I met her on a Friday night. She was helping at a youth project in inner London, to which she had been invited by a mutual friend who was a youth worker.
Steve Latham
She ran some ice-breaker games with games to loosen the kids up, for the first session of a new club promoting performing arts among teenagers.
I realised that she had probably learned these, in the acting training that she told me she had herself undergone.
In her early twenties, she was emerging from the immigrant sub-culture of London, to become an eager aspiring multi-talented artist, operating in a variety of disciplines. She had been educated as a dancer and actor, and was performing in a friend’s short film at the moment, as well as that day doing some life-modelling for another, painter, friend.
In addition, she wrote scripts, one of which had been taken on board by yet another film maker, part of the endless array of contact-based cooperation characterising their cashless non-economy.
She was also writing online journalistic pieces about the art scene in Shoreditch. Furthermore, she had written some songs, and was trying to record them, to give herself a wider exposure.
In all this, she typified the young creative person, arriving in the world of art, and bursting with ideas, yearning to express herself, and try them all out.
Experimenting with an infinite range of disciplines and media, she exhibited the vibrant energetic creativity that is rising up from the streets of the capital. She had attended one of the diverse range of community arts projects arising from within the urban networks, some now accredited to award degree level qualifications.
They are important avenues of advancement for young adults, who would otherwise be denied the routes open to the privileged products of public schools.
These instituitions are sadly often underfunded and in constant danger of closure, but are nevertheless essential to the cultural vitality of the multicultural mix of London.
Originating within one of the many diaspora communities in the metropolis, she also incarnated the struggle of the second and third generation immigrant young adult to find a place in the city. She explained to me that she incorporated into her art the feelings of displacement and disenfranchisement which her friends and colleagues experience in a still hostile topography. From the intense heat of cultural mixing, however, a new culture is forming; not unified, not single, but plural and layered.
The outcome is a fusion, not a melting pot, a blending of different tastes into the singular, a bland mulch; but the selecting and gathering of the disparate.
The result is hybrid, something different, other; not identical to the originary cultures from the ‘homeland’, and not wholly of British either. The mix is key. New ingredients combined to produce the new, containing recognisable ingredients from around the world, in a global culture.
That’s why she referred to her songs’ genre as ‘immigrant music’; a term often of dismissal, but for her a badge of pride.
(Photos: Pixabay)
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