Express Update
There’s a great deal of movement occurring in the office/studio @ TMTP and TSTS, from laptops under fingers while gulping coffee on the couch before leaving home for work/rehearsals, meetings, theatregoings, etc. Things seem right now to be unfolding swiftly, with some effort but not too much pain, and with a thankful understanding of an end-date. At the moment some very particular things are occupying me (or preoccupying me) more than others, with priority being only a small factor in the distinction of these. In no particular order, they are:
– Getting the footage from the last seven days of rehearsals/actor interviews uploaded to my hard drive so that I can view (transcribe, shape, notate, tear my hair out over) more easily.
– Understanding the very, very different perspectives that people of different ethnic and social backgrounds have on the experience of racial discrimination.
– Preparing for a week of MAPD (Multicultural Arts Professional Development Course) five-day intensive. Starting tomorrow. Complete with lectures, assignments and accreditations (insert panic here).
– Strangeland from the current Arts House program. Sadly now closed. Short seasons(!); I know that my position on this one is not all that popular (well, only from conversations I’ve had/heard), but I really loved it. The problem is not being able to fully articulate why I loved the piece. The other problem, well thing-with-which-I-am-grappling, is to not become jaded by the opinions of others. I am not as strong about this as I would like to make out. I can feel quite inadequate sometimes when my take on a work differs dramatically from the pack. This is the honest truth.
– Not reading reviews. I am trying to not read reviews for shows. In general. ‘Trying’ of course, being the operative word. I’m not doing terribly well. (One of my reasons for doing this relates to my above point on becoming jaded.) It’s an experiment with an aim to discover whether or not its permanent implementation will make life easier or sweeter.
– Pilates. Oh, was that a resounding, “I told you so” I heard ringing from across my extended network of friends and acquaintances? Yes, well. Gym-provided, mat-only at this stage. Reformer will have to wait until I am on a slightly higher pay bracket than ‘nothing at all’. Twice a week, I get forty-five minutes to an hour of pure, focused, strength-building bliss. What’s happening to me?
So, I now take this week to focus (really terrifyingly so) on the cerebral. I hope it all works out okay – I fear that taking my mind away from the room now is dangerous, switching from right-brain to left for an extended period of time. Oh, god. And there is so much theatre to see this week, yes?
back to the room
After having taken three and a bit days off to digest, process, think, be totally and utterly overwhelmed, and selectively view all the footage I took of the first five days of development, we’re all returning to the space again today without fluoro tubes (but with a few handhelds instead), and a stack of physical (non-spoken text only) sequences I want to try out. I feel like I’m wading deep into no-man’s land. Quite uncomfortable, really. What do I do with this material? I mean – what if it works? Do I then pack it away and put it into a notated form for the benefit of a stage manager, or keep working with it, reshaping it? I am feeling quite green to it all, all of a sudden. Perhaps this discomfort is a positive thing. Perhaps it will be my working from a place of uncertain fertility. Or fertile uncertainty…
a discussion across the road
I am deeply, deeply, deeply disappointed with myself for having not seen MTC’s production of The Birthday Party by Harold Pinter, directed by Julian Meyrick. I had had every intention of doing so, and it was due only to my sheer exhaustion and arrogant neglect of attention to closing dates that I did not. I regret this on many levels.
As such, I have not been able to be a part of the fascinating (and dare I say it, worthy) discussion that has been ongoing around the interwebs and beyond. I have caught snippets, heard rumours, but read very little of it until today. I can do little but point you to David Mence’s recent post on Captain’s B’log which then points you to all sorts of other tasty links, and to my mind, summarises the discussion nicely (nicely, of course being entirely the wrong word).
Yes, I am posting this on both blogs today.
the world this past week
Below is a minute sample of what I’ve been up to this week. When I start full-time development days, I always feel like I’ve been thrown in some kind of stasis room, and reality shifts so that nothing and everything is the same when you come out the other end. I swear yesterday (yesterday being Saturday) I had post-full-time-rehearsal withdrawal symptoms. It’s too early for me to begin writing about it yet, so everything seems to be in images, by necessity.
Several more images over @ TMTP’s blog.
Interview: Aviary
An interview I recently had with Anna Lozynski about Aviary is now up at Australian Stage Online.
