Homecoming... rain, music, art, theatre and Carnival!

If you want your theatre visceral, challenging, and provocative, one way is to create a promenade performance of a Beauty and the Beast fairytale with undertones of racial hatred and overtones of sexual abuse and stage it in the tunnels under a railway station. Alternatively you could envisage a more contemporary existentialist fable about an actor pretending to be a hypnotist juggling illusion and reality and questioning the nature and role of theatre itself. Annabelle Macfadyen came with me to Bristol on Thursday, and we saw both...

The Stick House from Raucous is the gothic fantasy and the vaults below Bristol Templemeads make a fantastic venue for this story fusing film, music, and digital technology with live performance from a trio of actors: the girl, the woodcutter, and a hobbledehoy played brilliantly by Christopher Elson as a combo of Mad Tom and Gollum. The script seems slightly overweighted with narrative but lighting effects are brilliant, especially the burning stick house and the falling barriers at the ending - 15 minutes after which we were panting into Bristol Old Vic studio theatre for our second show that night: An Oak Tree, Tim Crouch's multi-award-winning two-hander in which he plays the hypnotist who accidentally killed a girl, and a.n.other actor ~ different every night ~ plays the grief-sodden father who comes to challenge him.  Finn Gill, who took this part on our night, like all the others over the ten years since the premiere, had not seen the script before the show and simply followed directions, some audible and some not. 
Experiencing these two extraordinary productions contiguously made comparisons as well as contrasts inevitable. Both work through emotional intensity rather than story-line, and both rely strongly on audience involvement. In The Stick House this was overt as we followed the action with name-cards round our necks, carrying wicca dolls, and with marks on our wrists to identify our vulnerability in this alien place where no-one, friend or beast, could be trusted. In Tim Crouch's piece the unease seems contained onstage by the hypnotist in emotional meltdown and his unrehearsed co-actor and there are no visual effects at all: his story contradicts the evidence of our eyes and minds but the illusion is as compelling and the provocative impact equally strong. An amazing night.

There are other compensations, as well as radical theatre, for arriving home in a rain-wave: as well as friends, family, and creative planning meetings (next production from Nevertheless is stirring into a nice little toxic cocktail) there's always arty events and music. A fabulous Grain Bar Roots Session on my first evening back featured Bonne Nouvelle playing molten & moody covers with a 'gritty underbelly', vocals from Coralie Hyde and John Ruddock on guitar. And while the local artists exhibition is still up in Black Swan Gallery, the Round Tower proved a great space for the 6 x 9 exhibition from Bridport which opened on Friday curated by Kit Glaisyer and Frome's indefatigable Paul Newman ~ how does he find time for his immaculate prize-winning drawings? 

We've had a fair in the Market Yard all week in anticipation of Saturday's big event: Frome Carnival procession takes over an hour to make its glittering way down to the centre of town with bands, majorettes, fantasy royalty, comedy acts, themed costumes, and dazzlingly decorated floats playing music loud enough to drown their generators. Frome Rotary Club, who steward & shake the collecting buckets, were on hand with long props to deal with overhanging branches, though the Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines (my favourites) had a long wait when bunting threatened to sabotage their flight to Paris. 

To end on a less noisy note: Bath's annual Jane Austen Festival has been 'celebrating all things Austen' for ten days, and I went along on Sunday as Rosie was reading a chapter of Emma in the Library. Ladies in sprigged gowns & bonnets could be seen making their way between talks on 18th century issues like breakfast, phaetons, and 'Discomfort' (that one sounds intriguing), and workshops on Regency dance, archery, and harp, or an indepth look at the reticule. Outside Waitrose Cafe two homeless men sat on carpet strips and the man next to me started talking about Corbyn's housing pledges and hoping he 'gets in' next time. It took five days, but I feel I'm really home now.

It's all over now, California blue...a whistle-stop tour of my last week

People around here are very friendly. I'd arrived back in El Granada after a long walk along the beach on a glorious hot day, sky unflecked blazing cerulean for about a million miles, and outside the General Stores an old guy started talking to me about the pumpkin-flavour ice-cream I was licking ("Should be more orange" - "It's lovely, it's subtle," - "That's us, stateside - subtle. Subtle and dense,") and he told me how this place had began as a railroad station with no houses here at all.When I got back I asked Mo, and from him and from the plaque at the end of Portola Avenue, I learned the early history of El Granada. The whistle of the first Ocean Shore Railroad passenger train from San Francisco echoed off nearly hills on 21 June 1908. On board were five hundred SanFranciscans, good-time-loving people... and to cut the story short, they were all lured there to consider buying lots in this amazing new development. But sadly, when the last whistle blew just twelve years later, only a few homes had been bought on Daniel Burnham’s magnificent boulevards. Ocean Shore Railroad was plagued by landslides along the ocean bluffs and succumbed to the encroaching roads, but left its rugged mark along the San Mateo county coast. 
So there's a bit of history to go with all the geography.

