Engaging is the Challenge

Happy Bank Holiday Monday to you, my dear reader.  I hope that this extra day of freedom is affording you suitable levels of confusion about setting your alarm and all the poorly thought out DIY tasks you could possibly have hoped for.

“Tonight is the night when six become one”, as the famous Spice Girls song definitely does not go.  Tonight myself, my favourite Australian (the powerhouse producer and artistic director of RedBellyBlack) and the cast of A Year From Now will be hosting a fantastic fundraiser at our favourite haunt, The Boogaloo in North London.  We are raising money to pay for our venue, where in the first week of July we will be performing a verbatim, physical theatre piece about humans’ relationships with time.  Here are the miscreants/creative geniuses involved:

From left to right: Me, Jorge Franco IV, Clementine Sparrow Mills, Jessica Warshaw, Christopher Montague and Kate Goodfellow.  Kate’s the Australian.

“Oh, Vicki, come on now.  You’re not seriously trying to market an event less than six hours before kick off, are you?”  I hear you ask exasperatedly.  “Sorry, but yes,” I reply firmly, handing you a cup of tea and a nice piece of fudge.

The thing about fundraisers is that they obviously exist to raise money for a cause, but they also give people an opportunity to come together and show their support.  In twenty years’ time, those loons with the extreme facial expressions in the photo above will be running the artistic industry (fingers crossed), and we are starting as we mean to go on: hosting events that are fun, inclusive and emphatic about how important the arts are.

The whole point of A Year From Now is to give people the chance to talk about their lives.  How often do we get to hear a ninety-four year-old talk about their hopes for the future?  When do you get the chance to ask someone with brain damage how time affects their sense of self?  That’s what theatre is for.  You can dress it up (quite literally) in shiny costumes and put a pretty light on it, but at the end of the day we are all in this industry because we want to talk about things that matter.  To that end, we’ve put an evening aside to show a film, have some fun and hopefully get some funds.

The arts are easy to ignore if you don’t engage with them very often.  Facebook event invitations are easy to ignore if you get too many.  Marketing is easy to ignore if you pride yourself on being immune to “that kind of thing”, but since when are the best things in life easy?  Apathy is easy.  Engaging is the challenge.

So please, engage with us.  You don’t have to come to the fundraiser tonight (although you’ll be missing out on a fantastic movie night with free popcorn and playdough competitions), but get involved.  Look at RedBellyBlack’s website.  Ask me about the people we interviewed for the show.  Ask your creative friends about their projects.  Talk to the people who invite you to Facebook events and find out what the damn things are all about.  Ignorance may be bliss, but you don’t know what you’ll be missing out on, and you never lose anything by asking a question.

Whatever you’re up to, have a glorious day.

Judgement Call

Good morning and happy Saturday to you!  D’you know, I only discovered yesterday that this is another bank holiday weekend.  Thank goodness those poor, tired bankers are having a well-earned rest from the arduous task of stealing our money.

As you can see, I’ve just made a mass-judgement about bankers based on the global financial crisis, and although that’s not exactly a controversial opinion, I’m sure that there are nice, compassionate people among the financiers of Canary Wharf.  (Don’t look at me like that.  It could happen.)

What makes you judge someone?  Do you assume that someone is trendy (and therefore a bad person) because they’re sporting a beard and skinny jeans?  Do you dub someone a saint in your mind because you witness them buying a Big Issue?  Do you lose respect for a friend when you discover that they enjoy the musical stylings of Justin Bieber?

I do, and if you’re honest I think you do, too.  Don’t worry, this isn’t going to be a preachy post about how we need to be less judgemental (although I think we should probably give it a go, shouldn’t we?  Yeah, alright.  I will if you will).  Instead, I would like to identify a few things that we absolutely should judge people based on:

1) How they talk about their elders
Even if someone doesn’t have the best relationship in the world with their biological parents, everyone has parental figures in their lives from whom they have learned a great deal.  The way that someone talks about their mum, older sibling, grandparent, favourite teacher etc. tells you a lot about what made them who they are, and how big a part of their personality is informed by a sense of respect.

2) Sense of humour
Don’t be misled here: I don’t mean that you should judge people based on which sitcoms they like, or whether they’re fans of the Cornetto Trilogy.  By “sense of humour” I mean how they respond to day-to-day life: do they laugh when they fall over in public, or throw a hissy fit?  Do they snigger at others’ misfortune, or are they sympathetic?  A person’s sense of humour demonstrates very clearly what their priorities are and how much perspective they have.

3) Social standing
Again, don’t get the wrong idea: I’m not suggesting that we split the world into Breakfast Club characters.  What I mean is, you can tell a lot about someone by how their friends behave around them.  For example, my brother is the dad figure in his friendship group at uni.  This amuses me because I know him well enough (obviously) to know that how his friends see him accurately reflects his personality.

4) How (much) they feel about stuff
Obviously we can’t have an opinion about everything, but you can make fairly accurate assumptions about someone based on how much they care about their interests, ambitions and morals.  It doesn’t really matter what the interests are (within the limits of morality and the law, of course) as long as the person cares about them.  Apathy is the enemy of romance, art, the progress of science and half-decent conversation.

5) How they feel about you
For your own sake, you should definitely make judgements based on how someone treats you, and how they feel about you.  Someone who loves you (and acts like it) is clearly an excellent human being, and someone who does not is not worth your time.  Also, who wouldn’t love you?  You’re adorable!

Have a lovely, relaxing Saturday.  Maybe go for a long walk.