What it says on the tin

On Reclaiming Labels

Frida Kahlo’s diary

 

Tracey Enim’s hellter fucking skelter

Maddy Costa invited Selma Dimitrijevic, Samantha Ellis and me to Dialogue about labels some time ago. While it’s a subject we all have to deal with, there was also something about the topic that made the conversation feel a little more like work than play. – Perhaps because we would prefer to talk about the work itself rather than its label. We are labelled, or required to label ourselves and our work for marketing purposes, funders, theatres, audiences, our peers… Is it possible to talk about work without assigning it a category? Are labels used to exclude and dismiss? Can a label be anything more than an attempt to describe what’s in the tin? Does a label come with a value judgement?

For now, I’m not thinking about whether the substance in the tin is good or bad or tasty or deserving of its label; I’m interested in how the label itself can affect us and the way our work is seen, treated and discussed.

‘It’s not really a poem is it?’ – A statement often heard in poetry workshops.

Mimi Khalvati has structured a workshop around this question. She hands out several short paragraphs telling us that some are poems, and some are prose. She allows us to debate which is which. She puts columns up on a big piece of paper – prose versus poetry….and asks us to explain what makes a particular piece one or the other. At the end of the session she demonstrates that the titles at the top of the two columns could just as well be swapped over. The only thing differentiating poetry from prose is line breaks. Or the fact that the writer has said it’s a poem. If we look at a poem that doesn’t look like a poem through the lens of poetry, poetry might change, ways of writing it might change, ways of talking about it, thinking about it, teaching it, analysing it, performing it…

If the response of the tutor to the statement ‘it’s not really a poem’ were to be ‘yes that’s true.’ The next step would be to move on and look at a poem that is really a poem. This is a poetry workshop, we’re looking at poems, if it’s not a poem then we don’t have to look at it, we don’t have to engage with it, we don’t have to challenge our preconceptions, we don’t have to expand our ideas of what poetry is, we can keep everything as it has been and as we think it should be. We own poetry and we decide what is or isn’t a poem.

Frida Kahlo and Tracey Enim were/are visual artists. One painted her own portrait (using a brush), the other painted her own portrait (using a bed) – however the similarities between them are greater than their differences. The fact that Enim is described with the same label used to describe Kahlo expands the form. If Enim (as just one example) had been somehow prevented from showing her work within the context of visual art then the term ‘artist’ and its related field would not have been challenged as it has, she wouldn’t have been shortlisted for the Turner Prize and everything would have been much more comfortable for the visual arts establishment (Brief daydream to imagine what the world would be like if Enim called herself a writer.)

If we decide that something isn’t what it says it is then we put it in someone else’s box, it won’t be disruptive and it won’t force us to re-examine anything, it becomes someone else’s problem.

If we invent a new category every time a piece of work doesn’t look like work that has been made under the same banner in the past, then we lose a dialogue with history, we lose the opportunity for expansion, boundary pushing, reinvention….and we avoid having to engage with it on the terms it invites us to…it becomes someone else’s problem.

There are processes at work in the arts. For instance the process of getting a play from page to stage (as it is often put) – if the work in question doesn’t fit that process, it’s easier to suggest the work finds other friends to play with, other contexts to exist within (devised theatre, perhaps) than to examine and change the process itself. Changing the process could mean a job either needs to change or it becomes redundant –it’s no wonder the establishment resists.

An audience member going to theatre who hasn’t been to the theatre before, arrives without a label and without past experiences of what that label refers to. Rather than bringing their experience of watching theatre into the theatre, a non-theatre going audience comes to the theatre (or other place where performance is going to happen) with their lives as the experience they watch the work in relation to. David Lane suggests we need more of how we walk into an art gallery with how we walk into a theatre. I agree, and would extend this to needing more of how we walk through our lives with how we walk into a theatre. The odd thing is, the more I perform work, the more I find that an uninitiated audience, a non-theatre going/spoken word/poetry audience is far more responsive, far less self censored in their response to the work than the initiated. They bring their life experience to it rather than their theatre/poetry making and watching experience.

I was chatting with Jo Bell about this after Wordsmiths & Co the other night. She was talking about the problem that labelling something ‘poetry’ puts off an audience who might love the work. Likewise, the label ‘spoken word’ can do the same. She’s enthusiastic about trying to bring an audience that doesn’t consider themselves a poetry audience to poetry events… people who go to music events, and art galleries… How do we stop the word ‘poetry’ from putting off audiences? I think it’s about changing the associations/preconceptions around the word itself, rather than finding a different one.

We also agreed that the ideal situation is not to need a label but to have a name, as Lyn Gardner wrote:

Punchdrunk’s co-production of The Duchess of Malfi with ENO may have been called an “opera”, but I bet that most of the audience didn’t much care. As far as they were concerned it was Punchdrunk….It is the artists that increasingly engender loyalty, not the institution that produces them.

But it does take some time to get to the stage when people will come to your work because it’s your work…that involves drawing a new label, your own name…

I remember a conversation with Holly Pester about labels. ‘What do you call yourself?’ Someone asked her. ‘A poet’ she replied. And the poetry establishment must accept this; it’s the only way for the form’s boundaries to be pushed (or in the case of poetry in this country, to be kept open…they were pushed years ago but forced to constrict again). ‘A poet’, she replied, and it was a small challenge, a small ‘why, do you think I’m not a poet?’

An hour earlier, when Holly and I were on stage, I’d been introduced with a slightly cautious string of labels, one of them ‘performance artist’. I’d so much have preferred just to be called a poet. For me it’s very simple, I write and perform poetry, and I also write plays. I wish to do the first within the field/establishment of poetry (which encompasses spoken word etc. etc.) and I wish to do the second within the context of playwriting.

The funny thing is, those of us who sit outside of traditional labels fight to reclaim them. While at the same time those more firmly placed under a label reject them – see ‘I don’t call myself a poet’.

On the subject of Holly Pester, I recently read an interview with her in 3am magazine in which she embraced labels and their changing, transforming, linking, accumulative meanings. When Steven Fowler asked how she would define her poetry she responded:

People can get either defensive or carried away around labels. I dig ‘em. I like thinking up new ones that mix-match media; Speech Poetry, Voice-driven Poetics, Intermedial Sound and Performance Poetry. But I’m not scared of just ‘poetry’. That’s mine too. ‘Avant-garde’ seems to be used quite territorially, in antagonism to the ‘mainstream’, like laying down the battle ground. And I’m guilty of using it in that way. But it is originally a military term so I suppose that’s fine. I’m wondering if you mean that there’s a discrepancy between the doing of avant-garde/experimental cross-genre practices and the reception or categorisation of them? I think the blurrings, the cross-overs, the intermedias and the hyphenated labels are important to both, as long as they don’t get stuck. They’re something that need to stay transient – and naturally seem to – for the sake of the work and its connectivity.

Perhaps it’s easy to get defensive or carried-away around labels because they are not easy, not easy going. Labels are political. We use labels to shape our world and our engagement with it. A label is used to evict, to dismiss, to ignore. When work doesn’t sit easily within the field it situates itself within, it is simpler to suggest it finds someone else to play with than to allow that work to change the rules of the game.

When we choose how we are described we have the opportunity to set the agenda, to ask the world we’re working in to look at our work through a particular lens and in relation to other work within the field. When we name ourselves we claim an identity that we can run with, when others name us we are often condemned to a box that prevents movement. The reclaiming of labels is empowering….queer, cunt, marriage, artist, playwright….

Labels often appear to refer to product rather than process. I am comfortable describing elements of my process as compositional and choreographic….but uncomfortable with being described as a musician or choreographer. Because I studied music for many years I know what being a musician or composer entails, I know that is not what I do and it’s not the context I wish my work to be viewed within, even though I use techniques and processes coming from that background. I’m more interested in simply describing the process as ‘writing’. I do a lot of writing on my own, but another part of my writing process happens collaboratively, in rehearsal, or through building a soundscape, or through games and ‘devising’. I’m interested in carrying over what we mean by ‘writing’ from the individual to the collaborative, from page to feet.

Maddy was surprised that both Samantha and I embrace the label ‘playwright’ – and choose it over ‘theatre maker’:

I’m really intrigued that Hannah and Samantha have both moved away from “theatre-maker” as a label for themselves, because in my head that has the openness one might want while “playwright” with its buried connotations of alone-in-the-garret feels more closed. No, actually, different from that: theatre-maker, to my mind, blurs, and has a possibility of all in this together.

For Maddy ‘theatre maker’ is wonderful because it is so open. I have nothing against being called a ‘theatre maker’ – I do use the term to describe myself quite often. I have nothing against it…partly because it is innocuous, I find it a little meaningless. It is unspecific. These are both its negative and positive properties. (I tried it out on a taxi driver and he thought it meant I build theatres.) I would choose to be called a playwright and director rather than theatre maker because I write and direct plays. I want to be commissioned to write plays and I want to be invited to direct them. I am also happy to be commissioned simply to make theatre….but that’s never happened….

If I call myself a ‘theatre maker’ the writing is invisible. Ruth Mitchell (on twitter) suggests that this is what she likes about the term, and that  it appeals to many artists because it ‘covers and ticks many boxes’:

I certainly don’t call myself one, [a writer] wouldn’t dream of it. Theatre maker covers up for the disciplines I am not so hot at.

Samantha talked about the ‘wright’ part of the word playwright, the craft within the word:

We’ve got this suffix “wright”, and we’re the only profession that’s kept that suffix apart from wheelwrights, and “wright” isn’t just writing; it contains the idea of making….So then I started thinking “playwright” is great because it also fights the idea that all we do is write in our garrets and then emerge for opening nights. The word “playwright” contains the idea that even when we’re dreaming up a story, from the very seed of an idea, we’re thinking about how many actors might do it, their entrances and exits, costume changes, set changes, where the interval might go. And all this stagecraft and collaborative thinking comes into its own when a director starts to take the play from page to stage.

I’d add that the stagecraft and collaborative thinking also might occur during the rehearsal process itself, the playwright might be involved in this, or the playwright might write a score for performance that is crafted in such a way it invites a director to wright with or in response to the text… Each playwright finds their own ways to wright.

I’ve only had to think about labels because so many different ones have been stuck on me, and occasionally I’ve experienced being labeled as a way of being rejected from the context with which I wish to engage.  (The literary manager calls me a performance artist, the poet calls me a theatre maker etc.)

I doubt that we’ll ever get to a place where the funding, reviewing, making and marketing of work is boundary crossing and label free. – We also have labels for career stage. My friend was quite surprised to see her Arts Council report littered with labels such as ‘mature artist’ – she’s in her thirties and thought she was ‘emerging’.

