What am I when I can’t be what I am?
Clark Kent: Journalist/Superhero/American/Alien.
It’s hard to draw a mental picture of what the future looks like for artists at the moment. If theatres are to stay closed then am I to perform on YouTube? Do I move my exhibition from the gallery to a nearby garden centre where at least the public might get a chance to see it? What will happen to the theatres, the galleries, the music venues… and if they go, what will happen to me?
If my art is not in a gallery can I be an artist? What if the only movement I choreograph in the next four months is a tap routine for a group of four socially-distanced children at a community centre every second Saturday. Is that art? Will I still be an artist? If I fill my time trying to write until I have the opportunity to act again, would I be an actor or a writer? At what point would I cross over and what would that mean?
I love being an actor. It’s a title I’ve been wearing for almost twenty years and I’m proud of it. Proud of the choices I’ve made and the commitments I’ve kept and of the experiences I’ve enjoyed as a result. It’s been creative, collaborative and challenging in the way that only life as a freelance creative can be. It’s been a crucible from which I’ve ultimately been made stronger and become more of myself.
However I’d be lying if I said there weren’t times when I felt more than a little restricted by the title. In fact there have been times when I felt so limited by my identity as an actor that it felt more like self-imprisonment. By committing to being an actor it often seemed I had accepted a sort of banishment from normal society and the simple joys it offers to those on more ‘traditional’ paths. The poet Patrick Kavanagh gives us a sense of this frustration and isolation in his poem ‘Inniskeen Road’.
I have what every poet hates in spite
Of all the solemn talk of contemplation.
Oh, Alexander Selkirk knew my plight
Of being king and government and nation.
A road, a mile of Kingdom. I am king
of banks and stones and every blooming thing.
Freedom from this banishment could easily be achieved at any time by simply giving up the title of actor and all that comes with it. It was a step that always seemed too costly to consider; my armour in the world would be gone, the glamour (or what little I felt there was) would vanish. My identity and all that I had worked for so many years to attain would slowly melt away. At the root of this fear for me was the question: If you take away the ‘actor’ then what’s left?
During these periods I was doing all kinds of jobs to keep the wolf from the door. Some more fun then others. Bar work was great fun for awhile. The call centre was fun for about ten minutes. I sold ice cream in theatres with some of the industry’s now leading figures back when we were all sold ice cream in theatres. These jobs weren’t really things I was doing though. They didn’t officially exist. I would talk of them with friends when asked but in artistic circles the old rule was that you didn’t mention such things. The presented professional identity and the lived reality of being an artist were never allowed to be in the same place at the same time.
And then there was another type of work I stumbled across. Work that was mad and brilliant and a welcome relief from anything with walls, rules and quotas. I worked for a community based arts organisation as a street performer, improvising and clowning at community events bringing comedy and the unusual to areas of London and beyond sadly lacking in both. I taught workshops on verse speaking and physical theatre to groups of students from all over the world coming to see plays in the West End. All of this work felt meaningful, creative and collaborative. But I never spoke of it. It didn’t exist. It was the Clark Kent side of my artistic identity.
Collecting samples of the unique Hullian accent for Project Vear by ASWARM during Hull City’s Capital of Culture celebrations. Immersive street theatre at its best; free, imaginative, immediate and right in the heart of the community.
As time went on I did more of this ‘not real’ work. It made sense to me on a very instinctive level. It felt great to do and it created great experiences for others. Eventually, pouring beer, answering phones and selling ice cream was replaced with jobs that used my knowledge and skills to better effect. It felt better too. In fact all of my other work outside of acting became enjoyable and meaningful in this way, and the work that I traditionally didn’t admit to had become something I was deeply proud of. Running a drama workshop with a group of young offenders became as demanding and rewarding as working in a professional rehearsal room with any group of experienced actors.
But there was something amiss. What was I and what was I becoming? Was this work artistically credible? Why, when I went to an audition and was asked ‘what have you been up to’ would I find myself stumbling for things to say?
Delivering an applied theatre ‘transition’ project to a year six class on what navigating new relationships in secondary school for the awesome ‘Halfmoon theatre’.
I carried on through this dissonance until the ‘non-work’ become too much a source of pride to be hidden. It was part of me and the way that I worked. And ideally how I wanted to work. The definition of Actor had to make some new bedfellows; Facilitator, Workshop Leader, Trainer and most recently Coach. On an intuitive level all these separate and distinct titles seemed neither separate nor distinct to me. They all felt like the same thing. A thing I could only really define as ‘me' or, a more total version of me.
But the old fears often resurface ‘how can you be, and do, all of these things?’. I recently voiced this concern to a friend, “People don’t like it if you have too many dashes in you job description. It implies you can’t do any one of them well enough to be successful at it.” My friend, who’s not in my industry, looked at me and asked “in your experience have you found that to be true?". It hit me immediately, in that pleasant way truth sometimes does, ‘no, no I haven't.’
Who knows what is coming over the next twelve months and beyond. But there is great breadth and depth in being an artist and even more in being human. We may find ourselves having to use our creative abilities in all kinds of ways we couldn’t have imagined previously. Our titles may find themselves being re-shaped, adapted, added-to, perhaps forgotten, or simply allowed to rest over the coming months as we experiment with and explore other options.
Creativity is often defined as the putting together of two or more ideas to create a new one. Let’s loosen our definitions of what artists are and how they ‘should’ be. Let’s loosen our definition of ourselves too; we are much more then our definitions can hold. We are neither a specification marked and defined nor a definite outline to be easily categorised.
Clark Kent retreated to a phone box to change into Superman. As a child I always assumed this was to do with us not seeing him strip, but as an adult I wonder if it’s more to do with the idea that as a society we can’t easily accept the contradiction of someone being both one thing and another. Why can’t we be simultaneously mundane and fantastic, both journalist and superhero?
Clark Kent was always Superman even when he wasn’t.
The ever-inspiring Anthony Hopkins (Actor/Composer/Musician/Artist) on art, madness and painting.