Review: PALACE at Bethesda Theatre

PALACE was an immersive, important dance performance in the local tradition of giving a voice to those normally hidden from mainstream culture.

Taking place inside the Bethesda Theatre, the audience entered into the experience: a strict briefing, tightly controlled movements, hard seating and, if they were lucky enough to get one, a blanket to huddle together underneath through the forty minute performance of dance and visual effects. 

The action took place around the semi-restored church - itself a miraculous symbol of recovery requiring years of hard grind by volunteers - with the pulpit providing the main actor's safe space to sleep. Visual effects created clever illusions of snow drifting up, wobbling walls and ghosts in every corner. Many of the projections and sets were childlike in their portrayal of houses and comfortable imagined windows, which made small children's performances of insecure, freezing nights and family conflicts even more heartbreaking.

Live organ and songs performed by a well-wrapped choir echoed the Bethesda's roots as a spiritual home and it was convincing as a space where the homeless would find both refuge and new danger. Recorded voices broke into the space, mingled in with the live action and projections to tell the stories of both men and women who have found themselves homeless over the decades in a city where there is considered to be surplus housing. 

The performance was superb in building empathy through the experience rather than preaching. It didn't explain too much, rather allowing long, meditative stretches for the audience to decide meanings for themselves. It avoided sentimentalising the experience of the homeless, but still showed the upsides and the quiet hands that increasingly provide the city's only safety net.

The run took place just days before a host of benefit cuts and tax rises hit the poorest in our city. We already have a rapid increase in food bank dependency and will undoubtedly see more evictions over the next few months. We're not a city that shouts very loud. Rather than get angry, people get their heads down and get on. PALACE was authentic in its representation of the city's energy and dignity, a groundbreaking piece of work that did justice to its surroundings.

PALACE will soon be available on DVD from restoke and for a taste of the experience, here's the trailer:

Two ideas for Stoke's community assets

Why couldn't we spend a £40 million capital loan on current council-owned buildings across the city instead of just one? Here are two ideas for what we could do with them if we did, for debate:

Make every space a working web hub
The advantage of having so many buildings across the city in an era of broadband should be obvious. Forget the idea of single-use, purpose-built offices and make it possible for every council worker and councillor to book and log in to a computer in any council building. They could also use the spaces for meeting local people and partners or to support day service users and others with care needs. Charge organisations or projects that can afford it, otherwise allow free use - prioritising paid hiring and asking groups who are meeting for free to be flexible with the space they have. Make wifi available even if computers aren't possible. Put in more terminals if they can be supported - free for library uses and the unemployed, perhaps with subscriptions for those who want to spend longer on them. Train staff to train more volunteers to encourage even more people to get online and provide the often intensive one-to-one support this initially requires, or to run local informative web services the rest of the time. This would make a massive contribution to digital inclusion in the city, bringing cost-saving benefits to council and other government services. It could bring community members out of their houses and give them valuable experience and skills and the people who become really good at it can end up trainers, consultants or entrepreneurs.

Broadband also provides a wealth of further business possibilities: low-cost studios for local photographers or rooms with specialised hardware and software for organisations that occasionally need them but can't afford a full suite of their own, or for education. Secure storage facilities and meeting rooms could again be rented to organisations or provided to council workers to enable work across the city without always using cars. Huge numbers of us could then work within walking distance rather than having to commute, which would have a positive effect on rush hour and make Stoke an even more pleasant city to live in. If we need to go across the city for a meeting, then we can stay over there and work rather than having to dart back to a fixed office. A lot of these facilities will require funding as well, but this can be developed gradually with creative, small projects including, of course, energy generating projects.

Social enterprise coffee shops should be encouraged everywhere to provide grazing for the emerging generation of people who want to work virtually with wifi as well as older people who want to stay warm and get out to meet people. These shouldn't undercut local markets but should provide test-trading spaces that allow people to start out in small business, as has been done within some of the markets, and learn skills, as seen very successfully at the Burslem School of Art cafe. Again, as long as the basic infrastructure is provided, barriers to entry can be reduced and as people become more confident they can  move on and encourage more people to follow in their footsteps.

