Gathering the Queer SpiritJohn BensonProject Archivist – queerupnorth International Festival . Paper Presented at the 2007 Annual Conference of the International Council on Archives Section on University and Research Institution Archives, University of Dundee, Scotland, August 14, 2007 Standing here this morning it occurs to me that I perhaps should have called this ‘queer even further up north’. I thought this morning that I would spend just a little while telling you about what we’ve been doing with oral history at queerupnorth and, just as importantly, why we’ve been doing it. This is a Heritage Lottery funded project based ‘out there’ in the community. It’s amazing the things you can learn in that situation that you wouldn’t in the normal run of things. I’ve leaned far more about arts festivals by being in there: being part of that organization, than I ever would by occupying a desk within a library or record office. I’ve learned as much from things overheard and tantrums witnessed as I have anything I’ve catalogued or recorded. Anyone present who’s taken on a similar project may know what I mean though when I say that it can also seem isolated. In truth you ‘sort of’ work for several different organizations but not properly for any of them. You represent at least two different communities: you’ll feel obliged to defend the archives sector to the arts festival and the arts festival to the archives sector but you won’t, in truth, feel like you really belong to either. So it’s not always comfortable but it is, I think, productive. Some of you may be sitting there wondering just what queerupnorth is? Well, what it is the biggest gay and lesbian arts festival in Europe. Based in Manchester, queerupnorth began life in 1992 as the brainchild of Tanja Farman and Gavin Barlow, two members of staff from The Green Room, Manchester’s radical performance space based in a couple of the arches behind Oxford Road station. Within just one year it was styling itself the ‘National Festival and Lesbian and Gay Arts’ and by 2000 was described as the ‘International Festival of Lesbian and Gay Arts’. And international it certainly has been: regularly attracting performers from Australia, South Africa, America and Europe. It is certainly, I think, a unique event and its archive contains, among other things, almost certainly the best collection of material on queer artists in the world. Also, ironically perhaps for such a cosmopolitan event, the story of queerupnorth has a great deal to tell about the local gay scene in Manchester, which has played a vital part in transforming a run down area of the city around the Rochdale Canal into a thriving, lively, vibrant and colourful area providing a variety of bars, clubs, restaurants and other facilities. And with that transformation has come another: the transformation of the gay and lesbian experience. So what have we been doing? We’ve been cataloguing the paper records and that catalogue, of course, has gone on a2a. We’ve been cataloguing and digitising the video collection, which as a gathering of material must be almost unique and we’ve been trying to find a home for it. We’ve been producing an exhibition based on the archive and we’ll shortly be beginning to think about a learning day, also based around the archive, to be held next February as part of Lesbian and Gay History Month. And we’ve been running an oral history project, collecting the memories of people who have been involved with queerupnorth or the context in which it has operated since 1992. This collecting of memories is, I suppose, an attempt to capture experience, which is something that paper records don’t do as well. I think this is particularly true with adversity. It is said, I think accurately, that history is written by the victor and some of what oral history does is try to correct that – to get to the stories of those people who otherwise would not tell them because they wouldn’t write them down. One example of what I mean – one project queerupnorth have been involved in is ‘The Pansy Project’ which has been about people’s experience of homophobic bullying. Participants have been invited to take a pansy (I’m sure we don’t need to explore the language of this) and plant it in a location where they have experienced homophobic abuse. Like anything else in life, some will wither, some will flourish and so on. The point, I think, is to visualise and creatively deal with the adversities in life and that’s something ‘records’: an incredibly dull word, rarely do, because these things are about experience. And it’s this which oral history seeks to capture. And so to this end I and a small team of volunteers have been talking to performers, founders, staff and other interested parties at queerupnorth about their experiences of the festival and the context within which it’s operated since 1992. Doing oral history can be a developing experience: you’ve got to get the questions right and you’ve got to listen - apart from anything else you’ve got to make sure that you’re not about to ask a question that they’ve already answered, firstly, because that’s rude and secondly because the interviewee may quite rightly be annoyed and you’ll spoil the interview. And you’ve got be direct – I was brought up in a polite, courteous, middle class family and I