Evaristo gathers the threads of the past to help bind us back together
The Weavers of Woolwich General Gordon Square, Woolwich, SE18 ★★★★★
Lasting under 10 minutes, The Weavers of Woolwich, an outdoor launch event for the Greenwich + Docklands International Festival, offers a perfect example of the tentative state of the performing arts, as the sector takes its baby steps into the “new normal” – a realm where minimisation of risk is all consuming. The cultural congregation is being reassembled, but we must expect mainly wafers, not full-course meals.
At one level, that anything has been put together this year for south-east London’s annual cross-river, cross-arts jamboree, is a minor miracle. Festival organiser Bradley Hemmings took the decision to push it from the summer to the early autumn rather than cancel it. The resulting programme is a far cry from the usual explosion of large-scale happenings attended by heaving throngs. Although there is a smattering of performances with living, breathing actors, a salient feature of the reimagined 2020 package is the installation – a category to which this short recorded prosepoem (with simple accompanying visuals) by Bernardine Evaristo, the Booker-winning novelist, belongs.
Watching it on a screen in the heart of Woolwich, at the first iteration of many looping repeats – along with handfuls of other duly distanced members of the public – could hardly have represented a less uproarious night out. Having driven across town, at a snail’s pace thanks to the capital’s abysmal road management, it was an almost laughable investment of my time versus the dividend. But even though it’s now viewable online, with a transcript too, I’m still glad I went. Seeing it in situ affirmed its value as a welcome to the fast-regenerating locality (where Evaristo grew up) and it reinforced the sense that public art is going to be essential as we pull through the pandemic.
The lockdown period has torn at the social fabric – our sense of what came before, what comes after – and The Weavers of Woolwich feels like a modest act of binding things back together. Though the accompanying scrapbook of drawings and photos presents an initial image of a loom, the “weavers” that Evaristo is celebrating are the people of the vast, multifarious community that has informed this Thameside area’s rich history – that melting-pot dynamic emphasised by the plurality of voices reading the text.
“We are the weavers of Woolwich, who came here thousands of years ago,” it begins, glancing back at early settlers and later migration from the countryside too, with all the resulting misery of urban slum life. There’s an allusion to the racism that some immigrants encountered and the role the Royal Arsenal armaments factory played in giving Britain its imperial firepower. Yet while the cursory, catch-all approach teeters on pat sloganising – we get due reverence for the NHS, a nod to Black Lives Matter – the thrust is appreciative of the evolutionary nature of things. “We are the weavers of Woolwich, building on the past” runs one climactic phrase. In this wokeist age of toppled statues and simplistic denunciations this feels valuable, and urgent, a call to appreciate and augment, not decry and dismantle.
Perhaps consider this a 2020 Land of Hope and Glory, without jingoism on one side, recrimination on the other.
Available online at festival.org/ whats-on/gdif-weavers-of-woolwich/ The festival runs until Sept 12