netherhall august news 2011
angry young men: time to grow up
contents Cover page: Image from the flyer promoting Lost in Mozart, an urban musical which tells the story of a friendship which crosses gang rivalries. Lost in Mozart will arrive in London after a run at the Edinburgh festival. The play is the second production from fledgling theatre company Angry Young Men, a project launched by netherhall news editor luke wilkinson (angry young men, p.10) CONTENT EDITOR Zubin Mistry MANAGING EDITOR, DESIGN & SETTING Luke Wilkinson IN-HOUSE CORRESPONDENT Simon Jared CONTRIBUTIONS AND ADVICE Peter Brown, Fr. Joseph Evans, Luke Wilkinson, Andrei Serban, James Osborn, Andy Taylor
regular features editorial
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PHOTOGRAPHY Simon Jared, Jeff Nottingham, Luke Wilkinson
Zubin Mistry is moved by a glimpse into life under a totalitarian regime
CIRCULATION Netherhall News is sent by e-mail to current and past residents of Netherhall House. It is also available at http://www. nh.netherhall.org.uk/magazine/magazine.htm
director’s notes
CONTACT US Would you like to be included in our mailing list, contribute to or express your opinion on Netherhall News? Write to:
peter Brown pays tribute to some Netherhall stalwarts
LUKE WILKINSON C/O NETHERHALL NEWS, NETHERHALL HOUSE, NUTLEY TERRACE, LONDON, NW3 5SA, U.K. or E-MAIL: alumni@nh.netherhall.org.uk DISCLAIMER All opinions expressed in this magazine are those of the authors concerned and do not necessarily represent the views of the editors of Netherhall News, of Netherhall House or of Opus Dei.
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deadline for next edition! please send in articles for publication in the october edition by september 10th. we are particularly keen to feature more news from former residents, so do get in touch!
10 river plate dance: the argentine who’s great craic
unexpected guest: learning to live with a ‘singular character’
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24 moving beyond racism s cinema and multiculturalism may pilgrims s pilgrimage to walsingham spinning a yarn s two perspectives on a cricket battle passing through s news from former residents netherhall news 3
editorial zubin mistry is moved by a glimpse into life under a totalitarian regime
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ne of the most striking images from last year’s football World Cup was North Korean striker Jong Tae-Se crying as he and his team-mates proudly sang their national anthem. In 2010, though North Korea was the lowest ranked team at the tournament, they played admirably against Brazil in their opening match despite losing 2-1. They went on, however, to suffer rather more humiliating defeats at the hands of Portugal and Ivory Coast to the disappointment of their fans in the stands. Except these were slightly unusual fans. Given the strict prohibitions on leaving the country the story goes that the North Korean fans were not in fact North Koreans, but Chinese actors employed to act out the part of enthusiastic North Korean supporters. A common – and not entirely surprising – joke that did the rounds concerned how the football would be reported back home in North Korea. The BBC, for example, put together a mock news report, grainy and sepia-tinged, declaring triumphantly that North Korea had managed to beat Brazil. Similar mock reports can be found online – and the South Koreans are predictably quite keen on them. If these jokes are at the heavily militarized border of bad taste, others made rather more dangerous incursions. One suggested caption for the image of a tearful Jong Tae-Se ran, ‘They’re gonna kill my mother if I don’t score a hat-trick’. The recent story of the Chinese gymnast Zhang Shangwu, once an Olympic hopeful but now reduced to begging on the streets of Beijing, has been taken to show the possibility for callousness in a Soviet-style sports system, and it is sobering to think that contemporary China is far more open than contemporary North Korea. The jokes are jarring because they hint at a significant reality: the closed, murky world of North Korea. As journalist Barbara Demick points out in her prize-winning Nothing to Envy: Real Lives in North Korea, North Korea is shrouded in darkness in more ways than one. Satellite photographs of east Asia at night feature one spot conspicuously lacking light. The southern half of the jutting Korean peninsula glows but, with the exception of a tiny dot around Pyongyang, the northern half is pitch dark. In the early 1990s, North Korea, in Demick’s words, ‘faded to black’ in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Without the subsidies and support of its former ally, the North Korean economy ground to a halt. Contemporary North Korea is ‘not an undeveloped country [but] a country that has fallen out of the developed world’.