For my last three days here the solid blue sky disappeared and the coastline disappeared, though the beach happily was still fabulous for walking -  in fact I made my longest one-way journey ~ from Poplar to Pillar Point, about 7 miles ~  in dense sea mist. I've seen seals, dolphins, and whales, and masses of seabirds: little sanderlings, elegant marbled godwits (they look like curlews but with straight beaks and forage along the foam of the wildest seas), slow pelicans and speedy seagulls... also, sadly, scores of mysteriously dead murres on the sand (these are alive gulls in the picture, at their gathering-place on Roosevelt beach.)

I started a list of best-bits, including the Nancy Cassidy concert at Cyprus Meadow on Friday where Mo provided brilliant support... woodland walks like the ancient forest along Purisima Creek...  the fantastic Bar Bocce on Sausalito harbour-front... taking thousands of photographs of flora, fauna, and just about anything... and simply sitting in the yard on sunny evenings with Anja and Mo, sipping prosecco and watching the sun go down.

Of course Frome being the hotbed of creativity it is, I've inevitably missed much ~ music from great names including We Used To Make Things, Fat Stanley, Three Corners, and local favourites like Back For Breakfast, Steve Loudon (looking forward to tasters of all these in photographer David Goodman's archives here soon) ~ and there were no party-poppers to celebrate Jeremy Corbyn's brilliant landslide victory. But I did manage to participate in the Dismaland experience, by rousing at 4am to go online for tickets when the box office opened and finding after lots of clickings they'd already sold out, thus satisfyingly replicating the dismal experience of typical modern life that Banksy, bless his perverse dark mind, is keen to share with us.
So as I wait at San Francisco airport for a flight as yet only slightly delayed, I'll end with thoughts of England: one of the many marvellous pictures of hope, and the cover of a US magazine where news of our queen's abdication is sadly much exaggerated. Though as a republican I can't share the enthusiasm for new queen 'Duchess Kate'.

Dolphins, pelicans, blue sky and a bit more geography

One thing you notice as you lose your way around the undulations of El Granada is that most of the avenues are so broad they look like two one-way streets with a forest up the middle instead of a white line - not quite a forest, but a strip of ground up to 70 feet wide filled with towering pine and eucalyptus trees. These routes have the names of Spanish palaces and royalty and are mostly trafficless and silent apart from birdsong and the rustle of fallen leaves, especially on Labor Day Weekend (equivalent of UK Bank Holiday but a week later) when all of San Francisco, it seems, descends on the coast at Half Moon Bay.

I imagine the city bereft as Highway One becomes a molten stream of glinting metal, occasional surf-boards topping the cars and rap emanating from open windows. It's been hot this weekend - 80°, as they say here - and the usually-empty sand became crammed with extended families and their excited dogs, at least on the stretches near to vehicle access points. In between you can still walk long stretches with only the foam-foraging curlews for company, and a clamber up to Pillar Point radar station followed by a steep scramble down the cliff takes you to a soft-sanded beach always near-deserted except for pelicans.
I've been doing a lot of bird-observation on my long coastal walks: gulls and terns by the shoreline, finches along the paths, raptors circling overhead. Mo and I walk up on the bluff to see whales beyond the reef, and midweek drove down to Bean Hollow where we watched dolphins and seals playing round the rocks.

We've done jaunts, too. A local 'Book Faire' where I found a collection of General Ignorance full of fascinating data (it's a myth, apparently, that Eskimos use fifty words for snow, they actually have only four) and today we all went to the amazing Kings Mountain Art Fair in the middle of a forest - a real one this time - with over 200 mini marquees filled with art & crafts and a brilliant camp kitchen where early visitors get a 'mountain breakfast' of eggs with jalapeños, pancakes with maple syrup, and coffee with refills.

And on Saturday we  took in a show:
The Half Moon Bay Shakespeare Company performing The Tempest as outdoor theatre in the local park, a lovely place to picnic at sunset. Here's Stephano the drunken butler when he discovers Trinculo and Caliban hiding together in a comic scene which was the highlight of the play.  O Brave New World seems a good quote to end this post. 

