Categories
Wizz

The United Queendom: how RuPaul’s Drag Race put Liverpool on the map

Choriza May turns on the TV and gasps theatrically, teetering in her stilettos. She’s watching a report on the UK’s vote to leave the European Union. Gaping in wide-eyed shock under heavy false lashes and a beehive straight out of a Pedro Almodóvar movie, she turns to the several-hundred-strong audience, smooths down her royal-blue velvet dress, and launches into a lip-sync to Jennifer Hudson’s stirring Dreamgirls ballad. “There’s no way I’m living without you,” she implores. “I’m staying, and you’re gonna love me.” The crowd leaps to a standing ovation.

This is drag queen Choriza’s winning performance at Liverpool’s first Big Drag Pageant – a contest for “kings, queens, and everyone in-between” that arrived in the city last November. It’s the latest event to spotlight an art form that has long thrived in the port city that gave the world beloved British comedy drag queen Lily Savage, as well as the late gender-twisting Dead or Alive singer Pete Burns. A diverse range of performers and outfits is on show at the pageant: beards and hairy legs are paired with pleather miniskirts and frumpy leotards in a boisterous, lightly political mishmash that feels distinctly northern English.

Liverpool was recently put firmly back on the drag map thanks to local prodigy The Vivienne, winner of RuPaul’s Drag Race UK last November. It was the first British edition of the 11-season award-winning American show; the BBC version was less polished, peppered with crude slang and rough-and-ready Margaret Thatcher impressions.

The Vivienne’s raucous personality is typical of the down-to-earth comedy queens that Liverpool’s many cabaret clubs, such as The Lisbon Bar, Kitty’s Showbar and Superstar Boudoir, are known for. They fit into a wider scene in a city that claims to have an LGBTQ+ population equivalent to San Francisco’s, with a roster of gay clubs in its Stanley Street Quarter to match. You’ll catch resident queens most nights at the likes of Heaven, OMG and GBar, all nightclubs a couple of minutes’ walk from each other.

But just a few decades ago, Liverpool’s drag clubs were hidden from plain sight, despite the city’s busy port bringing in plenty of punters. “In the 1960s and 70s, seafarers arriving in Liverpool would use polari [a type of secret slang] as a language to get by without straight people knowing what they were talking about,” says Kitty Litter, the drag queen owner of the rainbow-painted Kitty’s Showbar. “When I started performing in the 1980s, queens looked more like your auntie or your mother than a superstar. Even now my whole costume can go in a carrier bag and no one would be any the wiser.” With tattooed hairy legs poking out from a dinner lady-style tabard, and purple, scrawled-on eyebrows, Kitty represents the northern-English antithesis of the preened, perfect-looking American queen pedalled by US icon RuPaul.

According to Kitty, drag performance took a nosedive between the 1980s and today, as tastes shifted. “Years ago, everyone wanted to be Lily Savage,” she says. “But then suddenly we had [British TV stars] Graham Norton and Alan Carr – camp comics that didn’t have to be in a frock.” Today, however, there’s a renewed appetite for outrageous, gender-shifting personas like Kitty, who performs at least three nights a week.

Social media has also had a hand in reviving drag in Liverpool. “If you perform in a bar, 50 people might see you, but post a video on Instagram and thousands see it all over the world,” says Choriza May. “It’s become such a window into drag. And then Drag Race has obviously helped a lot too.”

Even though The Vivienne was only recently crowned Drag Race UK champion, Choriza, who performs regularly in Newcastle and Liverpool, can already see an impact on the local scene. “It’s making everyone step up their game,” she says. “People who’ve been doing drag for years are now thinking that this is a job that can make them famous.”

Kitty and Choriza worry, however, that the groomed, photo-ready version of drag promoted by RuPaul risks pigeonholing performers, even as it makes the scene more accessible. Certain local promoters are setting out to address that. “Drag Race has done a lot for drag as a venture, but it does suggest that queens have to sit within this very defined box,” claims Pretentious Dross, a performer and producer at queer cabaret night EAT ME + Preach, in Liverpool’s Baltic Triangle area. “They’re predominantly white male. But there are so many people outside of the gender boxes – and the tradition comes from there, so let’s celebrate it.”

Dross draws from her theatre practice doctorate studies to blend drag with experimental live art, often mixing 1980s horror movie tropes with elements of New Romantic fashion. “When you go back to the origin of the word, ‘queer’ means oddness, something that doesn’t fit with the norm,” says Dross. “EAT ME + Preach provides a radical, queer platform for artists with accessibility issues, who are fighting against ableism, who are gender non-binary or trans – people who don’t generally get a gig in traditional drag venues and who don’t fit in the Drag Race box.”

The emergence of the Big Drag Pageant, while less radical than the EAT ME cabaret nights (Dross performs a Silence of the Lambs-themed act, using a raw chicken puppet of Buffalo Bill’s victims), shows another side to Liverpool’s diversifying drag scene, which is increasingly no longer confined to LGBTQ+ spaces. Events producer and drag promoter Tom Barrie – who recently started performing in drag under the name Dame Fanny De Faux – was tasked with organising the pageant after creating a successful family-friendly drag brunch show during Liverpool Pride, called Tuck Shop.

“I wanted Tuck Shop to be all-inclusive,” he says. “Until now, drag has normally been the domain of nightclubs or late-night TV. The response to our afternoon drag brunch from the younger audience was amazing. Some people view the drag scene as quite a frivolous thing – a couple of boys who just want to put on make-up and dresses, but it’s far from that. It’s a proper art form and it has the power to help younger people discuss issues of gender identity.”

Liverpool’s drag scene is on an upward trajectory. New cabaret venue On Point opened towards the end of last year, run by local queen Miss Tiara; Kitty’s Showbar will be adding rooms for overnight stays in time for Pride in July. It’s a microcosm of the growing popularity of drag performance across the UK: the self-styled “Europe’s largest celebration of drag”, DragWorld, launched in London in 2017, while the first Drag Fest UK festival will hit London and Manchester this June. But for Choriza, events like the Big Drag Pageant are more of a microcosm of the general Liverpudlian spirit.

“Liverpool has one of the most inclusive scenes I’ve ever witnessed,” she says. “It’s a city with a history of entertainment, so the drag performers here are real all-rounders – singing, comedy, the full package. That makes them powerful.”

Categories
Selamta

Is London the vegan capital of the world?

exc-5e0f69167b17704bed25f130

For the country with the most livestock in Africa, Ethiopia boasts curiously vegan-friendly cuisine. But it’s long been customary for Orthodox Tewahedo Christians to omit meat from their diet on Wednesdays and Fridays – something that the West cottoned onto in recent decades, with campaigns such as Paul, Mary and Stella McCartney’s Meat Free Monday. London has just been voted the world’s most vegan-friendly city by online vegan restaurant guide HappyCow, with 152 meat- and dairy-free eateries, including a family-run Ethiopian canteen. Here’s five of the best.

The Ethiopian bargain: Andu Cafe

Any Londoner will point you in the direction of Dalston for plant-based grub. The east London district’s main thoroughfare, Kingsland Road, is packed with veg-centric diners from a deep-fried jackfruit joint to the new outpost of Soho spot Mildreds. But there’s one unassuming, cash-only canteen that set up shop here long before vegan eating became a hipster trend.

“I came to London from Addis Ababa in 1970, and the city was missing Ethiopian food,” says Andu Cafe’s owner, Andu Alam. “We opened the UK’s first vegan Ethiopian restaurant. At first it wasn’t that busy, but since vegan food has taken off it’s gained popularity. Now people come from all over the UK and beyond.”

It’s easy to see why. Sitting at a wicker chair, surrounded by carved wooden figurines and faded photos on the lime-green walls, feels like being in a friend’s living room. And the food couldn’t get any homelier: brought out quickly on platters bearing six dishes each, it’s a warming antidote to the harsh winter outside. Alam’s yemisir wot (lentil stew) is his crowning glory. Smoky, oily and rich in tomato, it’s got just enough of a kick to ward off a cold, and its smooth texture complements the crunch of the accompanying cabbage and beans. It’s all mopped up with a tangy injera flatbread and followed by jebena-served coffee to keep you warm for the rest of the night. anducafe.co.uk

The veggie pioneer: The Gate

Red buses trundle past the ceiling-high windows of the bright dining room, where a shiny, glazed aubergine waits on a polished wooden table. Sliced in half, it drips with a sticky sauce of miso paste, sugar and soy. The knife slides smoothly through its roasted flesh and each bite crunches with a garnish of toasted cashew nuts and sesame seeds.

At vegetarian fine-dining spot The Gate – which launched in Hammersmith in 1989 and was followed by three more London openings – aubergine replaces meat. “Another of our classic Gate dishes is aubergine ‘schnitzel’,” says owner Michael Daniel. “But although we live in a world where everything gets compared to meat, vegetarian ‘meatballs’ are not meatballs – they’re lentil balls, or something different.”

