Tuesday, August 04, 2015
This is why I write what I do
"Theatre needs to be written for the world and about the world.
The problems that confront us are global: an artistic response based on the dilemmas of a single individual, or a single individual within a single nation, is no longer adequate.
all traditional values are no longer adequate to handle the dilemmas that confront us.
our political ideas and institutions are no longer adequate.
our economic values and institutions are no longer adequate.
our scientific values and institutions are no longer adequate.
our ideas of gender, of what it means to be male or female, are no longer adequate.
our artistic ideas are no longer adequate.
We have to create new values, new institutions, new economic and political structures. Or we will destroy ourselves.
It is the responsibility of the artist to help dream, envision, create these new values and these new structures.
This is the focus of my life and work."
I don’t quite remember when I wrote that. It was when I first set up my web page. Around 2002, maybe.
It seemed completely obvious to me at the time. And strangely enough still does.
In the late eighties I’d travelled to southern California and Bangladesh within 2 or 3 months of each other. So I’d been in one of the richest countries of the world; and then in one of the poorest.
And in between I’d been in Egypt and watched the Berlin Wall being broken down.
I knew that everything I’d been taught about the world up till then was false. That the conflict was not between East and West. Not between the ‘freedom’ of the West and the ‘tyranny’ of the East.
Perhaps it was between North and South: certainly between the rich and poor countries of the world. And that it wasn’t just the Communist bloc that was held up by the Berlin Wall, but the capitalist world too.
It was a very powerful vision I had and I travelled back to Bengal to spend some time in a village near Kolkata. Out of it I wrote my LIGHT IN THE VILLAGE.
The play caused me much suffering; and I was so hurt when one of its commissioners, Hampstead Theatre, turned it down and the play did really badly when it eventually opened.
But I’ve come to understand that people don’t want to be told unpleasant truths. And certainly not the kind of things that the Goddess Kali told them:
KALI
The children lie in the gutters and stare
At the rich in their towers of sculptured glass
and the rich ignore them
or feel self-righteous if they spare a tiny crust
prisoners in their towers of glass
prisoners afraid to feel the rain
Prisoners of vanity, Mukherjee,
Prisoners of lies. Stealing all the riches of the earth
forgetting that in the end
They’ll have to pay for them.
For they must pay. Everyone has to pay.
Pity the rich Mukherjee. Pity the rich.
Thinking of nothing but their clothes
Enriching themselves from blood and hunger and disease
And holding their noses so they won’t suffer from the smell.
Precious people Mukherjee. Refined people of sensitivity and taste.
And don’t tell me you’re poor.
Don’t tell me of the comforts that you lack.
I was so angry in those days. In my deep heart I still am. But I hope a little less arrogant.
But it’s as clear to me now as it was then that capitalism is failing and will fall, as the other economic systems that had prevailed in the world before it.
And it’s no use the contemptible David Camerons of this world trying to erect more fences, whether they’re around the Eurotunnel terminus or (much more powerfully) around our imaginations. They will fall.
We live in one world and we are all responsible for each other.
And how cross I used to get with all the artists who persist in creating according to capitalist values. Who continue to believe that drama is about individuals in isolation and in conflict.
I don’t want to keep creating capitalist art. I want to create post-capitalism art.
After ”Light In The Village” opened, someone said to me: “You are a new age playwright”. And it made me so happy that someone had understood.
Those were more optimistic days. Before the criminals who run our economies and our world had managed to colonise our brains and fill our imaginations with their landscapes of greed and despair.
But in my obstinate way I keep on trying to resist. And I don’t believe drama is at all about conflict. It’s about togetherness. It’s about love.
And how characteristic of this disastrous era we are living through that even to write that makes me feel as if I am being ridiculous.
But it’s true. My last two plays, EVERY ONE and THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE were not about conflict at all. And nor is THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO JESUS QUEEN OF HEAVEN.
This is the beginning of what a post-capitalist art might look like.
And how happy I was to come across Paul Mason’s new book - called POSTCAPITALISM! - and find him saying:
“The power of imagination will become critical. In an information society, no thought, debate or dream is wasted…”
And:
“The most obvious ‘economic’ thing to the Shakespeare of 2075 will be the total upheaval of gender relationships, or sexuality, or health”.
I am no Shakeapeare, and this is still 2015. But I know that me and my amazing companions on this journey - Director Susan, Archangel Annabel, and St. Claire of the light switches - have created something different and have created something new.
