TOAST Podcast

Our second podcast guest is founder and artistic director of Ballet Black, Cassa Pancho. After completing a degree in classical ballet, Cassa founded Ballet Black in 2001 to provide role models to Asian and black aspiring dancers, gaining an MBE in 2013 for services to classical ballet. The founder of the revolutionary classical company speaks to Laura Barton about her deep need for rhythm, diversity in the ballet world and the sounds and sensations that led her to enter the world of dance.

TOAST Podcast Series 5 is presented by Laura Barton and produced by Geoff Bird. Music for this season was written and performed by Laura James. All views expressed in the podcast are the interviewees own and not necessarily those of TOAST.

For our fifth podcast series, writer and broadcaster Laura Barton looks to the theme of Rhythm, exploring the ways in which it is harnessed creatively to stir the senses, how it forms in us, how we carry it and where it can lead us. From the rhythmic pattern that propels you into a poem, the expressiveness of a musical composition to the cadence of speech on stage or sculpting intimate scenes on a film set. Join Laura as she interviews six guests who have each developed their own unique sense of rhythm in their work.

The episodes will be released weekly throughout April and May and are presented by Laura Barton and produced by Geoff Bird. Music for this season was written and performed by Laura James. All views expressed in the podcast are the interviewees own and not necessarily those of TOAST.

Peggy Seeger

Kicking off our fifth series, Laura Barton joins Peggy Seeger at home in Oxfordshire where they spoke about where rhythm sits in Peggy’s own relationship with music, growing up a member of America’s famous folk family, the music that carried her to the UK, her partnership with Ewan MacColl, and why music can never be in the background of her life.

Our final guest for this Flux & Flow series of our TOAST Podcast is the award-winning novelist and screenwriter Emma Jane Unsworth. In October, Laura Barton travelled to Brighton to meet with Emma at the seafront. With seagulls screeching and waves lapping on the shingle shore, they discussed sea swimming, love, leaving the North and Emma’s experience of postnatal depression.

Emma Jane Unsworth has written three novels, including the Sunday Times bestseller Adults. She adapted her novel Animals into a screenplay, and the film, starring Alia Shawkat and Holliday Grainger, premiered at Sundance Film Festival in 2019. Unsworth won the British Independent Film Award for Best Debut Screenplay in 2019. She is currently writing several shows for television, including an episode of a comedy drama with Stephen Merchant and a new comedy for the BBC.

Joan Bakewell is a writer, broadcaster and Labour peer. Born in Stockport and educated at Cambridge, she began her career as an advertising copywriter before moving into broadcasting. A pioneering female on screen for the BBC in the ’60s, Joan’s television career started with Late Night Line-Up (1965-72), followed by Heart of the Matter (1988-2000). Joan has been a columnist for The Guardian, The Times, The Sunday Times, The Independent and The Telegraph. Her books include the autobiography The Centre of the Bed (2004), the novel All the Nice Girls (2009), and her heartfelt reflections on life with What I leave Behind (2016). Joan was made a CBE in 1999 and a Dame for her services to journalism and the arts in 2008. In January 2011 she took her seat in the House of Lords as Baroness Bakewell of Stockport.

Over the summer, Laura Barton joins our third podcast guest, Baroness Joan Bakewell in her North London garden to discuss growing up in Stockport, the shift she’s witnessed in women’s rights and the tiny changes that make life more tolerable.

For our fourth podcast series, writer and broadcaster Laura Barton explores the theme of Flux & Flow, how we navigate change and the forces that steer our lives. Join Laura as she meets with priest and writer Marie-Elsa Bragg, publisher Sharmaine Lovegrove, author, journalist and broadcaster Joan Bakewell and author Emma Unsworth. With each interview, we discover how the changing self is something to celebrate, and how we all have the capacity for great change and innovation.

The episodes will be released weekly throughout October and November. The podcasts are presented by Laura Barton and produced by Geoff Bird. All views expressed in the podcast are the interviewees own and not necessarily those of TOAST.

Laura Barton meets virtually with our second guest for this series on Flux & Flow, Berlin-based publisher Sharmaine Lovegrove. The founder of Dialogue Books, home to voices often excluded from the mainstream publishing world, discusses her move back to a city she loves, how her own life has encompassed many changes along with her route to becoming one of the most influential figures in modern publishing.

For our fourth podcast series, writer and broadcaster Laura Barton explores the theme of Flux & Flow, how we navigate change and the forces that steer our lives. Join Laura as she meets with priest and writer Marie-Elsa Bragg, publisher Sharmaine Lovegrove, author, journalist and broadcaster Joan Bakewell and author Emma Unsworth. With each interview, we discover how the changing self is something to celebrate, and how we all have the capacity for great change and innovation.

The episodes will be released weekly throughout October and November. The podcasts are presented by Laura Barton and produced by Geoff Bird. All views expressed in the podcast are the interviewees own and not necessarily those of TOAST.

