when art became something to be good at

I remember the first time I ever thought I had to be good at something in order to do it.

It was an ordinary week in spring and we were leaving for school, hand-in-hand, wrapped up safely in coats that we weren’t yet old enough to refuse to wear. The air brimmed with hope and possibility and yet we paid no attention to how we were feeling and what that meant for we were in unconscious bumbling bliss, trusting that in every moment we were safe and held and that when we got into school, we’d be presented with a whole host of opportunities. We were unthinking, un-trying, safe to be and safe to do our best.

That day, we were presented with a new excitement, the Dance Festival, which was going to be big: multiple schools, auditions, rehearsals, a competition and a chance to win. Holly, Lucy, Georgia, Maya and just about all of my friends were excited so I decided to be excited too - not that I had any prior interest in dancing prior to that day. The Saturday morning tap-dancing classes that my sister and I had been enrolled in for years was a fierce disappointment when we realised tap dancing was not the same as ice skating, yet it had become a permanent fixture in our weekly routine. Still, we were hardly dancers, but I liked the idea that I could try for the Dance Festival, and so the next afternoon, we filed into the large hall for auditions.

We were taught a dance to the tune of a song from Hairspray, and I loved that everytime the song said “motion on the ocean”, we would make an ocean wave with our right arm. Then there was a quick bit where it sung “or the sun in the sky” and I had to be the sun and the sky in quick succession. Some took to the dance very quickly, I took to it less quickly.

I could smell the quality of the Dance Festival. No naff dance moves from our forty-something teachers, this felt really cool and it was led my Miss Hay who’s first name was Annabelle, which was cool and she was a dancer who’s hair wasn’t naturally blonde, she dyed it, which was also very cool.

Miss Hay was coming round tapping people who were not going to make it to the Dance Festival, and as she walked around,  everyone in the room started to ramp up their moves. I was creating deeper waves for my motion on the ocean when I was tapped on the shoulder and told to leave the hall. I was suddenly neither the sun, nor the sky, nor the ocean, nor cool enough to be considered for this paradisiacal world. 

That night my mum found me leafing listlessly through a library book on the floor. I wasn’t a big reader so she sat down with me and I cried loudly because all my friends would be rehearsing every lunch time now and I would be alone and now life required more than enthusiasm. I cried because an invisible line had been drawn between myself and dancers and I cried because if these lines could be so suddenly drawn - what was next to be no longer open to me? Was growing up going to be a series of slashes over hobbies, like dates on a calendar? 

Maybe I was not so enormous and maybe the gate is narrow and maybe we’re not as good as we thought we were. Maybe we needed to grow up and be realistic and look at ourselves differently, examine what we’re good at: maybe it was high time to grow up.

I do remember a key stage of growing up where there was a shift in art and creativity. Prior to year 4 (age 10), we all enjoyed the lesson Art. The paints, the clay or the sewing. I can’t remember anyone saying, “I can’t paint”, or “I don’t sew”. We were delighted to do some art…and to not be doing a regular lesson. We were choosing things, never thinking, never needing them to choose us back.

There was a girl called Emma in my class, she was exceptional at art. She was extremely neat with everything she did and she was the first of all of us to receive her pen licence (graduating from using solely pencil). That year, our classroom had the old vintage lift-up desks, the desks with lids and a compartment to put your belongings inside. Despite them being old, they were a huge novelty to us. The lift-up desks were a chance for personal space and individuality and a chance to stand out from my thirty fellow uniform-clad peers. 

Emma had learnt to do a sort of graffiti lettering and had written her name and bluetacked the sheet of paper with her name on the inside of the lid of her lift-up desk. It looked phenomenal. Soon enough, we had all requested our names to be written by Emma so that we too could have our names, in that font on the inside of our desks.

Upon reflection, we all had an infinite number of ways we could have customised and personalised our desks and yet, we all chose to have the same thing. There is of course nothing wrong with commissioning someone better than us to do something that we can’t do ourselves but I think it is interesting that to us at this stage, it meant more to us that it was good than it was ours. Our desks were personalised but they didn’t say anything about the desk owners. It had somewhere along the line become about the outcome rather than the enjoyment of the process.

As you rise higher in school years, you are suddenly met with the need to think differently about your school subjects. Suddenly there is a need to specialise, to choose subjects and to assess your strengths and weaknesses. The subjects deemed as not relevant to your career path or not your strength are ‘dropped’ - a word that feels appropriately drastic for the quick and often permanent disownment of them. It’s interesting that we cease doing some subjects, disregarding the fact that they actually do something to us. I am not good at art but perhaps art is good for me. I felt this about so many of my subjects, Maths, Dance, Drama, Spanish, D&T which now exist in a locked box that many of us call ‘i’m not that kind of person’.

This meant that we left some important things behind and picked up a casual writing-off of things that we can actually do and might actually be good for us. Life might be a dance festival that only some are invited to, yet, in my adult life i’ve been asking myself how we can start to invite ourselves back to things that we dropped, or things that felt like they dropped us before we were ready.