I’ve been meaning to get around to updating my story for a
while now. Seems like 14 years have passed since I last attempted to make sense
of the path I have travelled! Ah well, maybe it’s a good time to assess those
years? Because, right now, things don’t make a lot of sense.
Shortly after writing up that last account, in Barcelona in
2005, I embarked on a new phase, prompted by a desire for a more stable pattern
of work, which I hoped I would discover by returning to Britain, where I imagined
teaching contracts would last more than the stipulated one-year maximum
available in the Spanish system. The problem being, that in Catalonia, pretty
much all the staff teaching performance or acting were (and probably still are)
from the same generation. That generation sharpened their craft in the late
years of the dictatorship, and belong to a heritage of cultural resistance that
chimed with Catalanist national identity. As the law stated that a public
institution must employ half its staff on permanent contracts, with the other
half on one-year contracts, almost all the for-life posts were held by those
who would all retire around the same time, being of similar age. I didn’t want to
wait around another 20 years for my chance. However, forewarned by friends back
in Britain that times had changed and in order to get a teaching job I’d now
need a postgraduate qualification, I got myself a place on the MA in Drama by
Practice-as-Research at Kent university. The one-year course proved ideal. I
managed to maintain my residency in Barcelona while popping over for the required
lectures: just one a week for 6 weeks or so, funding my trip with busking on
Brick Lane each Sunday during the market, which back then was a joyous and
chaotic affair, just before the grip of gentrification bleached the life out of
the area. I was housed as a guest at an also slightly chaotic community of 17
people on the corner of Bethnal Green Road, a haven of relative peace which had
survived since its initial founding back in the 80s as a Quaker initiative, now
sadly dissolved under the pressure of grotesquely raised rents across much of
East London, which has seen the disappearance not only of affordable housing,
but of affordable spaces for artists to work in. The rets of my MA course was
like a mini-PhD, under the marvellous supervision of Olly Double, stand-up
comedian and expert on comedy past and present. It was an absolute joy to
dedicate that year to researching how clowns have historically used prosthetics
and amputations to make their work, and it culminated in a one-man show with a
dozen or so recreated examples. I still make good use of my three-legged act
and the extending arms, and would love to revisit the floating head illusion
one day, too.
By chance, whilst in London during that period, I noticed my
old lecturer in theatre from Nottingham, Simon Shepherd, was giving an open
talk at Queen Mary University. To be honest, the topic didn’t draw me, but I was
curious enough to go along and have a chat with someone I hadn’t seen for a
couple of decades. That brief post-talk conversation laid the ground for the next
step: I would be applying for one of the new ‘Creative Fellowships’ funded by
the Arts and Humanities Research Council, designed to support the re-entry of
artists into the academy. And it would be hosted at Simon’s current place of
work Central School of Speech and Drama. Having been accepted as the school’s very
first Creative Fellow, I embarked on a three-year salaried period of investigation,
exploring the current state of clown training in the wider context of actor training.
It felt like the plan might be working out: I had a job, a full-time one. I immediately
spent my first month’s salary on all the books I hadn’t been able to buy over
the last several years. (Still haven’t read them all.) I became a permanent
member of the Bethnal Green community, whilst continuing to share my time
between London and Barcelona. My split life seemed to fuse. Central seemed to resemble
the Institut del Teatre de Barcelona, my previous pace of work. Both were
dedicated to training actors. Yet a culture shock awaited me…
