Transcript
Hello, I’m Claire Doherty, the director of Arnolfini in Bristol.
You are listening to the ‘Imagine New Rules’ podcast.
***
Claire Doherty (CD): Hello, I’m here with Tom Marshman this afternoon. Tom, I’m going to let you describe how you would like me to describe you.
Tom Marshman (TM): Ok, it probably is a wise idea. So I’m a local performer, I produce different events which have a LGBT focus, but I mostly call myself a compare, or host, of those events.
CD: You’re comparing an event later on this week for us. Maybe as a way to understand how you work, tell us a little bit about that.
TM: It’s called ‘Beacons, Icons and Dykons presents: Angora Nights’. We’re screening the film ‘Ed Wood’, who was the 1950s film director, producer and actor, and famously a transvestite who had a penchant for angora sweaters.
I’m going to be doing an introductory performance before the film starts and then we’re having a very informal chat around masculinity. I’m shaping it much more like a party game than a panel discussion, and then we’re going to head into the bar for a bit of a party with Don’t Tell Your Mother who are going to be playing some music for us.
CD: It sounds like a very appropriate event for the Grayson Perry season.
TM: So we’re thinking around masculinity for that, particularly getting involved with Grayson’s cross dressing.
CD: You also have your own artistic practise as well as comparing, or do you regard that as part of the practise as well?
TM: I try to think of them as quite separate really. I generally make one show a year, that’s a solo show that does tour a bit. The show I’m touring at the moment is called ‘Kings Cross Remix’, about Kings Cross area in London in the 1980s.
The work that I do with ‘Beacons, Icons and Dykons’ is much more about bringing artists together, collaborations, and building a sense of community around those events.
CD: You work with a number of different organisations. I think you’ve described yourself in the past as a bit of a trouble maker, a provocateur. In some ways poking a stick at or provoking organisations to rethink and change and do things they might not have done.
What do you see as emerging in terms of the new ways that art organisations might work to be more porous and open, or do you quite like the fact that they have institutional structures that you can come in and provoke and infect?
TM: I see that organisations are really looking at themselves and the audiences that they’re attracting and really wanting to diversify that.
With the work that I’ve been doing with the National Trust, they have realised that their pool of volunteers are older people and the visitors are getting older, so they’re shifting the narratives that they shine a light on which has been a large part of the work that they’ve been doing with the LGBT stories.
It allows a place for me, I think. I often feel like I’m not the greatest expert in arts, but really enjoy working in these places and trying to communicate to audiences what they might mean to them outside of an ‘arts speak’. Illuminating these places and making them feel accessible.
At the moment I feel like a lot of organisations are trying to do that and I feel like I can be an enabler of that.
CD: So how do we stop the provocation becoming simply an exception to the rules?
Let’s say National Trust, Arnolfini, or any arts organisation would work with you and a particular event happens and it diversifies the audience and raises all sorts of really urgent issues, and then Monday comes and everything comes back to how it was.
How does that become sustained? Is that increasingly working with artists like yourself consistently?
TM: I think it’s showing the audiences that these places are available to them.
I did an event at the Red Lodge museum, and it was about reimagining those portraits on the walls to be dating profiles online, like Grindr or Tinder, and making stuff up about what they’d been up to, or what I’d been up in the process of dating these portraits.
CD: So this is a Georgian house in Bristol, isn’t it?
TM: Yes, it’s part Georgian and part Tudor. Those people that came to that event had never stepped inside there – a lot of them anyway – and it’s quite well hidden really, although right in the centre. So I think it’s about introducing those places to them, making them feel comfortable, making them see that their stories may not be blatantly visible within those spaces; that they are or can be made up!
CD: That playfulness makes me think of the amazing history of practise and performance in Arnolfini over its four decades here at this Bush House site.
Many people have spoken to me about the extraordinary, eye opening experiences that they’ve had here, that this very much used to feel like a gathering place, but less so now.
In my first podcast, I spoke a little bit about how the Harbourside and the atmosphere has changed enormously, but I would like to see Arnolfini return to being a gathering place - a place in which there are social bridges. As well as responding to particular groups and existing communities, a place that builds a community.
What’s been your experience of other places where that happens and goes well?
TM: I think that a lot of different venues that I work with all have different attitudes towards that. It was so interesting; on Friday I did an event at the Zion Centre in Bedminster Down and Dundry view, which is further out of town and it’s very much got its own community there.
The event that we were hosting was a queer event called ‘A Queer Salon’, and we had about five different performers, and it was just local families that were coming, not necessarily LGBT+ families. People were curious about what was going on and they had a great time.
I was also aware that a lot of my friends and people that come to my events regularly weren’t there, because it was further out of town.
CD: What do you think – is it something to do with Zion Centre being recognised for having a trust there? People are coming there anyway and they feel comfortable there, so they think,‘we’ll give it a try’.
TM: Yeah, I think that centre has worked quite hard to be embedded in that community. They host regular events, they’re a café during the day, and they’re very friendly and accepting and they also talk quite openly.
That area specifically has experienced a lot of hate crime and so they’re trying to address that by having a Diversity Month, which is what they’re doing, and that’s about all sorts of different types of diversities.
CD: Tell me a bit more about how you act as a compare.
How do you know about what’s going on on the ground? How do you see the artists that are coming out of the woodwork? Where do you see their practise? Where do you look?
TM: I quite often want to work with people that I like, as people.
