Domestic Theatre as Future Hope
VICTORIA KINGHAM
At the present time, the ‘value’ of education appears generally to be measured in literal financial terms: it ceases to be about learning to think, argue, or evaluate. Generally it seems to be about ‘enterprise’ and ‘information’ and ‘employability’, which is supposed to be equipping children for today’s world, as though ideas and imagination and musical and artistic expression were flummery–sideline activities to be taken up, if they are lucky, by those privileged not to have to earn their living.
Gail Borrow as Puppeteer in Panelka in 2022
It’s a sad state of affairs but it was, I suppose, ever thus. Free education was not introduced for altruistic reasons, or for any notion that the working class were equal to the moneyed class in intellect or ambition. One of its first aims was religious education. In 1831 Sunday Schools, often seen as the forerunner to the current English school system, were ministering the Opium of the People to 1,250,000 children each week. Gradually, free education (up to the age of 11) became compulsory and secularised. In 1937, historian Lowndes wrote: “The contribution which a sound and universal system of public education can make to the sobriety, orderliness and stability of a population is perhaps the most patent of its benefits.” From that statement it’s easy to infer that as far as the authorities were concerned, available free education was about helping to keep down insurrectionists. Lowndes’ ‘population’ clearly refers to those controlled rather than the controllers. He goes on to talk of ‘a commensurate increase in the national wealth and prosperity’ – but this was the voice of an already wealthy and well-educated minority, essentially the keepers of the ‘national wealth’.
Cut again to the present day, and to the present day keepers. Some are wide boys whose companies are rumoured to have caused and sanctioned murders; some are Russian oligarchs whose wealth (oil and aluminium) was plundered from the Russian people at the fall of the Soviet Union. Of course, all these people’s companies have charitable outlets of which some are educational. Most will be set up as legitimate tax-diversionary measures. But however many millions of pounds are channelled into them, the wealth of the rich few is measured in billions – thousands of millions. So to give up 50 million quid to found an Oxford College is to invest just one 5000th of a total wealth package, a proportion that would be otherwise payable in tax.
These are the controllers of industry, and free education in the UK supplies the majority of their (lower-level) employees – tech workers for their internet companies, chemists and biologists for their pharmaceutical companies, engineers for their oil companies, architects and surveyors for their property companies.
This is obviously a reductive analysis, and any economist or indeed any education specialist will tell you how complex the whole picture is. Nevertheless, where is Art in all this? If it’s in Art investments, then it’s probably in the interests of the controllers to keep artist numbers down and thus maintain the rarity value of their assets. Music? Well, the Warner empire figures largely, but where does that leave the less conventional, experimental, progressive music output? Philosophy, psychology, linguistics? Who has time for these things? Literature, History, Culture – same applies. And many schools in Britain are now controlled by industrial magnates rather than educators, and children as young as seven are encouraged by banks (eager for their lifelong custom) to learn how to make profits.
Thus the need for charities, or organisations that depend on donations, to fill the gaps has become more and more urgent and conversely, less and less available. And this is where original projects like Explore The Arch fit in, to offer a small beacon of hope in a chaotic sea of inadequate provision. In the last issue of this newspaper I reviewed an extraordinary performance at Archer Lodge that linked two real, utterly different worlds through the topic of domestic activities and concerns via the medium of the internet.
Gail Borrow, prime mover and director of this unique project, explained more about it. She and her associates now part-own the lovely Archer Lodge. “In developing and outputting our originated genre, Theatre of Domestic Life, ExploreTheArch responds to and highlights the architectural space,” she tells me. “I originated the genre to explore a different approach to the excesses of theatre that I trained in–costly sets designed with little environmental consideration.”
Each production is unique. There was for example considerable emphasis, in the last production, on writing and poetry. Their performances and projects are co-operative ventures, so this poetic emphasis came directly from the participants, who had “discussed how their need to conform, as children, diminished their capacity to acknowledge and value their dual heritage. It’s a conversation they frequently have with the younger participants of our music sessions,” Borrow continues. “ExploreTheArch’s work typically involves pared-back scripts and repetition of words, reflecting the domestic experience of language. The home is a place to mull over things that have been said and heard in daily experience in the wider world.”
Various aspects of this collective’s output are supported by different funding organisations. The ‘early career’ team are those at the outset of their career who would otherwise be unable to overcome barriers in forging a freelance career in these employment sectors. For many of this team, a bedroom is their workspace. So, at least in the last production, “a bed becomes the site of conversations around the world, of dreams and ambitions.”
“Being able to mount an experiential theatre format and a new genre is a great honour” continues Gail Borrow. But clearly the numbers for this kind of audience (and they at least need to be able to manage stairs) are limited, so there’s a constant need to raise money. “We mount our productions alongside other funded community and international installation projects, so that our teams can balance their portfolio of creative work.” It’s a tough call, and funds are being raised in the context of a nation-wide arts funding crisis.
But given that these kinds of creative opportunities are now much less likely to be part of your child’s school curriculum, projects like ExploreTheArch offer limited, but tangible, hope. Hope that technology can stimulate rather than stifle the imagination; that original ideas are not reduced to Brave New World-type conformist mediocracy; that artificial intelligence does not replace creative thinking; that opinion is not subsumed by cliché; that there are, and will always be, actors, writers, musicians, painters, thinkers, stories.
explorethearch.co.uk
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