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It was not always so. In the early twentieth century, the Korean peninsula was under Japanese colonial rule. Following Japan’s defeat in 1945, Korea was divided at the 38th parallel, with the Soviet Union administering in the north and the USA in the south. The Soviets established the Provisional People’s Committee for North Korea headed by a former Korean exile and guerrilla, Kim Il-Sung, before their withdrawal in 1948. Both the Northern regime and the Southern one, headed by the right-wing strongman Syngman Rhee, had designs on ruling the entire peninsula. Simmering hostilities turned into a civil war in 1950, when the North invaded the South. After the USA intervened on behalf of the South and, subsequently, Chinese communists on behalf of
above: Jong Tae-Se crying during the North Korean national anthem at World Cup 2011 the North, the war turned into a stalemate which had cost over two million lives by the time it ended in 1953, with a border not dissimilar to those chalked up a few years earlier agreed upon. To this day, the border remains the most heavily militarized border in the world. In their opening decades as new nations, North Korea may well have outperformed South Korea economically, partly due to subsidies and investment from Communist allies China and the Soviet Union. By the 1990s, the roles had very much reversed. The pitch black nights conceal creaking factories and rusted electric wires. In a country in which almost no foreign media makes
it in and, until recently, less than 1% had mobile phones, it is difficult to gauge the extent to which ordinary North Koreans are aware of their own hardship in comparison to their bitter neighbours’ relative prosperity. Among the propaganda slogans emblazoned across train stations and other buildings are some which run, ‘LET’S LIVE OUR OWN WAY’, and, ‘WE HAVE NOTHING TO ENVY IN THE WORLD’. To those born and bred under this deliberately insulated, repressive regime, there has literally been nothing to envy. A distinguished reporter, Barbara Demick’s acquaintance with the Koreas began in 2001, when she became the Los Angeles Times’
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above: Statute of Kim Il Sung in Chongjin Korean bureau chief. Demick was a western journalist who managed to gain access to North Korea. But the visit was hardly illuminating. Western journalists are given ‘minders’ who carefully monitor conversations and routes. Ironically, Demick found out more about North Koreans’ everyday life in South Korea by speaking to defectors who had managed to escape. Her book, based on seven years’ work, focuses on the accounts of those from Chongjin, North Korea’s third-largest city located far in the north. The result is not unprecendented – the most detailed accounts of everyday life in North Korea come from Soviets who worked in the nation – but is most certainly gripping. Part of the power of Nothing to Envy comes from the repression chronicled. Networks of informants and the threat of dismissal to labour camps form part of the background reality of North Korean life. Various straitjackets of tradition, such as caste, intermingled with emergent forms of authoritarianism: the best families would have greater prospects of entering the Party. Moreover, for half a century, North Korean society has been gripped by an astounding cult of personality. Everything is overseen by the late Kim Il-Sung, the posthumously titled ‘Eternal Leader’, of whom there are over 500 statutes across the nation, and his son Kim Jong-Il, the ‘Dear Leader’, is similarly deified. North Koreans remember where they were when they heard that Kim Il-Sung died in 1994, a ‘moment when the ordinary laws of time and percep-
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tion were frozen by shock’. One of Demick’s interviewees recalls the frenzy of competitive grieving at university while another saw her father, reputedly like many North Koreans, starve himself to death at the news. The suffering that Demick recounts is extraordinarily moving. One eventual defector, Dr. Kim Ji-eun, struggled heroically and helplessly in Chongjin’s hospital as the effects of famine in the mid to late 1990s took their toll, while another, Mi-Ran, hopelessly saw her primary school class shrink down and learned painfully that sympathy and survival were not compatible. Between 1995 and 1998, anywhere between 900,000 and three million died from starvation-related diseases, and North Koreans struggled desperately to fend for themselves while never questioning the government who initially denied the disaster and later blamed it on Western blockades: ‘It has been said that people reared in Communist countries cannot fend for themselves because they expect the government to take care of them....[But in North Korea p]eople did not go passively to their deaths....They devised traps out of buckets and string to catch small animals in the field, draped nets over their balconies to snare sparrows. They educated themselves in the nutritive properties of plants... They stripped the sweet inner bark of pine trees to grind into a fine powder that could be used in place of flour...[They] learned to swal-
“Among the propaganda slogans emblazoned across train stations and other buildings are some which run, ‘LET’S LIVE OUR OWN WAY’, and, ‘WE HAVE NOTHING TO ENVY IN THE WORLD’. To those born and bred under this deliberately insulated, repressive regime, there has literally been nothing to envy” low their pride and hold their noses. They picked kernels of undigested corn out of the excrement of farm animals. Shipyard workers... scraped the bottoms of the cargo holds where food had been stored, then spread the foul-smelling gunk on rooftops so that they could collect from it tiny grains of uncooked rice and other edibles’ Reading Demick’s account it is important to remember that those described are not characters in a dystopian novel but real people: the tragically loyal Mrs. Song, hardworking mother and head of her block’s inminban or local council; her rebellious daughter, Oak-hee; Mi-ran, the daughter of a miner and former South Korean POW; her secret boyfriend, Jun-sang, from a socially respectable well-to-do family and student resident in the more exclusive Pyongyang. The most powerful aspect of her work are their stories, which are ‘not the sort of thing that shows up in satellite photographs’, and the way in which both literally and metaphorically they have come to ‘love the darkness’ – that is to say, to find ways of living. To middle-aged North Koreans, the dark nights cruelly contrast with their memories of more fortunate times; but to Mi-ran and Jun-sang, the nightly darkness was a ‘magic cloak of invisibility’ which enabled them to go for long walks together. Likewise, the stubbornly loyal Mrs. Song turned her hand to illegal but clever forms of private enterprise after famine struck her husband and son down. Indeed, one curious effect of the famine was to turn thousands of women into black-market breadwinners.
above: Satellite image of North and South Korea at night below: the cover of barbara demick’s ‘nothing to envy’
North Korea is not unchanging. The country has made moves to open up economically and diplomatically. At the end of June, it was announced that a senior official will be visiting Washington D.C. to discuss ending the nuclear programme and resurrecting six-nation disarmament talks following their breakdown three years ago. Nor is North Korea entirely unprecedented as a retrograde, repressive society. Anna Funder’s excellent Stasiland: Stories from behind the Berlin Wall, which like Demick’s book, won the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-fiction, offers glimpses of life in Communist East Germany for both individual resisters and those who worked for the Stasi. Following the collapse of the Berlin Wall, we read of such lives in retrospect. Crucially, however, there is no equivalent North Korean retrospect, and for many North Koreans there may still be nothing for them to envy.
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director’s notes peter brown pays tribute to some netherhall stalwarts
right (l-r): olivier coste (199697, 2002-3), peter brown, eniola leyimu (2007-10), and miguel anton (200511).
