Posted by: nickwardscenarios | February 9, 2010

Hats off to Kirsten Lavers and FLACK

sweet4

http://nickwardscenarios.wordpress.com/2010/02/05/debate-is-raging-in-cambridge/

‘Flack’ won the vote.

Hot from the first Committee meeting I am thrilled to report that an extraordinarily exciting new arts organisation has been born in Cambridge.

To quote Phil Cope, author of Holy Wells: Wales (foreword by Jan Morris), who chaired the first committee meeting: Flack could provide a model (and franchise) which he hopes will have a national and international application. The New New Deal, Mr Obama.

Nothing less will do.

The magazine will be monthly, the base will include artists’ studios , rehearsal, exhibition and performance space – and a cafe.

Posted by: nickwardscenarios | February 7, 2010

Dominic Dromgoole, Stratfordian and wonderful man of theatre

Dominic Dromgole ‘Stratfordian and wonderful man of theatre’ is my next ammendment to this blog featuring a great teacher I have recently encountered, Elspeth Owen, Greenham Common pioneer and artist with a wicked sense of humour and: http://nickwardscenarios.wordpress.com/2009/12/26/blue-moon-on-new-years-eve/

this kind of stuff really freaks Dom out. It’s cowpat time, Dromgoole.

Added Saturday 6 Feb.

One of the standout paragraphs in Dom’s lively and humane ‘Will & Me’ (Penguin 2006) is when Dom and his great mate Quentin Seddon have woken up after a kip within the magic, sacred, Rollright Stones Circle and it sums up both what is adorable about Dom and what is most dumfoundingly anti-mystical about him. First here’s Dom’s description of the circle, underwhelmed and accurate:

‘We find them behind a hedge. We are a little underwhelmed. They are a low-key Stonehenge, an almost perfect circle of three-foot-high, weather bashed and beaten prehistoric stones. The diameter of the circle is about a hundred feet – exactly the same as the Globe, by a strange coincidence.’

It’s no coincidence, Dom! Here’s one I did earlier (and not as a result of reading Dromgoole!):

The Theatre of the Future and ‘Stonehenge (2008)’

images 

DSC08434_2(2008)

When knackered Dom wakes up: ‘I purloin some rods’ (from chaotic diviners) ‘and set out across the middle. At regular intervals, every three paces, the wire rod twangs violently in one directions and then another. Gratified, I cross back, and they twang with perfect symmetry in the opposite direction. Brought up near Glastonbury, and over-burdened with ley-line, hippy-dippy mythology as I had been, I had always successfully rejected the idea of earth forces. The crude instruments in my hand contradicts me. Quentin gives me a long ‘There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in you philosophy’ look, and we move on.’

Bravo Quentin! I wonder what Dom thinks used to happen inside these stones. Who presided and with what invocations, riddles and ritual (sacrifice)? To what purpose?

Why were the earliest London theatres (or story-telling circles, what you will) located near wells and places of exceptional earth power?

Why do Churches make, arguably, the best provisional theatres? Check out the ancient chapel in Ely Place, London, and imagine a production of Macbeth in there. If you dare having read up about the human-sacrificial purpose this (originally) pre-Christian chapel used to entertain.

 That’s not speculation. No crosses in there, Dom, (originally) just a profoundly spooky atmosphere. oooooohhhhh!

If a theatre-maker were to come to Dom with a ’show’ which delves into this stuff would he get all ironic and sceptical or would he remember the twanging rod?

Here’s an Anglo Saxon Riddle (Number 85, p 82; The Earliest English Poems, Penguin Classics 1996), written many thousands of years after the construction of the Rollright Stones but about the earliest written-down record we have of some kind of spectator-event.

Many were met, men of discretion

wisdom and wit, when in there walked…

Two ears it had, and one eye solo,

two feet and twelve hundred heads,

back, belly, a brace of hands

a pair of sides and shoulders and arms

and one neck. Name, please.

