Driving back from the airport after performing Last Night I Dreamt My House Was Leaking... at PAD in Mainz, September 2009; Mary said "What do you think our next piece will be?", I hesitated, she continued: "I want it to be dirty" and I responded, "It will be a Chamber piece; it will be intimate and dirty". "Dirty!" we proclaimed to each other - somewhat in awe at what we had given birth to - and then we asked "What will that be like?".
Almost two years later, we have our 'dirty Chamber piece' - Fugitive Songs. We'd almost forgotten this early conversation when, around a month ago during a tech, I said to Mary "What is this thing we've created?" and then we both remembered and were delighted that it was indeed what we had wished for all those months before.
Our process then, at some level, must have been searching out a theatrical definition for that wonderful word - 'dirty'. Howard Barker suggests that theatre is "attending on a sin, the possibility of witnessing a transgression, the freedom to part with the necessary disciplines of the street, the possibility of acquiring that criminal perspective" (Barker, H. (1993) Arguments for a Theatre, Calder, p.75) and - he adds - "it is not you [the spectator] who sins, the actor sins for you." This wonderful description of the seduction offered by theatre has washed around my head for over a decade now - so did we seek to sin, to transgress; was this our version of 'dirty' theatre?
We did anything but sin in the early stages of the process; we are still made helpless by laughter when we recall our early workshops - which bored us both to death but, for some reason, we both assumed the other was doing what she wanted/needed to and carried on without comment. Eventually, overwhelmed by the tedium of what we were creating, we called a halt to the proceedings, and asked each other, rather forthrightly, "What is it you really want to do?!".
We wanted to drink gin, take drugs, smoke, listen to loud music, be raucous, swear a lot, not care when we went to bed, run away from the lives we had created for ourselves - stop (big stare at each other)- we wanted to run away; we wanted to be on the run; we wanted to be fugitives...
Well, this was a far cry from Mary icing cupcakes and me sitting on a chair discussing wallpaper (both of which had been activities integral to our earlier workshops), at least now there was something at stake for us. But how to be a fugitive from one's life?
I rather like the definition offered for 'fugitive' which suggests that that such a one is likely to change, fade or disappear, that this is an ephemeral being that flickers in and out of 'normal' vision. We began to work with the idea that the 'fugitive' was born of desire - each of us remembering moments in our lives when we had departed from the 'norm' and dropped out of sight in order to inhabit a subterranean landscape which transgressed the codes we had learnt from an early age as our survival manual. These transgressions tended to be brief and sultry, but entirely formative and seductive. These experiments with identity had, for both of us, occurred in our twenties and ceased as we became mothers and responsible wage earners; was it possible, then, to return to the heady state of the fugitive - were we still capable of transgressing?
We began to listen to music: Tom Waits, Nick Cave, P.J.Harvey. We found the songs that we wanted to fall into; that seemed to call out the 'fugitive' in us, and we played them over and over again. We had infatuations, we played out scenes from films that we loved, we dared to desire like we had desired when we were teenagers. We wrote our life in songs and played out our lives in films. We fell in love with that which we'd made 'fugitive' in our lives.
I played only males, and Mary played women 'reaching the end of the line'; we didn't question these desires; we honoured them. We found, in our fantasies, two people craving intimacy and we loved them for their failures and their attempts to love and be loved. The closer we got to them; the more we fell in love with them, the 'dirtier' the piece became - we headed for the wilderness.
The 'wilderness' was the name we gave to the point of escape; the point at which 'you dance as if there's no-one looking at you'; the point at which you lose definition and remember what you might be, not what you are. The wilderness engulfs when you least expect it; there was a Sunday morning when we danced ourselves into it and emerged feeling 'new' and 'odd' and not quite what we were before, and then it went again and it was months before it re-emerged. It's a dance of language as much as it is a dance of the body and - like plunging into the sea - if feels impossible until you do it and then it feels like the most natural thing. We found a form for it within the piece, but it's mutable, changeable and we can't say what it is we are doing at that moment, or who we are when we do it.
Amanda
Friday, 22 April 2011
Thursday, 21 October 2010
It has been a long time since last writing on here, since then so much has changed.
I was looking at the last entry and it was when we started to introduce the idea of the 'Secret Theatre' into our process.
