My blog at Uni

To contact me via snail-mail, email me!





An Inexplicable Dream

Thursday, February 28, 2008

Guess what I went to go and see last night?

Ever since I heard Kaos were back with a new show, I've been dying to see The Kaos Dream. Missing the performance in Norwich in October left me feeling muchly miffed, but a quick glance at their website soon revealed they were actually coming to Wakefield as well. I'd been nagging Sri to look at their website in a bid to get her interested in going with no success, and it was just by chance that I mentioned to Elena on the way back from our last-minute dash to Norwich a few weeks ago that there was this show by one of my favourite theatre companies on in Wakefield that I desperately wanted to see but would be missing (all buses would get me back to Leeds too late). Elena's Mum had also been to see the show in Norwich and had recommended it to her, so it was quickly decided that a road trip to Wakefield was in order.

As usual, I was not disappointed. If it wasn't for the fact that the show closes in Wakefield yesterday, I'd tell anyone and everyone to go, because defining and describing such an experience is absolutely impossible with the restrictions of the English language. Simply put, it was awesome. The interpretation of the text was the most original version of the Dream I have seen to date, with it making so much sense in a "Ohhhhh, that WORKS! How did I not SEE that before??!" kind of way. It was the first piece of theatre I've seen since... let's face it, Kaos' adaptation of Moll Flanders, that actually had me rolling about in the aisles. A brilliant, hilarious, clever production... can't say much more than that (well, I suppose I could, but not without going on in a drama luvvie, fangirl fanatic way).

The real shame in all of this boils down to two things. The first, that although I'd rung up expecting to be shoved at the back of the auditorium since I'd booked my tickets so late, I wasn't. It became blatantly clear why this was when we arrived at the theatre. Although we couldn't see the entirety of the stalls from where we were sitting (the dress circle, of course dahling), the dress circle seated a maximum of 15 people for the third performance (the one we went to) at the Wakefield Theatre Royal. The stalls didn't seem overly full either, although there was at least one rather rowdy school party there. Basically, the theatre wasn't even half full. How awful to perform to such few people towards the end of the run of a show? The second shame? It's their last show. With the Arts Council withdrawing their funding last July, on Saturday, Kaos play their last performance of their Dream, and their last performance as Kaos, to a theatre in Manchester. If you can get out to Manchester this weekend and have never seen Kaos, go!






Children in Our Prisons

Wednesday, February 27, 2008
I've held off writing or talking about our prison visit to HMP New Hall on Monday (for my Collaborative Performance Project module) mainly because I've needed a while to collect my thoughts about the whole experience. I wasn't really expecting anything in particular before I visited and I wasn't even scared by the prospect of being in the company of the female "dregs of our society", but nevertheless, the visit left me feeling completely hollow and incapable of holding a proper conversation about much for a whole afternoon and evening.

With a bit of reflection, I think it's fair to say I was a little in shock. Although the group working in Rivendell (the juvenile unit) were given a complete tour of the juvenile wing, we were only shown round the education department, so we were presented with the surreal experience of walking round what felt like a normal HE college, surrounded by several-metre-high green fences topped with barbed wire. The only glimpse we got of the actual "prison-like" bit of the prison was a quick glance to the left to see a corridor marked at every few feet with heavy white gates. With that image imprinted in my mind and still giving me shivers, I'm glad we weren't given the full tour we were primed for. And the actual department? Also all very surreal and unexpected.

The education department is a confusing mix of what you'd think prison cells may look like and a primary school. The classroom walls are covered by brightly-coloured displays created by the women: pictures they have created from cutting images out of magazines and pasting them onto coloured paper, and drawings vividly coloured in or stencilled with bright coloured pens. On the table of the room we were left to wait in while our guides were rounded up, there was an image created by one of the women depicting herself and her three children with the words "single parent family" stencilled underneath. Amongst this quite uncomfortable display of relatively childish work were "class rules" and "what you hope to gain from this course". There were thick white bars across each of the windows. Each of the classrooms opened onto a main corridor granting access to the two small "break" rooms: a rectangular room with bare white walls and low wooden benches along three of the walls. The contrast between the two was awful.

