'Ballet is for everyone'

Josette Bushell-Mingo's next project is her revival of Simply Heavenly
10 April 2012

The moment Josette Bushell-Mingo bursts into the room, the walls seem to shrink.

Actor, director, choreographer, Lion King star, this 40-year-old impresario of the impossible fills the space around her with an electrifying energy that leaves a bystander feeling dully unfit, desperate to keep up. That she has just come, buzzing, from a rehearsal for a new play merely adds to the whirr of activity.


Two Step, a first play by the actor Rhashan Stone, is one of three world premieres taking place in Push 04, a short season of black British theatre, ballet and opera staged across the Almeida, ROH2 at the Royal Opera House and English National Opera.

Bushell-Mingo founded Push in 1999 to address the under-representation of black practitioners in British theatre. "This is our most ambitious season so far," she says. "Rhashan's piece, which is set in Peckham and stars the great Derek Griffiths, was specially commissioned to celebrate an older generation of black British actors who blazed a trail.

"They made those of us who followed see that, yes, we could do it too. It's as if, by being there and doing it, they were saying to us: 'Go on, have a go.'"

Griffiths, who first caught the eye with his "wibbly-wobbly walk" on BBC's Playschool in the Seventies, went on to become a fixture in telly sitcoms and the Royal Shakespeare Company. The key question, as Bushell-Mingo knows only too well, is who is Push now for? Where do ghettoising and enabling overlap, where part company?

"I'm used to the flak. We still don't know whether it'll just play to a dog and someone's mother-in-law. It's always uncertain. Many people, black included, have said I'm selling out by performing in buildings laden with 'white' tradition and association. I always say, 'No, it's for everyone, in a way the performing arts never have been.'"

In recent years, theatres have been accused by the Arts Council of being institutionally racist and the Government has linked arts funding to equality monitoring. "Of course, things have improved," says Bushell-Mingo. "But we're not there yet.

It took months to cast these pieces because there just aren't enough black actors, dancers, singers, around to take the parts. It's not that black people are excluded.

We have laws to prevent that. There's a good representation among technical staff, designers, stage managers. But it's still an issue, a source of comment, when a black actor is put in an otherwise white cast. It's still a talking point whether Othello is played by black or white. One day, maybe, that will change and people will just say, that actor was good, or he wasn't."

Part of Bushell-Mingo's persuasive charm is that, for all her reputation as an activist, a campaigner, she knows there are no absolutes. Push is only part of an answer. Ethically, she says, there's no correct way of proceeding. "It's far more subtle and unconscious than anyone realises. We're all feeling our way as to how to make things better: it's as much to do with attitude - on both sides.

"There's still a view that black people can't do ballet, can't perform in the Royal Opera House or Sadler's Wells, as if somehow it's just not on the agenda. Aunts, cousins, uncles, within out own community, still say, 'Aw, no, it's not for us'. But why not? The whole point about Push is to take it off the agenda and make it a reality."

All this is spoken with champion-hurdler speed, darting off down byways and returning to the main thrust of the argument with determined clarity. "Times are not easy. But the support I'm getting is unbelievably exciting. Can you imagine how it feels to be talking to Deborah Bull at the Royal Opera House, to be going up in a lift with dancers from the Bolshoi and thinking, yes, we're here, too."

Errolyn Wallen's opera, Another America: Fire, set in 2014 in Houston where the first black American female astronaut is about to fly to Mars, and directed by Indhu Rubasingham, and Ben Love's ballet, Awakening, to be performed as a double-bill at Sadler's Wells, make up the rest of the season, under Bushell-Mingo's artistic leadership.

Her background hardly prepared her for a life in theatre. She was born in Plaistow of Guyanese parents, both now dead, who settled in London in the Sixties. Her mother was a nurse, her father, "as it says on my birth certificate, was an omnibus driver". She attended a comprehensive locally and then embarked on a performing-arts course at Barking College of Technology.

"It was a wonderful fairytale. We had a workshop with Liverpool's Kaboodle Theatre Company. I went in and gave it my all. They came up to me after and said, 'We saw you; would you like to join the company?' It was better than Pop Idol. I was 18."

She stayed with the multi-discipline company for three years, learning "the alphabet of what I use now, in every aspect of my stage work". Opportunities quickly followed: at the RSC, the National, Birmingham Rep, Complicite and the Temba Theatre Company. In 1999, she won wider fame for her portrayal of the shaman baboon Rafiki in The Lion King, opening the event with a show-stopping number which still fills her with nervous memories.

"I'm not a singer. I can't read a score. I had to learn every note by rote and hold the pitch in my head before going on stage and belting it out. It was effing amazing, hard, scary. But every time I had to say to myself, look Josette, get this into perspective. It's the theatre. It's not the civil-rights bus. Previously they had cast a South African in the role. And here was a black British woman born in the East End."

After a year in The Lion King she "stopped to have babies". Her two sons, now two and 10 months, remain in Stockholm where her Swedish husband is a theatre director. She commutes-back at weekends as much as she can but it sounds a hellish schedule.

"My husband said to me, 'Josette, go there, do what you have to do, but for our sakes come back a better person'. Meaning, of course, that I had to make it worthwhile, otherwise I shouldn't be doing it. But I'm not in any doubt about that. It's how things are for the moment. It has to be done."

Sweden, she says, for all its sophistication and progressiveness in all matters social and technological, lags far behind Britain - "about 10 years, at least" - over multicultural issues. "I know my boys will face difficulties. They will be looked at twice. They will be seen as black. There are efforts, certainly, and similar kinds of theatre projects. But in an otherwise fully functioning society, this component is still not in place."

Bushell-Mingo's continental commuting will continue for a while yet. A revival of her triumphant Young Vic staging of Simply Heavenly, Langston Hughes's high-octane gospel and blues musical set in Fifties Harlem, opens at the Whitehall Trafalgar Studio in November. Early next year she will play Cleopatra to Tom Mannion's Antony at Manchester Royal Exchange.

Is she juggling too many balls? "To me, it's all the same one. I don't have any boundaries. I don't want others to have any either. Push is here as long as it's necessary, and I'm with it. My dream is that one day we won't need to have this conversation."

She bowls out of the Almeida office. Life, and the walls, return to their normal size.

Push 04 runs 30 August to 18 September at the Almeida (020 7359 4404) and Sadler's Wells (0870 737 7737); www.pushherenow.com

Create a FREE account to continue reading

eros

Registration is a free and easy way to support our journalism.

Join our community where you can: comment on stories; sign up to newsletters; enter competitions and access content on our app.

Your email address

Must be at least 6 characters, include an upper and lower case character and a number

You must be at least 18 years old to create an account

* Required fields

Already have an account? SIGN IN

By clicking Create Account you confirm that your data has been entered correctly and you have read and agree to our Terms of use , Cookie policy and Privacy policy .

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged in