Life at Gateway

 

A drunk friend contacted me last week. He'd called me when I had visitors and I'd sent him a message explaining why I hadn't been able to converse. We ended up speaking for a couple of hours! We've had an on/off relationship in part because of our different backgrounds but similar creative and professional aims. It turned out that it had been a traumatic couple of weeks for him with three or four people he knows having died. He had decided to contact people with whom he doesn't have a lot of contact to let them know his feelings for them. He ended up inviting me to see a performance at the end of a rehearsal period for a piece of dance he'd been choreographing. I've got a collection of music on 'Spotify' I call 'Choreography' as I see complete dance pieces when I listen to them. I'd shared the collection with him last year and he'd used a couple of pieces in the dance.

I got to the venue and encountered a couple of people who were also waiting to see the performance. It was instantly clear that I hadn't been given all the information about what I was attending, but I was able to roll with it. The people I met introduced themselves as members of the Board of the organisation. I chuckled to myself as I'd been told that members of that Board were still smarting from some letter I'd sent them ten years ago which was apparently rude. I remember the blow up, I remember feeling justified, (of course) but I don't remember the letter itself. They asked me my connection with the organisation/ choreographer and I found myself burbling on about Intercultural Arts and the duplicitous Arse Council.

When the piece started I cringed. It was a bit of a cliche to put the dancers inside stretchy bodystocking type things and have them writhe. Having said that- at the time I didn't know that the piece was called "Life" and it was a fair way of showing emergence. Thankfully, the piece got a LOT better after the opening and I did recognise a couple of the tracks I'd shared with him. It was cool to do the Q&A session afterwards and I went with them to a pub across the road before heading home. I hadn't been to Gateshead for YEARS. The piece "Life" was created on a visiting group who will now take it into intense workshop before putting it into their repertoire.

He wants me to help out with a new building the organisation has been offered by the council. I kept telling him that I am finished with the creative sector in our region, when I start fostering I expect it to take up most of my time. I am sure I'll find it hard to resist being a bit of an adviser. I told him about the event about creating a cultural archive for minority communities that I'd been involved in online the week before. He was bemused not to have been invited and we sniggered about how few men had been involved in it. In some ways, he has taken on the position I used to occupy in the creative sector in this region, though I think he has it SLIGHTLY easier because he never pretended to be compromising like I felt I had to. the establishment try to dismiss him as an unintellectual Black man. -That's a mistake, but it has the advantage of letting him kick off when he needs to without as much pearl-clutching that followed me telling them what the artists wanted.

He told me the most delicious story about encountering someone who'd been exceedingly rude to him in public online after he'd bought drinks for people involved in an event. Over this person waltzed, smiling, they were told, clearly, to 'fuck off' with the explaination that they couldn't expect to be a keyboard warrior, to accuse him of "mysogynoir" and of  having 'sold out' and expect to be friends. I would have loved to have watched her leave with her crest dragging in the dust.