Y Cwm Soniarus / Where the waves meet the shore / sure
Teils ar lwybr Barddoniaeth Dic Jones, Fferm yr Hendre / Tiles on the Dic Jones Poetry Trail, Hendre Farm
The stated aim of my first professional performance project, Cerdded Adre: the long walk home, was to present myself as an artist in my local community. My publicity materials for that first project were illustrated with a picture of a now well documented performance art event which took place at the National Eisteddfod in Wrexham in 1977, Paul Davies’ durational action, ‘Welsh Not’. In 1977 the Welsh Arts Council had organised a week-long exhibition of international performance art in a tent at the National Eisteddfod. The event was curated under the banner of Joseph Beuys’ Free International University by Guardian critic Caroline Tisdall with support from Timothy Elwyn Jones and included work by some notable names in performance art including Beuys and Mario and Merisa Merz. During the week a Welsh artist called Paul Davies stood outside the exhibition tent and held a railway sleeper above his head with the letters W. N. carved on the wood.
The letters W N represent a potent symbol of the eradication of the Welsh language through the use of education. The Welsh Not or Welsh Note was a piece of wood inscribed with the letters W N with a chord attached for wearing about the neck. It was used in some schools in Wales during the late 19th century. Any child caught speaking Welsh was made to wear the Welsh Not and encouraged to tell on their class mates. The Note would be passed to the next child caught speaking Welsh. At the end of the day the child left with the Note would be beaten. Davies’ performance was an act of endurance. He held the sleeper aloft until, through exhaustion, he could hold it no longer. The action was completed when he dropped the sleeper letting it fall to the ground . [1]
The document of this performance had come to my notice through an AHRC funded research project titled, ‘What’s Welsh for performance?’ or in Welsh, ‘Beth yw ‘performance’ yn Gymraeg?’ led by Profesor Heike Roms at Aberystwyth University. The project was launched at the time I was studying for my MA and the powerful image of Paul Davies in the midst of his Welsh Not action featured on a postcard used to promote the project. In February 2007 I picked up a copy of the postcard at a panel discussion held at the National Museum in Cardiff which explored the wider context of the Wrexham Eisteddfod performance art programme. When I went on to use the image on the promotional materials for my Cerdded Adre project, adjacent to the image, I wrote the words, ‘I’m not Welsh’. During the performance I circulated the postcard of the image amongst the audience and expanded on my written sentiment, musing that really I was Anglo-Welsh and that my Dad was Irish or really Anglo-Irish.
Paul Davies was originally from Swansea but lived in the Wrexham area at the time of the Eisteddfod as he was working as a teacher at the Cheshire School of Art and Design. Davies's actions have generally been regarded as, 'the inception of a self-conscious Welsh political art'. [2] It’s worth exploring the context of his action a bit further. Paul’s brother Peter Davies, also an artist and part of the artist collective Beca, wrote an essay for the catalogue for the 1998 Paul Davies memorial exhibition explaining specifically what the work, ‘Welsh Not’, in his opinion represented. He stated, “It was an individual artist’s public declaration of Welsh identity and content to the Welsh nation...A challenge of the dispossessed in their own land, the disempowered Welsh artist to the Welsh cultural establishment.” [3] In the context of the Arts Council’s Eisteddfod Performance Art Exhibition, Davies’ action is thus taken to be a protest about the fact that no local artist had been invited to be part of the exhibition. As Roms noted at the symposium in 2007, Davies, “had a sense that there was a group of international artists coming in and not really engaging with the context in which they were placed.” [4]
Shelagh Hourahane’s writing about Davies’ Welsh Not action adds another dimension to understanding the artist’s work, “The event symbolises the penalisation of Welsh in the past and its continuing loss as a mother language to many Welsh people including himself.” [5] In her article Hourahane goes on to refer to Davies' attempt to write in Welsh for his Beca Bulletin in 1993, “he feels anxious about entrusting his learnt language to paper. He increasingly uses Welsh as well as English, but cautiously translates from one to the other, as if he fears that his Welsh might not be understood.” [6] In the light of this I consider his performance as a way in which he was able to embody the difficulty of visually asserting his Welshness because of his own uncertainty with regards to his possession of the Welsh language. As Andrew Knight pointed out at the symposium in 2007, “I can't imagine that it would have been easy for Paul to do this in the context of the traditional arts and crafts pavilion at that time.” [7] That is, without the context of a ‘performance art’ exhibition, Davies probably wouldn't have found a form that offered him a way of referring to his complex feelings about the Welsh language in the traditional Welsh context of the National Eisteddfod. What was less discussed in the re-circulation of the circumstances of Paul Davies’ ‘Welsh Not’ Eisteddfod performance is how the action ended, at the end of the week he laid the sleeper to the ground and set upon it with an axe, in order to carve a love spoon. [8]
As part of my mentored Research and Development programme with creative agency Addo I have been looking at the work of early 20th century novelist Allen Raine whose fiction is set in a thinly disguised Tresaith the coastal community where she holidayed as a child and came to live in the later part of her life recasting the hamlet variously as Treswnd, Abersethin or Mwntseison. Allen Raine is the pseudonym of woman novelist Anne Adalisa Puddicombe born into a middle class family at Newcastle Emlyn in 1836 and considered by some to be the mother of Anglo-Welsh literature or Welsh writing in English. Raine was in her day a bestselling author of romantic fiction. The plots of her novels feature doubled couplings of mis-matched lovers whose fated plot lines are resolved by traumatic events; death of the errant love match by fire in sail making sheds, barns and theatres, disputed inheritances resolved by the death of an estranged father at the hooves of a stampeding bull, or the settling of a land dispute through the collapse of an entire field into the sea. Though most of the work is set in the coastal communities surrounding her home village her work also connects to the coalmines of south Wales and the mountain uplands of the north (A Welsh Witch) as well as the gentrified artistic circles of the London Welsh (A Welsh Singer 1897).
