how I spent my Sunday...

Though the UK is in almost every way a much more secular country than the US, Londoners seem (much more than New Yorkers) to observe Sunday as a "day of rest."

Lots of shops are closed and we've learned that you're better off not trying to get anything done, since everyone is probably at home perusing one of the numerous Sunday papers (or, indeed, perusing more than one) or watching the EastEnders "omnibus" (during which all of the week's episodes are repeated in one two-hour marathon).
Perhaps the nicest Sunday tradition, however, is just to hang out in your local pub, a tradition that, for two weekends running, Sergio and I have whole-heartedly embraced. We're lucky in that our new neighborhood offers two very comfortable 21st century pubs to choose from, replete with hip locals, free Internet access, and (most surprisingly of all)... decent food! Last weekend, we went all-English and had a full "Sunday roast" at the White Hart, complete with roast beef, horseradish and Yorkshire pudding. And the vegetables were actually crisp!

This Sunday consisted of four hours of highly productive playwriting at one pub, followed by a relaxed evening of emailing (and blogging) -- with a pint of Guiness in hand -- at the other.
So, here's to many more Sundays at the pub! Cheers!

just the basics

Well, it's nice to be in our own place. And even nicer that it comes furnished (bed, sofa, table, etc.) There was no kitchen stuff, though (we've ordered some from Amazon). So here's what our fridge looked like this week:
Yes, pre-packaged meals from Sainsbury's - an English tradition. All the major supermarket chains (Tesco's, M & S) do a lot of business in store-brand ready-meals. I generally try to avoid them - but with no pots and pans for cooking...

Meanwhile some (but not yet all) of the boxes we shipped from the US arrived. It was nice to see these familiar things:

In fact I think I'll be taking those bags out to the Farmer's Market this morning, keeping my fingers crossed that the pots and pans will arrive soon!

Dirty Marti-not?

I went to a pub near LSE on Friday where a social event for my program was being held. I have learnt that pub-going after classes is a very common thing here in the UK-- students and professors get together after class and have a pint. I think it's a great way to encourage strong ties between students and the faculty-- so I give it the thumbs up!

HOWEVER, a funny thing happened to me at the pub. I have had next to no alcohol over the past month and a half. So I thought perhaps this would be a good time to have a Dirty Martini-- which over the summer in New York became my drink of choice. The pub was really fancy and had all sorts of nice liquors on display. So I asked a waitress how much a Martini would cost. She asked in disbelief: "you want to know how much a Martini costs?". I said that, indeed, I wanted to know how much a Martini cost. She then laughed and walked away.

Weird. I flagged the barman (or pubman). He came my way and I asked him the same question. He said, "oh, I don't know, 2 or 3 quid". For those of you unfamiliar, the Brits often use the word 'quid' to mean pound. Not sure why. So I said, "great, could I have a Dirty Martini, please." To which he replied, with a throaty chuckle, "this is a pub, not a bar" and walked away! A girl in my program saw my horrified face and told me that barmen at pubs love to pull these kinds of shenanigans-- ie. make unsuspecting foreigners feel super foreign.

So apparently, despite the fact that they are decked out like a full bar, pubs don't serve hard liquor. I wonder if maybe all the bottles of liquor they display are fake-- like those carton books that stores use in bookshelf displays.

Doesn't make that much sense to me-- but I guess not everything makes sense in life-- especially on certain sides of a certain pond. Lesson learnt. I'll leave the Martinis for when I get back to New York in December.

My apologies for not updating this in forever. Will write more (and something of more substance) soon. xx

culture vultures

Yesterday, was a day devoted to what New Yorkers call "cul-chah." 

The big event of the weekend was the Frieze Art Fair in Regents Park, where the top galleries from all over the world sell high-ticket artwork for hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of pounds.  [It's like London's equivalent of the Armory Show.]

We didn't spring for Frieze tickets, but the buzz around the fair does trickle down to lots of the smaller galleries, too.  So we began Saturday with an art exploration walk around the East End.

It began with Pickle and I checking out the Zoo Art Fair, Frieze's hipper, cheaper sibling held in a few abandoned warehouses in Shoreditch.  Like all contemporary art fairs, there was a lot of bullshit, but about 20% of it was really worthwhile.

A fringe benefit was getting to learn about lots of different galleries all in one place.  Signed up for multiple mailing lists and will hopefully be "in the know" about the latest art openings and events in the coming months.

