Tonight saw me dancing for two hours in a wee church hall with a bunch of people old enough to be my parents.
Fiona has been trying to avoid joining the gym by searching out less soul destroying forms of exercise. Yesterday was trampolining (ie jumping up and down on a big spring) and today was the wonderfully vaguely titled International Folk Dancing held in a church hall between the bus stop and our home.
Sidebar: Before Jez picks me up on the house / home thing, and trust me, you don’t want to go there, it’s Fi’s house – I’m the lodger.
I was on the bus home when I got a text:
So I did the honourable thing and joined her.
It was, of course, really odd, but also perfectly normal. This, I thought, is the city’s culture. All around Birmingham in spaces like this groups of people are gathering to do stuff. Selpar, as the group is known, is not centrally run and there’s no funding. Each group is autonomous yet linked by overly active people (the name Pam Bishop will be familiar to anyone involved in this sort of thing) and, most interestingly, no-one is “professional”. The fee for tonight was £2 to cover tea and biscuits. Maggie, the leader, is not paid a professional fee (or any fee) yet had been running this group, which has been going since 1972, for 15 years. And while she lead the class the group was held together by a tight bunch of regulars who, you felt, shared all the duties. It’s community arts in the purest sense.
Here’s a quick video I shot at the end while we were packing up:
It’s not representative of the dancing as it’s just a bit of freestyle to wind down but it gives you a sense of the who and the where.
What struck me most was how normal they were. It was the sort of thing the unassuming person in the office tells you they do of an evening and you raise an eyebrow because you thought they were just a boring so and so and had forgotten that everyone is interesting if you give them half the chance. These are people. Real people. The sort of people that arts orgs forget about because they don’t tick the right funding boxes or just think or as “the audience”. It was mundane and ordinary and not very interesting, yet like the Internet that’s exactly why I found it vibrant and radical and fascinating. Mainstream media would laugh at this in the same way teenagers laugh at things they don’t understand and feel threatened by.
As Birmingham hurtles towards this City of Culture thing which, if past experience is anything to go by, will end up defaulting to the medium and large arts organisations because it’s easier to deal with them, I find myself fascinated by things like this that survive and thrive without the need for Cultural Olympiads or any of that bullshit. This is DIY culture in its purest form and anyone in the culture industries should make it their duty to pay attention to it.
No prizes for guessing what I usually do on a Thursday evening… being old enough, and your parent to boot, that is!
Sing, dance, play! Best antidote to any stress-filled society. Gyms seem to me to be just another set of targets to be achieved. Not many people I see in them look as though they are enjoying themselves.
the gym near where i live, not many people i see look like they’re even keeping fit, let alone enjoying themselves… it has a full glass wall looking onto the canal towpath (fortunately for them not on a major through route), & every time we walk past it appears more like a photograph or a tableau, with people just sitting, stretching, squatting, & standing there rather than actually doing anything !
Very very nice. Not sure I can add much more than that.
Which is why Pete, your arrows pointing down to ‘cool’ bits of Digbeth in your earlier post about the new rail line so annoyed me. You’re quite right, the city’s culture is in Stirchley and Alum Rock and Handsworth; everywhere where large arts organisations aren’t. This is the city’s culture, much more than the stuff in the increasingly-gentrified Digbeth. You should get a glimpse of the city’s thriving Irish dancing scene, that’s extraordinary to say the least.
Although it doesn’t get on the arts council funding map it’s worth noting that some of this stuff (not the above I appreciate) is supported by the City Council. Ward committees are empowered to give out bits of cash which is where things like CoCoMAD gets its money from.
It seems a bit of a jump to suggest that the “sexy/interesting” area Pete highlighted consists solely of large arts organisations, rather than large arts organisations + small DIY gigs + proper boozers + Irish dancing etc etc etc.
I very much doubt “this is where the large arts organisations are, ergo this bit is better” is what he meant, but far more importantly it’s definitely not what he actually said.
@Russ L – eh? You’re implying I said something I didn’t.
I wasn’t really making a point about large arts orgs, I was just endorsing Pete’s view of the suburbs being full of really interesting cultural stuff. DIY/community stuff. The ‘us’ and ‘them’ view pitched in the Digbeth post I thought sat at odds with the view above.
I know the ‘sexy/interesting’ bit was a reference to everything from the interesting stuff Vivid do, to the vibrancy of gigs at the Rainbow to the charms of The Spotted Dog etc. But y’know, (and I’m going to have trouble articulating this clearly) it’s calling it sexy and interesting that I took offence to. Culture is ordinary, it’s about lived experience. Stop taking bits of my family’s lived experience (yes I’m playing the Irish card) and calling it sexy and interesting. They didn’t do it for you to reflect in its glory. ‘Sexy and Intersting’ is gentrification speak and I won’t stand for it.
I’m sorry if I strawman argument-ed you there, then. That’s honestly how it read, though, with the “the city’s culture is in Stirchley and Alum Rock and Handsworth; everywhere where large arts organisations aren’t”.
This latest comment baffles me. I’m not spoiling for an argument here (however it may appear) but “Sexy” and “interesting” are as generic a pair of positive adjectives as you’re likely to get. He might just as easily have said “good”, or “I like what happens here”. I don’t see how you could possibly suggest that one can’t like what happens somewhere without automatically representing some kind of outside “you” “reflect(ing) in glory”. Not without invoking some horrible isolationism that appears to run contrary to what seem to be saying more broadly.
I clearly have a completely different reading of the consultation post to you. I saw it as saying – in so far as contrasts are drawn between the “sexy/interesting/good/liked it//hoopy” area and the specific other stuff on his map – that the likeable bits come about when culture is allowed to occur, and the less likeable bits come about when it’s imposed from above by excess planning and so forth. That’s the only divide (I’m not going to say “us and them”, it seems needlessly emotive for what we’re talking about) I got from it. If what you’re saying is “all this likeable growing-on-its-own stuff that you like happens elsewhere too“, then I would agree. As, presumably, would Pete. I’m sure he’ll along soon enough to say.