We were given a tour of the department by two women who were on the Business Ed course. It was their job to take us round, getting each teacher to explain what they were doing with their class and generally chat to us about why we were here. The two classes that stand out for me the most are the Kitchen class (I can't remember the exact name of the class, but they were covering food preparation, hygiene, etc) and the class simply described to us as "the one where the girls who would struggle in the normal classes go".
The teacher in the Kitchen class explained to us about how her girls were being "angelic" today and were "behaving themselves": the "girls" referring to a group comprised mainly of middle-aged women, a few younger women and a heavily pregnant woman in her mid to late 20s. On hearing this, one of the younger women chipped in "We're not all bad people in here you know - some of us are nice people just in a bad situation". I couldn't have put it more succinctly.
The women in the other class were the most upsetting. They were clearly either heavily sedated or just not with us in this world, most of them staring out into space or quietly colouring in tessellation patterns. The description of the class was one given to us by the teacher in front of his whole class - there was no pretence that these women could be considered in the same way as all the others we had seen or the women who were showing us round. They shouldn't have been there.

For the other half of our visit, we were sat with the PHSE class (some of which we may be working with when we return to conduct out workshops in April) and were given the opportunity to ask them pretty much anything, and them us. Before anyone had a chance to say anything though, one of the women (with a large amount of facial piercings and a black and fushia pink mohican) burst into a fit of giggles, quickly followed by the other few women sitting round the table. It was quickly explained to us by another one of the women (with a shaved head and baseball cap) that "someone in this room is rather hot", with a meaningful look in Ginny's direction. The experience was similar to that of being in a year 8 class full of pubescent teenagers - very unnerving considering most of the women were older than us. The rest of our time there all but two of the women became resolutely silent, unwilling to ask any questions with their eyes tilted to their laps with their arms crossed or their fingers fidgeting.

Leaving felt wrong. Knowing that all the women we had met that day (bar the staff) couldn't leave whilst we were phoning for taxis to take us to the train station just seemed... wrong. I knew they were there for a reason - but what reason? Only a tiny percentage of women in prisons are there for violent crimes, the majority are there for theft, fraud, prostitution or drugs offences. Surely there's a better way to deal with these problems instead of locking them away from their children and their families? I knew I'd feel this way after meeting them - after all, as I explained to someone who asked me what it was like in a hushed, excited tone the day afterwards; they're just people. People like you and me, people with families, who had homes somewhere once, just people who have done something wrong and are paying dearly for it.

The fact they've done something wrong though - does that mean they should be treated like kids? Given tasks to draw patterns using circles, squares and triangles, magazines to cut nice pictures out of, and praised in front of strangers for being "angelic"? Called "girls" by every nearly every member of staff, most of whom are younger than them? It just seemed all wrong. What these women need is help, not patronisation. There is a reason why people offend, and sticking them in cells for a few months or a few years isn't going to change the reasons they committed the offence in the first place. In fact, they're even more likely to re-offend, losing their homes whilst they're locked up and consequently losing their children or partners because of this. Education is a help, but not this way. These prisoners are women, just like the teachers teaching them. We are all equal in that sense, and should be treated as such since these women have chosen education over manual labour.

And the women who are so sedated or so out of it they can't even join in with the main classes? Should they even be in prison at all, let alone an education system? What good is it doing them sitting in a room colouring in pictures? And how does it make them feel to hear they "wouldn't cope" with the work everyone else is doing being aired to a few strangers visiting from a university? They're like children; they're treated like children and some even have their mindset. Prison is right for some - I do still believe that, but I also believe some of them should never be put there in the first place.

Is there any wonder these women suffer from major self-esteem problems? That their confidence is so low that the minute they leave prison they resort back to the numbing drugs or the security of organised prostitution? There's no respect there - and why would there be? These women ARE "the dregs of society", the ones that several people have told me deserve to rot in jail because they're bad people and don't deserve to mix with us. And who the hell are we to judge? Our society isn't so great that we can consider ourselves to be the angelic layer of it. We're all human - we all have similar traits, similar thoughts, desires, hopes and dreams. It's just that some of us don't stand a chance where others do. They deserve some kind of respect - not praise for what they've done, just an acknowledgement that they're human too, and because of that some respect is deserved.

I won't be calling them "girls" during my workshops. And I won't be asking them to draw pretty pictures. They're women in their own right - funny, intelligent, interested women, and I for one am interested to hear what they have to say and what they feel about a society that has failed them somewhere along the line.