After which, we met up with Sergio (fresh from getting his trendy haircut) and walked around smaller East End spots and saw some more interesting art, including.

• Modern-day Abstract Expressionism in the attic of an old school...

• Paintings of pop cultural divas...

And much more.  And of course, since we were being very hip and chic, we had to dress like French intellectuals (at least I did):

The day concluded with our first trip to the National Theatre, to see a new production of Mother Courage directed by Deborah Warner and starring Fiona Shaw in the title role.  [Based on past history, this production may well be coming to BAM sometime in the future.]

The show's aesthetic was beautifully realized, a spare post-modern Brechtianism and the story-telling was ten million times clearer than the muddled Meryl Streep/George C. Wolfe production in Central Park a couple of summers ago.

Best of all, though, we'd been introduced by Sarah Sloboda to one of the actors who was in the show and he generously invited us backstage for a drink after it was done.  We got to wander through a bit of the backstage passageways at the National and hang out near Fiona during a post-show concert with the cast and crew.  There was an Irish rock band playing and at one point Ms. Shaw got up and recited this lovely John Donne poem:

  BUSY old fool, unruly Sun, 
        Why dost thou thus,
Through windows, and through curtains, call on us ? 
Must to thy motions lovers' seasons run ? 
        Saucy pedantic wretch, go chide 
        Late school-boys and sour prentices, 
    Go tell court-huntsmen that the king will ride, 
    Call country ants to harvest offices ;
Love, all alike, no season knows nor clime, 
Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time. 

....

        She's all states, and all princes I ;
        Nothing else is ; 
Princes do but play us ; compared to this, 
All honour's mimic, all wealth alchemy. 
        Thou, Sun, art half as happy as we, 
        In that the world's contracted thus ; 
    Thine age asks ease, and since thy duties be 
    To warm the world, that's done in warming us. 
Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere ; 
This bed thy center is, these walls thy sphere.

And, on that note, let me report that after five weeks of flopping on an air mattress in a friend's flat we have finally moved into our own place!!  Pictures and further reports on THAT to come soon!

mapping things out

It's been a week of creative breakthroughs on my writing projects. My plans for the first two short plays I'm working on have started to become much clearer (in my head at least).

One especially useful exercise from class was creating an actual map of the audience's experience of your piece. Here's a detail of the journey I hope to take people on:

Think I can achieve this?? I've got about four weeks now to figure out how!

Will keep you posted on the development of both works. Tonight, the plan is to soak up more Elephant & Castle Latin American experience by going to a Colombian restaurant/discoteca that promises to feel like a little bit of Bogota in South London. Maybe I'll have pictures to post...

discovering many Londons

This is the lovely notebook that I've been using to write my first plays in. It was a gift from Andrea Harrison -- a memento of NYC and also of my Youth Onstage! play Our City. So many lovely people gave me notebooks and journals before I left (and I'll be using all of them, eventually) but this one seemed good to start with, while the memory of the States was still strong...

It somehow seems appropriate that the notebook has Lady Liberty on it, since immigrants and newcomers appear to be figuring quite prominently in the two first pieces that I'm writing. America's 20th Century mythology is very much based on it being "a nation of immigrants." I'd always known (abstractly) that 21st Century Britain was also a multiethnic, multiracial society but my recent explorations have given me some more detailed experience of what that means:

- Last Sunday, I attended a service at a Nigerian aladura church in Peckham. I'd been passing by these places on my way to the train and thought they might make a good subject for drama. The experience itself was highly theatrical: with women dressed in colorful African dresses and gorgeous head wraps, a rock band playing live throughout the service, a charismatic female worship leader and LOTS of dancing (probably 30-40 minutes straight of it towards the end). It was a fascinating mix between aspects of Pentecostal Christianity and aspects of African music and ritual. Since then, I've been reading a bit of academic research about the Nigerian community in the UK, who first started coming over in the immediate post-colonial years as students, and about the importance of establishing churches as a support network for people who felt out of place in their new culture.

- Earlier in the week, has part of my research at Elephant & Castle, I thought I'd hang out in the Shopping Centre next to the bus station and observe a typical day. I got myself an arepa and a cafe con leche and sat myself outside of La Bodeguita, a popular restaurant and the seeming cnetral hub of the Colombian community in the area. Sitting at a side table for almost 90 minutes I saw all kinds of people coming and going: groups of young people in their twenties, mothers and children, older men. There was a palpable sense of a community, a small version of Bogota or Medellin within London (there's a store next door called Medellin y su Moda). These people came in for a bite of familiar food, a chat with the women behind the counter and some Spanish conversation with whomever it was they ran into, before going off to their various jobs. Looking around I also learned that La Bodeguita seems to host a popular discoteca on Friday and Saturday nights -- I may be back!

