Swansea 'City of Sanctuary'

Ada's involved in a move to make Swansea a 'City of Sanctuary' to counter the nastiness of immigration controls and/or BNP. I was asked to do a piece on a dance-show called 'Oyster Bay' in which some asylum seekers had a hand:



What have asylum-seekers got to do with oysters? If Swansea still had oyster-beds, it might be a job, like cocklepicking. But overfishing and pollution killed the oysters, so there are no jobs in that. For anyone. Unless oysters can be helped to grow again. For the moment, oysters are Heritage, and Heritage is nothing if not Art.

Including Dance. Last summer Tandance – a local powerhouse I only heard about this month - did a show called Oyster Bay. All sorts of people were involved, from primary schools to colleges and several local, and not so local, dance groups. Tandance is funded to promote ‘education, integration, community engagement and social change.’ A tall order! But with research into once-and-future oystercatching went a widening net of local involvement, along the coast to Port Talbot and up the Swansea and Neath valleys.

One of the dance groups involved is Dynion, all male, another is Arabic, and behind the scenes, making boats and sails for props, asylum-seekers from several continents came and went. How many of them had their own experiences of setting sail? And getting washed up… And why dance, why art at all, for people just surviving?

Maybe it’s when you’re worst off that you most something to get you out of the rut. Unlike most other social activities, visual arts, music and dance don’t depend on language. In the Oyster show, these artforms went together. If asylum-seekers worked mainly on the artwork side, that’s because the long process through rehearsal to performance needs regular attendance. Which depends on a stability that most asylum seekers can only pray for.

Does it work, that little bit of distraction? Or does it just feel worse when you turn back to a painful past and uncertain future? Feedback was positive from the few asylum seekers who were able to see the show and report back. And some of us will know from our own hard times that a moment of warmth and light can go a long way. Sometime, somehow, somewhere, something better might be possible!

And for us, relatively secure in our ‘host community’, what’s in it for us? Walking along Swansea beach, I’ve often wondered about those oyster shells, and bits of coal that get washed up. Did somebody eat those oysters? Who dug the coal, did it fall in the sea, or was it pushed? In town, or on the bus, I wonder what’s behind different faces, darker skins.You can never tell what’s going on in someone else’s head, but the more sorts of people you get to know, the better you can guess, the more comfortable you feel in your own skin.

Carol Brown, the Arts Director of Tandance, recalls some little turning points over the past ten years or so. A white person saying. ‘That’s the first time I’ve touched a black skin.’ Like finding you can float! And a Townhill woman in a women’s yoga class who asked a Muslim woman - who’d somehow managed the session under her hijab - ‘What’s it like in there?’

Of course we’re different, Maybe the highest education of all is reaching out, exploring our differences together. Nothing human is foreign to me! Or as Carol put it when we talked in her Baglan office the other day ‘We are one whole…You cant be safe by closing your borders.’