West Brom Girls… and how’s your walk?

So what a hectic week it’s been – you ever have one of those weeks where you blink and it’s saturday night and your week’s ‘to do’ list from Monday is still full up?!

Last weekend for the first time I worked with a director Rachel Mars in Manchester at Contact Theatre in Manchester. ( sublime venue with knitted grafitti ‘tags’ randomly tied to handrails etc., making your eyes scan every surface you wandered past in search of another to discover. Cute young guys who keep it running smoothly as well and couldn’t have been more helpful!)

It was for a Litup project that I’m doing, and it was nerve wracking and exciting at the same time to work with someone else on my words and how to perform them – whole new world! Rachel was great and has left me with a snowstorm of inspiration to sift through over coming weeks.

At one point she was walking behind me, to mirror my ‘walk’ to see how I use my body unconsciously – that was intriguing to see someone else who doesn’t look like me (Rachel’s petite and has a cute walk) actually seeming to because of a familiar walk. As I am on the tall and slightly willowy side, I’m grateful she didn’t make me look like John Cleese in a silly walks sketch or I may never have put one foot in front of the other again….. but I did realise I have quite a determined walk and keep my upper body totally still to fend off any perceived threat, as if I’m in one of the corny martial arts films I’ve spent too much of my teenage years glued to! A dodgy acquaintance once described it as a ‘f*** off walk that would deter many of his criminal mates from trying to nick my handbag…. I think that was a compliment.

It’s made me wonder what other unconscious things we do in our writing, which only when we blog/ dare to show to fellow writers for honest feedback or when we work with mentors. I’ve found it’s similar and genuinely surprising and how incisive Jo Bell has been so far, in showing me things I didn’t notice myself. Have any of your fellow writers done impressions of your work or performed a verse or two of yours with alarming accuracy? If so, has it surprised you, or am I just not very self observant?

Get someone to do your ‘walk’ by walking behind you for a few minutes, focusing on the way you hold your head, then neck, shoulders etc all the way down, or by working from the feet up, then once they’ve got your walk, let them tell you so you can stop walking while they continue then you can watch how your walk looks…. it may be creepy but worth doing to see yourself in a way you wouldn’t normally. Are there any parallels with your writing? I know Jo was saying that I often keep things very polite on the surface etc. like being immobile from the waist up perhaps?

Anyway, this week I’ve been trying out a few bits and pieces for MPOY with WBA, without any joy so far. Lots of words scribbled out and ripped up and recycled….. but this morning I had a new idea. As I’ve shadowed the West Brom ladies team, well one of the teams anyway – I’ve decided to write new words to the tune of the Pet Shop Boys West End Girls, but replacing it with ‘West Brom Girls’. Perhaps in future they could even chant it on the terraces at their grounds if it works out well, who knows. But later this morning I was struck by the powerful work by Emma on this blog and her work is so deep and moving and I read it through tears streaming down my face as it reminded me of things from years ago…. so then I didn’t get around to writing something so light and flippant in comparison as it seemed inadequate.

I’ll try again tomorrow, and hopefully this week post some early stages work for you to look at. I know my residency is so many months later starting than the rest on here, so it takes time… but more words soon come:)

Did anyone see the BBC Poetry programme Off By Heart? It was on a few weeks ago, but I saw the repeat tonight. I was a regional judge on the show, and saw the final live in Oxford – and the kids were genuinely brilliant so it was good to see and hear their stories told on the show. We’d been sitting nearby to the family of the winning boy, 10 yr old Azdan Isfahani and saw how overwhelmed they were by his success.

The programme talked of how they’d spent 2 yrs living in tents in Holland when they first left Iran, and finally won the right of asylum to live in England 6 years ago. That was the first time Azdan had seen his father cry, then just a boy aged 4 and unable to speak English. The programme also talked a little of the tradition of poetry in Iran, which made me want to explore some of the writers more.

The TV show was about memorising poetry, so they used famous poems – it was a shame they didn’t encourage the children to write their own work as well – that would have been so much more personal and compelling with family stories like the winners. What an opportunity to hear history first hand. I once saw a performance by Birmingham writers group ‘Writers without Borders’ where children talked of their experiences living in virtual prisons while they were awaiting decisions on status – not one dry eye in the audience as children spoke of thinking they’d been naughty and it was their fault the family had been moved and locked up.

One more moan…. having Benjamin Zephaniah as a judge without filming him performing at least one poem seems such a wasted opportunity to get tv viewers enthused by poetry – when the BBC is making lots of great programmes about dead poets at the moment, they scored an own goal by missing out on one of the finest living poets. But maybe I’m biased as Benjamin is a brummy originally, born in Handsworth. I interviewed him once and even though he was contrary about the temperature of the water he would drink… he was brilliant:) And he’s the first poet many of my friends’ children have got excited about and wanted to read more of once they’ve studied him in school. In our regional ‘Off by Heart’ heats for the programme, lots of children chose to do his ‘Talking turkeys’ poem and some I’m sure have become vegetarian since:)