Three Faces of Bradford: David Oxtoby, Andrea Dunbar and David Hockney
Screened online 26 - 30 June 2020 as part of Bradford Literary Festival
Stereotyped as a city of industry and mills, Bradford’s long history of art and writing can easily be overlooked. Three Faces of Bradford refocuses our gaze, with an exclusive screening of three short films made between 1975 and 1980 from the BBC Arena archives. Highlighting artists David Hockney and David Oxtoby and playwright Andrea Dunbar, the documentaries capture their distinctive individual creativity yet also their shared Bradford roots.
Here, you can still watch responses to the Arena film from four Bradfordians noted for their contributions to the arts today: Bradford Community Broadcasting director Mary Dowson, artist Mick Manning, actor Kat Rose-Martin and scriptwriter Tajinder Singh Hayer. Read and listen to new poems from Yorkshire poets Adam Lowe and Rommi Smith and then try your hand at writing your local memoirs, with a masterclass from author Monique Roffey.
THREE FACES OF BRADFORD
ARENA: Décor by David Hockney (Director: Colin Nears, 1975)
ARENA: The King and I – David Oxtoby (Director: Alan Lewens, 1979)
ARENA: Andrea Dunbar (Director: Nigel Williams, 1980)
These three films were made quite independently of each other and date from the early days of Arena. The Hockney film appeared in the very first edition, when Arena was a magazine programme addressing topical subjects in the arts before it became a series of single films on single subjects.
The three films tell very different stories, yet combining them reveals common ground. The three protagonists certainly all confirm Yorkshire’s famous reputation for straight talking but, most of all, they share an uncompromising commitment to their own particular vision.
For Dunbar, her writing is an affirmation of herself, it confronts deprived and straitened circumstances in her own life. Oxtoby has adopted another world, the one he entered in his teens; he’s an adept in the wild and unruly church of true rock ‘n’ roll. Hockney has enjoyed incomparable success. He quickly became the darling of the art world and the transatlantic media, as well as being that rare phenomenon, an artist as popular as he is feted by the critics. He approaches the uncharted territory of high opera with characteristic assurance and charm.
Hockney has always said exactly what he thinks – about smoking, whether the great classic painters of old could draw as well as we thought, his sexuality – but central to it all is his own artistic vision. He seems ever intrigued by the possibilities art holds for him. That’s exactly how he approaches the new challenge of designing sets for the opera.
The Rake’s Progress – music by Stravinsky, libretto co-written by WH Auden, based on Hogarth, staged at Glyndebourne – this is high art and high life. In every respect it’s at the other end of the spectrum from Arbor, Andrea Dunbar’s play. At Arena we never privileged one over the other. Incorporating both the high and the popular has been, perhaps, Arena’s most defining characteristic.
With little to go on but her own young life, Dunbar tells the story of a teenage girl who becomes pregnant and how she deals with it. The script, unforgiving and unsentimental, is worthy of Ken Loach. The film was directed by my colleague, the dramatist and author Nigel Williams. “The honesty and directness of her writing was irresistible,” he told me, “She was an amazing natural writer. She’d had one advantage — encouragement from her drama teacher at her comprehensive who told her she could write. He recognised her talent as I hope did I.”
Dunbar’s art is rooted in life, Oxtoby’s is rooted in thrills and glory. The effect of American rock ‘n’ roll on the youth of the depressed post-war Britain of the 1950s cannot be overestimated. The late John Peel, a man of Oxtoby’s age, observed that the first time he heard Little Richard, he realised “a quantum leap had taken place in the history of mankind.”
Like Peter Blake, his contemporary at the Royal College of Art, Oxtoby is an unabashed fan (Hockney was at the RCA at the same time). That devotion spawned British Pop Art. While the Beatles, the Stones and others tried to emulate Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry in music, Oxtoby did it in paint. His skill is as easy as his manner — confident, humorous and dedicated.
Three faces, three different voices — one Bradford.
Anthony Wall
26 May 2020
Responses
A film of responses from Mary Dowson, Mick Manning, Kat Rose-Martin and Tajinder Singh Hayer.
Responding to the film
Mary Dowson is the Director of pioneering community radio station Bradford Community Broadcasting (BCB) and interim Chair of Bradford 2025, Bradford's bid for City of Culture 2025. A co-founder of BCB, she has overseen its development and success for 25 years. She came to Bradford from London in the late 1970s to study and, other than two years in Italy, has made Bradford her home. Building on a background in youth and community work and as a lecturer at Bradford College, she has combined her passion for radio with a belief in people and communities and the importance of creativity and culture. Mary served for seven years as Chair of the Community Media Association, successfully lobbying for the establishment of full-time Community Radio licences. She also was a board member of the Unesco City of Film for many years. She received an Honorary Fellowship from Bradford College in 2017 and a BEM in the Queen's Honours 2018 for service to Community Radio. Mary also sings in a six-piece women's acapella group.
