On First Seeing 'Nanette'

This was a response to an invitation by Maddy Costa and Andy Field to talk about a performance that has been really important for me - for the launch of their book PERFORMANCE IN AN AGE OF PRECARITY

It is July 2017 and I am in a kitchen of a house on the banks of a loch which is a walk from a bus stop, which is a ferry ride from a train station, which is a train ride to Glasgow.

 It is a LADA DIY project that Greg Wohead and I are running with Buzzcut, and we have taken over a big house with a group of artists.

I’ve fallen down the stairs the week before and fucked my ankle a bit and Greg has pretty much broken his wrist after falling on a hike just recently and so it’s been a bit tricky getting all the food from the Glasgow aldi onto the train and the ferry and the bus and the walk but we’ve made it.

We have ummed and ahhed about alcohol or no alcohol and phones or no phones and in the end we decide on yes alcohol and phones in a box.

We are drinking wine getting ready for dinner and I believe artist Vera Chok has just been sitting in the sink – not for art – just to recreate the ‘is the cat in the sink’ twitter feed.

Bron Batten is an artist who is visiting from Melbourne and she says she’s just seen this show, well, stand-up really at home and did I know it was coming to Edinburgh in August and I should see it so I write its name down.

 It’s August 2017 now and it’s mid Edinburgh festival and all a bit much and I decide to go to see this show Bron has recommended on my own just to have some quiet time where you are invisible just watching the work. Just being an audience.

It’s in one of those incredibly awkward university rooms turned into a performance space – I’ve just checked – and it’s Assembly Rooms Studio 5 in George Square, a converted classroom with a capacity of 87. Very wide compared to its depth so the stage is incredibly thin. I’m sitting on the side of the front row so I’m basically watching the whole thing in profile.

I’ve heard of Hannah Gadsby before because comedy and gay but I’ve never seen her perform.

I’m talking about Nanette tonight and I’m talking about having seen it in a tiny audience before it was NANETTE and I realise there’s a risk that that makes me some kind of ‘I listened to them before they were famous’ cunt but I’ll take the risk.

 The pre-show music is ‘Bobby Reid’ by Lucette which I will think is called ‘Blood in the Water’ until I check out the name of it for this, and it’s a kind of lolloping driving Americana folk that sounds classic but is actually from 2014 . The song actually only sings the lyric Blood in the Water once but that phrase gets stuck to this show in my mind.

The stage of the Assembly Rooms Studio 5 in George Square seems to have no cross through and Hannah Gadsby invisibily introduces herself  and then appears from behind a curtain and I wonder if she’s been waiting there the whole time as the audience file in and I remember that feeling of needing to pee very badly just before you are about to go on and there being nowhere to go.

Then she starts talking and she’s very tall, and the room is not very high so she’s almost this giant on a matchbox stage. Also she’s just had dental work, she tells us, so she’s on painkillers that might run out during the show, so she’s touching her jaw a lot and pausing in winces of pain and it’s affecting her speech a bit.

For someone who likes to bang on about form a lot, it surprised me that this show is where I’ve ended up tonight. There are lots of ‘bigger’, more high concept theatrical shows I haven’t chosen to talk about. Gobsquad’s ‘Are you With Us’ at Spill Festival in 2014. Cassils’ ‘Becoming an Image’,  A one-on-one ‘Exposure’ with Jo Bannon in a theatre cupboard in Contact Theatre, Manchester; an entire audience crying at ‘Fun Home’ at the Young Vic, She-Goat in mullets at CPT, Rachael Young peeling oranges at the Yard, any number of high-budget Belgian shows at the Barbican with their £20,000 worth of real pine forests.

Everytime I started thinking about writing about one of them instead this one kept quietly putting its hand up from the back.

Yes, I’m not flashy it says, I’m just talking. But I’m really good talking.

 Hannah Gadby talks like someone firing a muffled machine gun, which sometimes sputters and dies out before refinding more bullets and going off again.  

 She mumbles bits-  on purpose or because she’s got toothache and it makes you lean in to try and make out the words.

You’ve probably heard the words she said sometime , either that Edinburgh or in another room or on a screen since. We’re two months before Metoo is #Metoo and Hannah Gadsby is talking about white male fragility and Picasso and being misgendered and power and the pride flag being too loud and violence and where the quiet gays are and the ongoing damage of soaking children in shame and expecting them to just get on with it.

 She talks about lesbians and the old days and she says:

 Back then, in the good old days, lesbian meant something different than it does now. Back then, lesbian wasn’t about sexuality, a lesbian was just any woman not laughing at a man.

 And I laugh and most of the other 86 people in the room laugh too.

 Sometimes you see a show where someone just says, just explains really elegantly, in some magic new word order, a thing you really need to hear.

 Listen, she says:

…do you understand what self-deprecation means when it comes from somebody who already exists in the margins? It’s not humility. It’s humiliation. I put myself down in order to speak, in order to seek permission… to speak. And I simply will not do that anymore. Not to myself or anybody who identifies with me.

 I’m sitting at the very side on the front row looking at the extreme angle of her face as she says this, and suddenly I’m freezing cold.

 Then she talks about jokes. About jokes being stories with the end lopped off because the truth mostly isn’t funny, or at least isn’t neat. She talks about jokes and about tension. About the shared air in the room and what she’s doing to it, what she’s been doing to it for years, and what that air does once it’s been deliberately sharpened, and the need to control the direction of the blade so it doesn’t slice up the wrong people or- no matter what you try - always end up slicing yourself.

 It’s late afternoon in August 2017 and I’ve been trying to express these ideas to myself for ages. Or. Not even. Just holding a space for trying to express them. The potential and actual damage of comedy. Using forms that have been historically used against you without really thinking it through. The risk you are to yourself and your community and your audiences.  The number of people who never think about the direction of the blade.

And then Hannah Gadsby says it, with careful rage in a too wide room out of a painful mouth.

 Afterwards I go and sit on those awkward massive concrete stairs for a while  and then I go to Summerhall and drink gin and tell people to go and see it.

This year long pause from going to shows.

Of course it’s the shows that are the thing.

But it’s also who told you about it. It’s who you went with, or didn’t, and where you had been just before and what you did immediately afterwards, and who you rushed to tell .

It’s the conversations afterwards that push on the interrogation of the show into the future, into other, future work. It’s what it did to your insides.

I don’t joke so much, or so carelessly, anymore. Not on stage and not off it either.

I’ve got language for myself about why that is.

I’m thankful to Nanette for that.

