mental state can’t quite handle that specific topic at that moment in time.

Now, I’m not here to entirely argue the ins and outs of them in academia, or social media or other circles. I get the criticisms, I don’t think they’re a perfect failsafe and I do prefer the term ‘content note’. But they do need to be employed.

This next ramble is looking at TWs from a live arts perspective.

A reviewer once said, regarding Spoilers, if you say “a character, whom we the audience presume to be the protagonist’s brother…” then you’re essentially giving away a plot point that they ain’t gonna be the brother. If you say before a poem, this is about X, then you’re giving away the emotional impact of any reveal that comes within the poem, it removes the subtext, it removes the open interpretation, and it can also totally dilute a piece to one singular topic. Like seeing Hail Caesar with the trailer in mind, it loses its weight as a piece.

Poetry nights are like going to see Captain America: Civil War. You can expect and predict there’ll be rude poems, funny poems and silly poems. They’ll also be deeply personal poems, political poems and poems that can be challenging in their subject matter and their content.

Poetry (and theatre/music/dance) is there to make you feel emotions, to take you to different places, explore themes, dissect, dissect and digest ideas. Arguably, if a poem has affected you, that’s a good thing. One would assume going to listen to poetry is an exercise in looking to be moved, inspired, challenged and affected.

But, as I say, I am in favour of Trigger Warnings because if you have hideous experiences, you should be able to confront them on your own terms, not the terms of a person on a microphone. This isn’t about wrapping people in cotton wool, it’s about accepting the world is violent and damaging to certain people of society, and part of the fight against the cause of this damage is also about dealing with the fallout. Fight war, not wars, and heal the wounds they cause.

So should poetry come with Trigger Warnings? I have taken to giving a blanket Trigger Warning at the very start of the night when I’m compering. Reminding the audience that anything could be said, and poetry can go to some troubling topics.

But I’ve seen TWs handled the wrong way at poetry night. You cannot ask your audience if anyone would prefer if you didn’t read your poem. “This poem is about rape, is that Ok to read?” I can’t imagine anybody who would find this topic upsetting piping up and putting themselves on the spot. Similarly, depending on the space and how quickly the poet leaps into the poem, it’s difficult actively stand up and leave in time.
It also leads to everyone questioning their content. Suicide is a particularly triggering topic. Is death? Death is a staple poetry topic. LBGTQ+ people might be going through a hard time with their family. Should a poem that references parents come with a TW? Where do you draw the line?

We’re all still learning. I’m up for any conversations, thoughts or suggestions for this topic.

Riot Nrrrd Tour podcast

Riot Nrrrd Tour Podcast

In March 2015, two nerdy poets set forth unto the world to bring hope, spoken word and angry feminism to the ears of budding audiences.

Henry Raby is based in York, Jenn Hart is based in Bristol. They both like punk, nerdiness, politics, feminism and saying poems about these topics in front of audiences.

Henry Raby & Jenn Hart would like to thank all the promoters, audiences and supporters and copius amount of coffee and cartoons which all made this tour possible.

DIY or Die!

The Riot Nrrrd Tour consisted of:
15th March: Nerd Hutch, Newcastle
16th March: Verbal Remedies, Leeds
17th March: Empty Shop, Durham
18th March: Poems, Pints & Prose, Harrogate
19th March: Away With Words, Hull
20th March: The Forest Café, Edinburgh. No record of this show was made, due to the over exhaustion of falafel, queer disco and evening shenanigans but thanks to Raph for the gig x
21st March: Tchai Ovna, Glasgow
22nd March: Say Owt Slam, York

CLICK TO LISTEN HERE!

20.16 Blog #4: Hashtag Kafka

Hashtag Kafka

On Thursday I popped over to Hull to see Hull truck Youth Theatre perform two of my plays, one first commissioned by York Theatre Royal called The Circle of Chalk, inspired by the classic Chinese tale with a smattering of Brecht.  The second was an entirely new play, The Castle, adapted from Kafka’s unfinished tale of a man, K (who shares the same name as the protagonist of one of Kafka’s more famous novels, The Trial).  Both were directed by Tom Bellerby, and both were fantastic productions. 

The Circle of Chalk employed a huge range of music to weave the story.  Not just a few musical interludes, but a really effective backdrop of folk sounds to drive the tale along.  Brilliant committment to the story-telling, drawing us into their world balanced on a knife-edge. Watching it back, there’s a lot of ideas peppered throughout the play.  Family, duty, country, fascism, home, identity and race constantly crop up, and I hope the play tries to explore what displacement means, and how governments react to displaced people with racism and walls.

