Newsletter #2
Croeso beautiful being to newsletter #2 intended to bring you a moment of respite, reflection and interest
Today, I’ve been thinking about failure, revisiting questions I’ve asked myself in the past, such as what constitutes creative failure or personal failure? What am I measuring myself against? Which lens am I looking through? Whose lens?
Do their values, views, and aesthetics align with mine? Where did this misery-inducing habit of measuring life come from in the first place?
After some reflection on what I considered to be my own failures, I had an epiphany - having succeeded in failing, perhaps I am a success after all?
There was a tutor at art college who made a project about failure. A huge sculpture of a wooden horse was made deliberately ugly and faulty. That’s some sort of success, isn’t it?
Moving on from success, failure, and judgement, with an obvious segue, I began thinking about an earlier piece of work: a short radio play, lasting less than three and a half minutes, which I wrote and directed back in 2014. Titled Rattling Bones, it aired on Radio Cardiff.
Unfortunately, I lost the original script soon after recording it. (All of my work between 2012 and 2022 was created solely on my mobile phone). By sheer luck, however, almost a decade later the recording found its way back to me, thanks to writer Kelly Jones, a BBC Drama Award winner and the creative facilitator for Off Centre, a performing arts community group run by the Wales Millennium Centre (WMC) at the time of the recording.
Listening back to it, I found myself thinking, "I like this piece of work. What can I do with it?"
What do we do with old work that perhaps isn't that good, or has been viewed, aired, or performed only once? Do we bin it? Leave it in the recesses of the past as a project that "failed" to reach an audience? Or do we approach it with curiosity?
Having been read by non-professional actors and never commissioned, I wasn't about to send it to Radio 4 only to be rejected that's for sure (hahaha).
Instead, I became interested in giving it another incarnation. What would happen if I paired it with moving images, not to illustrate the story, but to create something that still felt like a radio play, still requiring the audience to use their imagination?
With this in mind, I took the opportunity to film some new material while on the road just outside Aberystwyth with filmmaker Heledd Wyn. We shot the footage while making Shimmering (featured in June's newsletter).
Watch the reimagined film version of
(NB subtitles auto generated by YOUTUBE)
The Background Story
The play was written after a trip to Nairobi, where I accompanied my mum to visit my grandmother in hospital (her usual travel companion, my sister, was unavailable). During that time, my aunt told me the story of what happened when she and her sister took the ashes of their mum, Ilda (or Nonna, as she preferred to be called), to Mombasa to perform the final rites of a Hindu funeral, Asthi Visarjan.
The story fascinated me because it held so many contradictions. Ilda's father had been an Italian Blackshirt during the Second World War. After Italy's defeat, he somehow remained in Kenya despite the widespread capture and repatriation of Italians, eventually managing farmland. His wife later joined him from Italy.
What blows me away slightly is that, with Kenya under British colonial rule and strict racial segregation firmly in place, Ilda went against both convention and Italian Catholic tradition to marry a Kenyan born Shia Ismaili Muslim Indian man. Her daughters also married Kenyan born Indian men, one Hindu and the other, my uncle, a Shia Ismaili Muslim. Ilda was given a Hindu funeral, as she had left no instructions about her own funeral rites. Strangely, having known and spent time with Ilda, I'm under no illusion that she was an egalitarian but she was non religious so I’m sure she wouldn’t mind.
Rattling Bones for me is more than a short radio play. It’s part family archive and part social history— a memory easily lost amongst the stories of today.
Thanks to Arts Council Wales for their continued support and for helping me realise this newsletter through Creative Steps funding, diolch yn fawr.