Broaden business planning and grow confidence 
The current CAT process puts enormous pressure on small community groups and committees to find all the answers by themselves. Just as with Tunstall pool, the likely answer is that there is no wealthy flock of pool-goers queuing up to maintain an expensive Victorian pool within the current recession. The pool was enormously popular but relied on subsidies and school visits. That isn't to say that the same group couldn't have been an effective steering group, growing local involvement and finding new income streams for the pool. The group's biggest problem was that as soon as the pool closed, its users dispersed and the life was drained from a passionate campaign and loyal groups.

You could have many groups working for different generations or different parts of a building and its gardens, spreading the workload and risk and drawing on wider population groups. The best example of this working is Burslem Park, where years of volunteer effort developed into a strong, viable Heritage Lottery funded project with equal input from the council and other partners.

The groups of volunteers who are attempting to take on big, risky community centres and run them sustainably deserve a confidence boost and a lot more love and respect. Councillors and officers should be shouting about their efforts from every rooftop and linking them up with every source of help they can think of. They're doing it for the benefit of others in their community, people who in many cases can't afford to go anywhere else. Many are themselves retired and would prefer to be users than building managers. Many more people will not - can not - get involved because they haven't got time or energy for what looks all too often like an impossible challenge. A few of these groups make it to become strong cooperatives or development organisations. Others dwindle and struggle on.

To hand over the entire risk of community buildings is unfair and, potentially, undemocratic unless you can get definite assurances that they will make it available for the whole community; borne more out of desperation to save money than any strategic thinking. Kneejerk hurtling towards closure leads to expensive, depressing, confidence-sapping monoliths sitting in some of the most high-profile parts of the city. Instead, basic coordination, facilitation and maintenance of buildings and land could be provided by the council while they are in their ownership - not forgetting that this cost and responsibility could be handed over if they are sold to viable organisations that have had the time and space to develop properly.

This Land is Mine and Psycho - a comparison

Today I watched the 1943 movie 'This Land is Mine'. Amazed that the internet mice haven't written more about the links between this film and Psycho, I thought I should oblige. I've tried to avoid spoilers here as I do recommend both films if you're not already familiar with them. 

This Land is Mine is a fairly explicit propaganda film made once America was involved in the second world war. It is set "Somewhere in Europe" and that somewhere is probably France. It starts out as a lightly comical look at life under occupation but later becomes a courtroom drama. The transformation of the main character is from cowardly schoolteacher and mother's boy to upstanding pacifist martyr, speaking out for his nation and finding a voice to express himself to the woman he loves. It has some great speeches, wittily shows how resistance took place in nations that ceased to be free and effectively portrays the easy charm of the Nazi message in starving Europe. It highlights at several points how easily the "middle classes" (which has a wider meaning in America than Britain) in any country can become collaborators. It reaches out to different audiences across the seas by including a reading from the French Bill of the Rights of Man, which has much in common with the USA Declaration of Independence. They were both influenced by Thomas Paine who spent much of his life in France and America winding up his old country by being the really popular writer of Rights of Man. This Land is Mine is a wonderfully stirring affirmation of human rights. It had a record-breaking release at the box office, according to its Wikipedia entry. Its publicity poster, and the title, puts me in mind of Gone with the Wind with the red sky and a strong woman in the forefront (1939).

Source: Wikipedia: fair use claimed.

But enough background, onto the intertextuality! As a media studies student I gained more than a passing acquaintance with the symbolism in the 1960 version of Psycho and, although I'm going to have to watch it again to really indulge myself, many crossovers leap out. Most obviously, the mother and son relationship has been completely caricatured in the later film, with Bates picking up the metaphor in the courtroom scene that "we are all two people" and running with it to portray the twisted relationship in which his 'mother' persona kills women out of jealously and possessiveness. In This Land, the killing is not done with a big knife, but by informing. In a couple of cases, this looks far too much like deliberate copying for comic effect, such as a sillouette of Charles Laughton coming down the stairs that looks like the famous view of a Hitchcock cameo and his bursting towards a frosted door with murder in mind has echoes in Janet Leigh's shower scene. I'm sure someone will tell me if I'm reading too much in to this. 