Raine sprinkles her text with Welsh words with characters also commenting on their poor grasp of English, so that the audience will understand that the people she writes about are Welsh speaking but her audience is that of the English publisher Hutchinson and the depiction of her characters has been considered by critics such as Jane Aaron and M Wynn Thomas to be at least patronising if not casually racist. In reading some of these novels I was particularly struck by a scene in a Welsh Witch which depicts a mining accident. The scene is possibly one of the first treatments in fiction of such an event - a small group of miners are trapped underground following a pit collapse and one of the party, at the edge of hunger and insanity has to be restrained from giving way to his cannabilistic desire for a boy trapped with them. Her first published novel A Welsh Singer (1897) charts the rise of the shepherdess heroine Mifanwy from poor orphan to local eistedddfod singing competition winner, to circus performer in London and finally an opera singer on the European stage. The text contains a recurring motif regarding the brownness of the heroine’s skin, in opposition to the foster mother’s pet name for her which seems to allude to her whiteness, “Cream and roses!” laughed Lady Meredith; “that shows how a mother, even a foster-mother, is blinded by her love, for I never saw such a little brown-faced monkey.” [9]
With passages like these, so clearly inflected with the attitudes of colonialism and empire which can no longer be read without comment why spend time with such a Victorian throwback? What has drawn me to her work and why have I in some respects identified with it? Most obviously it is that she is Anglo-Welsh, she writes in English about the community that, despite the distancing that language and class impose upon her she still powerfully belongs to. More importantly, she is a woman and the subjects her novels touch on, despite the apparently unsophisticated romantic genre, do bring a certain social reality into question. The novels contain frequent allusions to the asylum as the place where troublesome women will be dispatched if they continue to disrupt the ‘stability’ of the community with their antisocial behaviour, one such woman clearly suffering from mental anguish following the death of her young baby (Torn Sails ) whilst the Vicar in A Welsh Witch secretly respects and admires the panentheism of the central character Catrin, who is labeled and persecuted as a witch by the rest of her community. I have also been drawn to the many references to singing in these novels. There is singing in chapel, and practicing in the fields and in the sail making shed and in the depiction of the mining accident already noted it is the singing of a hymn deep underground that alerts the rescuers to the presence of the trapped miners, the episode being a close rendition of the actual events at Pwll Tynewydd in April 1877 when water broke through an underground passage trapping a small group of men whose subterranean hymn singing enabled rescuers to locate and save them. [10]
As Phil Carradice has written, “Allen Raine was a romantic novelist but her unequalled knowledge of Welsh life and Welsh society mark her down as an influential and distinctive writer who captured the essence of a country still trying to find its place in the modern world.” [11] Raine’s novel set against the backdrop of the 1904 revival, Queen of the Rushes illustrates this well even featuring Evan Roberts, the leader of the charismatic prayer meetings as a character in the text. The Marxist historian Gwyn Alf Williams writing about the 1904 revival, an event which had such a mobilising effect on communities in West Wales and across the land most audibly in a passion for communal singing, considers it the last attempt by ordinary Welshmen (my italics) to make of religion (the binding of people together) what it had once been – ‘popular, non-clerical, unlearned, unsophisticated, enthusiastic, organic in the community and Welsh in language’. [12] My original idea for my Allen Raine project had been to base an opera on this novel and have it performed on the beach and in Tresaith. Returning to the book over the past months, I discovered I had quite forgotten that the central character Gwenifer is, for most of the novel, mute.
Since 2014 I have been based in Aberporth, a small seaside village in Ceredigion immediately to the south of Tresaith with a population of c. 2500. During this time I feel that I have had little interaction with my neighbours and surrounding community. Perhaps it is the nature of this place that has impeded my engagement with this community; a seaside town with a transient population of holiday and second homes; economically reliant on tourism coupled with proximity to a Ministry of Defence test facility and a significant retired population. My work as an artist has rather tended to focus on the nearby market town of Cardigan (Caermadoc in the novels of Raine) which has in recent years been forging a new identity in the face of rural and agricultural decline; an identity based predominantly on leisure and tourism. During the first Covid lockdown I initiated a practice of daily walking between Aberporth and the adjacent beach at Tresaith. Hearsay has it that there are only seven permanent households in Tresaith – the rest of the housing being holiday lets or second homes. A side effect of the covid pandemic locally has been a resilient and increasingly buoyant property market; houses are sold as soon as they are advertised. As we now emerge from the locked down winter how will our communities have changed or, to use a coastal metaphor, what will the tide have brought in?