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t the time of writing I am aware of five residents of the academic year just concluded (2010-11) who have been awarded first class degrees: from Kings College, Simon Jared (English literature), Sam Brawn (English literature) and Quique Requero (History); from Heythrop College, Raffy Rodriguez (Philosophy); and from the Institute of Contemporary Music, Tony Robinson (Drums). Many congratulations to them. As time goes on I’m sure we’ll hear of other results but these are the early ones. Particularly impressive is Quique’s award because he has done his degree in a foreign language. However, given his strident views on postgraduate studies I don’t think he will be rushing into a Master’s this year. At the postgraduate level we have just learnt that Aymeric Mellet (2010-2011) was awarded by LSE the Antoine Faure-Grimaud Prize for Overall Student Performance in the MSc in Finance and Economics and Miguel Anton (see final paragraph below) passed his viva with no changes required to his thesis. Two tremendous achievements. Aaron Taylor (08-11) earned a first class degree last year (he also claimed that as he is Cornish he was doing his degree in a foreign language). Aaron arrived in Netherhall in the second year of his undergraduate course. He actually applied to come here in his first year but because we wouldn’t offer him a room without his coming for an interview (all the way by train from his beloved Cornwall) he only arrived for his second year. In the final year of his degree he took over as bursar from the great Robert Chang and remained bursar after graduation, combining the job with a position as an intern at the Thomas More Institute under the eagle eye of Dr Andrew Hegarty (director of Netherhall 19931998). But at the end of June, Aaron finally joined a list of exNetherhall bursars going back to Val Morrisey. In September he starts a Master’s degree in Theology at Oxford. We wish him every success in his latest venture and of course thank him for doing such a great job. Aaron was efficiency personified and, if the residents were not scared of him, the directors certainly were. His departure will leave a big hole in the Netherhall set-up. Nor should we ignore that with Aaron’s departure the Netherhall Conservative Club will be reduced in number to one. Back in the club’s heyday David Wyatt, Frank Pells and Aaron were a force to be reckoned with. They each sported tea mugs bearing the Queen’s face and read biographies of Margaret Thatcher. Guest speakers were scrutinised for any possible left-leaning opinions and Netherhall’s purchase of the Guardian newspaper was constantly criticised. Frank’s departure last year damaged the Tory club but Aaron’s departure to pastures new could hole the club below the water line unless new and passionate Conservatives arrive among next year’s incoming residents.
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top: quique requero dug deep to gain a first class degree in history, writing in english, his second language. middle: netherhall busar aaron taylor was a force to be reckoned with if your rent was late! left: joao bettencourt gave a piano recital at netherhall on 4th june this year.
We welcome Arnil Paras as the new bursar. Arnil is a PhD student at the LSE. Our one concern is that his resemblance to a teddy bear will make any collection of fees from late paying students difficult. I was away on my annual course in June and came back to a very changed house population as residents had moved out and language students arrived. It was great to be able to interview Prakarsh Singh for Desert Island Discs on the Sunday before his departure for the States (see Director’s Notes, Netherhall News, May 2011). At the risk of repeating myself, he will be greatly missed. With Prakarsh’s exodus Netherhall’s Indian community – always totally united, in a state of constant but friendly argument, and profoundly hierarchical – has lost its leader, but 18-year-old Rohan Merchant, about to begin his second year at UCL and his second year with us, is chomping at the bit to replace him in the job. Another departure is the earlier-mentioned Sam Brawn who has been in Netherhall for three years and who made a huge contribution to drama in the House. Simon Jared has also moved on. Although his jokes will definitely not be missed, to Simon we owe tremendous thanks for all the help he has given to us, not least with this magazine. Oscar Alabau too has left us. Oscar has been the temperamental and long-suffering cellist of Netherhall for four years, lighting up the house with wonderful sound. Tony Robinson is also leaving after three years in Netherhall. In his amazing drumming displays he has introduced us to a whole new world of music. And after nearly two years here Ben Schoeman, a wonderful South African pianist, is also departing. On behalf of all who have had the privilege of listening to Oscar, Tony and Ben whilst they have been with us, thank you very much lads.
middle: sam brawn in full flow in house play ‘the government inspector’
And then there is Miguel Anton. Where do I start? Who else, on an excursion to the Chilterns in the middle of winter pulls out a small gas stove and frying pan from his rucksack to start cooking everyone bacon and quail egg sandwiches? Miguel arrived in Netherhall in September 2006 to start his PhD in Finance at the LSE. He spent a year in Harvard mid-way through and was Assistant Director of Netherhall for a year before that. Miguel ranks as one of the most passionate and talented people I have ever come across. He brings passion to football, cooking, excursions, singing, dancing, debates and pretty much everything he touches. He even beat me at squash once or twice. He is off to IESE in Barcelona to take up a teaching post in September and I have every confidence and hope that he will be a frequent visitor here. He will be greatly missed.
left: oscar alabau right (l-r): simon jared, andrea usai and hall chaplain fr joe evans. andrea was a frequent visitor to netherhall while studying for a master’s in law at king’s college.