Dead and Ill People You Probably Don’t Remember But Me and Your Father Feel Strongly We Should Tell You About Anyway

Remember Dorothy O’Hanlan? From choir when you were six? Yes. Well her cousin Louise’s husband has prostate cancer and he’s 68. So young. Terrible.

 Derek Markson finally died. You remember him? You do. He came for fish pie once in ’92.

 Jennifer Holmes’ mum, Elizabeth, well she was at school in Scotland with this lovely woman Carolyn, hill-walker, totally fluent in Mandarin, had terrible pain in her ears, went to get them syringed, tumours.

 So Geoffrey Cohen’s wife has Parkinsons now, awful . Not the first one. No. She was the one who came to your Bat Mitzvah, yes, no, not her. The second one. You know I don’t know what happened to the first one. I must find out.

 Thinking of divorces - wait, hang on, am I telling her or are you? Fine then – cousin Andrew had this funny looking mole and he went to get it checked out, -did you ever get that funny thing on your shoulder looked at, you must – anyway the mole was absolutely fine, but when he was in the waiting room he bumped into Jillian Redway, remember her, Sebastian’s mum, or maybe it was your brother who was friends with Sebastian, no it was you because she told you off that time for being in the wrong toilet because of your short hair, anyway she has IBS. Like you.

 And poor Peter, no it wasn’t COVID, your father is saying it was COVID, it wasn’t COVID. Peter Bloch. You do remember him. We went to his beach-hut near Worthing on a bank holiday. No he wasn't there, he lent it us. It wasn’t COVID. For heaven’s sake.

 Did you ever write and thank Jean for that card? Because she’s dead now.

 Also, I did mean to tell you last year I was in a terrible bus-related accident and I was in A & E for three weeks and I had all my blood replaced and most of my bones reset, it was that time when I said I was busy finally decluttering the house and my whatsapp messaging went a bit formal because your father had taken over and we didn’t want to worry you but I’m fine now so there we are. So did mention to you about Judy Lattner? Dreadful.

On Digital Pivoting, Grief and Insistance

Hi folk. Last week I wrote this on FB about the challenge of the pivot to digital working.
Lots of artists seemed to feel similarly:

So, this week I had a bit of a meltdown. I am preparing to pitch a show for 'the future', a pitch which will be done by Zoom. I had ideas and desires to not ignore the Zoom-ness of the pitch form, to make sure that the form was acknowledged in the content of the pitch. As such, I was planning to make some short video pieces (rather than just show documentation of previous R&D). And I tried. As much as someone who isn't a filmmaker can.
But. I'm not a film-maker. I'm pretty much not a digital artist. These are their own genres. And the show I'm pitching is not a film and it's not a digital work. At least, it isn't conceived as such and like much of my work (and so much of of all of my colleagues' work) it has at its heart assembly - it relies on, is driven by, the audience to audience live relationship as much as the audience to performer one. So why struggle to be a learner digital artist to sell the notion of a future live show?
And the answer comes - because, shweetheart, there ain't likely to be no assembly-ing for no performances. Not this year. And maybe not even next. And I worry that I am a luddite trying to smash up a mechanised loom, or at least - refusing to learn how to work it.
At this point - still fairly early in this whole crisis- I feel I can dig my heels in, shout from the rooftops or on places like this about the special sanctity of live work, about how my belief in it and love for it has formed a life built around it, how I think it is vital, magical, how it makes alchemists of everyone who comes into contact with it and how I don't want to consider any other way.
Perhaps after that comes a grief, and after that a slow sidling up to the mechanised knitting frame, with grumpy bitch-face on, and a quiet request to be taught it, even though in my heart I'll still hold that something is lost in this stitching. But not yet.

Since then I spent some time at the brilliant GIFT Festival, which was hugely inspiring - seeing the different ways communities were being made, assembly was being invited and online forms were stretched and tested. Now I feel the need to insist on live practices, grieve ways of working that are no longer possible, and slowly and carefully think about a translation of ideas to a digital form in ways that are simple, authentic to the enquiry of the work and financially possible.

An Extract from FORGE

Hi folks. I was due to present a work in progress version of FORGE in March 2020.
Thanks to everyone who was hoping to come. Here’s an extract of text from the work.

In the original version of this show, there is a welder with me. She’s just in there. Working. Mask, gloves, apron, boots, MIG welder machine – it’s an R-Tech 180 Portable Inverter Welder, 240 v.  In the interests of safety, yours, this building’s, the future of your eyes, tonight it’s a replica. Tonight it’s an atomic 3000 strobe and unique 2.1 hazer. So, exactly like the original with a few key changes…

The original welder, the person, is called Megan. She lives in Austin, Texas.

  Oh my good look at her arms. Look at them.

The first thing I notice when I see her is her smashed front tooth and she’s heavy. Hefty. She wears caps. She wears shorts. She wears long socks and floral print shirts. She has a proper jaw line and proper thighs and a truck. And a dog that turns out not to be hers but is a proper, hefty dog shaped dog.

 When she says she learnt to weld from her aunt and her dad and her brothers and I say oh so you came from a family of welders she tips her head to one side on her proper neck and she rolling looks at me from under the peak and she says ‘from a family of welders, what are you, a fucking poet? From a family of poor people who needed to know how to fix their own shit.’

She takes up all the space her body takes up. 
She tells me the most important thing is to be capable.
Capable shoulder breadth. 
Capable hand span.
Capable maximum lift.

 It is physical, it is breathing and moving, it is focused.

 When you do it right it sounds like bacon frying she says.

 That’s how you know they didn’t do the research properly for Flashdance. The welding sounded all wrong. Jennifer Beals’ technique is actually not bad, she learnt to weld for the part. And she does look very hot in the outfit.

Anyway, welding, she says, It’s taking two things and making them one thing over and over. It’s a few seconds again and again. The stitching of short numbers of seconds until a new structure emerges and you aren’t focused on the stitching anymore, but the whole.

I BABYSAT YOUR CHILD LAST NIGHT, EXPECT TO BE ASKING YOURSELF THE FOLLOWING QUESTIONS FOR THE NEXT FEW WEEKS

Why is my child talking into a sock as if it's a walkie-talkie?

Why is my child now whispering SASHAY AWAY threateningly when I enter a room?

What has happened to the washing machine?

When can I take my child's orange teddy bear out of the freezer without my child shouting LOCK HIM UP LOCK HIM UP?

Why does my child now stand in the bath with their arms up shouting I'M FLYING JACK?

How long does armpit chafing due to auto-fart noises take to clear up?

How does one play RAMPAGE RAMPAGE RAMPAGE RAMPAGE and how does one stop playing it?

When will my child stop trying to move things with their mind?

Who is Beryl and why does my child keep shouting her name into the toilet?