- And, finally, last night I went to see a play at an East End school created and performed by a group of Bengali girls from the London neighborhood of Tower Hamlets, which I take it has a large South Asian population. One of my instructors at Goldsmiths is the "writer-in-residence" there and has worked with the girls for three years straight to devise original plays. The school, called Mulberry School for Girls, was a rather amazing place -- somewhat like an excellent charter school here in NYC. Though a "state" (i.e. public school) it gets some kind of extra money to make arts curriculum a priority and has professional artists working at the school and building a relationship with the place.

This is not necessarily the London I anticipated, but it's one that I'm excited to discover. My curiosity about the many ethnic groups that make up this city is definitely a reflection also of the last six years I spent in New York, doing community organizing with All Stars and Castillo. I'm starting to feel proud about being a South Londoner, and to have such a range of neighbours!

community outreach

You might remember a previous post describing the four short plays that I need to complete for my course before the end of the Autumn Term. Well, I've begun work on two of them, and the experience of planning them has dove-tailed nicely with my desire to get to know London better.

On Friday, I spent more than an hour walking around Elephant & Castle:

Yes, that's a statue of the eponymous pachyderm. The area got its name, it seems, from a historic pub located on the site. The name "Elephant and Castle" seems to be an English bastardization of the name of a Spanish princess: La Infante de Castile.

Anyway, history aside, Elephant & Castle is now known (or avoided) by most Londoners as an overdeveloped area planned in the 1960's, which is comprised of two traffic roundabouts, a series of grotty pedestrian tunnels that can get you from one side of the street to the other, several housing projects, and a very tacky shopping mall.

To many, Elephant & Castle is a perfect example of bad 60's city planning that didn't take pedestrian life into consideration. There are calls for it to be torn down and many new design proposals for what can be put up in its place. It has struck me as an interesting spot to put on a site-specific outdoor performance (the platform in the picture above even looks a bit like a stage, no?)

Walking around the other day and mapping the area, I came across a number of interesting features: there's an old movie theater, a bingo parlor/bowling alley, a colorful area (below street level) of market stalls populated by a lively ethnic mix of vendors, and even a restaurant called La Bodeguita that seems to be frequented by most of London's Colombian community (which, to be honest, I hadn't even known existed). The network of pedestrian tunnels make for interesting staging opportunities and the mix of ethnic food stands can provide flavors and smells.

You can see from this shot that there's a conglomeration of bus stops (right near where that white tent is). My initial idea is to stage a night-time performance there for the assembled crowds of tired, drunk partiers who are waiting for London's night buses (the Tube shuts down around 12:30 AM). Perhaps involving distribution of empanadas from the Latin food stand next door? The fun thing about the project is that we have no budgetary or feasibility constraints since this is merely a proposal -- we don't actually have to stage it. I think my next step will be to hang around E & C a few more times and eavesdrop on people passing through in order to get some ideas for characters and stories...

Meanwhile, for my other assignment, I need to do research into a subject or a community that I have not had personal experience with. I immediately thought of the African community on Rye Lane in Peckham (near where we've been staying while we wait for the lease to start on our flat). You may remember my previous post about the African market along this road, which we pass through every time we go to the train. There are also a number of churches on the second stories of the buildings, from which one can hear incredible music emanating at different times.

I'm very interested in finding out more about the culture of these churches, most of which seem to be attended by African immigrants from Nigeria and Ghana. Below are some representative pictures (not my own) off of a website called Peckham Vision:

The research for the project can take on many forms. I've already been to the library to look into statistics about immigration from Nigeria to the UK, as well as the mixing of Christianity and traditional Yoruba religion. But the centerpiece of the work is supposed to be conducting interviews, so I'm hoping that I can meet some pastors and congregants of some of these churches and talk to them.

In a couple of hours, in fact, I'm planning to go down the street and see if I can sit in on a service...

All of this planning and research seems like a lot of work to do just for a 15-20 minute performance, but I'm truly curious to learn more. Being an outsider to London, I think I bring fewer pre-conceived notions to my investigations and everything that I discover has the appeal of being brand-new. I'll keep you posted on how these pieces are developing!