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river plate dance the argentine who’s great craic when he gets his dancing shoes on
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ernando Marcos is a man with electric feet. At least it looks that way when he puts on his dancing shoes and takes to the floor combining Latin American passion with Celtic fire. And that’s the curious thing about this Argentine former Netherhall resident: he is the first ever non-native English-speaking Irish dancing teacher in the world. In other words, before Fernando discovered Irish dancing in 2002, the only people teaching it were native English (or Gaelic) speakers. But a chance encounter with a lady in Rosario brought Fernando into contact with this exotic dance form and it was quite simply love at first sight. ‘What I most like about Irish dancing is its musicality and rhythm and all the history and culture it encapsulates’, he explained during a visit to Netherhall last June. Asking Fernando if Irish dancing is similar to tap dancing is like asking an Englishman if cricket is like baseball! Both questions elicit a painful groan. Tap dancing, he explains (patiently), is a ‘recent’ form of Irish dance developed by immigrants in the USA escaping the Great Famine. Irish dance is more intricate and disciplined than its simplified ‘offspring’. ‘You don’t flail your arms all over the place’, he says. For those who don’t know, Irish dancing involves quick movement with the legs and feet while keeping the upper body rigid and the arms fixed firm beside it. It’s all ‘jig’, a jumping dance form where the legs leap and the feet fly while the torso and arms stay tight. For anyone who has never seen Irish dancing, Fernando recommends a quick visit to You Tube. It is this discipline and tradition which seem to attract Fernando. In the shows he organises he avoids bringing in stories or narratives. The interest is in the dance. While he has had contact with the famous Riverdance productions which have made Irish dancing internationally famous, his own approach is more conservative, even purist: let the dance form speak for itself without imposing on it an extraneous narrative. Argentina is more known for its Welsh settlers, the immigrants from Wales who arrived in Patagonia from 1865 onwards seeking to defend their faith and traditions in a new continent. Welsh is still spoken today in parts of Patagonia. But there are also many Argentines of Irish origin, estimated at anything between 500,000 to one million people. Indeed, Argentina has the fifth
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below: the electric feet of fernando and his colleagues as they perform in shanghai 2010 largest Irish community in the world. Fernando’s encounter with the above mentioned woman, a lady by the name of Margaret Young who taught dancing as well as English, was not surprisingly the fruit of this Irish presence in Argentina. This good lady learned most of the Irish dance she knew from an Irish priest called Fr Fidelis Rush at St Brigid Boarding School in Buenos Aires. The Irish came to Argentina bringing faith and charity but also their own customs. For Fernando Irish dancing is a labour of love. While he now makes a reasonable living from it, it certainly
above: fernando (left) in full flight
does not make him rich and the road to professional dancing was a hard path involving many sacrifices. He still remembers fondly his time at Netherhall and how it helped him at a difficult moment in his life. He came to London with an extremely tight budget in 2003 to train to be a teacher, receiving private lessons in Haverstock Hill from a school operating throughout the capital. He would walk half-an-hour each day to school to save on the travel fares, dance all day and come back to the Netherhall’s multi-purpose hall to dance even more. They were intense
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months of aching feet, with exciting dreams but an insecure future. The stability he found at Netherhall, Fernando explains, was a key factor for him in a testing period. He now divides his time between Argentina and Ireland. In the latter country he dances for ‘Comhaltas Ceoltoiri Eireann’ (the Brotherhood of Irish Musicians, (www.comhaltas.ie), a nongovernmental organisation which seeks to promote and conserve Irish culture (principally music, dance and song). It has been operating for 60 years and now has 400 branches across the globe. Every summer he dances with a group of theirs called ‘Bru Boru’ in Cashel, Ireland, so anyone from this (eastern) side of the Atlantic who wishes to see him in action could always catch him there. He then returns to Argentina to teach Irish dancing in Buenos Aires and Rosario. The school he teaches at is called ‘Irish Feet’ (www.irish-feet.com.ar). One of his greatest moments was dancing for a group of world leaders as part of the Irish presidential entourage on its visit to Shanghai for the World Expo of 2010. The Republic’s premier invited various dignitaries and heads of State to the Irish pavilion there and Bru Boru was a key act among the various performances staged to impress them. Now 31 years old, Fernando plans to keep on dancing as long as the Lord gives him life and energy. And he thrives on the challenge of bringing this Celtic art form to Hispanic Latin America. From his own experience he knows what good real dancing – with all the discipline and dedication it involves – can do to young people. For him waving one’s arms wildly in a discotheque is not proper dancing. Keeping them cold by your body while the legs catch fire is what is truly creative.
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“What I most like about Irish dancing is its musicality and rhythm and all the history and culture it encapsulates”
above left: fernando at netherhall house with fr. joe evans above right: fernando meeting irish president mary mcaleese in shanghai in 2010 below left and right: shots from the performance in shanghai, 2010
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angry young men luke wilkinson on the practicalities of idealism and ‘manning up’
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formed Angry Young Men in late 2009 with two friends – a newly qualified probation officer and a youth worker about to begin training for ordination in the Church of England. At the time I was managing a community arts café and considering further training in community theatre facilitation/management. Reaching the current point of setting up Angry Young Men as an entity (of whatever sort) was the culmination of almost two years of informal discussions surrounding our roles as men training or working in social/cultural professions, and the kinds of challenges that we thought we faced, specifically as young men, finding our feet in contemporary society.
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Our initial idea was for Angry Young Men to be a forum that would connect us with other young men exploring similar issues and with a similar passion for bringing about positive social change. We defined ‘anger’ as ‘the strong feeling aroused by injury, injustice, wrong… an anger rooted in love not hatred’ and argued that there are many injustices in our world that stem from either the active or passive negative behaviour of men, and which therefore require men to do something about changing them. We wanted to encourage men (beginning with ourselves) to reflect on their own behaviour, and to change the way in which they act and interact with the world and the people around them: to get ‘angry’ about suffering and injustice wherever they encounter it.
Do you have any iDea what it takes to be a man arounD here ?
above left: lost in mozart writer jeff nottingham posing for a publicity photo above right: luke wilkinson biding his time on the flyer for lost in mozart We launched a website and began enthusiastically posting articles on topics ranging from homelessness to sex to creativity to ex-offenders, but, lacking proper expertise in website design and management, this soon fizzled out. However, alongside the website we had also set up a small theatre company to explore some of the same issues, and this has fared much better. In 2010 we devised a modern adaptation of John Osborne’s Look Back In Anger, updating the characters and themes from 1956 to 2010, and took it to the Edinburgh Fringe festival in the summer. Our current production, Lost In Mozart, covers themes of gang culture and violence, but also questions where true masculinity comes from and whether forgiveness actually takes more courage than revenge. Working on Lost In Mozart has occupied most of our time in the last few months. It is a much larger scale production than anything we have done before, both collectively and as individuals. We had the massive encouragement of securing a grant of £8,567 from the Arts Council to stage the play in London after a
month of performing it at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe, and have attracted interest from investors and other producers who want to help us develop the idea further, possibly even turning it into a feature film. All of this has been exciting but has also forced us to have a serious re-think over a lot of things we have perhaps taken for granted about what Angry Young Men is and what exactly we want to do. For example, to receive the money from the Arts Council, we had to open a bank account, and to open a bank account we had to have a constitution, and to have a constitution, we had to have members and get them all together for an Annual General Meeting! Trying to define our raison d’être at a hasty ‘AGM’ in Costa on Kilburn High Road, we came up with this suitably vague definition: ‘To be a forum for discussing issues affecting men in contemporary Britain. To create projects that address these issues.’
