Listening to Alan Lyddiard talk about his new arts project ‘100 Faces, 100 stories’ can be both a frustrating and enlightening experience. Such is his passion for the arts in all its myriads of forms, Alan can have a tendency to go a little; shall we say, off topic? He often goes off on wild tangents, telling meandering tales of his experiences and influences often all in the same sentence.
Alan made his name as a theatre director, specialising in George Orwell adaptations. He has extensively toured his own particular renderings of Down and Out in Paris and London, 1984 and Animal Farm, playing to audiences worldwide to considerable acclaim.
Alan is pretty much everything you would want, or maybe expect, in a theatre director. He’s enthusiastic, passionate, manic, camp as Christmas and a man with a genuine empathy for presenting authentic voices in art.
It is this search for authentic voices which gave Alan the idea for ‘100 Faces, 100 Stories.’ Alan is to oversee the production of an installation at the Crisis Skylight centre at City House in Newcastle. The installation will feature 100 stories and 100 complementing images all exploring themes of destitution, vulnerability and homelessness.
The stories are to be gathered through collaboration between service users of Crisis Skylight, which is a resource and education centre for homeless or vulnerably housed people, and a number of the regions writers as well as artists and photographers. Writing sessions will take place at formal workshops but there is also a strong sense of autonomy in regards to what work the writers choose to submit.
Writers may craft work which is based on their own experiences, of the experiences they have seen around them. Some accounts may be fictional, others anecdotal. The writers will also try to document the experiences of those who use Crisis Skylight, including those service users for whom not having a secure place to stay, is a daily reality
There are few boundaries for the project and it will encompass sculpture, performance and other mixed media art. In short, ‘100 Faces, 100 Stories’ will be a melting pot of ideas and a beautiful mix of style, thoughts, cultures and techniques.
“I wanted to get writers involved either to write stories or to help them the service users to write their stories or to act as a kind of mentor.”Alan Said. He hopes the project will work as a conduit to give an artistic voice to those who are marginalised. On his motivation to create the work, he said, “We want to focus on the idea of empathy and to see the world through other people’s eyes.” He added, “I want to get under the skin of these people who are vulnerable and I want to see into the soul of these people.”
When Alan speaks about ‘100 Faces, 100 Stories’, Alan often sets off on ebullient flights of fancy. On paper there is much that would make Alan sound very much the rambling pseud. I must admit, when he makes airy proclamations such as, “I like the idea of putting pieces of paper on walls. I think there is something quite religious in that. You see it quite often in Eastern Europe,” It’s hard not to chuckle at the absent minded artistic posturing.
But, catch Alan in full flow and it is hard not to be swept up in his excitable stream of consciousness visualising. He is also nothing if not ambitious; he predicts that ‘100 Faces, 100 Stories’ will be “Just the beginning of something special.” Alan hopes to take some of the experiences and results of the project and incorporate it into his theatre work and then, taking it global.
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| Project Leader- Alan Lyddiard |
“The next stage is using these stories and people with difficulties in their lives and professional actors and making a play about it. I would like it to be a kind of contemporary Down and Out in Paris and London” He said, adding, “I want to take it to cities all over the world such as Manila which is the poorest city I have ever been to.”
For the meantime though, the project is very much rooted in the North East. It is the Crisis Skylight centre which is to house the installation and provide much of its initial inspiration. The Newcastle centre was opened in 2007 by the national charity for single homeless people, Crisis. The centre was the first Crisis opened outside of London and provides education and training to help homeless people gain employment, as well as offering a range of classes focussed around well being such as yoga, meditation and creative writing. The centres act to allow service users to learn the skills to help themselves.
Crisis are keen to point out that there is a much bigger picture to consider in regards to issues of homelessness. They are keen to dismiss the common assumption that you must sleep on the streets to be considered homeless.
The Crisis website states, “Homelessness is about more than rooflessness. A home is not just a physical space, it also has a legal and social dimension. A home provides roots, identity, a sense of belonging and a place of emotional wellbeing. Homelessness is about the loss of these.”
Homelessness remains is a major social issue and there are some pretty shocking statistics related to this ‘bigger picture’ view of homeless. For every one rough sleeper in this country, there are roughly 100 people living in hostels, and approximately 1100 people living in unsecure or overcrowded accommodation.
