I went to see this production tonight.  It is part of the summer season at RWCMD, written and directed by the wonderful Firenza Guidi.


Joy House




 
This is a harrowing and powerful piece of theatre about the first few women forced to be prostitutes in 1942 when Himmler opened brothels in the concentration camps.
The women were told that they would be freed, fed and have warmth if they 'volunteered'. Those that were desperate enough to believe these lies were told to take five steps forward.

For the women who survived in the Sonderbau, the first brothel for Buchenwald concentration-camp prisoners, talking about their experiences was virtually impossible. The topic was, and still is, taboo.

Director and writer Firenza Guidi has succeeded in giving these women a voice. Interspersing the scenes of the brutality with personal details and tender moments when the women try to help each other, she gives us glimpses of humanity - small sparks in the darkness.

With a cast of ten women and three men, this is an innovative and ambitious production by the final year students at RWCMD.

The audience is not static, but encouraged to move with the actors, often inadvertently becoming part of a scene as onlookers sometimes separated by the barbed wire fences, sometimes not. This is uncomfortable and totally immersive. Beginning on an upper level railway track and descending with the women into the hell of the camp, we follow the actors through stark, minimalist settings with mostly subdued and occasionally brutal lighting that heightens the tension as the women are stripped of every shred of dignity and hope.

 Firenza Guidi,in an interview on Radio Wales, states that an influential dance tutor of hers (and author of the biography A Time to Speak) survived Auschwitz and still had the number branded on her arm. This made a strong impression on Guidi, and she wrote the play to give these forgotten women a voice. She has a long history of writing strong parts for and about women including: The Miracle set in 1789 about women sentenced to seven years transportation to Australia on a ship known as the floating brothel, and Fear No Man's Return, an adaptation of the Trojan Women.

Artist of the Day: Caspar David Friedrich

This enigmatic painting was on the cover of a Schumann score that I was labelling for our collection in work today.



The Monk by the SeaCaspar David Friedrich (1808-10)
Earth, water, sky: the elements are stacked in three bands, radically abstract. But the horizontals are countered by the tiny upright figure of the monk, who stands alone on the edge of the Earth. A black ocean extends immeasurably before him, opening like an abyss without comforting pictorial borders. The German romantic Caspar David Friedrich spent two years working on this alarming vision of a sea of darkness, with only the slightest hope in the hint of blue sky above the leaden clouds. The monk stands between the two sins against hope: presumption and despair. This is a sea of faith

Natalia Goncharova and the Ancestors - Returning to the Source

       

                                  
I discovered the artist Natalia Goncharova while looking at Futurism on the Art Foundation course last year. I liked the fact that through her well-known painting The Cyclist with its Futurist devices of depicting time and speed with multiple outlines, she challenged the Italian Futurists obsession with machines by choosing a more peaceful mode of transport, a bicycle. The cyclist is also willfully heading in the opposite direction to that indicated by the pointing authoritarian finger, but then Goncharova was definitely not afraid of challenging convention throughout her life.



The Cyclist (1912-13)

As I'm currently working on some pieces influenced by Mithila painting (traditional folk art of Nepal), and want to express a connection to my own agriculturist ancestors, I re-visited Goncharova's paintings from her Neo-Primitivism stage that were influenced by Russian peasant culture and country life. 
Already for several years before 1912, she and her partner Mikhail Larionov were intrigued with folk art, children’s paintings and self-taught artists, such as Georgian Niko Piromanishvili.
  
At the start of the twentieth century, Russia was primarily
a peasant country steeped in folk aesthetics such as icons, embroidered towels, home-made mats and rugs, wooden houses with carved window casings, jambs and lintels, painted clay toys - all made by the hands of friends and relatives - and not considered works of art. Goncharova was one of the first Russian artists to perceive and value the high artistic merits of Russian national creativity.
 
                                                                                                                                                       



Round Dance, 1910  The artist suggests notions of purity and tradition by imitating peasant woodcuts in paint. She portrays the peasants with faces like in icons, which has the effect of a attributing to them a saintly status.              

The hard edges, strong images, colours, lines, flatness and naively depicted characters are typical of indigenous folk painting.  However, although on the surface, these paintings are bold and deceptively simple, on closer inspection they brim with subtleties and emotional potency. As explained by Goncharova, the need to go back to these naive forms of art, are necessary to find new forms.
 Folk art is not refined. But it is direct and sincere, taken from its direct surroundings revealing the instinct of the tribe/community, the people unconsciously preserving the treasure of these primal concerns. 



 1910, ʻHay Cuttingʼ has elements of Cubism and Gauguin

 

Scything at Tinker's Bubble Eco-village where no mechanised tools are used and I felt close to my own ancestors.

I can relate to how Goncharova yearned for the countryside and its seasonal rituals which she witnessed in her youth. In reaction to modern urban life, she emphasised a sense of community and spirituality in her images of rural labour.
 

Gardening

1908

Oil paint on canvas


 

Allotment, 2014



                  

Woman washing on rooftop in Nepal, 2015          

 

 

Washerwoman, 1910’s

Unlike Gauguin's weightless native people, who do not so much stand on the soil as appear "suspended" between beams of golden light, Goncharova's peasant women have their feet more firmly planted on the ground.  

