old wounds

I have now begun my artist residency at the New Ashgate Gallery, Farnham, in earnest.  This week was moving-in week, a big enough challenge in itself.  It also coincided with me having the honour of staging a ‘take over’ of the Gallery’s Instagram feed while the director, Outi Remes, was on holiday.  Outi wanted me to introduce myself and my project to their 6000+ followers.  Gulp.  Suddenly it was time to take another opportunity seriously, and step out of my own shadow.

Ever since I started my first blog (shotatenpaces.blogspot.com) I’ve tried to write as if everyone, and no one, was listening.  I have learnt to write with a bit more vulnerability and honesty about letting Spirit take my work – in word or image – where She will.  It may be only one person ever reads or sees it, but I presume that will be the person who needs to receive something which, at that moment, I might be able to give.  I try not to write as if I’m ‘hanging it all out there’ for the world to see in a bout of narcissistic, navel-gazing confession.  Yet I’m also trying to check myself from curating an online version of a ‘Kate’ who is not ‘real’.  

I want to be a curious writer who says, ‘this is how it is with me in this now; how is it with you?’  I want to be someone who says how messy and painful and gritty and bloody it is to live with chronic illness and clinical depression; and to be the one who says, ‘and yet …’  

So today I need to explore some old wounds that I’m not aware of having looked at properly for at least a decade.  I’ve written a poem about them this morning, and I might quote a bit of it as I go on this afternoon, (or not), but I need to declare that I am not a dispassionate observer (if there is ever such a thing) when it comes to looking at the BrightWell’s Yard development in central Farnham (the focus of my residency work).  Investigating these old wounds means bringing all of the 50+ Kate to listen, with as much compassion as she can muster, to the under 30 Kate who was Education Director at the Redgrave Theatre, Farnham in 1997, and whose office was upstairs in BrightWell house (the eponymous centre of the new development).  

That Kate was made redundant from a job she absolutely loved so that the commercial redevelopment of that part of Farnham could take place, which included closing the theatre and knocking it down.  That Kate had tried to launch a bid with local partners to reopen the Redgrave as a regional centre for all things Youth Creatives might need to develop their skills. That Kate was told she was too late, the land deal had already been done.  That Kate then had to watch as BrightWell and The Redgrave Theatre buildings just then sat there for twenty years, unused apart from a becoming a homeless shelter during a couple of particularly bitter winters.  That Kate worked really hard to try to move on, but it was the beginning of the end of her involvement in professional theatre, theatre education, and any paid employment.

I realise as I write that paragraph that I’ve never allowed myself to mourn the extent of that loss of identity which involvement in professional theatre gave me.  Over the years I was a costume designer, a production designer, an assistant director, a dramaturge, a director, a workshop leader, a lecturer, a writer, a curriculum developer, an external examiner, an event planner.  I didn’t really care how I was involved with the making of theatre, I just believed in the transformational power of the ‘live’ interaction that happens between actors and audience when we are together in one space to tell, and to listen to, each other stories. That is theatre’s essence – always has been, always will be.  I wanted to be a part of it, any way I could.

So before, during and after being Education Director at the Redgrave I would be a follow-spot operator, a lighting technician, a stage-manager, a quick-change dresser, a wardrobe mistress, a producer, and a costume-maker.  I missed being a part of a professional company, with its sudden, peculiarly intimate, intense dynamic which builds during a rehearsal period, transmutes in the performance period, then produces a sudden drop of adrenalin to accompany the feelings of loss as the run finishes and the ‘family’ disperses to wherever the next job might take them – to do the whole thing all over again without you.

When I have thought about those days, memories are normally attached to the string of disastrous romantic relationships I had, before illness made even that impossible.  The Kate who was involved in those was running as far and fast away from her TrueSelf as she could, and inevitably, she failed to make any meaningful lasting connections, to find someone who would love and value the ‘real’ her.   

And all of this came to a crashing stop when my body called a halt, and said, ‘no more’, in 2003.  I stopped subscribing to The Stage because I couldn’t bear to see all the jobs I couldn’t do, all the projects I wasn’t a part of, to read reviews of pieces my friends and colleagues had gone onto.  I stopped writing a one-woman show.  I couldn’t turn my PhD in theatre history into a book.  It felt like every avenue I tried was refused to me.  It felt like every part of me was of no use to anyone.  I loathed who I was and how I was.  I no longer wanted to live.

So this is the Kate I have sitting next to me as I look at lines in my sketchbook, glance up at the wall in front of me and lift my camera to see what I can see.  This is BrightWell house as it is now.  It is no longer a theatre.  It is no longer my office.  It is designated to become a restaurant.  This is me as I am now.  Not an Educator or a Director, not ‘merely’ a writer, photographer or visual artist.  This is a Kate whose TrueSelf is without Title, who just knows she has to create in order to live.

My history may be just one layer of matter making this wall.  But I’m there.

so I swallow and follow the grace 

of a curve until it meets the acute of a jag, there

I pause, to listen to it speak my story,

to see to where it next points my journey.