Where are all the forks?

Hello!

Gaping Hole (Story #3)

Greg Wohead: We are making a performance called Gaping Hole (Story #3), which is a continuation of our ‘Story’ performances—after Story #1 (there is no Story #2 as yet, which is why we cheekily call this a non-linear trilogy—in actuality it’s the second Story performance to see the light of day and it may well not be a trilogy as I imagine we might just keep making these). Let’s check in with where we’re at with this performance. It’s about holes—plot holes in a way, but there’s something we keep saying to each other which is that it’s about the things we’re willing to overlook in order to stay comfortable. In our discussions this has meant both personal things and larger scale political or social things—like climate change, for instance.

We’re still in the process of making the show, so there is still a lot for us to discover, and perhaps some things we do already know that we might not want to tell people before they come and see it. But I have a few questions for you. We talk about being audacious with our collaboration and the different things that can mean. Do you think we’re being audacious in this performance? How? Do you think it’s ever important to continue to overlook something in order to stay comfortable? Do we always need to try to take in the full ‘truth’ of the matter at all times?

Rachel Mars: I think at this stage we are still pushing for the audacious. By which I mean the big conceptual radical act. And yet, as I write that, I'm thinking about small audaciousness. The audaciousness of making continual queer choices, of living these non-major stories every day, of pointing out again and again the heteronormativity of the world we are in, and being aware of how it has formed us, and how we are attempting to live in it in different shapes. I think that's on my mind. There are definitely big performance choices we are making that feel audacious, partly informed by the fact no one will ever perform in that space again after us. Choices to do with the audience’s perception, with safety.

What about you? Do you think we are being audacious? What does that term mean to you at the moment?

As for this second set of your questions, I think this is where the personal and the political start to pull apart. I've tried to overlook things personally to stay comfortable and it hasn't worked so well—things come and announce themselves when you aren't prepared for it. To look directly into the uncomfortable 'holes' of your own stuff is arduous, upsetting, but I increasingly think necessary in order to be living a conscious life. If I'd kept overlooking my own stuff I'd be married to a man and I'd have kids. Which doesn't look like a disaster from the outside, but, I think I would be in real trouble. The short-term comfort would be way out-shadowed by a dark-as-hell long term discomfort.

When it comes to the world it can be very soothing to pretend the world isn't on fire. I mean, at the moment I don't think it's possible to live fully consciously of our political and global situation at all times. I think it comes down to struggle and fight and sustainability—which struggles, at which times, for how much of our days? If I was really trying to take in the full truth of the political and environmental situation now, would I be writing this? Making this performance work? I have to continue believing that art is a necessary and righteous cause, and the time it takes is worthwhile socially, politically.  I think it comes down to death. What harm are we prepared to have done and to whom in pursuit of personal safety, personal pleasure?

How do you see this question of discomfort and truth?

I also wanted to ask—what are the things you are wanting to dig into in these project that wouldn't feel appropriate or possible in other projects? What are the risks you are wanting to take? 

GW: I like these questions. And I think I might speak to your last one first.

We talk about a sense of recklessness in our collaboration, and that’s certainly something that for whatever reason seems more possible here than in my own projects. I think for that reason the risks I’m wanting to take are sort of about being reckless with meaning-making. We have quite involved conversations about the ideas surrounding this piece—magical thinking, self-delusion, facing up to truths—but actually I think its ok if people watch the show and don’t come away with all the nuances of every discussion we’ve had. Instead we’re trying to make something that’s a juicy embodiment of the ideas rather than an intellectual comment on them. For me that feels more possible here in our collaboration in a building that’s about to be demolished.

For now the audaciousness in the performance is largely coming from the fact that we’re doing some demolition on the building. So I would agree in that we are still pushing for the audacious. At the moment audacious means something like the feeling that we’re doing something that you ‘can’t do’. There are a few things—including the demolition—that start to budge up against that, but I don’t think we’re quite there yet. I’d like to get there.

As for the question around discomfort and truth, I think I’m generally with you. Your statement towards the end of that paragraph is something that stands out to me: What harm are we prepared to have done and to whom in pursuit of personal safety, personal pleasure? Obviously we’re all implicated in harms against other people and against our world in order to live the way we live. As I’ve gotten older (I think of it in relationship to age anyway—this may or may not be true), I have thought more and more about which ways I’m prepared to sacrifice my personal comfort in order to persist with the values I think are important based on the information I have. And at times I find myself inching a little more towards personal comfort. Maybe this is how and why some people become more jaded and conservative with age—over time perhaps we increasingly see that many huge personal sacrifices have not had much of an effect. Obviously it’s difficult to speak in generalities on this and when I say conservative I probably mean incrementally less radical that I used to think I should be rather than actually conservative.

What are your responses to any of this and/or what is a provocation you would like to give us or me for this performance that you haven’t yet told me?

RM: Right. I do think this is why some people get more conservative with age—a realisation of time running out and a decision to make choices based on maximum personal comfort over that time. And yet, I think there are plenty of folks for whom the time running out is a galvanising factor to get more radical, more insistent on their values (I guess I'm thinking of so many of the older folks who campaign, the XR'ers, the Greenham Common women). It feels politically like we are entering a post-Thatcher period (that period has taken A LOT of time to shake out) where individuals are realising there is some point—some power—to personal discomfort for the sake of the wider good. I suppose it is about where your world view ends—at your death, or into the future beyond it? Where, at what time-point, do you feel your responsibility lies?

I'm also thinking particularly about queerness—I wonder perhaps if it goes two ways. So, you struggle as a queer person to get to a point of personal comfort (pretty much daily) in a heteronormative world. These tiny incidents every day remind you that the world is not designed with you in mind. You have to insist on living your story, carving out a channel for your existence and that of your community, and that costs—time, money, emotional labour. With that labour happening, it is really easy and understandable to get to a point of needing moments of personal comfort and relaxing into them because they are so hard won. Which is good. AND it's also vital to keep on fighting for the values you think are important if you want to see any change in the world when it's so tempting (and would be fair) to just shout FUCK IT I'M DONE and stop calling things out. I think any minority person living in a majority organised world is up against that all the time. And it is exhausting.

Which I think brings me to pleasure—pleasure as a radical action. Maybe even comfort as a radical action. I'm wondering what pleasure we can offer ourselves or the audience in this show and how that could be radical, reckless?

GW: Pleasure and fun is really important in this work, and it’s important in our collaboration. And our friendship I think!

