When thinking about how to reflect this legacy, I decided to speak to a friend and colleague, Pervaiz Khan, who is now an academic working in Johannesburg (lecturer, Wits School of Arts, Wits University). We worked together from 1996 – 1998 on the development of The Drum, a Black led arts centre established in Aston, north Birmingham which ran from 1996 – 2016, with Pervaiz leading the programming while I did the project management towards establishing the new centre.  Sadly, the Drum closed in 2016 due to funding difficulties, and it’s now hard to find much online to document its achievements. 

PERVAIZ: 

The great plus I had in my early childhood, from a working class background in Small Heath in Birmingham, was the Church of England primary school, with only one class per year.

It had a big ethos of the arts – for example they did pottery and we got taken to the mac (Midlands Arts Centre) to fire our pots, we made a mosaic for a pond, we made a puppet theatre and every year the headmaster would assemble a proper stage with curtains and everything else for the annual Christmas play (he was the son of a mining engineer). Secondary school seemed boring after all that, but this experience did give me some beginnings.

However, I had no idea about being able to go into the arts when I was at school. I hadn’t done a full set of ‘O’ levels, but I managed to get into Bourneville College to do A levels and make up for my O levels. But I was bored! I bunked off to watch films and realized that I was not interested in what I was doing – A levels in Government & Politics, Religious Knowledge and Sociology.  

I started to look around. The Youth Opportunities programme (YOPS) existed at that time, and I succeeded in getting a YOPS¹ job for 6 months at Malvern Street adventure playground and community farm. It was there for young people who came and took part in workshops or play, mainly after school. There was a photographic dark room and woodwork facilities.  As I had done a bit of photography they encouraged me to lead the photographic activities, giving me two weeks before Easter to spend in  the darkroom to get used to it. I was there for 6 months, some of the most important months in my life. 

After this, I got a job as a youth and community worker and I also got involved in Trinity Arts, a community arts organisation. They had a darkroom and film making equipment, facilities for pottery and silk screen printing and a publishing press. It was on a side road in Small Health but then moved into the high street – Coventry Rd – getting a shop front which made it really interesting.   

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Photomontage by Pervaiz Khan.

Most of the people running things had been to art school and then got involved in community arts. I had a note from someone the other day saying what a great time we had and how it had changed their lives. 

There was a sense of community and people were there because they wanted to be there, not on a college course, it was not about having to pay to do a course. You had access to people running the workshops who were all highly skilled and had decided to use their skills in this way. Not surprisingly I got into silkscreen printing and pottery. I was also interested in writing – they published a book of my poetry – some of it was reprinted in the 1990s by Hamish Hamilton.  We used to organize performance poets to come from London – James Berry and others – and I learnt about how to apply for a bit of money from the Arts Council. 

I then had a wonderful opportunity as part of a theatre project in London which resulted from an invitation from Parminder Vir, who was based in Birmingham in the late 70s (employed by MAAS – the Minorities’ Arts Advisory Service).

The director was Joseph Mydell, and the writer was Don Kinch. It was based at the Commonwealth Institute and funded by the Arts Council and Gulbenkian, with a series of workshops for 6 months and then a performance. Joe Mydell had worked in New York and was good at passing on skills.  We learnt contemporary and African dance; we learnt to play musical instruments.

I was the only person who wasn’t Caribbean – though I discovered some of them had Indian aunties – nobody made an issue of it. I was part of it. It was wonderful. A life changing moment.

When that finished I came back to Birmingham. I joined in with Wide Angle which by then had emerged out of Trinity, which fell apart because of the tensions amongst staff about the direction it should go in. The photography and filmmaking part of Trinity got funding and became WideAngle. It had the same work ethos; children would come to the playschemes, and OAPs would come on their own and people would share skills. You were in an environment where you could learn with people from completely different social backgrounds. Some people had a master’s in photography from the Royal College of Art and would come to use the dark room and pass on their skills. 

BELINDA:
Tell me about what happened next and how did what you had learnt in that early stage influence your next steps, e.g. with Triangle.

PERVAIZ:

My next job – part time – was to set up Vokani, a community film exhibition circuit. The management committee was made up of community organisations from across the West Midlands.

Vokani is a Zulu word meaning To Awaken – as one of the founders was South African. I would select a programme of work and take the films around with a 16mm projector in taxis and buses to community centres, schools and youth clubs and Black community groups and show the films.  It felt like the toybox to play with. There were catalogues of films to choose from which I’d order and would only have read about and watched just before I showed them. Every film screening had a discussion with youth club members, community workers or whoever else. I loved the idea of involving people. It wasn’t just the idea of showing people something – you would discuss and engage with people – like we did later with the post show discussions for Duende, the theatre company I set up – so they would take away more than what they had seen, they would think about the ideas they had shared with other people.

After a couple of years, I got a job as Head of Media at the Triangle Arts Centre.  I was only 24, very young to be doing that job. I was responsible for the cinemas, the best media library outside London and the photography gallery which was run by Derek Bishton. Pete Walsh ran the cinema and Neil Gammie ran the library and I was their boss. At my first meeting – you asked about my community arts influence – I sat down with them and said your combined working experience is more than my age – my job isn’t to tell you what to do, it’s to come up with some new ideas of what we could do together. Ten 8 was based there and Derek was involved in that. It was a thriving atmosphere. A second cinema space opened when I was there which was about education not profit, so I  set up some courses which went well.   The Triangle was really important because it came out of the Birmingham Arts Lab, which came out of that 60s and 70s ethos

The community experience was always important, it never went away. After two years the Triangle hit a funding crisis and eventually closed. I moved on to further develop my own creative skills, working on films, writing plays and programming events, which led to the role at the Drum, and to setting up my own theatre company, Duende. 

Through this immersion in community arts early on in my life, I learnt that there were levels of change you could bring about, enabling people to express themselves and through that process they could become more rounded human beings. Some people would want to take it further – there were some who went to college, got exhibitions and made work.

It was a grounding space to immerse people in not just the artistic practice but more generally in knowledge. 

BELINDA:
Tell me about what you are doing now?   

PERVAIZ:

A lot of my energy goes into discussion and debates around the importance of African cinema, which I do outside my academic job (teaching film studies, including scriptwriting).

The project Reframing Africa was organised by me with other colleagues to raise awareness that there  are great African films, but they don’t get shown at the cinemas here or in other parts of Africa.  I have been to Kenya, Ghana and Uganda which has allowed me to tap into a good range of discussion and debates around African cinema and has resulted in a book.

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Book cover image of Reframing Africa.

My PhD is on Barney Simon, founder of The Market Theatre. The background reading includes how community arts workshops took off in South Africa in the 70s, as people brought ideas back from their travels.   Barney worked briefly with Joan Littlewood at Theatre Royal Stratford East towards the end of the 50s – behind the bar – but she invited him to participate in the workshops.

And coming full circle, I still have a photomontage I did at Trinity Arts on my wall!

Utterance: The Music of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan – Released 1990.

Asian Dub Foundation – Enemy of the Enemy ADF (Live at The Astoria 2004).

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