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above: george owen films devauna mcfarlene (pidge) and toby white (mr leroy) in a promotional video for lost in mozart Faced, therefore, with the prospect of growing into a ‘proper’ company, we have had to think through some fairly fundamental things, both philosophically (what are we trying to do and why?) and practically (what organisational structure and mode of working will we have?). In one sense our ‘mission statement’ is fairly clear – ‘to be a forum for discussing issues affecting men in contemporary Britain’. Nevertheless, it has been good to get back to basics and to try to justify our purpose, but more importantly to think about how we are going to carry out that purpose. There is certainly no shortage of press rhetoric about the lack of male role models for young men growing up and the consequent social ills that result. On Father’s Day this year, David Cameron took it upon himself to issue a challenge to absent fathers: ‘When fathers aren’t there for their kids, those children are more likely to live in poverty, fail at school, end up in prison and be unemployed later in life’ But it is not just at the stage of parenthood that men need encouraging. One of the biggest periods of upheaval for young people is from the ages of 18-25, when the structured life of school is over and the question ‘what will I do with my life?’ looms. Apparently boys find it much harder to navigate this time than girls, and are much more likely to remain at home (or return from university) into their twenties.
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But we don’t want to define our purpose only in terms of negative reasons. There is a very strong positive reason to exist, which is to provide a protective environment for the idealistic view that many young men have of the world, before they ‘grow up’ and this idealism is replaced by ‘realism’. Paediatrician Eli Newberger identifies late adolescence (which for boys can be considered to stretch into their mid-twenties) as a stage of ‘giving back’, where young men begin to develop a social responsibility, often very pure and idealistic. We think that by grouping like-minded young men and encouraging each other, this is something that can be nurtured into a sustainable adult idealism that retains the keen sensitivity to injustice while making space for a degree of ambiguity. When started to look for funding for Lost In Mozart it became apparent that a lot of funding bodies would only seriously consider applications from registered charities or limited companies. We realised that fairly soon we would have to decide whether we were trying to run an organisation whose aims were primarily charitable or primarily concerned with making profit. For a theatre company, the answer to this is complicated – on the one hand, a theatre company can register as a charity, since theatre is considered to ‘advance public education’. Indeed, our receipt of Arts Council money has given us a sense of accountability to the general public, since it is public money we are spending. However, at the same time a small theatre company is faced with the challenge of making ends meet. Ticket sales
alone will rarely cover production costs, pay actors’ wages and reimburse expenses, let alone leave spare money to be re-invested in the company or paid out to shareholders. Furthermore, we don’t want Angry Young Men to be defined primarily as a theatre company; it is a forum for ideas, the discussion of which will take place in many different ways. In some iterations, we may provide a simple service for which due reimbursement would be right, for example when publishing and distributing a magazine to complement the web-forum. In others, however, we may want our products to be free at the point of delivery, perhaps for example when running a training workshop for volunteer youth workers. Getting the right legal structure is very important to enable us to do the things we want to do with Angry Young Men. Our overall aims are ‘charitable’ in the sense that we want to bring about positive social change, (falling under ‘the advancement of citizenship or community development’ in the Charities Act 2006), but we
“Creativity is so much more than the ‘arts’. We define anything as creative that comes from the core of who a person truly is: something that makes them passionate. and ‘being creative’ means passionately living from the centre of this true self” also need to be business-minded to ensure we can fund everything we want to do. At the moment we are considering whether to become a charitable company (which must have exclusively charitable purposes) or a community interest company (which is more lightly regulated than a charitable company but is not always eligible for funding). Weighing up the various benefits and drawbacks is something we will be continuing to do over the next few months, drawing on advice from the Independent Theatre Council and other sources, and then reaching a decision at our next (probably similarly informal) AGM in October 2011. To get a better idea of the needs of the young men we might serve, we conducted a quick straw poll through online survey website, Survey Monkey. The survey of 20 of our friends or colleagues working or training in what I have loosely termed ‘social/ cultural professions’ has opened up some new avenues of thought for how we might structure ourselves henceforth. Previously we had thought that a web-based forum (offering articles, advice, chat rooms etc) would be the best thing to focus our attention on, but the results of the survey have shown that it should not be our main focus. While 79% of people indicated that they thought a web-forum would be a good idea, and would like to read and share articles/resources through it, the main types of support that people indicated they would appreciate (that they don’t already receive) were more face-to-face than face-to-screen. These included formal/informal mentoring both in the workplace and by someone outside of the work environment, as well as retreats and training days.
