- High Rise eState of Mind:Love and Honesty in the Midst of London's Neoliberal Housing Crisis
It is a miserable day in November 2020. One of an interminable string of miserable days since the announcement of the latest "lockdown" measures to combat the spread of Covid-19 in the UK during the pandemic. I'm in my bedroom, watching a live-stream of the hip hop theatre performance High Rise eState of Mind. The four performers who make up the company Beats & Elements stand in a square formation on the stage of Manchester's HOME, each with a mic and a chair. The chairs demarcate the high-rise block of flats where the play is set (as the story unfolds, we come to understand that the two chairs upstage indicate the first floor and the two downstage the twenty-fourth floor, more of which later). The performers are dressed in hooded sweatshirts and baseball caps as they rap about life under conditions of housing precarity and insecurity. Their London accents vibrate tinnily through my laptop speakers. I know the performers personally, having worked with the company over the past two years, attending shows, documenting rehearsals, writing about their practice, and interacting with them socially through this process. My phone rings. On the laptop screen/stage, the performer Conrad Murray has stepped out of character and is telling the audience he's calling someone who he knows is watching. I answer my phone and it's Conrad. He wants to know about my housing situation: where I live, and where I'd choose to live if all my dreams came true. "I'm from South London, but I live in Devon at the moment," I tell him, "but if I could choose, I'd go back to the 90s and live in New York."
"Who would you live with?" he asks me."An Afghan dog, and a hot man." [End Page 129]
Conrad nods at me through the laptop screen and hangs up the phone—David Bonnick Jr (known as Jr, pronounced "Junior"), a rapper and performer in the show, steps forward. He uses my answers as the basis for a freestyle rap,1 weaving my housing dreams into funny and surprising lyrics ("Yeah, Katie / She's really pretty / Wants to be like those girls from Sex and the City").2 For the first time since the November lockdown was announced, I feel connected to other people and part of something bigger than myself, existing in a world beyond the confines of my house. It is the familiar pleasure of theatre, albeit in a digital-live capacity, and it is a relief.
The pleasure and relief I describe above are where I am going with this article, which examines how the hip hop theatre practiced by the Londonbased company Beats & Elements might create possibilities for connection and affinity (or 'love') and for truth and honesty under conditions of post-truth and dishonesty produced by the prevailing neoliberal system. Like much (perhaps all) theatre, Beats & Elements' work responds to the pressing social issues of its time, and in London in the twenty-first century, there are few issues more urgent or pressing than the scarcity of affordable housing. High Rise eState of Mind is a Beats & Elements show that takes London's housing crisis as its point of departure. Before I dwell on the company and the performance in any detail, however, I will divert us elsewhere for a while, parsing the social and political landscape in which the company work in order that we might return to the practice with a clearer sense of its context and therefore of its stakes and implications.
London's Neoliberal Housing Crisis
On its British website, the media outlet Vice regularly publishes a satirical social commentary feature called "London Rental Opportunity of the Week." In this feature, the journalist Joel Golby selects a rental advert for a property in London, typically taken from a popular national property marketing website such as Zoopla, Rightmove, or Gumtree. He issues a caustic take-down of the property on offer, whose price often nears or equals the average monthly wage of all but the very...