At the age of about 7 I attended my first Eisteddfod competing in a solo singing competition. The event took place in Aberporth village hall where I sang a traditional folk song titled Y Ddafad Gorniog. The opening lyrics are etched in my memory but I do not completely recall the tune. A current focus of community activity in Aberporth is a fund-raising campaign to re-develop that village hall updating facilities and enabling greater community access to activities which currently include a WI market, short mat bowls and exercise classes. Are these the activities that will inspire our communities to re-integrate and meet following the dramatic and traumatic events we have experienced during our varying degrees of isolation? Currently there is no choir in Aberporth and no communal music-making. In a recent radio programme about the importance of singing groups during the lockdown recourse was made to the social capital of music which is seen as two-fold enabling both bridging and bonding. [13] Since completing Cerdded Adre my first performance project in 2007 I have continued to work in the public realm making work that has engaged with ideas of language and identity seeking ways of bringing people together in culture and place. In my application to Addo for my place on their mentoring scheme I wrote of my work, ‘In each project the event/art work has acted as a ‘ritual’ container that attempts to allow the articulation of difference within a shared space of belonging.’ It has in this way been a work of bridging.
Last week I received a message from Cardigan library to say that a book I had ordered was ready to pick up. I recalled I had ordered the published version of Ynysoer, the work that set Allen Raine on her course as a writer when she won first prize having entered an English language story writing competition at the National Eisteddfod in Caernarfon in 1894. The book was published under a different title, Where Billows Roll in 1909, a year after her death. When I collected the volume from the library and saw the cover I laughed for what I had actually ordered was a Welsh translation of the book by Megan Morgan. The Welsh title, Lle Treigla’r Don, literally translates into English as, where the waves mutate. If you were to add a circumflex to the o, don becomes dôn, which means tune. I’m looking forward to reading this translated volume. As words mutate and languages change, new songs are sung and humans bond.
Y Cwm Soniarus was a phrase used by Hywel Teifi Edwards to caricature a utopian Victorian welsh community pre-industrialisation and pre-anglicisation. Gwenifer, the heroine of Raine’s revival novel Queen of the Rushes does eventually regain her speech and in that moment, overcome with emotion, she breathes a, ‘prayer of gratitude, in words that no longer died upon her tongue, but reached her ears in the music of the human voice.’ [14]. I have not yet produced an opera as a result of this mentoring scheme but I have produced this short audio piece:
This is the final blog post that coincides with the period of my Addo mentoring programme. When I started pulling these writings together I had a clear trajectory of six posts in mind. As I began to shape my material it became evident that there was one more post to be made - this is the seventh post - the post of future yet to come.
#UseYourWelshWithConfidence
#DefnyddiaDyGymraegGydaHyder
Footnotes
[1] For more information about Davies’ action please visit the website http://www.performance-wales.org/archive/eventsyears/1977.html
[2] Heike Roms, What’s Welsh for Performance? Vol. 1 (Cardiff: Trace Samizdat Press, 2008), p. 107.
[3] Quoted in: Peter Lord, ‘Homogeneity or individuation? A long view of the critical paradox of contemporary art in a stateless nation’ yn Globalization and Contemporary Art, gol. gan Jonathan Harris (Blackwell USA, 2011) (p. 10).
[4] Heike Roms, What’s Welsh for Performance? Vol. 1, p. 127.
[5] Shealagh Hourahane, ‘A Continuing Presence: a profile of Paul Davies (1947-93)’, Planet 1998 (130), p. 38.
[6] Ibid
[7] Heike Roms, What’s Welsh for Performance? Vol. 1, p. 127.
[8] Shealagh Hourahane, ‘A Continuing Presence: a profile of Paul Davies (1947-93)’, Planet 1998 (130), p. 38.
[9] Allen Raine, A Welsh Witch, (Dinas Powys: Honno, 2013), p. 317
[10] Hywel Teifi Edwards, Arwr Glew Erwau’r Glo (1850 - 1950), (Llandysyl: Prifysgol Cymru Abertawe, 1994), p. 19
[11] Phil Carradice https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/wales/entries/df1ec9a4-3643-3d0d-a3eb-aea0004acc39 viewed 25/4/2021
[12] Gwyn Alf Williams, When was Wales? (London: Penguin, 1991 ), p. 240 quoting Ieuan Gwynedd Jones Explorations and Explanations: Essays in the social history of Victorian Wales (Gomer, 1991)
[13] Thinking Allowed: Community and Social Capital broadcast on BBC Radio 4 (12/4/2021) https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000tskb
[14] Allen Raine, Queen of the Rushes: A Tale of the Welsh Revival (Aberystwyth: Honno, ), p. 211