An Englishwoman abroad

Penny Rae was, until recently, the artistic director at the Triskel Arts Centre in Cork. Born in England and widely travelled, she feels most at home in Ireland, but feels the house prices are exorbitant and that might well chase her away. A warm person, Penny has the quality of a fragile English rose, with pale blonde hair, fair skin and green eyes. As she is a very busy woman, I was grateful to get half an hour in her tiny office with her.

I was born in East Yorkshire, one of eight children, the 3rd youngest. There was quite a lot of economic hardship, and illness with two of my siblings. So it was always important that we didn’t cause any more problems than were already there. My father was from London, but they moved to Bridlington because of my brother’s ill health. There’s a history of cystic fibrosis in the family. It’s a mucus covering of the lungs, a genetic disorder, which means the pancreas doesn’t work properly. So fresh air is very important.

My grandmother, who lived next door to us as I was growing up, was originally from West Cork, I think. When she was a baby they moved to West Yorkshire where her father worked in the mills.

My parents separated when I was 10, which was quite unusual. Both my parents were schoolteachers. My mother had a small private school. It was the ground floor of our house. We all lived above it. My father was a teacher at the local secondary school and he also did quite a lot of broadcasting and theatre work.

He died a year after they separated. So really, my mother brought us up. She did really well. She’s an incredibly strong woman, even now at the age of 83. She’s quite extraordinary really. Most of us got scholarships at private schools. We never felt deprived. And of course if you’re in a family of 8 children, everybody wants to come to your house! Whereas we always wanted to go and make best friends with people who were only children or only had one brother or sister! We particularly had a lot of girls coming round, with four brothers in the house! So it was a fairly tempestuous, chaotic, happy house, but with a lot of trauma too. My brother died when I was 16. He developed diabetes on top of the cystic fibrosis, which often happens.

My youth and early teenage years were spent doing classical ballet, which was an outlet for me.

We’ve all ended up living away from our roots. My eldest brother is in the north east of England, my elder sister’s in France. I have one brother in Edinburgh, a sister in London. We’ve all travelled and lived in different places. We kind of gravitate back to some part of Britain, but we tend to travel as well. For example my younger brother is the motor racing correspondent for the Sunday Times and travels all the time. And my elder brother is the director of a theatre workshop in Edinburgh and also travels regularly. My younger sister works for the BBC as a researcher. Again, she’s travelling. So we’ve all chosen work that will enable us to travel, and we’ve found ourselves spending time in different countries. My mother hasn’t travelled much but has always encouraged us to do so. We were living in this fairly small town, and she was determined that none of us would end up there.

So when I left school I lived in Spain for a year, and then I went to university in Leeds, in Yorkshire.

When I started dancing professionally, I was 21. I realised very quickly I didn’t like performing. I used to feel very nervous, and I didn’t like working with the choreographers. When I was growing up, dancing was a real freedom, a way of escape. In many areas of my life, I didn’t have any control, except this physical control of my body. But I decided I didn’t need that outlet anymore and I’d prefer to teach dance instead, and I really enjoyed that. I was asked to teach at the university, and that’s when I started organising community arts projects and it was my way of entering into arts management.

From there I went to live in the north east of England, in Newcastle. I was working on a project in the North East - looking at the role of dance and community arts activities, particularly for young West Indian boys in the inner city area of Leeds called Chapeltown, which was experiencing race riots at the time. I was working with my partner, a West Indian dancer and choreographer, and someone from the Ford Foundation came to see us. They were very interested in replicating this kind of work in Zimbabwe, and so off we went, with two babies!

We spent four years there. That was an incredible experience, culturally, and from every point of view. The landscape was one thing. Then the extraordinarily close relationships with the people and dancers we worked with, all of whom had difficult personal backgrounds and histories.

The National Ballet had started an outreach programme, particularly through a woman called Dawn Saunders, who was a classical ballet teacher and did pioneering work, going to high density areas and starting dance workshops with young black Zimbabweans.

So, just as I had done in Leeds, I began doing outreach work. These young people, both physically, in terms of athleticism, and in spirit and focus, could give so much. And you could make beautiful dancers out of them very quickly. My partner started the Tambuka Dance Company, which quickly became internationally recognised.