And it Begins
The next few months are going to be a blogging marathon for me. I will be blogging rehearsal processes, producing processes, amongst a whole other stack of stuff Attract/Repel over at The Melbourne Town Players’ blog, here. The first post on anti-marketing-marketing (and marketing-marketing to boot) is up. It’s an interesting dilemma that I am quite keen to discuss with other artists.
Here I will probably be getting into a bit more of the artistic nitty-gritty (not sure yet), but will also be blogging a little about the Multicultural Arts Professional Development course that I will be undertaking in a fortnight, and the project that ensues.
Get ready…!
These Are Amazing Days
Aviary opens tonight at La Mama – I am feeling simultaneous elation and terror. It would be unwise to go into those feelings or ruminations too deeply here. I have never really had this experience – to witness a work opening that is simultaneously mine and not mine. 6.30pm. The atypical opening time suits me just fine. The imbibing of wine starts early, and finishes… well. It’s going to have to finish early tonight.
As tomorrow I am off to the ABC Southbank to record a radio play version of Jasmine Chan’s Corvus which I honestly couldn’t be more excited about. It was originally produced by The Rabble (a company for whom I have the utmost respect) and directed by Kate Davis. Corvus was originally performed by Dana Miltins. This was one of those productions I had dearly, dearly wished I could spirit myself up to Sydney for…
And so. I got the voicemail a week and a half ago from my agent saying that I’d been asked to perform the radio play version of a work by Jasmine Chan, and I held my breath for the next two days while I waited for the name of the script to come through… and there eventually it came. And the script arrived on its own one day into the PO box. And I snatch extended moments to work on it almost guiltily, as it’s such a treat. So, tomorrow. This is why we are actors. I feel so deeply, deeply privileged to be asked to read this work, and moreover to be trusted with the delivery of this script. This is a rare, wondrous job.
Meetings with my set and lighting designers have begun, and it is making Attract/Repel an imminent reality. To be on the same page as another artist who is going to come together with, and within your concept to realise something that doesn’t exist yet is truly the greatest privilege.
I am also now undergoing a series of meetings over the next few weeks, which I anticipate will get balls rolling on at least three other major projects that will unfold over the next eighteen months. It makes me breathe a deep sigh of relief, and I realise that all the hard work I’ve put in, and perpetual swathes of fifty things I’ve done at once are finally paying off creatively.
Whilst they are pure chaos, these are truly amazing days.
AVIARY and per se and…
AVIARY. Pictured: Hai Ha Le & Chloe Gordon. Photo: Carl Nilsson-Polias
Having commenced and failed to finish writing several blog posts prior to this, I thought it best to attempt something fairly unadventurous and relatively short in its composition. The last week or so has been spent madly running between studio, rehearsal room, radio or press interview, forums, meetings, theatres, and gymnasium (my one point of sanity). I’ve managed somehow to make it to several shows in the last week or so, including Beckett’s Happy Days at The Malthouse, which (although I feel it wasn’t perfect, for several very specific reasons I won’t go into here) I would recommend, if for no other reason than it is a truly rare and wonderful thing to see Beckett being done on a main Melbourne stage with a proper budget. Julie Forsythe’s work is wonderful, and gets stronger, and stronger throughout the duration of the piece. A must for the Melbourne Beckett kids.
An additional highlight of my week was this month’s Full Tilt the Talk Show – Beyond the Word: The Art of Not Speaking. Richard Watts is hosting a series of monthly talk shows for Full Tilt (yep, I’m coming in as a guest on one in a couple of months) on various topical issues amongst the performing arts community. Last Tuesday’s was on the non-spoken word, or as I like to think of it, the non-linguistic performance text. It opened up a huge can of worms for me, specifically, having been thinking about the notion of notation of script/text, versus the lack of notation. There was an interesting point made about the relative hierarchy of the text in the conventional or traditional theatre context: It’s rare for organisations/companies/funding bodies to trust a purely ‘devised’ work for performance (dance not so much, but ‘theatre’ certainly) as, with a script there is a sense of bankability. It’s a product in and of itself, it’s saleable, safe, easily recognised, a commodity, and something that can also be handed to an actor/director with the understanding that they will know what to do with it. The Full Tilt Panel comprised of: Heath McIvor (puppeteer), Jodie Ahrens (sensory theatre practitioner), Helen Herbertson (dancer/choreographer), Mike Finch (artistic director: Circus Oz). Jodie Ahrens, I suppose, was the artist on the panel who comes closest to being a ‘straight’ theatre practitioner – her work essentially, often being geared around audience members who are either hearing or seeing impaired. It was fascinating for me, as I felt that there was a huge chunk missing from the conversation, which was, I suppose, from the angle of the non-verbal or non-linguistic text-based theatre practitioner – the animateur, so to speak. I think there’s a huge dialogue to be had about creation, notation, value and regard for work that isn’t necessarily a well-made, Aristotelian verbal exchange in a drawing room or a holiday home. At any rate, it was deeply enlightening, for many reasons. Helen Herbertson at one stage spoke of art creation with ‘all borders down’ (with respect to crossing, and merging form), and within me, I felt such a deep surge of wistfulness – why is it so readily acknowledged that dance can and does practice in this way, and yet the definitions remain, relatively speaking so rigid within the context of theatre performance? We’re constantly having to categorise, de-categorise, or worse yet, denigrate efforts to create borderless art, art/performance that defies concrete definition, which I believe in theory to be theatre. Alas, a big conversation that I haven’t the energy to pursue right now. More on this at a later date.
