Stirring the Pot

A story about learning to go on stage without a script

A pot of apple butter on the stove.

According to my mum, my dad is the only person in the world who ever taught himself to drive by reading a book. I don’t know that this is true, or that she’d stand by the claim now I’ve gone and put it in writing; it has that quality of loving exaggeration tinged with exasperation which I recognise as part of the story-cloth from which long-haul partnerships are made. But it’s what she told me, many moons ago, and the memory comes back as I’m stirring a pot of apple butter on the stove and thinking about a message a friend sent earlier in the day.

This friend has been watching the video of a talk I gave on Saturday and wondering about “the way the conversation in your head must work”. At the start of the talk, I’d told the story of Wendell Berry’s admonition to travel no further than you can get back by nightfall, and Lee Hoinacki’s qualification of this: that friendship might be the one reason good enough for travelling further. I’d told a version of the same story in an online session last week, when answering a question from the same friend, and he wonders, “Had you already written your talk before the Monday call?”

The answer is, I hadn’t written a talk at all – and I didn’t know before I walked on stage that I would start by telling that story.

Here’s Saturday’s talk. There are a few bits in Swedish, so turn on subtitles for the translation.

But as I’m stirring the pot, I get to thinking about how it was I learned to walk on stage without a script and hold an audience’s attention for an hour – and I realise that it’s a bit like how my dad (allegedly) learned to drive.

Because if I had to name one source for how I learned this skill, then it’s the late, great improvisation teacher Keith Johnstone, but not only did I never meet the man, I have never intentionally participated in a workshop using his methods.¹ I just spent years chewing on the pair of books in which he gathered his notes, and hung out with enough people who’d trained in those methods to absorb what I needed by osmosis.

That’s not the whole story, of course, so maybe it’s worth gathering together a few other lessons from the journey. Because there’s something here about how you go about learning any set of cultural skills, and about the alchemy by which a set of disparate experiences can become ingredients in a developing practice.

The first lesson is the hardest to replicate, I’m afraid, because it must have helped that I grew up seeing my dad stand and talk in front of a bunch of people we knew every Sunday morning. Before I was in my teens, I was used to those Sundays when an extra reader was needed at short notice and I’d be up at the front reading a passage from the Bible. So even alongside the social shyness I mentioned in last week’s post, there was nonetheless a normalisation of standing up and using my voice in front of a roomful of people.

Through my twenties, there were a series of experiences which turned out to be helpful in hindsight, from busking on street corners, to selling books door-to-door, to working in a radio newsroom, where the first rule of writing copy is that the information has to land in a sequence that makes sense to a listener’s ear, because unlike reading a newspaper, there’s no opportunity for the eyes to scan back over a sentence that wasn’t clear.

When I’d trashed that early career at the BBC and was left with the question of what might be worth doing with a life, I went looking for people who had found a way to organise their lives around work that I admired – and I did my best to make myself useful enough that they would tolerate me hanging around, so that I could understand how they had become the people they were and got to do the things they did. I’ve sometimes talked about this as though it were a chapter in my mid-twenties, before I started doing my own work, but I realise that it’s a habit I’ve carried with me. So when I think about how I learned to walk into a room and notice a story that wants to be told, this has a lot to do with the mini-tour of Sweden that I arranged for the storyteller

Martin Shaw

a few years ago. Driving Martin around, arriving into a series of quite different venues, I saw that he didn’t know what story he was going to tell until he entered the space where the telling would take place. Sometimes you just need to see someone do a thing to realise that it’s possible.

In the chapel at Venngarn Castle with Martin Shaw, October 2015.

Around the time I turned thirty, I decided to apply myself, to take the raw ability I had as a speaker and work on it. I remembered hearing a story about George Bernard Shaw: that he arrived in London as a poor public speaker, but sought out every opportunity he could to give a talk, no matter the audience, until three years later, he was known as a celebrated orator. So, for a while, I did something similar, throwing myself into any and every opportunity, until I felt at home in that situation.

You can learn a lot from people who do something that’s not exactly what you do. I don’t tell the kind of old, mythic stories of which Martin is a master, nor have I ever tried my hand at stand-up comedy, but I learned a lot from the couple of years in which I hung out around a Thursday-night comedy club in Sheffield. Watching the acts, week by week, seeing the difference between an act that succeeds and an act that fails, and between the cheap ways of succeeding and the strange, wild, costly ways of succeeding, I came to think of stand-up as a shamanic practice, perhaps the one such practice that’s indigenous to modern urban culture. The first task of the person on stage is to take an audience of individuals and draw their consciousnesses together into a single, interconnected thing, a magic carpet on which we’re all taken for a ride. Whether the ride involves surreal semi-improvised narratives that link the mundane and the cosmic, or dirty gags about body parts – well, that’s down to the skills and the taste of the shaman in question.

