Unnamed ukelele delights
After finally picking up my white flying-V ukelele (a Christmas present from my big bro 2009) I attended a short course in beginner’s ukelele with the lovely Lorraine Bow (www.learntouke.co.uk). I got meself (well, Mother bought it and Father up-cycled it, Christmas 2011) a new CONCERT (which is bigger, hence the capitals) ukelele, and donated the white flying-v to Clumsy Fingers the landlord (no reduction in rent). Finding it not-too-tricky and quite-nice-socially, I did a bit of practice and harboured not-so-secret (sorry flatmates) dreams of forming some kind of melancholic folk band with like minded uke-passionsters. Well, at the end of 2011 I met one such individual, by chance, after an acting class, in a pub on the Liverpool Road. After he warbled a pint-fuelled Beirut cover we exchanged folk favourites and phone numbers, and subsequently set up a (mostly sober) guitar/piano/ukelele(X2)/singing extravaganza of our own.We don’t have a name yet, or indeed a good standard, but we’re working on 3 covers with a view to start descending on the open mic scene this summer. And it’s just LOVELY!
About
A piece by George Anderson who I had the pleasure of working with on an Open University Psychology project at Durham University, August 2009:
By Any Other Name
She entered my life stage left. Said her name was Amanda, or Bob or something; I can’t remember. I’ve been a synapse or two short of a schema since drinking a pitcher of the Open University’s own-brand pickling cider at the ED209 cheese and wine ice-breaker in ’96.
‘What do you think about Edwards and Middleton?’ she asked.
I came right back at her: ‘I suppose they’re okay, but I prefer Ant and Dec.’
She was tall, willowy, and blonde. Not usually my type. But there was something about this babe that made me feel like I’d been on intravenous Lucozade for a week. It might have been the British sherry diluted with lawnmower fuel that the OU were passing off as Chardonnay that night. Maybe it was Kismet. Or Swine flu. Who knows?
She said she was an experimental dramatist. ‘That great,’ I said. I had always had an affinity for the board-treaders craft. ‘Wasn’t Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang, the Musical, a doozie?’ It was a straightforward enough question. She didn’t answer.
Later, she said she had a boyfriend somewhere. My heart sank.
‘Somewhere in Europe?’ I quipped.
‘Somewhere in the house,’ she corrected. I took a step back. I was beginning to get the bigger picture: This dame had the Heebie-Jeebies. And I wasn’t too keen on catching them.
Sadly, sometime during the ebb and flow of subsequent conversation, the bubble burst. As Rose downed a row of Um Bongo Slammers and yakked on about her dream of setting Waiting For Godot on a tightrope over the Niagara Falls, I realized it was time for me to exit stage right.
I think about her from time to time, whenever the conversation drifts toward experimental theatre. Of course in Aberdeen, this is as likely as being struck simultaneously by two meteorites. Still, at least I have my Chitty-Chitty Bang Bang DVD to comfort me.
(CURTAIN FALLS)
George Anderson
Rose lives and works in London. Her recent work includes performing, theatre production, project management, writing, editing and research, filmmaking, design, and workshop leading. At the beginning of 2012 Rose finished working as a production coordinator and film editor with the lovely Ladder to the Moon lot. To earn her daily hummus in 2012 she works as a performer and workshops leader with The Cat’s Grin Theatre Company, and regularly takes on other performance projects.
Contact Rose_turner@hotmail.co.uk
Learning the ukelele…
“Darwin speculated that “music tones and rhythms were used by our half-human ancestors, during the season of courtship, when animals of all kinds are excited not only by love, but by strong passions of jealousy, rivalry, and triumph” and that speech arose, secondarily, from this primal music.”