Postcard from El Granada

Just south of San Francisco there's a five-mile crescent of champagne-pale soft sand, and at the northernmost tip, behind the headland from Mavericks beach - one of California's top beaches for surfing - a small community developed in the last century as a seaside resort. It has a 'concentric circle street planning' (very easy to get lost in, if you were wondering) with wide avenues of eucalyptus trees, and a coastal path runs alongside the beach, between the sand dunes and the mega-busy Highway One running down the Pacific Coast all the way to Mexico.  Around 5000 people are lucky enough to live here, and I've been lucky enough to visit annually for the last five years.
This year, as usual, my plan was to walk and to write and enjoy the incredible beauty of this peaceful place, but somehow all I've done for a week is walk and take pictures.

 For around five or six hours every day,  I've walked along beaches and coastal paths and across Pillar Point bluff: I've pictured seals & pelicans, flowers & butterflies, rabbits and even a racoon as well as long views of rolling waves and closeup patterns on sand and bark... peaceful solitary days, supplemented with some pleasant interaction: a yard party and folk concert on Saturday ~ here's my generous friends' lovely home, and my host Mo Robinson headlining with harmonies from Peter Bland,

and a few of the images that stay with me, along with songs like Sunny Afternoon, Hotel California, and a phrase from a poem by Pablo Medina: what the ocean says, and says again and then forgets.

As blackberries ripen and August ends...

It's that heavy end of summer now, fields stripped down to cornrow ridges and the verges decorated with silver thistledown & bright red hips. Autumnal, in short, but a pleasant aftertaste of  the summer festival this week: readings from the Writers in Residence event revealed the impressive inventiveness mustered on sight by the phrase 'It was a chance meeting that changed everything". Impromptu tales penned in shops and cafes, romantic, historical, poignant, quirky and very funny, were all shared at the Bell in Buckland Dinham on Thursday night in a delightfully laid-back event hosted by Sue Watts for Frome Writers Collective. Here's Nikki Lloyd reading her winning story, about the relationship between two women revealed with beautiful delicacy and an unexpected ending.

And what can I say about the Tri-Art Summer School production of West Side Story at Merlin Theatre except that it was a spectacular triumph, thoroughly deserving the standing-ovation applause of each full-house audience: a vibrant ensemble show that dazzled from the opening chords of  the overture to the moving final moment, with funky dance routines, superb voices, fabulous costumes, great filmic visuals, and a stark set that cleverly utilised mirror effects to increase impact.  The boys' gang set pieces were terrific but even more impressive were the girls: I like to be in America and I feel pretty were absolute highlights, as was the poignant duet between Maria (Tabitha Cox) and Anita (Marie-Claire Wood) after the street killings. Strong support from Ryan Hughes as Riff and Aynsley Minty, Nick White and Steve Scammell as the grownups, but the night belonged to the youngsters. There was a ban on cameras but I do hope someone managed to video the lads' unforgettable Officer Krupke routine with Ben Hardy-Phillips as Action leapfrogging his gang across the stage and 'Baby John' Dillon Berry's incredible trilling social-worker pastiche ~ posted on Youtube it would get about a zillion views.  Creative Team Leader Claudia Berry must be very happy ~ and brochures are out now so you don't miss out on the next big Merlin production, Little Mermaid.  

There's art stirring in wild places too, with the Step in Stone project in the disused rock quarries of East Mendip.  Six different venues throughout the summer till 18th October are featuring site-specific artworks in various media, and on Sunday the Westdown/Asham Quarry featured a call-and-response trumpet duet by Frome composer Helen Ottaway, together with birdsong and shadow sounds from long-gone industrial processes.
The art trail is intriguing but the whole place is enchanting now, reclaimed by trees and buddlia bushes and reedy marsh pools where dragonflies flit, reminding me of the temples of Cambodia reclaimed into jungle by determined Ficus Strangulosa trees.  The trail route is a walkers' right of way now, definitely a place to return and explore, when I'm home again in a few weeks.

I'm off to California now, to walk the coast and write and spend time with good friends. As always, there's much over here I'll miss ~ Merlin's 40th birthday celebrations for one, and all the excellent live music around in pubs & bars ~ here's Chic Mystique at the Artisan this afternoon.
Also happening while I'm away is the Festival of Puppetry in Bristol which looks awesome, various stage shows, and the Great British Bakeoff (only joking) but I did at least get to see the extraordinary and brilliant Grayson Perry self-portrait in Bath's adventurous little Victoria Gallery. It's a map of his life, half-chronicle half-citadel and totally engrossing.

Flaneurs in Lille

Travel to a new place is always thrilling, reminding me how soon the unknown becomes familiar. Some deep territorial instinct seems to claim the small details and promptly spin them into remembered knowledge while the bigger picture remains indifferently mysterious. That's how it felt last weekend in Lille.
Our room overlooked the railway and traffic in ‘Toutes Directions’ and massive new build, but the larger life of the city was far less interesting than our daily trips along 'our' route ~ the cycle track discovered on the first night ~ taking us directly into the old town of Flemish buildings painted ochre & russet with sloping triangular roofs and rococo cherubic & garlanded mouldings.