How did you attract potential dancers? Ballet is probably considered uncool by young male adolescents. Did you go to high density areas and say, ‘right, who’d like to learn to dance?’

In Africa, there isn’t that sense that dance isn’t OK to do. I mean these kids were being given a salary, and offered the chance to go tour abroad. And Neville was a very charismatic artistic director and choreographer. I think they were very excited and inspired by him. Before he went to Zimbabwe, he ran this company called Phoenix, which is the only all-black dance company in Britain, even though he doesn’t deal with colour or ethnicity, just dancers. He just wanted the best dancers, and the best dancers happened to be black. I think it was quite unusual in Zimbabwe at the time. He had a kind of apolitical naivity, but it obviously became quite political, seen incorrectly as an affirmative action thing.

Do you have any particular memories of Zimbabwe?

I remember going out to teach a class in one of the high-density areas. It was dark and there are no lights in high-density areas. And my car broke down. I was in this street with absolutely no lighting at all, and all these little houses all around me. Suddenly I felt the car being lifted up. It was incredibly frightening. And then all I could see was a sea of white teeth. About 10 men had quickly seen what had happened to me, come over and picked it up, taken it off to the sidewalk, shaken it around a bit, fiddled with the engine and got it going again. And at the same time, four of them jumped into the back and asked for a lift to town! There were lots of experiences like that. My children’s first day at school - I remember them in their sun hats and overalls on their first day. All kinds of kids from everywhere. I remember the first Tambuka performance at the Seven Arts Theatre. Packed. People standing outside. Tambuka is Shona for to blossom.

There was Bahrain who went to England. He came from nothing. And he got asked to guest with an English company and now tours the world. They were completely raw, about 15 or 16 at the start. It was so gratifying to give them that chance to make something of themselves.

It was a very idyllic lifestyle, especially for the children. We were living in a lovely cottage in Emerald Hill in Harare, with a swimming pool and beautiful grounds. We stayed there for four years, from ’90 to ’94 with our children, a daughter, Scarlet, and a little boy whom we adopted, called Mark, who is also West Indian.

Then our marriage broke up, and I came back with the children and he stayed.

What went wrong?

We were moving in different directions. Tambuka had become very big and kind of important and was doing international touring, and that was all great. But I didn’t have any release for my creativity and the writing that I had been doing, and the projects. So it was time, for all kinds of reasons, professional and personal, to leave.

What writing were you doing?

Well, I’ve always written. I’ve had small things, usually articles, published in magazines. And I’d done a few projects, working with different artists, providing text for exhibitions, testimonial work, artistic work, and I was beginning to get very interested in that.

When I came back to Glasgow, it was with the intention of developing that kind of work. I was thinking I had to support two children. So I took a job as the artistic director at the Centre for Contemporary Arts in Glasgow. I had close friends in Glasgow and I saw the job advertised, so I thought, why not?

I also began a relationship with someone I had known from a long time ago, whom I used to work with. He was behind the cultural revolution of what was happening in Glasgow. When Glasgow became the European City of Culture in 1990, he was the director of that. It had been this city of grime and dirt, ship-building, depressed industries. When the City of Culture scheme started it was all about Paris and Rome and Berlin, suddenly it was Glasgow, and it opened up a whole load of possibilities.

I applied for and got this job as artistic director of the City of Culture. After Zimbabwe I wanted to go for a much more socially-based programme. It was hard to come back and see British artists complaining about not getting enough when I had seen how responsive the Zimbabwean artists were to the slightest input. Those Shona sculptors would be earning considerable sums in Britain. It was a culture shock for me. To go to a big, established organisation was difficult. I felt frustrated. I was running the Centre for Contemporary Arts, with its huge gallery spaces, bookshop, café and all that, but my day-to-day contact with the artists was minimal. My job was more to do with management, pulling the whole thing together, whereas I wanted to be more hands-on.

So Glasgow was a three-year-phase that was OK and it meant I could give the kids security and stability, but it was a kind of barren period, creatively speaking. Although it doesn’t sound like that, when you’re the director of the largest Contemporary Arts Centre in Britain!

