Leeds Young Authors are a group of young people who meet weekly to write and perform poetry. I am interested in the group because they contribute to the creative map of Chapeltown. Also, I have seen some of the older poets from Leeds Young Authors perform at Letterbomb in Leeds before and I know they go to poetry slams in America and their work was brilliant. So I am going along to the group tonight to find out more and meet more young people.
So, before the young people arrived I chatted with Khadijah Ibrahim and Paulette Morris who were running the session. They were saying that when they were at school in the 70s was the most exciting time for creative energy in Chapeltown as young black people didn’t have many opportunities in education so had to make their own ways of working and expressing themselves. From talking to them it seems that lots of artists, poets, musicians, performers from the area work internationally and come back to Chapeltown to give back to the community although they aren’t necessarily known about in the rest of Leeds. I find this strange because surely this should be something for the city of Leeds to boast about!
Names that come up include Leonora Stapleton and Harlem Dance, Kuffdem theatre, David Hamilton and Phoenix Dance. Paulette tells me how her Dad was the first peripatetic steel drum teacher in Leeds and that he went round lots of schools in the Leeds area at a time lots of people had never seen a black man before in more rural areas.
I went to meet Max Farrar with Ulrika (Flink) today, she is interested in his photographs of the carnival and curating a show around this and I thought it would be interesting to see his work and hear about his experience of Chapeltown and the carnival, which he began documenting in the early 70s.
Max talked about photographs as part of the collective memory, he showed us lots of photos of the carnival as well as peoples weddings, other family celebrations and photos of peoples families taken in their homes. Max Farrar said he has been like a community photographer and lots of people have asked him to take photos of him. As a professor or sociology, and his energetic way, Max Farrar has an interesting commentary on Chapeltown and his own work. He is a font of knowledge on the carnival committee, how it came about and who has been instrumental in the community over the years such as Arthur France and Garnet Dore so I have lots of leads to follow up from this meeting.
From Max we learnt about Peepal Tree Press, a local publishers who I must find out more about. We talk about the national carnival centre in Luton – where I’m from and how it is mapping carnival histories. We talked about where carnival originates from – the 19th century transgression of society when colonialists houses were burnt down. Carnival as inversion of norms and how at Leeds carnival on the Monday mornings after the weekend of partying, young people would still be out in their party clothes and the oldies would come out in their pyjamas. Play and jeu vert…
It was interesting to listen to Max talk about his experiences of Chapeltown in the 70s as a white guy living in the area. He said the first protest he was witness to was in 1971, he heard it from his window and went down, he went to the meeting room with the group but wouldn’t have dared take any photos as black people were very wary of white people at that time. One thing I realise from working in Chapeltown, which I did know already, however in a more theoretical way, is how recent the history of division between races is and how different it would have been to grow up 20 years earlier.
Max suggested we should get in contact with Leroy, a black photographer who also took lots of photos of the carnival so Ulrika is going to try and find him.
We discuss the Leeds art scene and why the Chapeltown art scene seems so separate to this, do black artists from the area choose not to engage with it or do they not feel welcome or invited. Perhaps the is an ‘invisible barrier of space’. Maybe for some it is a choice to work within the community that their creativity developed in.
Overall a very interesting discussion to think about.
So, the MAPPING event. I have been looking into maps which has been very iteresting. Chapeltown as an area isn’t actually recognised by the Ordnance Survey. The Chapeltown Development Trust commissioned Leeds City Council to make a map of the borders of Chapeltown when it started up a year or so ago. However, from speaking to people I imagine that there are different ideas about where the border of Chapeltown is within the community. Just thinking about how – technicalities and materials – to get people to map out borders, daily journeys and favourite places etc.
So, some dance students got in touch – from Northern School of contemporary dance across the road from union 105. They have to do a collaborative project and might be interested in working with me. The deadline is very soon for their project and I am also organising a mapping event so will see what kind of work they want to make.
We meet. They are nice, Why Not? is their theme. They are thinking about socially acceptible behaviour and what people will or won’t do in front of others. This is interesting and we discuss how this could relate to my work and to the local community. With so many people from different cultures living in the area it occured that maybe there are things that people do that aren’t acceptible to other cultures and whether the boundaries of appropriateness of behaviour are blurred or crossed. We discussed documenting or observing people in the street and whether they do things that we or others might find inappropriate and then recreating them in performance. Or asking people what they wouldn’t do in public space or what they would love to do in public space but don’t feel able to. We could then create these acts as a representation of the thoughts of others from the local community.
This could be interesting
I feel like Chapeltown is such a rich area, culturally, creatively and historically. I am going to collect stories, oral histories and existing documentation of the area and communities who live here. I am also interested in how people navigate around Chapeltown and where the paths of different people cross, whether public spaces are shared between communities or not. So I am going to look for old maps as well as present maps of Chapeltown and develop some work around mapping. I have always loved maps so this should be interesting!