This is now more clearly defined as the process has radically changed.
This change has brought about a lot of more understanding and an acknowledgement of the way we work best. One of the key understandings that I have realized is that the work has to come out from the body, we need to feel a connection to the work being created and this connection is located somewhere in our bodies. If we lose this connection, then we are constantly trying to understand the creative process and work it all out, it is in these moments that we lose a connection to each other, to the space we are working in, and therefore, to the source of the material.
It seems that what we have been doing is going back to the source of our material.
We decided initially on two main elements that were there at the source; these were 'All the people I ever wanted to be', who did we 'desire' to be in this space? The 'secrets' which were not, as we discovered, the 'secret place of the theatre' but the 'secret theatre inside of us'. How could we access these, we knew that the 'secrets' were somehow important to us, but how would these find their expression in the piece? We began again.
We decided that we would bring into the space the costumes and props that belonged to our fantasies of 'all the people we always wanted to be'. We then decided that our strategy for working would be to work with some simple rules that would define the game of 'daring who we wanted to be'. We would decide on a track of music that we were particularly drawn to. We would play this for the 'other person' to improvise with, we would need to stay connected to each other through out the improvisation. We then had to select a prop or costume, that might serve as a prop to use in the improvisation. Throughout this work we were endlessly creating actions together. We were exploring what we desired with these materials we had brought in. Endless propositions, provocations and dares flourished in the space. We worked with very few words, we had the music and our desires to work with. The material was generated with each other in the space; this is our primary source of creativity.
We had probably been longing to express these ideas for a long time, but they had been hidden and suppressed by what we called the other 'performance'. What we had now achieved was a strategy through which we could shake off and 'escape' the other performance. This could only be done by relinquishing control. We had to trick the censorship in us and then we had the key to more authentic material.
The material was very rich and we had discovered a lot of new personas that excited us and that we could continue to develop. We now had the idea that we were 'fugitives'- an idea left over from the process we had abandoned. We were fugitives from the 'performance'; on the run and longing to escape it.
How did the secrets connect up with this?
We decided that if these secrets are inside us, then, when we listen to certain songs we feel something like a longing inside of us, a kind of obsession with certain songs that 'call us'. These songs call and we 'respond to the call'.
The songs speak to these secrets, the secret desires that lay in memories of things that might of happened, did happen or what we might desire to happen. We listened to the songs and we answered the call. We began to write songs in response, songs that came from the source of a secret. So the 'secret theatre' is now the 'theatre of secrets, of desires, fantasies that we dare to express'.
We now have 'Fugitive Songs'!
I was looking at the last entry and it was when we started to introduce the idea of the 'Secret Theatre' into our process.
This is now more clearly defined as the process has radically changed.
This change has brought about a lot of more understanding and an acknowledgement of the way we work best. One of the key understandings that I have realized is that the work has to come out from the body, we need to feel a connection to the work being created and this connection is located somewhere in our bodies. If we lose this connection, then we are constantly trying to understand the creative process and work it all out, it is in these moments that we lose a connection to each other, to the space we are working in, and therefore, to the source of the material.
It seems that what we have been doing is going back to the source of our material.
We decided initially on two main elements that were there at the source; these were 'All the people I ever wanted to be', who did we 'desire' to be in this space? The 'secrets' which were not, as we discovered, the 'secret place of the theatre' but the 'secret theatre inside of us'. How could we access these, we knew that the 'secrets' were somehow important to us, but how would these find their expression in the piece? We began again.
We decided that we would bring into the space the costumes and props that belonged to our fantasies of 'all the people we always wanted to be'. We then decided that our strategy for working would be to work with some simple rules that would define the game of 'daring who we wanted to be'. We would decide on a track of music that we were particularly drawn to. We would play this for the 'other person' to improvise with, we would need to stay connected to each other through out the improvisation. We then had to select a prop or costume, that might serve as a prop to use in the improvisation. Throughout this work we were endlessly creating actions together. We were exploring what we desired with these materials we had brought in. Endless propositions, provocations and dares flourished in the space. We worked with very few words, we had the music and our desires to work with. The material was generated with each other in the space; this is our primary source of creativity.