 

Goncharova was fascinated by the 6-8 feet high rough hewn stone statues of male and female figures known as kamennaia baba, that are scattered over the southern steppes of Russia, frequently found atop burial mounds and believed to represent the ancestors of those who originally erected them: non-Slavic tribes, among them the Scythians who occupied these areas as far back as the iron and bronze age. Growing up on her grandmother's country estate, Goncharova would have heard popular legends that tell of the rootedness of the Russian people in nature. 


Stone maiden (Still life)



Pillars of Salt (1908)

 

 

 

Fertility God 1909 /1910





Rusalka (1908-09) This seated naked woman with dark eyes testifies to Goncharova’s familiarity with pagan folk beliefs. The fishes underline the woman’s personification of a water spirit (rusalka) who had just come ashore, and the young branch decoration her hiding place in the woods at the end of winter. Traditionally feared and revered by peasants who tried to win Rusalka’s favour for the fertilization of their soil with new crops, she is depicted in a modern idiom of a fusion of cubist and fauvist elements. 

 
Goncharova's paintings were not just beautiful in themselves. They made socio-political statements, were full of symbolism such as woodcutters cutting away the old to make way for the new reflecting the 1905 and 1917 Russian revolutions. She choses ubiquitous figures at work and makes them her own by incorporating elements of styles such as cubism and fauvism. 

 

Relating this to my own work has given me new insight and ideas. For example, I might chose to depict people living alternative lifestyles such as those I have stayed with in Tinker's Bubble and Tipi Valley as a statement about manmade environmental destruction of the planet. I might depict these 'basic' ways of living - in yurts, not using machines - as an anti-capitalist statement. I might depict women talking in groups sitting on the earth with their children as a way of showing that motherhood is still undervalued in society, or groups of all ages of people sitting together in front of a fire on the street (as in Nepal) to show how capitalism has alienated us from each other in the West.

 

Another concern is where to locate my source for the primitive in my art. Do I stay close to my ancestors like Russian artists and writers, (south-west England and Wales)? Or do I turn, like Picasso to Africa, or Maia Deren to Haiti (perhaps important soul places rather than being actually ancestrally linked). In which case, looking to Nepal and India seems valid for me also. Perhaps there are more similarities than one might think anyway - as theories such as Jung's collective unconscious imply.

 

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Breaking the Mould: The Bronte Sisters

It is a sobering thought that it was only 150 years ago that women were not allowed to enter a library, had to publish under men's names and had no part in public life.


The Brontes broke the mould against all odds; that is why so many are fascinated by them and why so many continue to go on pilgrimages to the parsonage in Yorkshire where the famous books were written, from all over the world.







I've been fascinated with the Brontes since reading Jane Eyre in the last year of school, and later all about the sisters who lived for most of their short lives in an isolated house on the moors, yet produced some of the most passionate and original literature ever written. None of their books have ever gone out of print. Jane Eyre is believed to be the second-most read book in the English language (after the Bible).


I feel an affinity with both Emily and Charlotte, both of whom reacted to their isolation and severe limitation of their life options at that time in very different ways: Emily withdrew from society, refused to wear the petticoats and corsets and spent her time roaming the moors, and Charlotte was hugely ambitious, longing for fame and recognition. Just as well, for it was she who persuaded Emily to send their work to publishers (under the male names of Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell). For Emily though, writing was a deeply private act, an outlet that allowed her to live as she would want to - in her imagination - free to roam in communion with nature, free of social restraints and expectations.

There have been numerous cultural interpretations of the Brontes novels, poems and life including opera, dance, and music; even asteroids have been named after them. And now another off-shoot: Sally Wainwright is to write and direct a new one-off film for BBC1 about the Brontë sisters - To Walk Invisible: The Brontë Sisters, a drama that will focus on the three sisters' "increasingly difficult relationship with their brother Branwell, who in the last three years of his life – following a tragically misguided love affair – sank into alcoholism, drug addiction and appalling behaviour." The period of time was a tough one for the Brontë family, but coincided with the years the three women penned their now world-famous novels.

Many writers and artists, including myself have been fascinated by the mad woman in the attic in Jane Eyre. Why did Charlotte Bronte invent Bertha, Rochester's first wife, locked in an attic to torment her heroine? Perhaps Bertha is a part of Jane, and indeed their author, Charlotte Bronte - the part that had to be repressed in Victorian society where women were expected to be restrained, calm  and decorous at all times. Bertha represents the wild, instinctual nature of women that had to be locked away in order for a woman to be acceptable. Perhaps she represents all of us when we ignore and try to suppress our creative, curious, instinctual selves. She is the self screaming to be acknowledged.

 Paula Rego painted a whole series of work inspired by Jane Eyre.

A portrait of Bertha by Paula Rego

               

Lithograph from Paula Rego's illustrations of Jane Eyre

Paula Rego read the prequel Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys before reading Jane Eyre. She has transposed the context of  her Wide Sargasso Sea paintings onto her own background of growing up in Portugal, and she had added her own content as well. There is a play in the library about the author of Wide Sagasso Sea - Jean Rhys - called After Mrs Rochester by Polly Teale. It also features the mad woman that the book is about.

Which just shows how great art never grows old but continues to metamorphosize into new forms, feeding into and inspiring new creations, building layers, or perhaps revealing new truths.

All great artists break the mould in some way...The Brontes were true pioneers.
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