Ongoing

UNsung London – long walks to unlikely places. This is a book project that has been happening for the last few years. After her walks in Harlesden, Rose wanted to keep up these interviews while walking, these interactions with the various terrains, these ‘drifts’ on the wild side and she wanted to explore further afield the city. And she wanted to feel free to invite whoever she fancied walking with.

Of course, most people say No, but some say Yes and that’s the thrill of asking. Perhaps more than once. She walked to Beckton Sewage works with Billy Bragg – well it was more of a march -down the Green Way which does in fact cover a Bazalgette sewer; visited Southall with artist, Andrew Logan, they ended up being given lunch in a Sikh temple; remembered Earls Court during the Aids crisis with Shopping and Fucking playwright, Mark Ravenscroft; touched the remains of a Roman wall in an underground car park near the Barbican with journalist, Charlotte Higgins, rambled from Walthamstow to Islington with Grayson Perry, from his old studio to his new one; and scrambled around on the foreshores of Rotherhithe with mudlarker supreme, Jason Sandy.

She hopes to complete this project and publish the book in 2022.

2021

Dance Me To Death

Rose had the idea of an intergenerational collaboration around a dance project when she was organising the Willesden Junction Poets. She met contemporary dancers and choreographers, FUBUNATION – Rhys Dennis and Waddah Sinada – at a Brent Artist Network event. She saw that their work was all about masculinity, trust and intimacy, it is a way of re-defining black masculinity. She loved it and invited Rhys for a cup of tea. She proposed the idea of FUBUNATION choreographing a dance piece with a group of Over-60s non-professional dancers. Her not-so-secret aim was to be one of the dancers. Rhys seemed to be keen.

And then came the Arts Council England application. She almost gave up the will to live. It was painful. Seventy three pages of unrelenting agony. Eventually, it went off. In January 2021, she heard that it had been rejected but they had given feedback. In February, she gathered herself and re-applied. At the end of March, she realised that she’d been offered the money. Almost £15,000. She was overwhelmed, disbelieving and had to move into making it happen.

There was permission from Kensal Green Cemetery to garner for the performance in June. There was a hall to find for rehearsals. It was still the middle of strict Covid restrictions.

Rose ran the morning workshops on death and dying – she invited them all including Rhys and Waddah – to bring in grief objects to honour their loved and lost ones and talk about them. Every week, there was a different altar and after sharing intimately, one by one, they would place their objects on it. It was a ritual that permeated the performance. On another occasion, she invited them to get in pairs and create an International Grief Ritual for Covid 19. There were many ideas for songs, rituals and justice, they were unstoppable.

In the afternoons, Rhys and Waddah took the emotions of the morning and gave the dancers improvisational tasks in order to lay the foundations for the Dance Me To Death performance. It was exciting, inspiring and stretching work. And it did involve counting which somehow Rose had forgotten to consider. She’s not very good at counting. The musicians – Fran Loze on cello and Mark Fisher on percussion – were improvising alongside. It was a dramatic mix, they travelled from feeling like they were at a funeral, to releasing grief, to explosions of joy and love.

There were the duets. A mechanical coming together that turned into an exchange of the heart. There was clapping to a count of four, there were changes of pace, gestures, twirling, a solo. Gradually over the six weeks, a ritual dance emerged.

They had one day adapting it to the performance space in front of the Anglican Chapel in Kensal Green Cemetery and then the filming, which was a difficult day. They weren’t quite ready for filming and there was too much to do in one day. They were learning all the time.

Despite rain threatening to disrupt the final performance, it went ahead. It was a heart-open day, they were rehearsing there from 10 am and Rhys and Waddah made them feel utterly relaxed by the time they performed it at 3pm.

There was a silent procession where they carried photos and grief objects to represent their lost loved ones, they processed towards the audience who had gathered around the steps at the Anglican Chapel. The cello started its haunting melodies, the dancers erupted into dance on the steps, did duets, twirled and finally collapsed softly into each other. People were in tears. Rose knew that it had all come together beautifully. She was so grateful to all the dancers for their commitment, the musicians and Rhys and Waddah. And that audience.

I just wanted to congratulate you on such a brilliant, moving, uplifting dance. It was fabulous a brilliant creation with a great team of artists, choreographers and musicians. And the location was amazing. Full credit to you for making it all happen, even the after event party.