We had probably been longing to express these ideas for a long time, but they had been hidden and suppressed by what we called the other 'performance'. What we had now achieved was a strategy through which we could shake off and 'escape' the other performance. This could only be done by relinquishing control. We had to trick the censorship in us and then we had the key to more authentic material.
The material was very rich and we had discovered a lot of new personas that excited us and that we could continue to develop. We now had the idea that we were 'fugitives'- an idea left over from the process we had abandoned. We were fugitives from the 'performance'; on the run and longing to escape it.
How did the secrets connect up with this?
We decided that if these secrets are inside us, then, when we listen to certain songs we feel something like a longing inside of us, a kind of obsession with certain songs that 'call us'. These songs call and we 'respond to the call'.
The songs speak to these secrets, the secret desires that lay in memories of things that might of happened, did happen or what we might desire to happen. We listened to the songs and we answered the call. We began to write songs in response, songs that came from the source of a secret. So the 'secret theatre' is now the 'theatre of secrets, of desires, fantasies that we dare to express'.
We now have 'Fugitive Songs'!
Friday, 14 May 2010
The connection to space
What is exciting about the new discoveries that we make through devising process is that once again our imaginations are propelled. These discoveries, that effectively make the material more solid and present to us begin to generate new directions for our thoughts about the developing piece.
What we have set out to do this weekend has been an attempt to define the performance space and our dynamic with the audience. As in the previous process, we realised that it was necessary to define the metaphor of this space more clearly to ourselves. Once we have done this, the theatrical space provides us with an anchor for the material. It has been as if, until this moment, the material has 'floated' in our heads, and has therefore been difficult to pin down or hold on to. We have both commented upon difficult it is to grasp this piece, it has seemed to evade us and lack substance.
The definition of the space as a 'secret theatre', where we go to re-discover our secret dreams, places us in a different relationship to the material. We realise that this space has a gravitational pull, the material is pulled into it and we can begin to see it more clearly in this fictional world we have now created. Our relationship to the material changes when we ask why we would come to this place, why do we bring this material here. We become more present in this process and this changes the dynamic between us and the fictional characters that we are enacting, it has become less about our mothers. The focus shifts to us when we ask why we would need to go to this place. This provides us with the opportunity to position ourselves in relation to our material, and connections, that have probably been there all along, now begin to trigger at a pace. We become inspired and creative thinking begins to surge, as we make connections that until this moment had not been available to us.
What we have set out to do this weekend has been an attempt to define the performance space and our dynamic with the audience. As in the previous process, we realised that it was necessary to define the metaphor of this space more clearly to ourselves. Once we have done this, the theatrical space provides us with an anchor for the material. It has been as if, until this moment, the material has 'floated' in our heads, and has therefore been difficult to pin down or hold on to. We have both commented upon difficult it is to grasp this piece, it has seemed to evade us and lack substance.
The definition of the space as a 'secret theatre', where we go to re-discover our secret dreams, places us in a different relationship to the material. We realise that this space has a gravitational pull, the material is pulled into it and we can begin to see it more clearly in this fictional world we have now created. Our relationship to the material changes when we ask why we would come to this place, why do we bring this material here. We become more present in this process and this changes the dynamic between us and the fictional characters that we are enacting, it has become less about our mothers. The focus shifts to us when we ask why we would need to go to this place. This provides us with the opportunity to position ourselves in relation to our material, and connections, that have probably been there all along, now begin to trigger at a pace. We become inspired and creative thinking begins to surge, as we make connections that until this moment had not been available to us.
Thursday, 13 May 2010
How We Work With Space
Last time we met we began by imagining the space we were walking into when we entered the stage. This time we sat in the audience and thought about the qualities of the space we were conjuring. There were key questions we asked in order to consider this:
What are the rules that govern this space? Are they different from the rules that govern our everyday lives?
What is possible in this space that isn't possible anywhere else?
What demands does this space make upon us?
What do we have to leave behind in order to enter this space?
Why do we seek out this space?
Who is the spectator in this space?
Having posed these questions we then laid out chairs in different audience configurations. We wanted to find out what our relationship would be to the spectator, and this helped us to determine the audience/performer dynamic we would play with in this piece.
