Creative Rein -Part Two

A bit of history, Hate Crime against the best bits of Glasgow Remembered, plus the Social Engineering of our Youth

This is part of a series exposing the rot in the Scottish Arts scene. You can read the first part here: Creative Rein: The Isla Bryson and Catholic Church Abuse scandal moment for the Arts- Our creative industries are enabling child abuse

Part Two of a series shining a light on our broken creative industries in Scotland, in particular our failure to protect children

There is a lot going on for the arts at the minute. The Scottish Hate Crime bill comes into force 1 April (not a joke) which will see people criminalised for any 'perception' of hate crime. This includes any verbal infraction. If a person thinks you have committed some element of “hate” they can anonymously report you to the police via third party reporting centred located in every nook and cranny of the Scottish landscape. The police, by the strict parameters of this law will be *required* to follow up on all claims. For this they will come to your home, seize your devices, and (possibly) incarcerate you. The reports can derive from anywhere, a passing comment on the street, and even in your home. This thing is so crazy and dystopian that it's been covered on the Joe Rogan show amongst others. Someone with an axe to grind, and/or someone who is mentally well has been handed a metaphoric loaded gun. And don’t be fooled, any purported ‘good’ of the law, are already covered in other bits of legislation. It is superfluous for the maintenance of a safe and fair society. What it does is ends of free speech in Scotland. One commentator wrote ‘this is the end of the Scottish Enlightenment’. The repercussions for Scottish society are terrifying. (and yes this is really happening)

But the horror does not end there. Last week Scottish news sources lit up with the revelation that Creative Scotland, our national funding body for the arts, had funded a hardcore porn film which I explored in my first post. This understandably was condemned by the electorate on many fronts.

However this problem goes much deeper- most worryingly into our child and youth arts sector. There are no safe places for kids to get the experiences of drama or dance for their own sake. There is a trend in education and youth arts that is purposefully and strategically weaponising our young for political aims and social engineering them at the same time parents wishes are not considered (at best) or are actively rebelled against. This puts our children at great risk. In the next week I will be writing a series of posts exposing the dangers to children in our youth sector.

(I am aiming to finish before 1 April in order to protect myself and my son, though it has been pointed out they although they would find no proof of ‘hate’, the police are beholden to follow procedure and I may be charged and have to go through the process anyway, will I be arrested? Will my laptop and phone be taken and with that my livelihood? We all are on tetherhooks).

The fact is Scottish culture is in a bad way now. Our cultural sector has gone to the dark side. To say I am concerned would be a massive understatement. There are historic precedents to this kind of authoritarian rule and control. Maoist Red Guard, the Argentine and Chilean disappearances, the Stasi. That is actually where we are headed if things don’t change, and soon.

We need to bring back the importance of child-led work that is ACTUALLY led by child development and recognises the value and importance of childhood.

Thank you for reading. Please consider supporting my work. You can ‘buy me a coffee’ here. Or become a paid subscriber for as little as £3.50 per month, £25 for the year, or £250 for a founding membership. Every penny makes a difference (and I really really need every penny, I remain a solo Mum and putting head about parapet has made me a persona non-grata for many jobs) and allows me to keep speaking out about the failure in safeguarding for our children in schools and cultural institutions. We need to recognise, preserve and celebrate childhood. No one else is doing this in the arts in Scotland. Thank you.Deeming Dreaming is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Scotland 2000 vs Scotland 2024

One of the most striking things I found about about Scottish culture when I moved here from Philadelphia in 2000 was the ‘f-it’ attitude. There was a general sense that people did not take themselves too seriously. One could be expected ‘to have the piss taken’, insomuch as the person delivering the ‘burn’ would direct it back to themselves. I have come over for a one year whistle-stop tour to pursue my Masters in Drama at the Royal Conservatoire. Glasgow was buzzing with creativity and possibility.  Oh my! I fell in love with the place.  I remember being nine months in and thinking ‘I’m not done here yet’.  

The Arches (the now defunct Arts and Club venue) the cavernous space located in disused train tunnels under Glasgow Central Station was the centre point. Andy Arnold, founder and artistic director, was it’s beating heart.  A wonderful generous man, he somehow managed to create an extraordinary melting pot of every person you could think of. The club nights such a Colours and Inside Out brought in thousands of folks from across Glasgow for the banging tunes, meanwhile Andy might have been producing a Brecht play in the studio space, there was the Festival of New Scottish Theatre as well as New Moves (the dance end) and the (very fringe) National Review of Live Art. And lots of unannounced moments as artists had access to the space to ‘try stuff out’. 

