What does punk mean to today’s young theatre makers?

Cuncrete and the Great White Males in performance. Photograph: Paul Samuel White

Say the word ‘punk’ and for many the first images that come to mind are from the Malcolm McLaren/Sex Pistols era: white boys with guitars and ripped jeans, macho gestures and anarchic posturing.

I have worked and made work across both theatre and punk, and as a 32-year old (who wasn’t alive when McLaren was pilfering French Situationist theory and repackaging it as the Sex Pistols), when I talk about punk, I tend to use the word ‘DIY’ as a way of avoiding that punk, the kind that never belonged to me (and that I don’t want anyway).  Instead I talk about what it means within my scenes and for my peers; not the aesthetic, but the practice: “you can do it too, you don’t need permission, together we can build something new, different”. That sounds a lot like Arts Council England’s “Great art for everyone”, but improved: Great art for and by everyone (Stella Duffy talks about this too). Two years ago I wrote these words for the New Theatre in Your Neighbourhood collaboration between Fuel and Dialogue:

Give away the means of production.
Open up the places of presentation.
Art belongs to everybody, no one.

“Art belongs to everybody, no one”

This is what (I concluded) the usefully transferrable principles of punk* and DIY practices are. But that’s all speaking to the systems of production. What about the art? How does punk/DIY practice influence contemporary theatremakers’ work? The short answer is:  in as many different ways as there are people. In such localised matters as grassroots DIY communities you cannot make broad statements. However, you can gather individual accounts. Thus I set out to speak to three companies and performance makers, and ask them: what does punk mean to them?

Rachael Clerke

Cuncrete. Photograph: Paul Samuel White

“It goes straight to the guts”

I saw the breaktaking Cuncrete by Bristol-based Rachael Clerke and The Great White Males at Edinburgh this year. The show is a “drag king punk gig about architecture and idealism”; it places punk (both aesthetic and practice) front and centre.

Clerke explains that her practice can generally “be described as satire. It’s political, and usually quite silly. I want to change the world, and I want to give people a raucous space to confront the dark stuff at the pit of their stomach.” She spoke to me about her relationship to punk, describing two distinct discoveries. First off, as a teenager, listening to it, discovering 1970s and 1980s punk through her parents “which is not a cool way to discover punk, but I’m a millennial, and my parents are artists, so that’s how it happened”, and the pop punk of the 1990s and 2000s. And her second discovery, the act of making it:

In 2014 my housemates and I threw a punk band party. We plugged in a friend’s guitar, set up a couple of wooden boxes (drum kit) and a microphone and spent a night forming bands and making up songs on the spot. Very few of us had any musical ability at all. It was wild, and all of my dreams about being in a band came true. … We find it surprisingly easy to say things and make things happen in this medium. I think that’s the main thing for me – with being in a punk band we managed to get rid of a load of inhibitions, expectations, subtleties etc. It goes straight to the guts. 

In talking about how she feels theatre perceives punk in general, Clerke differs between live art/performance art – where her work is more accepted and lines between genres are often and intentionally pushed – and the theatre/performance establishment:

I think the contemporary theatre/performance establishment world is wary of it because it strays into ‘low art’. … I feel quite used to those contradictions because I make a lot of comedy, and I do drag, so there are definitely a few situations where I get treated like ‘not a serious artist’. 

 “Not only do we not care, we’re going to not care loudly”

Watching Cuncrete this summer, it occurred to me that punk is used by Clerke and her band as a way of speaking – one that is proudly and effectively unsubtle. The drag speaks to gender performatively and brashly; the sound of the band loudly riffs off the historical context of Great White Males; as does the subject matter of the show – which challenges the unspoken capitalist and hierarchical ideologies at the heart of Brutalist architecture. The performance says “we see you, we know what you expect, and not only do we not care, we’re going to not care loudly and in a way you can’t ignore”.

Action Hero

Wrecking Ball. Photograph: Action Hero

“Re-thinking how the work gets made and how it meets an audience”

Action Hero is James Stenhouse and Gemma Paintin, who have been making work for over a decade. They are a part of the Bristol DIY performance community that has been noticeably influential on contemporary devised performance over the past few years. When I ask Stenhouse to describe the work that they make, they touch on a similar point to Clerke; that of genre-fluidity and the division between ‘high brow’ and ‘low brow’ which is obviously a tension and a struggle.

More and more we've started describing our work as interdisciplinary and inhabiting spaces between things. Between theatre and live art, high brow and low brow etc etc. We find describing our work difficult because it deliberately resists genre and the form shifts between pieces.

I ask how they respond when the word ‘punk’ is used in relation to their work, Stenhouse explains:

Our early work was often described as having a punk energy, and we reflected on that at the time, which probably fed into the work we were making but we never set out to be punk. For me it’s about a set of methodologies, about disrupting certain ways of doing things and re-thinking how the work gets made and how it meets an audience. … Some of our work is very careful, deliberate and meticulous in its craft so doesn't bear the usual hallmarks we might associate with punk forms but we're still trying to do things differently.

“Technology has enabled people to make work”

When I ask Stenhouse how Action Hero feels their works sits within the theatre and performance establishment, his answer echoes some of Clerke’s wariness. But he also explains that contemporary technology has given DIY/punk practices an advantage: much greater access to the kind of tools the establishment used to profit from making scarce.

