4. Where the Somewhere / Anywhere project began

This blog begins to trace the experiences and threads of inspiration that led me to wanting to make a project in my hometown, the development of which forms part of my DYCP funded project.

I grew up in Stourport-on-Severn, a small town in Worcestershire in the West Midlands, in the 80s and early 90s. I didn’t know anyone who worked in theatre, I had a working class upbringing and was the first person in my family to go to university – everyone was really proud. My grandad gave me a box packed with food essentials – porridge oats, tins of new potatoes and baked beans, and as a treat a small tin of salmon. I’d always enjoyed learning and fitted well into the school system, appreciating the structure and being generally obedient. I had a strong sense of duty and a work ethic that I now recognise as part of my first born daughter of a working class, culturally Methodist family. There wasn’t much to do in Stourport growing up – no cinema, theatre or other markers of more traditional culture. Although Birmingham was only 23 miles away, without a car you needed to be able to get on a train from Kidderminster, which necessitated an expensive bus ride or a lift. So my world was quite small. I loved horses and living on the edge of the countryside, and was able to work in exchange for rides. 

Growing up, the world of professional art-making was utterly alien to me. However, looking back, I had a life rich in culture. My mum sang, and in her youth she’d travelled all over to sing in folk clubs. She sang at home and in the car, made up stories for us and I knew that she liked to draw, though she never had time. All the women in my family were skilled with textiles, knitting, sewing, embroidery, needle tatting. Skills I don’t really have. There was a strong drama department at my school, with annual musicals, though not having learned an instrument or how to dance meant that I never really got a look-in until I played a male non-singing role aged 16. As a teenager I was part of a local voluntary drama group, where I got the chance to direct my first show, Mr A’s Amazing Maze Plays by Alan Ayckbourn. The audience chose the route that the characters take, and there are lots of possible combinations, or versions of the play – quite a challenging directorial debut. 

When I left school I wanted to teach English, and all the English teachers I knew also taught drama. It was only when I went to Aberystwyth University to do English and Drama that I started to uncover a whole world of performance making and thinking, primarily through volunteering with the Centre for Performance Research. And I was hooked, intellectually, imaginatively and physically. I got to study with a student of Grotowski, and explore European theatre traditions. At the end of my first year I dropped English and started studying drama full-time. My family were concerned – university had seemed a way to ensure financial security through a job like teaching. And there I was, striking out into utterly unchartered territory. 

I have spent most of the following 20 years working in theatre in different ways. Often ‘sensibly’ and whilst also working in other industries, playing it safe. For a long time unpaid work was not an option, and it took me a long time to recognise the disadvantage that put me at in terms of developing my craft, making shows and gaining experience.I’m hugely grateful for all the opportunities I’ve had – and the hard work I put in. As the 2010s progressed and more people in the sector started talking about class in the arts I started to realise lots of things about my own experience. How my class may have impacted my experience of working in the arts, at odds with the meritocratic ideal I’d absorbed in the heady days of mid-nineties New Labour.

In 2018 I read a book called The Road to Somewhere by David Goodheart. Whilst it is problematic in some respects, and lacking nuance in how it categorised people, there was something in it that felt very familiar. Goodheart proposes that the traditional left / right descriptions of people’s political affiliations and likely attitudes to social issues are largely redundant in a post-Brext world. He identifies two groups, ‘somewhere’ people who value ascribed status, their role in family and community, and who are  more rooted to place, or ‘anywhere’ people, who value achieved status and are more mobile, moving for education, work, an idea or experience. In these descriptions I recognised,much of  my experience of growing up and sliding between two ways of being . The  concepts really came to life for me with the example of environmental activism. A ‘somewhere’ person might litter pick in their local park and speak to a local councillor about preserving it but not consider themselves an environmental activist, while an ‘anywhere’ person might sign online petitions and attend a city centre demonstration and self identify as an environmental activist. I saw myself in this, recognising that I started life as a ‘somewhere’ person in a ‘somewhere' family and community. My education, life and work meant that I lived most of my adult life as an ‘anywhere’ person, while I had a growing longing for a more rooted sense of place and community. Living in London as  an ‘anywhere’ person I longed to set up a composting scheme for my block of flats, but the transient population made it really complicated. 

Around the time I read The Road to Somewhere, I came across a quote from then Prime Minister Theresa May, from her post Brexit 2016 conference speech: 

if you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere. You don’t understand what citizenship means. 

Wyre Forest, the area I grew up in, had a 74% turnout in the Brexit referendum and 64% of voters voted leave. The vote split my family in surprising ways. I noticed the distance between my thinking and the place I grew up. While reading about this in the local newspaper I happened across some research showing that Wyre Forest was one of the areas of lowest social mobility in the country. This really surprised me. Whilst not a particularly wealthy place, Wyre Forest doesn’t seem like a poor place at first glance. There are comfortable looking housing estates, gently busy towns, lots of green space. Certainly in relation to some of the areas of London where I now live and work, parts of the North East where I’ve worked, and the West Midlands where I have family, and the poverty is immediately visible. I also realised in that moment how little I knew about the place I grew up in, how desperate I had been to leave as a teenager and yet how much it must have shaped my thinking – even if it taught me what I didn’t want. Or thought I didn’t want. Maybe it's also about reaching mid-life, I felt like there was something to explore about the place where I had spent my formative years. So I began wondering what a project in my hometown about belonging might look like.

Attending IETM in Brussels in 2017 had started me along this path, without me realising it, particularly this plenary (thinking about populism and re-locaising practice), and a workshop with Amrita Hepi a First Nations artist from Bundjulung (Aus) and Ngāpuhi (NZ) territories. In this workshop we explored the form and functions of ritual, welcome to country. As she explained the levels of description of place I had the vivid memory of the outline of two trees on the Stagborough  ridge on the opposite side of the valley from where I lived. An image so familiar as the edge of my world for so long. This experience nurtured the sense in me that there was something to explore in making work in, about, and with Stourport and its communities. 

I had threads of ideas of what I might want to make. I knew it would be a project made with the community, and that I wanted it to be open-ended. To not go in with a sense of I want to make a show, but to arrive with my skills and experience and discover together what needed to be said and the possible forms that might take. I had a sense that I wanted to work with children who were about 8 years old (which felt like the sort of time you might develop a sense of place and other place), teenagers on the edge of leaving (or not) and with older people who had spent their life in the town.

In 2021 at COP in Glasgow, I heard Alistair McIntosh speak. He offered a way to navigate with compassion and imagination the tension between Goodheart’s ‘somewhere’ and ‘anywhere’, which felt powerful and inspiring. He asked us to imagine what it would be to become indigenous wherever we touch the land. In that moment I realised that although I had spent my first 18 years in Stourport (and lived there for a further year as an adult) I was not indigenous to that place. Sure, there were traces: the familiarity of the colour of the soil, the imprint of the Stagborough ridge outline, the knowledge that thunderstorms could get ‘stuck’ and roll up and down the valley for hours. But there was so much that I didn’t know, and that I felt compelled to use this time to explore.