I loved every minute of it and I hope you are able to perform it again. Such an important theme. Clarinda Cuppage, psychotherapist

Full of movement and meaning. Shed a few tears. Releasing old grief. Heather Wells, soap-maker

It was poignant and brilliant and mesmerising, I won't be the only one who cried. The dancers were like pros. What a truly amazing woman, Rose is. Ruby Millington journalist

Thank you for the profoundly moving and glowing performance. If I'm honest, I was a bit scared about my own connection with grief and what might surface. I hadn't expected to see the thin veil between myself and my lost loved ones feel beautifully transcended. Doe Kan homeopath

I loved the whole happening. It prompted some lovely conversations about death, dying, grief and unresolved relationships. Mark Elliott, entrepreneur

An incredibly powerful piece danced by performers over the age of 60. Mish Aminoff Moon, photographer/artist

Review on Love and Loss by Sarah Plett.

Oh and photographer, Theo Gould took some stunning black and white portraits of all the dancers in different locations in the cemetery. They are cinematic/heroic and were included in an exhibition for Kensington and Chelsea Arts Festival. There are still huge posters with these portraits on the walls along the Grand Union Canal opposite the cemetery. The synergy happened.

They finally finished the filming in September. Marlon is the director, Pablo Rojo is the cinematographer. There were more weather cancellations. It is now being edited. And it looks sumptuous. They will launch-screen it on Dec 5th at the local independent, cinema, the Lexi.

2020

As soon as she heard that Brent was going to be London’s Borough of Culture 2020, Rose started planning a poetry project based on Willesden Junction station, one of the places that she returns to again and again. For her, WJ, it is eternally compelling in that the landscape there holds so much. So many layers. Such bleakness. And such beauty in the bleakness. She always thinks of Dave – who has now moved on – one of the station staff, who would make dazzling statements as passengers arrived. Welcome to wonderful Willesden Junction, he’d announce over the tannoy and for a few seconds people were transported to another universe.

In late 2019, she heard that she’d been awarded a small grant to form the Willesden Junction Poets. She put the word out on social media and in the Kilburn Times, Brent poets appeared out of all sorts of nooks and crannies. They had a gathering at Rose’s flat to share research and history, they wandered around the station and its canal surroundings. They were poised for this residency and then Covid 19 and lockdown descended.

There was one in-the-dark visit to the station with its looming towers – the landscape is changing because of the Crossrail and HS2 developments at Old Oak Common station and hence so many more flats – and red lights on cranes. Three Willesden Junction poets – Ian McLachlan, Rose and Sue Saunders – stood on Platform 5 as if they were in a Edward Hopper painting, socially distance was an unfamiliar way of being. For next two months, they held Zoom poetry workshops like the rest of the UK. They wrote poems and read them to each other, then gave constructive feedback. All about Willesden Junction from a distance. Rose was actually in North Wales.

By June and July, they were visiting the station again. With botanist, John Wells; with station historian Ian Bull and filmmaker, Tereza Stehlikova who made a lyrical film Disappearing Wormwood about the area. One high spot was discovering that over forty different kinds of wild flowers are entangled in the railway ‘wasteland’ including mugwort and bristly oxtongue.

WJ was continually unfolding – new words like marshalling yards learnt from reading about art critic John Berger’s visits to the station in the 1950s. Artist Leon Kossoff’s expressionistic, often dark but somehow also joyful depictions of the station done in the 80s. Kossoff’s deep love of the Willesden Junction expansive horizon was something Rose shared. And wondered at.

Keira Rathbone, a marvellous typewriter artist – she uses typewriters from the 1970s to create images – also joined Rose for magical trips to the station. Crazy little expeditions where Rose had located the heart of WJ. Round the back near that piss-stenched tunnel, in the midst of the intensity of the straight lines of the tracks – goods trains thundering past, Pendolinos whizzing. There was a strange wind, Rose suddenly felt as thought she was back on Ilkley moors again.

And then there were the conversations between a pipe on a pock-marked wall and a strange creature that looked as though it belonged on the bottom of the ocean. She was a flirty she-goddess beckoning her god. A railway worker passed by and told the story of his engagement bans being typed on the same kind of Imperial typewriter in Zambia in the 80s.