In Psycho, Saul Bass's titles and much of Hitchcock's direction includes shadows and the screen being split by lines, suggesting split personalities. In This Land the shadows of windows elegantly show the reality of imprisonment despite apparent freedom. This is underlined by the release of a pigeon that is trapped and given to one of the main characters for food. This theme is again echoed in a monologue by Norman Bates about his creepy taxidermy collection. Is there a tabby cat in Psycho? In This Land, the tabby belongs to the woman Londy loves who comes into his bedroom through the window at night (the cat, that is, not the woman). He brings the cat down to breakfast in the morning and gives it treats in small acts of rebellion against his overbearing mother who, obviously, hates the cat. The camera lingers on a crushed rose given to the character by the emasculating Nazi soldier as he quoted lines from Romeo and Juliet at him and tried to woo him into yet more betrayal. More watching and reading to see if there are any links there. 

So the question, my fellow students, is: what were the makers of Psycho trying to do by nicking so many of the elements of a film about Nazi-occupied Europe? Psycho is based on a novel written the previous year, a fairly straightforward tale of an American gone mad and I think most of the crossovers have been added in Hollywood processes. How about personal links between film-makers? Hitchcock and Laughton were both British and contemporaries, born in the same year and with a similar career path. They never worked together again, as far as the listings tell, following Jamaica Inn, which was Hitchock's last UK-based film before they both went to Hollywood and in which, according to Wikipedia again, there were creative tensions between the two. Could the similarities in character portrayal, in particular of the mother, be theft of a rival's work, or a tribute made in admiration for strong and memorable performances? IMDB's entry on Psycho mentions how much of the film revolves around the new highways that ripped so much of old-time America apart; this could have been a shot at modern society's so-called freedoms or perhaps it was a way to remind some of the audience at least of a film they would have remembered from a more noble, or difficult, time when people faced the sort of choices that make Marion Crane's choices look like actions of a woman in a decadent and self-serving era. Incidentally, comparing the two the portrayal of women is probably more sexist in the later film; although Crane is a liberated modern woman she is punished for it, whereas the two women in This Land, although apparently more dependent on their men, are portrayed as less duplicitous and braver than most of the male characters. Even the mother is a fierce anti-Nazi when they get on the wrong side of her china collection.

Psycho could be trying to revive messages from the earlier period, or it could have been portraying a psychological reaction to the traumas suffered in the old world during the war: Norman Bates' character is portrayed as immature but could be old enough to have grown up in the late 1920s and 30s, coming with his mother like many others and changing their name to something more American. Are we to read Psycho as a portrait of a country pathologically damaged by its roots?

Ot it could all simply be coincidence that these were common symbols and the mother's boy/mother were stereotype characters in this period, making for easy shorthand for Hitchcock and his film-literate audience? Discuss...

We need more than this two-way choice

There is plenty of concern about the NHS. What there isn't going to be, necessarily, is very much protest. This could be for a few reasons. Mass rallies lost credibility for many after they were ignored in our government's determination to invade Iraq. Second, the appeal of going down to London to be kettled for the day is limited, is a headcount on the Strand really so much more pursuasive than a tally of retweets? Third, it might be that the most angry are the least able to march. But beyond all of that, there's also the lack of really compelling alternatives to the path we're taking. We can shout all we like, but I'm struggling to spot other policies waiting in the wings. 

Labour finally got associated with a coherent message with #dropthebill and the risk register work has gradually developed into wide consternation, not least amongst groups who were probably involved in providing evidence for it. And there's no doubt that huge amounts of committed people are campaigning hard and effectively. What doesn't seem clear to me is what would happen if the bill did get dropped. I've had glimpses of the work NHS staff have put in to prepare for what they have seen as the inevitable. They've gritted their teeth and worked through years of uncertainty, which would be considerably extended if the bill was dropped, especially if we had yet more limbo period to thrash out what was going to happen next. Many of the changes so far (if you take out the cuts, which you really shouldn't) are structural and I've seen good arguments put forward that local authorities are the right place for their teams. But if it came to an election, voters would need to be reassured that Labour's policy wouldn't be the same with a slightly different colour. There was little to suggest a different course under the previous government. Yes, Stoke has benefited hugely from health centres and hospitals which are just being completed now, but many were funded under PFI initiatives which enriched the private sector by turning a lot of taxpayer money into profit and calling it debt. Super-rich company directors don't build hospitals; construction workers, engineers and associated trades do. Call me a radical, but would it be so bizarre to just collect taxes to pay for hospitals and then hire those people directly?