Then I went to Brussels, because my partner had been offered a job and because I was ready to leave. I thought it would be really exciting for the children to go to a French school and to have experience of living in another country. They were 9 and 11 then. My partner had two kids too, but they were older. We were all living together, very happily in Glasgow, up to the time they were ready to leave home.

When we went to Brussels my idea was to start writing again. But I was approached by the British Council, who had supported some of our work while we were in Zimbabwe and who had heard I was in Brussels.

Brussels was becoming the City of Culture for the year 2000 and they asked me if I would do something for it. They normally do a British programme each time, whichever European city it is. A Turner exhibition, or national theatre, conventional British large scale stuff. But they asked me to come up with a programme that was participatory and quirky, showing a contemporary Britain that wasn’t about landscapes. I came up with a concept called The Spaces in Between, which was looking at artists working with refugees, in prisons, public arts in the city and so on, and they said, ‘yes, can you do it?’

I did those projects for the next three years really. The most important one was in a place called Le Petit Chateau, which is Europe’s largest centre for asylum seekers. It had a unit within it, called a Cadet, which was a centre for adolescents in exile. I’d been doing lots of projects for artists in there.

One day, I was stopped by a 17-year old from Sierra Leone, who had been a child soldier, and who was now seeking asylum in Belgium. I’d got friendly with him and he’d been working on the projects with me. Then two Kosovan girls, Donna and Lisa came along and we got talking, and I was saying, you know, in a very middle class, liberal kind of way, ‘it’s terrible that you’ve been denied your voice twice, once in your
own country, when there was no choice about whether there was a war or not, and now in your new country, where you’re not allowed to say whether you want to stay or go’. And they said, ‘well, you know, maybe you’re denying it to us a third time, because you just give us these artists to work with. Maybe we’d like to develop our own projects.’

So about five of us sat down and devised a project according to the way they wanted it. It was called New Young Europeans. It was about them as young people, not specifically as refugees. For every young refugee represented, they wanted to involve a young person who had always had the security and status of their home country. They wanted to choose where they would be photographed, what they wanted to say. They didn’t want to talk about the trauma of their past, they wanted to talk about their dreams for the future.

So I did the interviews and testimonies, and we worked with a French photographer. The opening took place on the first night of Brussels as the City of Culture. Then lots of other cities got involved, and we ended up taking it to 10 European cities. It went everywhere, from the metro station in Madrid to a school in Rome, to the English Market in Cork, outside the post office and outside the Gate cinema. We always did it in public places, in non-gallery places. And in every city, we interviewed five young asylum seekers and five young local people talking about their hopes and dreams. Of the five asylum seekers we interviewed here in Cork, three have been sent back and two have been referred to Dublin.

So that’s how I came to Cork, with this project. The British Council in Dublin came to see the project in one city and asked us to do it in Cork for 2005. So my introduction to Cork was through five young asylum seekers and our contact here, Tom McCarthy, a wonderful poet. It was really interesting, an amazing introduction to a city.

Then as this project was coming to an end, I saw a job advertised for artistic director here (at the Triskel Arts Centre). I realised that it was small enough for me to develop my own projects, which would keep my own creativity going and also give me the chance to develop a strategic policy as artistic director. So the board accepted that.

I also had this sense of coming back to the place of my grandmother’s roots. I felt that Cork was small enough and Ireland was gentle enough. Before I came, I had had my first round of breast cancer and I knew that I didn’t want to go into a big stressful situation. Cork didn’t frighten me. People, when I came, were incredibly hospitable and kind and generous, and I felt I could do a good job here.

Since I came here, I’ve had another round of breast cancer. I’ve only been back at work a month. The first time it was just a lumpectomy, then chemo and radiotherapy, but this time I had to have both breasts and my ovaries removed. So it was a big one.

How are you now?

OK, I’m good, I mean I have lots of energy again, and I’m coping very well with the new drugs. It’s still in the lymph system, so they’re trying to get rid of it. But they’re holding back on the chemo at the moment. They want to see what happens. But in the meantime, Ireland is a very gentle, warm place to be if you’re in a stressful, traumatic situation.