And something that is of the theatre, which I so profoundly love, but does not need one. A show that can be performed anywhere and which just needs its creators, the clothes I am wearing, and the suitcase I bring on stage.
And a tin of yeast to make bread with.
We don’t know if it works or not, though we hope it does. We did our technical rehearsal today; and the first preview is tomorrow.
And then we will see….
THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO JESUS QUEEN OF HEAVEN opens at 10.45 on Wednesday August 5th in the Old Anatomy Lecture Theatre in Summerhall and runs till the end of the Festival.
Labels: Jesus Queen of Heaven, New Age, postcapitalism
Friday, July 31, 2015
performing and arthritis
When I look at the films we made before and during the performance last year I tend to wince.
I look at myself, bandy legged and waddling along as old people tend to do when we have sore hips and knees.
I know I’ve no reason to feel ashamed: but I do.
And when I began to come out using a stick for the first time, that is exactly what it felt like. Coming out. Making myself be open and proud of something I’d been made to be ashamed of.
I don’t wholly understand why old people and disabled people are made to feel ashamed of who we are. Perhaps it’s because we remind everybody, starting with ourselves, of human frailty and human decay.
That, and the unavoidable approach of sister death. And we don’t want to think about that.
I know I was in denial last year and trying to pretend it wasn’t happening.
That’s one thing professional actors have to learn to be good at. Concealment and denial. Because we are supposed to be able to dance, sing, play multiple music instruments, fence, ride horses and motorbikes and never do anything like show weakness or fall ill.
I, on the other hand, often can’t walk properly. And it embarrasses me.
But there it is. The arthritis began in the left knee, and is now in the right knee and hip.
And note how when I write this I say “the” instead of “my”. As if I still want to believe this is all happening to somebody else, and not to me.
But it is happening. I can’t walk any distance, climb stairs with any ease, or stand for any period of time.
It’s hard for us to talk about this, director Susan, archangel Annabel, and me. Or at least it’s hard for me.
But there’s no choice, really. I don’t want to suffer performing and the only way to begin to deal with any pain is to at least acknowledge it is there.
Luckily one of the many things I admire about director Susan’s style of directing is the way she makes use of space.
And the stairs in the Old Anatomy Lecture Theatre in Summerhall have lots of railings.
And the script now acknowledges what is happening and maybe the way I perform does too.
I hope somehow that in the process, in this show that openly acknowledges all our frailty and mortality, something beautiful will be made of it.
And eventually, too, that I’m able to create my new show about old age and death.
But that’s another story. For now it’s this one that has to be told.
Labels: disability, Jesus Queen of Heaven
Sunday, February 22, 2015
The pulpit Queen Jesus preached from this morning
I preached here today. Or rather my trans* Jesus did: Jesus The Queen Of Heaven. Preaching in this bastion of apparent straightness.
Maybe I did it out of mischief. Certainly not the best place to communicate with people from.
But it felt like a good place to stand in and rail against the fact that so many of us are forced into prostitution. A good place to declare my personal pride in embodying "this so-called shame and this disgrace". A good place in which to remind the congregation that Jesus never condemned gay or trans*people. The people he condemned were the self-righteous: "those who condemn others and imagine themselves good".
And a good place, above all, to remind everyone that Jesus is Queer. "Always was. Always is. Always shall be. From now until the end of time".
I was there, at Broughton St.Mary's in Edinburgh, in a time when certain other congregations in the Church of Scotland have decided that their hostility to homosexuality is the most important thing about their Christian faith. But this congregation and their minister are determined to affirm their commitment to ending discrimination: and they invited me to affirm with them.
So I did the Queen Jesus sermon, and the story of the Prodigal Daughter, and blessed them all as part of their regular Sunday service.
And the congregation were lovely. They all wanted to hold hands for the blessing; they made me so very welcome; they made sure I had water to drink and a hymn book to sing from and that I was able to join them in communion.
I was so moved by their warmth. I had been nervous coming - still affected by the memories of the hatred expressed by Christians at my first performance, and by the fact that when I was young and forced to lived as a boy it was in church, above all, that I could never ever be myself.
So today brought healing for me; and a reminder, too, that change is coming in ways we could never have imagined. Not even in our wildest dreams.
Labels: Church of Scotland, Jesus Queen of Heaven
Tuesday, August 12, 2014
Only one review: but many responses filled with love
Reviews are so difficult.
They do matter, even though we might wish they didn’t.
This year we’ve had very few of them so far. In fact just the one: a very beautiful piece in the Guardian early on from the Blessed Lyn Gardner. (and I've included that below, too)
But what I have had are the most beautiful responses from the audience.
I can’t really put into words how grateful I am for these. I do hope their authors don’t mind if I share some of them with you.
Because this is the time in the Fringe when we would normally be proudly plastering our posters and flyers with stars.
Only we don’t have any stars. Only these responses, filled with love:
“It's hard to describe @jesusthequeen. Not just storytelling, nor politics or religion. It's... a journey of love and humanity.”
“When transgender playwright Jo Clifford first presented The Gospel According to Jesus, Queen of Heaven as part of Glasgay! in 2009, it was condemned by the Archbishop of Glasgow, who declared that it was "hard to imagine a greater affront to the Christian faith". He hadn't seen the show or read the script, and neither had the demonstrators who picketed the Tron where it was being performed, one of whom commented: "You don't have to go near a sewer to know that it stinks." Clifford admits that "there is no denying it's a forceful metaphor, though, speaking as the sewer in question, I think I would want to question its accuracy."
So it's good to see The Gospel According to Jesus, Queen of Heaven getting a new production away from the hysteria, in the welcoming hallows of Artspace at St Mark's unitarian church. Part of the fringe, it's performed with an understated power by Clifford herself in flickering candlelight. And it's all the more important that The Gospel is being staged now, in the wake of the Commonwealth Games, in Glasgow, where 42 of the 54 countries competing criminalise lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people and they face prejudice that sometimes is life-threatening. Some of that anti-LGBT sentiment is done in the name of Christianity.
Apparently St John's church, down the road, refused to have the show as part of its JustFest. But somebody from St John's should pop into St Mark's to see what they're missing. It's a humane, mischievous and loving solo show, one in which bread is shared, wine is drunk and the familiar stories of the New Testament are reimagined. In the process, the world is also reimagined – as a far better, kinder and more tolerant place. Which is fitting, because when you think about Jesus and the 12 apostles, statistically it's very likely that at least one of them was LGBT.”
“All I can say is that a church refusing to show this demonstrates that it hasn't a clue what the gospel is about. This is possibly the most important show on the entire Fringe and should be compulsory watching for anyone who wants to know what Christianity is really all about. It is also beautiful, funny, sad and absolutely spot on.”
“The Gospel According to Jesus Queen of Heaven was haunting, meditative and beautiful. Everyone who has the chance should see it.”
“Congratulations to the remarkable Jo Clifford on a truly spellbinding and thoroughly enjoyable performance!”
“I am so glad and honoured to have seen it. Truly wonderful.”
“I stopped going to church years ago. A pity really because done well Sunday could be the best day of the week. Imagine that! Wanting to go every week to a wholesome, peace-inducing,community celebration of being alive. But I cannot abide being preached at. A typical sermon only puts questions and objections in my mind and the desire to argue. So what a relief tonight to sit, rapt, engaged and attentive, in a pew, in a church, with no running commentary of dissent running in the background inside my head. .”
“I think your audiences all come away feeling blessed.”
“It is a thing of magnificent beauty. I hold to this: if only one person in the room enjoys your work, feels moved, goes home thinking about the experience, tells their friends about it, your night has been a success. Having seen your play I know for sure I was not alone in loving it last night. But even if I was, it wouldn't matter. Such courage and imagination will sit in human hearts for a long time.”
“I didn't know what to expect from this show - I had a half-baked idea that it was going to be a satirical comedy, taking a swipe at the homophobic elements of some forms of Christianity. I couldn't have been more wrong. It's a touching, life-affirming and ultimately joyous theological exploration of what it means to be a human being. I left looking at the world through new eyes, and I've been recommending it unreservedly to friends and colleagues since. It's a thing of rare beauty."
"I've just seen the show, and it's lovely - thoughtful, beautifully performed, brimming with humanity. Do go if you're in the vicinity."
“The Gospel According to Jesus, Queen of Heaven was very lovely and thoughtful. Well done Jo Clifford and Susan Worsfold.”
“You are a really beautiful performer and your words are so inspiring.”
“My son and I came to see your show on Saturday night 'The Gospel According to Jesus, the Queen of Heaven'. My son is only 14 so technically he shouldn't have got in. I came to see your show at his suggestion. We weren't sure what to expect. My son is an atheist, unless there is proof, it is just not believable. Me, on the other hand, I love the poetry of life, enjoy meditation, love empty churches and speak to my angels, Raphael and Michael. Your performance was proof of my very existence, to my son, I now have an ally!!! Joking apart I thought it was beautiful. I think my son enjoyed it, I could hear a snigger from him when you started talking about pubic hair .... he was just about to give the game away!!! My son is a big thinker, he is sensitive, open and hopefully will be true to himself. Thank You for sharing your light and reminding me of my own. With Love ..... x”
“Dear Jo. I so enjoyed your performance last night and wanted to let you know how wonderful your performance made me feel but I couldn't quite find the words. I still can't so I'll just say this. Thank you.”
