“Your freedom to uphold / seeing Cavaliers of old / to kill you if they could / and rights from you withhold /Stand up now Diggers all!”
Was it all just a fever dream? A sunny Saturday lunchtime, and my folk choir is singing a 17th century folk ballad in Whitehawk, encouraging gardeners with pitchforks to resist the Civil War-era troops sent to subdue them.
The singing is real, the troops are re-enactors, and The Diggers are played by actual present-day community vegetable growers and food volunteers.
And Mark Thomas is going to be on stage later.
All this emerged from the brain of Victoria Melody, Brighton Festival Artist In Residence for East Brighton. Melody describes the day as “part re-enactment, part demonstration and part live art piece”.
She spends it dressed as Gerard Winstanley, founder of the pacifist Digger movement, who reclaimed common land for the growing of food for the people.
He believed “the earth was made a common treasury for all”; many centuries on, land is still in the hands of a tiny elite.
Still, today we locals eat food grown locally, by locals, and there is an encampment under the shadow of the Downs. This in itself feels a radical act, and a nod to all the work done by volunteers, activists and food banks in the absence of a functional welfare state.
Do the Whitehawk residents enjoying the spring sunshine understand what they are participating in? Perhaps some do, although one man is deeply confused to see a 400-year-old army massing on a patch of green in front of the Crew Club community centre, and one older lady sits and eats a banana amid the tumult.
There is a beautiful stage set up under Whitehawk hill, but most seem wary of it, instead preferring to watch from hay bales a safe distance away. This means brilliant local comedian Paggy performs mainly to an excited group of local kids, who literally punch the ground with laughter, especially at things they don’t understand, and talk back continuously.
Paggy engages, asking the kids what they do for a living (“annoying my sister”) and gamefully responses to their questions, even when they are in danger of derailing the entire set. It’s a very funny, chaotic quarter of an hour, and feels very much in the spirit of things: the comedian in the role of the entertainer-wanderer, and the kids playing themselves as the anarchic spirit of the future.
Later, there is the aforementioned Mark Thomas, who plans to do more with this idea, in partnership with Melody. Given his long track record of anti-establishment stunts that have actually made a real difference to people’s lives – funny AND useful, very rare for a stand-up – I’m sure this will happen, and I encourage anyone out there reading this to get involved with whatever it is they come up with.
The Brighton Folk Choir – of which your correspondent is a member – join Thomas on stage for a rousing final singalong of The Digger’s Song, and then a magician is introduced. It’s that kind of day: tv comedians alongside local kids, magicians performing on carrots grown in land salvaged from the margins.
This might not quite be a live art piece, but it’s certainly a template for the kind of world we all need to help build.
*****
jamesofwalsh 