Julie Mac

Read the full interview

Date of interview: 18th August 2023

Content notes: the Troubles, monarchy, colonialism, hostile state policies, police violence, anti-immigration policies, class, war, Windrush, Alzheimers, elder care, psychiatric survivorship, disability, rape within warfare, human remains, DWP, institutional violence, legal discrimination/racism, HIV

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Jet Moon

Morning Mac, do you feel right to go ahead with some questions?

Julie Mac   

Yeah, I’d love to. I’m really excited to do this. Yes.

Jet Moon

Fantastic. Sounds so good. I feel like it’s a real, complete luxury for me to get to have these conversations.

Julie Mac  

Hopefully. It’s a great project.

Jet Moon  

All right, so, um, we’ve had a few email exchanges and in one of those you spoke about our conversation being ‘from one misfit to another’, and often ‘being an outsider among outsiders’. Do you want to talk to how that applies to you and how you define yourself as a survivor?

Julie Mac

Okay, I’ll start with why do I think of myself as a misfit among misfits or an outsider, definitely among outsiders. Because I was born into a family of rebels: my family are Irish, and they come from a very disavowed relationship at the time of the Union. My father’s Catholic, and my mother’s Protestant and they ran away to be together. They lived in Birkenhead where eventually my father got a job with Cammell Laird’s shipping company, which is where I was born. But I was always raised to believe we would go back to Ireland, one day, there was a romantic notion about home. 

And so I had this sense from the beginning that we didn’t really belong here. And we were always on the move, I can’t tell you how many different homes I lived in as a child, that we lived in. And many times I was placed with one grandmother or the other because of events at home, and violence at home. It feels to me when I look back, that they lived out a lot of the sectarian violence and the struggles around the table, but also a lot of pain that they were carrying from each of their families, which of course is…we’re talking about people from contested land, that this current King Big Ears believes he owns and that for 600 years of imperialism, that monarchy- and the kind of elite that’s attached to that – believe those resources and that land belongs to England and no, it doesn’t. 

So only the other day, I was going to sign up for an upskills course in digital computers or you know, digitising your computer understanding blah, blah, you can tell until I’m a luddite just the way I speak. And one of the first things we were obliged to do was sign up to British values and I said “I can’t do that”…. I know. What the fuck? …I stayed for a little while and then I realised I was on the wrong course in the wrong place anyway, because suddenly I looked around and the tutor there said, right, can everybody find the “shift” key. And I thought, “oh, we’re starting from a really low place here”, finding the Shift key on your keyboard. And I thought, “I don’t want to waste anyone’s time,” there weren’t enough computers to go around, there was a couple of us playing on a cardboard layout of a computer board, a keyboard. So I thought I’m in the wrong place again. 

But that very moment where I was asked to sign up to British values, I said “nah I don’t”, I can’t collude with this. I’m sure this has come from Brexit or something. But I didn’t vote for us to leave the European Union. And I don’t vote for the fourth green field, the six counties in the north, the contested land of Ireland to be in possession of this monarchy, who I didn’t vote for, nor should it be in possession of this government who I didn’t vote for, or this prime minister who none of us had an opportunity to vote for. So I said I’m going to leave to allow this space for somebody else. But in that moment, I realised here I am yet again – an outsider among outsiders, you know. This was a free course given to Hackney residents who were poor down on their luck, no income coming in, and they wanted to offer us free computer skills. All very noble until you’re asked to tick that box: “Agree to British values”.

Jet Moon  

It sounds like comp-…. its compliance. And it’s also a way of getting those council workers or whoever’s running that course is doing a kind of monitoring around people’s status. You know, like when you go to the NHS, and it’s like, how long have you lived here? Or, you know, are you eligible for this service? It’s this kind of low-level monitoring and picking people up, I think. 

I think it’s very decentring when you continually find yourself to be in that place. And I, you know, I’m really interested in not only you know, yourself as a survivor, but you’ve continued for a long time as a person making work and getting it out there. Which is quite different from starting, you know, like, keeping going is a whole ‘nother thing.

Julie Mac  

Sometimes I get weary, you know, I’m kind of tired of hearing the word resilience, or you’re so resilient. And I think actually, sometimes it’s really tough, really tough to keep going. But what’s the other option? Do you know what I mean? This is my life’s blood. This is the breath that keeps my heart pulsing, you know, my artwork, the creative theatre making, filmmaking – whenever I’m making (I’ve been involved in a visual arts exhibition recently). But whatever it is, it keeps me alive. And it’s the only way I can actually talk truth to power. 

You know, I guess I’ve been located as mad all of my life. And I didn’t get a brain injury until the 5th March 1994, courtesy of the Metropolitan Police down here in London. That’s another story for later. But in terms of as a child, I remember the social services getting involved in our family from when I was the age of 10, or something. I was placed in care with X when I was about three and a half, four. I don’t know how long I was in care, I remember the very day that me and X were left on the hospital steps. And I remember then feeling like an outsider, because I looked down and we both had our slippers on. And I knew that was wrong, we were in slippers outdoors, and we should have had sandals or shoes on. And I remember that very, very clearly. And I remember the day my, um, yeah, I have to say mine, but her maternal grandmother is the one that saved us, who got us out, sprung us out of the care home.

I don’t know what, six weeks, six months later, I have no clue. I have no memory of what went on between I can’t even remember the inside of the building, all that I remember is the feel of X’s hand and the fingernails in the palm of my hand and feeling ashamed that we have slippers on outdoors, you know, outsiders among outsiders again. And that was the beginning really of that kind of roll on with the services getting involved in our family. So by the age of 19, I’d done my first time in psychiatric hospital and so on. And I decided about the age of 22, that I was going to train as a drama therapist, because I thought nobody’s going to do this again, I understand some of the structures, but I couldn’t quite get the thinking behind it. Like, what made them think they could just be so intrusive in a family unit? What made them feel they were entitled to intrude, you know? What made them feel they could take apart our personalities, and try and restructure it in a way that suited them best to understand their concept of normal? 

And so I went off and trained as a drama therapist and then trained in psychodrama. And that was purely because one of the shrinks that I saw, a psychiatrist in Nottingham, one of the many clinics said, “I think you’re too sensitive for theatre. Have you thought about becoming a therapist? I think you’ve got a very listening ear, and you’re an empath at heart”. And I thought, “You know what, why not?” So I did. So I went and I really enjoyed the training. I was the youngest person on that training course. And that actually stood me in good stead because I was looking at this demographic of very middle-class people who were academics. And it was almost like, there was a sudden cultural interest in the poverty of the working class or in the sort of how can I describe it? Oh, yeah, go ahead. Sorry.

Jet Moon  

I just want to ask what year it was?

Julie Mac   

That I began me training?

Jet Moon  

When you say the sudden interest in the poverty of the working class, you know, I’m trying to place it in a time,

Julie Mac   

Early 1980s. So I think it was when we were just coming out of the Falklands War. And a lot of our young people were disaffected around politics, Margaret Thatcher was becoming unpopular, in some ways; the sinking of the Belgrano; the fact that she looked so excited the night before we went into the war in the Falklands; the fact that most of us didn’t know where the Falklands was, honest to god, doesn’t matter what your education was, really (I thought it might have been near the Shetlands). When I found out it was Spanish islands on the edge of you know, Argentina, it’s like, “Really? What are we doing? Sending forces over there with these massive battleships? We’re going into war for God’s sake”. Anyway, let’s not get started on war, because clearly, that was where I began in a house full of rebels, re-running the war in the north of Ireland round around the dinner table, you know. Anyway, but also, we were a poor family with a lot of financial insecurity, food insecurity, which I feel like we’re right back there again right now. And that’s why I consider myself a misfit among misfits, especially in disability arts or mental health system survivors, you know, I don’t fit the bill.