Those new overused labels are meaningless and only required for tick box funding purposes, but labels like ‘playwright’ and ‘dramaturg’ have power because they have history. To bring a label with a past into the present is to continue a journey. To abandon labels or use all embracing ones, is to avoid having to confront and question a lineage of work that in its time, was also fighting to be seen…fighting for validation, for its right to be viewed in the context it chose….It’s not really art, it’s not really a play, it’s not really poetry, it’s not really theatre….The fact that the work in question stood its ground and said ‘yes it is’ enabled artistic fields to develop, to widen, extend, challenge, question, morph.

Writing with you

The Disappearance of Sadie Jones is a play. Written on page. By me….

But now that we’ve gone through our development, rehearsal and production process, it has become a performance written in a space, with a creative team, and with you.

When my writing is occasionally published on a page it empties. As if the words have been stolen, type set, set in stone, an elegy, lost and concrete at the same time.

When I receive a book I have poems in, it sits for weeks before I can bear to look up my work.  When I eventually bring myself to do it, I skim them really quickly and never return to them after that.

I hate the finality. I suppose that the act of reading brings them alive again. I suppose when someone reads them they can live. But I don’t believe mine do, because I write for voice and space and people. Words can’t move when they’re trapped on a page.

Perhaps having a play published is slightly different, as the reader knows it is really just the blue print. I’d like to be able to give my plays to other people to play with. But still, the play text becomes final. A final word, I don’t want to have a final word on anything.

In conversation, in performance, we constantly adjust, to other performers, to space, to audience, even when it’s a quiet one. We adjust our bodies, faces, voices, intonation…it’s a constant search for communication. Even when the audience isn’t asked to respond verbally, it’s never a one sided conversation.

During the last few performances of The Disappearance of Sadie Jones at the Bike Shed Theatre, and during discussions afterwards, I felt the work being taken by an audience, taken into their imagination, their bodies…and what they translated was often more beautiful than anything we worked out the play was about.

The work is given a new life by the viewer, it is born, something of it is taken away and it might transform, and grow and become something else. A performance is a gift that is given in different shaped pieces to anyone who wants to take it home with them.

The audience member is an artist (yup, I’ve no problem with that word), the audience member is the most interesting artist at this stage in the process, because they are new, they are questioning, taking in, helping a birth, assembling and assimilating the work within themselves. The audience brings the final stage of the creative process to the work. In the end they are the best dramaturgs. Audience members help us to see the work fresh, to see it from many perspectives, to witness that it is continuing to be written, every night. The writing is never finished. 

 Stephanie Greer playing Sadie Jones. Photos by Eileen and Chris Long

Progressive Dramaturgy

Learning the language of a play

Stephanie Greer and Alan Humphreys. Photo: Eileen Long

On our second night in residence at the Bike Shed Theatre, David Lane held a discussion on progressive dramaturgy, and the dramaturgical processes we went on with The Disappearance of Sadie Jones. This is a transcript of the event. 

David began by reading a poem by Billy Collins. It is a poem also quoted in an article on dramaturgy by Mark Bly called ‘Pressing an Ear against The Hive’ (Theatre Topics, Vol.13, No.1)

Introduction to Poetry
By Billy Collins

I asked them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem’s room
and feel the wall for a light switch.

I want them to water-ski
Across the surface of a poem
Waving at the author’s name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
To find out what it really means.

David went on to contextualise his work with quotes about dramaturgy and a brief history of the role. I am leaving these parts out and jumping straight to the meat. What follows is a slightly abridged transcription of the session:

David Lane: Sarah Dickenson describes the dramaturg as a ‘situational role’: it’s always going to be different depending on the project you are working on. I personally think about it in two ways. Every piece of theatre has a dramaturgy, made up of its composition – all the elements contained within it such as acting, light, sound, music, text, staging, how the audience is cast, how the audience move through the work imaginatively, intellectually, physically….and we use the word ‘dramaturgy’ to define it as a dynamic system: all of those forces working with one another in different combinations at different times throughout the piece. The other way of thinking about it is as a process….

Dramaturgs in the UK tend to be working with new writing but not solely. The thing that separates the dramaturg’s role from the director’s is that not all directors know how to work with a playwright from nothing to a 3^rd or 4^th draft of a play: that’s a key skill, and it involves working with every writer in a different way in order to help that writer write the work they want to write. One of the reasons I’ll end up working freelance is that writers want someone to work with them who isn’t a theatre, because perhaps they feel they will get feedback that’s just about them and their work, rather than feedback delivered in the shadow of a particular artistic agenda.

I’ve worked in two capacities: the first is what I call a ‘desk dramaturg’. I do a lot of work with the script and writer, over the phone or in a room, with the writer, director, whole company….it will be about structure… you can see on the walls around us some of the ‘desk’ work, which is about introducing the play to the whole company by looking at its composition, what organises it, what makes it tick as a piece of work.

The other role is a ‘floor dramaturg’, or a production dramaturg…someone who is in rehearsal with actors, director, perhaps the writer – looking at it kinaesthetically, looking at gesture, arrangement of space, light, sound, stage, and how those languages are cohering with the text to guide an audience through a play, to shape a journey for the audience through the piece.

Different dramaturgs use different metaphors, I know one who always talks about cooking, creating a recipe…I’ve developed a metaphor recently, the thing that fascinates me about plays is that every play has its own map, is unique and the minute you walk into a play and say ‘I know what you should be and if you don’t do that you’re not a play’ then you’re in massive trouble, you’re going to miss signing the Beatles. By that I mean missing the play that’s doing something progressive because it speaks a different language from the one you’ve learnt, the one you’ve decided, in your infinite wisdom, is the only way to write a play. As soon as anybody in the theatre does that you’re not listening to the play – you are listening to what you are saying the play is.

One of the things that struck me about Hannah’s work is that it really required me to be inquisitive and to trust that something of real sophistication and confidence was going on in that script which fascinated me but I didn’t understand. I had two choices at that point. I could say ‘you need to write a three act structure here because this is a total mess and I don’t get it’ or I needed to sit down and say ‘I don’t know what you’re doing here, I don’t quite get it but I want to understand it and I believe there is something in here that I’ve not seen before.’ That ended up being the journey we went on.

I look at the mapping of the play, the logic it has, what are its rules, how does it work, what are its organising principles…around what is this writing organised …what’s driving it, where are its motors…is it around a person, a political idea, a theme, a philosophy …I think about plays as a universe….everything in a play is there for a reason, so it’s there to exert some kind of force or pressure on another element somewhere in the play….whether that is an object, an idea, a line of dialogue, a gesture , it does something…everything in the script has an active purpose…an object exerts a pressure on character….location on person…..there is a dynamic universe of elements whizzing around, knocking together. I look for tension, rhythm and tempo and ask what that tells me about how ideas are positioning themselves…. I aim to learn the language of the play and to never go into a play assuming I know how to speak its language.

Stephanie Greer. photo: Eileen Long

Every play should be like exploring a foreign language for the first time, and you very quickly discover structural echoes, things that are similar to your own language…it’s very rare I will sit down and read a play and not know any of its languages. I will know some of them, normally I will know 99 per cent of them. I think with this play I probably recognised about 60 per cent and wanted to know what the other 40 per cent were.

It’s about reading from the bottom up, asking what the play is trying to do ….and to approach it on its own terms. If you approach it from the top saying ‘this is what a play is’ then firstly you’ll really annoy writers and secondly you will only ever make work that looks like what you say a play is.

There is a short essay by Elinor Fuchs called ‘Visit To A Small Planet’ (Theater,
Vol. 34, No. 2, Summer 2004): the principle that Fuchs introduces is that you come to character last, and that’s a really different concept to how most of us go into a play…Normally we ask who is it about, what is their journey, what do they want?

Fuchs asks that you go into the play first looking at the world, because if you go in looking for character you’re going to miss the world that they are in. So her methodology is about the world they are in: not landscape in a physical sense, but how does the world work, does it obey laws of physics, are we in different places at once: reality, dream, a hinterland of imaginations, and reality at same time….How is the world socially or physically organised? The idea is that you try to get an understanding of how the world of the play works before judging what the people in it are doing.  They can only ever be operating in relationship to the world around them.

We have a real obsession with character driven drama in this country…we’ve learned from the schools of Aristotle, Freud, Jung, Stanislavski, Lee Strasberg, who all place character at the centre. Actor training is delivered in the same way. A lot of actor training looks at character, psychological motivation, characters in a causal world, time moving in one direction: obstacle, journey, decision, choice, success, failure, play ends…We are deeply engrained that that’s the way a play works, that it hooks around character and it’s not actually true…which brings me to the progressive bit…

Tori Haring-Smith wrote an article called Dramaturging Non-Realism (Theatre Topics, Vol. 13, No. 1). She was looking at plays by Caryl Churchill, Suzan-Lori Parks, Anne Bogart: plays that don’t exist in the ‘real world’. She plays with the vocabulary we use to talk about plays. If  ‘character’ only means someone like you or me then you are cutting out loads of options of what a person on stage could be. You can have roles, figures, ghosts, echoes, outlines, a character that represents a myth, a city…if you think of character as one concept it’s limiting. Likewise language doesn’t just mean dialogue, but how text arrives in the piece…narrative doesn’t mean story necessarily, and in fact narrative, plot and story can be viewed as different things. I believe you have to start thinking about how they can be defined more loosely to allow a bigger conception of what a play can be.

The Disappearance of Sadie Jones

Julian Meyrick wrote a fantastic piece about dramaturgical development…he looks at plot, language and character being the three elements of a play but defines them in a very particular way. Plot is referred to as any sequence that arranges material in time and place: that’s not the same thing as story, that’s sequence….you might have a sequence of images, a room that’s empty that fills up: that’s a narrative of space, but it’s not plot in the way we think about character-driven, causal action. He then describes character as the points of deep understanding in a text – I think his exact wording is ‘the accumulative development of thought or feeling in time’ – ….so, if you think about Ibsen, Chekhov…we’ll come to understand their plays through these huge moments of choice the characters make….at those moments, the play contracts and action, theme, meaning all seem to condense into one choice, a moment of deep understanding….Meyrick’s idea is that this moment of deep understanding – this point of contraction – could come from music, image, the relationship between an object and people on stage…not necessarily human beings as character.

Finally language does not just mean dialogue….theatre might contain the language of space, light, sound, objects, puppetry, architecture….all these are our resources as a writer….sometimes those languages speak more clearly than the language I’m using now. Meyrick comes to language as that which serves plot and character: it’s ‘the substance, verbal, visual or behavioural, by which formal coherence is expressed’. Very often in plays, the world is made coherent simply because people are speaking dialogue – but there are many other ways that a play can make its world coherent to an audience.

I think this relaxing of vocabulary in the way we think about plays is one of the first ways of thinking about playwriting and dramaturgy progressively…because you are opening up your conception of what a play can be, which is important in terms of theatre being progressive and encompassing more ways of telling stories….look at multi-platform work using iPhones, projected text, online activities, multi-platforms that require new ways of thinking about what a play is.