It’s easy to lose yourself here, as the tourist ‘city map’ apparently locates roads where there's room for the print rather than with reliable reference to location and has no truck with scale, but Lilleans are friendly, and speak English far better than my pigeon French.

And anyway Hazel and I were happily indifferent as we sat with our notebooks at a pavement bar, beside a fountain, by the river, on a bench in the park or a log in the Bois du Boulogne. This was a writing retreat, our ‘artist’s date’ with the kind of process writing we used to do when we performed  words together as Live & Lippy a decade ago.

Why a citybreak in Lille? Because this random location and impulsive decision had a quirky energy we hoped would re-ignite a shared creativity that has, inevitably, lapsed since Hazel left Frome to live further and further north, now among the Cumbrian hills. So this post is not a travel guide to a city in Northern France, just a few personal glimpses: our notebooks filled daily without attempting much objective analysis. We observed life around us, flaneur-style, at the Palais des Beaux Arts, at the Veille Bourse on Argentinian tango night, at the student bar in the old horse market, the pop-up cafe in front of the cathedral on Sunday, along the river where paddleboarders glided by like swans, beside crumbling walls of the old citadel, at the open-air zoo in the park... For me this trip was about staying offline & offscreen for three days, using a notebook & pen, and connecting more intensely with a physical world. And having a really nice time too.
 

art and nature in Bruton

Hauser and Wirth in Bruton is a great place to visit, I discovered this week: not only beautiful barns filled with extraordinary art, but the most amazing gardens stretching seemingly into the far hills of Somerset, with massive clumps of pink, purple, blue and bronze flowers humming with bees and swifts darting across the pool. It's a short train trip from Frome, with a footpath stroll through fields and allotments from close to the station. The reward, as well as this luschious vista, is a one-woman show from Jenny Holzer: Softer Targets  features a series of dark aphorisms flowing in liquid light through differently coloured rooms, with coffin-like  sculptures carved with sinister phrases that could be the last words of someone unknown... there are bones too, tagged with messages that might be the last thoughts of the dying victim. It's sombre and challenging but too interesting to be depressing, and well worth a visit. Plus there's the Bruton Art Factory exhibition near the station, which is very jolly.

I'm heading off now with my writer-friend Hazel Stewart for a weekend in Lille, which has apparently reinvented itself as France's most underrated major city & an architectural feast (there's even an art gallery in a swimming pool). Lonely Planet is enthusiastic: "this once-grimy industrial metropolis has shrugged off its grey image and transformed itself into a glittering and self-confident cultural and commercial hub. Highlights include an attractive old town with a strong Flemish accent, three renowned art museums, stylish shopping, some excellent dining options and a cutting-edge, student-driven nightlife scene."  Expect a glittering and cutting-edge report later. 

"In August most of Europe goes on holiday"

In Frome however, summer holidays come to us, with a beach party throughout Sunday's Independent Market.               Sand, seagulls, seaside disco and superbly steady sunshine supplemented by seaside disco to create this blissful idyll in the market yard, with retro photo-booth, donkey rides and ice-pops (I chose Pina Colada, but no-added-sugar, so that's ok.) With all the usual artisan food, art & craft, and clothing stalls, extensive flea market, and busking stage including a great set from Leander Morales, this street market unfolded into a perfect English holiday.
 
Writers don't stop for the sun, of course: Words at the Black Swan monthly workshop was led in the afternoon by Bath poet Sue Boyle who led us into the magic of mysterious glimpses in poetic postcards,
 and then a swift scamper up to the Merlin amphitheatre to join the 'Flash Fiction' picnic. Organised by Frome Writers Collective, this was a great little showcase of the group's varied talents: the challenge was a 500-word story starting There's that sound again, & I loved the winning story by Alison Murdoch, a witty sci-fi take on trying to live in a human body when you've never heard of hiccups...

Meanwhile, Frome's new theatre company Shot In The Dark is heading for Edinburgh with a fair wind blowing from a big plug in The Scotsman for their suspense thriller Rope. It's a psychological study of a Dostoevskian motiveless murder, and writer Geoff Hunt who also directs, has studied several real-life cases to create a site-specific scenario for the streets of Edinburgh. If you're heading for the fringe festival, this is a production to look out for. A line-run before the trip gave me an opportunity to hear the script and take some typical, and non-typical, pictures of the show. Guess which this one is...

 Looking ahead even further, Nevertheless fringe theatre company is making big plans for the future and for our next production, so I'll end this post with me and Rosie plotting... at Castello, if you're wondering where in Frome is good for planning your own next artistic endeavour. Other venues also available....