Jet Moon  

And then just probably do a bit of a jump. So you collaborate with other people and you, I mean, you also describe that process of like, how you have learned skills and um, you wrote, co-wrote “Let Me Stay” with your mom, writing about Alzheimer’s, you said, you know, four years ago. Can you talk about collaboration and why you do it? I mean, that’s a very particular collaboration. But I am interested in that process. It has so many levels of being with other people. And I believe that that process of acknowledgement is a really core survival activity. You know, even for me this process of interviewing, I’m like “oh, yeah, well, that’s something that will go to the public”. But, for me to sit one to one with other people, is of huge importance, personally, you know, to do that sharing of stories.

Julie Mac   

Yeah, I hear ya, and it’s the thing I miss most during the last three years of the pandemic and its impact, and in the first year, God, I went nuts, I was clawing the walls. Because what I miss most is hearts beating in the same room, exchanging stories that literally, we feel an affect, we feel moved by, our bodies change, you know, the hairs on the back of our neck, you know, or the freeze in our guts, or the tension in our bodies when we’re listening to aspects of somebody else’s story. That leap of surprise, when we recognise somebody else is on the same path, or, wow, we’ve got crossovers. 

Do you know what I mean? Those connections really, really excite me. And I think it’s the essence of being human. One of the reasons I’ve made theatre more often than I’ve made film, is because for me, theatre is about the process of becoming human together. So I might start off with an idea of a story, or a script, I might even have the bones of a script, which I call the rehearsal draft. It’s like a map that we take together in the rehearsal space, whether it’s a room or I don’t know, it could be outside in the field of a care home, which has happened before now. Collaboration is essential, because it’s about our connection. As human beings, what we do together is dependent on the skills that we feel we have, we can contribute to the team. 

And it may be that I’ve decided, I really want a visually impaired consultant, but somebody who really loves soundscape and is happy to experiment with binaural sound, you know, from four directions, 360 degrees. I want to work with a choreographer who can actually excite me about where we can get those voices to dance in space, when they become intimate when they move away. What does that do to our bodies, when we hear those sounds choreographed, close, further away, moving as they speak, or run or whatever, you know, and all of those people that bring the different ingredients of dramaturgy, or what I call the “aesthetics of access”, are essential to me. 

And so collaboration is about building teams in unexpected ways in unexpected places, and what I love and probably really pisses some people off, is that I love experimenting and testing. I’m not traditional in the modes of access I use or the way I use them at all. And I’ve sat in rooms where I’ve had a whole team of people who are probably expert witnesses in the spaces and places they’ve worked in the sector. And I’ll sit there and go, “But that’s great. But I want to try something new”. 

Which is what I did with “Quiet Rebels” with Hassan Mahamdallie. And what I love about working alongside Hassan was he was completely willing to experiment and let me go bold and we both went bold together. Do you know we played with the timing, we notched creative captions in certain places and other places, we had integrated pre-recorded filmed footage of the sign language interpreter in character, as part of the witnesses in this massive hunt for the culprits of a murder. So we run it almost like an old pulp fiction investigation, with the key detective being the audio describer, as well as the chief witness, and the key detective being a narrator like a narrative voice if you like, but into the future, because we’d written it as if Enoch Powell had been our prime minister.

Jet Moon  

On…just come back around to “Let Me Stay” and the experience of writing with your mom and you also said something about, you know, ‘I might do something out in a field or, you know, out of sight of a care home and I’ve actually done that.’ And it’s I…trying to get back to that experience of working one-to-one, not so much with the people who are involved in the technical – and technical is such a technical word, you know, that I feel that adds a lot more emotion to it than that – but more than people who might collaborate from a really source level, and is, as you said, that real embodied feeling of being together and what happens there. So yeah,

Julie Mac   

I think it’s important to say that it was never possible to completely co-write the work together. But we certainly co-created and what I learned to do was sit right back to lead from behind. Because my mother had always wanted to be a star of each and every play I’ve ever made. Always. She had Alzheimer’s for a long time, 16 years. And she was given the diagnosis quite early in life. She was 68 when she got the diagnosis, she’d already showed signs of dissociated behaviour. And I thought it was trauma related, because she had a really difficult life and some difficulties in her early 60s that I thought had had an impact. And who knows the truth, they gave her that diagnosis, it was useful to all of us because we got some services at least. And we then pulled together as a family. 

So I made absolutely certain that I had the family involved, that we had both my sisters who had Power of Attorney who were looking through the materials, listening to the stories, watching what she was doing. They weren’t always in the room because when they realised how much she enjoyed the process, they just let us away with it. I had Caglar Kimyoncu who is one of my favourite filmmakers to work alongside. He has been a collaborator with me over 16 years and would have been more so but these last three years we’ve kind of lost touch because of our separate isolation in zoom tombs. But Caglar fell in love with Shirley McNamara, my mother, known as Shirley Mac Queen of the Mersey, and he fell in love with her as a subject which was a delight to watch. She would always call him Charlotte and I’d say “please, that’s perhaps a bit offensive because Charlotte is actually Caglar and he is male, and Charlotte is quite a female name”. She went “I don’t think Charlotte minds that, do you Charlotte?”, at which point Charlotte was like cheering and egging her on. 

Every time he turned the lens towards her, she moved into these extraordinary poses. And I’d say “Who are you now Shirley?” She’d go: “i’m Gina Lollobrigida” or whoever it was in her fantasy. And I just love that process. So yes, we had careful safeguards in place to make sure that there was no emotional harm, or no further harm than she’d already lived through. We had permission from the care home because we went and took photographs of her and interviewed her but she was in a care home for the last four and a half years of her life. But right up till then, we’d managed to keep her at home with the dog, the trusty dog, who I later took on. Yeah, what can I say? That was quite an interesting process. It was deeply personal, sometimes very raw. I recorded a whole process with the social services when two of them came in to interview her at home, didn’t film it. And I’ve never done anything with the recordings except to stay faithful to her voice throughout the process. 

Because what she did, I thought was extraordinary. And for me, that’s exemplary of somebody who’s been a survivor all of her life. I told her two people were coming to interview her. And she said “Of course they are. I’ve had a very long career”. And I was thinking, “Okay, that’s great, don’t know where her career is but never mind”, I don’t know what she did. Clearly, she’s been a film model for Caglar for 15 years now. So maybe she thinks she’s a film star. She went upstairs to put her favourite dancing dress on and her favourite shoes, and she was looking around for them. And I said, “what you’re looking for?” “I’m looking for my favourite shoes”. And I said, “What colour are they, I’ll help?” And she said, “Erm glitter grey”. I said, “Do you mean silver?” “Yes, I said that, go and get them”. So in her mind’s eye, she told me what she wanted. So sometimes I’d have to interpret for her. And I’d go through a tick list in my head. Because at one point, she caught me crying, and I very rarely cried in front of her. But she told me something that was really touching. And she saw me weeping, and she went “go and get a dib-dab for your hub”. And I knew by what she said that she meant me to get a tissue or something to mop my face: “go and get a dib-dab for your hub”. So we ended up with a kind of shorthand, metaphors in an extraordinary language. 

So she chose the title of that play from her favourite song at that time, she chose the clips from Caglar’s film footage that he selected things that he thought she would find interesting, and that we would find interesting as part of telling their story. And then she would go through and choose what she was going to have. She chose the end of the show, which was extraordinary. And she chose for us to sing together. So I had that filmed footage of her at the end, and I was singing with her and correcting her when she got the words wrong and all that. But that was me live and her pre-recorded. And a lot of the technical stuff, she had no say on. Occasionally she chose things we thought were completely random. There was an image that I tried to encourage her not to use of seven children and…looking very poor, and they were all sort of in this very sepia photograph. And I said, “Well, who are they? “She said “they’re all my children”. And actually, when I looked into it, it was my father’s family when they were young. And I thought, “Okay, well, she’s made that work in her mind”, but there were moments that I would think “Okay, we’re gonna get into trouble now”.