(Michael Alexander’s translation)

Don’t worry, Dom, its one of the unsolved riddles. When I read it I see the 1,200 heads becoming one in the presence of a story-teller. The playwright-performer with as many heads as there are spectators. Something like that. No subject. No object. The unifying force of the theatre remembered?

And just to prove that Anglo Saxon Riddlers could out-do Samuel Beckett and Peter Brook, here’s number 75 from the same sequence:

I saw a woman sit alone.

Dom writes wonderfully throughout on Shakespeare’s resistance to concept-heavy interpretation (academic or directorial), most tellingly on King Lear (as an ‘exploded play) and on Macbeth Dom’s writing-hand seems to tremble with the very same childlike fear this blast of occult lore and infinite ‘word-drunkeness’ (F R Leavis) insitils.

‘Sunburst’ (2008)

I was less impressed with Dom’s wrong-headed ‘go’ at Queen Elizabeth 2 when she commented early in her reign that it was hard to believe the filthy Thames was the magical river of dreams it had been for Liza. It was declared a dead river in the early 1960s and I believe the Queen’s comment may have helped bring about one of the greatest environmental turnarounds ever, anywhere in the world. Why is it so fashionable to knock the Queen in subsidised theatre circles?

I’ll come back to this subject. I’m in Cambridge City Library right now and I’m about to be timed-out on the computer. Hence forgive uncorrected text. This blog could grow into something – perhaps I’ve found a home to put into words my experience of clearing a theatre circle for my Master in 1997 which led to one of the most unforgettable nights of my life. Two fires either side and four tribes together dancing and singing (story) to the sound of three digeridoos and clapping sticks which created such a volume of sound and such a sight that cars were stopping on the Great Northern Highway. ‘Can you see the bird?’

Old man Old man with a message for you

There’s a bird if you look in the sound of the digeridoo.

Oh, Dom – why do you have this effect on me? Wanting to tell you things I’ve told no-one else. Perhaps its because directing The Present at the Bush was my London highlight – and you saved the play after it had been rejected by the Court.

Read Stowe for more on the great story-telling marathons around the London Wells – the true source of the histories (apart from Hollinshed, of course).

11

me sculling (2009)

Must dash… — love you Dom you beery and caky old cunt… wish I’d been there to row you down the river. The ’short-cut’ through Staines was a cuntishly dumb-arsed thing to do rather than follow the magestic sweeps of Silver Thames.

Added Monday 8 Feb:

Woke up this morning with the absolute conviction that I was back in my childhood bedroom in the attic of the Queen’s Hall, Ely. I just lay there and tried to work out why. I must have been transported by sticking-dreams brought on by yesterday’s blog, which I leave uncorrected.

NOTES

‘Notes’ – how academic of me! (On the day of The Guardian’s front page story about arch-philistine New labour war-maker Peter Mandelson’s  5% cut in Government funding to Higher Education. Not such a bad idea you might think if they were to target the ghastlystrators (a coinage meaning ghastly university administrators caused by the very annoying ‘over-ride’ facility which I have no idea how to de-activate) but they won’t, they’ll target the kinds of departments like Anglo-Saxon where brilliant accademics like Michael Alexander used to do their work.)

Here is Alexander quoted from his introduction to The Earliest English Poems. ‘At the opening of a conference on the medieval and renaissance literature of Scotland held in 1981 at the University of Stirling the news was received that the Conservative government, led by a former Minister of Education, had cut the grant to universities by one tenth. Stirling had to cut its intake by a quatrer’.

He cannot bear to speak her name. I remember very clearly (1981) receiving in my Corpus Christi College (Cambridge) pidgeon-hole a memo (distributed by College!) claiming that we were to have our grants turned into loans and how did we feel about that? When we Freshmen bemusedly asked the Senior Tutor’s Office what the hell this was all about we were told it was just a prank. I would like to check this with Corpus as it seemed such a strange and unfunny joke. Was extreme right-wing Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, willingly pushing the thatcherite cause of grant-cutting? Another question for Stuart Laing, the current Master. A career Classicist. Diplomat. Embattled man of Peace, by his own admission. Kick out the middle-men, Stuart – invest in the eccentrics – swim upstream. Kick ass!