We then put objects we had been working with into the space to see how they sat within the context that was developing. Now we were able to start making decisions about what belonged in the space and what didn't. The hostess trolley which had featured quite strongly over the past two rehearsals was unceremoniously ousted, however the fairy-cakes remained. It's a great moment when you start 'knowing' things like this! A period chair asserted itself for the first time and was terrifically helpful in the development of the work over the next two days, and some objects 'hung on in there' with the proviso that they might not make it through too many more rehearsals - such as the old gramaphone records.
We stood back and looked at what we had made; it had a solidity quite in contrast to the abject ephemeral quality of our last piece, and it stretched the imagination temporally as well as spatially. The battered old trunk, covered in labels raised questions as to the journey which had brought it here; the 1950s suit and sunglasses referenced film images quite distinctly. We talked about the space and its potential until we felt compelled to enter it - there was a game afoot, now, and once we had smelt it out we wanted to embody the potential we had created.
What are the rules that govern this space? Are they different from the rules that govern our everyday lives?
What is possible in this space that isn't possible anywhere else?
What demands does this space make upon us?
What do we have to leave behind in order to enter this space?
Why do we seek out this space?
Who is the spectator in this space?
Having posed these questions we then laid out chairs in different audience configurations. We wanted to find out what our relationship would be to the spectator, and this helped us to determine the audience/performer dynamic we would play with in this piece.
We then put objects we had been working with into the space to see how they sat within the context that was developing. Now we were able to start making decisions about what belonged in the space and what didn't. The hostess trolley which had featured quite strongly over the past two rehearsals was unceremoniously ousted, however the fairy-cakes remained. It's a great moment when you start 'knowing' things like this! A period chair asserted itself for the first time and was terrifically helpful in the development of the work over the next two days, and some objects 'hung on in there' with the proviso that they might not make it through too many more rehearsals - such as the old gramaphone records.
We stood back and looked at what we had made; it had a solidity quite in contrast to the abject ephemeral quality of our last piece, and it stretched the imagination temporally as well as spatially. The battered old trunk, covered in labels raised questions as to the journey which had brought it here; the 1950s suit and sunglasses referenced film images quite distinctly. We talked about the space and its potential until we felt compelled to enter it - there was a game afoot, now, and once we had smelt it out we wanted to embody the potential we had created.
Wednesday, 21 April 2010
Finding the right questions
The Sunday rehearsal really began to consolidate a number of questions that had remained unanswerable. The driving question being 'What is this piece? As we pose this question we have explored ways that seek to to answer it. One of these has been, as with Last Night I Dreamt My House Was Leaking...to address the issue of the theatrical space, in Last Night... we had to define the 'Zone'; In this current work we have the metaphor of the 'Secret Theatre'. We began by considering what is it to arrive in the Secret Theatre, who are we when we arrive? We have made the decision that this 'Secret Theatre' is a place that we travel to as a 'troupe', in order to escape. This definition of the theatrical space as a metaphor has anchored us in a specific world. This has in turn anchored the the 'personas' that we have been working with, and then begins the process of finding new questions that seek to be answered: What are the different personas doing in this metaphoric place? We began to find action for the opening of the piece which was based on their arrival at the 'Secret Theatre'. What do they go there to do? What is the relationship between them?. We began to consider what they are arriving to do there and what do they arrive with? Where have they come from and what has happened to them on the way to this place? This opened up a number of creative possiblities that are based on a 'What if', this spurs our imagination and creativity into making connections between the different elements of the material that already exists, the personas, the filmic narratives, the stories, as a result of this process new material is generated and the existing material is reconfigured to provide a sense of purpose and meaning. This creative process demands that we make these connections,throught he questioning, weaving the form together to create new forms that are textured with complex layers of meaning.
Monday, 19 April 2010
What A Great Day!