Daniel’s mainly vegan menu pre-dates and avoids the current craze for meat replacements, letting seasonal, local vegetables shine on their own merits. Artfully plated South- and East-Asian inflections spice up foraged mushrooms, baby artichokes and raw beetroot.

“Plant-based has gone mainstream, and it’s very exciting,” says Daniel. “Nowadays, we see people in the restaurant we wouldn’t expect – groups of guys, and people who are open to just trying vegan once in a while.” thegaterestaurants.com

The insta paradise: Kalifornia Kitchen

“Healthy is sexy!” proclaims Tottenham Court Road’s latest plant-based eatery on Instagram. The Barbie-pink eatery seems tailored for the social media generation. The youthful clientele is equally photo-ready, sipping on quinoa, strawberry and coconut milk smoothies and nibbling on CBD granola on banana pancakes, in between photoshoots on the fuchsia spiral staircase.

But there’s substance behind the fashionable facade. Many diners head to Kalifornia Kitchen for a Moving Mountains burger, one of the most convincing mock-meat products on the market. Made from oyster mushrooms, vitamin B12, wheat proteins and coconut oil, the patty also contains beetroot juice which makes it “bleed” in the middle.

“The environmental impact of animal agriculture is becoming catastrophic,” says Moving Mountains’ Simeon Van der Molen. “Plant-based meat requires less land, less water and produces less greenhouse emissions than animal meat.” kaliforniakitchen.co.uk

The one for dessert: by CHLOE

Vegan cakes get a bad rap: traditional bakers have long complained that replacing eggs and butter with coconut oil and soy milk leads to heavy, dry results. Those prejudices can be left at the door of by CHLOE, which arrived from New York City in Covent Garden in 2017, with its menu of fast-casual burgers, sandwiches and salads, and the most un-vegan-tasting vegan cakes on the market. Think sweet sponge topped with rich vanilla icing, dotted with cocoa nibs and raspberries; air-light blueberry muffins tinged green with matcha; silky, red velvet cupcakes smeared with shocking-pink icing.

The interior is Instagrammable and millennial-friendly, with wicker chairs swinging from the ceiling and recyclable plates and cutlery. The sweet stuff here should be good: Californian founder Chloe Coscarelli made her name as the first vegan chef to win the USA’s Food Network’s Cupcake Wars in 2010. eatbychloe.com

The Michelin-starred treat: Pied à Terre

In Fitzrovia, the restaurant-packed pocket just north of Oxford Street, the roster of food businesses is in near-constant flux. But Pied à Terre is not only one of the area’s longest-standing restaurants, it also boasts one of London’s longest-held Michelin stars, awarded in 1993, two years after opening. Thanks to founder David Moore’s determination to be ahead of the curve, you can forget the starched tablecloths and haughty service usually associated with Michelin-starred dining rooms. Here, pendant lamps cast dappled light over leather booths and teal velvet chairs.

But it’s the restaurant’s 10-course vegan tasting menu, launched almost three years ago with the appointment of head chef Asimakis Chaniotis, that’s kept it modern. The delicate tasters of spelt risotto, coconut cream “cheese” and zesty lime sorbet are a far cry from the meat-focused kitchen of the 90s, where the chefs would scrabble to find a plant-based alternative on the fly.

“Nowadays, out of 45 covers, 20 of them could be on the vegan menu,” says Moore. “Over the next five or 10 years we are all going to eat much less meat. It’ll be like when we stopped smoking on buses or planes. Your kids will say to you, ‘Did you really eat meat twice a day?’” pied-a-terre.co.uk

Categories
N by Norwegian

Moving mountains: the power of women-only tours in Morocco

exc-5e0f60f27674db57a4ba258d

Fatima sits down at a wooden loom at the mouth of the cave and gestures for me to kneel beside her. Handing me a ball of wool, dyed yellow with saffron, she nods in encouragement as I attempt the fiddly process of weaving the next layer of the rug she’s working on, pushing it down with a metal comb.

A nomadic Berber, Fatima lives in caves across the sparse, rocky plains of Morocco’s High Atlas Mountains with her family, herd of goats, chickens and mule. Making a small living through weaving and selling goat meat, she pursues a lifestyle that hasn’t changed for thousands of years – except that, two years ago, she began to supplement her family’s income by hosting tourists for a taste of nomad life.

“She says she weaves for just one hour each day, because it’s such intense work,” says my guide, Chama Ouammi, pouring steaming cups of mint tea. Ouammi acts as translator between visitors and the nomads, who only speak a regional Berber dialect. “I am Berber, too, so I understand this life,” she says.

We’re here for a taster of a Women’s Expedition in Morocco – the first female-only trek from tour operator Intrepid Travel. It takes groups of up to 12 women on an eight-day immersive journey through the country, staying at homestays in the Atlas Mountains. These trips are also organised and guided by women, and men are noticeably absent from our travels. If they were here, we wouldn’t be baking bread, trying our hand at weaving and sipping tea with Fatima and her children.

“With men present you wouldn’t be able to enter women’s homes and break that cultural barrier,” Zina Bencheikh, Intrepid Group’s regional director for Europe, Middle East and North Africa, explained to me prior to this trip. “A lot of customers want to do challenging stuff like a trek, without being judged by men or seen all sweaty, but the main thing they want is to enter the women’s world.”

Women-only travel is one of the fastest growing sectors in the global travel industry – and demand for trips like these has been growing. The number of solo female travellers soared from 59 million to 138 million between 2014 and 2017, according to the World Tourism Organization, and 84% of all solo trips are now made by women.

Intrepid isn’t the only group responding to these figures. American operator smarTours launched women-only itineraries in Egypt, Morocco and Colombia last year, while Condé Nast Traveler invited its online community, Women Who Travel, on group trips to Colombia, Mexico and Cuba. But what makes these journeys into the Atlas Mountains special is that they’re actively encouraging women’s employment in Morocco.

“Intrepid is very committed to gender equality. But in 2017 we had less than 20% of female tour guides globally and in Morocco, we had none,” explains Bencheikh. “It’s a conservative country. Women seen leading groups of men and women in different cities, spending nights out of the house, was problematic.”

When her company instructed its global outposts to double their number of female tour guides by 2020, Bencheikh – who grew up in Canada, France and the UK before returning to Marrakech in her twenties – decided she had to unpick the cultural barriers stopping women from applying. She lobbied Morocco’s Ministry of Tourism to issue 1,000 new tour-guide licences, and campaigned to raise awareness among local women, encouraging them to apply. “It’s prestigious and really well paid,” she says. “Why wouldn’t women want to do it?”

At the same time, she launched a campaign in the M’Goun valley, a popular trekking region of the High Atlas, for an itinerary run by women, for women. “We didn’t want to shock the culture – and this way, the men accepted it,” she says. “In fact, they loved it. Their wives and sisters bring in more income.”

Now around 100 Moroccan women have tour guide licences, and the Intrepid team has built a network of women-led suppliers and homestays that had been cut off from the benefits of tourism. We visit one of these on our first night in the M’Goun valley, after a six-hour winding drive from Marrakech, over the barren, snow-dusted Tichka summit and past the mud-built kasbah of Aït Benhaddou, where scenes in Gladiator and Game of Thrones have been filmed.

We pull up in Agouti, a hamlet of low-rise stone houses surrounded by almond and fig trees, and receive an open-armed welcome from a family of six women, dressed in full-length velvet dresses in purples, blues and greens. I spend the evening cross-legged on the concrete kitchen floor with our hostess Ajo Bendaoud, peeling vegetables for a tagine and making couscous from scratch, rolling flour with water and oil, and steaming it slowly. We eat together, scooping up the delicious, spiced mixture with our hands.

Bendaoud picks up a drum and the women break into song, encouraging me to clap and sing along, making up lyrics as I try to imitate their Berber dialect. Ouammi, who speaks six languages, is our smiley go-between, but for the most part we connect through hand gestures, smiles and hugs. There’s something comforting about being ushered around the house by mothers and grandmothers, finding your place by lending a hand in domestic tasks that don’t much vary between cultures. In a female space, it’s easier to feel like an added-on family member, trusted to have a toddler plonked on your lap or to laugh your way through new dance moves without fear of looking silly.

The next morning, I embark on an early morning trek to visit the nomadic community with another local woman, Mama Bie. We stroll through lush orchards until we reach a craggy gorge, leap over rivers on stepping stones and pause to eat fresh tangerines while she tells me her story via Ouammi.

In rural Morocco, more than 80% of women are illiterate, and arranged marriage is common – at as young as 13 for girls – typically leading to a life of child-rearing and housework. Mama Bie, now in her late fifties, is one such woman. She divorced aged 17 and became a single mother to her young son – her legal right, but a socially precarious decision. “After my divorce I couldn’t trust anybody,” she says. “Society thinks you are a bad woman.”

