Once upon a time, wise old age was an object of aspiration and a pinnacle of collective societal experience. In the 21st century ageing is perceived as a form of diminishment, something to be hidden away, denied and resisted. The question is not so much how and why we got to this point, but rather what is at stake when we deny the reality of ageing? What insights are we pushing away? What means of empowerment do we reject?

Having spent his whole career working with local, national and international communities to bring meaning, beauty and art out of the seemingly ordinary, director Alan Lyddiard has dedicated the eighth decade of his life to making theatre with the older residents of Leeds. Growing out of his work with Heydays at Leeds Playhouse and a number of community groups around the city, Lyddiard’s Performance Ensemble has also just gained the National Portfolio Organisation funding from the Arts Council of England and is set to embark on an exciting new journey of professionalising and spotlighting collaborative creation of older artists.

A recent two week run of Sinfonia at the Playhouse’s Quarry Theatre marks the culmination of the Performance Ensemble’s endeavours so far and serves as a fitting crossover to the new phase. In good old Lyddiard-fashion – characteristic of his project-model approach to programming developed during his leadership of Northern Stage (1992-2005) – Sinfonia is additionally framed by a rich array of related cross-artform events named ‘1001 Stories’ and billed as a ‘takeover of the Playhouse by the generation that brought you punk’.

1001 Stories is furthermore part of the Leeds 2023 celebration – a year of culture, envisaged originally, before Brexit, as a potential European City of Culture bid for the West Yorkshire city.

Stories, in the broadest sense of the word, are indeed what holds this programme together. They include testimonies, reminiscences, origin stories, stories of migration, love and revolution, accounts of successes and thwarted dreams, biographies and autobiographies. Stories of different genres, they are rendered here in song, dance, music, visual and digital arts, film and cookery, as well as through straightforward speech and conversation. Performance art veterans John Fox and Sue Gill (co-founders of Welfare State International), filmmaker Ken Loach, musician Dunstan Bruce of Chumbawamba side by side with local community groups and guests from China and Hong Kong contribute to the takeover to amplify The Performance Ensemble’s efforts. In addition, some of the personal stories shared in Sinfonia are also given fuller-length standalone treatment in 1001 Stories. For example, Paulette Morris’s testimony about her father St Clair Morris bringing the Caribbean love of the steel pan music to the population of Yorkshire is here expanded in collaboration with activist/director Khadijah Ibrahiim, and shown at the Playhouse in the form that may evoke the Leeds West Indian carnival and the work of the one-time Associate at this theatre – Geraldine Connor.

There is a story in Sinfonia about synchronicities and how there are moments in life which unexpectedly crystallise mysterious workings of interconnections on a larger scale. One such moment for me was when Alan Lyddiard asked me to Leeds to see this work. Having made Sinfonia and the 1001 Stories takeover together with a number of other past collaborators from his Northern Stage days – choreographer Tammy McLorg, actor Alex Elliott, designer Neil Murray, producers Mark Dobson, Mandy Stewart, Paul Crewes and composer Nikola Kodjabashia – Alan kindly brought me to Leeds too to help him reflect on his ongoing work as his former company dramaturg.

But, as it happens, there was more to it than that. And while we are on the topic of telling stories – here is mine. A story Alan didn’t actually know about me.

*

I had first arrived in Leeds in 1993, aged 19, with two hand-held suitcases (before the ones with wheels were invented). My home country Yugoslavia had gone up in flames two years previously. Although struck by sanctions and a galloping inflation, Serbia, where I was coming from, was not the actual warzone. I could not claim that my life would be in danger if I returned and therefore I was not technically in a position to seek political asylum. But, filled with youthful enthusiasm, I was seeking a sense of normality and a brighter future, and by some stroke of luck, I had been one of the last girls from Serbia to be granted an au pair visa to come to this town I had only heard of in a song by the Sisters of Mercy.