Letter to Stuart Laing, Master, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge

The Ruin

Well-wrougt this wall – Wieards (origin of my English surname, Weard: Ward = ‘protector’; ‘Druidical clan leader’, I’m very proud to say)broke it. The stonghold burst…Snapped roof trees, towers fallen, the work of Giants (Romans)…the stonesmiths mouldereth. (Alexander’s translation, my punctuation and ‘notes’).

Here are the full quotes from Dominic Dromgoole’s ‘Will & Me, How Shakespeare Took Over My Life’.

1. P.37-8. On Macbeth (10 out of 10)

Macbeth:

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day

To the last syllable of recorded time

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage

And then is heard no more; it is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury

Signifying nothing.

Dom: …this (speech) was one that popped up unbidden in the head in that terrifying moment before sleep, the moment when your mind starts whirring just as your body is shutting doen. Everything in one side of the brain is screaming stop, go to sleep, while the other side is like a computer screen invaded by spam. Ideas and images and connections pop up deliriously all over the screen. ‘My mind is ruling me. I can’t rule my mind!’ my eldest daughter wails, when this moment hits. The same invasion of mental effervescence harrassed me – it still returns to haunt me once or twice a year – but as a child it was daily torture. The questions are starker as a child, the connections more fierce, since they have wider chasms to bridge.

Nick: Here it comes. Dromgoole brilliance.

Dom: Nothing provoked those nights more than that speech. The mind reeled and twisted back to the begining of the universe and swooped towards the end of the world, all decorated in the same unknowability.

Jester: In my strutting image, Dom, in my strutting and fretting image.

2. P.277 (1 out of 10. When and on which channel was this television interview?).

‘The Queen remembered once on television sailing up the river towards Westminster with Winston Churchill shortly after her coronation. She said, in her stangulated accent. ‘I remember Churchill looking down on the Thames and speaking of it as ‘the silver thread that runs through history’, and I looked out on this dirty, commercial river and thought, ‘Can this really be true?’ Well there is poetry in some souls, and not in others.’

Dom, do you have any idea what a stinking channel the Thames had become by the early 1950s? When my father was sculling the river at Putney in the late 40s – early 50s it was a dreaded imperative that stomachs were pumped if there was a capsize. It stank. This was the foul and shamefull river Churchill was looking at at and grandiloquently over-looking in his purple prose. He could have said to the Queen. ‘Let’s clean the Thames up’. No. You have got it totally the wrong way around. And you should apologise to Her Majesty and invite her to a show. She might have a Ball and really let her hair down – and commission a new barge from my friends at Richmond Bridge Boathouses and get rowed down the river with a grand flotilla and wave graciously at her adoring subjects.

(me teaching in ‘Ivan’ in 2007 at Hammersmith as Boatman at Furnivall Sculling Club).

For the first time in her reign. Who would be the loser? You call her speech patterns ’strangulated’. I think that is unnecessarily rude. Would you prefer her to affect ‘Estuary’?

3…

60988

well we know Tarleton was part of it LOL

imagesCAPE4HKP

I am the Boatman (2009)

c

Liza, Liza, dream with me

I’ll meet you by the willow at the house of John Dee

Liza, Liza, boat with me

I’ll take you down the river all the way to the sea

I am the Boatman

2007-12-22-104852

Liza, Liza, standing tall

I am the Boatman with a crystal ball

I can drown or I can burn

Either way I don’t return

I am the Boatman

AL-CB1-JohnDeesSeal

We embark when the tide is slack

This time round there’s no turning back

The mystic paintings on the cabin wall

The stork and the book and the burning fall

I am the Boatman

CathalMcNaughton-PA460

Liza, Liza, calling back

Stop the day from turning black

Who’s to say that it was just a dream?