Luckily, her brother supported her, and she’s worked at his hostel ever since. It was already in the Intrepid network but it wasn’t until the Women’s Expedition came along that Bie took on an active role with guests, leading treks and teaching them to make bread, with a female guide as mediator. “When I’m doing the expeditions, I’m not just thinking about housework,” she smiles.

Ouammi was raised in the next valley along. “There are ladies in Berber villages who are very smart, but can’t finish their studies because no one can support them,” she says. “I was lucky to have open-minded parents who encouraged me to follow my dreams.”

She studied computer management and went on to be a freelance tour guide in Marrakech, before Intrepid headhunted her for the Women’s Expedition. But being the youngest and first female tour guide from the M’Goun valley hasn’t come without obstacles. “My uncle is a tour guide and he said: ‘This job is too hard for you. You can’t carry heavy bags or trek up mountains, you’ll never marry in the future.’” But she didn’t listen to him. “Women can do everything men can, and more.”

After tea in the caves, we trek to the Gîte Tamaloute in Boutaghrar village, the hostel run by Bie and her brother Hussain. We reunite with some women from the night before, who greet us with all the excitement and affection of lifelong friends, before I’m whisked away and dressed up in regional celebration wear: a full-length toga-like dress, an elaborate headdress of pompoms and a back-combed fringe.

We parade outside and I’m thrown into a folkloric dance demonstration, learning the steps as my new friends spin me around to an increasingly frenzied drumbeat. Attempts to sit down are vetoed: we dance and laugh together for hours, unable to exchange words but finding a close bond nonetheless.

In rural Morocco, women lead private, domestic lives. Without the link set up by Bencheikh, and cultivated by guides like Ouammi, it would be near-impossible for women like Bie and Fatima to participate in the tourism industry – and for non-Moroccan women to communicate with them.

A business model like this gives an economic boost to women at every level of the supply chain, whether they are visible or not: from utilising the country’s only female-owned transport company to kick-starting careers for smart, ambitious would-be leaders, like Ouammi. Most striking of all, it leaves misconceptions by the wayside, opening the door to travel that creates real cross-cultural connections.

“With women, I can talk about anything, and they can, too,” says Ouammi. “We can share and learn from each other. My dream is to travel outside of Morocco and show the women who live in the mountains in Morocco, and the world, that Berber women can do anything.”

intrepidtravel.com

Categories
Wings

So hot right now: London’s new sauna obsession

exc-5e0f590db70c1f3b0c9449f9

I’m face down on a hot wooden bench, in a dimly lit steam room. To my side, a large, hairy man dressed in swimming trunks opens the door of a deep stove that resembles a pizza oven. Inside, red-hot metal glows at 700ºC. He throws in a ladle of cold water, which explodes into steam. Then he begins to lightly whip my back, legs and feet with a bunch of oak branches, forcing down the hot sauna air so that it stings and slightly burns my skin.

As the sweat seeps from my pores, I’m on the verge of crying out in pain – but just when I can’t take any more, he stops and presses the branches onto my skin like a leafy hot water bottle.

“Our therapists keep you on the edge of pain and pleasure,” owner Andrei Fomin had warned me on arrival. Moscow-born Fomin opened Banya No. 1, London’s first real banya (Russian steam bath) seven years ago, and it’s still the only place in the capital where you can experience a traditional parenie (from €35), the fairly extreme treatment I’m enjoying – or suffering – now.

Banya No. 1 has garnered a reputation as London’s most intense sauna experience. The spa counts Justin Bieber, Emilia Clarke and Kate Moss among its fans – in fact, Biebs loved his post-parenie massage so much that he asked the therapist to join him on a three-month album tour. I had to find out what the fuss was all about.

Turns out the whipping is just the first step. Now my banschik (bath attendant) tells me to stand by a wall. Suddenly he pours a wooden bucket of iced water over my head. I scream. He leads me to a tub that looks like a Jacuzzi – except the water is chilled to 8ºC. Reluctantly, I climb in till the water’s over my head. By the time I come up for air, my body is in shock. Shaking and disoriented, I sit on the plunge pool steps while the banschik wraps towels around my shoulders and legs, laughing at my reaction. I feel intoxicated.

They’ve been doing parenie in heated log cabins in rural Russia for over 1,000 years, and those who practise it weekly swear by its health benefits. It’s effectively a cardiovascular workout that also releases toxins through intense sweating.

“If you do it regularly during the winter season, you don’t catch flu or colds,” says Fomin. “When I opened Banya No. 1 it was for Russians in London who were missing parenie. But after a couple of years the non-Russian customers took over. I was surprised at how quickly people got hooked on it.”

The wellness industry (which encompasses nutrition, fitness and cosmetics) is now worth up to €3.3 trillion worldwide. Instagram has gone a long way to drive it with sumptuous marketing imagery and picture-perfect influencers. Londoners aren’t only seeking increasingly novel experiences, they also want to feel and look good while doing it (or at least afterwards).

We’ve seen alternative fitness trends such as disco yoga and circus training. Now profuse sweating, and its associated benefits, is the capital’s feel-good trend – and standard thermal spa treatments don’t seem to cut it any more. London’s Glow Bar offers one-person infra-red pods heated to up to 70ºC for 45-minute solo sweat sessions. Spending the best part of an hour in a personal sauna (from €45), podcast playing over the inbuilt speakers, feels like an almost over-indulgent amount of me-time. After 20 minutes I’m so sweat-drenched that I wonder whether such a long stint is a good idea. However, according to Glow Bar’s owner, Sasha Sabapathy, lengthy sauna sessions lead to better circulation, immune function and sleep. “It also encourages the production of collagen, which makes skin glow.” My post-sauna skin isn’t so much glowing as fire-engine red, but I do feel both energised and relaxed.

Wellness today has nothing to do with floating lazily in the pool. You sweat, you scream, you’re tormented with cold water. These days, feeling good is tough work. But you just might end up looking as good as Kate Moss or Justin Bieber.

gobanya.co.uk, glowbarldn.com

Categories
Eventbrite

My First Time: Massaoke

exc-5e0f712d3a6c3e4b5eaff330

It’s the epic, closing bars of Bohemian Rhapsody and the silver catsuit-clad guitarist is playing the final notes with his teeth. Packed to the rafters, the venue sways as the audience members, arm in arm, sing their hearts out in unison. The atmosphere nears euphoria, but that’s not Brian May up there, and this is certainly not Live Aid. We’re at Camden’s Electric Ballroom on a dreary December evening, witnessing a cover act that’s managed to draw the same level of crowd as the chart-topping acts that play this venue every other day of the week. Welcome to Massaoke. 

The concept was launched eight years ago when five musicians – who go by Bat, Rebel Rye, Mac Savage, McClean and El Neilio – formed a singalong covers act under the name Massaoke. “We’d all been in separate indie bands that had flirted with some kind of success,” says drummer Bat. “We did the first one of these in a pub in Russell Square the day that William and Kate got married. We gave out lyric sheets and just got people together to have a singsong.”

Karaoke increasingly takes up space in leather-boothed rooms in Soho or raucous upstairs rooms in east end pubs, while interest in cover bands also seems to be growing in London. Ten-piece brass band Old Dirty Brasstards regularly treats Londoners to renditions of classic Arctic Monkeys or Oasis albums, while the hugely popular Re:Imagine series brings orchestral versions of seminal albums to the Jazz Café and XOYO: think Dr Dre’s 2001, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill or Frank Ocean’s Channel Orange. Inspired by Swedish singalong TV show Allsang, Massaoke sits somewhere between the two.

Perhaps it’s no surprise that music fans are turning to smaller versions of big-name shows when standing tickets at the O2 Arena often cost upwards of £60; the Massaoke boys tear it up for a smidgeon of the entry fee, and you’ll still get to hear all your favourite songs. You also get to join in: each song is accompanied by lyrics projected on big screens around the room, karaoke-style.

Tonight, it’s a Christmas-themed show, and it’s sometimes hard to see the stage through all the bobbing Santa hats and reindeer antlers. The energetic band blasts through a medley of Christmas favourites – by Slade, Wham! and Wizzard – before bringing out a guest female soloist to belt out a Mariah Carey tribute. We stomp our way through The Proclaimers and growl out The Pogues, before Bat swaps his drum kit for a handheld snare and plays to a downbeat cover of Little Drummer Boy. Not one person in the room isn’t singing, whether they’re in couples, groups of friends or raucous work outings. It’s rare to see a club venue like Electric Ballroom filled with such an age-diverse range of people, and the unlikely coming together of so many different groups makes the room glow with Christmas spirit.

Massaoke might be a fairly new concept, but congregating to sing together is a natural form of human expression. “Throughout history people have always passed along and borrowed songs,” Bat says. “With Motown they all swapped songs and before that you had songs called standards that everyone knew. This is a returning to something that’s always happened. Getting together in social spaces and having a sing-song is entrenched in every country in the world.”