— Oliver Sacks
Age 5 - I started learning the descant recorder
Age 7 - I started learning the violin
Age 9 - I graduated from descant recorder to tenor recorder (bigger, same tuning, but BIGGER okay)
Age 10 - I started learning the piano
Age 12 - I toyed with the idea of swapping the violin for the cello (which is BIGGER) but then didn’t
Age 12 - I stopped learning the piano
Age 13 - I quit the violin, no longer able to endure the mocking of the kids on the train for my ’sad guitar’
Age 14 - I carried on learning the piano
Age 15 - I stopped learning the piano again
Age 16 - I started singing lessons
Age 18 - I stopped singing lessons
Age 26 - I started learning the ukelele…
Cat’s Grin Theatre Company
Rapunzel (KS1) at Trinity Theatre, Tunbridge Wells
Lazy John (KS1) at Trinity Theatre, Tunbridge Wells
Snow White & Rose Red (KS1) at Trinity Theatre, Tunbridge Wells
Little Red Riding Hood (KS1) in rehearsal
The Three Little Pigs (KS1) in rehearsal
Goldilocks and the Three Bears (KS1) in rehearsal
Alice in Wonderland (KS1-2) on tour
The Terrible Tale of Tantalus (KS2) on tour
Pandora and the Box of Whispers (KS2) on tour
Demeter and Persephone (KS2) on tour
Review
Chelsea BA Fine Art Graduate Exhibition 2009
Dancers equipped with a boom box on Chelsea’s open quad occupy those of us who, arriving in the middle of it all, are required to join a long queue for the exhibition that forms around a series of Billy Kerry’s mixed-media sculptures twisted into curiously abstract yet grotesquely human contortions. These works seem absurd, humorous almost, although those situated inside the building are smaller and appear more like individual body parts, phallic, deformed.
Susannah Pal’s sculptures also explore embodiment, with the tagline ‘cliterally speaking your life is boring’ rather heavily signposting the postfeminist ideology of the ‘Noughties’. The juxtaposition between the live presence of the artist and the distorted representations of the artist’s head and torso, however, generates a palpable sense of conflict in the assemblage of internal and external female sexual identities.
JiYoung Kim also places herself within her work, in her photograph ‘Memoria’. In the installation component, however, her body is replaced by cotton wool and fabric, a tangibly cloud-like form. The work betrays transience, permeating the boundaries between presence and absence and illuminating the ephemeral moment at which the art becomes made.
Other exhibits point towards the porosity of familiar dichotomies – old and new, past and present, presence and absence. Sophie Turner’s solemn room seems to tell a story whose protagonist is a melancholic shadow that moves across a film of the room shown on an old-fashioned television screen. The work is presented like a collection of artefacts: preserved, not to be touched, unsettlingly ghostly; the suggestion of death signifies the temporality of the human body, and the remaining objects become relics of its brief interactions.
The exhibition layout does not denote a particular journey; rooms seem characterised more by medium than by theme, for example through the grouping together of potentially interactive pieces. Among these are Karen Wilkinson’s paper stalagmites and stalactites; the denting caused by people meandering through them reminds me of the disposability of the medium. Nearby, a woman turns the handle of a wind-up bird – one of Flaminia Veronesi’s hat designs – whose wings flap slowly. Shortly, the woman stops winding and establishes eye contact with the young woman ‘modeling’ the headgear. She moves her hand purposefully and the young woman follows it with her gaze. I wonder if such interaction is anticipated – the performers (it seems appropriate to use that term) move slowly through the space in a way that appears to invite it. Subtle though it is, this interaction begins to conceive characters in a way that blurs the distinction between installation and live art.
The exhibits vary aesthetically, from room-sized installations to single canvases, sculptures and video. Despite the size of the cohort, some works stand out as poignantly atmospheric; I particularly like Harry Scoging Beer’s oil paintings, where warm colour beams through gaps in what appear to be walls to another world. The prominent works as I see them here tend to incarnate alternative dimensions, allude to old and new stories, through the imagination of an interactive viewer perhaps, or self-reflexive signposting of the ephemeral act of art-making.
Read this review at http://www.artartartgallery.com/
Older People in the Media
The Portrayal of Older People in the Popular Media
Public interest in older people is evident through popular media coverage, particularly concerning centenarians. Online resources include press archives, book publications, and even websites dedicated to the post-100 demographic (e.g. www.thecentenarian.co.uk). A Google search of the word ‘centenarian’ currently produces nearly 40,000 results from UK websites alone, an increase of over 15,000 since December 2009. For ‘centenarian’, The Guardian’s online archive contains over 200 search results including advice on reaching the 100 year benchmark. Seemingly, then, achieving very old age is considered a covetable feat, for which there are secrets to be sought.