My children have always travelled round with me. They’ve spent term times with me, and holidays with their father. So they’ve been all over, because he’s been travelling as well. But when I got my first round, Scarlet, my daughter, was particularly frightened, and she asked if she could go and do her GCSEs in England with her father, get to know him a bit more. So that was really hard. Mark’s 19 now and is working as a sous chef and he has a girlfriend and they have an apartment, so he’s already on his own really. He’s also in the north of England. He went to see his father and got a job there. So now they spend holidays with me and term times with their father.

Also, as I’ve had my ovaries removed, and know that I can’t have children, even though I wouldn’t want to, it’s hard. It’s also hard to think of new relationships…yeah, it’s very difficult. So there’s a double loss, a sense of bereavement. It’s another reason why I came here. I couldn’t continue to live in our big house in Brussels without the children. I felt their absence too much.

I’ve always been very healthy, always eaten well, exercised and danced. But I’m also on a vegan diet now and don’t drink any alcohol. It’s all about compromise and trying to hang on to the big picture. When you’re faced with your own mortality, things become simple. Now I aim for happiness and peace, and working, especially on things that are important to me. I’ve resigned from lots of boards and that and get huge pleasure now from small moments that I might have missed earlier. The kids and I have re-established a close relationship. I’ve let them go, really, but get great enjoyment out of the time I have with them.

Tell me how you find living in Ireland in view of your health situation.

I’ve had absolutely no contact with the Irish health system. Everybody told me to stay in the Belgian health system, especially with my medical history. I do know in Belgium I’ve had fantastic care while a friend in Ireland with the same problem waited much longer for treatment. She also had less access to consultants. In Belgium there is a team approach, and consultations between specialists happen with you present, so it feels empowering. You are part of the process.

I’ve had second opinions and gone into the area of alternative medicine as well. But you never feel safe really, especially once it’s come back and got into the lymph system.
I’ve had reconstruction and will go back in a few months to have further work done. My plastic surgeon was a beautiful 35 year old, glamorous woman, and that was really encouraging! Not an old grey haired man!

So although I haven’t experienced the medical system here, I have seen indirectly that I was treated better in Belgium than my friend was here.

Do you see any other downsides to living in Ireland?

It’s still a mono-cultural society. There’s a sense of ignorance in terms of other cultures. I don’t think the government is doing enough to prepare people for new influences. The country is also impossibly expensive! I think it’s a dangerous problem. I can’t imagine buying a house in Ireland, because I couldn’t get anything that would give me any quality of life, and I think that, in the end, is what might send me away much sooner. I’m still renting a house. I will feel a need for permanence, so I’m much more likely to go to Italy or France, or somewhere I could afford a house, where I can get a decent quality of life.

And the positive aspects of life here?

Openness, gentleness, hospitality, kindness, wonderful humour. That’s quite a lot! That’ll keep me going for a while…

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England has been a major influence in the world throughout history, and remains a forceful presence in the EU today. The UK economy is stable, and one of the strongest in Europe, based on low rates of inflation, interest and unemployment. As a result of good economic performance, the government has come against public resistance to joining the European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU), with British opinion polls showing more faith in sterling than in the euro.

While most former British colonies (one of which was Zimbabwe) are now independent, many have chosen to remain within the Commonwealth. Certain islands remain under British control. These include the following:
Anguilla, Bermuda, British Indian Ocean Territory, British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, Falkland Islands, Gibraltar, Guernsey, Jersey, Isle of Man, Montserrat, Pitcairn Islands, Saint Helena and Ascension, South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands, Turks and Caicos Islands.

The union between England and Wales was formalized in 1536, with an Act of Union. In a later Act of Union, in 1707, England and Scotland agreed to join, renamed as Great Britain. In 1801 came the legislative union of Great Britain and Ireland, with the adoption of the name the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. After the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921, Ireland was partitioned, the six northern counties remaining with Britain, and in 1927 the UK was formally renamed as the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

(Source: CIA World Factbook.)