And despite its name, Massaoke is also popular with people who aren’t into singing karaoke. “Karaoke can be negative because people can find the spotlight difficult,” says Bat. “There’s no spotlight here and people who feel like they can’t sing get the opportunity to do it. There’s no one hogging the mic and it’s about all being together. And when people all sing along it sounds really good.”

The musicians behind Massaoke have just announced that they’ll be holding a singalong residency at Electric Ballroom from March 2020. They’ve also started holding matinees, bringing the phenomenon to an even wider range of ages, and regularly tour in Australia, the US and Europe. It’s plain to see that a mass singalong is, just as Bat says, common to all creeds.

But what does the band do if someone’s too cool to sing along? “We always break them by the end of the night,” Bat laughs. “There’s always a fella who’s been brought along by his partner and he’s stood there crossed arms. But by the end he’s usually the one that’s got his shirt off and waving it around his head from someone’s shoulders.”

Thankfully, no one’s too cool for the festive edition. We leave feeling like we’ve been at the world’s most raucous festive work do. The world seems a little rosier and a bit less disconnected. And that’s a feeling that shouldn’t just be for Christmas.

massaoke.com

Categories
N by Norwegian

Feminist Renaissance: the Florentine restorers rescuing art by women

exc-5dbc0c6b3763bd6e76859cda

As the wooden shutters fold back, the dark restoration studio is flooded with Tuscan sunlight, illuminating an enormous canvas. Seven metres by two, it’s a 16th-century rendering of the Last Supper, a favoured theme for painters of the Renaissance. Versions of the scene are found in monasteries all over Florence – but this one has some unusual traits.

“There’s a wonderful attention to how the table is set,” says Rosella Lari, an art restorer who’s just completed four years on this work – etching away years of dirt and damage, and applying earth-tone paint and protective varnish. “It’s the only Last Supper I’m aware of that has an ironed tablecloth.”

As well as the cloth, with its perfectly pressed folds, the table is replete with chunky bread rolls, fava beans, roasted meat and salad; wine glasses are filled to the brim. It makes a down-to-earth contrast with other Last Suppers, which mostly display empty plates and glasses, and a distinct lack of actual eating. There’s a good reason for this, according to Lari. It was painted by a woman.

While many of us will be familiar with the big male names of Renaissance art who worked in Florence in the 1500s – da Vinci, Botticelli, Caravaggio – few will have heard of their female counterparts. Like self-taught artist and nun Plautilla Nelli, whose newly restored Last Supper is the largest known canvas by an early-modern female artist.

The painting’s crowdfunded restoration is the latest and most ambitious project from Advancing Women Artists (AWA) – a Florence-based non-profit organisation that searches for forgotten works by women artists, restores them, and supports galleries and museums in exhibiting them to the public. Since its launch in 2009 by the late American philanthropist Jane Fortune, AWA’s four-women-strong team has restored 65 works. There are now 124 by female artists on display in the city, but still a further 1,600 in storage – most of which are in dire need of restoration.

“When people come here, they want to see Botticelli and Leonardo da Vinci,” says Linda Falcone, a former journalist and close friend of Fortune who now runs AWA and believes there’s just as much to gain from artworks by women. “They’re valuable from both an artistic and social point of view,” she says. “In some cases they’re the only social documents that testify to their lives.”

The organisation was born after Fortune came across a woodworm-infested oil painting by Nelli, Lamentation with Saints, in the San Marco Museum – and vowed to pay for its restoration herself. That led to a city-wide quest for the nun’s forgotten works, eventually found in Florence’s museum deposits, particularly the San Salvi monastery (now a museum).

It’s no coincidence that women’s art is often found in religious buildings, as much of it was produced in convents, which were unexpected centres of female creativity in 16th-century Italy. “To enter a convent like Nelli’s, families had to pay a dowry, and women of talent, who could paint or sing, could pay less because they were considered a resource,” explains Falcone. “People wanted to buy devotional art from nuns to feel closer to God.”

But while their talents were recognised – and some were commercially successful – a life of quiet chastity left little opportunity for nuns to study the human form, leaving them mainly with drawings from prominent male artists to work from. “They were painting things they had access to when they weren’t allowed to go to academies or paint nude models – so women’s portraits, and what they were preparing for dinner.”

It’s not known how many women artists were working in this period, but Giorgio Vasari, their contemporary and the world’s first art historian, mentions just four in his Lives of the Artists. There are complex obstacles to uncovering their works. “When we first approached galleries, they had no gender-based records of what they had,” reveals Falcone. She has personally sifted through countless museum archives to find art by women – a frustrating task, as the records are often handwritten, inconsistent and gender ambiguous, listing artists by initials rather than their full names.

This is, however, good news for today’s visitor who’s interested in knowing more, as they don’t have to do any digging. There’s now a Women Artists’ Trail, put together by the AWA, which is printed at the back of Invisible Women, Fortune’s book charting her hunt for forgotten women’s art. Following it, book in hand, is an easy way to see art by women while also taking in some of the city’s finest institutions.

One of the stops is San Salvi, which Falcone says has become known as “Nelli’s home… There are five of her works there now, four of which we restored and asked them to exhibit. Before, they were covered in pigeon droppings, they’d been gnawed by rats, someone had gone at the warping with a hammer.”

The revived paintings have a raw, emotional power that sets them apart from their more idealised counterparts by male artists. Nelli’s Lamentation puts the feminine experience in focus, her female characters’ eyes red-raw from crying as they cradle Christ’s lifeless body.

One of the trail’s other must-visit spots is the Palazzo Pitti – a vast Renaissance palace linked to the Uffizi by the arched Ponte Vecchio bridge, where the Pitti and Medici families (the world’s first modern bankers and the primary patrons of Renaissance art) lived between the 15th and 18th centuries. The setting alone is a visual overload, thanks to its deep-red walls, gilded cornices and chandeliers.

AWA runs an Invisible Women tour through the Palazzo Pitti with guiding company Freya’s Florence, that even goes into locked-off areas to view a set of 21 still lives by Giovanni Garzona – the most represented female artist in the gallery, although her work is not on public display. It’s also home to an unusual Baroque masterpiece: David and Bathsheba by Artemisia Gentileschi – the “poster child” of early modern female painting, according to Falcone. She and Fortune campaigned to have the work restored in 2008 after 363 years in storage.

A 10-minute walk north is another hidden work by Gentileschi at Casa Buonarroti – a mansion once owned by the artist Michelangelo. On a wood-panelled ceiling alongside 41 works by men, it’s a self-portrait under the guise of an Allegory of Inclination. Invoicing records show that she was paid three times more than her male counterparts for the work.

“Artemisia was a smart businesswoman and very successful,” says Falcone. “Because of the institutions’ focus on the male masters, people aren’t aware of that. We’re restoring more than paintings – we’re restoring these women’s identities.”

Nowhere is this more important than at the world-famous Uffizi, which houses the most works produced by women before the 19th century. In 2017, the gallery held its first Nelli exhibition, with free entry to women on International Women’s Day and a pledge to run an annual series on women’s art.

“We spent 10 years restoring 13 works by Nelli, which laid the groundwork for the Uffizi show,” Falcone explains. “Our attitude is collaborative and kudos to those who get the message, but there’s still a lot of art that’s not accessible to the public.”

There are still plenty of frustrations, too. “There are directors who ask why you’d want to restore art by women, and the general public wants to stay on the beaten track, which doesn’t yet include work by female artists. It’s about educating on the value of these works and understanding who your public is.”

It’s slow progress but early women’s art is becoming increasingly visible around the world. Visitors this month to the Prado, in Madrid, can see an exhibition on Renaissance artists Sofonisba Anguissola, a painter in the court of King Phillip II, and Lavinia Fontana, thought to be the first professional female artist. In London, the National Portrait Gallery’s Pre-Raphaelite Sisters reveals the hidden stories of those on both sides of the easel (until 26 January). Next year will also see the UK’s first Gentileschi show, at the National Gallery.

Eike Schmidt, the Uffizi’s director, has seen an exponential rise of interest in Gentileschi’s work, which appears on social media second only to Botticelli’s.

“She’s a kind of Quentin Tarantino of the past, which has become fashionable,” he says, referring to her violent portrayal of Judith Slaying Holofernes – which shows the artist herself taking a sword to the throat of her antagonist (and, as some like to think, the patriarchy).

The drama surrounding Gentileschi has somewhat overshadowed Nelli’s more contemplative work, but her Last Supper, which went on permanent display last month at the Santa Maria Novella Museum, should up her profile considerably. Nelli was clearly proud of the work, as she has, unusually, signed the art, in the top corner, followed by the words: “Pray for the paintress.”