 Because we went to the DaDa festival once when I was up for an award. And I’ve been telling her about it, to see if she wanted to come. It was going to be part of the show in terms of the footage we use and the story we tell, but she kept forgetting. And on the day in question, I was suited and booted, and she saw me about to leave and she said, “Where are you going?” and I said, “I’m just going over to the Hilton Hotel”. She said, “You’re not gonna without me”. I said “Well, that’s lovely. So you’re going to come tonight?” and she said “I’m coming now”. And I said, “Okay, you’ve got your gardening clothes on”. She said “I don’t care, they’re warm”. I said, “Do you really want to go to the Hilton Hotel in your Wellingtons?” She said “yes”. So I thought “I don’t think I can bear to take her in her Wellingtons so I could just about live with her in a corduroy trousers and sloppy cardigan, because we put a beautiful pendant on top and people have been distracted. But thought I’m not going with her in them muddy wellies. So I said “how do you think I’d look in these Wellingtons with this suit?” So I took her wellies off very carefully and I put them on and stomped about the house and she said “You look ridiculous get them off”. So gradually, I got her to put the other shoes on, and off we went to the Hilton Hotel, where she literally worked the room as if it was her party and talked to every journalist there telling them all it was her own work. 

At one point, I overheard her talking to John from the Liverpool Echo. and she said her father was a poet now. And he said, “Oh, that’s wonderful, Shirley, was he published anywhere?” She said “I don’t know, I’ve never met him”. So she was an extraordinary human. That piece of work was very much her, right to the heart of it. And one of the things she really wanted people to know which she would come back to whenever she had her moment of kind of clarity, it was like, these red-hot coals come in through a wall of cotton wool, and she’d say “it’s not as bad as you think, you know, I mean, you don’t pay a bill. And if you do, you don’t know about it, it’s not as bad as they tell, you don’t give up. don’t ever give up”. Which i think is a crucial message for other survivors, particularly families who are getting a new diagnosis, somebody they love has just had a new diagnosis. It isn’t all a negative trope, no surrender. As Shirley Mac would tell you. 

Jet Moon  

Listening to you, you know, I’m also thinking about you know, those choices about what to make work about and, and yours, your choice about what you make work about. And, um, I was thinking of, you know, you brought work and yourself into the survivor writers workshop, and you spoke about that personal loss, you know, losing a partner, and, you know, and within that very closed space, some of the taboo associated with survivorship, and our being able to voice the unacceptable. I don’t know, I mean, I remember the questions that says “Do you feel comfortable to recap on that?” but I guess I’m more interested in a) How a safe space functions for you? You know, like having that for yourself. And, um, you know, like, what’s, you know, that choice between what’s external and then like, what’s, what’s for you, you know, is there a line somehow? What gets shown? How you can like, bring something into a space where it’s not going any further?

Julie Mac   

That’s an interesting question, because I think I’m very guarded, particularly on Zoom, because I’m going to come up against people I will never meet again, I’m going to come up against people, or at least, little boxes of people or the top half of them. I don’t even know if they’ve got arms or legs or bodies at all, so it’s all head and shoulders, isn’t it, which I find disconcerting in the first place. And it’s not that I don’t feel comfortable with unusual bodies or unruly minds, because that’s been very much my normal world. 

(redacted) …That’s my normality. However, what do I do? I think I have strong boundaries for a start. And I’ve had to, since I was a kid, I learned who to talk to about what very early on: what remained inside the family unit? what did we talk to the people invading our home about? So when the social services come in, I never forget, we had a social worker called Melody. She lasted five minutes. But I remember coming in, and her asking us what we thought was wrong. And we closed ranks and said, “there’s nothing wrong”. And it was that sense of what is the taboo and how do we stay safe? What do we say? And where do we say it. It’s almost like you become multilingual. Then when I trained as a therapist, I learned some very strong boundaries. I learned swiftly about how power can move around a group, particularly in groups where there’s a certain elite present. And those people clearly live with a sense of entitlement and privilege. And I would work hard to unpick those boundaries very delicately in a room where we can see each other and play with that together. When we’re working on screen, it’s a very different experience.

Jet Moon  

I mean, you talk about boundaries, but I also remember, you know, that it flows both ways. And that I felt that when you came into that group, with the desire to talk about something that was taboo, that you were really careful in how you brought it up. And I felt it was not only your own sense of like, well, I’m checking, but with other people, you know, they’re like this sense of care that flowed really both ways.

Julie Mac  

Yeah. I agree. I mean, I think it’s crucial. Actually, you created a very safe space in that workshop anyway, because the whole thing was about how we care for ourselves and how we care for each other. And to be mindful, we have no understanding, really, of what other people’s stories are and what they bring into that space. I have to say, without naming names, one of the worst experiences I’ve had was when I was invited to deliver a workshop online for a group of students. And I was told in advance, there was one team of students on. When it actually went on the day, there were 83 students on this ridiculous quilt of zoom tombs. And so I was very concerned to begin with, because some of the work I was talking about was Staging trauma. 

So I said: “Who’s looking after these different groups of people? How many tutors on board? How many breakout rooms do we have? And how do we look after 83 students and the four tutors on board because you don’t know what the tutors are bringing with them either”. So I’m very, very careful. But I’ve never worked for that company, or that – it’s a university, of course – again, just because I thought “Wow, this feels very dangerous, it feels it could cause more harm. I’m not sure what people are actively learning. And I don’t know when that little stickle brick drops off, is that because your WiFi’s fucked up wherever you are? Or is it because you’re quite distressed by something I’ve just raised?” I have no way of knowing I would constantly check in with people. So yes, I’m cautious what I share. 

I know this one story I would love to make work about and I haven’t found the right collaborators yet. Because it is, I guess, because it is about sexual violence. It’s also about the shame that’s attached to female-sexed bodies, regardless of your gender identity. I think because we’re in a cancel culture at the moment. So it feels more difficult to explore this work in this moment. But that makes me feel that actually it’s absolutely the right time to make this work. And shame silences. And I have in the past worked in conflict zones. Not long after I trained as a drama therapist, actually, I felt like okay, a lot of this is Arty Farty, but some of this is really useful stuff. Where can I best contribute, and how can I give back? And so I worked near the Divis flats in Belfast, I worked in Derry, I worked in Bosnia and Croatia when they were just allegedly post-conflict wasn’t post conflict at all. I think it’s gonna take generations. But anyway. And I was working with my then partner gathering stories of women and girls, female-sexed bodies who had survived the rape camps. And I can never forget the stories I’ve heard. Actually, there’s one letter that will stay with me forever. And I’ll talk to you about that, if you want to about work we made out in Bosnia. Actually, it wasn’t Bosnia, it was on Obonjan), the island of children, ironically, on the edge of Croatia. And it was a reconciliation project I was doing with a company called Firefly, linked up with “Humanitarian Aid for Medical Development”. And so I was, I think, the second Firefly agent they sent into that project, which was about bringing young people who had been on the frontline – male, female, people in between, people who didn’t want to identify their gender – but everybody had seen the most despicable acts of human cruelty. I can’t not see what I’ve seen. I can’t not hear what I’ve heard. And I refuse to not know that, when I get into conversations about gendered violence. Because I think we’re in a cancel culture that’s trying to suppress those voices, while quite rightly, Trans voices are emerging and saying, “We’re hurt, we’re bruised. We want our rights. We want our day and we want you all to hear our pain”. I get that. I appreciate it. But that should not be to the erasure of other voices.

Jet Moon  

I’m thinking of a women’s organisations that I know in Belgrade, who were doing phone support with women in Bosnia while the war was happening. And it was some, you know, two countries at war, but these women in different countries learning how to do kind of rape crisis support together. Yeah. And again I am also interested in this thing where you’re like “Oh, well, I learned these very good boundaries”. But then you’re like, “Oh, well, I’ve seen these things that I can’t and heard things I can’t, you know, I can’t, unhear them”. But I wonder, for me that the processing is often in the work. And I wonder how that is for you like surviving, being alongside people during these intense things? Because this is also where I really feel with myself, you know, that intensity with other people is amazing, but how do you process that yourself?