If I was casting round for an idea that was better than asking the Queen for help, I'd look back to the people who won power all those decades ago and managed to get the NHS created in the first place. What can we learn from them? We take the NHS for granted and it's probably fair to say that the people who aren't angry or worried aren't imagining a Britain without it. The politicians of my lifetime, at least the ones who have hung onto power, have often been apologetic about the presence of a cradle-to-grave health service, at times treating its recipients like spongers rather than deserving citizens. Where is the party standing proud and saying that the NHS, as it was originally imagined not after years of fragmentation and reorganisation, is just what we still need? Why have we been allowing departments to become so stressed and stretched that people die or get treated inhumanely? What is wrong with us that we can't see the problem in declaring people fit to work while they are receiving chemotherapy? When did we stop seeing that one very good reason for funding people through university is that, statistically, better educated people are healthier? Where are the leaders reminding us that we are a country that fights side-by-side together in peace as well as wartime? (Sidenote: they are in some places, like the Tolpuddle Festival, but that doesn't flow well with heartfelt rhetoric of this post)

A lifetime NHS which links up with everything else and treats people like responsible citizens is the only way to chip away at our timebombs. Public health officials can be heard speaking out to say that exercise is one of the greatest tools we have to prevent expensive ill health. Yet exercise programmes are often still funded without too much fanfare because media departments are worried about the headlines and politicians are too frightened of newspapers whose commercial interest is in keeping us all in fearful, passive consumption. The NHS has done an amazing thing in lengthening people's lives, but we have a way to go to make sure that everyone's old age is dignified and full of joy. As a taxpayer I object every time anyone suggests that we want to see some sort of retribution meted out upon people who had the bad manners to call upon the help of the state. A trusting, caring society with good systems of accountability does not need to constantly worry whether others are fiddling the system, but it seems our distrust is filtering from the top all the way down.

Healthcare is not just the responsibility of the NHS or just national government, but local government too. It's a whole infrastructure of different services that connect together and if they are all made fragile through cuts there is the prospect of the whole lot collapsing. The common thread is that they are supposed to be within the remit of the people we vote for. Without bold politicians in amongst their parties and their communities listening, getting stuck in and debating every view and putting more people onto platforms until the different figureheads look and sound even a little bit different to each other, our movement has a limited choice: fight in ways we don't really believe will work, or stay quiet. We need to start talking, planning and imagining what the future could look like. 

On a clunky 2011 and our new powers

For 2011 I wrote a list of achievements and predictions called Agile Stoke. While I would say that it has been more clunky than agile, 2011 has been noteworthy because we hit mass adoption of the web. Before reflecting on the local area, I'm going to pick out three interesting examples that show how mass behaviour can make change happen.

• First we had Occupy. I loved the mashing together of the old and new, the rapid spread of ideas and the bravery and inventiveness of those who took considerable personal risks to further a cause which could not adequately be communicated through our older structures. Occupy is complex, messy and thought-provoking - exactly what politics needs.
• Second the riots, subsequent clean-up and political/punitive aftermath. 
• Third, concern over many retail chains. Was this due to unemployment, lack of confidence in the economy, people's switch to online shopping or the start of a move away from corporate chains? Probably a combination of all of these things. 

As many pointed out, outbursts like riots and occupations are not new. Nor do they exist because of web tools. This is the kind of dull argument that distracts from what is interesting about these happenings, because for most people web tools are no longer shiny, new things to be talked about as brands, they are woven into our lives. They are simply like the pavements we walk on or the houses we live in. It is no more newsworthy to say that riots were organised using BBM than it is to say that people live in tents. Both things may be of interest to those interested in technology or housing, but journalists will have to make more of an effort to keep our attention. We need more curation in 2012.

In Stoke, the Facebook ad process says that I can now reach 124,000 people over 18 within Stoke-on-Trent. Now that number needs to be treated with a pinch of salt, because some people will not have registered themselves in Stoke, others will be younger than 18, some will have more than one account and others may be living outside the city but have registered themselves with the nearest city. But bearing all that in mind, it's still a very high number. It is - if I've done the maths right - 61% of the amount of people registered to vote and 109% of the number of ballots issued in the 2010 general election. Yup, roughly speaking, more people have signed up for Facebook in Stoke-on-Trent than turned out to vote. Draw your own conclusions.