The function of centenarian-centred stories varies across media channels. Countless local press articles feature centenarians with celebrity-like status in their community, e.g. ‘Centenarian open Kelty’s new play park’ (Dunfermline Press, 22.10.2009). Centenarians are used to draw the public’s attention to current issues affecting older people, for example, ‘Louisa Watts, 106, loses court fight to halt care home closure’ (The Times, 7.10.2009), and to depict social histories through a personal perspective: ‘Centenarian ‘Kit’ survived 1940 Kenilworth bombing (Kenilworth Weekly News, 25.11.2009). Centenarians are even used for politic ends, e.g. ‘MP attends 100th birthday party’ (Conservative Party, 25.11.2009). Prolific too are stories of centenarians who are unusual, heroic or high achieving, illustrated in headlines such as ‘Centenarian Lilian rides out in a red sports car’ (Herald Express South Devon 27.06.2009) and ‘Centenarian “bear-hugged” thief’ (BBC online, 17.09.2009). Such articles tend to generate a sense of mystery surrounding old age, for example The Hartlepool Mail’s tribute to Sarah Noble hints at supernatural elements to her longevity by referring to the significance of the number nine in her life and death (30.10.2009).
Can such articles be considered to deconstruct negative stereotypes that represent the oldest members of our society as out of touch and obsolete? Notably, the articles in the popular media are produced by journalists - non-centenarians, the relatively young - and customary use of the term ‘centenarian’ in the headings for their stories function as signifiers of the ‘frame’ or, to use a journalistic term, ‘angle’, that situates stories of the very-capable-very-old in the realms of the uncommon and unexpected: the ‘hook’ of the story is that it features a capable older person, and this is precisely its intended appeal. In this way the voice of the media can be seen as continuing to compartmentalise older people.
Positive representations of old age in the popular media constitute an initial step towards dissipating the negative stereotypes that surround ageing and old people. The increasing ubiquity of stories about able older people can certainly be seen to help de-stigmatise very old age and, as the number of centenarians in the UK increases as it continues to do, mystery surrounding the 100 year benchmark is bound to decrease. However in order to gain a truer understanding of the issues concerning ageing, the role that older people have in the community and wider society, and to reverse the negative stereotypes already established, the popular media should move towards privileging the voices of older individuals themselves, rather than interpreting their stories through journalistic frameworks concerned with readership sales. As the Joseph Rowntree Foundation succinctly puts it, we need to ‘listen to older people, not the stereotypes’ (2010, online).
References
BBC, 17.09.2009, Online, Available: http://news.bbc.co.uk/local/oxford/hi/people_and_places/newsid_860000/8260654.stm
The Centenarian Online, Available: http://www.thecentenarian.co.uk
Conservative Party, 17.08.2009, Online, Available: www.epolitix.com/mpwebsites/mppressreleases/mppressreleasedetails/newsarticle/mpattends-100th-birthday-party///mpsite.david-arness
Dunfermline Press, 22.10.2009, Online, Available: http://dunfermlinepress.com/news/roundup/articles/2009/10/22/393177-centenarian-opens-keltys-new-play-park
Hartlepool Mail, 30.10.2009, Online, Available: http://www.thisissouthdevon.co.uk/news/Centenarian-Lilian-rides-red-sports-car/article-1116292-detail/article.html
Joseph Rowntree Foundation, Online, Available: http://www.jrf.org.uk/media-centre/listen-older-people-not-stereotypes-jrf-report-urges-policy-makers
Kenilworth Weekly News, 25.11.2009 Online, Available: http://www.kenilworthweeklynews.co.uk/news/Centenarian-Kit-survived-1940-Kenilworth.5716306.jp
Time of their Lives film, Online, Available: http://www.timeoftheirlives.com/index.php?/Biogs/hetty-bower-103.html
Times Online, 7.10.2009, Online, Available: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article6964399.ece
Sum of its Parts
A piece inter-reflecting social construction and the construction of performance
Nuffield Theatre, Lancaster 2006
LISTEN TO ACCOMPANYING Piano Piece (Rose Turner 2006)
Media Lab
Media Lab Project
Central School of Speech and Drama
MAKE / MoD
- Dissertation piece - Central School of Speecha and Drama MA Performance Practices and Research
Dick Turpin in Ghana
A multi-cultural performance event fusing British and Ghanaian performace traditions and performers.