I was recently running a course in adaptation at the Bristol Old Vic and one of the tasks I gave writers was to adapt a Picasso painting….though I was very specific about this. Don’t use it as inspiration for something you’d normally do – actually study the Poetics of the painting. What would it look like if it were a play? What happens to character and place and time and structure? We were looking at the the later Picasso…cubist, refracted images…Why can’t we write a play like that? Why do most plays look like photos not Picasso paintings? What are poetics of the image, of a Picasso painting?

You might walk into the Tate Modern with a certain set of interpretive tools: are these tools the same ones you expect to take into a theatre? What do you expect from an art gallery in terms of meaning, and how is that different to what you expect when you walk into a theatre? I suppose it’s my contention that we need more of how we walk into art gallery in how we walk into the theatre.

One of the things we talked about on that course was that as soon as you are in a theatre and a human walks on stage, you are working against an assumption of us being in reality…there’s a human in front of us in our real world and you have to work with or against that….a Picasso painting is its own thing and is not sitting in relation to anything apart from what we bring to it. In theatre we expect this thing over there, on the stage, to do all the work for us….I’m not sure that’s the only way to encounter writing, or to write a play.

With Picasso we are immediately removed from assumptions of realism and naturalism…it’s got its own world, its own rules…it is expressive of its subject. Someone criticised Picasso by saying he couldn’t paint a tree. He replied ‘no, I can’t: but I can paint the feeling you get when you look at a tree’, and I think that brings us back to The Disappearance of Sadie Jones.

I think what Hannah is really good at is writing the feeling you get when something happens rather than the thing itself: that’s the lens this play gives us on the world. And I think that’s a really hard thing to take as an audience sometimes, because you are anticipating a play to give meaning – in an art gallery you’re not. Where are the plays that sit in the middle of that? That say ‘move towards me audience, maybe you will come out with multiple meanings and that’s OK.’

Jackson Pollock, 1912 – 1956. Number 7, 1951

If you take a Jackson Pollock – who holds the authoritative meaning on what a Pollock painting means? We are uncomfortable of theatre doing the same thing – containing hugely multiple meanings, expressing the act of expression itself – we often think with plays that there is something wrong with it, because it’s not being clear. It’s performance art, or installation, or ‘not a play’, which is reductive to this idea of progressive dramaturgy.

On the Old Vic course we also talked about structure using the language of music: recitatives, phrases, movements, sequences, chorus…all of these elements exist in writing and help structure work but often what we watch on stage is linear, with characters doing big things, making big choices that make sense to us at the end. Which I’m not sure is the only way to create stories.

So that’s just to give an introduction to in some way, the openness that was required for me coming to Hannah’s play. When I read the first draft I was excited because I knew that if I were to work on the play with Hannah it would really push me, I wanted to move towards the work and work it out, it was a challenge. One of the first things I did was to write down loads of words that came to me, and we ticked them all off – not a checklist, but an assurance that the two of us believed the play was exploring the same sorts of things….it was about all of those twenty things, yet I still had loads of questions about what was holding the play together.

Alan Humphreys playing Danny

Taking Fuchs’ idea of worlds, the way I organised the draft in my own head before I had a notes meeting with Hannah was to basically section off the play when I thought we moved from one world to another. The play moves between different worlds, worlds of imagination, worlds of reality, worlds of the imagination that are controlled by characters, worlds where the characters were out of control, worlds that might be at odds with the previously established time-frame of the play. There are also moments in the past that we re-visit but are fractured in some way. We’re moving between lots of worlds, so I suggested this was the organising principle of the play. So why is that, and where do we go from there…? Which is a good place to bring Hannah in…why did you want to work with a dramaturg and where were you in your process with this play?

HS: I think at the time David came to work with me, I’d actually written the play two or three years before that and had taken some time re-writing and re-drafting, and I had sent it out everywhere. I purposefully didn’t write stage directions into the script, I wanted collaborators to come in and bring their worlds to it, I wanted to work with a director and designer and I didn’t want to set what all of those things would be, I wanted that collaboration…I sent it to theatres, the usual new writing places, I got some good feedback, some ‘completely didn’t get it’ feedback, and I was really at the stage of giving up…on the play…But I also knew that if I didn’t do this play I would struggle to write the next thing…I had to see it.

So I invited David in, because he was the only person I’d met who looked at the play on its own terms. I had experienced various meetings with people who asked me a stock set of questions which I wasn’t able to answer, didn’t want to answer, and couldn’t answer until we saw the play with performers, until we’d gone through the kind of process that we’ve gone through now, which has been a month of time with actors as well as a lot of time looking at the work. It seemed that if I couldn’t give answers at that point then I was demonstrating that the play wasn’t working, I also found it hard to find someone who would give it the time it needed. I would have a meeting with a literary manager or director and they would say ‘I’m afraid I’ve only had time to have a quick read, but this is what I think…’ They didn’t say ‘this is wrong,’ but the way they approached me was hostile towards the play, and me; in some cases I wasn’t being seen as a theatre maker but as a kind of beginner writer who needed to be told how to do it, or as a spoken word performer who should stick to that and devising.

Stephanie Greer, photo by Eileen Long

DL: If you ever read a play properly it should take half a day minimum…I can spend 5-6 hours on a script, or a whole day, and only then do I feel confident enough to talk to the writer about it. If I don’t go in understanding it as best as I can then I’m no use to them, I can go in with questions, but in order to see it on the play’s term and the writer’s terms, you need to read it at least three times.

HS: Yes, so you came into our meeting having read it three times, with three sets of notes after each reading. And that was different to how anyone else had approached the work. I’ve been thinking about this, and partly it’s because David is great and would do that for anyone, but also I was paying him for his time myself, whereas everyone else I’d met, it was usually their job of course to meet writers, but I felt because I had said to David ‘I want to work with you and I will pay you for your time,’ that then I really got the time.

Asking and paying someone to work with you is very different to the feeling of being a lowly writer going to a theatre for that meeting. David’s approach to the play was entirely different and restored my faith in it, and everything that he said about it, in that first meeting was just such a relief…that’s what I thought I’d done! Thank you! And his response was the opposite of the other responses I’d had. It looks weird on the page, and others had said, it’s just poetry, there’s no characters, there’s no emotion it’s just clever…but David saw the emotion in it, on the page, it’s very hard to see that and hard to read a play that doesn’t look like a play. And that’s not really a criticism of those readers, because I find it very difficult as well, it is really difficult to read a play that is not written for the page. So many plays are written for readers who know how to read a play and know what they think it should look like, but there’s a big difference between writing a play for the page and writing for the stage.

DL: Just as an industry perspective –often, script reading is one of the first jobs you get in a theatre, and I think that’s really problematic, if it’s one of the first jobs you get, what are you bringing to that process? If I’d read Hannah’s play when I was a script reader at twenty-two, I probably would have said the same things, but reading at at thirty-three after eleven years of writing my own stuff and working as a dramaturg as well, I knew what its theatrical potential could be, and that’s what you should be looking for…if it works on page that’s fine I’ll go away and read it, but how is it going to work in space and time with actors? So after we had that meeting Hannah said, I’ve got some money to do two weeks R&D at Beaford.

HS: I applied for money for the whole thing, first I got development money from Jerwood and I used that to apply to the Arts Council …because I had realised, no one’s going to accept this, no one’s going to produce it, I really want to do it, I’ve got to do it myself, direct it myself, and I’m going to get the money. And that’s actually a brilliant position to be in as writer and director, I can choose who I work with and can do the project on my own terms. Basically that involved three weeks development, two weeks at Beaford arts and one at CPT….Then we’ve gone quite quickly into this production, since last week. It’s a very empowering thing for writers to have some kind of control over your own process….because I’ve done quite a bit of work in theatre and performance, and studied directing, I’ve got some of those tools that a lot of writers are nervous about, but it’s very important to find a way to see your work and not just write play after play after play that doesn’t get produced.

DL: So we met up, Hannah said, I’ll pay you to come in for first day and a half. In our first meeting I asked open questions – what does success look like at the end of R&D? What images do you have in your head about how we work on it? What does the room look like? And through those open questions I devised a process that would make the dramaturgy of the play visible, in the room. That’s what this stuff around us on the walls is – making the dramaturgy visible.

Because part of our concern was that all of those things Hannah has described about literary managers, script readers, the things that I’ve talked about in terms of having quite a narrow conception of what a play is….might we have performers in the room who are also having those struggles, those fears? So one of the first things we did was ask the actors to write on post it notes what they were most frightened about and excited about, and there were a lot of things ‘what if I don’t get the play?’ ‘what if I don’t understand the characters?’ ‘what if I don’t get how Hannah’s work is meant to work?’.

So we got rid of all of that at the very first stage and found ourselves on an even keel, all five of us sitting around the room going ‘we need to work out how this play operates and what its universe, world is so we can discover a common language and vocabulary’, that’s what we wanted….a way of talking about the work, because talking about ‘story’ or ‘plot’ wasn’t going to work, that’s not what drives the play. The play is driven by experience, image, memory, gesture, musicality, poetry, dreamscapes, those are not  ‘plot’, in the way that we think about cause and effect, linear plot…so we did a couple of processes…we had a read through but what we asked the actors to do after they read was to respond on paper, and brilliantly, they nearly all drew pictures, that says a lot about the play, the things that resonates are images rather than words…

We wanted to know what the play meant to the actors in room, what did they think they were making, all of those things were consolidated into this…I made a record of what the five of us agreed….skeletons and outlines, clocks and circles, a sequence of progression rather than a plot, we see things from different perspectives, it’s a play about someone’s insides…This was just the first day, trying to work out what everyone in that room agreed on about the play, what was contained in the play.

The other thing we did was we tasked everyone in the room with breaking the play down into movements or phases, where did they feel there was a shift between one thing and another? Just to see what they thought was organising the play…We got back together and my job was to navigate these perspectives into a common consensus on how we moved from one place to another, we ended up with a working understanding of the play’s composition….I took that away over night and drew the play on a page, so this is something I’ll do with my own writing…map the play out, so you can see…we ended up with four movements, which were broken down…We had 17 sequences of something in the play…it enabled us to understand the play’s structure collectively, to make it visible, available to everyone in room…that was what I did on first day, find a way of helping the company access the play and its construction.

I’ve only discovered today that this was then produced….Taking the principle of mapping the company did this…it’s very long…let’s put it down that way…(unravelled on table) can I put you on the spot Lizzie…could you tell us what this is….

Lizzie Crarer (actor): It’s funny looking at this now as it’s actually quite sparse, we did it again at the beginning of last week and it’s much more detailed…So basically it started to become clear that there was some linear narrative, a real time real life sequence of events that happened to these people….which as performers we needed to know as well…On one level you need to know who these people are and what they are doing so that you can then see what the strange associations between things are…so I think this side is what’s going on in the imagination and the upper side is what we worked out what had actually happened to the characters..

