Oh Comely 35

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Power and poise Words of hard-won wisdom Surprisingly strong things issue34 35£5 £5 issue

A collective intake of breath. A world waits on the edge, watching. There is no other way down.

It can feel lonely, suddenly. Overwhelming. But plenty of others have stood here before you. Plenty are right here now.

And there is strength in numbers.

To lean on, learn from.

It’s a test. Leap.

That’s where your power is.

oh comely 35: strength

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The dancer

Maëva Berthelot, contemporary dancer Age: 31 Achievements: Founding member of dance, live music and video collective Collectif Larsen, six years as a full-time member of the Hofesh Shechter Company, work with choreographers including Wayne McGregor and Emanuel Gat. How did you become interested in dance?

I started dancing when I started walking.

I was always a very active child and gave anything a try. I had the schedule of a prime minister, and grew up surrounded by contemporary dancers. My mum taught dance, in a very different way from how I do now. It wasn’t strictly dance, but working with little humans to encourage movement and play.

I spent Saturdays and Wednesdays at her best friend’s dance school. From nine in the morning until nine at night, going to every single class. It became more focused when I turned ten – I started doing half school, half dance, taking classes for people that wanted to become dance teachers – it was just me and lots of adults.

What’s the toughest thing about it?

It’s not physically demanding so much as it’s exhausting. If you’re a full-time member of a dance company you don’t get a minute

for yourself. You perform the work again and again, you tour again and again, and when you don’t perform you’re teaching or rehearsing. To be honest it’s been tricky. I could say it’s always fantastic but even as a teacher I try to make my students aware that it’s a hard job. There’s very little recognition or financial reward, so you do it for the love, and the level of commitment and dedication is something else. You work 365 days a year and you’re devoting all your time and energy. You don’t really have a life outside of the company. It’s been hard for me to sustain friendships and relationships.

what you focus on. You don’t have fun, you work. You work hard. So my class is the opposite. I don’t necessarily teach a style, but try to help people find themselves in dance. Everything is connected to that first feeling when you started dancing, to those bursts of pleasure in movement. Sometimes you have to train to get that love back.

What are your goals for the future?

I’m taking this year to do personal projects that I’ve always wanted to try. I feel like I need to work with movement in a different context – video art, photography, film. The

“It’s demanding but it’s beautiful. You feel so strong. You feel like you can do everything” What do you enjoy most about dancing?

It demands everything but the feelings you experience, they’re amazing. My love for it has definitely gone up and down: when your passion becomes a routine it’s easily killable. It’s a daily challenge to make it fresh, to keep something spontaneous and honest in the work. That’s mainly why I teach. In a company, the dimension of enjoyment isn’t

dance audience, I know how to play with them, how to grasp their attention. I want to start working in a new way. After 30 years of focusing so much on one craft, it’s time to make sure I don’t fall asleep. I just want to start playing again. I want to keep on challenging myself, to keep learning and growing. I’m in a period of reconnecting with pure creative enjoyment. 

Hard-won wisdom Only experience makes us formidable. Four writers share personal stories of the defining moments that gave them a fresh perspective photos carolin grassmann

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Lonely city Olivia Laing’s latest book tackles loneliness through art

interview marta bausells portraits liz seabrook

Loneliness isn’t talked about enough. How does it actually feel to be truly lonely – as opposed to alone, or in content solitude?

Why does being surrounded by other people make it worse? And is technology drawing us closer together, or pulling us ever more apart behind our alienating screens? Writer and critic Olivia Laing answers these questions, and then some, in her book The Lonely City. After two previous books in which she explored the relationship between writers and alcohol and a journey down the river Virginia Woolf drowned in, here she turns her gaze inward and explores her loneliness as she arrives in New York City in her mid-30s – by way of art.

As she sinks into her own experience and is fascinated by it, she simultaneously investigates the experiences a variety of artists had of the very particular flavour of loneliness to be found in cities – from Edward Hopper’s paintings, to Andy Warhol’s Time Capsules, to David Wojnarowicz with his AIDS activism. It’s a moving, illuminating, restorative and addictive book that has had the entire Oh Comely office hooked.