floating down  in the Tideway stream

I am the Boatman

251415044iQDDzZ_fsd_dee_john_illus

http://bdoza.wordpress.com/2009/09/20/a-dailys-crusade-to-save-our-rivers/#comment-2895

4. nickwardscenarios – October 22, 2009

How we go about the continued environmental protection of the Thames which in the 1960s was declared a ‘dead’ river is to impress upon politicians that a clean river always has the support of the majority. Polluters must be prosecuted. Rivers are the life-blood of the planet. Sacred geometry in action. Good luck with your battle to create a future for your children. Nick Ward, River Environmentalist.

Be fearless. Polluters are the scum of the earth.

http://nickwardscenarios.wordpress.com/2009/10/21/boris/

Posted by: nickwardscenarios | February 5, 2010

Debate is raging in Cambridge

Wonderful Editor Kirsten Lavers (well-known to Nick Ward Scenarios regulars) has rustled (and battled) up support for a brand new arts and features magazine to replace the de-funded Willow Walker. What should it be called?

Posted by: nickwardscenarios | February 5, 2010

Dylan (2008)

What can I tell you about Kirsten Lavers?

She spotted me painting at the essential Cambridge homeless drop-in oasis called Winter Comfort early last year and she featured my paintings in Willow Walker. This was a boost. She got me talking about the theatre again and she published the interview. She’s one of life’s angels.

‘Dylan’ was my one of my first attempts at painting someone or something rather than just applying colour to paper and finding patterns in abstraction.

The poem is one of Dylan’s faves by Robert Burns:

O, my Luve’s like a red, red rose,
That’s newly sprung in June.
O, my Luve’s like a melodie
That’s sweetly play’d in tune.

As fair as thou, my bonnie lass,
So deep in luve am I;
And I will love thee still, my dear,
Till a’ the seas gang dry.

Till a’ the seas gang dry, my dear,
And the rocks melt wi’ the sun:
I will love thess till, my dear,
While the sands o’ life shall run:

And fare thee well, my only luve!
And fare thee weel, a while!
And I will come again, my luve,
Tho’ it ware ten thousand mile.

Posted by: nickwardscenarios | February 4, 2010

Me, I love the river

Me, I love the River (2005, revised 2009)

Yewbarrow-and-Wasdale-Head-Wastwater

http://www.martinlawrencephotography.com/

City has its freedom, city has its vice

Thanks to Hare Krishna for the vegetables and rice

Me, I love the river and the babbling mountain stream

The cliffs and screes of Wasdale, England’s ancient dream

River-Thames

City has its freedom, City has its vice

Men in suits at the peepshow, like a mob of horny mice

Me I love the river, sweet Thames run gently on

Til I end my story of the times that are long gone

Swan_River,Perth,Western_Australia

City has its freedom, City has its vice

Hookers, pushers, drifters, hair full of tiny lice

Me I love the river, where the black swan glides at night

And poor neglected children learn the reason they must fight

fitzroy-crossing

City has its freedom, city has its vice

All mixed up together, Lord, makes me feel quite nice

Me I love the river, the Fitzroy’s mighty roar

When the rain comes down from heaven, Lord, and knocks down heaven’s door

sculler

City has its freedom, City has its vice

I met an old man travelling and he gave me sound advice

Always love the river, wherever you may roam

For if you love the river you will always have a home

yirra

For Miri x


From: martin@martinlawrencephotography.com
To: nick
Subject: Re: Use of copyrighted image
Date: Fri, 24 Jul 2009 11:37:28 +0100 

Thanks Nick – the link is great. All is forgiven.
 
Wasdale is one of my favourite places. The scenery is so dramatic. It just cries out to be photographed. I hope I’ve gone some way to doing it justice.
 