But the most popular (42.1% of people voted for it) was formal peer-mentoring. This is a new consideration for us, and will have ramifications on how we structure ourselves; we will certainly need to undergo further research and training in this area. Peer-mentoring is something that is currently advocated among young people – for example the charity UK Youth offers a BTEC course in Peer-Mentoring (UK Youth 2011) – but we are concerned primarily with working with those who may be youth workers rather than young people themselves, and the results of the survey indicate that this is something there would certainly be a demand for. From the theatre perspective, ‘forum’ immediately evokes Brazilian theatre-maker Augusto Boal’s famous technique for opening community dialogue: ‘forum theatre’. This may be a very useful tool for our working practice, possibly in theatrical contexts, but also for training days or with peer-mentoring groups. Forum theatre and other related exercises are very valuable in facilitating co-learning in groups (rather than the more traditional teacher/ pupil approach) since they give agency to the learner, allowing peers to teach each other from their own experience. The value of cross-discipline sharing is something I have experienced first hand, when, with some classmates, I ran a series of drama sessions in a youth club. We had a disappointing turn-out from the young people, but at the end of our six weeks there, the youth worker came and told us how much he had learnt from observing us – things he would feed back into his own practice. We likewise learnt from him the value of patience and longerterm interventions in the context of a youth club, as it takes a long time to build trusting relationships with the young people. We want creativity to be the foundation of everything we do, from the mundane task of choosing a legal structure within which to work, to deciding how to organise ourselves and set aims and objectives for the coming months and years, and most importantly, the work that we will do. Creativity is so much more than the ‘arts’. We define anything as creative that comes from the core of who a person truly is – something that makes them passionate – and ‘being creative’ means passionately living from the centre of this true self. Ken Robinson, a key thinker on creativity, simply calls this ‘being in your element’. Our belief is that much negative behaviour by men comes from a frustration with not being able to exercise a passion, and so the restless energy spills out in other ways. In many ways it is time for Angry Young Men to ‘grow up’ – to leave the safety of its parents’ home (i.e. our bank accounts!) and take full legal responsibility for itself. But we are determined that it will never ‘grow up’ in the sense of losing faith in the capacity of a small group of determined men to make positive differences in society. What will guide all our decision-making as we enter this new stage is the simple goal of helping each other to find and grow into our element. Luke Wilkinson lived in Netherhall House for two years, and much of the inspiration for Angry Young Men has grown out his experience of the nurturing and challenging community the house provides. Lost In Mozart plays at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe Festival. More details and promo videos available at www.angryyoungmen.org
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the unexpected guest andy taylor discovers the different meanings of hospitality
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arlier this month, Andy Taylor had the opportunity to catch up with a quite remarkable man and hear about the unexpected guest he has learnt to live with.
Can you introduce yourself? Who are you? Please tell us a bit about your background? How old are you? My name is Joaquin Romero. I am from Barcelona, Spain, and I am 43 years old. I am a quantity surveyor and I have suffered from multiple sclerosis since I was 22. My father, who died three years ago, was from Cadiz, and my mother was from Menorca. As a kid, I used to spend wonderful summers on the island with my siblings and my family. I studied at Viaro, an Opus Dei school, until I was 14. When I turned 15, I had clear idea of what I wanted in the future: to get married, to have lots of children and to become a quantity surveyor. But God had other plans for me and after a retreat I joined Opus Dei as a celibate member in January1983. Can you tell us about the ‘unexpected guest’ who entered your life? Who is he? When did he arrive? How did he change your life? I remember I did the first year of my degree and then went to Valladolid to do military service, which was mandatory at that time in Spain. My goal was to start clambering up scaffolding and manage building works as soon as possible. A few months after finishing military service I started feeling something strange every time I played football: a general lack of coordination, blurred vision… and after a year of medical testing I was told I would have to share my life with someone else: multiple sclerosis. How are you coping with your guest now? What adaptations has it required in your life? I like telling my friends that I have always chosen the clothes I wear, the decoration in my house, etc. But no one asked me if I wanted to share my life with such a singular character. Although to begin with it was quite a surprise, this guest has become a constant alarm that goes off every time I forget that my life has a meaning, and that my work, when I do it well, can be a means to be more united to God, and to get to heaven, where I have placed all my hopes. What do you do now? How do you help others?
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“I started feeling something strange every time I played football: a general lack of coordination, blurred vision, and after a year of medical testing I was told I would have to share my life with someone else: multiple sclerosis” My illness got suddenly worse. So my brother Borja and my sister-in-law Marta, who had planned to go to an aid project in Cambodia, realized that the person who needed them most at that moment was me. In order to be a bit more autonomous and thus to improve my quality of life, Borja and I decided to make some changes to my home. The first thing we did was to go to speak to my doctor, Dr Oliveras, and we asked him to explain clearly what the worst case of multiple sclerosis would entail. He answered I could lose control of my hands and feet, my sight, my speech… and he quickly came to the conclusion that we would have to assume the worse to make the changes at home. And that’s what we did. The final result was excellent, and we decided to make known the treasure we had discovered to many disabled people. It was then that we formed ‘BJ Adaptaciones’. The name of the company comes from our initials. We help disabled people make the necessary adaptations to their homes so that they can deal as best as possible with their condition. I have countless occasions to share and to transmit what I have received, and I feel very fortunate.
above left: joaquin with his brother borja Does your life have value now? What would you say to those who would call for the legalization of euthanasia in such cases? What is your attitude to euthanasia? I would tell them to go deeper into the meaning of suffering. I have personally discovered that it is the same as the meaning of life: both point to heaven. With respect to euthanasia, I consider it a very easy way-out for those in power. I would ask them to provide the necessary care and attention needed by the sick instead of getting rid of them. I personally think that pain and suffering, because of the freedom God has given us, are among the ways by which God communicates with us. Many people ask themselves, when faced with a natural catastrophe, ‘why does God allows this to happen?’ I always have the answer ready: ‘maybe He wants you to discover Him as a result.’ Regarding the title they have given to euthanasia, a dignified death, I think it is especially macabre; I would rather opt for a dignified life.
above right: joaquin at the offices of bj adaptaciones
What keeps you struggling, in form and happy? In a word: heaven. Or in two words: again, heaven. Or in three: I desire heaven. Do you have any piece of advice or anything else you’d like to say? I’ve always thought an illness is much easier to bear if one stays close to God and if one improves the quality of life of a sick person, which is what my company tries to do. I encourage you to look at some of the candidates for the ‘Romper Barreras’ prizes www.premiosromperbarreras.es. This is a competition in which people come up with schemes to help disabled people achieve more autonomy. It has attracted enormous interest. It just shows what can be done. Andy Taylor is studying aeronautical engineering at City University. He has been an English teacher at Netherhall this summer.