You’ve isolated yourself in the countryside before. How does that differ from being alone in New York City, and the very particular breed of loneliness that happens in cities?

The main difference is that when you’re in a city you’re surrounded by other eyes, so you’re constantly aware that people are witnessing you in your state of aloneness, you’re constantly aware of the potential for connections that you could be making but are not. So I think there’s a lot more going on around feelings of shame and exposure, whereas when you’re choosing to be in nature and isolating yourself, it’s a lot easier to sink into an experience of solitude, rather than actually feeling lonely. It’s a lot easier to be content in it, I think.

Is there also something particular about New York that makes it isolating, or do you think you could have written a similar book in London or other big cities?

If I’d chosen a different city, a lot of the ideas would have been the same, but the feeling of it would have been different. London, for example, is a very sprawling city, it’s very hard to get around, you’re seeing friends but you’ve got to travel a long way on the tube, so it has this feeling of dispersal. Whereas the thing with New York that I find fascinating is that [Manhattan] is a tiny little island, so it’s very concentrated, everybody’s living in very high-rise buildings, so the experience that I have that I tell at the beginning of the book is that you’re constantly looking out of your window at other people’s windows, you can see other people’s lives; and I think that 

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Prices correct at time of going to print and subject to change. For full terms and conditions please visit icebergpress.co.uk/tandc. photograph liz seabrook

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The sound of letting go Rising star Jones on growing up in a high rise, the power of self-care and music as a time machine

interview marta bausells portraits ellie smith styling alice burnfield hair and make up alice oliver

Jones wears: Black sheer shirt and cropped top (underneath), JH Zane; Gold ear cuff and rings, Maria Black; Grey skinny jeans, & Other Stories.

Bobbi Brown make up used throughout.

Picture a teenager, an only child, growing up in a high rise. It’s in the middle of the financial district of a metropolis and she’s coming up with ways to entertain herself.

While this is a good opening for a dystopian film, it’s also the experience Cherie Jones had growing up in London. Jones (her artistic name) grew up in a tower block in Aldgate, right in the City. If being 16 is all kinds of complicated in itself, living in such a setting was very “bizarre”, she says – and in her case, it triggered her artistic impulses.

“I started making music in my bedroom, in my diary, talking about boys, life and about the loneliness I would feel in the City, because I was quite isolated. I used to spend a lot of time alone, taking lots of walks, and I think that’s why I got such a close relationship with music. The City is obviously really busy, but not many people live in that district of London, they work there. I think that’s good as well, though, because you meet people from all over and you get out of your comfort zone.”

We meet further east, in Hackney, an area she slowly “moved out towards”, for a chilly wander and lunch, and she comes across as sensitive and charismatic, emanating a sense of calm many wish they

could summon at any age, let alone 26. Jones released her debut album, New Skin, late last year, becoming one of the UK’s rising soul-pop stars. While she plans a tour that will take her around the UK, Europe and the US, she is spending winter songwriting.

She’s just back from Stockholm, where she has spent a week writing for her next album – “I feel like I’m making a real progression, taking a step up.” As we prepare for her photoshoot, I suggest putting on some music, and she cringes at the idea of us listening to her own songs: “When it’s your own work you see the imperfections, rather than looking at the full picture. I think that’s only human.”

The tracks on New Skin go from upbeat, melodic songs to softer, more delicate tunes, but they’re all supported by her spectacular velvety voice. From the chant to commitment in ‘Melt’ (“We started with nothing / grew into something / We’ve got the heat / to last a lifetime / this is the right time / trust in me”) to the lament against toxic relationships and partners who are “not on my side” in ‘Hoops’, she takes a close look at many of the emotions triggered by relationships. Interestingtly, she doesn’t particularly feel like looking back at this stage, and is now on to a “happier” body of sound. 

