Spotlight: Midnight in Stockholm (with Julian Assange)
Rosalind Coleman told a story at one of our most memorable shows "Art?" in November 2018. She began producing immersive theater in 2009 with works in cathedrals, old television studios, derelict office blocks, forests, cemeteries, on the roof of the Royal Festival Hall, and underneath the world’s largest disco ball, to name a few. As a founding member of the collective KLANGHAUS, Ros is no stranger to creative endeavors and found herself in Shanghai working for Punchdrunk on their globally renowned ongoing production Sleep No More. We were lucky enough to have her grace the Unravel stage to tell us about a time when she was pursuing a very different career path...
UNRAVEL: You now work in the arts, but when your story took place you were a journalist. What was it that drew you to journalism in the first place
ROS: I had been working on art projects and doing more and more writing. Me and my mate had a fanzine about music which we called "The Revolution Will Not Be Amplified." People were encouraging me to write more, but I didn’t want to write local or travel journalism. My favorite magazine, "The Private Eye" ran an ad in their back pages on an investigative journalism summer school. I scrimped and saved enough money to pay the entry fee in the first year, and then I was hooked. Every year after that I worked, volunteered, and got more and more involved, since the draw was simply that investigative journalism is my favorite kind of writing to read, so I thought it might be the kind that I might want to write too.
UNRAVEL: Your story was about a chance encounter with one of the most notorious and controversial figures on the planet, Julian Assange. How did you find yourself in this situation in the first place? Was he how you expected him to be, or did he surprise you?
ROS: I had met this American journalist at the investigative journalism summer school in London. The American guy offered me a position helping him produce his European book tour and I jumped at the chance. We arrived in to Sweden and had a meeting with Donald, the guy whose restaurant we were scheduled for, when he invited us for dinner and then nearly canceled since Julian was flying over from London that afternoon to get out of the UK. He too was speaking that year as Wikileaks had just released a video that brought them to instant rockstar status, and not only in the journo community -- normal people were also paying attention now. In the end, we all went to dinner together, since the journalism community is, like any other, very welcoming and supportive. Julian was like you would expect in that ambitious high register rockstar way, but also very human and a total bag of contradictions. I think that’s part of the key message for me in the whole story. People are complicated, life is complexity, there is no black and white, only endless grey, nitty-gritty, inexplicable detail.
UNRAVEL: The night you describe in your story is a real rollercoaster - you met a cast of characters, your laptop got stolen, and you found yourself locked out and cashless. Is there any one moment in the night that stands out the clearest?
ROS: Yes, and funnily, it's really got nothing to do with Assange. I remember walking back to the harbor after dinner, when I was beginning to tune back into my intuition, think for myself, and dig my heels in. I can be real stubborn when I want to be, but on the whole I am so congenial and avoid confrontation that I was really needing to get my courage together to say to the American journalist who I'd come to realize was a proper dickhead, “Hey listen, I am not going to go back to the Airbnb with you right now, I have had more than enough of your vibe for one evening.”
At some point, since I was dawdling and the American journalist had been steaming ahead this whole time, fuming away up front, he stormed back along the line of walkers to fall into step alongside me, as we passed generic fashion shops and bars in downtown Stockholm. Once we were sharing a stride, he urgently stage-whispered at me, “Can you please pick up the pace right now, I am VERY tired and I would like to get back to the apartment right away.”
But before I had a chance to answer he had stomped off up ahead again.
“Well,” I thought, as I watched the sunlight intensify over the raised eyebrows of the buildings around me; “Noted.”
It was this glorious revelation; you have no power over me, and I will do what I damn well please. My folks have always raised me to listen to my gut, and it was so nice to have that feeling confirmed in this funny little high energy tirade of pure tantrum-driven agitation, I’m sure it went directly into my long term memory for future reference.
UNRAVEL: Why did you end up moving away from journalism and did this experience have anything to do with that? Was there any connection between this experience and your career change?
ROS: It made me realize so many things, not only about absurdity but also about human history, and that the feckless version is so much more often closer to reality than the conspiracy. My feeling is we should inherently distrust anyone who says, “I have the answer. Follow me.”
And that it takes a certain kind of person to exist on the front line, as I so often describe it. When I say front line, I mean of investigative journalism, where careless talk costs people their lives, and your errors of judgement can lead to extreme consequences. I have always been much more content hanging out in the back making snide remarks (my grand metaphor for, and love story of, art, in my budget Oscar Wilde moments) and since what we then saw over the ensuing months was a confirmation of some of those feelings with people behaving appallingly and out of power and fear, I simply felt less worried producing large scale international art. A lot of my close friends worked on the Iraq war logs release, and that was incredible and inspiring. A lot of those same friends then quit over the diplomatic cables release, and that was a tough time.
UNRAVEL: Did that trip signal the start of something for you? The end of something?
ROS: Everything is the start of something and the end of something else, so yes, so many things! The start of my *proper* career as a producer, the end of recording an album with my band, and actually the beginning of the end of my band full stop as bigger and crazier jobs came in. So the end of making my own art, in some ways, and the beginning of getting paid to produce other people’s.
I'd say it marked the end of my near blind enthusiasm for investigative journalism, and certainly the end of my assumption that everyone in that profession must be automatically a good person since they subscribe to certain values of mischief-making that I admire. The end of second guessing myself, and [the start of] valuing the work of art in society, to help us heal, and process, and to contribute to the international narrative by pioneering human emotional connection and by realizing that this emotional pioneer work is as important as the science, technology, and the rest, since in this modern world it is ultimately connection with surreality which will save us from the robots, and more importantly, from ourselves.
UNRAVEL: What did the experience of sharing your story in front of an audience mean to you?
ROS: It meant everything. I’ve been telling that story time and again for nearly a decade now, and I’ve never really thought about it as a story with a beginning, middle, and end. It felt wonderful to craft it and hone it in such a way that brought it back into that realm of art. I didn’t take notes or prompt cards because the guidance said you oughtn’t so instead I programmed my hands. I made the story into roughly ten sections and then used my ten fingers to try and embed the narrative on each digit like some sort of NLP failsafe.
UNRAVEL: What would you say to someone thinking about sharing a story at Unravel?
ROS: Do it. Work hard. Redraft. Ask for help. Listen to the notes. Notice that it’s for you as much as it is for the audience and that your ability to bring people with you on it somehow, also means enjoying the process and having fun with it in your own way. If you are having fun, and you are trying and leaning into it, then the people listening will see that investment and the traces of effort, and feel their way through it all with you.