And then, of course, there is Aviary. Director/Dramaturg, Melanie Beddie (with whom I have an ongoing collaborative relationship) approached me late last year, and commissioned me to write one of three plays for a new, design-based work that she was producing and directing at La Mama under the umbrella of her company, Branch Theatre. The brief was a work between 20 – 35 minutes in length that would be in response to a design stimulus given by Daryl Cordell, and to the three actors who were to form the performance ensemble: Chloe Gordon, Hai Ha Le, and Carl Nilsson-Polias. The other two writers of the work that is now entitled Aviary are Anna Barnes and Dan Giovannoni, both of whom can wrangle the word in ways in which I am simply incapable of even attempting. The other designers are Natasha Anderson and Bronwyn Pringle, sound and light respectively.
So, I have been re-drafting, so to speak, for this entire time, really. In and out of rehearsals, on and off the floor, and it has been at once wonderful and extraordinarily difficult. Wonderful as there is something incredibly liberating in putting forth thirty-minutes of idea, and then stepping back and allowing someone else to do most of the work – it feels like a kind of reverse process for me. But incredibly difficult because I am not a playwright. I have really, really discovered this in the process of creating my third of the work, which is at present entitled, Movements for Three Actors (and I’ve suddenly realised how unimaginative that title is…). My work sits in stark contrast to the others (well, they’re all incredibly distinct in voice and style) – I suppose mine is the least easy to read – but that is a subjective thing, who can say, really? The other pieces, Revelation or Bust and Edmund and Grace (Barnes and Giovannoni respectively) both have stunning rhythm and turn of phrase, but a depth of emotional insight, too, with which I am particularly impressed. Themeatically they are also much broader (grander) than mine. I worry that I have a tendency make work with obscure, micro, and introspective themes. I do find the interior world so deeply fascinating and endlessly tragic. I suppose, interestingly enough, the themes of the work shrunk, to me throughout the duration of its creation, too. The last time I blogged about the work, it was very much rooted in the broader emotional conservationist tangent, and it has been not whittled, but honed, I suppose down to the manifestation of a much smaller experience being felt in the symbolic interpretation of our relationship to the environment. And if you think all of that sounds like a lot of airy theoretics, then I fear you’re probably right.
Aside from being in a period where artistically, I’m not particularly interested in narrative or conventional theatrical structure, and I have had to carve out a mini-narrative from the diverse and contrasting collection of scenes that I assembled for the work, that I feel now fit, but that I also now have absolutely no partiality about, I have discovered that without doubt, I am a theatre maker, and really, really not a playwright. And so, I wasn’t able to wrangle the scenes on the floor the way I would have otherwise, and I think that I neglected to take this into consideration. My work was as a writer, and not a maker/director, my job was to hand the script over to be poured over dramaturgically, and directed. Melanie Beddie has given me much more licence to come in and play around than a writer would normally ever be given. This was a fantastic gift, but also a huge lesson for me. Because of course, I felt most comfortable, on the floor, playing around with the material with the actors. To me, actually being on the floor felt like writing. That is to say, working the text, editing on the fly, et cetera, is for me, by definition, the act of writing theatre text. Text is in the body. Text is in the ‘blocking’ so to speak, the creation of stage images. But of course, there must be limits to this, and my role is as a a writer, and I did need to hand the reins back to Melanie. And so, it has been a sort of ongoing negotiation, both within myself, and between me and Melanie, to try and figure out the best way of carving this piece through the space with the bodies and the voices of the performers. And because the work is incomplete (the work is always incomplete), and there is always more that could or can be done, I don’t think I will ever be entirely satisfied with the outcome, no matter how much I love what is made of it. But it is something I have to leave, now, and accept that it is in other people’s hands, because I have to go off and make another piece of theatre, one and a half weeks after Aviary opens. And that piece really doesn’t have a script.