Speaking out Introducing five women you need to know about – the next generation of strong voices to admire, follow and inspire your own revolution words aimee-lee abraham

portrait gareth iwan jones

"People go to extraordinary lengths to control the humble vagina�

Fahma Mohamed, FGM Campaigner At 14, Fahma Mohamed discovered that female genital mutilation was rife within her own Somali community in Bristol, and was shocked into action. Since then, she has juggled her high-school studies with a fierce campaign to emphasise the needless, illegal damage that is occurring behind closed doors. That campaign has translated into solid legislation, and at just 19 she has persuaded key government players to commit to ending FGM by 2030. Because of Fahma and her team, public sector workers are now helping teachers, doctors and social workers to identify and assist girls at risk. She has already been awarded an honorary PHD in law in recognition of her hard campaign work, and is due to begin her undergraduate degree in Biomedicine. An unstoppable force, and a Sister of which we can collectively be proud. @FahmaEndFGM

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investigation

Who you calling vulgar?

From the way we talk to the way we dress, we’re told to guard against vulgarity. We investigate whether too much is always such a bad thing

words frances ambler illustration fay huo

It’s someone cursing in the street, it’s a leopard-print thong out on display and it’s the decor of Trump Towers. Vulgarity is bold, brash, shameless and almost impossible to ignore. It’s also usually a quality we brand someone or something else with – very rarely do we use it to describe ourselves.

But we are all the vulgar. The word comes from the Latin vulgus (meaning ‘common people’) and vulgare (‘to make public or common’). Initially used to refer to the common language of a country – the vernacular – it became, first, a description, “people belonging to the ordinary or common class of a community,” and later – by 1763 – an insult: a “person not reckoned as belonging to good society”, according to the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. Despite the span of centuries in between, an insult it has stayed.

A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue To compile his pioneering guide, Francis Grose and his assistant Tom Cocking took midnight walks through London, picking up slang words in slums, brothels, drinking dens and dockyards. Some favourites: “Admiral of the narrow seas: One who from drunkenness vomits into the lap of the person sitting opposite him”; “Fart catcher: A valet or footman, from his walking behind his master or mistress”; “Bagpipe: to bagpipe, a lascivious practice too indecent for explanation”.

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It’s no coincidence that vulgarity’s meaning shifted as society became more fluid, more educated, more able to question the status quo. If everyone can have something, how is status preserved? Vulgarity could, and can, be used to identify the social climber, the arriviste, the mutton dressed as lamb. An insult specifically intended to put you in your place, it takes aim at our vulnerabilities about our place in society, and strikes fear into our aspirations.

No wonder the novels of writers who grapple with such themes – Jane Austen, Henry James, Charles Dickens – are riddled with references to vulgarity.

In opposition to vulgarity rose the idea of “good taste”. Reams of etiquette guides were produced to help 18th- and 19thcentury readers navigate this nebulous terrain. Ladies were told to aspire to heights of refinement and gentility, and not be the woman described in 1859’s The Habits of Good Society, “who walks in the streets in a showy dress suitable only to a fete; who comes to a quiet social gathering with a profusion of costly jewellery.” Those who “are always over-drest for the occasion”, it councils, “may be set down as vulgar.” Such style didn’t only reflect badly on their taste, it warns, “indulgence in personal luxury in woman has an injurious effect on the moral tone …the first symptom, if not the cause, of a relaxation in virtue”.

The recent exhibition, ‘The Vulgar’, at London’s Barbican Gallery made these concepts visible, using fashion to demonstrate that the judgement of vulgarity extends far beyond what we wear, and is as applicable today as centuries ago. You could also be considered vulgar for the way you talk – Francis Grose’s 1785 A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue marked the growing interest in the differences in the speech between the educated and uneducated – or what you like to talk about (“Never boast of your wealth, your money, your grand friends, or anything that is yours,” warned Nora M. Bickley in her 1956 A Manual of Etiquette).

You could be vulgar because of the way you spend your money (“The question of taste is more important than money,” sniffed 

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