Julie Mac   

Well, I always have therapy. I’m a great believer in making sure you debrief. Amnesty International used to always recommend three months in the field, and then have a full debrief. And when things were really, really rough and resources were low, suddenly, the debriefs went off the radar, and you didn’t get a chance. So I would go out and make sure I found the right people to talk to, other people who had been in the field. I have a strong tribe of close friends who are not afraid of deep diving and hearing some difficult things and processing that besides you, but also, I ended up paying for therapy. You know, I think it’s important that you’ve got somebody in your corner that you can literally offload the most difficult stuff. Which is why I’ve made sure I’ve got a therapist at the moment, because I think this past three years has been traumatic. And doesn’t look like it’s gonna get any easier anytime soon. But no surrender as  Shirley Mac would say.

Jet Moon  

I mean, the pandemic stuff was really strange, because, you know, it’s been this huge, shared trauma, and yet somehow really quickly invisible. In terms of what the public voice about it is, I mean, there’s many of us, you know, who don’t have a choice about it not being, you know, invisible, you know, Mmm hmm.

I’m gonna just go back to a question: Is there a difference for you, between working with communities and making more personal work?

Julie Mac   

Yeah. And I thought through this really carefully last night, I was looking at your question, because I thought, “This is crucial to me in the way I work”. And it kind of follows on from what I’ve just been talking about, and I’ll start first off with “Let Me Stay”, the work with my mother. Somebody asked me recently if I’d bring that piece of work out, again, and I said, “not with me in it”. But there is one other actor, I would imagine would be able to do that piece of work. But then I would ask my question: “Why am I bringing that piece of work out?” 

Because at the time of the tour of that work, which was nearly two years actually, Shirely Mac was still alive. And so she was able to enjoy the process, albeit sometimes in the care home. So I got the entire audience in Brazil, in Pernambuco, Northeast Brazil, chanting her name clapping “Shirley, Shirley Shirley”, whilst I had her on the end of a mobile phone with my sister there in the care home. I brought a leaflet home for her, from that tour, which is stuck up on her wall, you know, and after a while, she gave it to somebody for Christmas, she had no clue what it was about. But for that moment, she was a star. Then when we came to the very end of the tour, which I think was in 2015, towards the end of ’15, I was invited to present that work in a series of care homes in the Northwest here in England. And so I invited her care home, but did they want to participate? They said no. And I’ll come to that another time, actually, because I think they were quite disturbed by what was going on in their team in the care home at the time. So that’s fair enough. That’s their decision. 

So we went to…it’s called the Mariners’ Village. And it’s a village that was set up by seamen and their families who had survived all sorts of things in their lives, but towards the end of their years, it was a retirement village and it became a dementia village. And at the heart of it, it was right on the edge of the Mersey just beyond Wallasey. You know, there’s kind of all the way along the ferries, there’s Eastham ferry, New Ferry, Rock Ferry, Seacombe Ferry and I’ve left out Woodside Ferry. Eventually you come to Wallasey. So whilst he had this mariners village, which became the dementia village, at the heart of it was an arts hub. I mean, how radical is that? It was fantastic. So, Roger Cliffe-Thompson, who I always think of as the poet laureate of Liverpool, had invited us up there to do “Let Me Stay”, and he knew my mother, because she had been to DaDa festival every year for God knows how many years, they kind of adopted her as a mascot. And there were a number of times she had to be removed from the stage because she wanted to be the star, you know, no boundaries. Never did. Never had a fourth wall. 

No. In fact, she was a great joy, actually to watch her make mischief. She was a bit cruel to the Dutch comic on one occasion, who she told wasn’t funny, he needed to get off or she was going to carry him off. That kind of thing which can’t have been kind. But you got to learn your craft haven’t you, certainly before you set foot in front of Shirley Mac. So on the very last showing of “Let Me Stay” I had permission to bring my mother into the audience. And she was in the audience in this wonderful, chaise-longue she had chosen to sit on herself, there was all sorts of different shaped seating, but she went for that one. She was in between my niece and my sister, whose sole role was to keep hold of her, so she didn’t rush the stage at the wrong time. Because we knew she’d want on or in, as per usual.

And we came to the end of the show. And to be honest, there wasn’t a dry eye in the house at that point in time, but nobody had recognised her. So I stopped everybody mid applause and I said “Ladies, gentlemen, people in between, I’d like to invite on stage the real star of the show tonight”. So I said “Shirley Mac, Queen of the Mersey”. And you just heard this intake of breath from the audience and she stood up and she went, “Thank you, my audience, thank you, I’m a star”. And then stood up on stage and began to curtsy and bow and she looked around, she said “We’re coming to the end now. I just want to say thank you”. And then she went a bit blank and said “I’ll go and put a kettle on, shall I?” She wandered off. And you know what? I could never follow that again. We didn’t film it. We didn’t photograph it. But I will never forget it as long as I live. Job done. Shirley Mac, the star of the show. So why would I want to bring that out? But for me, that is the very deep, raw personal work that you do in something like that, that’s so much about your life, you know, that was a love letter to my mother. And her to me really, we’re very much together in lots of ways. 

What is the difference between making work with other people? I create a safe space where it becomes possible to say anything. To recreate anything in a safe environment where we don’t hit each other. There’s no…any re-enactments of violence are very carefully choreographed. We don’t need to see bruised human flesh, we don’t need to see the pictures, we don’t need to….it’s all in our imaginations. It’s in our worst nightmares. We’ve seen enough on film. 

You know, I’m tired of witnessing bruised black bodies at the moment that are coming from New York, that are now infiltrating here in England. Liverpool has got more gun crime on the streets now. Shocking. But that kind of black trauma that has been the penchant over the last 20 years and some. We have to have other ways, particularly as white people, if you are determined to pick out your racism and to become an anti-racist, and it is a slow process, because let’s face it, we are utterly spoon-fed racism as white people from the moment of our first education in the streets or in the school system. Then yeah, we need to start standing up and be counted, or wheel-in and be counted.

Jet Moon  

So in this way, where you’re talking about like what we see, what’s visible, so I have, you know, made this question: Do you want to say something about stigma, how people are valued or devalued in society, and making visible resistant work that challenges us? And I feel like you’ve spoken to that in some degree. You know about these choices of what is seen, how has it worked. But is there something more to say about this visible survivorship? You know, I’m thinking about how lonely and isolating like…how power and stigma functions, and how wild it is to discover community or have something different happen in terms of representation.

Julie Mac  

Yeah. And you know what, I’ve got about three or four different ways of answering this question, but I’m just going to spill and let’s see what happens. Because my first thought is that even in the disability arts community, I’m still perceived as a difficult, difficult person. And I just think, what is that? Is that because I’m mad? Is that because we’re not mad, we’re angry? Is that because I’m continually saying the unsayable? Is that because look, having been sectioned by the police, having been taken off in ankle restraints and handcuffs, having been delivered the brain injury that took me five years to learn to read again, having gone through all of that, and fearless, what more can they do to me? If they’re going to kill me., I’m not going to know about it. I won’t like the pain. I don’t like pain. But actually, it has to be said, truth to power. 

And so if people want somebody controversial on their panel, they’ll often choose me. If they want to say the thing that they’re scared to say, they will invite me. And I think “Yeah, okay, here we go again., here we go again”. But I’ve kind of lost my thread now because where did we think…oh, yeah, it’s about the stigma. 

My very favourite commission. I would say certainly in the last 15 years of my life was a commission through the Research Centre for Museums and Galleries (RMCG) and Richard Sandell and Jocelyn Dodd were the people who invited me to become part of that. There were four artists who were selected across the country. And it was a great privilege because it was part of a whole project they’d been doing called “Exceptional and Extraordinary: Unruly bodies and minds in the Medical Museum”. 

