Courage Songs is a documentary play that I wrote in tribute to five Birmingham-based women and their multiplicities. These women include me – I am written into the script, both as a documentary theatre writer and as a woman with multiplicities.
The play is about ambition and family, love and independence, faith and criticality. The plot reads like this: Five women are drawn together in Sufi Sisters, a Birmingham-based choral project. One of them is an outsider to the Muslim and South Asian majority, two are divorced, all are migrants or daughters of the diaspora. They begin staying back to share memories about songs that have given them courage. As their past lives are imagined and celebrated, they invite us into the discord of the present: Uzma finds new independence as her daughter leaves the nest but doesn’t have a language for it in her relationship. Shalina experiences success in her breathwork career while new caring responsibilities for her mum see her finding it hard to breathe. Ciara’s trying to write an autobiographical play but doesn’t know who her community is. The women learn tolerance and vulnerability as they strive for multiplicity in today’s binary logic.
The reading was made possible with the musicians Oliver Weeks, Deepa Nair Rasiya and Hassan Mohyeddin who wrote the arrangements and performed live alongside the generous support of an ensemble of University of Birmingham student actors, production staff and volunteers. It invited producers of various companies throughout the region, community arts workers, friends and family of the artists and colleagues across departments at the University of Birmingham. We were able to feed our audiences the fine food of Munayam Khan of Raja Monkey and cover the musicians’ time with the support of the Sir Barry Jackson award.
The play ran for two hours with a break for lunch/chai in the interval and a question-and-answer session (Q&A) with the audience led by Shalina Litt, one of the women the play is in tribute to.
Litt is a breathwork coach and singer who shared her courage songs and guided decisions on the play’s multiple drafts. Litt and I had agreed that the Q&A would elicit feedback from the audience, rather than from the creative team, and for this reason, I sat in the audience.
Litt’s Q&A largely saw Muslim women coming forward to comment on the work’s relatability. One spoke about the play striking her on a personal level because of how the stories are so similar to the people she knows. Another discussed the relatability of the characters before asking me about my process for making this possible.
I wasn’t quite prepared to be asked questions about the work and tentatively stood from my seat. My answer included being vulnerable, growing friendships, activating close listening and contextual knowledge that accumulates acuity for potential stereotypes. When I sat down, my answer seemed a little short. I didn’t know what else to say – the notion of relatability was such a personal one.
On reflection, I can see that I had many things to say, but was holding off: I held off from discussing the ethical framework for my storytelling with communities, how it nurtures multilingualism and positions myself as a participant. I held off from academic terminology attached to my teaching of applied and documentary theatre. But why I was holding off on my usual articulations of research and practice is something I would like to go further with:
As an academic, sometimes the intensive processes of supporting and grading students’ performance work see some conflation between academic rules and audience rules for reception. A Q&A at the National Theatre’s Olivier with its middle-class, institutionally educated crowd, may come to suggest that the distance between academic thought and audience thought isn’t too dissimilar. With this in mind, one may make the mistake of speaking to audiences in the theatre in a similar language to those in the university.
At the University of Birmingham theatre department, we were of course positioned at my workplace. Here, amongst other modules, I have taught the ethics of collaboration and representation in applied and documentary theatre. Perhaps, then I was holding off discussing my methodologies because I didn’t want to pretend that this global north, academic language was also a lingua franca for the audience.
This brings me to the racialised and faith-based elephant in the room. In my two years at the University of Birmingham, I hadn’t seen the George Cadbury Hall home to as many Muslims and (particularly female) people of colour as at this reading. Thus, I could have been holding off because of personal inadequacies in communicating to a global majority audience at this institution. My applied theatre projects, after all, happen in small, horizontally led groups, often in the suburbs, and never see me standing at the front of a large group discussing ‘my process’.
Such a reflection reveals a wider passage of knowledge about communicating with global majority audiences more generally.
Perhaps, in future instances like the above example, I could explore communicative practices borrowed from applied theatre projects to challenge artist/audience and knowledge-producer/receiver hierarchies in the theatre.
For example, Q&As with global majority audiences don’t need to be structured in a top-down formation where the audience stays seated and the artists/knowledge remain on the stage.
Instead, what might happen if we invite audiences onto the stage to provide feedback and be in horizontal dialogue with artists? After all, when one individual is in front of another, it is much easier to find, and elaborate on, an appropriate response.
I have a routine to prepare for change.
I turn on all the lamps in the house, put on some music, sit myself on the rug, in front of a window.
Take a duvet and leave it close by, for comfort.
I usually have a film on in the background that I know, and love – something a bit trashy, blooming with positivity, a romance too.
But I never really watch it. I sit there preparing for the storm.
It is like hearing the rain pummel down on a tin ceiling and knowing that you have to eventually walk out into it.
I was in Berlin, and it was 2013.
I have a routine to prepare for change.
I sit by my dog, wishing that I could tell him what was ahead. ‘You are going to be in a small box for 22 hours and then you’ll see me again. You are going to be looked after by a friend for five months while I find a flight for you’.
I didn’t know what was ahead, not really.
I was in Birmingham, and it was 2020.
I have a routine to prepare for change.
I pack up all of my photographs, taking them out of their frames and placing them in an envelope, for new frames.
When I unpack them, I was in Perth, it was 2022.
I had to give my books to charity.
I try not to own books now.
I have a routine for dealing with change.
UK: Ludgate Hill, Birmingham B31DW;
Australia: Mary St, Como 6152
claire(at)clairefrench.com
+44 (0) 7514 714 414