Aviary is a bloody exciting experiment in theatrical composition. As a whole, these three very diverse works were initiated with a design, and the writers meeting the three actors with whom they could play. The results are totally up for grabs, really, and shall be witnessed from this coming Wednesday, 15th July. Details are at the La Mama website, here. I have no idea what it’s going to be like, but I suspect it will be incredibly diverse, fascinating, and quite wonderful.
Vale Pina Bausch
Vale Pina Bausch.
It’s 11.11am, I have only just found out. I am extraordinarily saddened and quite shocked, but I am afraid I must leave immediately for an appointment, and so I will post at length later. However, here is the link to the Guardian announcement.
Thinking about the structure of what I am currently writing/making, I know that a lot of ‘dialogue’ so to speak will remain incomplete until I begin working with the actors. After having spent the last fortnight doing a lot of (largely) theoretical research into thematically what I will be working with, and aesthetically what I am hoping to achieve, some solid ideas have begun to slowly emerge. I eventually (this morning) had to put the books down and get into video and images, online interviews and a great deal of prizing my brain open. I am suddenly amazed at how grateful I am for YouTube and blogs, and really every ounce of Web 2.0 that has given me easy access to research material that I otherwise would have had to trawl trough the State, VCA and Melbourne University libraries for hours to find, or worse, not be able to discover at all.
As an aside: The beauty of the internet when it comes to contemporary research is its matrixed ability to lead us into so many other directions that we might ordinarily not know we need to discover. And while this happens in the context of a library and its catalogues absolutely, the speed and ease with which a google or wiki search produces results – rabbit holes down which to take oneself – is phenomenal. Some might say this is a negative thing – we’re losing the art of thorough, longhand research, but when time is a factor, and one’s work is clarified and expedited, I can only see its extraordinary simplicity as entirely positive. Given that we have full access to the technology that allows us to choose to divide our research time between books and electronic media, I have no ethical issues with complimenting one with the other (and in some instances eliminating the manual altogether). The beauty of this privileged position we’re now in made itself entirely known to me on Sunday, when sitting in a cafe reading a research text, I was able to google one of the authors cited on my iPhone and bring up their Wikipedia entry which linked to a catalogue of their written books, which I suppose I could have gone on to purchase on Amazon if I so desired. This could be easily shunned as the inundation of the individual with too much access to a) information and b) easy consumerism. And I suppose there actually is a part of me deep down who, knitting my own socks and baking my own bread, sits in the corner of my kitchen next to my pot-bellied stove and grumbles about the evils of the modern world and the corruption that capitalism has visited upon every starving child and artist. But then I realise just how reliant I am on the internet, electronic transactions, ease of access, my Mac products, and yes – the evil capitalist structure, and resolve that I am going to have to shrug off the guilt, and accept some material evils in favour of fighting different battles more effectively. I don’t think the middle-class are ever going to be truly resolved about this conundrum.
In returning to the question of the research: earlier on today I started out thinking about the two shows that I have actually seen (live in the flesh) over the last few years that use a similar device to that which I am more and more strongly leaning towards employing in Attract/Repel. These are Pichet Klunchun and Myself by Jerôme Bel, and more recently, STO Union’s 7 Important Things. As a result of googling around these two shows, I have today lighted upon the following two gems (to be honest, I didn’t have to look very hard for them):
Jerôme Bel’s work Veronique Doisneau, a piece made for the forty-two year old Paris Opera Ballet, corps de ballet dancer of the same name, on the eve of her retirement from classical dance. Below is part one of the film made on the final night of the performance. Parts two, three and four are available to watch on YouTube. More information on the project, and the film of the work is available on Jerôme Bel’s website, here.