I saw that Take Me Somewhere (involved in the scandal of Rein) sees itself as the legacy of the Arches and specifically the NRLA.  Now to be clear, NRLA was fringe in the fringiest sort, it had performances around blood letting (yes, blood letting). It by no means was ever a mainstream platform.  It had a small cohort of followers, largely coming out of the Royal Conservatoire Contemporary Theatre course and it was FRINGE.  I would even say their existence was largely aided by the fact that the more ‘accessible’ stuff happened. You cannot have fringe culture without a foundational culture for it to sit on the edges of. One did not have to sway loyalty to the fringe stuff insomuch as the fringe didn’t need to sign up for an Ibiza themed dance night. No judgement but freedom to make for all.

In the meantime youth theatre did but youth theatres always did. Teach vital performance skills, give kids an opportunity to be creative and imaginative and have fun. Parents could feel safe allowing their kids to participate in these programs. Some of these graduated some of our most famous Scottish performers- Alan Cumming, James McAvoy, Emma Thompson and Billy Boyd to name a few.

It has been suggested that the RCS course seeing the show Once and for All We're Gonna Tell You Who We Are So Shut Up and Listen by Belgian company Ontroerendgoed at the Edinburgh Festival 2008 planted seeds for a new kind of youth performance.  Exploring the experiences of adolescents, with adolescents in a high production international touring show was new and exciting.  And one might understand the attraction of it’s mad presentation on stage in parallel to a “staid traditional” forms of youth theatre would have spurred on the trainee directors.  But there is the other side which should have offered a warning shot, not fuel for further exploration. 

“There’s a sense in which this parade of pubescence has been orchestrated for a grown-up audience. (Who knows what teens would make of it?) It also confronts us with these young bodies in their first sexual flush – and when the cast pair off to snog, grope and discover one another's bodies, spectating starts to feel like prying.”

-Brian Logan, 15 August 2008, Guardian

It is this overstep into children’s private lives where we start to see the real problem.  The theatre directors are not the children’s parent.  The directors will not have to face the repercussions of the child sharing, oversharing or being compelled to share or do something private or sensitive.  It is the parents who face the backlash and the aftercare of these situations. 

Fast forward 15 years my son is accepted in a Musical Theatre Summer Course on a bursary funded by Agnes Allan and James McAvoy at the Royal Conservatoire.  Nine years old, he had just seen his first major musical ‘The Lion King’ with his school at the Edinburgh Playhouse.  (This was one of the ‘fun stuff’ programs that had been funded by my Christmas Tree dancing). The production was a brilliant introduction into musical theatre. With extraordinary costumes, set, special effects, big musical numbers, choreography and dynamic characters  it opened the children up to the possibility of performance, like they had never seen before. It was thrilling.

Post lockdown, my child (as many) was still in recovery from the months of isolation and lack of access to normal kid stuff.  As a low income solo parent I did not have the financial resources to “magic him up” opportunities. My local community used to have four community centres, now had none. There are (still) no local youth clubs. So I was delighted when he got the bursary. I thought he would spend a week ‘doing musical theatre’ and having fun that would follow on from his experience of the Lion King.

He did not.

It should have been obvious to me when he exited the studio space despondent every damn day. When I saw the ‘work in progress’ on the Friday after a week of sessions it made sense. The ‘production’ was nothing more then a reflection of a social emotional learning program, wherein the message was #bekind.  In addition to not learning any actual skills related to musical theatre, or a space where he could explore things imaginatively with no baggage, he left dejected and turned off to the pursuit of performance.

But the experience of children, of childhood seems very far from the interest of theatre makers. Better to explore ‘queer identities’ as in the case of Sanctuary Queer Arts.  A theatre company for adults, it also gathers children who “identify” as queer. 

Gone are the days when all the odd kids did drama club with the other odd kids (looks at self in the mirror), we now have programs which encourage separation based on sexual identities and attraction (why are adults so interested in kids sexual attraction?), and the elevation of the self.  I also wonder (as this company has supported professional trans artists on their program) if they are promoting wrong body propaganda.  And onto the nature of the queer focus, is this further proof of political indoctrination as per queer theory, wherein boundaries, all boundaries are to be transgressed? Is this what parents want?

Looking further into this organisation and I see that their youth program works with a mental health professional from an organisation called Pure Potential .  Surely a performance project should not have a therapist or mental health practitioner on call?  In all my decades of working with children (even with at risk youth) I have never seen, required or called for such intervention. 