Now, I’d always been fascinated by museums, because they were spaces that I figured fairly quickly that we weren’t really allowed in, not our family because we were not…we wouldn’t sit still. In fact, I remember when I was a kid in Church Drive Primary School, and I can’t remember why I couldn’t sit still…doesn’t matter. It’s just who I am, still can’t sit still, to be honest. I’m trying it hard now. And I got sent over to the Lady Leverhulme Walker Art Gallery. And I’d never been inside. And they sent me off with a drawing pad and some pens. And there was a teaching assistant who took another few kids as well. And I remember going in through the front, and I’d never been inside and it all felt very….and people were wearing certain clothing, you know, they looked better dressed than our family did. They all had proper shoes on outdoors, that’s for sure. And there were certain ways of speaking in there, you know, it was all a bit harsh and precious. 

And I fell in love with this statue of Kuan Yin, the goddess of mercy. And I discovered that she was a kind of two-spirit he-she who represented  safety for the violence against women. There was all of these kinds of threads. I need to know more about Kuan Yin, actually, because I’d have to go back to what was written underneath. But that was my first engagement with any kind of museum space until this commission. Now the commission was actually about unpicking stigma. The provocation they gave me was around disability. And they said, “we want you to research, you have permission to deep search inside any of the six museums of the eight in this gathering, in this collective”. Well, wow, that blew my mind. And I was supposed to choose two specifically, but actually, I got carried away. 

Me being me, and I’m a nosy git anyway. And when I started to uncover stuff behind the scenes, that provocation kept coming and coming. Why are some lives more highly valued than others? And the only time I’ve ever heard the terms “exceptional” and “extraordinary” in the same sentence is around accounts. “Exceptional and “extraordinary” is the figures that stick out that don’t match the rest of the cashflow or the accounting system. So what is exceptional and extraordinary, are the things that don’t fit. They don’t suit the norm. They don’t sit with the average or the mean in terms of how we’re trying to balance our books. And I thought “that’s really interesting: ‘exceptional and extraordinary’ attached to ‘unruly bodies and minds in the medical museum'”. Very swiftly, I asked to be invited into the wet collections, what they informally call the collections of specimens of dead people, or dead samples of people that they’ve kept in formaldehyde. The majority of them are, of course, disabled people. And I discovered that they’ve got numbers and all the details of how they acquired these specimens have been separated from identifying characteristics; no names, no family names, I kid you not. 

The things I found in there really shocked me, really shocked me at what people have been able to collect and keep. And it is actually preserved in an inventory with a name, sorry, not a name and number, which means it becomes property of the original collector, or property of the museum or property of the funders who own the museum and on and on it goes…(redacted).

Jet Moon  

So I’m thinking about like this contrast, you know, by…between this um, you know, the exceptional and also the erasure. And how the exceptional people gets really flipped to being like you’re nothing. Yeah, and um, you know, we’re really in a crash at the moment with these fucking long years of brutality. You know, at the government level and, um, I know you’ve collaborated with Dolly Sen, targeting the DWP and highlighting the link between their policies and the deaths of disabled claimants. Do you want to say something about that level of survival? You know, for many of us, we’re fucking exhausted and if we’re still here, and survival can be like, really day to day and I just wonder how you’re doing and I just wanted to bring in something. Um, of um…. also talking about humour. Because this stuff is really, really bleak. But I know Dolly is also very funny…can be and you know, and you have…humour has a strong place in your work. And for me, I don’t….would not….would often see humour as a counterpoint with the hardest stuff.

Julie Mac  

It’s like a gallows humour, isn’t it? We have to. It’s almost like our bodies are uptight, the tension, the choking on this, the gut-wrenching kind of knocks me sick, some of the stuff that happens. How do you release that tension in your body? It’s through laughter for me. It’s like, the chaos of laughter. I don’t even mind if it’s hysterical laughter I don’t care what they call it. Maybe I have got a wandering womb, I really don’t care. I think the comedy literally lets me breathe out from a very deep place. I like nothing better than a belly laugh. And I find the duplicity of this current government so shocking, that it’s ridiculous. The fact that they can be so corrupt in plain sight…I’m no longer surprised but it still shocks me. And so it should because I’m a human being and I value the lives around me. And I don’t just mean my immediate family. I mean, I value human life.

I’m kind of worried that we’ve got in position people who are so disconnected from working class human life, because we live in a serfdom that maybe they’re no longer functioning as human beings anymore. They’re so cut off you know. We live in a disaster capitalism, an era of Money, money, money, I can’t believe we’ve now got, did they say recently 28 more millionaires and they happen to be in Parliament. Twenty-eight more over the last three years; that truly is amassing wealth on the backs of the serfs. And the two extremes in terms of the stigmas we’ve created, we still support, is the monarchy. Okay, we paid for the Queen’s funeral. Then we paid for his investiture as king, then we paid for his birthday. It knocks me sick. And we have no money for children’s free school meals or for the National Health Service, for doctors and consultants who are part of our welfare system.

Jet Moon  

So I mean, there’s times when I just think I’m not going to read the news. I can’t do it anymore, because I gets so overwhelmed. You know, I can get…become so awash with…there’s already so much and then I, as you say, it’s so overwhelming this level of corruption. But I think, you know, when at the beginning, you spoke about survivorship, it’s like, well, what choice do I have? It’s like, you do make the choices. And I really wonder in this concrete level, like, how, how is that one foot in front of the other process? What does it look like? And how do you bring humour into that? Because otherwise, you know, that thing of just getting flattened by it?

Julie Mac   

Yeah. Yeah. Well, that’s a good question. I mean, I have to have my downtime, and I’ve taken up painting again, I started life in art college, do you know what i mean, and I met somebody there randomly, who heard me telling a story at the edge of the gallery and said, “Why aren’t you in theatre?” And I went, “I’ve only ever been inside a theatre once and then I got a detention. So, you know, it’s not for me, is it?” And they invited me to their theatre in Wrexham, because I went to art college in Chester, which I loved actually, loved art college. Anyway, so yes, going back to painting is like a meditation.

That raw humour, I bring into the theatre spaces because actually, I want to ridicule some of the stuff that’s happening at government level. It’s only when we actually strip away the illusions we’ve been fed or the delusions, and we all acknowledge the emperor has no clothes, it’s only then that we laugh together publicly, that we can acknowledge what’s really happening. You asked about Dolly Sen. I have to say Dolly is utterly brilliant. And I don’t feel like I truly collaborated with her, I was a stooge for her. She planned that, she planned it down to the last detail. And she got in touch with me because she knows I’m a difficult person and that actually, I’m very passionate about what she’s talking about, the disabled people that have been thrown under the bus. 

We met in early September, I think, I may have that wrong, but it was September anyway in 2020. People were still in lockdown. We met at 8:30. It was essential services for us. I was dressed as a ward aid? Anyway was a NHS costume that I’d nicked from some play we’d done earlier on. Dolly had a doctor’s coat, Jane had a doctor’s coat. Dolly brought a whole section of tape with 136 section written on it, which is a section of the Mental Health Act

Jet Moon  

Sorry technical thing.

Julie Mac   

and we attempted to wrap it around the building to section the department.

Jet Moon  

Sorry, I’m very sorry to interrupt, but um, something’s going a bit wrong with our recording because your camera has turned itself off. And I wonder if you want to turn the camera off and turn it back on again. Oh dear.

Part 2:

Julie Mac  

Here we go. 

Jet Moon  

You’re all good. Yeah, I mean…

Julie Mac

We’ll turn this back on happens.

Jet Moon  

And the reason I was like, “Oh, I’m gonna stop you” was because you had sort of gone like you sounded like you were underwater. And I was like “Yeah, this is definitely one of those instances”

Julie Mac  

Yeah, I think it’s definitely their fucking around with the signals.