The second beautiful thing offered up to me today by the Ws is an interview by Chris Dupuis with STO Union artistic director and co-creator of 7 Important Things, Nadia Ross. While I personally didn’t love every aspect of 7 Important Things, I found it fascinating, and what smacked me on the back of the head and out of my reverie was the clunkiness of transition from one form into another – it read to me as theatre being created before me – the backstage forward, the inside out. This is what I was most interested in on the night – the anatomy of the performance. I suppose what some might consider its ugliness, but I regarded as its most eloquent – its truest. Here is question 3 and its answer:
3. The first STO Union show I ever saw, I didn’t like. The improvisatory nature of the performance left me feeling like the artists on stage hadn’t put that much thought into what they were doing. It was only after seeing more of the company’s work that I began to understand the careful choreography that goes into creating a work which gives off the energy of being improvisatory. How do you respond to audience members who, being unfamiliar with the way in which the company works, respond to your work like this?
In my experience, I’ve met some audiences that like to be taken away by a strong narrative and the perfect/repeatable performance. They like the feeling of having their minds and imaginations taken for a ride through a well-made illusion. That’s just their cup of tea and when it is well done, it is a great experience. Often, this is a cultural difference: audiences in Germany, for example, are more at ease with different kinds of work than audiences in other parts of the world.
For those who don’t know how to approach our work but are willing to try, I say to them that one of the best ways to connect with the work is to stay in the moment. I think that the struggle people may be having is that their minds are trying to connect the dots and make a traditional story out of what they are seeing. They want to make sense of things right away and to feel secure in the thought that the performer is not going to make any mistakes – is not going to be humiliated. They came to see something solid, perfect; they don’t want to be reminded of our humanness, and they don’t want to be brought into the present moment. They want to be taken over and not participate at some level. Some people hate the feeling of ‘not knowing’ – it feels a little bit like a kind of death. If one can relax enough into this kind of open system, they often find that they’ve ended up somewhere they didn’t expect. This happens because they’ve allowed themselves to become more vulnerable, because usually that is what comes with ‘not knowing’. The audience’s vulnerability touches us onstage, and we also become more vulnerable. A kind of intimacy can ensue: it is a tangible feeling in the room and it is really nourishing for humans to experience this kind of intimacy.
So, at the moment I am thinking a great deal about the concept of ‘script’ and its various permutations. I have long maintained (as many, many now do) that theatre ‘text’ is not relegated solely to the spoken, verbal, or linguistic utterances of performers onstage. Many of the works I have found most engaging of late have dealt with text in a manner alternative to the traditional dialogue/monologue conceit of the well-made, or at least the linguistically-based theatre text. This is not necessarily because of the fact of its divergence from the convention, but because in doing so – that is to say, in the act of diverging – something quite other is created. It is not simply the absence of a traditional form, but all the other little things that are realised in its stead that often make for quite complex, difficult and conflicting theatrical experiences. This is what I am finding most interesting at the moment.
I have written before about an experience I had years ago before I graduated from VCA. I auditioned for and was asked to work with German artist, Uwe Mengel in a project that he created for MIAF ’02 entitled Lifeline. The rehearsal process was a series of interviews that he conducted one-on-one with us over the course of five weeks. We were then (the four actors/the four characters that we had created with Uwe) planted individually into booths that permitted a limited number of audience members. The audience were to ask us questions about the given narrative (this was about a murder), and what was unfolded by us (actors/characters) were the psychological and emotional states experienced with leading up to, and as a result of the fictional event. I often described it as not a ‘whodunnit’ but a ‘whydunnit’. The performance lasted for a duration of about an hour, during which the audience would wander from booth to booth either simply observing, or participating and asking questions of us. Our back-story/character had to be so watertight and clear in our minds that we could answer pretty much every question hurled at us, or convincingly make up the answer on the spot. Nothing was pre-scripted, at all. There was often repetition, but it was simply repetition of the ‘fact’ of our narrative in the way that someone under interrogation might have to repeat their story for different audiences.
I am not a big fan of verbatim theatre. Perhaps because I haven’t seen a great deal of it done very well, or perhaps because I simpy don’t like it. At any rate, it’s certainly not something I am interested in as a tool for creating performance. However, I am returning more and more to the idea of scriptlessness, or certainly, I am developing a strong curiosity towards the formalities and informalities of onstage communication, and the way that it has been explored recently by contemporary practitioners.
actual/ideal 