Having learnt our lesson the hard way with the last piece - we had a performance but no photos, no trailer, no website - we've decided to 'get on the case' with this one! So we're at a critical point in the devising process but we have some great publicity photos and actually setting aside the time and energy to organise this gave us a great boost - and we had a great day's rehearsal on Sunday to boot!! It took us a while to think carefully about what we wanted from the photos; when we suddenly found ourselves in a meeting with the photographer we suddenly realised that the photos were an entirely different product to the piece we were making and needed an entirely different approach. It was a case of shifting our heads sideways and we both recalled Cindy Sherman's series of 'film stills' which we'd talked about way back at the beginning of this process. We looked up film stills of Marnie (still a major influence in this piece) and decided to try to reproduce the Sean Connery/Tippi Hedron pose which advertised the film. We both liked the idea that we would be quoting the film from quite a distance, but we brought no cynicism or irony to the task, rather we both worked hard to source appropriate costumes, find good locations and we committed ourselves completely to what it is we love about the film. The results are intriguing, dramatic and strangely dissociated from the present without being historical. It is as though the present and the historical are sitting side by side.
The other idea we played with was that of the 'spirit photo'. I've always been terrified of those photos that look like bad snaps until you realise that lurking in the background is a face watching the entirely unaware 'live' subjects. We talked a great deal in our process about the omnipresence of our mothers (who are both very much alive) in everything we do, and about the fact that our relationship to our mothers has arrested during an adolescent stage of our development. We decided, therefore, to try to create a photograph which had as its essence a 1970s adolesence; we wanted the quality of a 'snap' rather than a studied photograph, and then we wanted to superimpose the face of an older woman into the background of the picture, watching us. The process of getting these shots was really good fun; we approximated 70s clothes and found a wall sporting a 1970s mural - which incidentally matched my jumper - but it was also very strange to revisit a part of your life by posing for pictures in the way that you had then. At one point the photographer got caught up in the spirit of the moment and became our 'dad' urging us to 'smile a bit more'.
It was fascinating to look at the two sets of photographs (Marnie and 70s) straight after the shoot; there were two sets of bodies in play, quite differentiated, living in different worlds, having different experiences. This is what we're interested in capturing in this piece, the idea that the body transforms constantly as it experiences the world in different ways and according to different desires.
And there were no planes in the sky!
The other idea we played with was that of the 'spirit photo'. I've always been terrified of those photos that look like bad snaps until you realise that lurking in the background is a face watching the entirely unaware 'live' subjects. We talked a great deal in our process about the omnipresence of our mothers (who are both very much alive) in everything we do, and about the fact that our relationship to our mothers has arrested during an adolescent stage of our development. We decided, therefore, to try to create a photograph which had as its essence a 1970s adolesence; we wanted the quality of a 'snap' rather than a studied photograph, and then we wanted to superimpose the face of an older woman into the background of the picture, watching us. The process of getting these shots was really good fun; we approximated 70s clothes and found a wall sporting a 1970s mural - which incidentally matched my jumper - but it was also very strange to revisit a part of your life by posing for pictures in the way that you had then. At one point the photographer got caught up in the spirit of the moment and became our 'dad' urging us to 'smile a bit more'.
It was fascinating to look at the two sets of photographs (Marnie and 70s) straight after the shoot; there were two sets of bodies in play, quite differentiated, living in different worlds, having different experiences. This is what we're interested in capturing in this piece, the idea that the body transforms constantly as it experiences the world in different ways and according to different desires.
And there were no planes in the sky!
Wednesday, 7 April 2010
Entering the Labyrinth
What a couple of days! Just when we thought that the material was beginning to yield, to cohere, we found ourselves having to unpick everything we had created in order to progress the piece. The most enjoyable aspect of devising (and the most frustrating) is the creation of a dense weave of ideas, images and intuitions which eventually begin to proliferate meaning in what appears to be a semi-autonomous process of generation. Mary and I have begun to recognise when it’s happening as the work becomes light, playful and ridiculously easy. Drop a stitch in the weave, however, and you find yourself laboriously unpicking the work in order to find the fault which has made any further progress impossible.
We had found a fertile starting point in a dream which I had had way back at the beginning of our devising process. It was a dream which appeared highly significant to me – although I didn’t know why – and it returned in conversations and in the devising process a couple of weeks ago. In this dream I find myself as a sole performer on the comedy circuit waiting to go and do my ‘spot’ but with no material to speak of – apart from a book of jokes I’ve borrowed from other comics. I’m aware, in the dream, that I should really be generating my own material but I can’t really think what that may be; in desperation I consider using a Brummie accent to comic effect, and telling some stories about my days in ‘avant-garde theatre’. Once in front of the audience I become a gross caricature of myself screeching a welcome in broad Brummie and making fun of everything I’ve held dear about the theatre. I found it cathartic to actually make this image flesh and blood but I wasn’t sure why she was relevant to the piece.
