A blog series by Duška Radosavljević on the emerging work of The Performance Ensemble.
Paulette wants to be known as a ‘seasoned’ performer, rather than ‘older’ or ‘ageing’ one. She wants us to find new words to talk about growing old. And then she gets hold of a microphone to tempt the audience into a moment of shared joy through musical call and response.
The Performance Ensemble member Paulette Morris and I are taking part in a panel at the National Conference of Creative Ageing in Newcastle upon Tyne, where we make a brief presentation about Sinfonia, the piece by the Ensemble performed in May in Leeds. Paulette offers an insider perspective, while I try to contextualise it from the outside, by reference to Alan’s previous work that stretches all the way back here in Newcastle where he had founded and ran the Northern Stage ensemble, and where I worked with him as the company dramaturg. In Newcastle, Paulette, Alan, Tamara and I are also joined by current co-chair of The Performance Ensemble’s board/ former priest and Leeds councillor/current performer with the company, Roger Harington, and also by Newcastle-based actor Alex Elliott, another co-conspirator who has followed Alan from the Northern Stage days all the way to the current project in creative ageing in Leeds. It is a motley crew that nevertheless shares values which run deep and strong, values that have the capacity to bind together across various kinds of difference and to keep people together, long term. What else is there when it comes to growing old, but being surrounded by those you can still sing together with, no matter where you come from? I don’t get to say that at the time, but these are the thoughts crystallising for me now, as I think back to it all.
Being back in Newcastle, it is hard to resist a flood of memories; it’s hard to contain curiosity and wonder about how the place changes over time, layers and layers of skin shedding or eroding and being replaced with new glossier ones. Added to this is the bonus of unexpected re-encounters, hugs with old friends, colleagues, acquaintances, jubilant reconnections with those one has lost touch with. This conference on creative ageing actually turns out for me to be a party, fueled by the joy of connection in the place of any other stimulants. Already at the opening keynote I have the pleasure to text a friend in London that their show has been name-checked by the chair of the Arts Council. I get to run around introducing people from different parts of my life to each other: Alan, who once lived in the Philippines, to a former student of mine, a second generation Philippina Londoner who is about to move back there to live in her grandmother’s house. My long lost friend Kath and Paulette happen to hit it off on their own anyway over their shared ancestral connection to the West Indies. And at the end, as Roger, Tamara, Paulette and I scramble out to the railway station for our 5pm train, the great Jackie Kay, the former Scottish Makar – who had just triumphed with her conference-busting off-the-cuff sit-down comedy routine about ageing gracefully as a minoritised member of the society – runs out with us to give Paulette a hug, and indulges me with a moment of reminiscence about our shared time at Newcastle University.
I spend part of my train journey back to the airport nestled next to Paulette, the conversation artist, the poet, musician, all-around amazing human and muse, listening at close range as she whispers stories about her life into my phone. How her dad, a former preacher and steel pan teacher (whose name graces a blue plaque in the Merrion Centre in Leeds) came over from Saint Kitts in the 1960s, and how music was always a big part of their family life. How she went to schools in Chapeltown and Headingley and how rife and traumatising racism had been at the time, but how she drew confidence from her father’s work to resist and fight and raise awareness where she could. And how she wanted to be a dress designer, but how she started writing songs and teaching music in her daughter’s school to deal with a confidence crisis, and how a song she wrote in the 1980s hit the top of the reggae charts and propelled her and her sister Annette’s double act Royal Blood to a national and international fame. How in the late 1990s, she worked with the performance poet and playwright Khadijah Ibrahiim to start Leeds Young Authors, a programme of creative activities taking a multitude of young people from Leeds to slam poetry competitions all over the United States. How they won countless awards, propelled multiple young people to international careers, and how they were even used as an example for the sort of work the Arts Council should continue to fund at the time when they had not been funded by the Arts Council at all but by the local community arts initiatives instead. And how nowadays, Paulette adds to her range of inspirational work, that is always unfailing in its commitment to the community, her ‘conversation work’ in prisons. How she uses spoken word and music to get through layers and layers of attitude, trauma, alienation, self-protective silence, peer pressure, and fear, in order to get young people on her side. And how then she helps them develop their creative talents so they can create artistic career alternatives to the trajectories that had got them into prison in the first place.
This ultimately is a story of how getting ‘seasoned’ over time is not about loss or decline, but about gain and enrichment. It is an insight into growing one’s own wonderful layers of brilliance and self-protection, rather than putting anything on. And then how those riches one gains with ageing, in order to be fully savoured, must be given back and wrapped around the bare and vulnerable youth, like a necessary layer of love and care and understanding. And how then and only then, new songs for the future can be heard.
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).