To Martin: The photo caught me by the hairs of my imagination and unlocked the kind of cultural/childhood memories that make sense of being a poet. You have an exceptional eye, my friend.

I love the depth of that water – a deeply mysterious lake – full of changeabilty. 

 
**************************************************************************************************************
From: martin@martinlawrencephotography.com
To: nick
Subject: Re: Wastwater
Date: Fri, 24 Jul 2009 11:59:16 +0100: Thanks –  it’s suppose to be the deepest lake in Cumbria. A lot of divers dive the lake which apparently is very cold with lots of underground caves giving it extra mystery.
 
Martin

 

 
From Nick:
 
That makes it the deepest lake in England too. Yes it is extremely cold and very dangerous. Once as a 12 year old I was night-fishing (the trout taste so good and fit!) and some drunken swimmers set off from the shallows near the campsite enjoying the very thin layer of warm water after a baking hot day. It was a moonless night. Soon they were in real trouble and lost all sense of direction (voices echo against the steep screes) and were in a state of panic as their legs began to freeze. Luckily I had a white towel with me which I waved at them and showed up thanks to the magical flashes of electrical light discharging on the mountains. They got back safely. Thankfully.
 
It was defintely 1974 because I remember Watergate was on the news. Nixon squirming like the worm beneath my bubble float. That was the only way to catch those trout. They would rise to the thin layer of warm water. It took me a long time to work that out. I was very popular with my Mum, Dad and two sisters, Ness and Frankie, when I appeared at dawn with the most delicious Brown Trout it is possible to imagine. Flesh so firm and markings so bright. Could never catch them by day. By day I’d fish the streams or hike up Styhead Pass to Styhead Tarn or further up to the jewell of mountain pools, Sprinking Tarn. No one fished them it seemed and they were plentiful. Happy days of solitude. Fishing is wonderful single-pointed concentration for a restless boy.
 

 HI Nick 

 
Check out the Lakeland Valleys and Tarns shop on my website, the image of Sprinkling Tarn at the top of page 3 may refresh your memory even more. I took this on my way up to Scafell Pike one very still day when there was no wind at all. The place was truly magical.
 
Sprinkling-Tarn-near-Seathwaite
 
Martin
 
 
 
 
 
Subject: memories of Wasdale

 
thanks again – you have really sparked my memory…

 
Posted by: nickwardscenarios | February 1, 2010

Michael Billington on Tony Blair in the Chilcott Zone

‘It was a clever, lawyerly, almost Ciceronian performance in which Blair trotted out all the usual arguments and gave a display of his question-dodging skill. But it would have been much more revealing to see Blair quizzed by the parents, many of them present at the inquiry, of the British soldiers killed in Iraq. Then perhaps he wouldn’t have got away quite so easily, as he did here, with murder. ‘

This is typical Billington – a savage concluding statement arising from Guardian-friendly faint praise (not so faint in ‘lawyerly’ circles invoking Cicero is nothing less than bold. Bold praise)concerning the crime that dare not speak its name: the causes of the illegal invasion of Iraq.

I watched Blair’s performance on the big screen at the Inn on the Green and it struck me most forcibly as the voice of Zionism, from the sickeningly casual defense of Israeli’s use of ‘disproportionate force’ against Palestinian civilians trapped in Concentration Camp Gaza to the ‘I am a General of Unpredicatable Democracy and Iran is next’.

The crime that dare not speak its name?

How successful was the mission in securing Iraq’s oil pipelines? See the liberal intelligentsia squirm behind their driving wheels.

It was the sheer excitement that arose in Blair as he spelled out his mission to bomb the fuck out Iran that should be noted. ‘ I agree with you’, the contemptible Chilcott intoned in his summing up.

They all stuck to the god-awful script. The drama is far from over.

Posted by: nickwardscenarios | January 29, 2010

Adam and Nick at Peter’s place

Int. The Playground, Latimer Road, West London

Nick: I like our conversations to be witnessed.