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moving beyond racism andrei serban on depicting racism and multiculturalism in film
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pike Lee is well known for his controversial and unique films dealing with problems of racial tension, political hypocrisy, imperialism and ethnic identity in an ever expanding world. He has challenged the very foundation of American cinema, which he sees as being predominantly white, and founded on white principles and values. Lee’s provocative views have something to them when one considers that the founder of modern cinematic narrative technique and continuity editing style – indeed, the ‘Dante’ of cinema in many respects – was none other than the pioneering American director D. W. Griffith. While he was a brilliant filmmaker, without whose contribution film would have probably never been recognized as an art form, his legacy is chequered. Griffith’s 1915 film, Birth of a Nation, was a historical revision of the US Civil War which favoured the South, blamed the Union for the ‘downfall of the nation’ and depicted the Ku Klux Klan as a heroic band seeking to restore a benign slave society. Griffith, whose father had been a Confederate soldier in the Civil War, was a very well educated man with profound knowledge in world history, literature, theatre and all the arts. Despite his technical innovations and filmmaking brilliance, however, Griffith brought a vision of an all-white, Protestant American dream to the silver screen, igniting waves of racism and prejudice for decades. Spike Lee started his filmmaking career back in the late 1980s when independent films were booming largely thanks to the Sundance Film Festival. One of his first films, Do the Right Thing, was made primarily for black audiences and aimed to challenge the very foundation of cinema. This was a film made entirely outside the big studio finance system. While all the major studios were located in Los Angeles at the time, Do the Right Thing was shot in New York with the support of production companies usually responsible for cheap B-movie action flicks. Lee’s own film studio is called 40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks, a reference to the short-lived policy of compensating newly freed slaves after the Civil War with exactly this – forty acres of land and a mule. Though widely praised, Do the Right Thing, his ‘dramedy’ about race tensions during one random day in Brooklyn, also caused a great deal of controversy. Some reviewers argued that the film’s culmination, which shows the communal fallout stirred by the death of a man at the hands of the police, was intended to incite black rioting and violence. Lee dismissed these claims, suggesting that only white viewers saw it like that and further criticized his own critics for ‘suggesting that black audiences are incapable of making the distinction between fiction and reality.’ Many
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continued to wonder why Lee had made a film that attacks the issue of further separating people, instead of seeing them all together as part of the same human race. Perhaps failing to let his film speak for itself, Lee has responded by raising the question of whether the dream of complete racial equality and integration is as idealistic as the American dream was during the Great Depression. Lee continued to respond to criticism in subsequent films, such as Malcolm X (incidentally, one of my favourite films from the 1990s). The monologue introducing this three-hour long biopic begins: ‘I accuse the white man of being the greatest murderer in the world! I accuse the white man of being the greatest thief in the world!’ Is that offensive? If I say yes, does it matter what race I am? I would be equally offended by a Ku Klux Klan member or some other white extremist lunatic saying the same thing about another race, if not more so. However, inverted racism is never the solution, a conclusion which Malcolm X reached after his pilgrimage to Mecca in 1964 and which is also properly covered in the film. Watching Lee’s films, I begin to wonder: am I white? What does ‘white’ even mean? Words like white and black are merely umbrella-terms applicable only in multi-ethnic states, such as the United States, where people have chosen to identify primarily with their nationality, thus losing track of their heritage. In this case, they use these terms defining skin color to constitute race. It is possibly an issue of Pan-European and Pan-African identity when using both terms, but why make the distinction in a
country that is founded on principles of equality and modern democracy? After 9/11 everything has changed in the US on so many levels. Leaving the war aside and analyzing the situation of the film industry alone, there has been a clear sense of distress, increasing fear and shattered idealism, in many ways similar to the spirit of the films produced after the Vietnam War. Spike Lee’s 25th Hour is probably the best example of this transition. He sets aside issues of racial tension, integration and so on. The film depicts drug dealer Monty Brogan’s last day of freedom before he begins a seven year prison sentence. This is covered up perfectly in Lee’s film, always making the distinction between idealism and reality, between the American dream of racial unity and prosperity and ‘escapism in the wilderness and solitude’ while acknowledging the impossibility of ever achieving it. At a symbolic level, Lee suggests that the entirety of American history is only written by a few while the multitude that make up the very fabric of multicultural America today never have had a chance to be properly integrated and make their voices heard in the past. Near the end, a long voice-over monologue is placed over an imagined sequence representing the protagonist’s last attempt at escapism before accepting his final fate. This is probably one of the best sequences in the film, second only to the striking mirror scene in which Monty expresses his rage in a quick voice-over narration superimposed over a rapid editing of all the different ethnic and cultural stereotypes constituting the multicultural fabric of New York. At moments Monty’s rant is highly offen-
above (from l-r): posters for some of spike lee’s most controversial films, ‘do the right thing’, ‘malcolm x’ and ‘25th hour’ right: d.w. griffith’s ‘birth of a nation’ below: the logo of spike lee’s film company, 40 acres and a mule
sive to several ethnic and religious groups, but at the end of the sequences he recants his torrent of abuse and becomes clear that the real problem comes from within himself. In many ways, in 25th Hour, which I regard as a recent masterpiece, Spike Lee made the film I have always expected him to make – about the human drama, overlooking racial differences or any further categories separating people. Following recent reader feedback, Netherhall News clarifies that this article represents the views of the author and not necessarily those of Netherhall House.