Based on figures collected by the Department for Communities and Local Government for England in 2007, There are approximately 500 people in England sleeping rough each night, 50,000 staying in hostel accommodation and just over half a million people living in cramped and vulnerable conditions. Despite these estimations at the time those figures were collated, only 84,900 of these overcrowded or vulnerable households were classified as homeless. There is a very clear disparity in these figures, and in how hopelessness is perceived in general.
While the ‘100 Faces, 100 Stories’ project certainly hopes to allow the voices and experiences of those affected by homelessness to be shared, Alan Lyddiard has a different focus for the project. Alan sees homelessness as a worthy subject to make art about but his priority is to create a competent, accomplished and engaging work of art over any social agenda.
“What I want to find out”, he said, “is can we create great art with everybody? Some artists think there is amateur art and professional art. I want to go beyond that. I think we can create great art, working class art, with a small group of people.”
I find Alan’s intentions and honesty refreshing. Many in the community focused arts world would choose to focus on the ‘worthy’ angle for a project like this but Alan clearly has a lot of belief in the people involved in the project, and also in people in general, as well as high expectations. Regardless of Alan’s motivation for driving this project, the desire to create inclusive, participatory art can reap huge emotional and psychological rewards for those service users and artists involved.
In 2008, Arts Council England published the paper ‘Great Art, Good Intentions’ the paper aimed to address some of the stigmas and limitations within the field of participatory arts. The intended outcome was that by 2011 the Arts Council would support arts organisations “To overcome barriers to engagement and participation in the arts, focussing in particular on reaching those who at present rarely or never attend or take part in the arts.”
Those involved in the arts have a lot of responsibility in maintaining the balancing act between social inclusiveness and creating high quality art. They must at once create a high value aesthetic, which is seen as valid to other artists, the public, funders and other organisations while delivering positive social and community relevant outcomes.
The Arts Council believe there is much value in participatory art practices, stating in the ‘Great Art’ paper, “It is a malleable dialogue that informs the work of the artist, builds and develops audiences, engages with communities, promotes learning and forges routes into active experience and artistic creation of many kinds.” Alan Lyddiard supports the views of the Arts Council. He said, “I want to go for great art but I want good intentions to be integral to that.”
Writer Tim Joss ruffled the feathers of many in the profession with the publication of his book ‘New Flow: A Better Future for Artists, Citizens and State’ in 2008. Joss was deeply critical of the existing models of, participatory arts practice in England.
In ‘New Flow’ he said, “A public debate grinds on about the value of the arts in society. It has set up a misleading polarity between the arts intrinsic and instrumental benefits.” ‘New Flow’ called for a reform in the participatory arts to create a comfortable space where creativity meets inclusion. This public scepticism of the value of the arts is something Joss believes must change.
Alan Johnson, Secretary of State for Health agrees, “I would like to see the benefits of participation in the arts recognised more widely by health and social care professionals.” he said, adding, “Access and participation in the arts are an essential part of everyday well being and quality of life.”
In these collaborative, creative environments the skill of the professional artists combine with the creative energy of the participants to create that “something special” Alan had foreseen with his project. The outcome of such processes is that all involved quickly become more than the sum of their parts.
This improvement to well being is one of the most simple benefits of taking part in participatory art. In a 1997 study, Francois Matarosso identified over 50 different positive outcomes from participation in the arts. It can bring us pleasure, it can relieve stress and it can be deeply cathartic.
I hoped to feel some of these benefits when I decided to contribute to the ‘100 Faces, 100 Stories’ project and get involved first hand. I headed down to one of the weekly writers workshops down at Crisis Skylight in Newcastle City centre. The workshops are an opportunity for writers to get feedback on the stories they have collected and written, as well as an opportunity to catch up on the progress of the project as a whole. The latter is an incredibly important element of the workshops as I found out. Alan’s vision of what he wants to achieve from ‘100 Faces, 100 Stories’ is constantly evolving, sometimes so quickly it’s hard to keep up.
At the workshops I was witness to some really great work being moulded and formed. I saw the beginnings of some beautiful complex sculptures featuring themes of ornithology, disease and renewal. The piece featured taxidermy merged with medical apparatus to create an unnerving amalgamation of the natural and the artificial coming together with an eerie disharmony.