The noted Geordie shaman Ross Noble takes refuge behind my hair on a Thursday night in Sheffield, circa 2006.

This esoteric theory about what’s going on in the room found confirmation in a couple of experiences. First, there was the point at which the host of our club decided to ban the local police, because he was sick of the way their presence disrupted the shows. What I saw was that a group of off-duty police officers were already so fused into a shared consciousness, and cut off from the general public, that they were immune to the implicit agreement that emerges as an act wins over an audience. They were a law to themselves and a pain to everyone else.

In the second experience, me and my friends were the disruptive presence. It was the night before the start of the first Dark Mountain festival, Josie Long was playing the venue in Llangollen which we would be using over the weekend, and the organisers had given us free tickets. The room was set up theatre-style, there were probably eighty locals, and then twenty or so from the festival team, filling up the back two rows. Josie’s act often involved her playing with “losing” an audience, taking it to the edge and then bringing us back. But on this night, it went wrong, because once again the room was split in two, and – as I remember it – those of us in the back two rows stayed with her longer and quite vocally, making it hard to read how far she had lost the rest of the audience, and she never really got them back. Afterwards, we invited her back to our campfire and fed her cider by way of consolation.

It’s a powerful thing to stand in front of a roomful of people and have all that attention trained on you. I have an image of attention as a material you can work with: a pliable material, somewhere between clay and thread. The playwright Mark Ravenhill once told performers at the Edinburgh Fringe, your job is to be “the most truthful person in that room”, that’s why you’re on stage and everyone else is giving you their attention. The way I see it, if there’s any gap between what comes out of your mouth and what you can feel in your heart, then the shape of the shared attention will slacken and the life will drain out of what is happening.

I often have a few notes on a page when I step on stage, there may be moments in the course of an hour when I glance at them or even read a line or two that was written in advance, but if things are going as they should, then there may not be much in common between those notes and what I end up saying. Instead, my experience when I’m up there is of having a whole bundle of stories and images come into reach, including some I’ve never thought of telling and others which I may not have thought of in years, but which come to hand in the moment. The old Greek word for an oral poet was a rhapsode, one who “sews songs” together, and that etymology of stitching or weaving fits my sense of the gestures involved in pulling in and joining together the stories.

Which brings me back to Keith Johnstone, because one of the many lessons I learned from his books is that, when you’re improvising a story, you should be like someone walking backwards: not worrying about what’s coming next, but looking for the moment to weave in a thread from earlier on, what the comedians call a “callback”:

Very often an audience will applaud when earlier material is brought back into the story. They couldn’t tell you why they applaud, but the reincorporation does give them pleasure.

For a long while now, I’ve been convinced that what we’re doing in these situations has a significance for which our language and culture has no frame. At best, or worst, there’s some high-flung language about “art” that’s full of pompous abstraction. But the practical power of what we’re doing, or learning to do, when we work with the material of attention is hard to name in a way that will make sense.

One more lesson from Johnstone, then, which may gesture towards what I mean. Because it was from his work that I first learned a secret: one of the most generous things you can do as a human being is to be on stage when something has gone wrong, and not try to cover it up, and not respond with any of the fight or flight or fawn reactions that seem hard-wired into our bodies, but to just be OK with it. To model the possibility that we can be OK with the unexpected, the unlooked-for, the undesired, and even receive it as a gift, a chance for something good to happen.

I’ve carried that lesson a long time, and lately it’s been opening like a seed which decided it was time to grow, showing me some of the other ways it can bear fruit, besides the strange setting of a human going on stage without a script. But that’s a story for another day, and there are a dozen jars of apple butter here that want to be put onto the cellar shelves.

Thanks for reading and sharing these letters, essays and stories that I publish. I’d had in mind to include some recommendations of other reading around the neighbourhood, but the story itself got longer than I was expecting, so I’ll save that for a separate post. Meanwhile, a little reminder that we’ve got just under three weeks to go before this autumn’s online series, where we’ll be sharing stories, joining up conversations and gathering around the Pockets, Patterns & Practices that might be part of the work of regrowing a living culture.

DH

1. Now I think of it, there was this one time in an empty shop in Brixton Village.