DL: One of the definitions I read at the beginning is appropriate: ‘the dramaturg is facilitator of dramaturgical thinking’ – that thinking was applied again at the end of the process, in my absence. Looking at this now it occurred to me that the play has an associative structure: what I mean by that is you have moments that brush against one another….you are required to make associations between a gesture in minute twelve that comes back in minute sixty seven…an object, a line, relates…you are moving through a world picking up on connections, associations, lines, phrases…something Hannah is very insistent about is that it is OK for an audience to come out with different understandings of the play they have just seen, and that they are experiencing something, not just watching something…

I suppose I will say a couple of things that have happened over the time from starting at Beaford to going into production and working as a ‘floor dramaturg’ in the last two weeks. I’m also interested to hear from Lizzie and Stephanie too about their experiences as actors…but certainly, a couple of key changes occurred through having an outside eye coming back into process….There are a few moments of narration in the play, it’s a tiny tiny thing, but I felt that the audience needed this narration in the past tense rather than present: it’s a common thing to create an off-stage world for the audience, but you have to be very careful about how you position it in space and time in our imaginations, because if you get it wrong we get totally confused and we lose it. I was insistent about the audience being able to position this off-stage world which was being revisited….but the narration of what we were watching was delivered in the present tense. So we switched it and those moments transformed…

I suppose those interventions have been co-directorial but also keeping a close eye on the text, and saying to Hannah, I really think we need this bit of text lifted up as it’s an anchor for the audience, it’s a moment when we are going to make those synapse connections….thinking about gesture on stage…allowing the audience to map the play in the same way we did at Beaford. We need to go into that space and to come out feeling that we can map that experience, going ‘I’ve got a map of that play’ and it means this: those maps might be different person to person, but that doesn’t matter. Is that fair?

HS: Well I think personally I don’t need people to be able to map the play, I think that would be quite hard actually, on a first viewing, but I want them to be able to feel it, and to come out feeling that something has changed in the gut…and then when they remember the play to remember that sense of being in a particular place in a particular atmosphere and what it felt like…

DL: I suppose maybe mapping doesn’t necessarily mean tying down narrative. I suppose by mapping I mean that you come out having been able to connect things, and, having been given that opportunity – perhaps through us identifying those anchors, those associations, and putting them more at the forefront of the production language – we are therefore able to feel more deeply those emotions you want us to be feeling.

HS: Yes, and it could be making connections between events happening on stage or between what you’ve experienced yourself or seen yourself and connecting that with what’s on stage. I love seeing work that enables me to write as a viewer….When I used to watch a lot of dance work, it was as if streams of text were coming out of my head provoked by the relationships I was seeing on stage, and for me it was telling me lots about what it is to be human. I think if something you are seeing triggers or tells you something about how you feel or resonates…that’s exciting…

I think everyone has a different mind, a different way of thinking; ‘mapping’ could be the way a lot of people think, but other people don’t…I was going to say, something to mention is that I didn’t understand the play either, it wasn’t that I understood it and no one else got it , it was that I liked it, but I didn’t really understand it and it has taken me a long time to get to the understanding of it that I’ve got now, now I feel confident and clear about what it is. I think I knew all of that intuitively, I had it in me, but it took quite a long time to piece things together, and when we got there it was very exciting, because that’s the process of constructing meaning and understanding, which is  the same process which happens when you watch work. Because I wrote it from an emotional place… I had this thing, I liked it, I didn’t want to re-write it to make it make sense, I wanted to understand what I had written and it did go through different drafts, but not the kind of drafts we are told to write, not drafts imposed by an outside idea of what a play is, but drafts that helped the play become what it was.

DL: One more thing about structure….I don’t think dramaturgs or dramaturgy necessarily holds the elixir of amazing theatre: it’s theatre, it happens all the time anyway, there are many directors brilliant at dramaturgy, it’s part of what they do.

There’s something about form I wanted to demonstrate with three [different shaped] glasses. Say you’ve go a certain amount of content in a play, and that’s the amount of content there….. I can put that same content in this glass here or this glass here or this glass here, but each of those containers will tell you a completely different story about what that content means…there are different associations with each shape. Something that I’m really interested in with plays is looking at expressive structure: structure is not a stiff thing you hook content onto but it is active, it does something, forming the structure of play is part of how meaning is constructed. Caryl Churchill is fantastic at doing this, the shape of her plays, the form of her plays, is part of what they mean, it’s not just that those plays are in three acts, boom, done…

Something that Hannah does with The Disappearance of Sadie Jones is that structurally it’s incredibly sophisticated, because the shape of the play expresses….to me it’s the closest thing to that ‘Picasso play’ that I’ve read. It expresses an emotional experience and uses different shapes to do that.

LC: You were asking about the experience for the performer….the word ‘mid wife’ came to mind, the dramaturg’s role is like delivering a baby, certainly that initial few days in Beaford, it’s interested being reminded about it because I think it set the tone for the way in which we were to approach play, which was establishing an attitude of openness, inquisitiveness, curiosity…which I think is something that Hannah is excellent at doing, which is being very objective, ruthlessly objective of your own work…but I think it’s really good to include performers in that and having a dramaturg in the room opens up that dialogue and it’s a really great starting point, and then again last week and this week, it’s been really helpful to have someone who is not the director, not the producer, but an objective third party to come in and ask helpful questions which you can get lost in when you’ve got into your own process…we’ve created this world, we’ve gone into it, it makes total sense to us now! Well not total sense…but we’ve built a kind of logic and it’s really useful to have someone say.…have you thought about this?

DL: Watching you do a run through on Tuesday, you could see how the physical, vocal, spatial language had absorbed this structural understanding…it was amazing to watch actually, before the lights or sound or props were in the mix the performers’ bodies and voices were moving us between worlds, moving us between dimensions in the play: that was amazing, you found a way to move between these sequences just by being performers in the space.

Stephanie Greer (actor): For me it was a bit different because I wasn’t in Beaford or at CPT so it feels like I’ve been involved in this for a while but actually that’s not true…it’s for two weeks…but I was really glad that we had someone come in…I think if you have a writer who is also director….I think Hannah is the best person to direct this piece, but equally Hannah knows everything about this more than anyone else and actually it was really good for someone to come in and be really clear about what is going on, so he’d be like, OK, the audience don’t need to know what that is but there is clarity, whatever that may be, for us…I don’t know whether my lack of knowledge of what happened at Beaford was useful for the process, but it was great to have someone else who hadn’t been in every single day of the process to share that with.

DL: Julian Meyrick said you can only experience a play or script fresh once, everything after that is decay: and it’s the hardest job as writer, director, actor, to revisit and keep fresh that first impression of what you are watching, and that’s the role that I had to take into the room, I needed to imagine I’m watching this as an audience member for the first time….again…so coming in and out of the process with a month and then 3 weeks then 4 days between watching it helped me to do that, helped me to come back to it and watch the broad sweep of the piece and pick out those moments where I didn’t understand something or catch something, or something could be accentuated…trying to think like an audience member….

So we’ve got twenty-five minutes for questions or comments….

Question from floor: I just wondered what process you went through to select performers, because that must be very important…what was their understanding about what they were about to do?

HS: I was crazy lucky, I still can’t believe my luck with this team. I did this massive audition about a year ago, and I just put out a call myself, I didn’t go through agents, or casting directors or anything, just a call on the Arts Council Jobs website and Ideas Tap, and I got hundreds of applications, and I didn’t know how to choose, who to invite to audition, it was really hard, I’m sure there was something a bit random about it.  The audition was really about getting the actors to play with the text, I didn’t really tell them anything about the text, I didn’t know how to talk about it at that stage yet either, but I do think it was useful to run workshop auditions where people were working together and experimenting with the text and I think …well Lizzie just came in and she was Kim, one of the characters, which was amazing, but also I knew that Lizzie ‘got’ the play.

Of course actors will always say ‘I really love the play’ if they want the part, but I saw that Lizzie honestly did really love it, or get it, and because so few people had ‘got’ it, on the page, that was very important, and I just loved what she did. And I had another actor (Kathryn O’Reilly) already on board…turned out she played Sadie during our development process, but Stephanie was in the same audition with Lizzie, so when I was looking back over audition tapes, when Kathryn wasn’t able to go forwards with the production…there was just something about how Stephanie tasted the words, something about how she approached the language, that made me think – yeah I think we’ll work really well, I think this will be great, and it was such a good decision. Stephanie has only been here for two weeks, and she came to the first day of last week having learned all her lines…the entire play, it was astonishing.

LC: And it was the hardest text I’ve ever had to learn.

HS: She just knew it! Alan was in that same audition, and it is kind of interesting that I’ve ended up with three actors who were all in the same audition and worked together… I’ve got a team who are all really nice people to work with which is partly who you choose, you bring people in you get on with but also about making sure the process from the beginning is open…and it had to be…and in a way I was quite vulnerable, being the director, because I also didn’t know what it was…I was there saying ‘I don’t know’, I don’t quite know how to work on this, I would get up in the morning and be running the day but not really with any idea of how it was going to go, and I’ve never experienced that before, I found it exciting not to know what I was doing and because I’m lucky to have such generous people in the room, we’ve discovered how to do it over the process…so now I feel very confident with it, but I do think if you know exactly what you’re doing…if you know what you’re going to write before you write it, if you know how you’re going to write it, if you know what it is when you’ve written it and you know exactly how to direct it then what’s the point? Then you haven’t done anything new.

SG: I think it’s worth saying as well that if you direct your own work then you do have the choice of who you work with.  I found it really strange actually how little directors and theatres care about who the writer wants in the play, so you can have worked with a writer in development of the script, and they will be saying to the director ‘please see this person for this role’ and the director will say OK yeah fine, and not do that and not go with them…the writer can then feel they’ve got no control over their work.

Question from floor: I want to ask about the process of the performing, so you got this piece of paper and you wanted to know what actual action is happening to this person in the real world…and then there was the imaginative world, and you had these parallel lines running…and I wanted to ask whether you as a writer, were surprised about anything your actors found….and was it a journey you yourself had made prior to trying out….?

HS I had done it but not in such a clear way, I had an idea going into the meeting with David that this is a linear thing over forty eight hours but it wasn’t completely filled in and I enjoyed doing that with the actors…I think what surprises me and what I don’t do is back story…what had happened before this play starts, and definitely when I talked to Stephanie, she was talking about how Sadie grew up, and what her mother was like, and what she’d experienced in childhood and how she’d adapted to that, all of these things we hadn’t really talked about but it all rings true. That’s something that I don’t tend to think about so much.

LC: It’s a two way thing, because as an actor you want to know who this person is, and that’s prejudice too, about character being primary…so actually there’s a lot we have to chuck out to meet you in this work, and work out a different way…a way that is more akin to music…and sometimes this play is just a musical  score…it feels like that..