Theatre sees what we do as something exciting and influential but it stops short of fully allowing us into its arms. This is probably a good thing but it can also be frustrating because the theatres have all the money. … But I think there's a huge degree of compensation in the way technology has enabled people to make work. We're able to do so much more with less resources because of how much free/cheap digital technologies we can access. In theatre, which costs a lot to make, this has been revolutionary. We quite often find it’s easy to realise our ideas without having to spend loads of money.

Selina Thompson

Selina Thompson's Salt. Photograph: The Other Richard

 “Someone on stage screaming because there is nothing else they can do”

Finally, I speak to Selina Thompson. A performance artist based in Leeds. I feel like the work of Thompson’s that I know definitely has DIY/punk energy to it: often unapologetically challenging, without artifice or wrapping, it talks plainly and earnestly about how we relate to one another, and to her.  When I ask Thompson to describe her work, she explains that:

A huge part of my work is being an angry, black, queer woman with depression, from a working class family, feeling that nothing really fits. And a huge part of my work is not really knowing what I’m doing, making it up, hoping for the best.

Thompson says she specifically describes herself as a performance artist because ‘live artist’ sounds too academic, and ‘artist’ feels “po-faced”, but her work also definitely doesn’t fit within the strictures of what is traditionally considered theatre (plays, or play-like devised works). She continues:

I pick ‘performance artist’, because when I say it I can hear Karen Finley screeching ‘and nothing happened’ in my head when I say it. The anger and distortion in her voice when she does that work, the spit catching at the back of her throat (she almost chokes), the gasping for breath and the image of just someone on stage screaming because there is nothing else they can do, feels very fitting for describing why I want to make work.

When I ask Thompson directly about her relationship to the historical idea of punk, she is open and earnest about how it feels like, in part, a contradiction to her:

when I think of it I think of white people! … [But I also] think of punk as people going: “I can’t play the guitar, but I have something to say and the guitar might help me say it – so I’m going to teach myself enough guitar to make the point” … If that is what punk is, then that will do, for my work. What I want or need to say is bigger than the form, is bigger than precision. … I think that punk is inherently connected to the live – and that because of that, it is local, that even the internet cannot homogenise it. I think that punk exists in places that are hard to find and hard to commodify – in bedrooms.

“When I think of punk I think of white people”

The hesitancy in Thompson’s reaction might be me asking bad questions, but it also feels like a reaction to a form that is not hers in the same way it’s mine. Punk, for Thompson, is a form both speaking of liberation but historically rarely to her liberation, specifically. She also asks some important questions in return:

I’m suspicious about a lot of things between contemporary theatre and punk. I sometimes think that contemporary theatre is the worst of all the culprits for taking something with authenticity & integrity … and making it twee. What is the relationship between punk and class, between punk and need, lack of choice? How do punk principles work with something like the Arts Council, with subsidy as a whole? Is it punk to have a producer – with all of the problems with commodification of self and work that are bound up in that?

Thompson says that she believes that in the current socio-political climate it’s: 

almost impossible for working class kids to make work. To make it fast and furious and without special skill, and without having to code switch** and seamlessly blend into the middle classes. … And there is a sort of need for working class artists who do have that skill set to find a way to get those people in the right places at the right times – seeing the right work, on the right schemes, getting the right commissions – to be able to do that, and to not have to be beholden to respectability politics*** while they are there. And to make it plain that we are making it up as we go along, for that to exist in the work.

“There are some people for whom taking the means of production is immeasurably harder than others”

Action Hero and Clerke, in different ways, relate to punk as contemporary theatre makers by just doing it, by not being apologetic about taking the means of production, by making work which can cross genres and sits better in front of ‘non-theatre-goers’ than those who speak the code and etiquette of theatre. But we don’t all start from the same beginning. There are some people for whom taking the means of production – and being allowed to keep it, to occupy a space, to speak and be listened to – is immeasurably harder than others. Thompson finishes:

I dunno how punk works for the middle class, I’m not sure if I care. No, that's not right. I'm just angry.

*Also, punk hasn’t been just ‘punk’ since the 1970s, it’s been riot grrl, afropunk, anarcho-punk, beard punk, noisepunk, post-punk, Oi!, pop punk, hardcore, post-hardcore, etc etc etc. 

**Switch between ways of speaking and being understood; between specialist and class ways of speaking.

*** Respectability politics – policing marginalised people’s actions and words so they are ‘respectably different’; trying to make marginalised groups’ aims fit into mainstream views, rather than challenging the mainstream.

Hannah Nicklin is a writer, game designer, academic, producer and artist working at the confluence of performance writing, community-based practices and digital art and game design.

See the work:

Rachael Clerke and The Great White Males perform Cuncrete on 11 February in Bristol as part of In Between Time (IBT) 2017, with other UK tour dates including 23 February at Salisbury Playhouse and 18–22 April at Soho Theatre, London.

Action Hero performs Wrecking Ball at Birmingham Rep on 2–4 February and tours Hokes Bluff to Arts House, Melbourne on 24–27 May.

Selina Thompson’s Race Cards will be at IBT 2017 on 9–19 February (except 10 and 13February) in Bristol and at Leeds Library on 8–29 June.

In Between Time International Festival 2017 features 40 artists over five days. It takes place in Bristol on 8–12 February.

Find out more: 

Download the DIY series for free: two books by Robert Daniels (Bootworks) on DIY performance

Read the first feature in our series: How punk inspired my work in live art, by Lois Keidan and Anthony Roberts

Listen to a podcast from our music team on DIY music culture with Jon Savage and Hyperfrank