A few weeks ago I found myself in an increasingly familiar unfamiliar situation. I was in a room, working in one of a number of jobs I have in ‘The Arts’. I looked around and noticed something about everyone else in the room. They were all Oxbridge graduates, looked a certain way, were from middle or privileged class families – and I was not like them.
I didn’t share a background, an ethnicity, an Oxbridge college with any of them – there was nothing familiar between us, nothing that would immediately connect me to them, only that we worked in the same place.
As I looked at all those colleagues I had a strange thought, something that feels more than a little exposing for sure. The thought was this: “‘I’m a miracle.” Or more accurately: “It’s a miracle that I’m here.” Not just unlikely, not just improbable, it felt Impossible that I was in that room, working alongside those people. It was miraculous.
While some people found the door to that room – and lots of rooms like it – swung open like its hinges had been drenched in oil daily, I had to hunt to find a key for a rusted lock and shove my shoulder hard against it to push that door to that room open.
Realising the impossibility that I should be in that room made me angry and despondent.
It shouldn’t take an almost impossible miracle for someone like me to end up in a room like that.
But it does. Because I’m the son of a Bangladeshi bus driver from Keighley and I didn’t go to the right university.
Cut to last night, and I stood in a town square surrounded by thousands of people who did look like me, who were from the same place I’m from and together we watched a piece of art and I wept.
Bloom was a piece of outdoor theatre that combined dance, circus skills, opera, music, aerial dance and it happened in Shipley Town Centre, a five minute walk from my front door. It came to the town as part of Bradford 2025, the year in which my home celebrates being the UK City of Culture. It was an absolutely beautiful piece of work.
When the choir sang and people held hands in the sky above us swinging and performing what I can only describe as air ballet, I cried.
When an opera singer climbed on top of a clocktower that is known locally as a blight, it became beautiful, she sang and I cried.
When a theatrical moment saw a ball of moonlight thrown from the clocktower to the young dancers in the market square, I cried.
It was intensely powerful to stand shoulder to shoulder with people you share streets with and see such a transformative piece of art.
But the thing that absolutely punched me in the gut and had me weeping was a little moment of spoken poetry in the performance and I heard the line ‘like flowers that grow in the cracks of the pavement’ resonate in the air above Shipley Market Square and, with my little boy on my shoulders, I wept.
In that moment I realised that it won’t take a miracle for my son to access those rooms that I somehow found the key for.
A couple of minutes into the show he watched a performer climb on top of a ladder, hoisted into the air by a troupe of dancers and he let out an involuntary ‘Daddy that’s amazing’ and I knew that he understood in his core the power of what he was watching.
It was a five minute walk from his front door, it was world class art. And he now knows that art belongs to him. He told me after the show that ‘I want to do that’. And I told him that if wanted to, he could. And it won’t take a miracle.
And that’s the point of bringing great art to the doorstep of everyone, not just the people who happen to live in a place where art happens. It’s miraculous.
Reflections on Bloom written by Nick Ahad.