HS: It goes though various stages, I think we got to a stage where actors were asking a lot of questions like ‘why am I doing this?’ ‘Where am I?’…And I couldn’t really answer because…well, you’re in the imagination or, it’s kind of a dream and it doesn’t make sense and there isn’t logic in this place… and I felt we were getting trapped, and I think it was Kathryn who said ‘you’re the director, what do you want?’ And I went away and came back and said ‘I want us to treat this like a piece of music’ and that was very helpful, for a while. We went through a logical process of what’s going on stage, then a musical stage, then we looked at the body, physicality…to see what that does to meaning and that in a way moved us towards and away from the play.

Where we are now I think has taken elements of all of that but I wouldn’t say now that we are treating the play as a piece of music because I think what I’ve discovered is that if you do that, without a sense of character and emotional journey, that’s when it becomes what people were telling me it was. I think the musical parts should be communicating something about the inner world of the characters or emotion in this particular play, so it’s been a weird layering up of processes, and now those layers have brought us here.

DL: The director Katie Mitchell has a process she talks about in her book, On Directing, where she sits down with a play and goes through it scene by scene or unit by unit and asks, what are the things that are facts that I can pull out and what questions, or impressions have I got, and I think that’s something I did…What are the things I feel are facts, what are impressions…the reason I do that…the audience goes into the theatre with very little, the title, maybe a strapline, the blurb, everything after that is accumulation, you are accumulating knowledge so dramaturgically that role of going in and watching over and over is abut wiping the slate clean and starting from nothing…again…and what’s building up, section by section…this is what I mean by mapping in the brain…you’re accumulating and all that time trying to make sense of accumulation…which things are sitting up, where are the anchors, the moments when I go ‘I get that’…where are those moments through the play, if we hit those, the bits in between can cope with being multiple in their meaning, and undefined.

The Disappearance of Sadie Jones is on at the Bike Shed Theatre in Exeter until 20th April. It will tour in the Autumn.

David Lane is a playwright and freelance dramaturg based in Bristol. He is regularly working with the Egg in Bath, Half Moon Young People’s Theatre, Goldsmiths College in London and as a workshop leader with Bristol Old Vic. He has been commissioned to write and adapt for young companies at Theatre Royal Plymouth and Salisbury Playhouse and for rural touring with Forest Forge. He has written articles on dramaturgy in the journal Studies in Theatre and Performance; his book Contemporary British Drama was published by Edinburgh university Press in 2010 and a feature on playwright Jim Cartwright is included in Modern British Playwriting: The Eighties by Methuen Drama. He is convenor of Final Projects on the MA Writing for Performance at Goldsmiths College and has taught modules in dramaturgy, playwriting and text and performance at Exeter University, City University, Brunel and Sussex. He is also part-time coordinator of Theatre Writing South West, which has been supporting and developing new writing in the region since 2004.

Interview with Stephanie Greer (Sadie Jones)

Stephanie Greer. @Stephanie De Leng

I met Stephanie nearly a year ago at the audition for ‘The Disappearance of Sadie Jones’ (then called ‘Hunger’). I thought she was great, but the role she was right for (Sadie) was already cast. The first phase of work was development followed by a showing at CPT, after which it turned out our lead was unable to do the production and tour, so I called Stephanie. I knew she was very keen on the project, her training seemed right, and there was something about how she found her way around Sadie’s lines that told me she got my writing.

- The fact that she looked so perfect for the role wasn’t the deciding factor – it’s a bit disconcerting to meet someone who has existed in your imagination in real life. Thankfully the similarities are only external.

It was a great call. Stephanie is a fantastic actor – flexible, dedicated, open, emotionally connected, and after just a few days she has a great sense of the character and the play. I found it interesting to hear Stephanie talk about Sadie – she started with her back-story, and details that aren’t actually mentioned in the play. – perhaps reveals the actor’s approach to character.

[odd fact: Stephanie’s real surname is Jones]

****

Where did you train?

At Bretton Hall, in the middle of nowhere in Yorkshire. It had a reputation for being a bit cult-like, which is accurate in a way, it was very much a bubble, the emphasis was on creating new and exciting work, it wasn’t as traditional as some drama schools. So even though it was an acting course- Stanislavski training, animal studies, Shakespeare, Greek plays, you got the opportunity to choose your own path through the degree.

In my third year I was lucky, our large cast performance was directed by someone with a theatre company and links with the National Theatre in Cyprus, so that was how I got my first job. We took a version of the same piece to a festival of ancient Greek drama in Cyprus, the director produced it and we had a new director – Michael Fentiman who was at the RSC.

I was the last year to graduate from Bretton hall. We didn’t know it was going to close until half way through our first year. Once we’d come to terms with it, for us it meant we had a lot of outside directors who came in for modules, so we worked with some very interesting professional people. …and there was loads of space….

It sounds similar to my experience of Dartington – in the middle of nowhere in Devon. The move to Falmouth was announced in my final year there. It seems that these kind of small, experimental arts colleges aren’t sustainable anymore. We also described Dartington as a bubble….actually that’s a great thing when it comes to training and making your own work. I always feel like I’m in a bubble during a rehearsal process…..  In what ways was your training at Bretton Hall useful for this project?

In a general sense, it’s the openness to something different and not having set ideas on what ‘theatre’ should be. I worked with a PhD student in my 3^rd year and he was interested in treating text as music, not everything, but some of the things in this piece are reminiscent of that. I think I take for granted how physical our training was, and even if you didn’t decide to go down physical theatre route, if you’re devising theatre it’s different to being sat around a table writing. When I think of creating a piece it comes out of the body first…

Tell us about your character:

Sadie lives with her boyfriend Danny, her sister Kim lives nearby. Her and her sister were predominantly brought up by their mum, their dad left when they were young. Their mum wasn’t very stable, she had depression, I think that’s had a massive impact on Sadie, I think she blames herself for her mother’s unhappiness and I think her mother’s relationship to food and meals was perhaps not greatly helpful for Sadie.

However I don’t think you can blame everything on the mother, because Sadie has got an eating disorder, and self-harms as well as seeing things and hearing voices that aren’t there. Kim deals with the grief of the mum’s death in a very different way. When their mother died, Kim took on her role, Sadie was too vulnerable. What we see in the play is that Kim has smothered Sadie and not allowed her to become an adult, and her own person. Sadie is living with her boyfriend, but I think her sister is around a lot and involved in that relationship. I think Danny is a very patient person, to put up with that, and loves Sadie very much. And perhaps he didn’t quite know what he was letting himself in for.

Sadie wants to be tall and thin, and has no real sense of her actual body. This image, even though it’s something she aspires to, manifests itself in a nightmarish way….She sees tall, thin people around her, when she’s walking down a street or at home…but also I think her mind guards itself. If something painful happens in real life she switches, forgets about it and goes into her imagination. Her imagination frightens her a lot of the time but it also protects her, which is maybe why she believes it. I think when she’s in a really bad place she loses bits of time, she won’t remember something that’s happened, I think that’s really quite scary.

I think she finds things that are real and builds nice places and fantasies from that…if she felt safe in her childhood bedroom, or something she’s seen…it’ll appear in her fantasy….and then it might take over and the fantasy becomes a nightmare.

Do you identify with her in any way?

Yes, it’s difficult because she’s really messed up, and I think I’ve been fortunate in my life in that I’ve nowhere near got the same issues that she’s got, but – some of her worries and fears and insecurities do ring true, I would imagine with a lot of people. Danny’s got his issues with tidying up, we see in the play that at one point this prevents him going to bed with Sadie, she takes that as a massive rejection. I think there’s something in me that if someone was to say ‘OK yeah but later’ I’d be like – do you not fancy me enough? I suppose I’ve learned about my own insecurity there…I think if all her issues were coming out of somewhere far from most people she’d be hard to identify with, but I think there is a point where you go ‘I do get that, I understand, I just don’t deal with it in that way’. The people around her aren’t helping. She’s coddled and protected, Danny puts up with her craziness and shouting and moods.

What are the challenges of the role?

Her journey is a rollercoaster. Where she goes emotionally is so extreme that it’s about finding the sense and meaning of it but then going further than that. Whatever I imagine I would do in that situation, if those things were happening to me – I then push that to the very extreme… I have to lose any barriers, any holding back. I think we do guard ourselves, we don’t cry in front of people we don’t know…in order for me to play Sadie in the most truthful way I need to let that go…

As an example – Sadie is in the market having an absurd conversation about buying apples and a disagreement on the price…she’s trying to explain her point of view but the market seller is having none of it and she completely breaks down. It reminded me of a time recently when I needed to be in London for a screening, and I had a ticket for a specific train but I’d forgotten it was Sunday and the buses were irregular, I was cutting it fine and I ran from the bus stop to Liverpool Lime Street, I got there just in time. I’m convinced the conductor saw me and he put up the signal for it to go just as I was getting there. I lost all sense of the people around…I was pleading with him, he was like stone, I completely burst into tears which is very unlike me. People were stood on the platform staring at the conductor like he was the worst person in the world.

He came to help me change my ticket, I couldn’t say thank you in a normal way, I was choking. So that’s what I channel for the breakdown…..you know  it’s embarrassing and you want to control your speech but you can’t, you’re in such a state of distress.

 What’s your favourite moment in the play? 

I really like the naturalistic bits with Danny at the moment, you can ask me this again when we’re further on, I think it’s because the naturalistic bits are easy for me to find, I can relate to them – living with a boyfriend, having tense moments. It should remind the audience that actually she’s a person…not a fantastical character, and I think that’s important, and hopefully she’ll be likeable so they will care…that’s my job…

You came into the process later than Lizzie and Alan. What’s this like?

I’ve never done that before, I’ve always started with everyone else, so it’s a bit daunting despite everyone being really nice, it’s a bit scary because I don’t want people to get frustrated if we have to stop because I’m not up to speed on lines or don’t understand bits they’ve already worked on… plus there’s the fact someone else has already had a go at this role, so I’m trying not to think about that as it’s not helpful. I am really competitive and a perfectionist, I’m not used to being the person who’s behind, it’s a good learning curve for me.

At times though it’s been really useful. A scene has just been left to run and the other two are doing things in character and in the space, and I have no idea what’s going on, so I get to experience it for the first time, I’m in the same position that Sadie is in.

I’m really impressed by the other two, in awe at times actually. Which makes me go ‘come on’ – sometimes you might be in a cast where the others don’t have the same work ethic. But here everyone’s working extremely hard and are really talented…so I have to tell myself ‘OK don’t let the side down’.

What’s it like being based in Liverpool?