This is what the Willesden Junction poetry project was all about. Memories and new stories. History and our stories. Enchantment and spectacle. Made from the mundane.

Keira created amazing illustrations for their poems – instinctive impressions of pigeons that seemed to move, back alleys, views from bridges and more detailed encounters with buildings and horizons.

BeWILDering was birthed during the summer and launched with a series of radio shows in October and November – the poets were on Resonance FM with Debbie Golt, K2K local radio, Portobello Radio – and a Zoom with almost a hundred people in attendance.

There were also the individual films of the poets reading their poems at various locations in Willesden Junction Station, as well as the longer film of them all.

It was a triumph.

Reviews for the Performance

A piece in the Kilburn Times.

This is a wonderful piece by filmmaker Tereza Stehlikova on her visit to Willesden Junction Station with the poets.

Interview with Rose Rouse for Metroland Cultures.

These are the films of the poets and their WJ poems.

2017

Suzanne Noble and Rose co-founded Advantages of Age in 2016 as a way of challenging media stereotypes around ageing. All that exhaustion. No, that wasn’t them. But, yes, there are different more challenging aspects of life to deal with as we grow older – health, work, retirement or not, sexuality, partnership, death and dying. They wanted AofA to be a place to share all of this and black humour too. Death, sex & rockn’roll, that’s them.

So when Suzanne – ever throwing herself into the unknown – suggested that they apply for an Arts Council England grant, Rose agreed, wrote most of the content for this OUTage series of performances then didn’t expect to get the money. They got it on the second attempt. She was amazed. Now they had to make it happen.

There was Death Dinner – which was a film but also a performance. They invited the ten participants – from groovy pathologist, Carla Valentine to Professor Douglas Davies, an expert in death rituals to founder of Kicking The Bucket festival and natural burial grounds owner, Liz Rothschild – to come dressed as they would like to be buried or burnt. Photographer Elainea Emmott made Momenti Mori of them all as they arrived, a Queen of the Night marked their voyage into Deathland with a stick of burning sage as we stepped over the threshold into the Dissenter’s Chapel in Kensal Green cemetery where an abundant feast awaited. As they tasted these sensual morsels, Suzanne and Rose asked questions about their roles around death, what a good death would look like to them and what object they had brought along with them. This dialogue was turned into Death Dinner, the film. The aim was to open up discussion about death and dying. There was a sell out screening at the Pathology Museum and further screenings at festivals like Byline.

The second OUTage event was Taboo Night at Vout-O-Renees in East London where they looked at the taboos around getting older. There were poets declaring their poems on ageing with the Naked poet in attendance; there was performer Debra Watson doing Gimme, Gimme, Gimme!! Love which was about dating again in one’s 50s; there was a film showing older people enjoying themselves having sex, particularly the woman; there were personal stories about OUTage – about dry vaginas, use oil; about drugs and dancing; about older sex.

Finally, there was the Flamboyant Forever open-top double decker bus where they invited people Over 50 to come dressed in their most OUTageous finery. The message was that style can be theirs in this way. Invisibility is not an obligation as they age, they can dress in defiance and with exuberance. The meeting place was Sloane Square, they had no idea how many people would turn up.

They were delighted to welcome seventy colourfully attired participants onto the bus. They had a ball and there was a tribal sense to the occasion. People rejoiced in finding their tribe.

Each one of these performances was preceded by a hot tub micro salon on one of the subjects in Suzanne’s garden. They went FB Live with salons on OUTageous style with stylist Johnny Blue Eyes, on death and dying with psychotherapist and death activist, Caroline Bobby and death mask maker, Nick Reynolds, and on Tantra with holistic sex worker, Seani Love and writer, Monique Roffey. They were huge fun. And taboo-breaking.

This OUTageous series influenced Rose, the experience gave her the confidence to apply for other grants and projects on her own. Which is what Advantages of Age is all about. Inspiring each other to follow our dreams and believe they are possible as we get older.

Reviews

Death Dinner

Flamboyance Forever

Advantages of Age on Facebook

A film of the Flamboyance Forever Bus Tour

A Times article on Advantages of Age