Having given her a few outings I commented to Mary that the views this woman held on theatre would probably be shared by my mother who has never really trusted theatre and ‘theatricals’; my mother doesn’t have a Brummie accent but Birmingham is my home. This morning we returned to the problem of Brummie Woman’s presence in the piece (she felt right but we just didn’t know what she was doing there). Our conversation led us to consideration of the ‘monstrous mothers’ who have appeared to dominate our research during the last few months and she appeared to fit the bill as one more incarnation of this strange breed. We noted that these mothers appear in films such as Marnie and The Piano Teacher as ‘real’ mothers whereas, in fact, Freudian theory would suggest that they are externalisations of unconscious monsters – superegos - created by the daughters in response to an inability to free themselves from their love-bond with the mother. I suggested that Brummie Woman was one such manifestation and Mary responded: “Yes, and not only have you created her, now you’ve got her running the show!”
In that moment it was as though an earthquake occurred in my brain. Tectonic plates shifted and huge layers of metaphorical accretions cracked and stirred. In such moments – and they are terrifically rare – it seems, just for an instant – possible to remake the world so easily. In reality we dashed to work and had a great three hours re-arranging the Brummie Woman material and the stuff that adhered to her; suddenly this material was malleable and manageable; we knew how to use it, how to play with it. The further we moved from it, however, the more difficult and intractable the work became. The energy became dense and heavy again, like moving boulders. And yet I know that just a word, a thought, looking at the material from a different perspective will shift the blockage and provide new vistas on the material we’re exploring!
I have the feeling though, that nothing will ever be the same again…
We had found a fertile starting point in a dream which I had had way back at the beginning of our devising process. It was a dream which appeared highly significant to me – although I didn’t know why – and it returned in conversations and in the devising process a couple of weeks ago. In this dream I find myself as a sole performer on the comedy circuit waiting to go and do my ‘spot’ but with no material to speak of – apart from a book of jokes I’ve borrowed from other comics. I’m aware, in the dream, that I should really be generating my own material but I can’t really think what that may be; in desperation I consider using a Brummie accent to comic effect, and telling some stories about my days in ‘avant-garde theatre’. Once in front of the audience I become a gross caricature of myself screeching a welcome in broad Brummie and making fun of everything I’ve held dear about the theatre. I found it cathartic to actually make this image flesh and blood but I wasn’t sure why she was relevant to the piece.
Having given her a few outings I commented to Mary that the views this woman held on theatre would probably be shared by my mother who has never really trusted theatre and ‘theatricals’; my mother doesn’t have a Brummie accent but Birmingham is my home. This morning we returned to the problem of Brummie Woman’s presence in the piece (she felt right but we just didn’t know what she was doing there). Our conversation led us to consideration of the ‘monstrous mothers’ who have appeared to dominate our research during the last few months and she appeared to fit the bill as one more incarnation of this strange breed. We noted that these mothers appear in films such as Marnie and The Piano Teacher as ‘real’ mothers whereas, in fact, Freudian theory would suggest that they are externalisations of unconscious monsters – superegos - created by the daughters in response to an inability to free themselves from their love-bond with the mother. I suggested that Brummie Woman was one such manifestation and Mary responded: “Yes, and not only have you created her, now you’ve got her running the show!”
In that moment it was as though an earthquake occurred in my brain. Tectonic plates shifted and huge layers of metaphorical accretions cracked and stirred. In such moments – and they are terrifically rare – it seems, just for an instant – possible to remake the world so easily. In reality we dashed to work and had a great three hours re-arranging the Brummie Woman material and the stuff that adhered to her; suddenly this material was malleable and manageable; we knew how to use it, how to play with it. The further we moved from it, however, the more difficult and intractable the work became. The energy became dense and heavy again, like moving boulders. And yet I know that just a word, a thought, looking at the material from a different perspective will shift the blockage and provide new vistas on the material we’re exploring!
I have the feeling though, that nothing will ever be the same again…
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