I’ve never lived in London, although I spend a lot of time here, there is that assumption that if you’re taking acting seriously you should live in London. I continuously pull against that and I wonder if I’m making a bad decision, putting myself out of opportunities – which is why I go to auditions, I get up at stupid 0’ Clock in the morning…but Liverpool is so much cheaper so you can get a better quality of life for less money. I remind myself of that when I’m on a coach at five in the morning…it allows me more time to be creative and not have to do menial jobs for rent and things. So I do think I made the right choice for me, also because I’m Northern…. I’m not about to be on Eastenders….but Liverpool and Manchester are in the middle of the country, and media city is now in Salford.

I’ve only lived in Liverpool for two years….moving out of Manchester didn’t affect my work there, but I’d never worked in Liverpool until I lived there. I’ve had a lot of work there since…I have had to perfect my scouse accent….

What are your ambitions for the future?

I’d like to be able to live off just performing. At the moment I do lots of workshop leading and teaching. Having said that, I’m sure I would miss working with children and young people, they always surprise you and that can inform your work, but I suppose if it was a choice rather than a necessity that would be nice. I’ve done a lot of film recently and I’m liking that as it’s very different, I’d like to do more, and there are so many theatres and theatre companies I think are brilliant….I want to work with them all.

This job is closer to my training than anything I’ve done before. When we go to Leeds in the autumn I’ll get some of my tutors to come, it’s funny because even though I’ve had good jobs I’m proud of, this will be what they are most proud of me for. Because it’s new and exciting and daring.

Thanks! – Great place to end the interview and start the rehearsal!

Stephanie Greer, Lizzie Crarer (and Alan Humphrey’s arm) in rehearsals.

The Disappearance Residency at the Bike Shed Theatre 10-20th April

Join Hannah Silva and company for poetry, debate, discussion and the premiere of a new piece of theatre ‘The Disappearance of Sadie Jones’.

“Silva uses techniques like cut-up and collage, sound poetry and physical theatre to create something that’s unique but nods to older forms like shamanism, pre-religious ceremonies, Dadaism and the kind of games that children play with language.” Radio 3, The Verb

APRIL 10-20th:

10th 7:30pm: Words Words Words: Poetry in performance with Hannah Silva, Jack Dean, Clive Pig and Jane Slavin

11th 7:30pm: Pressing an Ear against a Hive: David Lane discusses the role of the dramaturg and reveals the working process behind ‘The Disappearance of Sadie Jones’

12th 7:30pm: View a rough and (hopefully) ready run of The Disappearance of Sadie Jones followed by a wide ranging discussion on the joys, trials and tribulations of making theatre.

13th & 16th 7:30pm: The Disappearance of Sadie Jones (work in progress)

17th & 18th 7:30pm: The Disappearance of Sadie Jones (previews)

19th 7:30pm: The Disappearance of Sadie Jones

20th: 2pm and 7:30pm: The Disappearance of Sadie Jones

Tickets £5-£10: 01392 434169
The Bike Shed Theatre, 162 Fore Street, Exeter, EX4 3AT
www.bikeshedtheatre.co.uk

http://www.facebook.com/events/136856916496211/

…..

The Disappearance Team:

Writer & Director: Hannah Silva
Actors: Stephanie Greer, Alan Humphreys, Lizzie Crarer
Designer: Fiona Chivers
Light: Gary Bowman
Dramaturg: David Lane
Associate Producer: Milan Govedarica
Supporters: Jerwood Charitable Foundation and the Arts Council

Developed through residencies at Beaford Arts, CPT and the Bike Shed

 

Written and Writing

Terribly neglected blog. Much apologising. Will write about self-censorship and impossibility of translation and being solo writer/performer/maker person soon as the idea doesn’t cause panic. Meantime, here’s why the blog hasn’t been blogging:

I have finished touring my solo show ‘Opposition’ and am currently writing/directing a new play called ‘The Disappearance of Sadie Jones’*. You can see it at the Bike Shed Theatre 13th-20th April. We’ll also be running talks and other performances the week prior including a session with David Lane on how he worked with us as a dramaturg (11th April). Thanks to funding from the Arts Council and Jerwood Charitable Foundation, we’ll be touring it in the Autumn.

Kathryn O’Reilly, ‘The Disappearance of Sadie Jones’ – from work in progress showing at CPT 11th Jan.

I’ll be on another mini tour as a solo performer/writer/person as part of a project called ‘Electronic Voice Phenomena‘ this Spring – I plan to acquire a beard for my short piece called ‘The Total Man’ (check website for tour dates).

inspired by Stan Gooch’s book ‘The Total Man’

I’m writing a little piece for the Paines Plough project ‘Come to where I’m from’ which I’ll perform at the Drum in Plymouth on 27th March.

Plymouth (and my flat)

Please check out a new anthology from Bloodaxe, it’s called ‘Dear World and Everyone In it‘. Thanks to its unconventional submissions policy I’m in it – and  it represents a great range of youngish poets currently working and playing in the UK.

I’ll be performing poetry at Stanza festival in Scotland 9th March.

photo: Nina McDonagh

I’ve recently been working with Mary Pearson on re-development of her solo show ‘Failure’. She’s touring this Spring, to Bike Shed Theatre, Brighton Fringe, and CPT’s Sprint Festival – check it out!

I’m currently ‘writer in residence’ at the Lady Eleanor Holles School where they are producing a play I wrote for a cast of 20 girls this May.

LEHS new theatre

Nothing planned for the summer. 

*Previously titled ‘Hunger’

p.s info about South West Theatre Writers meetings:

TWSW MEETINGS

 SAVE THE DATES for the following Theatre Writing South West meetings:

Saturday 13th April @ Salisbury Playhouse, Community Room

Thursday 11th July @ Bristol Old Vic, Coopers Loft

As ever, more details on the day’s events will follow nearer the time. We’ve had a few requests in the last month for a meeting day that isn’t a weekday, so I hope those of you that struggle to take time out from the working week will be able to join us in Salisbury.

For info/reserve a place/join mailing list: contact David Lane on: theatrewritingsouthwest@gmail.com

London Should Love its Bankers

and various tangents involving implausible analogies and credit cards….

[Results of the Vote: 338 votes for, 281 against and four don’t knows]

Panel:
For: William Right, Anthony Fry, Jennifer Moses
Against: Ken Livingstone, Tony Curzon Price, Aditya Chakrabortty

As the Chair acknowledged to me following the Intelligence Squared debate – ‘London Should Love Its Bankers’ may not have been the right statement to debate in the first place, nonetheless, the motion was carried.

According to those present last night – Not only should we stop blaming them, stop joking about hanging them, and bail them out when they mess up, we should also love our bankers. Perhaps the outcome would have been different if bankers, trainee bankers and partners of bankers and trainee bankers had withheld their votes.

Growing up, we didn’t have political debate in our household. The general mentality was – we know it all – don’t believe a word they say anyway – we’re on the same side in this house so there’s nothing to debate. My parents rarely read newspapers. The news was generally criticised for being too depressing ‘why can’t they report nice things?’

So when I tried my ‘the credit card analogy is bullshit’ argument on my mum the other day she was a bit taken aback by my passion and told me to calm down. I suggested (declared) she had become a Tory – apparently that’s not the case and she’s still LibDem (if only they were).

The problem with heated debates between me and my mum is that neither of us knows what we are talking about. So I relished the opportunity to try it out on an expert last night.

I went to the debate because I’m looking for a more nuanced discussion than I can get through consuming the standard fare of political rhetoric, and because I want to know more from both sides. I’m still cultivating my own political views – the process began when I started making my solo show ‘Opposition’ two years ago. I was angry about not being able to care about voting for any of the political parties, frustrated by the fact that when they speak they rarely communicate. Not much has changed.

I won’t attempt to do a potted version of what the panellists said. There were many analogies. Tony Curzon Price’s comparison of loving a banker to Stockholm syndrome was my favourite. The ‘for’ side repeatedly quoted Ken Livingstone talking positively about the city and its importance to London, which was interesting as last night he was sitting on the ‘against’ side. Jennifer Moses mentioned flip-flopping, though my favourite statement of hers was her opening: ‘It’s very kind of you to have a woman on this panel’. Both sides said those who committed crimes needed punishing and regulation was necessary. So no one took the same view as Jamie Whyte on Radio 4 recently, defending the free market and arguing that the crisis was the fault of state interference.

William Wright’s argument focused on a comparison of bankers with wayward teenagers; they were just responding to the context they were in and should be given stricter boundaries and forgiven. Wright said ‘by not loving them [bankers] we are denying our own role in the crisis’. – We apparently played a part in creating the monster. I wanted to know how I was responsible, never having taken out a mortgage, not seeing myself doing so in the conceivable future, having paid off my credit card and student overdraft (not much chance of paying off the loan), how did I, or others of my generation and younger play a part in the crisis?

Initially this was mistranslated as the Mike Bartlett clichéd moan  – my generation are paying for the mistakes of our parents etc. Actually I don’t think I am owed a house or a car or a job. I am happy that I can pay my bills and that I am able to do the work I want to do in this climate, working in the arts has never been paid well and that’s my choice. I met quite a lovable banker following the debate (reminded me of my Granddad), I invited him to Opposition and he said he hoped it would make me some money. Which was amusing. Anyway, my question was rephrased and Wright’s response was to suggest that I wasn’t whom he was referring to, as perhaps I am not contributing to the economy (just a little bit patronising). It seemed that by ‘we’ he meant the Cameron ‘we’ as in ‘we’re all in this together’ not a literal ‘we’.

But we discussed it further afterwards. In fact by ‘we’ he means those who, during the boom, took out mortgages that were triple their income. And I disagree with this too. To use yet another analogy –when you go to a doctor you acknowledge that they are experts and that you are not. You give your symptoms and accept the prognosis even if it sounds dubious. If it turns out the doctor administered the wrong medicine and endangered you they can be tried, maybe fired, maybe jailed.

Like a doctor, a banker is a professional and an expert. If a gardener goes to a banker, presents details of his income and finances and is offered a large mortgage, the gardener will accept it. Then the differences set in. When it turns out it was wrong for the banker to offer the mortgage, that the banker did not calculate the sums correctly and the gardener cannot afford the mortgage, the banker is not punished, the gardener is. Although perhaps that’s another poor analogy, as it wasn’t so much the high street banking that was the problem but the casino style speculative gambling with our money. If that’s the case, then Wright is certainly wrong to suggest all those who took out high mortgages played a role in the crisis.

There was a question from the floor ‘are they actually going to be punished?’. I think it was Ken Livingstone who made the point that they didn’t let (us) have clauses in our mortgages that prevented our homes being seized if we default on payments, so why are their pay offs and salaries protected when they mess up? But of course they are self-serving institutions with little interest in the health of the wider economy or the people they are ‘serving’. They had no need to protect against collapse because they are ‘too big to fail’. We’ll bail them out etc. Going back to that Radio 4 programme, Whyte made the point that without state interference, without the cushion of knowing the state will bail them out if they failed, perhaps the banks would have been more cautious about how they gambled with our money in the first place.

