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Coal
DanceXchange
Patrick Centre
Birmingham Hippodrome
**** THIRTY years ago you would never have
thought a contemporary dance company would one day create a working
class piece. Mind you, thirty years ago it would have been
inconceivable that Britain, in 2016, the nation that created the
industrial revolution, would not have a single coal mine nor one working
miner. How times change. Coal
from the Gary Clarke Company is a piece which incorporates spoken drama,
dance, audio and video to express first, the arduous life down the pit
and then the raw emotion of the miners’ strike, a strike not about pay
but about jobs, about pit closures and the future of the industry. Clarke, in the programme notes, says “it is not
really a political show”, which is akin to saying grass is only a bit
green. Any clash between public sector workers and the Government is
political whether the miners’ strike of 1984-5 or even the current
dispute with junior doctors. It is 30 years since the Miners’ strike ended but
the repercussions of one of the longest and certainly bitterest and
bloodiest strikes in British history still remain; ther Clarke was brought up
in Grimethorpe and wanted
to capture a moment in our industrial and social history he is afraid is
being forgotten. The plot of Mike Herman’s film
Brassed off,
incidentally, set 10 years after the end of the strike, was based on
Grimethorpe’s own battles against pit closures and featured the famed
Grimethorpe Colliery Band. A year after the closure an EU report stated
Grimethorpe was the poorest settlement in Britain and one of the poorest
in the EU. Colliery bands were as much a part of mining as
coal, a point recognised by Clarke with extensive use of a five-man
brass band providing live music, with musicians drawn from local brass
bands, and, if possible colliery bands. For the world premiere it was
members of the City of Birmingham Brass Band. Clarke has also
recognised the huge part played by women in the strike, something
examined by Steven Downs in his play
Black Roses, and has invited women from
mining communities to take part. Many have never been on stage before
but bring an authenticity to their roles as miner’s wives; in Birmingham
it was Michelle Burgess, Heather Albrighton, Jeni Bennett and Lindsey
Richards who played their parts well – and handed out a collection of
biscuits to the audience in splendid style – it’s years since I had a
Blue Riband! But it is the miners, seen above, who take
the accolades, danced by Alistair Goldsmith, Nicholas Vendange, James
Finnemore, Joss Carter and Connor Quill. We open with TC Howard, dancing the part of a
wife with an amusing, athletic and noisy piece as she gets her man ready
for work. Then we have the miners laughing and joking their way to the
pit, changing into overalls and then descending into the depths in the
cage. I have been down pits three times as a
journalist, including Daw Mill at Arley in its National Coal Board days,
the last working pit to close in the West Midlands, and they are both
fascinating and frightening places. Places no one would choose to work –
but miners were a special breed. Men work surrounded by cracks and groans as half
a mile of rock above them settles and shifts, working in seams sometimes
barely high enough for a man to kneel, with a threat of explosion, of
fire, of roof collapse, of gas, or of simple industrial accident always
present with dust a constant, silent danger – causing miner’s
pneumoconiosis, black lung. These are the conditions and emotions Clarke
tries to depict as his miners work their shift – with a light hearted
break for snap – as the darkness, danger and sheer physical effort find
their expression in dance.
The strike is epitomised by Margaret Thatcher,
danced by Eleanor Perry, in a symbolic blue suit overlaid by quotes in
what was a personal battle between her and the miners. She draws a symbolic line with long thick rope
and one miner crosses it, a scab, returning to work. Despised and
reviled by former workmates, once the strike ends, symbolised by the
remaining miners throwing their shows at the Iron Maiden, he is even
shunned by Thatcher. Scabs are still not really forgiven and are still
regarded as outsiders and seen as traitors in some solid mining
communities and, when the curtain fell and bows were taken to cheers and
loud applause, Eleanor Perry’s Thatcher received . . . concerted boos. That should have dispelled the fear Clarke had
that this episode of history was being forgotten. He wanted to keep the
memory alive – and a full house for the premiere of the work,
co-commissioned by DanceXchange, shows it is a long way from being
forgotten. Charles Webber’s
lighting design adds to the drama while the set, a bare space with props
around the side give an intimate feel, Choreographer Clarke has also
used an interesting selection of music from folk songs to the brass band
with the likes of The Floral Dance
and The Miner’s Hymn, Gresford,
to a dramatic recording of Beethoven’s
Fifth. It’s a play, a social commentary and a dance
piece which expresses all the emotion and pain – and humanity and humour
- of the time. And that is exactly what Gary Clarke intended. To
13-02-16 Roger Clarke 11-02-16 In 1983 Britain had 174 working underground
mines and in 1984 187,000 miners came out on strike, while others who
continued to work made the numbers of miners even higher. In 2011 NUM membership was down to 1,855, while
the Union of Democratic Mineworkers, founded in Nottinghamshire in 1984
by miners who had continued to work, could muster just over 1,000. In December last year Britain’s last deep mine,
Kellingley Colliery in North Yorkshire closed and the British coal miner
is no more. Incidentally, South Tyneside musician Robert Saint, a former miner at Hebburn colliery, wrote the tune Gresford in 1936 commemorate the Gresford Mining Disaster, at Gresford Colliery near Wrexham, where 266 men and boys were killed in an underground explosion in 1934.
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