Ovalhouse’s offer for Gaping Hole is that some building demolition is possible—the fun of that is a big part of the appeal for us in making the show and hopefully for the audience watching it. I have found it a challenge to bridge the gap between our imagined dream version of the dramatic destruction of the theatre and the reality of what is safely possible, what that actually looks like and to make it just as fun as we had imagined. And not *just* to make it fun—as you know we have had endless mini ideas for Marx-Brothers-esque gags you can do with the destruction elements, but just fun on its own doesn’t seem to be enough for us. Or at least it’s not what we’re trying to do. I think we want the fun to get us somewhere, to knock something loose and to make something else seem possible.

Fan fiction is still fun for us I think. Unexpected unaddressed images are fun. Putting each other on the spot is fun. Some of the things I have found the most reckless and radical have had to do with context—what is something that is mundane or ordinary when you do it at home or at work or on the street or in private, for example, but when done in a theatre or in a show somehow seems reckless or radical?

RM: Fun is a weird one isn't it. Working in a space with holes in it suggests endless gags that you can do—it’s hard to find a balance. You can give people fast thrilling hilarity which collapses as soon as you show it and is delightful, but really is an empty gesture when it comes to the overall concept or questions of the show. Those actions in themselves are quite useful to cover up holes—look at this surprising thing! Look at another one! Don't look over here! It's felt like a fairly tough process to date—something that is shifting in this last week—I think we are are holding ourselves to higher and higher standards as we make and see more work. Those kinds of fast delightful gags are choices that feel fairly easy. I'm not into that on its own as an organising principle for the work, and yet I don't want us to decide that those gags/surprises are off the table completely.

Everyday news has been imitating art—what with photoshopped dogs and no one dead in a ditch despite their promises. So I think we can afford not to be on the nose in the material—there’s no need to show everyone politics. The job is about continuing to insist on other stories.

FORGE

Today I’m starting work on a new project, FORGE. I’m sitting in Metal, Peterborough, beginning to figure out what it is, and where my brain is at. Here are some opening tumbles:

I have never been to Auschwitz.

My grandparents were refugees. I don’t have someone seeking refuge living in my house.

There is going to be a new Holocaust memorial on the Thames in London. I’m not into it.

Why do people visit spaces where humans have committed atrocities? What are we after?

In 2014 one of the two 100kg iron 'welcome' gates was stolen from Dachau concentration camp. A local blacksmith made a replica. It was exactly like the original. And it wasn’t at all.

When places where terrible shit has happened start to decay, should we leave them to rot?

Grindr Remembers The Holocaust.

Is it a good idea to hand over memorialisation of atrocities to the very forces that helped them happen – states, industry, capital?

Why are so many memorials/memorial museums all concrete, steel, spirals, shards?

I work in words. Light. Images. Music. Ideas. Disappearing things.

Female welders are hot.

There are Memorial Architecture conferences. For Memorial Architects.

What’s an appropriate café to have at an ex-torture centre? Benugo?

What if you want to stop remembering?

What doesn’t even get to be remembered?

What time lines are different communities’ histories on with regard to memorial?

Villa Grimaldi. Chile.

If you have a memorial far away from the place where a thing happened, what space is it really?

What if I was done remembering, done with that identity and then lots of people got shot up in a Synagogue, and colleagues tell me anti-semitism isn’t really a thing so much.

Whataboutery.

How can you both pull down a statue and not erase the trouble associated with that history, those acts?

Should they rename ‘Colston Hall’ ‘Not Colston Hall’?

We have memorial museums. We keep committing atrocities.

Remembering is honouring. Surely.

Vilina Vlas is a spa hotel in Visegrad, Bosnia. Also, previously, a rape and torture centre. Three out of Five on Trip Advisor.

Appropriate Behaviour. Ethical Behaviour. The difference and who decides.

Flashdance.

The performance of contemplation. Of solemnity.

What if you are so busy remembering you aren’t doing anything useful in the present?

Daniel Libeskind, you and your gaps and empty spaces.

Gunter Demnig's Stolpersteine.

Rachel Whiteread.

The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, Montgomery Alabama. Those Corten Steel hanging columns. Jesus. It wasn’t a state planned memorial though - it was the passion project of one man.

This all sounds IMPORTANT. Nothing wrong with Important. Andbut, tell me about entertainment, again.

(for details of who is supporting/working on the project - please go HERE)

The 8 Miracles of VAGINUKAH

HAPPY VAGINUKAH!
We love winter festivals - light, fried things, trees on the inside, booze with added booze in it.
But for a long time I’ve sensed that something was missing. So.
WELCOME TO VAGINUKAH.
A new festival combining the joy of the light of Chanukah with eight chances to
CELEBRATE THE MIRACLES OF THE VULVA.

HAPPY VAGINUKAH NIGHT 1!
8 Miraculous Cunt Facts for 8 Nights of Chanukah
THE FIRST MIRACLE OF VULVAS:
Pubes. Pubes are getting ripped off around the place at the moment. How you coiffe is up to you but here’s a thing - your bush may well be serving the purpose of absorbing and disseminating your pheromones- helping to attract potential shtup-folk. Like a hairy, sex-positive loudspeaker.

HAPPY VAGINUKAH NIGHT 2!
The second miracle of vulvas:
A clitoral orgasm has between about 3 and 16 contractions.

Oh hi!
HAPPY VAGINUKAH NIGHT 3!
The third miracle of vulvas:
Unaroused, the average vagina is roughly three to four inches deep. But during sex it can expand to twice as big - that's partially because of a process called vaginal tenting, and happens due to Rugae - small pleats that expand and contract. Like a fabulous internal pleasure-ruching system.

That's right:
HAPPY 4th night of VAGINUKAH!
The fourth miracle of vulvas:
Besides the clitoris being made up of the clitoral head, the hood and the clitoral shaft, it is also composed of the urethral sponge, erectile tissue, glands, vestibular bulbs and the clitoral legs.
THE CLITORAL LEGS.

Yup!
HAPPY VAGINUKAH NIGHT 5!
The fifth miracle of vulvas:
'Clitoris' probably comes from the Greek word, Kleitoris, which in turn comes from Kleio -to close, as with a door or latch. Maybe labia are like doors that enclose the clitoris, folks. Or maybe it's clitoris as metaphorical gateway to A PLACE OF DREAMS.

Ciao Cunt Lovers!
HAPPY VAGINUKAH NIGHT 6!
The sixth miracle of vulvas:

The vagina is tilted at roughly a 130-degree angle.
Making it Obtuse, in purely mathematical terms, but - I would argue - Acute in many others.

Nearly there!
HAPPY VAGINUKAH NIGHT 7!
The seventh miracle of vulvas:
Menstrual Cramps! Ok. They are not a miracle. BUT newish research suggests cannabis suppositories for pain relief might be. More money for more research for more female body stuff please.