The Castle was a different beast in the sense it had one driving theme throughout, the ineffectiveness in the face of a sheer power.  Within that, there’s the destabilisation of relationships, the abuse of power, the reliance on contacts and pressures of business and ambition.  But the base idea is that our protagonist, K The Land Surveyor, is desperately trying to find work but caught in a bureaucratic nightmare and told if he isn’t work, he is worthless.

This is the same message young people across the country and being told, as their support networks have been, and are being, slashed.  Removing EMA and student grants limit their access to education.  Removing housing benefit, and the stigma of not being able to ‘make someone of one’s self.’

I’m very proud of the final script.  The cast brought out eccentric and unstable characters full of mischief and malevolence.  The atmosphere was gripping and haunting.  Kafka has a certain level of grim humour which I toyed and recreated for the stage.  But in Kafka’s novels, characters are trapped, cursed, doomed and never make the right decisions.  And all other characters are seen through the tinted eyes of the protagonist.  In our version, we tried to show characters actually making good and negative choices.  We showed empathy, sympathy and rejection of these traits.  Because this is an ensemble, and though K is at the very centre, it is a connected web of Villagers and Officials who each have their role in the story.

That is essential in a Youth Theatre play, where every actor needs to feel, and should be, relevant to the story and have a part they can get their teeth into.  Young people deserve quality scripts.  I may not be able to give them security, but I can at least give them a bloody good play to work with.  Thanks to Tom and Hull Truck for having me!

To swerve this somewhat, I tried to change my Twitter handle from HenryRabyPoetry to HenryRaby.  Because as much as poetry is my core skill, I’m also doing more play-wrighting and theatre making.  Alas, HenryRaby is taken.  The account has 0 Tweets.  I can only hope it gets deleted.  It’s a dog-eat-Tweet world out there.

Feels a little Kafka-esque doesn’t it?  This great vast system of Twitter dictating rules and names, and myself, powerless within the loopholes, to make any leeway.  I just have to sit and wait.

This week I also worked with director Natalie Quatermass on a new show about punk and politics.  It’s called Whatever Happened To Vandal Raptor?, and we’re scratching it at Derby Theatre on the 6^th March.  It’s still early days, so I’ll blog about it in detail once we’ve fleshed out more of the show.  But watch this space!

20.16 Blog #3: The Greatest Cartoon Ever

The Greatest Cartoon Ever

Hey.  Get ready to tear me apart.  Get ready to rip me limb-from-limb as I declare a statement that will shock the very foundations of the zeitgeist to it’s core.

Adventure Time is over-rated.

BOOM.  There.  Said.  *drops mic*

*Picks up mic again*

OK, so let me unpack that.  Adventure Time is brilliant.  It’s masterful and funny and full of fantastic characters and story and marvellous inventive.  But it’s everywhere.  It’s on t-shirts and hats and pencil cases and games and I really love it.  I haven’t seen every single episode (there’s a lot) but it’s not struck the chord with me that it has with so many other people, and many of my friends.  I don’t consider it the *fanfare* Greatest cartoon Ever.

So why is it that this cartoon has magically captured children and adults?  And why is it that so many of the queer community love it so much too?

Because to those fans, Adventure Time is the greatest cartoon ever.  Everyone has their favourite songs, poems, stories, films etc.  Adventure Time is dear to many people’s hearts.

Me and my housemate recently watched a few Count Duckulas, which are incredibly pun-heavy surreal nuggets of British eccentricity.  Much more nutty than Dangermouse, with some great set pieces that lead to a zaniness only 80s cartoons could provide.  The puns drove me quackers.

I’ve also been caning a lot inordinate amount of the Batman The Animated Podcast which is a gushing source of fan nostalgia waterfalling from my iPad.  Check it out, I never watched much Batman TAS cos it wasn’t on UK telly as much (Batman Of The Future was though, or Batman ‘Beyond’ to you ‘Americans’), but the Podcast is very funny, well-made and goes into great detail of the show, which I love, cos I love analysing and details (could ya guess?)

Retro cartoons are back, or at the least they have a marketability.  You can slap a 80s or 90s cartoon onto anything and it’ll sell.  But how much do people revisit these cartoons?

You know I love Pokémon.  But I don’t even think the Pokémon cartoon is the best thing in the world EVER.  It holds a heap of nostalgia for me, and I’d watch it gleefully, but that would be rooted in the memory how much it mattered when I was 11.