Grown Ups

Tuesday, February 26, 2008
------------------------

Being a grown-up is a scary reality of adult life that should be avoided at all costs. A grown-up is a responsible adult who handles things like the mortgage and other bills, someone who has a job, and someone, as I was told today, who has "no life". It would appear that this generation's 'responsible' and 'mature' students consider anyone who isn't a part of the student elite and who works instead to have missed out on the best opportunities open to them in life, and that their chosen path can only lead to doom and gloom as they have severely limited their options by making choices before they turn 30. What you really ought to do, the government, our teachers and our parents tell us, is go to university.

The common trend with the youth of today is, if you can, to go to university to study a BA in whatever you fancy. Most people don't really know exactly what they want to do aged 18 for the rest of their lives, so a stint in university, "growing up" away from home, is the best place to get your thoughts together and to prepare yourself for the real world. The problem with this is that if you don't know what you want to do with your life, how can you know which degree you want to take? For many students, those three or four blissful years can be used solely for "the experience" of being a student - whatever that is (most people would argue that it's meeting a load of people, getting drunk on a regular basis and attending the odd lecture in between). If you've got an aim behind your degree, then maybe academic achievement is on the agenda, but if you're not working in any particular direction, keeping your options open and avoiding those pesky limitations, then that's fine too - everyone knows that just having a degree is guaranteed to get you where you eventually decide you want to be, since they work as fast tickets into the workplace nowadays.

The best thing about being a student is that you don't have to be a grown up. You're in a wonderful limbo between dependence and independence, not needing to be completely responsible for your actions since your parents are always there to pick up the bill for any monetary problems, and free to do whatever you want because you're away from home, in "the best years of your life" and with access to more pubs and clubs than you could possibly think of. Being a grown-up? That's not for many years to come - students need to live their lives to the fullest before they can even start to think about all that.

------------------------

I do wonder when I became a "grown up". And when and where the cynicism kicked in.

I sat in a discussion with the rest of my Actions and Interventions group today, arguing the case for those of us who think getting into £19k worth of debt isn't worth it if you're just at uni because you were told it was the right/best thing to or because you're there just for "the experience". If I've learnt anything from this module, it's that most students feel lonely quite a lot of the time, despite being around thousands of other academics and people with the same interests. Most of us have felt depressed at some point, whether it be clinical or just feeling a bit blue and homesick. And most of us have so little money, you'd be lucky to get one night out a month where you could buy enough to get roaring drunk. Is all that worth the debt? What kind of experience is it you're paying for if it's not the education you rate?

As someone at university with an agenda - to leave Leeds with a 2:1 or 1:1 to go on to achieve QTS - it's incredibly frustrating to have to work alongside people who are simply there for "the experience". They are the ones who are getting the stereotypical experience, because they're putting all of their time, money and effort into everything but the educational experience, complaining at the same time about the standard of teaching and the content of the lessons, only half of which they attend. I was told on application to the university that I was one of over 9000, and that I'd be lucky to become one of the 90 odd who actually got accepted. It angers me to think of all those other people who wanted to be here so much when half the people I come across don't want to be here, have thought about dropping out, or have just given up already.

Academic achievement isn't the priority for a proportion of students "studying" at university in our society. Doing the reading for the session or getting an essay finished any time before a few hours before the due time is still looked down on, even though everyone here supposedly did that in high school to be able to get where they are now. Apathy kicked in somewhere in the application process and just "a degree" of any level in any subject seems to be the goal for some people I come across. The number of people hoping to continue with drama after BA? A handful.

Being a student allows you to postpone becoming a grown up. Those of us who start our adult lives as students won't be leaving home for several years after we graduate because of the amount of debt we're in. We're bestowed with limited responsibility masquerading as independence whilst we're at university because we're living away from home, but in reality we're given the money to get through everything by a loans company or by our parents, so we're never in a situation where we're not depending on anyone. The debt ensures that this will continue for several years, where, at the same time, the 16-year-old school leavers will have more money and possibly property behind them than we hope to have 5-10 years after graduation.

Maybe I'm too serious about things. I don't aim to travel for a few years after leaving (how would I afford it anyway?) or anything else away from Norwich, I just want to secure myself a job I'm going to be happy to work in for 40 odd years, have a home and a family. Yes, I'm "limiting" myself by having hopes and plans, but is it really limitation? Isn't what I'm doing more about enabling? I've hopefully got about 60 or so years left in me - why would I want to concentrate all the good times into 5 or 6 years and be miserable, in large amounts of debt and with no direction in life for the other 55?