HAAAPPPYYY FINAL NIGHT OF VAGINUKAH FOLKS!
The eighth miracle of vulvas:
Let’s talk squirting. Between 10 and 70% of women ejaculate during sex. It ain’t urine and it ain’t vaginal secretions. It is its own damn self. It comes from the skenes - tiny glands on the side of the urethra.
So hooray for you if you do, and hooray for you if you don’t. If we’ve learnt nothing else from these miracles o’the cunt it’s that Every Kind of Vulva is Welcome at Vaginukah.
Especially yours.

And that hereby concludes The Inaugural 2018 Vaginukah.
It’s been delightful.
Mark it in your calendars folks. We’re going annual.

x

Edinburgh Excitements- (mostly) 80s film trailers.

Dear All

We're off to Edinburgh for OUR CARNAL HEARTS from the 15th - 26th August at 11am at Summerhall.

Here are a few things I'm excited to see, in the form of the 80s films.

WILD BORE - Various Times and dates, Traverse
SEE:  SAVAGE STREETS -  'Too bad you're not double-jointed. Because if you were, you'd be able to bend over and kiss your ass goodbye'

DOLLYWOULD - Sh!t Theatre - Summerhall
SEE: RHINESTONE - 'All right, we'll go to your place and you can show me your organ.'

NO SHOW - Ellie Dubois - Summerhall
SEE: ALIEN - 'I'm going to go out there after them'

A MACHINE THEY'RE SECRETLY BUILDING  - Proto-type Theatre - SUMMERHALL
SEE: BRAZIL - 'And you can't tell me what the proper channels are, because that's classified information?'

NANETTE - Hannah Gadsby - Assembly
SEE: A QUESTION OF SILENCE / De Stilte Rond Christine M - 'The women laugh and laugh, there is silence'

I AM A TREE - Jamie Wood - Assembly
SEE: LABYRINTH -  'Canst thou summon up the very rocks?'

SHOW ME THE MONEY - Paula Varjack -  BEDLAM
SEE: THE MONEY PIT - 'It was no picnic but those guys are work animals'

PALMYRA - Bert and Nasi - Summerhall
SEE: ROLLERBALL - 'The game was created to demonstrate the futility of individual effort. And the game must do its work.'

WORKSHY - Katy Baird - Summerhall
SEE: BUGSY MALONE -' I was born to be a dancer.'

THE CLASS PROJECT - Rebecca Atkinson-Lord - Summerhall
SEE: EDUCATING RITA - 'As Trish says there is not a lot of point in discussing beautiful literature in an ugly voice.”

Singing, Women and Resistance: a conversation with Roberta Mock

This was originally posted on THE LARK THEATRE BLOG.

This piece is part of a blog salon, curated by Caridad Svich, called "Stages of Resistance." The series welcomes reflections on themes related to making work for live performance in political and aesthetic resistance to forms and systems that oppress human rights and censor or severely limit freedom of expression. We are in increasingly hostile, volatile times around the world, and this salon hopes to serve as a space for considered, thoughtful, polemical articulations of practice and theory on the subject of resistance, the multiple meanings of political art, and the ways in which progressive, wholistic cultural change may be instigated through artworks. 

Roberta Mock: I saw your show, Our Carnal Hearts, on International Woman’s Day, which seemed really significant to me in this particularly horrific political moment. I was taken by what you said during the talk back afterwards about it being a deliberate choice to make a production with a company of women. I always love seeing women technicians, perhaps since I trained as a lighting technician myself and it was my way into directing theater.

For me, the all-woman company now paradoxically feels both remarkably resistant and slightly old-fashioned. I’m thinking of the 1970s: righteous companies with wonderful names like Cunning Stunts and Hormone Imbalance and Monstrous Regiment. On the other hand, there’s been subsequent critique of so-called 2nd wave feminism for supposedly excluding men.

Rachel Mars: When I conceived the show, it never occurred to me to have a male singing voice in it. If I unpacked that, it’s probably something to do with making a dedicated space for the female voice. I’m not exclusionary – I do work with men when I want to work with men. This time I wanted to work with women. I applied for a wodge of funding and I got it. I had this tiny amount of power to do what I wanted with the money, so why not employ women off stage too?

Roberta: Would you describe your choice to work only with women on this production as political?

Rachel: I think it’s proven to be. When you enter a theater space as an all-female company, you are sometimes approached by a technician or programmer or front of house person, and they often don’t know what to do, who to ask their questions to. They address a question to the group, and the group decides who is best equipped to answer it.

Roberta: That confusion rings very true. When I started making company work, with Lusty Juventus Physical Theatre, it was a mixed company but led and driven by women. The first three shows in the mid to late 1990s always had men in them, but our final show in 2002, M(other), had an all-woman cast and crew. We started working deliberately outside of traditional theatrical role descriptions, so we wouldn’t say “This person is the writer, this person is the director, this person is the choreographer…” When we showed up at a theater, they asked which of us is the director. I would say, “We all are”, and they’d say “Well, we’re going to talk to you because you’re the one who told us that there wasn’t a director.”

Rachel: It’s a way of troubling systems and structures that people assume, or have internalized. One of the other performers in Our Carnal Hearts, who is in a lot of bands where she’s the only woman, has told me she’s rarely asked questions about technical set ups, or sometimes barely addressed at all at venues. Our production manager just told me a similar story. So I suppose it has become a small political act, retrospectively. It’s hard to know how conscious that was.

Roberta: Do you have any thoughts about what the term resistance might mean in relation to your theater work?

Rachel: I think we’re resisting an assumption of the power structures that we accept as neutral. I try to travel through life ignoring gender, until somebody reminds me of it. Perhaps this is a privilege. Somehow this all-female company, and all-female rehearsal space, meant we weren’t doing the work “as women” because we weren’t being reminded by anyone else.

Roberta: And you weren’t reminding yourselves all the time either, unlike for us creating a show about motherhood from our lived experience. Even though it was about trying to separate the maternal from an essentialist understanding of what it means to be a woman, gender was always in the rehearsal space.

But your subject matter in this piece is not specifically about women or being a woman. I think Maddy Costa sums it up well when she suggests the show is asking how envy might “be held within the panoply of human emotion, in a manner that isn’t injurious, as the basis of collaboration rather than competition.”

Many of the all-women or women-centered companies of the 1970s and 80s were collectives, which is a lineage we were definitely drawing on as Lusty Juventus. When you made Our Carnal Hearts, did you do this, for example, in a non-hierarchical way?