Adam: Why?

Enter Peter

Jester: Good question.

Posted by: nickwardscenarios | January 28, 2010

Jonathan Steele on Resistence and Recklessness

From Today’s Guardian.

Criticism of the invasion rests on a host of factors – its lack of legality, the manipulation of intelligence, and the lies that were served up to justify war. But the bill of indictment must also include recklessness (the second word the inquiry has missed). If an invader makes no attempt to assess the scale and endurance of potential resistance but assumes an occupation will be easily managed, that amounts to culpable irresponsibility. However easy the seizure of a foreign capital city and the toppling of a dictator might be, Blair and his advisers should have done far more to calculate the cost of trying to run a proud country once its regime was changed. This was not a failure of planning. It was a failure of political common sense. Even if the occupation period had been better planned, resistance was inevitable.

So let me suggest eight questions which should be put to Blair on Friday:

1. Did you at any time before the invasion ask to meet Iraqi exiles who opposed it and inquire into their reasons?

2. Did you know that Britain had occupied the country for many years in an earlier period, and was not popular?

3. Were you aware that vast numbers of Iraqis, including those who hated Saddam, blamed Britain and the US for the sanctions which ruined their living standards in the 1990s?

4. Did you ask your advisers in the Cabinet Office, the Foreign Office, and the intelligence services to assess the state of Iraqi opinion on whether a US- and UK-led occupation would meet resistance, even if it were authorised by a post-invasion Security Council resolution?

5. Did you receive any assessments from within Whitehall that Iraqis would resist occupation and, if so, did you discuss these assessments with the cabinet?

6. Did you ever ask whether French opposition to an invasion might be linked to the fact that they, unlike Britain and the United States, had an embassy in Baghdad throughout the 1990s and this helped them to see how risky and unpopular a western-led occupation would be?

7. Did you receive any assessments from Whitehall that an occupation would act as a recruiting tool for al-Qaida and attract hundreds of foreign jihadis to attack US and British troops in Iraq?

8. Did you receive assessments that it would increase the threat of terrorism in Britain itself?

The charge is that Blair took this country to war not just illegally and unnecessarily, given that Saddam was not an imminent threat, but that he acted with criminal carelessness. Good intentions and the belief that one is right are not a sufficient defence against the charge of recklessness. Actions have to be judged by their predictable consequences. Friday’s hearing is the moment to stick that to the man who put so many British and Iraqi lives at risk.

Posted by: nickwardscenarios | January 26, 2010

Judy added, beautifully and full of regret:

Judy: You’re just too original, Nick.

Here I am in 1987 – yes, I was better-looking  in 1984, less self-conscious maybe: http://nickwardscenarios.wordpress.com/2009/12/15/1984-remembered/

Top Posts for all days ending 2010-01-28 (Summarized)

Summarize: All Time

All Time

Title Views  
Home page 6,453
Boris… 901
Jester dreams of Macca and message for B 883
Me, I love the river 742
the nature of dreams 733
What are we fighting for? 515
The Present (1995) revived at the Cock T 417
Howling at the Moon (scrapbook diary) 369
1984 – remembered 242
Nick Ward Plays, Productions, Adaptation 221
Marathon Sculling Log 2 195

Top Posts for 7 days ending 2010-01-27 (Summarized)

Summarize: 7 Days

2010-01-20 to Today

Title Views  
Home page 257
Boris… 104
the nature of dreams 71
Jester dreams of Macca and message for B 57
1984 – remembered 46
What are we fighting for? 26
Tantric Rasta 25
Howling at the Moon (scrapbook diary) 19
love song (with Cluck Ol Hen) 18
OIL 17
Rachel’s Memoire Erotique 14
Posted by: nickwardscenarios | January 26, 2010

Rachel’s Memoire Erotique

There was one story Nicky Wright chiefly loved

Nick by Sylvie (16.12.2009)

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