This morning’s cabaret page in Time Out London will be the last one. This brings to an end a section that was created in January 2009 by its first editor, Simone Baird, from whom I took over in October 2009. It also brings to an end my working on a weekly basis for Time Out London.
Why the change? Time Out London magazine has decided no longer to cover certain areas, including Cabaret, Classical Music and Dance, as dedicated weekly sections. I’m told they hope to continue to cover specific shows and events elsewhere in the magazine, and that shows submitted for listing will still appear on the Time Out website. From now on, if you have a show or event you’d like Time Out to list, you should submit details at http://www.pressassociation.
It’s hard to express what a privilege it has been to hold this position. I believe London’s cabaret scene is one of the most dynamic, creative and progressive collective cultural enterprises in existence today. For more than a decade, both on stage and off, it has been forging new ways of making art, of connecting with audiences and of experimenting with togetherness that have huge value in this age of cultural, political, economic and environmental freefall. The work is sidesplittling, libido-arousing, stomach-churning, heartbreaking, mindblowing. The people are thoughtful, kind, conscientious, crazy, drunk. Few critics get the opportunity to witness such an extraordinary artistic scene at close range, to watch it mutate and expand, to engage so freely with its participants and to feel a real sense of value and consequence in their attempts to understand, engage with and champion what they see – in other words, to have so much fun while doing such serious work. For this, I will forever be grateful to every single person involved in the cabaret scene, and to Simone, and to Time Out.
For myself, I expect to keep pretty busy. This Is Not a Dream, the documentary I co-directed about artists’ and performers’ use of moving images since Warhol, is out on DVD next month. There are exciting plans afoot for BURN, the platform for moving images by cabaret artists that I run, including going monthly at the Hackney Attic every first Sunday. (To kick things off, on January 5, you can catch the 75-minute BURN sampler that recently went down a storm in New York – it’s the perfect jumping-on point for BURN newbies.) There are also various ideas brewing with the likes of the Guardian, BFI, ICA and Vogue Fabrics. And, erm, I’m open to offers.
And of course I’ll also remain strongly committed to covering the cabaret scene wherever and however I can. One of the pleasures of my role at Time Out was knowing that my words would reach many thousands of people who had never been to a cabaret show, and I’ll still hope to get the word out by covering the scene for mainstream outlets. But I’ll also be using this blog, Not Television, as a place to flag up whatever I find interesting in the cabaret world and beyond – with special attention to moving-image, queer and DIY culture – whether in the form of reviews, opinion pieces, interviews, galleries, videos or whatever. It’ll be an experiment in a new way for me to do criticism and I guess (I hope!) it will take shape over time. You can read a bit more about why Not Television here.
Well, there we go. Change is hard but change is good. I’m sad not to have the best gig in town any more. (Very, very, very sad.) But I’m more grateful for the things the last four years have given me – the visceral things, the emotional things, the intellectual things, even the things I’ve blanked from my mind out of trauma or inebriation. I’m proud of my efforts to be useful to the scene that gave me those things. And I’m excited about what will happen next.
