By Matti Colley
On Wednesday 5th August, I had the chance to go along to the Dare To Create Festival’s “I AM OLDHAM” Day with WonderGround Lincoln Festival founder Georgia Preece as part of our visit to the town.
Dare To Create is a festival celebrating the culture and creativity of Oldham which is organised by Dare To Know Theatre, a working class theatre collective founded by Miranda Parker and Jake Talbot in 2020. This year, Oldham Positive Action Network (OPAN) collaborated with Dare To Know to put on “I AM OLDHAM” Day, which included a performance of Dare To Know’s Community Project play, “Dead in Oldham”.
Read more about the Dare To Create festival:
https://www.daretoknowtheatre.com/copy-of-dare-to-create
As part of the “I AM OLDHAM” Day, myself and Georgia went along to two workshops run by Cathy Crabb, an award-winning Oldham based playwright and dramaturge who worked on the original “Dead In Oldham” script and subsequent scripts and performances. These workshops focused on encouraging people to “write fiction from the I” based on source material grounded in lived experiences.
Workshop 1: Sibling Relationships/ Rivalries
In the first workshop, Cathy introduced us to her two sons, one a DJ and the other a firefighter based in Oldham and talked about how their collective love for playing music and raving led to their different career paths emerging. As a group, we were asked to dream differently and craft story narratives based on that initial story by focussing on what interested us (and we had 15 mins to do this!)
So I came up with the story of Edwin, a young person living in late 1960’s Oldham who had a love for gobstoppers and the relationship they have with Mrs Henderson, a shopkeeper who worried about keeping her business afloat with rent rises and neighbourhoods changing as a result of house demolition.
For me, I found the process of writing quite surprising, in that I wasn’t expecting my story to take the turn that it did. There wasn’t an overtly conscious decision for me to decide where the starting point of my story was, other than to introduce my main character, Edwin and that they liked gobstoppers (a lot). And it made me realise isn’t it interesting how sometimes we jump to humour and satire in order to make sense of unfamiliar challenges that we face in life?
Bringing Edwin to life made me think about the pride that I feel in my ancestors having been shopkeepers, butchers, bakers, carpenters, chandlers etc which hadn’t really surfaced till that point. Also how pivotal retail professionals are in keeping the spirit of communities alive, whether in Oldham, Lincoln or anywhere else in the world.
Cathy helped the creative process along through sharing anecdotes of life in Oldham with us, along with quotes from writers and creatives that she has heard over the years. She believes that there is an inner power within us in our narrative weave making that allows us to will things into action, reminding us all of the Kate Bush quote “just saying it can make it happen.”
In this way, storytelling acts like a declaration of intent, even when the narrative hasn’t been fully formed and encourages us to explore what can be possible, what needs to be said.
There is also a sense of creating space to give ourselves permission to tell stories and feel proud in celebrating passion – whether that is:
- Passion for your local neighbourhood
- Passion for your favourite food
- Passion for your hobbies
- And passion for friendships formed between places and communities.
If you’d like to read my short piece, you can here:
Workshop Two: Telling Stories of Difficult Real Life Events (Wildfires/Drownings in Oldham)
To be a storyteller is to be brave. To be willing to tell a story based on traumatic, raw real life experiences to try and find different lenses to make sense of what has happened. Storytelling can offer communities (and the storyteller) a powerful way of healing, which can include creating coherent narratives that provide meaning and structure to painful collective memories.
Storytelling can create a space for validation and empathy and I experienced that during the second workshop, where we came together as a group with Cathy to reflect on a tragic story that was dividing opinion in Oldham – the drowning of a young person in a local reservoir and the subsequent starting of a wildfire at a meeting to honour the memory of the young person who had drowned.
Different media of storytelling was explored by each of to weave into the final performance, including poetry, visualisation of water imagery and stories told from the perspective of a tree based in the local area.
During this workshop I encouraged myself to put myself in the shoes of young people who had lost their friend to drowning and who also witnessed the inadvertent starting of the wildfire.
I approached this through improvisation to evoke the immediacy of the thoughts, feelings and emotions that are felt in a moment of heightened tension and loss. I definitely felt those feelings and emotions through my whole body – the shaking, the shock and surprise but of course remembering that it would be magnified in a real-life event.
What I learned through my experience is how improvision can help us let go of the urge to try to control a narrative based on our previous views and opinions and instead to trust in instinct and instant action.
There is no perfect way to deliver when improvising and I feel this challenges the sense of urgency that we have to “know exactly” what has happened during an event (something we can never be certain about when we are not witness to an event happening.
I did find that staying in the present moment of the performance brought others along on the quest for understanding which then allowed space for collective empathy. There was a sense at the end of the performance of challenging the rush to judge people as “good” or “bad” based on one set of actions and recognising the deep sense of loss and grief that continues to remain embedded within communities long after an event happens.
I want to say a huge Thank You To Cathy for delivering her workshops with authenticity, rawness and a curiosity to see how visitors from Lincoln engaged with real-life stories of Oldham life and a huge Thank You to Dare To Know Theatre, OPAN and the team at 1853 Studios for welcoming us and learning aside us!