Labels: Jesus Queen of Heaven
Thursday, August 07, 2014
A not so crap second night
I had a feeling yesterday that all the props I had so liberally scattered around my plays without a second’s thought - props I had just assumed the actors would deal with - were all coming back to haunt me. A kind of karmic revenge of the props...
But then last night they started to become my friends. Mainly through the help of a very small but very attentive and very lovely audience.
I got so relaxed I forgot to check the presence of a very essential prop and so somewhat bungled the creation of the world.... but somehow that, too, could be turned into a source of pleasure.
The feared reviewer wrote something very beautiful and full of understanding, too.
And tonight will bring something different. Tonight will be a step into a new unknown...
And I still need to practice with the tablecloth.
Labels: Jesus Queen of Heaven
Monday, June 30, 2014
Resisting oppression with a smile
Yesterday I wrote about smiling. How it helps in rehearsals to smile. And a dear friend responded by saying she might try that out in life.
And suddenly her response brought back a whole heap of memories when smiling was impossible.
This was in the early stages of transition when I used to encounter a lot of hostility and abuse in the street.
I became adept at walking fast, head down, not meeting anyone in the eye. Staying alert to dangerous places or people and avoiding them. Crossing the road to avoid groups of adolescents. Especially adolescent girls. Avoiding groups of men smoking outside pubs.
My journeys through town became very erratic. They involved a lot of zigging and zagging; and it still wasn’t enough to avoid the derisive laughter, the nasty remarks, or the derogatory conversations about me that would go on in my presence as if i wasn’t there.
The problem was I was afraid. And people pick up on fear.
And as well as being afraid, I was ill at ease with myself. My new identity was a kind of ill fitting skin that still chafed me. And people pick up on that too.
Like many of us, I pinned my hopes on surgery. But the Thai surgeon I had chosen turned me down because of my recent heart surgery, and I felt devastated for a while.
Another dear friend had had facial surgery - and how I had envied her! - but that was not an option for me either. And for the same reason.
I was determined that, surgery or not, I would live the life I knew i needed to live; and as I became more comfortable in my new skin I began to be able to look people in the eye, and smile at them too, and the abuse lessened.
It only stopped completely, however, when I finally managed to have a much less invasive form of surgery that simply removed my testes.
The absence of any testosterone producing gland ended the chemical & hormonal war within me: and suddenly I became at peace with myself and with the world.
There’s been no research, as far as I know, on how we perceive testosterone in each other. Something subliminal is obviously at work; because suddenly people stopped finding my appearance incongruous.
And then I really could smile; because I really am at ease with myself and so much more at ease in the world.
It's not a placatory smile, I should add. There's a kind of fierceness to it that stops dead in their tracks anyone who tries to invasively stare at me.
And generally, post transition, my casual street encounters are so much pleasanter than they ever were when I lived as a man.
Thinking all this today when we had a rehearsal in the church, St. Mark’s, where I will be performing JESUS QUEEN OF HEAVEN.
I so hated it there at first. I felt horribly oppressed by the weight of Christian oppression.
It's not simply a question of the vile stuff perpetuated by fundamentalists now. There is a whole history of sytematic persecution and extermination of our gender non conforming brothers and sisters by Christian missionaries at the time of Imperialist expansion in the 19th century. A story that needs to be properly researched and which remains largely untold.
It seemed to hang in the space about me and I could only resist it by shouting as loudly and as fiercely as I could the words Jesus speaks in the play:
“I never said beware the homosexual or the transgendered or the queer
Because our lives are unnatural
Or we are depraved in our desires.
I never said that.
I said beware the self righteous and the hypocrite
Beware those who judge others and imagine themselves virtuous...”
Which wasn’t at all fair on either the present or the past congregations of this amazing church, who live now and lived in the past according to very beautiful and enlightened Unitarian principles.
And also not effective aesthetically. As my dear director, Susan Worsfold, was quick to point out.
And I wonder if it’s possible to create a piece that will smile that defiant smile back at these centuries of past and present oppression.
Laugh at it all, even. Acknowledge the anger but refuse to simply mirror the rage directed at us.