Sharing dressing rooms with other artist and performers, you get to know whether someone is difficult to work with, whether you want to hang out, work with them. Whether you want to bring them to Bristol and say, ‘you can sleep on my sofa’.
CD: I’m interested in this phrase, ‘talent development’ that a number of arts organisationswill talk about in funding applications and in their visions. I’ve been thinking a lot about the role of an arts organisation like Arnolfini is and I’m quite interested in thinking about it slightly differently in terms of nourishing artistic practise and creativity.
If we think for a moment about the artistic ecology in a city like Bristol, or any regional city of this kind of size, I’m intrigued to think what nourishes artistic practise?
It’s not only opportunities to perform, to test out, to network, and as we’ve talked about, as a gathering point; but also about seeing work that you never imagined that you would see in your home town.
I’m interested to think about for you, what do you want to see in this city? What do think is missing in terms of the ecology that we have?
TM: I feel like that there isn’t really a home for experimental theatre in Bristol. It’s not a go-to venue.
I think that the programme that Trinity offer has been really great in terms of performance that’s very much interconnected with the community, but works around the building.
CD: You’re a trustee of Trinity. Tell me a little bit about that and the importance for you about artists being on the board of an organisation?What do you notice as an artist that other board members don’t notice?
TM: I think it’s having another set of eyes onto the programme, thinking about the community that you as an artist are connected to. But also I think it might be around ways to use the space, that maybe if you’re in that organisation and stuck in it, you may not see.
For Trinity, I’m very interested in seeing the garden as a space that might be a place for the programme – maybe there’s a temporary sculpture that sits there, or a permanent one. I have talked about that in meetings before and I think that’s something that they’re considering. I don’t think that’s something that would have been considered otherwise.
CD: Tell me a little bit about you; how you first encountered performance and experimental theatre. How did you get to experience that?
TM: So I came from doing a B-tech in performance as I didn’t get very good A-Levels. My B-tech was in Weston-Super-Mare, and it was very much a showbiz B-tech. A lot of the work that we did was a panto that lasted quite a long part of the year.
CD: Lots of jazz hands?
TM: Yes, loads of jazz hands!I think the panto acted as a big income generator for the course, so we were forced to do two shows a day for two months or something.
Then I really wanted to do a degree, but the only place I could get a place through clearing was Leicester, and as it turned out it was the best thing really.
CD: What was the course?
TM: It was called Performing Arts. However, the course was much more about your own voice within performance – creating theatre or installations or experimental practise around things that were important to you, and that opened up lots of different things.
Beforehand, I thought I wanted to be an actor, and that’s really not me. After graduating, I had quite a clear idea of the type of performance that I wanted to make, and came back to Bristol that being my home town
That was when I started to come to Arnolfini much more. At that time, there was a very regular programme; most Fridays and Saturdays there was a show here. There was quite a community of artists that would come, and I still see those people now.
CD: Was that being run by the programme here?
TM: Yes, so that was when Helen Cole had just been put in post and through that, I started to talk to Helen about my work, and I think she was one of the first people to really support it through different emerging schemes that she had created.
CD: It’s interesting thinking about In Between Time (IBT) and how Helen developed that into an organisation out of Arnolfini. She describes it as a global home for radical ideas, and to think about how important the exchange of ideas in and out of Bristol is incredibly important.
Have you ever felt that it can become parochial, in terms of the network of artists who are here?
You described your role as bringing other artists in; do you see that as being a crucial part of shaking up the ecology here?
TM: In a way the climate in Bristol is quite interesting for a lot of theatre practitioners. There’s a lot going on, there’s a lot to see, and there are spaces to develop work within that, so I think that artists can be a little bit complacent in Bristol.
CD: That’s probably similar for a lot of cities where there’s a certain dynamism about the ecology but it needs outsiders to shake things up, to show different perspectives, to create new synergies and new encounters.
It also seems to me that another rule, if we are talking about rules going forward, would be the role of an arts organisation in amplifying practise – nourishing it, and helping to export and support it internationally, which is very much what Helen Cole has done at IBT, I think.
Tom, if you were to have one new rule for a 21st century arts organisation, what would it be?
TM: It feels like it is about the artist, it is about bringing them back in more, and to make sure that there are always artists in the building.
I’m thinking much more specifically about Arnolfini, because it has been a place where I’ve have residencies to develop work and I see that as being really useful and valuable.
I think it’s beneficial for everyone really.
CD: It’s interesting, we’ve had a conversation amongst the team here about residencies and one of the things we were talking about was that if you’re resident, in whatever form – artist, musician, writer – that you’re resident within the team, as opposed to resident in a room with the door shut.
That idea of artists who influence our daily thinking would be a huge step forward in terms of a dynamic arts organisation.
TM: And to add to that, I thinkthat often when I’ve had residencies within organisations, I always feel like there should be another residency at the beginning which is about the way that the organisation works.
I’ve really felt that withinthe National Trust. It’s quite a big deal to get your head around the way that these volunteers work specifically and who does what. You need to get your head around who these people are and the building before you go into a dark room and start making whatever you’re making.
CD: Thank you so much for coming in and talking about your ideas for New Rules.
TM: Pleasure.
Thank you for listening to Imagine New Rules. All the podcasts in this series are available for download at arnolfini.org.uk.
Ensure you are notified of future episodes by following Arnolfini on SoundCloud.