tend to dress up my questions, my conversations, with little flowery bits of verbiage which I have told myself are helpful but which doing oral history has taught me is just plain irritating. Most people, I have come to believe, like directness and certainly if you listen to an interview with someone you don’t want to hear an interviewer, which you want to hear as little as possible in any case, using one hundred words when one will do. So I and my small band of volunteers set out to interview founders, members of staff, performers and members of the audience. I don’t want to say a huge amount myself this morning but I thought I would play you some extracts of these recordings. This is Tanja Farman, co-founder of queerupnorth: So, we put on this first season of work…I don’t think we even thought of it a festival. We nicked the title [It’s Queer Up North] from Paul Cons, the publicity guy at the Hacienda and we put on this season of work which was amazingly successful at the Green Room. And so Tanja reflects on her favourite performers: Who were my favourite performers?...Well, I think Diamanda…Diamanda Galas, I was very proud of bringing her to the festival…and also, I think, Ronnie Burkett. I have…I still have…a very close relationship with Ronnie Burkett. You must go and see him. Also David Rousseve…he’s a black American actor and dancer. He produces some very beautiful work. queerupnorth’s beginnings were very humble indeed, and if in recent years the festival has accommodated people in four star Manchester hotels, that certainly didn’t use to be the case. This doesn’t mean that there weren’t notable performers in these early days, however, as witness this account, by Adrian Howells, currently appearing at the Edinburgh Festival in ‘An Audience with Adrienne’, of his night spent sharing a mattress with the infamous performance artist Leigh Bowery: You know I think we just went to someone’s house, and I think it must have been a friend of Gavin and Tanja’s and we just slept on the floor and I remember that I had to share a mattress with Leigh [Bowery]. And that was just what it was like in those days. And Leigh, you know, was a very sexually confident person and I thought, you know, sharing this mattress with him…is he going to try something on with me? And one of the things I remember about that night was…one of the things that people didn’t know about Leigh was that he didn’t have any of his own hair. So Leigh had some secrets which is kind of ironic given that Leigh’s whole life was on display really. And in the night because he was cold he put on this tea cosy. And it was, you know, one of those with cottages and woods on the outside and he was laid there with this tea cosy on. And one of the stage crew started sleepwalking in the night and went and stood over Leigh and he was just terrified. He didn’t know that I could see this… but I just thought this was absolutely hilarious. And in the morning he told me that he had been scare stiff because he thought she was going to piss on him! queerupnorth has consistently tried to be at the cutting edge of radical performance: the same Adrian Howells has become associated with so called confessional theatre. Here he describes ‘Adrienne’s Great Depression’ in which his alter ego takes over a room at the Malmaison Hotel where she remains for some days in a severely depressive state of squalor. ‘Clients’ were invited to book an appointment and could do so at any time of the day or night. I should perhaps explain that I have Adrian’s permission to play you this. So, you know, I moved into this hotel room and for four days I didn’t wash, or shave, or change my make up. And the hotel had agreed that I could write in lipstick on the mirror and had saved some dirty dinner plates and glasses and so on that I could leave them in the room too. And you know, John, I was really quite severely depressed at that time and there were some people that came to see me that were really quite severely depressed and I’m here to tell you that I’m never revisiting that piece. And finally: I know time is short, Ronnie Burkett, the well known Canadian puppeteer, responds to a question about how he experienced Manchester in 1998: What I remember is the rain. It rained and rained and rained. The Green Room had this, kind of, tin roof and I remember the rain was like bullets [laughs]. And it was fantastic… it was like a revival meeting. It was a Friday evening and even now when things go well we say that it was like Friday night in Manchester. So, in gathering together some of these memories we have, we hope, helped to tell the story of how a festival celebrating queer culture has come from very humble beginnings to be the biggest event of its type in Europe and, as an arts festival, possibly in the world. It’s grown through adversity and through pain and like most cultures that have grown through adversity and pain: witness celtic tradition – it is very proud of its heritage and what it has achieved. And oral history can help to capture this pride, no pun intended, because very few written records are going to adequately describe it. Oral history can record the experience of adversity and struggle in a way that written archives, invariably the product of the victor, the controller and the manager, cannot. Thank you. |