On the flip side, I devoured Gravity Falls.  Such a well-crafted collection of stories.  Twin peaks meets Hey Arnold.  Not only were the jokes spot-on, but the characters were 3-dimensional (which is ironic considering one was a nightmare 2-D space demon), including strong female characters, gay characters and quite possibly a Trans* character.  I couldn’t watch the finale for fear of it ending, like the apocalypse.  But end it did, and marvellous so.  With salty tears running down my cheeks, as Dipper and Mabel bid farewell to Gravity Falls, and part of their childhood, I too said goodbye to a cartoon which PROVES to me that cartoons are still high quality.

Well, actually, it doesn’t.  Because it’s all subjective.  Just as one person adores Adventure Time for its fresh take on the adventure genre, another person will argue “cartoons aren’t as good as they used to be” while rocking their He-Man t-shirt.

But compare this whole comparison with other genres.  We hold Citizen Kane up to be one of the greatest films of all time, just like we declare Shakespeare, Dickins and Tolstoy to be our greatest writers.  The greatest musicians include Bob Dylan, The Beatles and Presley.  I’m not saying I much rate these assumptions but that is the general structure of our western culture.

But no one really holds up a cartoon as the greatest ever.  Because kids don’t care about that.  They just love sitting after school and watching something silly, exciting and/or funny.  They’ll watch reruns, they’ll watch the latest show, as long as they enjoy it, they enjoy it.  If you enjoy something, you enjoy it.  I’ll analyse it for hours and hours and hours, but at the end of the day you love something because you love it, and the rest is silence.

Oh, and for the record the Greatest Cartoon Ever is Legends Of Treasure Island.  Without doubt.

Goodnight out there, whatever you are….

20.16 Blog #2: Workshops through the looking glass

You stand in front of an audience, one of several poets who have stepped forth during the night.  You may be remembered, you may be forgotten.  If it’s a slam, you might win.  You might be the guest poet, and this is your job.  Better earn that crust.

Sometimes your throw our political, personal or funny poems and in return the audience act as a mirror, they reflect back with laughter, gasps, applause…or even stand up and walk out in disgust.  But sometimes they absorb, they remain still, they listen but they give nothing back.

I have always said, if you want to get better at performance poetry (and performance in general), perform as much as possible.  Gigs, slams, open mics.  Most cities are full of them, my context of York is no exception.  You can perform in front of the mirror as much as you like, it will reflect back your words and your stance and your politics but it won’t absorb like an audience.

But then, when you write, you pour in your thoughts onto your page.  It’s just a transition from thought to screen.  Like the mirror, it’s only reflecting yourself back in ink.

I’m still pondering the workshop from last week.  Not the one I led, the one I took part in led by Sally Jenkinson, our guest poet for Say Owt Slam #8.

The last workshop we held for SOS was way back in March 2015 with Jess Green, though we have always invited our guests to deliver a workshop, though it doesn’t always work for various reasons.

I started thinking about the people who came along to the workshop.  Some people experienced writers, some without much confidence, some totally new to the artform.  Handled marvellously by Sally, it was fun but also very interesting, a very minimal set of exercises leading to interesting results.

It got my reminiscing about previous workshops I’ve attended from poets like Jacob Sam-La Rose, Sophia Walker and Kirsten Luckins.  I travelled down to London for a free workshop with Apples & Snakes, and had mentorship from Hannah Silva when I was part of the Soapbox Tour.  Not to mention the hours and hours of workshops at NAYT’s Raising The Game events for working with young people in theatre.

Workshops allow you to bounce ideas around, to have input different to your normal perception of stimulus and writing, and then have alternate opinions in a room.  Much more productive than relying on an audience who see you as the evening’s entertainment rather than a brain/heart processing art.

When you write, you exist within the bubble of your head, the words and thoughts bouncing around, perhaps assisted by some music (at the moment it’s The Raincoats on my iPod) and interest explorations.  A workshop allows some breath and breadth, to explore someone else’s methods and styles, to get some thoughts from other people.  In Sally’s workshop, we shared our own personal ways and methods of writing, advice and experiences.

And in this way, we do reflect each other.  We bounce ideas off one another, and something surprising and refreshing can emerge. 

The looking glass is a gateway to another world.  But what does it contain?  Yoda states to the hasty Luke when he asks what’s in the Dark Side cave:  "Only what you take with you."