“Artists didn’t sign their work at that time,” says Lari. “She’s saying, ‘Plautilla made this.’ She knows she’s worth something.”

This is even more poignant when you consider that Nelli sold small devotional paintings in order to fund the huge painting, with the sole intention of hanging it in the refectory, just as the men did in monasteries. “Women’s history is just not told,” says Falcone. “But restoring a painting is restoring a moment in history. Plautilla’s signature makes an appeal to the future – and we’re answering it.”

advancingwomenartists.org

Categories
Eventbrite

My First Time: Extinction Training

exc-5dbb14429b38bb477325992b

In the Arctic, shrinking ice sheets are leaving polar bears starving, with nowhere to hunt. 7,000 miles south, Tokyo reels from its worst typhoon in 60 years. Extinction Rebellion protesters are staging a “die in” outside the New York Stock Exchange while on London’s Westminster Bridge, they’re locking arms in defiance of an approaching police line.

Two miles up the road at Gymbox, Farringdon, I’m hyperventilating through an asphyxiation mask that’s strapped to my face.

“It is the year 2050,” the gym trainer shouts, pacing down the row of panting participants, each of us looking like extras in a nuclear fallout dystopia. “Climate change has happened. Do not breathe too fast through your mask – you’ll choke.”

Gymbox is a London-based fitness company that cites “making sweating enjoyable” as its primary goal – and the flagship Farringdon branch goes all out to achieve that. A DJ spins Daft Punk from a booth by the treadmills, while low lighting and industrial design lend the boxing ring a gritty, steampunk vibe. It’s like a nightclub, if all misbehaviour was swapped for weight lifting and cross-training. No wonder London’s trendiest gym has been behind many of the capital’s quirkiest fitness ideas – from a CBD-enhanced stretch class called Cannabliss to Brexfit, in which participants attack a Boris Johnson-printed punchbag. It’s part of a city-wide yearning to ditch the dumbbells in favour of less-boring exercise: think parkour, pole dancing and circus training.

Gymbox’s latest brainchild, Extinction Training, is even more out there. Having launched in Farringdon this month, the hour-long HIIT class aims to emulate the worst-case-scenario of global warming: “scorching heat, restricted air, extreme conditions and lack of water”, according to the description online.

“The idea is that, if we carry on the way we are, this is what the world could be like in 2050,” says the company’s creative director, Rory McEntee. “We increase the temperature of the room to up to 34 degrees. You wear an asphyxiation mask to imagine a world where the air is so poor that you struggle to breathe. We want to raise awareness – all the exercises are based on science, like real rising temperature statistics.”

So far, so dramatic. I head into the class, my imagination whirring with apocalyptic images of barbed wire and contaminated water – as well as an internal debate about using the most pressing matter of our time, climate change, as a marketing tool. Is this a gimmick, or a genuine attempt to raise awareness of the consequences of inaction? We’re already plagued with eco-anxiety: 70% of the UK population wants dramatic governmental action, but we’re set to miss both our 2025 and 2030 targets for cutting emissions. Perhaps taking it out on some gym equipment could be helpful.

In groups of four, we undergo a series of 60-second exercises, from lunges to dumbbell curls, squats to ball slams. Some keep their asphyxiation masks on at all times, while the rest of us slip them on during the minute-long recovery after each set. It’s a well-devised workout, but I haven’t noticed the elevated heat, or thought much about melting icecaps, since the instructor’s brief introduction.

The second half of the class is more unusual. We crawl under a camouflage net into room two, where we each pick up a plastic water container, half-filled with liquid, and run across a squidgy mat as fast as we can (this part aims to draw attention to water shortages and create the sensation of running through water). We spend a minute each on a rowing machine and a spin bicycle, and push a metal frame in the path of an industrial-strength fan, which is meant to replicate the weather extremes of a hurricane. We’re each given a 125ml sachet of “emergency drinking water”, which everybody spills as they tear open the tricky packaging.

I leave with my heart-rate soaring and thigh muscles burning, but I’m not sure I’m any the wiser about climate change, which makes me question the class’s awareness-raising power.

“Our goal is to educate and inspire our members in our own Gymbox way, while giving them a really good workout,” says McEntee. “The feedback I’ve had from members is that it’s fun, and a bit of a wakeup call. The two don’t need to be mutually exclusive.”

When I hear that proceeds from Extinction Training go to Greenpeace, and the water sachets are recyclable, I agree. “We couldn’t put on this class without living and breathing the values behind it,” says McEntee. “It’s inspired the team to make sure we’re doing our bit, and we’ve changed to reusable bags and coffee cups as a result. These may be small things in the business, but we’re not perfect. We’re just asking, how can we inspire our members to make a little bit of a difference?”

The Gymbox social media hashtag is #AnythingGoes. When I first heard about Extinction Training, I cynically agreed. But stepping back out into the cool autumn night, I gaze at the trees and the London streetlights and realise that climate change is on my mind after all – but I’m so packed full of post-exercise endorphins that my eco-anxiety has been replaced by energy. This class isn’t a lecture or a protest, and it’s not meant to be. But if it slips climate change into our general consciousness just a tiny bit more – however vaguely – it’s surely done some good.

Categories
N by Norwegian

A wellness guide to witch city: Salem, Massachusetts

exc-5d9cc6725048cd167bb2632e

A makeshift altar stands on the cobbled waterfront of Salem’s misty harbour. Fashioned from a wooden cabinet, it’s draped with animal skins and topped with candles that flicker in the cool East Coast breeze. Holding hands, 10 women and two men encircle it, sporting long, flowing robes, wolf-tooth earrings and flowers in their hair. One by one they place offerings: a rosebud, a sunflower, a rabbit’s paw.

Justice the Wizard, an oracle who’s leading this evening’s ritual, rolls up the sleeves of his cloak and tears a sprig of mint leaves into a stone font of water fragranced with rose petals and lemon juice. I rinse my hands before taking the silver chalice of grape juice he’s holding out. “May you never thirst,” he says, smiling.

Welcome to Salem, Massachusetts – or Witch City, as this former fishing port is nicknamed. It’s best known for its leading role in the witch trials of 1692, which saw the execution of 20 people and imprisonment of more than 200 others, most of them women. Over the past 50 years, it’s developed a thriving tourism industry around its gruesome history. Less well known, though, is that Salem is now home to a community of real-life witches – as many as 1,600 out of a 40,000 population – who’ve been reclaiming the town as their own. Rather than black capes and pointy hats, these enchanters and enchantresses are identified by their liberal politics: performing protective charms for vulnerable groups, engaging in cleansing rituals, and sharing spells on the #witchesofinstagram hashtag.

Salem is now, somewhat ironically, considered one of the most inclusive communities on America’s East Coast for Wicca, witchcraft and paganism. And, although tourist tat shops still peddle a cartoon version of witchery with black-cat coasters and broomstick key rings, the town is now welcoming a growing number of guests for alternative wellness holidays – ones that swap spas for tarot cards and saunas for Moon circles.

“A lot of people come to Salem to experience modern witchcraft,” says Now Age Travel guide Melissa Nierman, who runs walking tours of the city that aim to tell a non-sensationalist version of the events of 1692 and to unpick Salem’s complex relationship with witchcraft. “People think Salem’s always had witches,” she says, “but we didn’t have any witch shops here before the ’70s. That’s because in the past, the term ‘witch’ was very disempowered and led to the murder of innocent people.”

While on the surface Salem has come to terms with its witchy history, she points out that most of the witchcraft imagery around town still tends to focus either on the tragic deaths of the trial victims, or on a kitsch, cartoonish archetype. The latter is typified by the cutesy statue of sorceress Samantha Stephens (from the 1960s sitcom Bewitched), which sits on the site where “the hanging judge”, John Hathorne, lived. Its installation in 2005 prompted protests by real practitioners of witchcraft, who take issue with the patriarchy-friendly image that’s often seen on screen.

Her tours shows how this trivialisation of a violently misogynistic period of history points to a wider tendency in Western culture to neutralise the threat that witches traditionally represent. “I ask how this ties in with cycles of persecution that are happening today,” she says.

While this sub-text certainly doesn’t deter the many thousands of visitors who come here (as many as 250,000 just for its Halloween Happenings each October), Nierman has found an increasing number are eager to learn about how magical beliefs manifest today – and how “modern feminist witchcraft offers an alternative to the status quo”. Those who don’t move in Wiccan circles might be surprised by this level of interest, but as membership of traditional religions has fallen among younger generations, nature-based spirituality is booming. Surveys show that 40% of Americans now believe in psychics and 30% in astrology. The country’s psychic services industry – which includes astrology, tarot-card reading and palmistry – is worth US$2 billion.

