The Host, the Ghost and the Witness: at the limits of hybridity

In 2007 after finishing my MA I had sent out marketing information regarding my project Cerdded Adre. In the light of that information I was invited to become part of a PhD project hosted at the University of the West of England, Bristol. The project was part of a large academic consortium researching the lives of older people living in rural areas. The project required the undertaking of field work and one of the criteria for my involvement in the project was the ability to do this through the medium of Welsh. The project outline referred to the work of an artist called Cliff McLucas, more specifically his ‘deep mapping’ methodology, a concept I had encountered before. 

In the Summer of 1996 whilst at home from University I helped out with an open air theatre production on a farm down the road from the farm I was bought up on. The production was called, Once Upon a Time in the West, and brought together images from the film Shane and the story of a local farm badly effected by a landslip precipitated by the presence of underground water reservoirs.  Part of my work for the production was to dig a trench the length of the field where the performance was taking place.  The trench was then filled with sawdust and drenched in petrol to be set alight during the performance creating a beacon of fire across the field. The production’s writer and performer was Eddie Ladd.  The director of the performance was Cliff McLucas. 

Some years later I was living in Newport, Gwent and working in a University Library. Surfing the web between re-shelving the books and working on the issue desk, I came across an article with the title, ‘I was invited to this Island’.  The article referred to the production that I had helped out on, Once upon a time in the West and the concept of ‘deep maps’ and concluded with a kind of manifesto for their making. The text was written in a striking style being a mixture of Welsh and English; a macaronic text more specifically an English body with Welsh footnotes. The article struck a chord with me; it felt like it had grown out of the place where I was from. The writer of this text was Cliff McLucas.

After an initial project meeting in Bristol I gave up my PhD place.  My main reason for doing this was that the project was being administered by an institution outside of Wales with myself playing the role of ‘guide’ or go between in the extraction of information from my home place. This role heightened my sensitivities and insecurity about my own identity in relation to the place that I am from.  A year after giving up this opportunity I saw an advert for a PhD with Aberystwyth University funded through the Centre for Welsh Medium Higher Education. They were looking for someone to research the contribution of the late Cliff McLucas to theatre design and the Welsh performance space. Here was an opportunity in my own country that spoke to my heritage and the questions of language and identity I had been trying to explore through my own performance work. I applied for the place and was successful in getting it.

Cliff McLucas was born in the North of England and after training in architecture at Manchester University, moved as an adult to Tregroes, Ceredigion in the early seventies. As part of the process of moving to this place he learned Welsh and through his work became involved in a vibrant arts and cultural scene centred around the Barn Centre in Aberystwyth.  In 1985 he made some of the set and seating for the Brith Gof production Rhydcymerau and by the time of their performance Gododdin he was fully engaged by the company as scenographer and joint director becoming synonymous with their large scale site based productions and innovative uses of technology.  McLucas died of a brain tumour in Singleton hospital, Swansea on the first of September 2002.  Following his death a trust was formed to safeguard his collection and that of Brith Gof for Wales and the National Library took his archive as a long-term loan in 2006 [1].

In an interview with Fiona Wilkie, for her MA dissertation on site specific performance practice McLucas observed, “As an Englishman, working in the Welsh language is a political act – it’s about finding a way of existing honourably in this place”[2].  In the work Second Language Identities David Block gives a detailed consideration of the challenges to identity in the learning of a second language especially in the context of migration, “…it is in the adult migrant experience that identity and one’s sense of self are most put on the line, not least because most or all previous support systems in terms of history, culture and language have been removed and must rapidly be replaced by new ones.  It is in the maelstrom resulting from this relative vacuum that individuals are forced to reconstruct and redefine themselves, both for their own sense of ontological security (Giddens, 1991) and the positions ascribed to them by others in their new surroundings.”[3]  He also notes that there has been little work about how learners of other languages position themselves or are positioned depending on their social context.[4]  The work of Margalit and Raz affirms that, “…people’s sense of their own identity is bound up with their sense of belonging to encompassing groups and…their self respect is affected by the esteem in which these groups are held”[5].

Starting on my PhD I foresaw that my project would follow a pattern becoming familiar within the field of academic creative research, that known as ‘practice as research’. I imagined that my study would consist of a series of practical performance projects combined with written commentary and critical analysis. In the first year I undertook the site specific project Hwyl Fawr Frank Lloyd Wright. At the same time I began researching in the Brith Gof archive and discovered a book proposal which had been prepared by McLucas for the academic publisher, Routledge. The proposal outlined a discussion of the role of site in the theatre work of Brith Gof the company McLucas was associated with for over sixteen years. My community performance, Hwyl Fawr Frank Lloyd Wright, centered on similar questions and as I began to write a commentary on that event I noticed that its structure and content mirrored the outline that McLucas had prepared for his book.

McLucas’ proposed book went by the title, The Host and the Ghost: Some approaches to Site in the Theatre Works of Brith Gof 1989-1999 and promised to offer, 'a new extended notion of Theatre that is brought about by a true engagement with location… '[6]. His proposal was sent to three independent (anonymous) referees to evaluate the project. The reports they produced are also to be found in the archive.  Although all were in favour of publishing the book they also all raised concerns and proposed changes that were contingent to this happening. The recommended changes highlighted a perceived discrepancy between the book proposal and the sample text that McLucas had sent with that proposal. McLucas’ proposal promises an interpretation of 'site-specificity' which presents, “sophisticated models…that engage event and location in cultural and political debates as well as merely aesthetic ones”. [7] However, in one of the referees reports McLucas' sample text is likened to, “a coffee-table art book… an elitist commercial object that precisely put into question some of the very notions of theatre that McLucas posits” [8].  Despite the importance of the conceptual context that McLucas claims as central to his book, the same referee complains, “From what I was sent to read I could not quite discern what the cultural/political problems of site-specific work have been and still are”[9].   At the time of his death McLucas’ book remained unpublished and unfinished. 