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May Pilgrims James Osborn reports back from one of the great pilgrimage sites of medieval christendom
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n Sunday 29th May six cars left Netherhall House for a day pilgrimage to the small Norfolk village of Walsingham, Britain’s most famous Catholic shrine. The ancient belief is that the Blessed Virgin Mary appeared there in 1061 instructing a rich noblewoman to build a replica of the house in Nazareth where Jesus lived for most of his life. From then on it was a major place of pilgrimage until it was largely destroyed in the Reformation, before being revived in the 20th century . For many Netherhall residents it was a good chance to pray and relax, and a welcome change from days of studying hard in the hall library during exam season. The May pilgrimage is an annual tradition and a way for the hall to honour the Mother of God in a collective way, thanking her for her protection in the year just gone. We departed London in bright sunshine accompanied by expectations of a lovely day in the East Anglian countryside. Arriving at Walsingham to find the National Association of Catholic Families pilgrimage taking place on the same weekend (which made parking rather more complicated), we had lunch just behind the Slipper Chapel at the Catholic shrine once everyone had arrived. Although it was very cloudy, it was not yet raining (a feature of most Walsingham trips). We set off along the disused railway line into the village of Walsingham itself, praying the Rosary as we went. As well as looking around the shops in the village, we visited the Holy House in the Anglican shrine. This House has a carved image of Our Lady of Walsingham and is a beautiful place in which to pray, after which we walked back to the Catholic shrine praying the Rosary once again before going into the Slipper Chapel to pray. Then a debate arose as to what was to happen next. Eventually it was decided that the majority of people were going to go to the beach and play football – this correspondent turned down the chance given the windy and quite threatening weather at the time, and chose instead to go with three others to Ely to have a look at the city’s stunning cathedral. Ely Cathedral can be seen for miles around and is by far the largest building in the city. One of the most amusing aspects of Ely Cathedral is that, at least at the time of our visit, it was exhibiting the throne used in the film The King’s Speech. People are invited to sit on the throne and have their photograph taken. This produced some interesting results when each member of the group in turn posed regally for their photographs. But this certainly did not diminish the magnificence of the cathedral and the group followed this with fish and chips in a very quiet Ely city centre before embarking on the drive back to London. All involved had a prayerful and enjoyable pilgrimage, providing a fitting end to a busy academic year.
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above: (l-r) Netherhall residents Piers Tattersall, Pablo Hinojo, Alvaro Camacho and Daniel Olabarri en route to Walsingham. right: while some people went to the beach after the pilgrimage, others chose the more cultural option of going to Ely Cathedral on their return. The cathedral had been used for the coronation scene of King George VI in the Film “The King’s Speech” and the chair made for the scene was available for people to sit on, an opportunity juan sosa jumped at below: the ruins of the original priory at walsingham
spinning a yarn fr joe evans offers two possible perspectives on a momentous netherhall cricket match earlier in july The Indian perspective (as might have been written by Srinath Iyer) Lagaan in London India’s cricket giants once again achieved a momentous cricket victory against the inept Britishers, further proof (if proof were needed) of India’s meteoric and inexorable rise to world domination. A combination of sizzling speed and mesmerisng spin whittled out an English batting line which was no match for India’s bowling titans Prakarsh and Aditya Singh (commonly known as the Singh scorchers). Not a single English cricketer came even close to matching the skill, genius and downright grit of our Indian heroes. Our brave batsmen then made easy work of the English bowlers to achieve a historic and comprehensive Indian victory, a phenomenon which is almost becoming dull for its repeated occurrence. It was another Lagaan [for the benefit of English ignoramuses who have no idea of decent cinema, this is a famous 2001 Bollywood film about a cricket match between Indians and Britons]: oppressed Indians overcoming the British oppressors to emerge triumphant against all the odds.
The people seated are (l-r): Rohan Merchant, Peter Brown, Srinath Iyer, Dominic O’Leary, Tom Sloan, Mark Gibson, Fr Joe Evans, Prakarsh Singh Standing (l-r): Aditya Singh, Aravind Krishnan
The English perspective (as might have been written by Mark Gibson) Dunkirk spirit on the pitches of Netherhall We was robbed! Those shifty blighters got up to their usual tricks with ball tampering, psychological mind-games, inventing the rules as they went along and umpire bribing (ok, so there weren’t umpires, but if there had been …). If Prakarsh Singh bent his arm any more when bowling, he’d dislocate it! And if he had re-interpreted the rules any more we would have found ourselves playing hockey not cricket. English bulldog spirit once again came to the fore as an ageing English side (including our veteran director Peter Brown and venerable chaplain Fr Joe Evans) overcame the ravages of time to almost pull off what might have been a heroic victory against all the odds. We even had to field a semi-American, Tom Sloan, who wasn’t sure whether he was playing cricket or baseball. But in spite of this and other drawbacks, and with the help of Welsh wizard Dominic O’Leary (ignore the surname: he’s Kosher), English Dunkirk spirit was in full force on the pitches of Netherhall in early July. The Indians may think they won but, apart from the fact that an ICC enquiry is now underway, that’s what Napoleon thought in 1812. With a few curries (a fine example of typical English cuisine) and lagers in our bellies, we’ll be back to fight another day!
The facts: On Saturday 2nd July a five-a-side cricket match was played between English and Indian residents on the sports pitch at Netherhall. The Indians won three matches to one.
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passing through
news and pics of former residents
above: Philipp Wirtz wrote from Istanbul on 11th July with this picture showing the view from his office window in the German research institute where he has been doing some work for his PhD. The peninsula one can see in the picture is the old Byzantine acropolis and site of the palace, first of the emperor, then the sultan. The cluster of minarets on the peninsula belongs to Hagia Sofia. philipp describes Istanbul as a combination of ‘extremely interesting sights versus traffic straight from hell’. by the time you read this, Philipp will be back at home in Germany busily writing up his thesis. right: Congratulations to Reuven Proenca and his wife Christina who were married in Cyprus last May. Reuven, from goa, India, and Christina, from Cyprus, met as colleagues on a Masters’ course in public relations at Westminster University in 2005/2006, when reuven lived in Netherhall. He subsequently worked in public relations in London before moving to his present job with Weber Shandwick in dubai. left: Nicholas Zambrana (2000-2001), second from right, who was awarded a PhD in Law by the University of Navarre. He has not been made a Cardinal despite the regalia below (l-r): Miguel Anton (2005-11) from spain, Kamil Olesiejuk (2007-8) from Poland, peter brown of orpington, Jan Carl Stjernsward (2005-7, 2008-9) from Sweden, Aditya Singh (2008-10) from India, and Pablo Hinojo (assistant director)
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