One major highlight for these pilgrims is HausWitch Home + Healing. Opened in 2015 by self-identifying witch Erica Feldmann, its airy, minimalist interior wouldn’t look amiss in Copenhagen. On the whitepainted shelves are origami-encased spell kits, velvet-bound spell books and herbal cosmetics. “We only stock things we truly believe are medicine and magic, from makers that are women, queer, people of colour,” says Feldmann. “We focus on self-care as witchcraft. You can effortlessly bring magic into your everyday life, to empower you to create the life you want.”

This idea of witchcraft as wellness isn’t so different from the philosophies seen in popular self-help manuals like The Secret and The Law of Attraction, where practitioners hope to harness natural forces to manifest positive futures. Books like last year’s The Witch’s Book of Self-Care, Spellwork for Self-Care and the forthcoming Magical Self-Care for Everyday Life, are part of a new phenomenon that seems particularly tailored to millennials, who are driving the $4.2 trillion global wellness market with their love of yoga, meditation and, now, love spells and moonstones.

In Salem today you’ll find every possible wellness trope given a uniquely witchy bent, with spiritual treatments for a litany of life ills. There are Full Moon, Half Moon or Dark Moon rituals, lessons on the guiding power of crystals, tarot card readings and candlelit seances. You can visit a high priestess at Omen (a “Psychic Parlour and Witchcraft Emporium”) and learn to “manifest your life” on a “Ritual Transformation” that involves discarding symbols of unwanted habits into a “dark cauldron”. Or – for those who are particularly worried about Mercury entering retrograde this month – work out which herbs will protect you at a “folk herbalism” workshop.

Across town, Artemisia Botanicals, home to the “Green Witch School of Herbalism”, is the place to find out more about how plants can aid well-being. Stepping inside, there’s a rich scent of dried petals and incense sticks. The walls are stacked, floor-to-ceiling, with essential oils, handcrafted goat-milk soaps, gleaming crystals and dried herbs. The owner, herbalist and coven-sister Teri Kalgren, points out that historically wellness has always been plant-based. Before we had medicine in the scientific sense, humans put their faith in wise women to cure ills, whether they claimed to have magical powers or not.

She describes casting spells – quite simply – as a therapeutic form of meditation. “If you’re going through a rough time, you might naturally want to have a bath, make a cup of tea, light a candle. When you light it, you’ll meditate on it and visualise yourself getting better. Positive affirmations are so good for the spirit.”

I’m a bit wary of trying some of the more occult-sounding stuff, but in the interests of research I find myself at The Cauldron Black, a Mediterranean folk-magic shop opened on the harbour in 2017. Tarot reader Nick Dickinson leads me behind a velvet curtain at the back of the shop and hands me a deck of cards to shuffle. To soothing sitar playing over the speakers, he leans forward and smiles. “Things have been a bit up in the air lately,” he says softly. “Is there anything you want to talk about?”

As my tarot reading progresses into an impromptu counselling session, I start to understand the appeal of these treatments. For witchcraft to work as self-care, you have to be receptive to its influence. Like talking therapies, meditation and arguably prayer, these practices are simply tools for making sense of and coping with daily life.

It doesn’t feel like a coincidence that Americans are turning to these natural touchstones during an era of political upheaval. As Feldman told me: “People are feeling a bit powerless right now, and women and other oppressed people feel a connection to witchcraft as a language. People practised Earth worship for millions of years. It’s only in the past couple of hundred years that it’s been looked at as a wacky idea, but it’s in all of our ancestry.” To seek harmony with the natural cycles of the Earth, when global insecurity weighs heavy, is an act of well-being in itself.

I meditate on this as I end my stay at Justice the Wizard’s sunset ritual, holding a rose to my heart, then placing it on the makeshift altar by the sea. As I sip from the chalice and pass it back to Justice, to my slight surprise I’m full of calm and feel present on a more fundamental level than a spa weekend could have wrought. I smile back at him. “May you never thirst.”

Categories
Conde Nast Traveler

Meet the woman recreating the journeys of history’s forgotten female explorers

By the time she was 16,400-feet high in the Himalayas, Elise Wortley had learned to deal with altitude sickness and blistered feet. She’d even gotten used to her uncomfortable leather boots slipping on the rocks as she picked her way between sheets of ice and tufts of coarse grass. But as the sun went down near Kangchenjunga basecamp—the third highest peak in the world—it was the extreme, bone-chilling temperature that nearly broke her.

“I’ll never forget that night,” says the 29-year-old Londoner. “It was -15 degrees Celsius and I had ice in my hair and all over my blanket. The ground was too wet to make a fire. I remember thinking, ‘I’m going to die.’”

Nowadays, trekkers in Thangu Valley are equipped with snow-proof tents and buttoned up in state-of-the-art clothing to protect them from the harsh conditions that characterize that strip of northern India. Not so for Wortley. In 2017, she embarked on a journey that she’d been dreaming of since age 16, when she read a book that changed her life: My Journey to Lhasa by Alexandra David-Néel. Published in 1927, the autobiography charts the French female explorer’s 14-year expedition to Tibet, between 1911 and 1925. She traveled overland across Europe before finally reaching the town of Lachen in Sikkim, a northern region of India that juts out between Tibet, Nepal, and Bhutan. Making the region her home for four years, it was from there that she first caught a glimpse of Tibet and vowed to enter it, eventually making it over the border by disguising herself as a beggar. Entry was forbidden for foreigners at the time, and it was unthinkable for a solo European woman to embark on such a journey alone.

“Women just didn’t do things like that,” Wortley says. “When I was a teenager I was shy and I dealt with extreme anxiety for years. The fact that she’d done this epic voyage fascinated me. I always had this inkling that maybe I could follow in her footsteps, but at the time, I was so anxious, I struggled to get on the bus.”

Part self-funded and part-funded by travel company Exodus, for whom she was working at the time, Wortley set off for Sikkim in 2017. An avid traveler, both personally and professionally, it wasn’t her first trip to India (she had already traveled extensively in Southeast Asia, Senegal and South Africa), but it was certainly her most adventurous. Joined by camerawoman Emily Almond Barr and local female mountain guide Jangu, Wortley recreated a portion of David-Néel’s journey from regional capital Gangtok to Kangchenjunga on the Tibetan border, covering some 435 miles by foot in a month-long trek. Keen to recreate David-Néel’s experience to the full, she made a mad-cap pledge to only take with her the equipment available to the French explorer in the 1920s. She traded in all modern-day comforts (minus emergency medical supplies) for a yak wool coat, rubber-soled boots, and a wooden backpack that she’d fashioned from an old chair, some rope, and an Indian wicker basket that she bought from a market in Gangtok.

“I went the whole hog. I had 1920s underwear—a cotton bra and high-waisted pants, and a woolen undergarment that was so itchy,” Wortley says. “The ropes on my backpack rubbed a lot, I had scabs on my shoulders. But I had to know how it felt to do it that way. The journeys of female explorers were way more hardcore than for their male counterparts. It was much more dangerous [for them] and they had to deal with the physical elements but also their periods, and even having to hide the fact they were women.”

Despite the decades separating their adventures, it wasn’t just the old-school underwear that aligned Wortley’s experience with David-Néel’s. “The scenery that she describes so beautifully in the book hasn’t changed. Mountains don’t change, not in 100 years anyway,” she says. “And she writes about how any house she passed welcomed her in, as they do now. You have a Tibetan tea with salt and butter, you have a chat even though no one knows what anyone’s saying.”

Wortley and her small team had to stop short of Lhasa due to similar difficulties in entering Tibet today, but the experience inspired her to celebrate other female explorers of the past. She pledged to continue to undertake expeditions to other extreme terrains explored and catalogued by intrepid women, under the name Woman With Altitude, in 2017.

“There are so many women like this and they’re not household names, but they should be,” Wortley says. “Annie Smith Peck was the first person to climb the north peak of the Huascarán in Peru. Ursula Graham Bower left England for India and ended up marrying the chief of the Naga tribe. And no one knows about her! The only problem is that it’s hard to find much written about explorers that aren’t white and European. But I’ve found some warrior queens and Tibetan nuns that I’m looking into.”

While Wortley’s main aim is to celebrate the achievements of historical female explorers, there’s a charitable element to her expeditions, too. “Because the project is woman-based, I wanted to help women in the areas I’m going to in some way,” she says. As part of the Himalayan project, she raised £2,500 ($3,000) for the charity Freedom Kit Bags, which provides girls in rural Nepal with reusable bags of sanitary products.

When we spoke, Wortley was preparing for her second trip (which she has since completed), following in the footsteps of Scottish explorer Nan Shepherd, who scaled the six highest peaks in the Cairngorm Mountains and catalogued it in her book The Living Mountain. Written in the 1940s but not published until 1977, it’s now considered a masterpiece of poetic non-fiction.