Jet Moon  

So where you were at you were talking about….that you said, “oh, you know, I don’t know if I really actually collaborated with Dolly Sen because Dolly set me up as a stooge” talking about that tape.

Julie Mac  

Yeah oh, look, I love working with Dolly. Anything she asked me to do. I’d do it. Frankly. I think she’s a brilliant thinker. She really puts herself her body and mind on the line. And I really believe in the work she does. She had deeply researched the statistics of disabled people dying within the first six months of being declared fit to live, sorry, fit to work, forgive me. It’s something I’m passionate about, you know, to disabled sisters, my mother was disabled. I’m now disabled myself, you know, as like, why have we watched in plain sight, the emergence of these new buildings that are used to assess disabled people in every city on these islands. And we’ve allowed that to happen, in plain sight. There hasn’t been a national outcry. If anything, people have colluded with it and gone “Yes, yes, they’re all scroungers anyway. I mean, useless eaters, really”. 

So when Dolly got in touch, and I think it was Caroline Cardus, who was working on her behalf, got in touch and said, “Julie, Mac, would you be up for doing this? And I know it’s during lockdown. I know, it’s a difficult time for people to be out and about, but we believe these are, you know, essential moments to push back”. I said “I’ll be there. Where do you want me what you want me to wear?”. And so we met down near the Department of Work and Pensions, we met in a hotel directly opposite. It was a peculiar time. We were still all anxious and wary on the streets. And we assembled what from eight-thirty. And then we were out there nine o’clock on the dot. And Dolly made her impact, quite an impact I’ll tell you. I thought it was a brilliant protest. Really brilliant. 

So that’s what I mean by I’m not really a collaborator. I was a stooge for her, whatever she wanted, if she’d said, right, you know, force the doors, let’s go over the ramparts. I’d have said, “Yeah, let’s do it” You know, storm, the Bastille? “Yes. I’m in”. And I remember, I brought two different changes of clothes. And they were costumes, you know, where I could be perceived as a psychiatrist or a ward auxiliary, or whatever, nursing auxiliary. And, and, of course, male attire, me being me. And then I just sent her pictures and said, “What do you think of this then?” And she said, “Yeah, go on in. I want to see that. That’s great”. And we made it work. She made it work. I have to say, Yeah, I was just a stooge.

Jet Moon  

So, on the other side of that, in bringing less heard voices and histories to light, there’s often I mean, strong resonances with the present. And in Quiet Rebels you stage a production exploring the experiences of white working-class women, you know, so called white pariahs who crossed the colour line and married men of the Windrush generation. Can you talk about the research process, what it felt like to bring that work to the stage as the Windrush scandal, you know, continues, I mean, to be so incredibly present and echo in people’s lives?

Julie Mac   

You know, what, we didn’t start with the Windrush actually. My…the kind of the thing that gave me the impetus, and that really drove me to further research this work was a (contemporary) court case.

(redacted section) 

Julie Mac  

And that was my research around the court case, we used the judgement from the Supreme Court, that judge will remain nameless and so be it, had to erase him, But we used that judgement to bookend the first R&D that we did at the Albany. And people were saying in that Q&A session we had afterwards and that would have been in 2018, October 2018. They were saying: Why didn’t you use more contemporary stories? Why are you just going to the Windrush? And I said, “Excuse me, this was from a court case. And that judgement you’ve just heard at the beginning and end of this presentation was on June the 19th 2018”. 

Jet Moon  

What do you think made people do that disconnect?

Julie Mac  

They could not believe the language, they could not believe the language, it sounded like 1950s, dated language. And I said, “this is from the Supreme Court, one of the highest courts in the land. And the only place we have to go next is the Royal Courts of Justice. But this is the way barristers speak. This is the law in this country. And this is what we need to fight against now”. 

So Hassan Mahamdallie and I had wanted to work together for some years, we’d spent five years trying to think things through just kind of casually having conversations each time we met and seeing where we were going with it. And when that court case came through, I took it to Hassan and said, we’ve got to do something about this. And he said, “Yeah, look what’s happening with the Windrush, we need to make those connections”, he said, “but nobody will believe this is what’s happening today. Nobody will believe you”. I said, “No, I know that”. He said, “so supposedly people think the Windrush, there’s kind of almost a romance about it now. It’s a story that we’ve all heard, and we think, “Oh, they’ll get reparations, of course, they’ll get their money”. No, they won’t. Well, I mean, not after a long fight, you know, or not until there’s a big fight. You know what I mean?

Jet Moon  

Because they’re ours. They’re ours. Yeah, we’d can’t ….Yeah,

Julie Mac  

Yeah. Absolutely. So for Hassan, he followed  (redacted) Xs story. he said she was a lioness. You know, she was somebody who fought for her children. But she was so gracious, this kind of very calm, quiet rebel. And that’s one of the things that we found in common of all the women we interrogated and interviewed, and we had about something like, between 12 and 15 stories that we were looking at to try and integrate, we decided it was too much. We were overwhelming the whole story. So we chose four women’s stories in the end. And they were from London, Liverpool, Birmingham, and up in Leeds, Yorkshir- ish way, you know, and they were extraordinary human beings and they were less extraordinary. Do you know what I mean? It’s like, these are women who fell in love. Who said, “you know, well, I didn’t see what was wrong and it was cool, it was exciting to me. I’ve never seen a man of that colour before and he spoke extraordinary languages and he was very well read, you know, I fell in love with him. There’s nothing wrong with love is there?” is what people would say, you know, (redacted)…when she told us her story, she wouldn’t go on camera, but she’d sit and tell me a story. And she said, “You’d never believe the racism there is today. Listen to the way they treat me in court. They actually said to her in court “we think you’re an unreliable witness”. And she said “How could I be an unreliable witness? This is the man I love. (redacted) They’re our kids. What, am I not their mother? I’m just a witness, and I’m unreliable. How does that work?” It’s imagine

Jet Moon  

That you’re gonna lie to make things go your way, when you’re actually within an extremely punitive situation, you know? I mean, it’s a complete flip.

Julie Mac  

Yeah. Absolutely. You know, what can I say? So, that was a very exciting project. I loved doing the research, I loved gathering the stories. If anything, we had to put brakes on it, and then go, “Alright, how are we going to reframe this, now we’re hitting Zoom times, because actually, we can’t do it in the theatre anymore”. So we decided we’d create a kind of pulp fiction style, very visual world that we could represent on Zoom. So we did the whole of the next R&D, I think, was in July 2020. and we did a 35-minute piece with this extraordinary digital work that was done by Mohammad Ali from Seoul City Arts in Birmingham, based at the MAC or somewhere near there, he’s got his studios. And he made each of those images we created in Zoom come to life. 

So one of our women who was at the kitchen, he had a pot bubbling behind her, you know, and steam coming out. It was brilliant. He scratched mixed, a desk of pre-recorded images we’d done in the first stage we did at the Albany. He had one of our characters, played by Charlie Folorunsho a brilliant actor, who was suddenly he was being kind of…given a shock like a cattle prod every time he lied, or allegedly lied, of course – same thinking – there’d be some kind of ministry official, you know, from the regime who would bzzz buzz him etc. And then the next minute, he’s in some kind of cell. He’s in a prison cell somewhere. Mohammad Ali helped us bring that to life. And we’d never played with this kind of digital stuff before. But it did remind us that actually we’re playwrights, the theatre.

Jet Moon  

And this was the piece long listed for the digital culture awards?

Julie Mac   

I think that’s partly why it was long listed. But actually, that wasn’t the piece. The piece was the final production, which was just over an hour long and that toured last year. God ,it was the most difficult tour to book I think, because we were all kind of blinking out of the woodshed, coming out of our little lock-in iso bubbles, and trying to go back into theatre spaces, which we thought was still there. And of course, some of them had died and gone. And a lot of theatres weren’t quite functioning. Not a single theatre had a bar open. We actually insist on the last one that we had the bar open. Thank god, the Albany were up for it, you know. And we had a full week there with a completely sold-out run. But look I’m so pleased we did it. And I’m so grateful to the creative team and the actors that took it on. We had four actors working with us. Yeah, you get it.

