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Shame it or Name it: Skimmington Skimmity Stang Ride by Jessica Akerman

My take on the brief for the Beggar’s Opera commission has been to combine two themes I’ve been working with for a number of years. 1) Traditional folk songs and related sonic customs; and 2) making costumes from neighbourhood markets that cost the value of the market’s postcode (which in the case of Barnstaple Pannier Market is £31 for EX31!).

My plan is to create three costumes inspired by the market and area, and three songs that correspond to these costumes; together they will create fragments of a story. Why three? Because John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera, the source material for this commission, uses a three-act structure, and I like to find metrics like this to work with. Much of my work is process-led, and these structures - like using the market’s postcode to determine the cost of the costume - provide a helpful and playful set of limitations, preventing me from following too many tangents.

While researching the history of Barnstaple and the surrounding region, I found references to the custom skimmington ride, also known as stang ride, charivari, ran tan or rough music. This was a historic tradition found across the UK until the early 20th century; a form of public humiliation, used to shame behaviours deemed as immoral. A community would congregate outside the house of the shamed subject, beating pots and pans, chanting, processing around town and making a hullabaloo. The transgressive behaviours were often gender-based, including examples of women who were considered too dominant over their husbands, unmarried couples, domestic abuse, or infidelity. In 2020 I worked with Bristol arts collective Caraboo Projects on a podcast about rough music, which charted its Traditional roots to connections with the Northern Irish Troubles, American battle rap and Latin American protests.

How might I incorporate this form of collective performance, noise-making and storytelling into the Pannier Market context, and creation of new songs? I’m thinking about making basic shakers and noisy instruments, and playing with the common visual features of a charivari. This includes effigies of the ‘culprits’, or the people themselves, being tied backwards on a horse while being made to hold its tail while being paraded through the streets. Given that John Gay satirised the moral codes of his time through the Beggar’s Opera, this seems like a rich area to explore.

Refs:

Caraboo Loops podcast, Rough Music by Jessica Akerman: https://open.spotify.com/episode/029HpZRu58sNl2j1Sl5ESO

Image: Dr. Syntax and the Skimmington Riders by Thomas Rowlandson (1757–1827) taken from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Thomas_Rowlandson_skimmington.jpg

Using money raised by National Lottery players, The National Lottery Heritage Fund supports projects that connect people and communities with the UK’s heritage. Thanks to National Lottery players, we will be able to deliver a year-long project that provides research opportunities, fun activities for the community, and the chance for people to think more deeply about what the Pannier Market means to our area.