“It was written when people were racing to be the first people to scale peaks,” Wortley says. “She was into Taoism and saw it in the water, rocks, the sky, and the air. She wrote this about seeing the mountain as a whole.” Mostly alone, Wortley wandered between the peaks and lochs of the Cairngorm National Park for three weeks, equipped with a wartime gas cooker, a canvas tent, and old-school food supplies—mostly potatoes, cheese, and eggs. Part-sponsored by Wilderness Scotland, she was raising money for Scottish Women’s Aid and hopes to use these two projects to pitch a television series to fund forthcoming expeditions.

Wortley’s adventures are all the more impressive when you consider how alien the concept felt to her at the beginning. “Five years ago, my anxiety was so bad that I couldn’t even get on a bus,” she says. “But I could read Alexandra David-Néel and think, if she managed to leave Europe on her own and do this, I’m sure I can get on the Tube. I just want to make people more aware of these women, so they can inspire others.”

Categories
The Independent

A ‘new’ new Nordic food tour of Tallinn

exc-5d4c40b744f89a00018446a7

On the stripped-pine table before me sits a glass bell jar. Chef Kaido Metsa lifts it and a cloud of wood smoke pours out to reveal a thick slice of almost-translucent raw white fish, topped with horseradish ice cream, pickled morel mushrooms and a scattering of foraged leaves.  

I’m at Restaurant JUUR, near Tallinn’s Unesco World Heritage centre. Until a few years ago, fine dining was an alien concept in the small EU country bordered by Latvia, Russia and the Baltic Sea. Centuries of occupation by Denmark, Germany, Sweden and Russia – not to mention the Nazi and then Soviet Union rules of the 20th century – left Estonians with a diet of sauerkraut, rye bread and herring, an amalgamation of its neighbours’ cuisines. 

But a new generation of chefs is spearheading an emerging food revolution in the capital and beyond, turning to the thick forest that covers 90 per cent of the country to forage for ramson berries, wild mushrooms and pine cones to be fermented and pickled just as their ancestors always did – regardless of occupying powers.   

Beautifully plated and served in a Scandi-inspired space that’s all exposed brickwork and filament bulbs, the food at JUUR seems a clear nod to New Nordic cuisine – a Copenhagen-led movement led by Noma chef Rene Redzepi and characterised by immaculate presentation, foraged ingredients and a sustainable ethos. But at €60 for six courses, two-year-old JUUR offers a level of fine dining that’s not only radical in Estonia, but far more affordable than its Nordic counterparts – roughly five times cheaper than a meal at its Copenhagen counterpart.

“Salaries are low here but we’re getting more modernised and eating out more,” says Metsa, who grows vegetables, hand-makes crockery on a pottery wheel and sources 90 per cent of his ingredients within the border, advocating old-school methods as a way to celebrate Estonian food traditions. 

“In the old times there weren’t refrigerators, Estonians had to cure or dry fish and meat,” he says. “Fermenting is the natural way of preserving. In the spring and autumn we gather berries and herbs and cure, dry and ferment them to use in the winter period.” Unlike in Germany or Denmark, these traditions never died down in Estonia. Cellars are still stocked with jams and pickles, and on crisp autumn days, cars line the forest edge where good mushrooms are known to grow.

But until recently, Metsa’s passion for his nation’s food culture wasn’t widely shared.

“Ten years ago, Estonians weren’t proud of their produce,” says Märt Metsallik, co-founder of countryside restaurant Põhjaka Manor, an hour’s drive from Tallinn. 

“We were such a young nation and we’d been so cut off from the world, that these colourful, imported ingredients were fascinating for us. The mindset was that everything from Estonia was bad. I didn’t think so.” 

With two friends, Metsallik renovated the 19th-century manor house and opened it as Estonia’s first countryside restaurant in 2010. Today, the restaurant is thriving and everything but spices and citrus fruits is sourced in Estonia, delivered by specialist farmers or grown in the kitchen garden. As for meat, much of it is game bought from local hunters controlling the populations of wild boar, elk and deer. Not only is it an ethical priority for Metsallik to support local producers (despite the sometimes-elevated cost), it’s a way to realign with the land of his ancestors, whose culinary traditions survived despite the political turmoil of the 20th century. 

“The Russian and Soviet times helped preserve our traditions of foraging and preserving because there was nothing in the shops from outside Estonia,” he suggests. “You didn’t have this variety, so people made things themselves.”

Back in Tallinn, there’s one chef managing to use 100 per cent Estonian produce while stamping out the stereotype of bland Baltic food for good.

“There’s a lot to be foraged and found if you know what you’re doing,” says Martin Meikas, head chef at Restoran Ö, who relishes the creative challenge of cooking seasonally. “Cooking isn’t frying a scallop and putting some caviar on top. Anyone can do that. Cooking is inventing, taking a cabbage and making it the best it can be. Everything on this menu, you have never seen or tasted before.”

The €76 euro, 11-course tasting menu spans potato black pudding with hay-smoked cream; marinated eel with leek-infused oil, pureed artichoke and seaweed paste; beetroot-glazed goat’s curd and black garlic-infused chocolate. It’s Estonian to the core and, true to Meikas’s word, unlike anything I’ve ever experienced.

A 15-minute drive from the centre is seafront restaurant Noa, where €14 main courses demonstrate better than anywhere the affordability of fine dining in Tallinn.

“Ten years ago, Estonian cuisine didn’t exist,” claims executive chef Orm Oja, who at 27 years old was born the same year that the Soviet Union collapsed.

“Under Soviet control, restaurants had such strict rules – a chicken Kiev had to weigh 128 grams,” he says. “When the borders opened, people started to travel and experience new things, and chefs came here too.” 

Oja’s menu best reflects the cultural exchange that independence brought, blending Asian techniques with home-grown ingredients: he even makes “Nordic Dim Sum” that wraps Peking duck mousse in sourdough batter. Noa’s Scandi-style dining room is modern and aspirational – not unlike its fusion menu. The chef’s dextrous approach makes it clear that the only Estonia he’s ever known is an independent one, unafraid to take influence from the outside world, while treating his entire homeland as a kitchen garden. 

One thing’s certain: with Estonia’s rising Rene Redzepis at the stove, there’s never been a more exciting time to eat there. And it’s only a matter of time before the prices rise to prove it.

Travel essentials

Getting there 

Wizz Air flies from London Luton to Tallinn from £30 return.

Staying there

The four-star Hotel Palace has been a fixture of Tallinn’s main square since 1937 and has an excellent on-site restaurant and pool. Doubles from £127 including breakfast.

More information

visitestonia.com/en

Categories
Conde Nast Traveler

Meet the world’s longboarding women

When Valeria Kechichian started longboarding in Madrid in 2008, there were just three other women in her crew. It represented freedom; an escape from a soul-crushing job as a secretary in a law firm and a self-destructive spiral of partying. ‘It was this very pure kind of joy,’ she says. ‘It completed me somehow.’ Still, when she first stood on a board in the Spanish capital, people would ‘turn their heads and look at me as if I was doing something weird’.

It’s fair to say that Argentinian-born Kechichian’s gang has grown a bit. Longboard Girls Crew (LGC), which she co-founded in 2010, now claims to be the world’s biggest action-sports community, with 233,400 Facebook followers and counting, and representatives in 70 countries. With some of its videos being viewed as many as 3.6 million times on YouTube, the group has ignited an international scene built on female empowerment and dreamy images of cruising golden-hour open roads. Kechichian has become the global face of it all, launching and partnering with NGOs, giving TEDx Talks and motivating Nike ambassadors and Facebook employees with the free-wheeling gospel.

The sport was invented in Hawaii in the 1950s, when surfers started customising skateboards with bigger wheels and looser trucks to make them more like surfboards. These Hawaiian pioneers would drive up volcanoes and glide down, carving S-shaped turns as if on a peeling wave. Over the years, longboarders developed tricks and started speeding down hills at more than 90mph – but the primary appeal has always been a certain languorous elegance; a free-spirited surfer vibe, more at home in nature than gritty skateboarding. There’s a scene in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, of Ben Stiller whizzing alone through the mossy Icelandic landscape, grinning at the wild freedom of it all.

That spirit is central to the movement, which includes all kinds of women across the world. In Nice, Marina Corrêa spins along the old boardwalk, flicking her dreadlocks to a reggaeton soundtrack. Seoul freestyle longboarder Ko Hyojoo (pictured below) is the queen of a flourishing Korean community, dancing on her board in cute knee-high socks to the tune of 568,000 Instagram followers and partnerships with Chanel and Gucci. Chinese boarder Mu Qing skates through Chengdu in a hoodie and Vans, filmed by a friend on a smartphone for her 500,000 followers on the Douyin video app. In Malaysia, Fatin Amalina whooshes between Kuala Lumpur’sshiny skyscrapers in a hijab.