Jet Moon  

I mean, it’s interesting that in that space where the theatres are already, you know, maybe a bit more rigid because they’re just opening and everything’s feeling a bit like “ohhh what’s happening”, but at the same time you are long listed because of the features that you know, serve to enhance the storytelling making the production accessible and enjoyable for everyone. And, you know, from you and I, it’s obvious about why you’d make those decisions but I imagine it would even be harder to push for that stuff in that situation. But I’m interested in how you’ve, you know, I mean, you spoke at the beginning about this enormously creative collaboration with your other, you know, in that dramaturgy space, but, um, how you found those ways to embrace and expand access, you know, it sounds like a really joyful process, rather than the people who are like, “Oh, well, there’s no money for that”. The number of times you hear that? You know,

Julie Mac   

I know, it drives me even more nuts than I allegedly am. Look, I’m a determined experimenter. I don’t think any of us have got it right yet. And there’s some brilliant practitioners of aesthetics of access. You know, Jen Sealey, Graeae Theatre, Definitely Theatre, Paula Garfield, the Finger Smiths Jenny Draper, Jean St. Claire Katie O’Reilly, who is an international consultant, etc. Or David Wellington, I mean, there’s some brilliant, brilliant, brilliant work happening, but nobody’s got it right. It’s not perfect. None of its perfect. One of my favourite projects I’ve done over the last few years was part of Vital Exposure’s “The Trouble with Access”, and we had a creative lab and I brought in all sorts of expertise. 

So we had two blind consultants and actors, Deaf consultant and actor. Sula Gleason was our sign language interpreter at the heart of it, but I wanted her to be a mouthpiece and an artist and an advisor as well. There were 13 of us engaged in part of that as a piece of work. And we had Lachlan Philpott, who is a brilliant playwright. I fell in love with his work because he has a narrative voice. He’s a beautiful writer, there’s a kind of choral voice in them, but his narrative voice, he always has witnesses describing the world they’re looking at. So there are always people in the piece who are commenting regularly or you know, there might be nosy neighbours bitching, going “did you see that? Is that a man or a woman or an it? What is it?” And that’s literally a piece from The Trouble with Harry, which is about Eugenia Fellini who lived as Harry Crawford. We brought over Alyson Campbell, who has worked for 22 years with Lachlan Philpott. Alyson Campbell’s a brilliant director, and very, very familiar with Lachlan’s work, you know, because of their collaboration. What I heard when I heard Lachlan’s work for the first time was almost a natural ease of audio description. 

And I’m not a great fan of the clunky traditional audio description where you’ve got blind or visually impaired visitors, audience members with headsets looking set apart already, and then somebody in a booth, that’s sitting in a separate technical booth so the operators of the light and sound and giving a very subjective interpretation of what they perceive as the visual facts. There are some brilliant audio describers around, brilliant, and I’d love to name Ali Clarke who’s one of our favourites has worked with us for years, you know, Pauline Brandt, Ann Hornsby and I know they have honed their craft over many, many years and their work is sensitive and careful work.

 But actually what I’m missing is the dramaturgy. It doesn’t matter to me if somebody’s just jumped on stage with red and white polka dots on: is it part of the dramaturgy? Is it? Does it have meaning in the unravelling of the story or the unveiling of what we need to know? Unless it has meaning, unless me picking up this mug, the bitter chalice, the poison in this mug,  matters, unless that’s part of the story, I don’t need to know. You with your visual impairment will hear me slurp out of that mug. So why do you need to know what patterns on it? Do you know what i mean? I’m tired of Zooms where people describe what they’re wearing. And I think I don’t have time for this, actually, you’re boring. It bores me. I’m not sure who it’s going to help. For you to know that I’ve got a clown poster at me back or something else. That’s just people’s nosiness. They want to know what you’ve got in your room. So very often I just have a blurred background or something, I don’t care what somebody’s wearing, you’re just head and shoulders as far as I can see, you could be wearing what you like love or nothing at all, that’d be more fun.

Jet Moon  

I mean, that…Lachlan’s way of working sounds akin to the way that someone writing a novel narrative would add details to you know, bring something into a place or you know, like, make something alive. So it’s not just a dialogue, this kind of sounds, all of it sounds so exciting and so integrated. And then when you talk about this thing, where people do like the add ons, or the form, or the, you know, that thing where people do it with racism as well, “I just want to acknowledge blah blah that something la la” Oh, good. You’ve now you’ve done your bit. Now, you’re absolved. Like that kind of thing.

Julie Mac   

It’s a bit like some of the welcome to country or the acknowledgments at the beginning of wherever we’re speaking from on whoever’s land. Look, I think it’s crucial that we have that respect, and that we honour, you know, elders that have gone before us and emerging in the community. And are you gonna support people financially emerging in the community? Is it real?

Jet Moon  

Yeah, that way where it is, people are purely doing it, because they believe that they have to do it, yeah, in order to look alright, and then there’s nothing else that comes out and from there. 

And I’m wanting to just like, go into that you’ve worked across a lot of different media, you know, and you’ve described a way of working and within lots of different media, you know, bringing that into the stage form, I want to say something about reaching particular audiences or finding a medium that fits the subject matter. You know, to me, it seems entirely natural to find the form that fits the situation, the resources you have. And that that, to me, is a real survivor move to be able to have that flexibility and find the way.

Julie Mac    

Absolutely, it depends where you are. It depends what story needs to be told in this social political context in this time, that’s all part of the ingredients of the dramaturgy. And one of the most important pieces of work I’ve ever been involved in was when I was Firefly agent over in Obonjan island of children. And I was working with young people who had been either side of the conflict, but seen some really dirty stuff on the front line. And there was a young woman, we’ve sat in a circle literally outside, we had to jeeps with headlights on late afternoon, early evening, that’s all the lighting we had. The only props we had were paper bags, and bottle tops and old brooms. That’s all we had. We didn’t have any sign language interpreter, I needed two interpreters for the languages spoken in that circle, and for me, as well as a facilitator or director. And there was a young woman who wanted to speak a letter out loud to her rapists. And we did this very safely. She had…she chose two young men to stand at her back who were dear friends of hers, and some women in her part of the circle where she was working from. 

I asked for any of the young men who would be willing to receive the letter and hear it on her behalf. And there was a young man who had a twin brother, and he said, I want to do it, but I can’t do it without my twin. This twin didn’t want to do it. So I said, I need you to choose somebody else but you may need to be brave and step outside your family and choose. And anyway somebody else stepped in. So there were three boys in the end, about 19 maybe 20, but they’d been on the frontline and so who knows what they’d seen or what they’d been involved with, you know, and they’re just as wounded. And she read her letter. It’s one of the most powerful things I’ve witnessed. And we did it in that context in that moment, which was crucial, with very little resources. But we did one of the most powerful things I’ve witnessed in theatre and it was on this dirt-poor island, which we found had been used as a detention centre for Muslim prisoners. So some of our young people were Muslim and some of our people were Serbian who had been part of the outrage. 

Look, if there’s anybody Serbian listening to this, forgive us, we’ve been given a particular version, you will have your own narrative listening to this. But this is what the young people were giving me at the time. It was very hard not to take sides. But anyway, we’re working together in a circle. And the important thing was, towards the end, they just stepped forward and embraced. And then the rest of the group who had been witness in that circle, stepped around them and embraced. And all we can do is hope that actually, we can hold each other through the hell that we’ve created as human beings, and survive. And the only way we’re going to survive is together, hearts beating in the same room, the only restoration and real justice is to acknowledge the pain, to say how deeply sorry we are that we’ve hurt each other, to take accountability. And only then can we actually hold each other and hope to move on and rebuild. Otherwise, what’s the point?