So I don’t think my generation had anything to do with the collapse, and neither did those individuals who applied for mortgages and were given them. They were individuals. One of them could have refused a mortgage and been careful with borrowing (surely many were) – this wouldn’t have made any difference whatsoever. Wright asked me if I had a student loan and how much it was. Not sure where we were going with that. Did I exist in a culture of entitlement, did I think I somehow deserved a subsidised education?….Well…yes….otherwise only those who can afford one can have one… He may actually have just been making an argument for the rise in tuition fees (while at the same time saying that accepting high loans is reckless?). Anyway, an independent body did think I was entitled to an education, on merit. The AHRC funded me full time for two years to do an MFA, and they don’t ask for it back with interest either.

If it isn’t the fault of all of us, or the fault of bankers, is it the government’s fault? Obviously it’s convenient for governments of all colours to blame bankers to avoid being blamed themselves. Is this influencing the rhetoric we are being spun? But if it was Britain’s particular government’s fault then why was it that the financial collapse wasn’t restricted to our country but occurred at the same time under other governments elsewhere? Were all governments getting it wrong? Or all bankers? Or was it just ‘a tiny minority of bankers’ in many countries….Very convenient to blame tiny minorities. Saves rehauling entire systems.

Going back to the credit card analogy – it’s been bothering me for a while so good to have a chance to run it past Wright. The Tories and the LibDems continue their chant that Labour ‘maxed out the country’s credit card’ and that when a credit card is maxed out you don’t keep borrowing you pay it off.

A lot of people seem to buy this; the argument comes up as often as the phrase ‘the mess we inherited from the previous government’. But surely it’s a cheap trick used over and over again to brainwash voters into agreeing with austerity measures and to ridicule Labour. Weirdly, even now when it’s clear austerity isn’t working that analogy is holding fast. But surely a personal credit card is completely different to government borrowing? Now that I’ve Googled the issue turns out other people have been saying that for a while and explaining why. Never mind I’ll keep going.

Sticking with the inappropriate credit card analogy…my thoughts go like this: You have a debt on your credit card, you have a great idea for starting a business that will generate jobs and profit. The government’s view is, no you can’t borrow anymore you need to pay off your credit card. You say: how can I pay off my credit card when I don’t have a job? There aren’t any jobs, but I’ve got this great idea and not only will it employ me, in the future it will generate jobs for others too. But the government says it would be reckless to borrow more. Therefore you can’t start up a new business, you can’t pay your credit card, the interest increases and you are driven into double dip poverty.

If the whole analogy isn’t appropriate anyway, then whether or not my continuation of the analogy is accurate or not is irrelevant. If it’s true that the analogy is nonsense in the first place then the economic argument the current government has been using to communicate their policies to the voters is fundamentally flawed. Either they think we’re idiots, they are idiots, or their economic policy is idiotic.  Or am I over simplifying things?

As someone trying to figure out her own position and understanding of all this, I’d appreciate it if those communicating the situation would do so without flawed analogies and repetitive sound bites. So far I haven’t understood the arguments for severe austerity measures and reducing government borrowing. Mostly because they have been repeatedly presented with this credit card analogy. (The fact that they’re clearly not working and the national debt and borrowing has gone up considerably doesn’t help either.) Wright told me the austerity measures will start working next year. Looking forward to it.

In the meantime, join me in Opposition: Ovalhouse 6-17th Nov

Puppet. The Book of Splendour

Summerhall. Edinburgh Fringe.

by neTTheatre. Directed by Pawel Passini

Another disclaimer – I’m not a reviewer/critic/journalist. I don’t make any kind of notes when I’m watching. I have a selective memory and no desire or ability to sum things up with a synopsis. If I had any stars I’d give this five. But I don’t do that either, thankfully. I do however do spoilers. Maybe stop reading and go see it, then read this after if you’re still interested. From this website:

The work of Tadeusz Kantor reveals an archipelago of figures where the ‘zone of death’, as Kantor called it, has an unexpected neighbour – childhood. Encounters with both the imaginary and the real lead to moments of madness, to fear and joy, to euphoria and despair, and to a pulsating world seen by the Kabbalah master’s eyes. The Book of Splendour (Sefer ha-Zohar) is one of the key texts of Jewish mysticism. This beautiful text teaches us a lesson of understanding the world: the people and objects surrounding us, the global and intimate events which happen to us – they are all part of the Conversation between God and Man.

I have never read the Kabbalah or the Torah or any of the texts that this performance works with. I got the general gist of the texts, but not much more.

I also happen to be one of those odd people with no need for linear narrative or to understand the text or to really ‘understand’ anything. I’m quite happy just to watch it. So this is my experience of watching it.

At the beginning there was a voice behind us ‘yes I am here behind you, I am speaking this now’ he said (or words to that effect). I’ll call him the ‘concession to the British’. The voice that talks in a normal and friendly way, tells us not to worry. He tells us it will be hot (not that the play is hot, but that the room is hot). He warns ‘this is not stand up comedy this is sit down tragedy’ we laugh’ ‘that was the last time you will laugh’ he tells us.

fot. M.Rukasz, M.Zgierska, BlowUp Agency

There’s a kind of diagram projected on stage. The projection intersects with the stage design, scaffolding of many levels, ladders and hooks. The diagram is from the Kabbalah, there are discs and wheel shapes and spokes. The voice tells us that this is our map, this is how we will understand the performance (or words to that effect). He also says alternatively you can use the diagram to make a bicycle (we laugh again, so he was wrong, that wasn’t the last time we would laugh).

I expect things happened on stage at around this point. There was a little chorus of tacky white angels at one side of the stage – the only performers who spoke/sung in English. Later the woman angel screams, and screams, and screams, I can’t remember her words, but her screams were somehow picked up in the soundscape. Throughout the performance the recorded soundscape is an extension of the voices on stage. Which is bloody hard to do.

The video too, weaves within the stage design and the performers, it’s really very sophisticated; it echoes what happens on stage, it zooms in on faces, it appears to be live feed, but there are differences, it is the ghost version, or the real version, the nightmare reality, the reflection. On stage there is a woman in a white dress, on the video there is a woman in a white dress starving in a concentration camp. (There probably wasn’t – I’m totally winging it, this is what I mean by the montage, the narrative happening in the mind of the spectator)

Mirrors – the performers look into each other, mirror each other’s movements, they are doubles, echoes and memories. There’s a sense of nostalgia (go on then, there’s a Tarkovskian sense of Nostalgia).

In Grotowski’s Akropolis the performers  in rags march around the stage, emaciated, ritualistic, those performers are here.

fot. M.Rukasz, M.Zgierska, BlowUp Agency

But in many ways this is beyond Grotowski, more sophisticated, more layered, the physicality more refined and detailed, the energy almost as raw, the use of voice more nuanced. There’s a woman in a red dress, a woman in a white dress, and there’s a painter, who is he? God, painting this world? The ghost of  Kantor? The Kaballah Master? Again – echoes, images…. a child with a huge Jewish black fur hat.

fot. M.Rukasz, M.Zgierska, BlowUp Agency

The voice tells us that when the child imagines the devil, he sees him as a big black leather dog.

The child rides on a big black leather dog, an actor in a padded black leather dog suit, it’s a terrifying, brilliant image.

In Kantor’s theatre the dead return to take once again their seats on the school benches. They push aside the doubles of their childhood and drag them offstage. The class has been dead for years, the doubles are mannequins. (Jan Kott)

Dipping into Jan Kott’s essay Kantor, Memory, Memoire (as one does) – this theatre is described. The images of soldiers or prisoners, mannequins or doubles, memories or nightmare… this is a world of memory, imagination, dream, desires, the subconscious…births and dyings… a collective ghost of horrors…this is what our brains do when we are at the edge of our lives.

I’ll resurface to mention that the texts were mostly performed in Polish, with subtitles projected high up (I recommend sitting towards the back for this one as the staging also works on different levels. I mean, literally, as well as…) The ‘concession to the British’ – voice came and went during the performance, now and again grounding us with comments such as ‘and now a very famous Polish actor will perform a text in Russian’. – Or maybe in Polish. I read the subtitles for a while and then realised it wasn’t helping, and there was so much to ‘read’ on stage. It’s a large cast, there are stories and encounters and crazy images everywhere. But it isn’t fragmented. It isn’t chaotic. It is very carefully choreographed.

A woman performs sounds from the Hebrew alphabet. The sounds come from her body, rejected by her body, released from her gut, from her skin. A man has a hook for a head, a puppet has no head. A child speaks and an old man’s face watches. An old man speaks through a child’s face. A group of performers scuttle onto stage, strange creatures, masks strapped across the back of their heads, distorting their bodies.

I’m not saying it was perfect. The subtitle setup didn’t really work. I’d like to think about a way of using texts and words to lift something of the many meanings in the work out, some other way of working with language. I don’t know what the effect would be if I understood Polish; I got the sense the texts would be dense and abstract even if you did understand them. Or perhaps the words work best as sounds and just didn’t need any translating at all.

The ‘concession to the British’  helped us through the performance, but still a whole row left the night I was there.

It was enthralling. I guess it wasn’t easy, but it wasn’t forgettable either. And I left the theatre feeling that something had shifted.

We don’t make theatre like this here.

I don’t know why not.

The Opening Ceremony & Political Theatre

Oh Danny boy, oh Danny Boyle, we love you so

A few weeks ago I read this speech by Sam West: Shift Happens

A few weeks ago a large camp of us in Britain were feeling alienated from our country, from our politicians, and from the Olympics. My East London dwelling friends talked about the Olympic site being imposed on their city, with its own security, shutting out the local community instead of integrating them. Graffiti that contained layers of history being wiped out.

photo: Sid Bose

Sam West describes the scenario:

Once the two camps hit mutual incomprehension and are no longer able to recognise each other as human, the door is open to real exploitation and hatred.
And that’s where we, as artists, come in.  Because that alienation isn’t just a failure of government, it’s a failure of imagination.

Which is where Danny Boyle came in. The opening ceremony was a triumph of the imagination.

Nothing is as good as a story which belongs to its audience. (Sam West)

And the audience wasn’t the Olympic officials, the official sponsers, Simon Cowell – the audience was the British, but more specifically, East Londoners.

Funnily enough West also said:

I want us to take pride in the NHS, schools, museums, libraries, Universities, the BBC.  And of course, in local theatres.

If the point of making political theatre is to change people, attitudes, views on fundamental issues, The Opening Ceremony succeeded. It transformed those of us who had been skeptical about the London Olympics takeover into proud-to-be-British Olympic enthusiasts. Danny Boyle showed us that the Olympics is not (just) about corporate sponsorship, but about people.

We saw performances by artists we respect, artists who have been working on their craft for years, rather than those plucked from a talent contest and molded into something neutral. – Akram Khan, Dizzee Rascal, Evelyn Glennie… And then there was Bond and the parachuting Queen, Mr Bean and the keyboard fart.