Rachel: No, it wouldn’t be right to say it was non-hierarchical because I was leading the process; I conceived it. I’m the one who wrote the first big funding bid and then employed the others. But it was a collaborative process in the rehearsal room. The collectivism now is more about being aware of people’s time and money. As we do the show more and more, the singers are better equipped to just show up and do it. So we have discussions about the call time since they’re going to be paid a certain amount no matter what. I’m aware they’re all freelancers so being there from 3:00pm, as opposed to 5:30, makes a big difference to them.

Roberta: Of course. How much does that add up to, all of those two hour periods?

Rachel: Exactly. I will talk most of the financial decisions through with the company; they are transparent. There are new questions arising as we are touring more. We talk about how it feels being a part of a company with new people coming in who are replacements. There’s emotional stuff. We don’t pretend that we’re not people.

Roberta: I think this is all important. The discussion of the labor of making theater is a resistant act in itself. It acknowledges time is money and your body is money, even when you love what you’re doing. And the issues that arise with replacing people in a cast is the same for a lot of devised work. But I don’t think it’s a coincidence that a lot of devised work has come through woman-centred or feminist companies. You start to have to confront the ethics of different bodies doing the work created from somebody else’s experiences and to ask who owns those experiences.

Rachel:  There’s also something resistant about insisting on the show having a long-ish shelf-life. So many shows happen and then they’re done. But this show has cost so much money and took so long to develop, a year and a half to two years, that I wasn’t prepared for it to be in that kind of economy of ‘now what?’ It hasn’t found all its audiences yet so we have to keep doing it. A friend of mine – Paula Varjack – says, “You’ve made this baby and venues ask what are you doing next and it’s like ‘wait a minute, you haven’t even held this baby yet.’” The things we’re encountering about ownership are mainly to do with doing something that is more long term. I’m trying to draw from established systems for advice and deciding what’s right for this work.

Roberta: You say established systems, but there aren’t that many established systems for devised theater – you’re out there in uncharted territory in many ways.

Rachel: I’m just trying to navigate what feels fair, which of course is subjective. I’m trying to get to somewhere where people feel represented and happy. Touring this production – the pre-shows, the conversations over tea – has definitely become a space for talking about our patriarchal fury. And we all appreciate that supported space, where we can decide how we’re going to respond to the world. It becomes, at times, a group of really angry women who are using the support of each other and the differences we come with, to decide how to behave when we feel fucked off, how to carve out space, how to be heard, when it’s time to shut up and get out of the way. I’m trying to build up a tool kit by constantly reporting experience. I’ve been more furious since the US elections in November than ever. I mean day to day.

Roberta: There have been massive changes since you finished making the piece a year ago. Have you noticed any differences with audiences since the Brexit referendum and the US election last year?

Rachel: I think since then there’s been a slightly better expressed need for assembly. I think there’s more capacity and desire for coming together and talking.

Roberta: Do you usually do talk backs after the performances?

Rachel: We try to. We just did one with two economics professors from the University of Essex. That was very much an economic discussion around the theme of competition in the show: good and bad types of competition, envy that comes from inequality. Even without talk backs, I’m finding people want to talk more.

Roberta: To resist competition is to resist what makes a neoliberal society tick – and you’re doing that both by working in a company in a particular way and by exploring it nakedly as subject matter in performance.

Rachel: We’re trying desperately to hold on to being colleagues when everything is telling us we’re in competition with one another.  It’s a hard thing to do, I think. Having a space to talk about our grubbier feelings of comparison, putting them on the outside and being aware of what this is doing to us, feels important to me right now.

'33 Shades of Shit Date' for Worst.Date.Ever - Varjack and Simpson for And What Festival

Paula Varjack and Dan Simpson run a night called Worst.Date.Ever, which invites people to share their stories of terrible dating mishaps. I conducted a poll of friends and family and performed this. All true. Thank you to all contributors.

1.     The first date where we had to sit in the shade in a pub garden on a lovely summer’s day as he told me he was on medication for chlamydia

2.     The date where he said ‘is that all I’m getting’ as we parted on a street corner with a snog

3.     The date where she got asked to take part in a threesome by a couple sitting next to us. Not a foursome. A threesome. And she spent ages chatting to them

4.     The date when I had food poisoning and I went back to hers just before it kicked in, and then it kicked in and I threw up violently in her loo and then her dog threw up violently on the carpet in front of us and she gave me a dry cracker, led me to the door and micro flinched when she hugged me goodbye

5.     The date where she brought her boyfriend along

6.     The date where we had nothing in common except crisps so we had to talk about crisps until a socially acceptable amount of time had passed and I could leave

7.     The date who had already had 2 bottles of wine before I got there and mumbled through the first half hour then I went to get her some water and when I got back she had passed out

8.     The not first date where I realised he was a deeply cynical person as he kept mocking everything I enjoyed and I called him out on it and we sat in silence until a socially acceptable amount of time had passed and I could leave

9.     The date who I didn’t fancy but fucking them in an alley was easier than talking any more

10.  The date where I flippantly said I didn’t know how people got accidentally pregnant so easily and she told me about the first time she’d had sex with her ex and accidentally got pregnant and had to have an abortion

11.  The date who ordered food but didn’t eat and it was the first date so I didn’t feel I could eat their dinner as well as mine and I never got over their wastage

12.  The date where I was thrown out of girl’s house for laughing at her poster of 50 Seminal Danish Chairs

13.  The date where he kicked a homeless man and ripped a hole up the arse of his own white jeans in the process

14.  The date who turned up pushing a double buggy but didn’t have kids

15.  The date where the guy was 45 mins late and I said I wasn’t drinking and he said ‘are you doing that to punish me’ and then told me everyone who has a pet should be forced to have children because pets are immoral

16.  The date that was so boring I pretended to be having a diabetes induced hypo

17.  The date who didn’t know how to use a bus because he’d never left Kilburn

18.  The second date who I immediately remembered I hadn’t even fancied on the first date but I’d been wasted so I’d forgotten

19.  The third date who I immediately remembered I hadn’t even fancied on the first or second date but had been wasted both times and forgotten.