Mick Manning MA (RCA), FEA, FBC is an artist and writer born in 1959. He grew up in Haworth and was educated at comprehensive schools in Keighley before attending Bradford College of Art in 1978 and eventually a three-year MA at the Royal College of Art. Later, he ran the Illustration Course at The Glasgow School of Art. His latest book is Near the Bear, North, published by Design for Today. He also has a back catalogue of over 80 books for children (jointly illustrated with his partner Brita Granström). These include: The Brontes: Children of the Moors and The Wordsworths (both published by Hachette). His book awards include five English Association Awards and two nominations for the world’s biggest children’s literary award, the ALMA. He is an elected Honorary Fellow of The English Association (2011) and Bradford College (2015) and is also listed as one of the College’s 175 Heroes.
Kat Rose-Martin is a writer and actor born and based in Bradford. She is currently developing work for theatre and TV and won the 2020 Kay Mellor Fellowship. She has performed or written for: BBC Children’s TV; Shakespeare’s Globe; Audible; Northern Broadsides; Hull Truck; Freedom Studios; Sneaky Experience; Out of Joint; Sheffield Theatres; Leeds Playhouse; and Paines Plough. She has also written about Andrea Dunbar. http://www.spotlight.com/4290-8977-8061
Tajinder Singh Hayer was born and raised in Bradford. He is a scriptwriter and has worked with Freedom Studios, Ragged Edge Production, the BBC (Radio 3 and 4) and the Asian Network in the past. Tajinder was Writer in Residence at BBC Manchester and also at the West Yorkshire Playhouse from March-September 2004, a member of the Lime Pictures/Liverpool Everyman writers group in 2007 and an Associate Writer with Peshkar Productions, Oldham from 2007 to 2009. He currently lectures in Creative Writing at Lancaster University. His research clusters around writing for the stage, radio, film and television. He is interested in British Asian subject matter and the genres of sci-fi, fantasy and horror (with a particular interest in the post-apocalyptic subgenre). Much of his work is informed by living in Bradford, a city which still haunts his writing.
Poetry
Poetic responses from Adam Lowe and Rommi Smith
Commissioned poets
Adam Lowe is the UK's LGBT History Month Poet Laureate and Yorkshire's Olympic Poet for 2012. He is a writer, educator, publisher and performer from Leeds, though he currently lives on t'other side of the Pennines, in Manchester. Adam is a guest lecturer at the University of Leeds and the University of Central Lancashire, and has worked with The Poetry School and English PEN. He was named one of the '20 best writers under 40' in Leeds for the LS13 Awards and his chapbook Precocious was a reader nomination for the Guardian First Book Prize. He was a finalist for the Venture Poetry Awards, Eric Hoffer Award and Lambda Literary Awards, and was selected as one of ten advanced poets for The Complete Works II programme, where he was mentored by poet Patience Agbabi. The Complete Works was managed by Nathalie Teitler and founded by Bernardine Evaristo. See adam-lowe.com
Rommi Smith is an award-winning poet, playwright, theatre-maker, performer and librettist. She is a three-time BBC writer-in-residence; her work has been broadcast on programmes including Poetry Please, The Verb and Melvyn Bragg’s acclaimed series The Matter of the North. She was the inaugural British Parliamentary Writer-in-Residence and was inaugural Poet-in-Residence for Keats’ House, Hampstead. In 2018, she founded her own production company, 125TH& MIDNIGHT. Rommi is finalising her practice-led PhD, a re-reading of the classic black blues and jazz women, and is a Visiting Scholar at City University New York. She is currently collaborating with composer and baritone Roderick Williams on a new work for soprano Carolyn Sampson, to be premiered at the Australian Festival of Chamber Music (July 2020). Shortlisted for a Southbank Show Award, Rommi’s plays have been performed at the Edinburgh Festival among others and commissioned by various theatre companies. She is recipient of a Hedgebrook Fellowship (USA) and won The Northern Writers’ Prize for Poetry 2019 (chosen by the poet Don Paterson). She was recently awarded a prestigious Cave Canem fellowship in the USA. www.rommi-smith.co.uk Twitter: @rommismith Soundcloud: RommiSmith
Masterclass
With Monique Roffey
Monique Roffeyis an award-winning Trinidadian-born British writer of novels, essays, a memoir and literary journalism. Her novels have been translated into five languages and shortlisted for several major awards, (the Orange, Encore, Orion and COSTA Fiction Award) and, in 2013, Archipelago won the OCM BOCAS Award for Caribbean Literature. With the Kisses of His Mouth and The Tryst are works which examine female sexuality and desire. Her essays have appeared in The New York Review of Books, Boundless magazine, The Independent, Wasafiri and Caribbean Quarterly. She is a Lecturer in Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University.
Interviews