Is this related to the new theatre of overshare, of drama as therapy?  What happened to drama for fun?  It is interesting to note that Pure Potential Scotland are also the “Wellbeing Specialists” for Scottish Youth Theatre.  Thinking back to my own son’s fraught experience at RCS I wonder how many other of these social emotional therapy programs are embedded into youth theatre? Wherein children are not being provided with the skills of making drama, or the opportunity to have fun for it’s own sake, but as a form of social and political indoctrination.

One has to wonder how this all progressed at such a pace. It was not part of my training in the 1990s. I came across an early Imaginate artist residency by Eildh MacCaskill (as she was then known, she has since transitioned to Ivor). Imaginate is “the national organisation in Scotland which develops, celebrates and presents theatre and dance for children and young people”. One might expect them to lead on ensuring that child development was at the forefront of their programming and with child development, safeguarding. Eildh was commissioned by Imaginate in a funded research project called ‘Gendersaurus’. The adult aims of activism are laid stark in language by the artist.

She stated, “It’s about making work that can speak directly to the gender-variant child, the queer child, the homosexual child, the cis-gendered child who might feel constrained by the expectations inherent in being a girl or a boy. It’s about using the power of art as a place to question, subvert, hide from, muddy, invert and take refuge from the oppression of every day life.”

Oppression of everyday life? Imaginate makes works for nursery school kids. I have worked with children in war zones and despite the actual real life oppression, the only thing they want to do is… play.

She goes on…

“What I love about making work for children is that there is a curiosity in childhood that is open and demanding. Who are you? What are you? Are you a boy or a girl? Why are you doing that? Why are you different? What is normal here?”

She is right children are suggestible, and they are vulnerable, and they are vulnerable to adults leading them in ways they do not understand.

Which brings us to Scottish Ballet. Most kids in Scotland do not access ballet. They will recognise it by it’s iconic form, but will never have the opportunity to develop a liking for, let alone a skill, let alone a career in ballet. I live within minutes of Scottish Ballet’s front door and despite working with many local kids, some of them with incredible dance talent, have no opportunity to ‘try dance out’. There are no open studios, or ‘regular’ dance classes for local kids.

What they do have however is a touring program that goes into schools, reaching 14,000 kids a year. Does this program focus on ballet? It does not.

Titled ‘Safe to Be Me’ this programs addresses and tackles all the “oppressions” that Eildh so succinctly laid out in her Imaginate residency in 2008.

“This innovative programme uses dance and film to introduce topics such as racism, homophobia, ableism, and transphobia. Delivered in line with key Scottish Government targets to address these areas, the project engages with young people to explore themes that include identity, respect, acceptance, family diversity, and LGBTQ+ communities.”

Rather then teach ballet skills, rather then introduce children (most of whom have no experience of dance) to the beauty of ballet, they cloud it with activism. Not only that they have preached ‘wrong body propaganda’ to thousands of Scottish School children. What of the children who will take their message to heart and be further pushed down a devastating medical pathway, as seen by the WPATH files?

And I also think there has to be some recognition that when Creative Scotland makes statement that it is keen to support underrepresented work it implies that there is  thriving arts scene everyone can access. And that simply is not true.  We do not have a healthy sector of works that ‘regular’ people can access.  My child - had never stood on a stage.  He had no experience of learning singing.  And then he was subjected to a week of therapy and belief. 

But this just scrapes the surface.

We need to prioritise drama and dance projects rooted in the basics of drama and dance. We need to provide children with the freedom to explore things imaginatively without political or social motivations of the artist leaders or organisations. We need to ensure that parents rights are respected and adhered to. We need to ensure that drama and dance sessions are not actually therapy in place of creative play and learning. We need to ensure that workshop leaders and organisations do not treat our children as ‘adults in small bodies’ but recognise, respect and protect the boundaries of childhood.

In my next post I will be exploring how the ‘sexing’ everything up for kids is mirrored in our educational settings and how parents are (by accident or design) kept out.

Thank you for reading. Please consider supporting my work. You can ‘buy me a coffee’ here. Or become a paid subscriber for as little as £3.50 per month, £25 for the year, or £250 for a founding membership. Every penny makes a difference (and I really really need every penny, I remain a solo Mum and putting head about parapet has made me a persona non-grata for many jobs) and allows me to keep speaking out about the failure in safeguarding for our children in schools and cultural institutions. We need to recognise, preserve and celebrate childhood. No one else is doing this in the arts in Scotland. Thank you.