Jet Moon  

It’s interesting, because I am having a different conversation with someone at the moment about this concept of forgiveness. But I’m with you on this. And I, you know, like if someone is saying for me, to 

me, for example “Oh, you know, what’s your apocalypse plan?” For me, it’s about how do we see each other and hear each other? Yeah, it’s not about “Where’s my bunker?”

Julie Mac   

Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Jet Moon  

Because I don’t have one.

Julie Mac   

No, I can’t remember building one either. Yeah, I do want to say though, I think it’s really important. You just mentioned the word “forgiveness”. I think it’s really important that we remember that forgiveness is a gift for giving. And until we can actually own the darkest part of our psyches and forgive ourselves, I don’t think we truly know what forgiveness is. And I don’t think we can easily expect it of people who are not ready to forgive themselves. Or forgive the moment or forgive the people they have othered and perceived as the enemy Yeah, go for it.

Jet Moon  

Yeah, I mean, we’ve spoken about so many things. Amazing. Is there anyone’s work that’s particularly sparked, lifted, inspired, given you courage?

Julie Mac  

Do you know what, so many people but I can think of four people immediately springs to mind. Lisa Reihana, who is a Maori feminist activist and artist, I absolutely adore her work. And when I came across The Pathway of Women in Te Papa Museum in Wellington, I was blown away. And it was so different that the pathway of women went up to the marae, and it’s usually kind of so dominated by male cultural icons and the male leaders of the iwi that takes us to the pōwhiri. And then she had chosen all her oldest relatives, you know, like a great aunt, her aunt, her sisters, and incredible posters of- portraits sorry – of her relatives that were lining this pathway of women that led us through to the marae, the community meeting space. I just fell in love, and I fell in love with Hine-nui Ngāpuhi, Hine-nui-te-pō from the Ngāpuhi, which is an area, just north of Auckland. And so I wrote to Lisa Reihana and asked her if I could use aspects of the image because for me, it represented the first mother. And I really wanted to use that on the projection of the sails on this piece of work I’ve done called Crossings and projection.

Visual imagery, has always been strong in my work. Not just for deaf people, actually, but also because it’s part of the thread of the story for everyone there but for blind and visually impaired people, I’ll describe the fluttering of that image and why it matters that we see and disappear the eyes, that the eyes are there from first mother watching us forever, over us kind of thing but this appears when her disappointment arrives when she sees we’ve failed, whatever the kind of the challenges are. And in Crossings, it was very much about forced migration and sexual slavery. So Lisa Reihana gave me an extraordinary lesson because she said, “I want to see the script and I’ll take the script to our elders. And if they approve, then I’ll speak to my great aunt and I’ll allow you to use part of the portrait Hine-nui-te-pō. And that’s what happened: they blessed the script. 

I met one of the elders of the Iwi’s some time 

later, and it turned out it was somebody who had seen Pigtails, which I took down to New Zealand many many years ago. I wrote pigtails way back in 2000 in Wanganui, Good health Wanganui, to a conference called Making A Difference.

Part 3

Jet Moon  

I’m recording again.

I was going to ask you if you wanted to say something to survivors who wish to write like words of encouragement, why writing either privately or publicly is important?

Julie Mac  

You know what I wanted to say before that, there’s two more people who deeply excited my work, and one of them is Nando Messias sometimes calls himself Nancy. My favourite piece of their work is The Pink Supper which I thought was utterly brilliant. It’s like a cry of rage from the depth of their grief about what has happened in Brazil, but specifically what has happened to trans women who have been murdered. And it was done so graciously, so beautifully and so creatively. I mean, I will never forget that piece of work that I witnessed. And I think I reviewed it for them for Disability Arts Online, actually.

The other person whose work really touches me and excites me, and I hope they do this work again, because I’ve only seen it once is Alyson Campbell’s work on WHoLE. And WHoLE was created specifically for voices in the north of Ireland. Because Alyson had discovered that the highest climbing statistics of people getting diagnosis of HIV are women, of menopausal years, women in the north, who, perhaps they’ve been divorced, or for some reason, they’ve got a second wind, and they’re going out there, and dating and meeting people again, and did not think it necessary to have sexual protection at all. And these are the voices that are describing the pushback to stigma, the stigma of having HIV in the north of Ireland is extraordinary. And the statistics have been climbing fast. 

And so Alyson created this wonderful piece. She took over two windows two shop windows in one of the main streets in the centre of Belfast City and in one window, it was a black cube and the other window, it was a white cube. We’re outside as if we’re looking through this petri dish, you know, we’re screened off, mind you ‘we don’t want to touch people with HIV, do we really?’ And there is somebody who invites you into the White Room first, and you’re taken in one at a time. And they make a mask out of white royal icing of your face as you’re seated, then you’re invited to take the mask and present it through a hole in between the white Room and the black room. And somebody in the other side receives the masks, and starts to build this great mask of peoples who are willing to touch, people who are willing to communicate what has been put through the hole for them. But while you’re sat there, and listening to, first of all, the person who feels like a face massage making this mask for you, you listen through binaural sound to all of these different testimonies of ordinary women like me, like you, who have HIV and are talking about the shame of it, the stigma, the destruction of their everyday lives. And I thought it was the most beautifully done, most carefully created piece of work by somebody ,who is not actually HIV positive, but who describes herself as a feral neighbour, which I think was a term given to her by Kim Davis. But it’s fabulously done and really needs to be put out there among invisible women far and wide. You asked me what would I say to survivors?

Jet Moon  

Yeah I’m trying to get over like the sense…evocation of the royal icing within that as well. You know,  of just Yeah, yeah, alongside all of that, yeah. 

Julie Mac   

Of course, at the end, you’re invited to sit down and take cup of tea with somebody who is there who is a survivor with HIV. And you take a cup of tea in your porcelain china cup with saucer. How very British! Tea the answer to every crisis. 

What would I say to survivors? Keep going, keep going. I know sometimes trying to be resilient, the very fact that we have to try, the effort of getting up in the morning….Keep breathing, the trick is to keep breathing. If for you it’s shite TV, if for you it’s reading a comic if it’s avoiding reading, avoiding the news. Find those tendrils of connection that keep your creative heart, pulsing, breathing! Or breeding, if that’s what you need to do! Breathing I would say. The trick is to keep going battle the  bastards beyond our shabby hovels, or shabby little halls, keep flexing those muscles. Write as if it’s your very last breath. Write as if you’re the only person who’s ever going to read it. Write because we have to keep on making work. Keep on, stay true to you. Stay true to you, whoever you are, no matter how lonely as Mary Oliver would say.

Jet Moon  05:46

And I’m finally Mac, any part of your work that you want to mention or promote? I 

Julie Mac  

Well, I’ve just had two commission’s from Vici Wreford-Sinnott who has set up this collective called IN/Visible, a collective of disabled women over 50. And so our exhibition will be down here in London from the 4th September…5th September (2023) I think it opens at arts depot, the exhibition is called – it’s a great provocation – All The Women I Could Have Been. And there are 9 or 10 of us, I think, artists responding to that provocation in a beautiful, brilliant visual arts exhibition. So that’ll be on an arts depot which is near Finchley Road. I’m sorry, I can’t remember the address; Google, ask a friend. 

The other is a series of monologues written in a book for the Funny Ha ha series again commissioned by Vici Wreford-Sinnott as the convener of the Funny Ha ha series, but also the creator of IN/Visible. 

And for me personally, what I’m writing at the moment is a piece called Jonah’s Wail. And that’s “w-a-i-l” as in the existential cry of grief, as they’re belched out of that beautiful belly of the majestic beast, and there’s been like some wasted placenta trodden in the sand. Poor old Jonah. No surrender.

Jet Moon  

Okay. Okay to stop recording at this point.