This indicator of the internet's popularity had other effects. For earlier adopters, Twitter because less like a few communities of interest and much more difficult to keep track of. Early in 2011, David Elks of the Sentinel could easily find nearly 100 people to snap up places for a Tweetup (and around half that actually turned up, which isn't bad in the web world), but finding coherence in follow-up actions proved difficult. I felt less able to stay in touch with many people I like enormously because there are just so many of you buggers. Indeed, everytime I try to weed people out I am just reminded of how interesting, nay inspiring, you all are. Add to that the awareness that there are so many more great people I have never connected with and it's easy to feel overwhelmed. It's a difficult problem for people who love the firehose because we can actually drown ourselves. I try to make sure I switch off (almost) as much as I dive in, but definitely felt that I missed a lot this year and I also lost a lot of time just trying to tune up my filtering tools, especially in light of changes they made.

What had been called the Stoke Twitter community lost some of its energy and a few hyperlocal blogs fell along the wayside. I felt at the time that this was inevitable and that bloggers should not feel under pressure to keep things going for ever. Partly in response, Facebook groups got quite busy but again those conversations seem to be waning a little. These pulses should, I think, be seen as part of the natural order of the web. People will gather and disperse again like shoals of fish and we don't need to create feeding frenzies just to get them to our ponds, we just need to make some more canals between them. Pitsnpots had a rocky year but ended it with the announcement that it is to be a pioneering project of the Journalism Foundation - well deserved recognition of the part it has played in Stoke's democratic history over the last couple of years and very promising for the future. Meanwhile the Sentinel started a digital column, great for local digital activists to reach paper readers, and 6 Towns Radio and My Tunstall both continued to thrive and develop. On my own projects, Delicious's decision to take down tag clouds took the wind out of my Social Stoke sails, but luckily this has now been reinstated and I have my tagging enthusiasm back again - with some help from the WEA volunteer Andrew we've now reached 1,548 links.

Despite all the challenges it will face, many of the advantages Stoke has make it well prepared for a good year. We have a mature sector of people working and volunteering in new media and a supportive old media. Everyone knows each other - that's always been the case but now Facebook and Linkedin makes it easier to see. We're a city of interconnected towns and villages with plentiful cheap buildings and land. Outside investors come and go - the commitment of Prince Charles' charities in particular gives hope for 2012 - while the dominance of the council in saying what can and cannot happen is being shaken up, albeit gradually. Many of our strengths were on display at the Stoke Stories conference which was ably organised by Tristram Hunt's team and the RSA. The conversations continue here.

What people need now to break through the gloom that is so pervasive is knowledge about the opportunities that mass adoption of the internet creates. Nearly all of us, including nonliners, are now connected to people who can reach each other with the click of a button. The exception is truly isolated individuals, for whom special attention - ie funding, not cuts - is needed. Our personal networks are excellent jumping off points to find forms of power that in many cases aren't new, but are more accessible to those who were previously disconnected from them. The other new thing about them is that they're made possible not by the web itself, but by the fact that we have these networks that can amplify and share what we do. Returning to the first three examples I quoted, they all showed how change can happen because we can now be more aware of each other's thoughts and feelings. The consequences of this can be good or bad and we can all play a role as influencers.

One of the reasons I highlighted the rise of online buying is that while it may well threaten retail jobs, there is an opportunity for people to start selling directly to customers around the world. We need policies and bold politicians that support people within an economic landscape that is likely to move very rapidly and unpredictably. We need to be able to seek and capitalise upon the good times, as well as support people through the bad. While the council's Mandate for Change vision is quite good on the former, no longer just putting all its eggs into one poorly-spelt retail basket, as a Labour controlled council they should, in my view, be fighting tooth-and-nail to maintain and even improve core services and community spaces.

So I've made another list: ten powers that we have now that more of us are online. All of them involve some learning and none of them should be seen as easy, but they are all things that I have seen other people achieve using the web. Many of you reading this will know how to get started so if you do, please help someone who doesn't. And if you know someone doing one of these things, take a second to retweet or share.

Now that we are (nearly) all online, we - you! - can do all this: 

• trade
• connect with people you admire
• find work
• report your own news, and your town's 
• run a TV channel
• build our own websites, networks and applications
• learn about almost anything
• contribute to policy and debate
• start big local or global movements
• raise funds

More ideas, and examples of the above in action, are very welcome. Happy New Year!