Don't Confuse My Passion for Aggression
So many bells rang in my head reading Lady Phyll Opoku-Gyimah's post on Facebook I realised it was time to come back to Wildewire.
I remembered how many times my "passion" has been used against me: "you're so passionate, Oscar" they told me at ONE NorthEast, "-and that's a BAD thing?" I thought, confused. It is a good way for ineffectual individuals to "throw" someone off their stride. When I respond to irritating niggles from people with a fraction of my ability, they cry foul and accuse me of aggression, of shouting, of being a bully.
Culture has much to do with it: Jamaicans- people of colour in general are noisier and more expressive than the average Northern European. I imagine many former UK colleagues finding working in similar jobs in the Caribbean or Africa a shock. The flip side Lady Phyll alludes to is that people of colour who learn how to be effective in UK can earn the "choc ice" epithet from their peers. -I remember returning home during my 2nd year at university, bumping into guys with whom I'd been to primary school hanging about on the street where I grew up. I instinctively played down the fabulous experience I was having, but it didn't stop one of them saying "Well, it was always easier for you; you're not that black"! It was a shock, but that comment did a lot to motivate me to be as successful a black man as I could be in this society and to work for black people who didn't have what I had achieved.
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Sometimes my passion is all I have. The ICONNE centre has been a dream/obsession since November 2009 but now it looks like it could become a reality despite continued ACE obstruction. My passion to prove that there IS another way to do "Diverse Arts": that you DON'T necessarily have to be spending millions if you're lucky-enough to find the right building in the right place that people are actually interested in using.
ACE continues to try to force us into unwanted partnerships with "established" companies out of fear they will be forced to step in to bail us out when we inevitably (to their minds) fail. The Waygood fiasco had much to do with that: a £4.3m project ended up costing £10.5m and STILL isn't fully operational. But I want to know why Waygood was allowed to proceed in the first place, it was obvious to me the people running it didn't know what they were doing. Why wasn't it obvious to ACE? Was it because the people behind Waygood had friends in ACE? Now the ACE mantra is "buildings are bad"- after close to £50m has been spent on cultural capital projects since I've been here. But, has minority access to those venues increased?
ACE insists venues generate maximum box office and that they increase their minority arts programming without accepting that the two aims potentially conflict with each other: Almost by definition, "minority" arts do not attract majority audiences. Simply programming BME artists doesn't mean minority ethnic audience will suddenly come to venues that don't generally seem welcoming or relevant to them. The ICONNE centre is to be the proving ground for minority arts in this city- perhaps region, a place to show the "established" venues that there IS minority ethnic talent and audiences for that talent. We don't need their hands to hold to show them what we already know!
Like Lady Phyll says "Don't judge me; you'll be amazed and surprised at what I know"
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