In his diaries John Cage wrote: “Don’t try to change anything, you will only make matters worse”

My husband asked Carlos Monsiváis, the Mexican writer and political activist whether theatre could change society and he answered:

“Individual efforts will always be that – individual efforts”

But I’m not sure you could describe the opening ceremony as an individual effort.

While we were trying to tweet something witty in between throwing shoes at the TV in glee, Aidan Burley was harnessing the power of twitter to fume about ‘multicultural crap’:

Thank God the athletes have arrived! Now we can move on from leftie multi-cultural crap. Bring back red arrows, Shakespeare and the Stones!  (@AidanBurleyMP) 

Ignoring the bomb for a moment – The Opening Ceremony was a montage, a cut-up text on a huge scale….and was opened by Kenneth Branagh quoting The Tempest….I’m not sure ‘to be or not to be’ in the middle of Dizzee Rascal would have worked.

He then tweeted in response to the response to his first tweet:

Seems my tweet has been misunderstood. I was talking about the way it was handled in the show, not multiculturalism itself

-       Suggesting multiculturalism is something that must be ‘handled’ – as in, one water fountain for whites another for everyone else? As in, a few are fine but let’s make sure us whites are the majority….or as in:

This was supposed to be a representation of modern life in England but it is likely to be a challenge for the organisers to find an educated white middle-aged mother and black father living together with a happy family in such a set-up.(Daily Mail)

John Walker pulls this apart brilliantly on botherer.org

It’s a horribly written sentence, so it’s not clear if he’s deliberately only referring to the “white middle-aged mother” as such, and not the “black father”, but it wouldn’t be particularly surprising. But what does “educated” have to do with it? Does he believe that mixed-race couples can only be stupid people? That education would prevent such a thing happening? And what about “happy”? If they weren’t educated but happy, presumably that’s because they’re too stupid to know how awful their lives must be? But as soon as they get some smarts, there’s no chance of happiness, right? John Walker

If we particularly noticed the number of non white performers on stage, the mixed race couple, the number of women, the occasional wheelchair user, the signing choir, the lesbian kiss (which actually I blinked and missed) – if we particularly noticed these things it’s because we’re not used to seeing our society represented on TV. It’s true that in Devon (where I live) a cross-section of the population will be mostly white….but this ceremony was representing East London not rural Devon. And anyway, I happen to be one half of an “educated” “happy” mixed race marriage.

Someone tweeted that this is why politicians should not use twitter. Someone replied that this is exactly why politicians should use twitter.

The Daily Mail have pulled the article that John Walker quotes. So that’s a third proof of the power of theatre.

I think Sam West’s speech poses a question about what political theatre is now. Lecturing an audience doesn’t provoke change. Showing the audience how things are doesn’t provoke change. Showing people protesting and dreaming of utopia doesn’t help – although Monsiváis says “maintaining utopia amongst one’s convictions is a pre-requisite for good mental health”.

So we need a different way of making political theatre. By celebrating the NHS Danny Boyle made a stronger point than by showing a protest against NHS cuts. By using spectacle, music and humour, he jump started our energy beyond the point of intellectual engagement – making us want to share the experience immediately, making us want to get up and do something.

Michael Billington, esteemed Guardian critic wrote ‘State of the Nation’ – a book  which charts theatre across sixty years – post-war to post-Iraq. He explores the way theatre reflects politics and society, and what theatre reveals about our nation. So he would appear to be the ideal critic to discuss the importance of the Opening Ceremony.

However, his ‘review’ is rather odd. He gives Danny Boyle three stars. Why is an opening ceremony given stars at all? “Imaginatively, it left something to be desired”, he says.

He mourns the lack of coherency and the fragmented nature of the narrative, the ‘shifts in tone’. He critiques the show as if it were, or as if it should have been, a three act play with one theme and a message (preferably delivered in the form of a speech at some point during the night with something quotable for the review). His own summary of what the ceremony might mean is absolutely lacking in imagination.  He performs what is described in this blog as a ‘category error’.

I’ve never been sure whether theatre has the power to provoke a change in society. But so far it looks like the opening ceremony has exposed a racist politician (we already knew he was racist after the Nazi thing, but somehow he was still a politician so needed re-exposing); it has forced the Daily Mail to question its views, first adjust, and then pull an article; it got the first gay kiss onto TV in homophobic countries; it has transformed skepticism about the Olympics into optimism; it has made a point about the value of the NHS (and therefore the danger of cuts). It may also have proved a point about equality and diversity on stage – that it’s not to tick boxes, it’s to make great theatre. It demonstrates the power of theatre…

And most of all, it demonstrates the importance of funding the arts.

Devoted…

…& Disgruntled in Plymouth (and Cornwall and Devon)

My first D&D, although I’ve done the open space format thing a few times.

Theatre Royal Plymouth

Here’s a detailed description of how the D&D Roadshow works in case you want to have a better idea of what I’m talking about: Downstagewrite

So it’s basically filling a day with those kind of coffee break chats that are often the best bit of a conference. Anyone can suggest a topic. And anyone can turn up – theatre goers/dancers/writers/producers/artists/venues ….maybe a little tricky to communicate that, I asked a composer-friend if he was coming and he’d assumed it was an exclusive invite-only event.

Devoted and Disgruntled – how was it for me…

I immediately liked the title as it pretty much sums me up – utterly devoted and a bit disgruntled.

But during the day I got the sense these states were being polarised. You were either in the devoted camp (good) or in the disgruntled camp (bad). Being seen as being in the disgruntled camp felt rather uncomfortable, like you were just a moaner.

I think being both devoted and disgruntled means that you are up for debating the problems, and then up for trying to do something about them.

Do we need the provocative formal debates/speakers in order to have something to rebel against/discuss/debate during the coffee chats?

One conclusion of the day is an obvious one….Devon….whether that’s Exeter or Plymouth…is never going to be Bristol.

We just don’t have the population. So we’ll never have that kind of self-perpetuating theatre ecology that draws people in and keeps them. I still think the various theatres and organisations in Devon can do more in terms of talking to each other, trusting each other, getting together to support the few full time theatre makers who are based here, helping us develop the regional audiences for our work, providing a bit of infrastructure…and they think that too.

from: http://welovelocalgovernment.wordpress.com

Will it happen? How long will it take? Why is being a supported artist a postcode lottery?

I look at what goes on in the East region  – I never would have imagined that the place I grew up – which felt so cut off and rural and boring –is now pretty much the best place in the country for a theatre maker to live.

Having said that, while growing up in Suffolk I was a member of ‘Splinters’ youth dance company at Suffolk dance, and we worked with Richard Alston, Wayne McGregor, Phoenix dance company…and I commuted once a week to the Royal College of Music junior school. On second thoughts rural Suffolk was the perfect place for an artist to grow up.  (if your arty middle class parents take you to Snape Maltings)

–Is it simply distance to London and travel costs that are the problem?

When I attended the Jerwood Aldeburgh opera writing foundation scheme last year,  it was brilliant to have time to talk with other artists – writers, directors, composers, – all of them full time practitioners, and to collaborate. That’s one of the things missing from Plymouth/Devon. Even when artists do get together we’re usually too preoccupied with the practicalities of how to make the work happen to talk about the work itself.

Which is why it’s so important to travel and spend time outside of the region. – That was one of the suggestions of the ‘Is the work being made in Devon good enough?’ session. – Maybe the artists based here don’t see enough good work. I guess that might be true for the recent graduates who have stuck around, but it’s also a little patronising. I’m a graduate from the region who stuck around. The few writers/directors/actors/theatre makers I know here have spent most of their lives making and seeing work in other places. It’s quite tricky to suggest that the work being made here isn’t good enough  - when many of the professional artists based here are not actually able to make the work they want to make at all.

Doing something about it.

There were some great things I got from the day…I met Kate Sparshatt who was very impressive and nice, and generous, and we have subsequently met up and had a useful chat about Gecko and producers and funding applications. On the topic of brilliant women –  one of the most vibrant chats was called by Natalie McGrath, ‘Women’s Voices – ? Do We Want To Hear And See Women On Our ‘Stages’ In The South West?‘ – other than Kate (Plymouth Arts Centre), and Emily Williams (Wide Awake Devon/Theatre Devon) I think the representatives of organisations/theatres in the room were all men. Robert Miles from the Brewhouse joined the debate.

There were a number of women making things happen in the room – including: Natalie McGrath (playwright), Josie Sutcliffe (director), Belinda Dillon (critic, Exeunt/Devon Life), Belinda Chapman (choreographer/director), Fiona Chivers (designer), Ruth Mitchell (actor/theatre maker), Bethany Pitts (director), Emily Williams (producer/Wide Awake Devon), Danielle Rose (producer), Cassandra Williamson (Pilot’s Thumb) …

I did a little tweeting and Lyn Gardner liked the idea of coordinating with other performances in the region and sending invites to critics to come down and see a few things at once. I would have liked to have talked more about the issue of lack of theatre criticism in the region …. I turned up too late to that session – but I think a conclusion was we need to blog more – tweet and blog about everything. And #swtheatre is available. I’m going to see the latest Belgium experiment at the Drum tonight. I’ll give the hashtag a go afterwards.  (But still find it very hard to comment on/review work, especially when I don’t like it) – Had a chat with Belinda Dillon about that. – I can’t afford to make any more enemies than I already make through this blog!

Had a little brain storm with Seth Honnor about what to call things.  - He made a list, none of them are great, although ‘Grokking’ perhaps the favourite. But anything that taxi drivers don’t understand is no good. My taxi driver thought ‘theatre maker’ meant that I built theatres. Maybe we just need to call ourselves and our work by different names in different situations.

I talked to Mark at Beaford Arts and started thinking about rural touring, and pondering whether my work could be rurally toured. We have subsequently had a chat and Beaford is supporting the development phase of ‘Hunger’ with a two week residency – which also gives me a chance to explore the question about audiences for my work.

So it now it looks like making Hunger in the region is a possibility. I‘ll still be based in London for a few months from September, but even having just one thing to come back for makes my year ahead more exciting, less disgruntling – and I’m as devoted as ever.

A selection of the reports:

How can theatres and organisations prioritise and support their local theatre makers?
Is Work Being Made In Devon Good Enough?
Should We Be Happy To Work For Free – And Are We Damaging Theatre If We Do?
Theatre In Non-Theatre Space: Was Creating The Bike Shed Theatre A Waste Of Time?
Women’s Voices – ? Do We Want To Hear And See Women On Our ‘Stages’ In The South West?
How Do We Get SW Theatre Regularly Reviewed?
Half The SW Lives In The Countryside. Why Doesn’t The Sector Give Rural Work Equal Weight?
In addition to developing opportunities for artists in the South West, how do we retain, attract and develop producers and arts managers?