20.  The date who was furious and became abusive when I wanted a pint and chat and not to go home and fuck and shouted I wasn’t all that anyway

21.  The internet date who turned out to be my mate’s dad who wasn’t out as gay

22.  The date who showed me hundreds of pictures of the vegetables she carved ornately for  dinners on her own

23.  The date who didn’t ask me a single question

24.  The date who talked about her ex all the way through the evening but I went home with her anyway and then she started talking about her ex when we were fucking and I finally realised I’d been out with her too

25.  The date who looked so much like my mum a bit of sick came up when they walked in

26.   The date who walked in carrying a plastic bag as his main bag bag and you just know

27.  The only date I’ve ever been on that has turned into an 11 year relationship and I’m still not sure it’s right     

28.  The date where I didn’t fancy them at all so I said I was having an early night and walked them back to their bike and I got on a bus and then got off at the next stop and walked back to the bar and snogged the person I’d actually had my eye on all night

29.  The date who suddenly disappeared after 3 weeks as he went to prison

30.  The date who was an actor on Coronation Street who would spend every meal saying ‘are they looking at me? are they staring at me?’ when we were eating. They never were.

31.  The date who was German and spent the whole time banging on about how in Germany they had had double glazing since the 1960s and we were really backward in only having it recently

32.  The date I didn’t realise was a date and took my partner to

33.  The date who took me to the same restaurant where his parents were eating out that night and we sat next to them and said hullo and then politely ignored each other until we were looking at the menu and my date asked me if I thought the chicken sounded like a good choice and his mum said darling that’s what I’m having it’s lovely and leant over and fed him with her own fork

A Pause for Thought that never was (Radio 2 doesn't do bodily functions, alas)

Last year I was being very grown up and I booked one of those hire-by-the-hour cars that you can pick up on a local street. We were going to the garden centre, a sure sign of maturity. Loading up the car boot with plants and pots and I thought proudly – here I am, finally arriving in adulthood.

Driving back home, we got stuck in a long traffic jam and I realised I really should have used the bathroom at the garden centre. Not to worry! I thought. Adults use their wits! There, a shortcut, and I turned down a small road on the left. A very small road. A road that got narrower and narrower until it became obvious it wasn’t a road, just a passageway to someone’s garage, until it was clear that there would be no way of turning the car around. I panicked – how was I going to reverse the car out without scratching it, it wasn’t even my car and it had to be back in 20 minutes. The panic suddenly made me laugh, and the laughing and the panic combined to make me need a wee more than ever. I realised I was going to have to get out and pee in the passageway. I tried to open the car door and found that the walls of the passage were only a fraction wider than the car. I couldn’t get out.

There’s a prayer in Judaism that you say after going to the bathroom. It thanks god for keeping our passages open and working because a blocked passageway would make it impossible to survive.  Trapped in my hire car, the perils of a blocked passage had become horribly apparent.

So, this is a story about pride coming before a fall. Or about wetting yourself in a hire-by-the-hour-car, aged 35. You can go to the garden centre, you can buy all the spider plants you like, childhood is never that far away.

On Women, Comedy and Older Jewish Audiences

For two years now I've co-produced the UK Jewish Comedy Festival in London. It's an inclusive beast- we programme acts that are Jewish, Jew-ish and not at all Jewish for any one who wants to come. There have been events which felt vital - the cross- communal joy of 'A Rabbi, A Vicar and An Imam Walk Into A Comedy Club'; nights which were thinly veiled scratches to personal itches - 'When Harry Met Sally: The Live Read Through' and a moment where a naked man danced around in an Jeremy Clarkson mask (thank you Arthur Smith).

Audiences at the festival for traditional stand-up are tricky to figure out.  On the whole the average audience age is higher than you might predict at a standard comedy night and blue material is hard to get past them. There's an initial suspicion, a 'come on then, entertain me' challenge. There's not a lot of drinking ( but interval queues for coffee and cake, absolutely ) so comics don't get that kind of rolling laughter that comes from a crowd being being slightly...softened.. But, mostly, they'll slowly defrost and acts have a good time.

Except, that is, if you are a Jewish female comic. Now, I'd thought that being an out-Jew in front of a predominantly Jewish crowd would be an advantage. Like playing at home. The slightly in-jokes, the mirror-reflecting your experience back at you from the stage can be reassuring, especially if you don't feel represented a lot of the time.  And yes, if you are in a male body, this seems to be true. But everytime a confident, edgy Jewish woman is on, something bizarre and worrying happens to the atmosphere in the room.  There's a sudden feeling of hostility, an air of disapproval. Whilst noone heckles or says anything outright at the time, it's a loaded and complex silence which is harder to challenge.

The audience reception is notably unequal.  You can drop some mild homophobia down the mic if you have a circumcised penis, but good luck to you if you swear whilst being Jewish in possession of breasts. Two older women walked out of a gig after a female comic said 'cunt', complained about that, but not about the fact that an older male comic had previously joked that they were a 'couple of hookers'.

I've seen the same women performers rock non-Jewish comedy nights time after time -it's not a question of talent or quality- it's our (supposedly celebratory) Jewish spaces that are the problem.

It sends a pretty clear message. We are fine with non-Jewish women taking the stage.  We will laugh along with Jewish men. We will not support a Jewish woman owning her voice. We do not want the world filtered to us through a female Jewish perspective, and we are absolutely not OK with her expressing challenging opinions. Back again to Yose ben Yochanan and his 'do not converse much with women' (Pirkei Avot 1:5)

If I am being generous, I might attribute a kind of strange parental concern to the behaviour. There is enough of an age gap that the comic could be the audience's daughter, and a sense of familial ownership and the potential shame of a subsersive child kicks in. We are entitled to criticise, to disparage. You belong to us and we haven't raised you to speak like this.

There are exceptions. if you are an outspoken Jewish woman who is lauded by the non-Jewish world first - Ruby Wax for example, then the community want to welcome you back. You've got the 'real-world' stamp of approval. We can get over our discomfort if them-others tell us it's ok to appreciate our people, to get with modernity.  A friend reminded me of Naomi Alderman's brilliant and depressing article [you can only read a bit of it there, alas] about her treatment by the British Jewish press and community before she was lauded by non-Jewish institutions, which so frighteningly echoed that of late Nineteenth Century novellist Amy Levy who was reviled for her novel Reuben Sachs. Both women were berated for speaking too loudly about the weaknesses of the Jewish community to a potentially non-Jewish readership, (I realise I risk that here. Fuck it.)   It's the kind of 'head below the parapet', entrenched auto-anti-semitism which we are loathed to admit, but, when coupled with the acting-out of internalised patriarchal repression , finds an acceptable target - the public Jewish female voice.

I know that we're emerging out of a hugely unequal tradition, but I really thought we'd travelled further than this. We claim to be a welcoming, liberal community with valued female Rabbis and thinkers. We say we want to be louder, prouder in our Jewishness. This comedic space seems to be an area where old-fashioned British Jewish misogyny and entrenched patriarchal shame can silently simmer on- or make itself known in disapproving complaints after the fact- as yet unchallenged.  It's not gone unnoticed. It's time to call it out. Enough.