Can it be done? What will it look like?
That is one of the things we have to find out...
Labels: Christian oppression of trans people, Jesus Queen of Heaven, resistance, transition
Thursday, June 05, 2014
Jesus Queen of Heaven: making a trailer. Saying a prayer...
When you're making a film and they say "Action!" then, right enough, you generally have to do something.
Open a door, walk to the spot you're meant to stand on, look a certain direction, say something...
And all the while ignoring the crew who may be remarkably close to your face, and looking anxious maybe, certainly concentrating hard and hoping you'll do it right...
It's an odd process. trying to look and sound completely natural in an utterly unnatural situation, and it amazes me that these days I should somehow feel so at home in it.
Making this trailer, however, was very strange
http://vimeo.com/97319258
When Stuart Platt, the film-maker, said "Action" I was supposed to do nothing.
Or at least not move. Just look. Look calmly and with presence at the camera as it came slowly closer.
And then afterwards I thought: did I actually do anything?
Because it was Stuart who actually made the film.
And it did take hours, and I must have done something, because when I got home at about seven that night I went straight to bed. And slept for hours and hours and hours...
.
Open a door, walk to the spot you're meant to stand on, look a certain direction, say something...
And all the while ignoring the crew who may be remarkably close to your face, and looking anxious maybe, certainly concentrating hard and hoping you'll do it right...
It's an odd process. trying to look and sound completely natural in an utterly unnatural situation, and it amazes me that these days I should somehow feel so at home in it.
Making this trailer, however, was very strange
http://vimeo.com/97319258
When Stuart Platt, the film-maker, said "Action" I was supposed to do nothing.
Or at least not move. Just look. Look calmly and with presence at the camera as it came slowly closer.
And then afterwards I thought: did I actually do anything?
Because it was Stuart who actually made the film.
And it did take hours, and I must have done something, because when I got home at about seven that night I went straight to bed. And slept for hours and hours and hours...
Labels: film making, Jesus Queen of Heaven
Friday, November 01, 2013
Maw Broon, Queen Jesus, Glasgay! and me
When I got to the Glasgow Tron last night to see The Maw Broon Monologues I found myself half expecting the street to be filled withe same crowd of angry protesters that were there when the first version of the show opened in Glasgay! 2009.
I had joked then they were protesting about the disrespect shown to The Broons: but actually they were protesting about me.
+high+res.jpg)
In their hatred of transwomen they had jumped to the conclusion that a transwoman like myself could only be portraying Jesus in a spirit of mockery and disrespect.
And so hundreds of them turned out with their Virgin and their placards on which they had written inspiring christian messages like this:
GOD SAYS MY SON IS NOT A PERVERT
& when asked why they were getting so angry about a show they had not seen and about which they knew nothing they said “You don’t need to go near a sewer to know that it stinks”
& I can boast of having done my bit for christian unity in that devout catholics and evangelical baptists dropped their intensely christian dislike of one another to unite in piously christian hatred of me.
On the Friday of that week, the catholic archbishop of Glasgow, Mario Conti, put out a statement to the effect that it was “hard to think of a greater affront to the Christian faith” than my show.
My show about which he knew nothing; and about which he spoke in terms that it now becomes clear would have been far more applicable to senior members of the catholic church than it ever was to me.
The cast of the Broons show, and especially Terry Neason, were supportive and lovely. But their show started half an hour before mine, and so they would have to leave me, and I would sit on my own in my dressing room and listen to the cheers and the laughter and the applause that greeted them.
None of which helped me much, somehow, as I tried to cope with my nerves and the knowledge of the immense hatred which I had somehow managed to inspire.
I felt lonely and afraid and wished I could write something as clever and as good-hearted as the Broons show was then and in its new incarnation is again.
Instead of struggling to write trans theatre, which had hardly been attempted before and probably, as far as I could tell, would never be attempted again.
Yet when I look back at my GOSPEL ACCORDING TO JESUS QUEEN OF HEAVEN which was the fruit of so many years of internal struggle against self-hatred and shame and which, when she eventually came to light, aroused so much hatred and opposition... when I look back I think maybe it is this play of which I am the proudest.
Proud enough to have written a book, which I know I one day will find the means to publish, proud enough to keep on performing it and which, if I could find the right help, I might even be happy enough to go on performing for the rest of my days.
Labels: Christianity, Glasgay!, Jesus Queen of Heaven, trans theatre, transphobia, Tron Theatre
Subscribe to Posts [Atom]