Marie Elsa Bragg

Kicking off our Flux & Flow series, Laura Barton meets priest, writer and spiritual director, Marie-Elsa Bragg in a small park that stands between two churches in Hampstead Garden Suburb. Discussing Marie-Elsa’s early career as a dancer, the devastating loss of her mother, her quiet route to faith, and how 2020 is a real time for keeping vigil.

TOAST, https://www.toa.st, is a clothing and lifestyle brand that aspires to a slower, more thoughtful way of life.

This season we have been examining our relationship with the line. Following the marks we make through writing and weaving and tracing the lines that shape our landscape, from telegraph lines and washing lines to those made by walking, railways and rivers.

For this special episode, we delve into the subject further. Down the telephone line from Aberdeen, we hear Tim Ingold, academic and author of A Brief History of Lines. Tim takes us through his discoveries surrounding the line, suggesting that we are all interwoven and interconnected by drawing on archaeology, language, music and nature.

In a lively London square, during early March, Laura Barton speaks to Max Porter, acclaimed author of Grief is the Thing with Feathers and Lanny. Max is known for his intermingling of prose and poetry, for his physical exploration of the line on the page.

Both speakers give an insight into their own relationship with the line, seeing it as an entry into how we might better live our lives.

TOAST Podcasts are presented by Laura Barton, produced by Geoff Bird and conceived by Emily Cameron. The music is part of TOAST Slow Sound, the full album can be heard at https://www.toa.st/uk/content/features/slowsound.htm.

*EXTENDED EPISODE* Vanessa Bell’s portrait is on display in Room 31 at the National Portrait Gallery. Painted by her lover and life partner Duncan Grant somewhere around 1918, it shows her in an easy, contemplative pose, wearing a floral red dress and holding a pale pink rose.

The creative talent of Bell is often overshadowed by that of her sister, Virginia Woolf, and other members of the Bloomsbury Group, to which she belonged. More recently, her work has been reappraised and reconsidered, celebrated for its experimental, often radical force and raw sensuality.

On a brisk Autumn day, Laura Barton heads to Charleston, the country home of the Bloomsbury Group, where the furniture and walls are still covered in Bell’s designs. There she meets the curator Dr Darren Clarke, head gardener Fiona Dennis, and Bell’s granddaughter, the writer Virginia Nicholson.

Charleston Farmhouse is open to the public from Wednesday to Sunday, 10-5pm.

Image: Vanessa Bell by Duncan Grant. Oil on canvas, circa 1918. © National Portrait Gallery, London.

The portrait of the Australian academic, writer and broadcaster Germaine Greer, by Paula Rego shows its subject filling the canvas, legs apart. Her hands are rough from gardening and she is dressed in her favourite Jean Muir dress and old, silver shoes. The portrait’s lack of flattery appealed to Greer: “A portrait that is kind is condescending. The last thing I would want is for Paula to condescend to me, and it's the last thing she would think of doing.”

A major voice of second wave feminism, in 1970 Greer published The Female Eunuch, which argued that traditional family structures repress women’s sexuality. Still one of the most widely-read feminist texts, it has never been out of print.

Greer has long courted controversy, and is regarded by many as a combative and frequently frustrating icon of feminism. A New Statesman column once stated that Greer “doesn’t get into trouble occasionally or inadvertently, but consistently and with the attitude of a tank rolling directly into a crowd of infantry.”

For all of this, Greer remains a crucial and powerful figure in the development of feminist thinking. One Guardian commentator put it: “As it goes with pioneering figures, there is much to doubt and dismiss; yet we are still indebted to them, as we are to Greer, for taking risks in the first place.”

Greer is 80 now, still writing, still vocal. On a midweek morning Laura Barton visits her at her home in Essex. There they discuss Greer’s current works and her plans to return to her homeland, leaving behind the garden that she has been creating for the last three decades.*

Image: Germaine Greer by Paula Rego. Pastel on paper laid on aluminium, 1995. © National Portrait Gallery, London. Discover more pioneering women from the National Portrait Gallery Collection in the book 100 Pioneering Women, featuring portraits of remarkable women from the last five centuries.

*Please note, this episode contains strong language from the start.

John Opie’s portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft hangs in Room 18 of the National Portrait Gallery; a woman in high-waisted white dress and soft hat, her gaze falling somewhere off to the right. The sitter’s pose reveals little of her revolutionary life and the progressiveness of her views. She was a radical thinker, a feminist, journalist and author, famed particularly for her 1792 work A Vindication of the Rights of Women, in which she discussed the novel idea that the sexes should be considered equal. “I do not wish them to have power over men,” she wrote of women, “but over themselves.”

When she sat for Opie, Wollstonecraft was pregnant with her daughter, the writer Mary Shelley. Wollstonecraft died days after her daughter’s birth, and in the years that followed her role in the feminist movement became largely forgotten.

In 1974, Claire Tomalin wrote her first book, a biography of Wollstonecraft, kindling huge interest in Wollstonecraft’s life and works. Laura Barton visits Tomalin at her home near the river in Richmond to discuss Wollstonecraft’s remarkable legacy.

Image: Mary Wollstonecraft by John Opie. Oil on canvas, circa 1797. © National Portrait Gallery, London.