Pause for Thought on 'Surprising Encounters' - BBC Radio 2, Jan 2016

If you’d pulled up alongside a particular London minicab at a particular red light last Sunday evening, you may have seen the driver and the passenger engaged in what might have looked like an argument, arms flailing, mouths animated. But if you rolled down your window and listened, you would have heard that they were in fact singing, dueting passionately.

I was taking a cab home from the community centre where I sometimes work. The driver who picked me up asked what this place was. ‘It’s a Jewish cultural centre’ I said. ‘Well, Jew-ish. It’s for everyone really’. ‘Oh’ he said. And then went very quiet. After a considerable pause he suddenly broke out in song ‘Sunrise! Sunset! Sunrise! Sunset!’ He told me he’d left his home in Kabul ten years ago, escaping war and uncertainty. He had moved into a room in London where the previous occupant had left behind one DVD -‘Fiddler on The Roof’. He had used it to learn English and now could recite the whole thing off by heart, and sing all of the parts in all of the songs. We talked about the music and culture in Afghanistan, the Afghan sense of humour and then we got down to the nitty-gritty – what was the best number in ‘Fiddler on the Roof’.

It is encounters like this that give me hope for human connection, and blow myassumptions about difference getting in the way of our relationships well and truly out of the water. A small Jewish woman and an Afghan man crossing a city, singing songs about a family escaping conflict, both he and I brought to this moment by our own acts of fleeing (his journey to the UK, my grandparents’ journeys generations before.) As the lights changed and we belted out ‘Tradition’, the sadness at the cycles of war that displace us were eclipsed by the joy of this surprising affinity.

Hullo. An Article on Jewish Humour (and the Moose joke) for The JC, Dec 2015

Dissecting humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it.
E.B White

This year’s inaugural UK Jewish Comedy Festival at JW3 has prompted a lot of people asking ‘what is Jewish comedy? Not least, me. As a co-producer of the festival I’ve killed a lot of frogs, trying to work out what would be different about this festival to any other comedy week. Did we operate via the Virgil Thomson model? Thomson, a US composer, remarked: “ The way to write American music is simple. All you have to do is be an American and then write any kind of music you wish.”

So we could just programme Jews, whose material – no matter the style or content – would be inherently Jewish. Or does Jewish comedy have to be identified by something more than who your (standard-joke-character) mother is?  Is there a tone, a rhythm, subject matters that mark comedy out as Jewish comedy, no matter who is saying it? Arguably (and argued-albeit jokingly - by David Schneider on this week’s BBC ‘Front Row’) all comedians are outsiders, observers, and therefore, Jews. I’m not convinced that this revelation is going to go down well with everyone.

The most well celebrated Jewish Comedians’ material is marked by a seductive mix of intelligence and coarseness; it’s there in Larry David, Lenny Bruce, Sarah Silverman, Joan Rivers.  This makes sense. We’re the people of the book, but also the people of the book that contains a prayer for the successful working of our bumholes. So yes, it’s got to be sharply argued, and yes they’ll likely be references to oral sex/ erectile problems/ hemorrhoids. But if I had to nail my colours to the mast (to use a particularly non-Jewish phrase – what Jews do you know going boating?) I think it’s the rhythms that, above all, make comedy Jewish. Rhythms rooted in a language lovechild of Yiddish and English with a no-nonsense New York tawwking step-mother. This doesn’t mean Jewish comedy has to have an American accent; you can use these cadences whether you’re Brooklyn or Bromley.

I would argue that Woody Allen’s Moose routine is one of the finest examples of Jewish comedy going.  A mix of the potentially believable and wildly fanciful, with a lyrical linguistic phrasing and a killer pay-off, all told in a way that’s both neurotic and nonchalant - like he could be talking about his day in the office.

‘I shot a moose, once’ he starts. Not ‘once I shot a moose’.  The latter is both too smooth rhythmically and also builds the event into a big deal. The way Woody tells it makes it sounds casual, allowing the audience time to figure out the actual surprise and surrealism of the statement before disrupting the rhythm with ‘once’. Subtly echoing the word order of Yiddish phrasing like ‘smart, he isn’t’, it is also funny out of Allen’s mouth: a tiny, twitching, urban man who we wouldn’t believe had ever had access to a gun, or a moose.

Allen ties the animal to his car, but ends up having only wounded it. On the road he has an idea, so drives the moose back into town, trying to ditch him at a costume party.  Here we are out of the woods, back in a familiar suburban world and the classic terrain of unlikely juxtaposition providing humour. As the host of the party opens the door, Allen introduces the moose: ‘You know the Solomons’. Not the Jones’, not the Smiths , not even the Cohens. Three syllables - a classic comedy choice- and a name that immediately makes the audience understand what kind of party this is. Plus, the idea of passing a moose off as a Jewish couple is such an outrage, so meshugge and chutzpahdik , that we recognise it as effortlessly Jewish (almost Rabbinic) in logic .  Sure enough, at midnight when the best costume is announced: ‘The first prize goes to the Berkowitz’s, [beat] a married couple [beat] dressed in a moose suit.  The moose comes in second’.   

The end of the routine sees Allen mistakenly transport the Berkowitz’s –not the moose- back to the woods, where Mr Berkowitz is: ‘shot, stuffed….and mounted….at the New York City Golf Club’.  Massive pause. And then, here comes the kicker: ‘And the joke’s on them, because they don’t allow Jews.’ Noone sees this coming, this fantastic story that has paid no care to reality suddenly slamming back into local, political territory; ending with two-fingers up at Anti-Semitism and a massive victory for the Jews (although, not so much for Mr Berkovitz). Again, the Yiddish-inspired word order - not: ‘And because they don’t allow Jews, the joke’s on them’ – means the final idea comes like an actual punch, withholding the piece of information that makes sense of the phrase until the last word.

Woody Allen was not at the UK Jewish Comedy Festival in person (although we did screen ‘Sleeper’). But the quality of the entrants to the UK Jewish Comedian of the Year Competition highlights the riches we have as a British Jewish community.  Although the acts were wildly differing in content and Jewishness - (look, we didn’t ask, some of them might have been Mormons, anyone even considering holding the title ‘Jewish Comedian of the Year’ is Jewish enough) – there was still a unifying factor. Close your eyes, don’t listen to the words so much as the cadence, and there was the essence of Jewishness, a melody even, that had travelled time and continents to be there. And after consultation with our lawyers we’ve decided the prize for the competition is £1000. The plan to stuff and mount the winner in the JW3 entrance as an extravagant call-back to the best Jewish comedy routine of all time has been scrapped.