McLucas’ collection in archival terms is classified as hybrid referring to the fact that it contains traditional formats such as paper and cloth alongside digital material including film, sound, images and digital documents and carriers.  In his work, The Predicament of Culture, anthropologist James Clifford considers the concept of hybridity whilst discussing cultural authority and authenticity in relation to the collections of art history museums.  Clifford writes: "What is hybrid…in an emergent sense has been less commonly collected and presented as a system of authenticity".[10]  In my thesis I propose that the particular cultural and political problem McLucas was trying to address was his own alienation from the Welsh (and predominantly Welsh language) theatre company he sought to represent through his work because of his own experience of being, what I term in the thesis, a British incomer.  His ambition to demonstrate how, “… issues of location and cultural specificity…have led to a radical hybridisation of artistic techniques and new, cross-formatted cultural productions…”[11] is represented through the ambitious visual layout of his sample text. This alienation is further illustrated by the book’s prospective title in reference to which the same referee noted: “I didn’t particularly find the religious tone in the title to be especially appropriate, accurate or compelling given the contents.  And the subtitle is so very specific.  It seems that a title and/or subtitle that spoke to the broader spectrum of issues, and thus readers, who might be interested in this work would be a helpful move.”[12]

The Host and the Ghost was a phrase that McLucas had adopted as a way of speaking and writing about the site specific work that he was creating with Brith Gof through their re-purposing of unusual and abandoned buildings or spaces for performance events; the host (site) is occupied by the animating spirit or ghost of a performance.  The terms 'the host and the ghost', are also of particular significance in a religious context. For whilst 'host' can refer to someone who receives guests at their home or elsewhere 'host' can also refer to the wafer used in the central ritual of the Christian faith, the Eucharist. This particular understanding of the host is explored further in the work Metamorphosis and Identity, by the medieval historian Caroline Walker Bynum who considers the symbolism of the Eucharist to be an example of hybridity and as such a way of expressing change.  Bynum's linking of the host with the concept of hybridity is explained by the doctrine of transubstantiation:

…in the case of Eucharistic change – an exception to natural processes and a clear replacement of something by something else (bread by flesh) – theories of the coexistence of two substances or the survival of substance were considered tenable…and the concept of transubstantiation was elaborated as a way of expressing the necessary “going over” of one thing into another.[13]

Her work goes on to explore the use of the term hybridity by educated medieval Norman clergy, such as Gerald of Wales, Bernard of Clairvaux and Walter Map and proposes that hybridity is a concept that allows them to maintain their personal identity and public roles in the context of social change. 

In 2000 McLucas’ main contact with Routledge, wrote to him about his book in the light of the recommendations from the reader reports suggesting that McLucas reconsider the books’ form in order to reduce the need for large-scale funding for the publication. She admits however that, “…trying to do without subsidy altogether is not really an option.”[14] It is arguable that that subsidy finally came through the sponsor of my research, the Coleg Cymraeg Cenedlaethol, the Welsh Medium Higher Education institution established during the period of my scholarship, for at the end of the second year of my PhD, I decided that this would be my doctoral project, to re-write McLucas's book using the structure of his original proposal but re-writing that project in Welsh. 

Clark Moustakas considers code-switching to be, “the profession of bilingual education”[15]. 

The Cliff McLucas archive can be searched via the website of the National Library of Wales. Here is a link to their finding aid: https://archives.library.wales/downloads/cliff-clifford-mclucas-archive.pdf

For further biographical information about Cliff McLucas please see: https://biography.wales/article/s11-MCLU-CLI-1945

Footnotes

[1] The terms of that loan changed in 2011 when the trust was dissolved and the McLucas archive was handed over to the Library with full responsibility for the preservation needs of the collection.

[2] Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, Cliff McLucas Collection, MCL5/3, interview with Fiona Wilkie.

[3] David Block, Second Language Identities (London: Continuum, 2009) p. 75.  
According to evidence in the archive, McLucas began learning Welsh in 1973 and moved to West Wales in 1974. Aberystwyth, National Library, Cliff McLucas Collection, E2 / 4, CV McLucas, September 2001.

[4] Ibid., p. 2.

[5] A. Margalit & J. Raz, ‘National self-determination’ yn The Rights of the Minority Culture, gol. W. Kymlicka (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), tt. 79-92 (pp. 86-87).

[6] Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, Brith Gof Collection, G2/14, Book Proposal Llyfr The Host and the Ghost, p. 3.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, Brith Gof Collection, G2/14, Report B.

[9] Ibid.

[10] J. Clifford, The Predicament of Culture, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988) p. 231.

[11] Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, Brith Gof Collection, G2/14, Book Proposal Llyfr The Host and the Ghost, p. 3. Ibid, p. 7.

[12] Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, Brith Gof Collection, G2/14, Report B.

[13] Caroline Walker Bynum, Metamorphosis and identity (New York; Zone Books, 2001), p. 24.

[14] Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, Brith Gof Collection, G2/14, Letter from Talia Rogers

[15] Moustakas, C, Heuristic Research: Design and Methodology (London: Sage Publications, 1990) p. 78.