During my nine years in Leeds, I lived in Alwoodley, Chapeltown, Little London, Clarendon Road and Headingly. I took English classes at Park Lane College and the Joseph Priestly in Beeston, lived at the YWCA, worked briefly at a teashop in Burton Arcade, survived an armed robbery on Chapeltown Road, and had an immigration case at the Law Centre in Harehills. I had hearings, tribunals and appeals, and was eventually funded by the Leeds Local Educational Authority to do a Theatre and Communication Studies degree at Huddersfield University. I had a student Metro card and took countless train and bus journeys around West Yorkshire, making friends in Wakefield, Halifax, Bradford and Holmfirth. Burning to write and work in theatre, I spent much of my free time and limited cash at the then West Yorkshire Playhouse, run by Jude Kelly. But also I often ventured out to the Northern School of Contemporary Dance, Hyde Park Cinema, Arts Café, Roundhay Park, and occasionally, out of female solidarity and love of vegetarian food, Hansa’s restaurant on North Street. Before I got to Newcastle to work with Alan at the end of that journey, I had notched up a first class BA, a Sunday Times award for theatre criticism, a PhD, and a marriage certificate (though sadly that marriage did not survive the relocation).

Thirty years on, several more UK relocations and another marriage later, Alan’s invitation found me in southern Sweden where I had moved recently with my new husband’s work. Post-Brexit regulations have meant that I could not continue my job at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in London and at the same time take care of my young family in Sweden. This meant having to come to terms with the end of a career path I had been pursuing for 25 years, combined with a midlife crisis and a burn out from a project I had just completed during the lockdown. This winter in Sweden has been a dark one in more ways than one. Dramaturgically speaking, I could not make sense of the way in which the final act of my British years had fallen flat and fizzled out, without a big finale, a punchline or a meaningful conclusion. Alan’s invitation carried a promise of a closure.

*

On my arrival to Leeds I don’t get to see Sinfonia straightaway; it is being saved for the end of my stay.

Instead I am soaking in the city bedecked with Union Jacks for the coronation weekend. I am lurking around the edges of the Takeover, chatting and hugging long-lost friends. I am aware more than ever before of how memory is contained in insignificant details: a railway bridge, a street corner, a shop front, a previously unnoticed slope. I am working through the layers of familiar and unfamiliar, old and new, deliberate and incidental. I am realising how hopeful it must have been to grow one’s dreams for the future in this landscape of red brick and black soot framed by every shade of luscious green, in the run up to Tony Blair’s Cool Britannia and, later, his warmongering years. I am drawn to reading the blue plaques I had never even noticed before. I see how much I had taken for granted the inherent convenience of this compact but bountiful market town.

Well before I get to see Sinfonia I am thinking of my walk down the memory lane as an inherently immersive, symphonic experience, with different instrumental lines competing to swim up to the surface.

When I finally get to see it, even though I have known Alan’s work for decades, the show still takes me by surprise with its earnestness and simplicity. Every person in it shines with uniqueness and personal dignity; seeming as though they had been handpicked out of hundreds and thousands for the occasion. Each story is held up by the ensemble with extreme care. Parents, lovers, activists, nurses, smokers, scientists, carers and grandparents weaving that fine mesh of interconnectedness. Singing. Leaning on their walking sticks. Dancing with unsettling amounts of inexhaustible energy. A smiling deaf lady tells us her needs. A Chinese-born Leeds citizen speaks her story in her mother tongue. Oh Bella Ciao blares out. This is not a show that merely ticks boxes of equality, diversity and inclusion – this is a show that just is; thinking as it does outside of the box, modelling mindfulness, being effortless in its beauty. One by one colourful umbrellas are held up high over the individuals’ heads, suggesting protection without obligation. Light clouds pass gently by even higher still. Gilded chairs are stomped across the stage. The music at the base of it all is complex and powerful and searing – coming live out of four pianos and 20 glockenspiels, as well as an assortment of other percussion instruments. Two very different kinds of pianists – meeting on this stage from different walks of life but equally virtuosic – hold the show in perfect harmony together.

Punctuated by two moments of engulfing and unapologetic anger, this hour and twenty minutes is mostly however about love. Pure and to the point, at times even tough, but love without cheap sentimentality. Layers of seemingly insignificant things add up generously here to a vision for a future. A vision that insists on creating both space and accountability for those who are coming, and a vision that is above all setting an example in aging with grace.

If nothing else, I know that this is exactly what I need right now, and that I would not have it any other way.

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).