A blog series by Duška Radosavljević on the emerging work of The Performance Ensemble.
Alan, Tamara and I take a train to Selby to imagine a new version of Wings of Desire – a show to be based on Wim Wenders’ famous film, set in 1980s Berlin, about an angel falling in love with a trapeze artist. Alan has already created theatre versions of this show for Newcastle and for Copenhagen in the early 2000s, and has dramaturged an open air circus version of it in Birmingham in 2014. The new one is being envisaged for the Selby Abbey as part of the Arts Council’s ‘levelling up for culture’ strategy. Ideally, the show would be made by Alan Lyddiard in 2025, in exactly the same way he has always worked on making art: with members of the local community performing side by side with the professionals, in this case The Performance Ensemble – a new NPO-funded ensemble based in Leeds, consisting of performers aged 60+.
Now in their 70s, choreographer Tamara McLorg and director Alan Lyddiard still have a spring in their step as they embark on a mission to bring the arts into the community and the community into the artistic work. The two have known each other for decades and this shows in the subtle ways in which they have endless patience for each other, they chuckle at each other’s familiar flaws, they share shortcuts, unspoken signals and irresistible in-jokes. It’s not dissimilar from watching two teenagers banter, the main difference being that when a name of a person or a place is mentioned, their eyes glaze over and there is a palpable weight of memory behind it, a larger load of meaning that inhabits the gaps in the conversation and stretches the mind further back into the mists of time.
As we settle into our set of table seats on the train, some conversation trail leads us towards the 1960s, so I want to know how the two of them met. It was in a show, they tell me, about the poet John Clare, made by EMMA (East Midlands Mobile Arts) company in Loughborough in 1977. Alan played John Clare, and Tamara played his muse Mary, which was a dancing-only part. It was directed by Andrew Manley who had brought Alan to EMMA from Keswick to act and direct for the company. The EMMA Theatre company used to work alongside the EMMA dance company which was led by Gideon Avrahami, a choreographer who later went to Israel and joined a kibbutz. And sometimes the two branches of EMMA worked together.
‘I mean, I was part of the EMMA theatre company, and I used to go to the pub and play darts, and I used to think dance was just stupid. “Why are these people prancing about in their funny costumes”, I thought it was ridiculous. They’d be talking about it and I’d be nodding and rolling cigarettes, and doing working class plays by Steven Poliakoff. But one day I went into the rehearsal and I saw this piece, I think it was Ladylove that Tamara had choreographed and she was in, and I just thought “That’s just really beautiful, really amazing!” So I suddenly became a convert to dance’.
And when they both later left EMMA, Alan directed Tamara’s solo show, and they have worked together on and off ever since.
As floods of stories pour out – about theatre and dance shows, individuals’ and companies’ names from all around the UK, parties and projects, training schemes, travels and tours, chance meetings and fallings out – a young woman comes along to say how she couldn’t help overhearing, but she is a theatre student, and they seem like they’ve had amazing careers!…
Pleasantly surprised Alan pulls out his business card to give her, but as we leave the train he and Tamara conclude maybe we were a little too loud? Maybe it’s our hearing that makes us speak a little too loudly… Or maybe the conversation got a little too exciting as we got to the part in the recollections about the decadence of the 1960s British rep theatres, and the wild East London parties, the all too familiar hopes and carefree promises of youth that any person in their twenties can still relate to.
As we walk the streets of Selby on a sunny and warm October morning, we notice passageways and interesting looking restaurants, a Roma flag flying on one of the windows, a boy filming us from an open window. In a second hand shop Tamara spots a teddy bear she needs for a piece she is making in Beeston, and so we gain a new fluffy companion on our travels. There is a wonderful amphitheatre in the city centre that never gets used for live performance, and Alan has ideas how to use it. Then we call at a miniature bookshop that Alan had visited before. He remembers hearing about some local interest stories there and maybe we can find some books for our research; maybe we can find out something about a potential local celebrity that can play the Peter Falk character in the Selby adaptation… But no luck this time, the nearest place popular culture celebrities from Yorkshire come from is Leeds.
The most famous Selby celebrity might be Benedict, the 11th century French monk, who had a vision about three swans in a bend in a river marking the place where he should build an abbey in England. That is how the Selby Abbey came to be in 1069. Over a thousand years of history makes for a brimful of stories, but we are focusing on the space itself. Tamara is feeling the walls with her hands, leaping up gently to nestle her body into the alcoves, imagining moments of choreographed movement. Alan is whizzing up and down the aisles, counting the seats, planning the ways in which the audience gets to experience an equivalent of the worlds conjured up in the Wenders movie: the black and white, turning into the technicolour one. His vision for the opening is a choir of children entering the church, looking up at the angels.
We spend the rest of our visit searching for the Tiny Treasures. These are miniscule embroiderings made by the local artist Serena Partridge and hidden in the nooks and crannies of the abbey’s walls – tiny depictions of swans and martyrs, maids and saints tucked into the stone crevices. We hear stories of a high profile Korean pop star booking the abbey for his wedding (he had wanted the Westminster abbey initially but this was the more easily available back up) – and then, strangely, we actually bump into a lone Asian woman in a wedding dress, running around the abbey’s grounds looking for a photographer… All this brings the thought of treasure trails as a dramaturgical structure, a way of creating the equivalent of a cinematic close up for an audience on a kind of pilgrimage in the Selby version of Wings of Desire.
Not really realising the incidental dancing connection, we wind up in the downstairs café of the River Mills Ballroom – a place Alan declares the best restaurant in Selby. Here I am beguiled by more stories of Alan and Tamara’s journeys through the arts world of late 20th century Britain, and more specifically its margins, its nooks and crannies that have been sometimes referred to by the chroniclers of that time as British ‘alternative theatre’ (Sandy Craig 1980), ‘radical performance’ (Baz Kershaw 1992), and less fortuitously, perhaps, ‘community arts’.
When I get back to my hotel room, I google the British dancer and choreographer Royston Maldoom, another key former collaborator of Tamara and Alan’s. In 2004, aged 60, Maldoom became a top celebrity in Germany thanks to a film called Rhythm is it! Which was made to document his and Simon Rattle’s community arts project using Stravinsky’s ‘Rite of Spring’. In it they collaborated with 250 school children and the Berlin Philharmonic, to prove the simple conviction that art and creativity belong to everyone, not just the professionals, and that, as such, they can transform lives.
Based in Germany, Royston Maldoom is an OBE, but he cannot get a British publisher interested in publishing his autobiography.
Duška Radosavljević
Duška Radosavljević is a writer, dramaturg and academic. Her books include Aural/Oral Dramaturgies (2023), Theatre Criticism: Changing Landscapes (2016), The Mums and Babies’ Ensemble: A Manual (2015), Theatre-Making (2013) and The Contemporary Ensemble (2013).