The riding styles are as diverse as the women. On the Venice Beach Boardwalk, Natalie Pluto (pictured below) is part of a small band of balletic freestylers, doing kick-flips and shove-its as she weaves among the tourists. Based in Virginia, Emily Pross, who styles herself ‘the Prossecutor’, wears a shiny black speed suit and aerodynamic helmet to beat the men in downhill races – her speed record is 83.88mph. All of them are celebrated on the LGC social feeds, from the cruisers to the leather-clad competitors posting under the #girlscanride hashtag.

The group had its Endless Summer moment in 2011, with a film of seven women road-tripping across Spain and the Balearics in a red VW camper van, riding their boards through white-stone villages and down sun-flared roads overlooking limestone cliffs. Endless Roads, the result of this 2,670-mile journey, became a clarion call for a certain type of female-powered adventure, with 1.4 million views on YouTube. ‘It was more rare for something to go viral back then,’ says Kechichian. ‘But our video was suddenly everywhere. It resonated with women who thought, “Hey, we can do this.” It started a global movement.’

One of the people who watched Endless Roads on repeat was a teenage Valeriya Gogunskaya (pictured above), who lived in the forested Finnish city of Kuopio. ‘It just looked super-cool,’ she says. ‘I used to roller-skate, and I gave my skates to a friend in exchange for his longboard. I downloaded some YouTube tutorials and started cruising.’ A year later, Gogunskaya moved to Santa Cruz, a beach town north of Lisbon, with hopes of finding other skaters: ‘There was just one guy there at the time. I was always whining to my boyfriend that there was no one to skate with. He said, “Why don’t you start something?”’ Inspired by LGC, Gogunskaya organised a meet-up in 2017 at Praia de Santa Cruz’s white-stone-balustered platform, which looks out over the hazy, rocky coastline. To her surprise, around 30 people showed up – almost all of them female. She launched a skate camp, Longboarding Days and Nights, and single-handedly sparked a scene in Santa Cruz, where many are now women in their 30s and 40s.

Gogunskaya practises most evenings, carving wide turns and hanging 10 like the old-school surfers. Just as Kechichian used longboarding as a form of therapy, Gogunskaya applied her passion to face down her own challenges. ‘I began when I was struggling with bulimia,’ she says. ‘It helped me relax, nurture self-love and respect my body again. I just want to share that chance with other people, especially women.’

But while Gogunskaya and Kechichian have both used longboarding as a way to process their issues, behind it all is still that simple, joyous feeling of gliding along a road: ‘When I’m skating, that’s all that matters,’ says Kechichian. ‘Me, my board and the road. It creates some sort of magic, a bubble where nothing else matters… You feel like you rule the world.’

Categories
Eventbrite

Elitist or Empowering? Inside the Women-Only Private Members’ Clubs

A room of one’s own

One street back from the hubbub of Oxford Street is a Georgian townhouse with a Virginia Woolf quote in its window. Step over the threshold and the geometric patterned, pastel-furnished interior is an Instagrammer’s dream come true. Experimental canvases by female artists adorn muted-blue walls, marble fireplaces meet matte-wooden floorboards and a hot-desking space is filled almost entirely by women. Tapping on laptops or gathered in brainstorm circles, they are nearly all in their 30s, impeccably dressed and blow-dried and manicured to perfection from the in-house salon.

Welcome to The AllBright: a private members’ club created for and by women.

Elitism to empowerment

While The AllBright may feel startlingly modern, women’s private members clubs actually date back to the 19th century. The University Women’s Club, which still exists today, was opened in 1886 by some of the first women holding university degrees, in defiance of exclusive gentlemen’s club culture, which was (and still is) big business among London’s aristocratic and political elite.

Decisions with country-wide ramifications have long been made over Old Fashioneds between the wood-panelled walls of White’s and The Garrick Club, despite a wave of female-welcoming members’ clubs, such as The Groucho, opening from the 1980s onwards. Fast forward a decade or two and corduroys and cigars are replaced by slick interior design and MacBooks, at hip social clubs like Soho House and the Hospital Club. 

Their female-centric offshoots serve a different need, having sprung up in the midst of an unprecedented conversation about gendered injustice in the workplace. The AllBright was conceived by its founders, Debbie Wosskow (founder of LoveHomeSwap) and Anna Jones (former CEO of Hearst), in the wake of #MeToo and the Presidents Club Scandal, which saw female hostesses sexually harassed at a men-only gala event. Their mission was two-fold: to create a space for fed-up women that mean business and turn boys’ club culture on its head. 

Having opened on International Women’s Day in 2018, The AllBright already has a valuation of £100 million. As well as providing a positive working environment for women in business and the arts, they regularly host events at their Fitzrovia and Mayfair branches – typically with empowerment or educational themes.

Their success has coincided and intersected with the rise of cowork spaces spearheaded by WeWork, a 400,000 member-strong group that came to London in 2014. But while the free craft beer perks and millennial-friendly décor made WeWork’s fortune, it didn’t serve to disrupt the male-dominated culture of entrepreneurship in the capital – a culture observed by Lu Li, who in 2015 founded female-focused cowork and networking space Blooming Founders, in Shoreditch.

“I moved to London in 2012 and went to a ton of startup events, but they were full of guys,” Li remembers. “I’m from the corporate world and can deal with male-dominated environments, but is that really it?” She began her own meetup group for women entrepreneurs, which reached 1,000 members in less than a year. Li now runs events that are open to all but focus on facilitating business connections between female founders and investors. They take place surrounded by peace lilies and pastel-painted walls, in the serene, Nespresso-fuelled workspace at Blooming Founders.

“We wanted a real social club, where people make friends for life”

It’s safe to say there’s a market for this.

The odds are stacked against female entrepreneurs: 70% of them are solo founders, yet for every £1 of venture capital invested in the UK, only 1p goes to female founders. Research consistently points to unconscious gender bias on investor panels holding businesswomen back and the importance of female mentors in shifting the balance.

Enter Sister Snog, a women-only members’ club that, rather than having a bricks-and-mortar base, holds regular lunches and breakfast meetings to facilitate business connections between members. 

“Women and men network in a different way,” claims co-founder Annie Brooks. “In the past, it was old boys’ clubs and networking with a warm glass of chardonnay and a canapé. But get the right kind of women together in a room and they create relationships, uplift each other and work well together.”

Talking to the members, dressed to the nines at Sister Snog’s classy monthly meetup at ME hotel on the Strand, it’s clear they agree – and are directly benefitting from it. “There’s less ego involved among women,” says property developer Claire Norwood. “Everyone within Sister Snog provided the services I needed to launch my business – head shots, website, marketing.”

One members’ club caters to millennial women that are equally interested in swapping stories of backpacking in South America as in building a career. “We’re not a physical club – we hold fashion events, trips abroad, meditation,” explains 28-year-old founder Jae Ruax, who worked on the committee for the Hospital Club before launching Fiena in 2016. “We wanted a real social club, where people make friends for life.”

According to Ruax, this does lead to business endeavours, but as a consequence of the club’s social element. “Men have always had these networks, they go play golf and leave with new clients,” she says. “Women have to fight for projects and clients. So we’re turning that on its head.” Fiena offers members discounts at partner venues for a few months at a time, such as Fulham beach bar Neverland and cowork space Uncommon. It’s a modern, less-committal approach to membership.

No boys allowed?

With success comes criticism.

Female-focused clubs have come under fire for excluding men, despite the fact that The AllBright welcomes male guests, Blooming Founders is mixed gender and The Wing (a booming US club due to hit London this summer) is open to all (following a gender discrimination lawsuit filed by a man last year). “This isn’t an anti-men move,” Wosskow told the Independent in 2017. “Sometimes women need to be separate to turbocharge their progress.”

It’s been argued, too, that there’s a certain elitism at work. Certainly the fees involved can be eye-watering. Sister Snog’s annual membership starts at £999, Fiena and The AllBright at £750. University Women’s Club fees start at £262, but applicants require a university degree or ‘similar’ and recommendations from two existing members to be considered. Sister Snog and Fiena are selective.

“We have a stringent application process and turn down about 40% of applicants,” says Ruax. As with Sister Snog, being accepted comes down to possessing values deemed in line with the club – but without vigorous criteria, it’s difficult to prove that bias doesn’t tinge the applications process.

Even if membership fees are the only barrier, it has been said that the women in greatest need of business help are financially excluded by default. “There should be something out there for everyone,” agrees Brooks. “And there are lots of free networking events. But to some people, club membership is expensive, while for others, it’s cost effective.”

Plus, within the greater landscape of coworking spaces in London, these clubs are relatively cheap – hot-desking at WeWork costs upwards of £200 per month, whereas desk space at Blooming Founders starts at £30. For Li, the power of women’s members’ clubs comes down to their business sense in addressing a clear gap in the market.

“The AllBright and The Wing aren’t helping all women, but neither am I,” she points out. “You have to pick the customer you are serving and create the best product for them. But we’re so nascent in this process [of addressing inequality]. There are so many things to come.”