I also had the opportunity to hear some of the stories which have been compiled for ‘100 Faces, 100 Stories.’ Many of the stories were written by the service users of Crisis Skylight themselves. Some of the stories were light-hearted tales of happier times, of childhood and family. Others tread a much darker, more contemplative path. Alan showed us a video of one service user telling his story where he admitted to trying to kill his mother in a drunken rage.
Another story detailed a young man’s experiences battling mental health taking in destitution, incarceration and attempted suicide. Many of the stories were deeply sad but many of the protagonists are now able to focus their lives towards positive goals. I still couldn’t help but feel a sense of melancholy when hearing the stories as they were so short in length (around 500 words each) we were always left with a sense of ambiguity in regards to the fate of those in the stories resulting in a great sense of pathos.
In order to write my own story for ‘100 Faces, 100 Stories’ I decided to spend some time at the Crisis Skylight Cafe. The Cafe is a commercially run cafe which is open to the public but employs homeless people to work there. The cafe is an excellent opportunity for those affected by homelessness to learn new, practical skills while earning money and gaining recognised qualifications.
Unfortunately, on my trip to the Crisis Skylight cafe, it was totally rammed. All my attempts to talk to the staff about their experiences were quickly aborted due to the constant flow of customers. So, sat enjoying a fair trade coffee, I thought about my own experiences and preconceptions of homelessness.
Four years ago I spent just under a year drifting from floor to sofa in a number of flats and houses in Manchester. It was a pretty uncomfortable existence. I was unemployed for much of it, penniless but glad to have a roof over my head. Since that time I had blocked this ‘wilderness year’ out of my mind having found a job and somewhere stable to live. Strangely though I never thought of myself as homeless, but then maybe that’s because I had other options, friends and family I could rely on. Perhaps I have a preconceived (and totally erroneous) notion of what a homeless person is like. Looking over the Crisis statistics on homelessness, it dawned on me that I had been one of these statistics. Slowly but surely memories began to surface of my experiences around that time. One particular memory came to mind, so I put pen to paper, Alan Lyddiard’s words echoing round my head, “Everyone has a story to tell.”
The story I wrote was detailed a time when I was sleeping on the floor of a small, damp living room in a rundown flat in a trendy bit of South Manchester. One morning I awoke to find slug trails latticing my pillow centimetres away from my face. After a failed attempt of sleeping within a circle of salt, I decided to take more drastic action. I procured some slug pellets and began liberally dousing them around the backyard where I believed the creepy gastropods were getting into the house from. I woke after an anxious night and checked my pillow. There were no slimy trails. I headed to the yard where I was met with the repulsive sight of approximately 3000 dead slugs. Horrified I checked the empty carton of pellets. The tub informed me the pellets attracted slugs and then poisoned them. I had failed to read the instructions on the back which read ‘“Use one kilogram tub per 44,000 sq feet.”
Whilst on the surface simple being a funny, if fairly unsettling story, I found the process of writing about that time cathartic. Storytelling has always been used to reflect on our experiences and make sense of our surroundings. Allan et al, in a 2002 essay about the benefits of storytelling, said, “Stories encourage creativity, help in handling emotion and help to make sense of puzzling situations.”
The value of storytelling is often neglected in the world of participatory arts. There is often a clash between what is considered timeless or classic in art versus the contemporaneous view that art, including storytelling can have a valid and beneficial social purpose.
Stories have been a community activity since the beginning of time, from when there was no other means to pass on information and histories other than to do it orally. In this tradition of community storytelling, stories are didactic tools. They have a moral or a meaning. They say, “Learn from my mistakes.”
The ‘100 Faces, 100 Stories’ project will hopefully use these incredible, rich stories as a catalyst for learning resulting in people challenging their preconceived ideas of what homelessness is. In his book ‘Storytelling in Organizations: Facts, Fictions, and Fantasies,’ Yainnis Gabriel said, “Storytelling is an art of weaving, of constructing the product of intimate knowledge.”
With this in mind, the sheer scale of the ‘100 Faces 100 Stories’ should provide a vastly educational and enlightening experience for anyone who has the pleasure to view it.
‘100 Faces, 100 Stories’ will take place in the courtyard of Crisis Skylight, 1 City Road, Newcastle on 9th, 10th and 11th September 2010
Photographs by Magali Pettier for Small Change magazine
There is a shorter, additional article on ‘100 Faces, 100 Stories’ by Ben O’Connell in the Summer 2010 issue of Small Change magazine.
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