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'!

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.

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.

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.

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!

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…

Vital ingredients

From the beginning of this process we have been working with a number of 'strands' that have informed our working process. The work for this new piece, The Day My Mother Forgot About Me, began with Amanda's experience on the 'biscuit tin', which she has written about below. This was 'the day her mother forgot about her'. On that day she watched the TV, watching films, one of which she remembers was Great Expectations. We began to think about films, and we decided to watch a number of films that explored Mother and Daughter relationships in their narratives. This strand of the 'films' has provided us with narratives and roles that we perform in the piece as well as some action that initially derived from the films, these have transformed as we work through this material creatively, and as we ask ourselves what are we doing with this material within the context of the piece we are making.
The filmic strand was also an aesthetic we wanted to explore in the piece.
Initially, we also decided to write down our stories about particular experiences of going to the cinema. Amanda wrote about her experience of going to watch The Go-between when she was 14, I wrote about how I had gone to watch In The Realm of the Senses with a new boyfriend (a big mistake), and also about watching The Wizard of Oz in a makeshift cinema, where I fight broke out during the film and everything grounded to a halt.
We also have the strand of our dreams, reoccuring dreams that run parallel to our creative process, we listen to these and they provide us with rich information and ideas about the work we are making. A dream about a 'secret theatre' that I would find once I had moved in to new houses kept reooccuring, we both had dreams about undiscovered rooms, in basements, behind other rooms. The secret theatre has stuck, this has provided us with ideas with regards to the 'world' that exists on stage.
This also links up with the strand of 'secrets and silences', the idea that memories and past experiences are transmitted from mother to daughter, unconsciously and in silence. These experiences might have been traumatic, they are not talked about as if experiences that are 'stuck', moments arrested in time and not integrated into the narratrives of these women's lives. They are often frightening, and we disussed how something about the relationships in the family changes and shifts in these moments; they have a destabilising affect.
Another strand is of adolescence, this theme emerged in our dreams and also in the film 'The Dreamers', where a group of adolescents who are 'left' by their parents, forgotten in the house, begin to transgress sexaul boundaries and 'test' limits. Recently, when talking on the phone about the work and our frustrations with it, we started joking about the frustration of not knowing what we are doing with this piece. We were talking about the photoshoot for our marketing and Amanda joked about how she could only see 'Marnie' in her nice suit; a role I play, in these photos, as she, as yet, had no defined role. We realised that we had not discovered what our relationship to each other was on stage, so it was unravelling as a series of monlogues with little interaction. We have always enjoyed the 'play' between us as performers and this has been a very pleasureable part of the making of work, this was missing in this process; an interchange of shifting energies on stage. We then decided that we would draw on this 'adolescent' strand to begin to explore our relationship to each other on stage. Once we had done this, we could conceive of eachother on stage together, and when we worked that weekend the play was there. From this we could begin to make the material for this new piece. The interplay between us as performers was a vital ingredient or catalsyst to the work, this was evident in the dreams we had been having, and once we had decided to work with this a vast range of possibilties opened up to us. We were able to find ways of constantly shifting this energy between us and a lot of new material has emerged from this.

Weaving strands together

For the past few months we have been questioning what it is that we we have been working with, what is at the essence of what we are doing? This question has persisted but the answer eluded us. Our conversations and blogs continued, but it seemed that the only way to get to this heart of this piece was to actually be in the studio and working with it. We then work differently, our minds are engaged in the work in a different way, we have to trust our intuition and what we bring in to the space; what has informed the work and the material that we have developed in long improvisations over the past 6 months.
This weekend was a breakthrough, it is as if we have moved closer to the core of this piece, so what seemed like disparate elements, different 'strands', as we called them, began to conflate.
On example of this was when we were working on a section that we named 'bickering'and 'cooking'.
In this section we are performing directly to the audience, the text we are using has come from stories that we have written down about our mothers. We perform this as if we are bickering like the 'adolescents' that we have been dreaming about, we are betraying eachother, we then developed this in the rehearsal by bringing in another strand, this was of the 'war' and the 'silences' that surround our parents in relation to the 'war'; how we heard stories about this when we were children, but they were only fragments and did not make sense to us. There seemed to be a 'silence' surrounding the experiences, something unsaid. This became another 'strand': the 'silence'. In 'bickering', the bickering subsides and the silences then became more distinct. Amanda started to sing a war song, as if in some kind of reverie, and this evoked the silence, the memories of a time past, the memories and stories that unknowingly get passed onto us. So in this particular section we have the threes strands beginning to interweave and layer the work. The 'silence' the 'adolescents' from our 'dreams' and the the 'domesticity' of our mother's stories which corresopnded to a particular time in their childhood. This interweaving of the strands happened very easily, it was as if the material was being activated as we began to weave these strands together.

Taking the Plunge

The most difficult moment is that of the 'plunge' when we commit to an idea without knowing - rationally - why we are doing what we are doing or where it will go. A major part of our work is allowing ourselves not to know, to remain in 'not knowing' until we find - often through intuition - how to move forward. This not knowing can feel desperate at times, as though we are failing, as though this process just won't bear fruit. Even in the most horrible moments of being lost we've always worked on, perhaps only producing fragments of material that hold our faith in place - nothing more. I know when the work is 'plugged in' by the level of playfulness we're able to bring to a moment in performance. By this I mean that the material feels rich enough to stand being 'played' with; it has layers of ambiguity to be explored and we both become engrossed in finding out what we're dealing with. On Saturday we worked with a list of 'confessions' emerging out of our work around The Piano Teacher; the first time we tried them we knew instinctively that there was a game to be had with these but we couldn't quite catch it. Just as we were about to leave it occurred to us that whilst the confessions belonged to one text, the performance they required belonged to a very different text - The Dreamers. On Sunday morning we started by trying out the confessions via the darkly adolescent world of The Dreamers and suddenly they found a new life - the game was on. Mary and I began playing with the length of time we left between each 'confession'; this worked but the silences were not yet 'alive'. We then inserted a moment of imagination in which we indulged in imagining the other performer enacting what they had just 'confessed'. Suddenly the statement were no longer confessions; they were more like provocations to the redrawing of boundaries and possibilities. The text we were using began to float free from its original moorings into the emerging 'world' of our piece. This was a game we wanted to play over and over again, and each time we played it we found out more about what we were doing in that moment and who we were in relation to the text we were speaking. An atmosphere began to settle around what we were doing - we called it 'dirty energy' - the kind of energy you find in a chamber play when the atmosphere is too intense, too intimate, too cloying to be breathed for long without emotional violence occurring. These moments are addictive, when you feel that you're making something happen out of nothing, and that 'something' is also changing you as you produce it; all you have to do is 'take the plunge' and let it happen.

Amanda
www.famousanddivine.org

The Day That My Mother Forgot About Me...

This piece began with an image from my childhood - I was sitting on a biscuit tin on Christmas Eve watching TV all day - and a phrase that I found to describe it: "The Day That My Mother Forgot About Me...". Mary and I were talking about how liberating it was for our kids to feel they'd been 'forgotten' about once in a while; that they weren't being 'supervised' or 'organised' but were just 'pottering' free from adult eyes, and suddenly this event from when I was 7 or 8 flashed into my memory. The day was memorable on two counts: one, TV was rarely available during the day in my childhood, and two: my mother would never have countenanced my sitting idly in front of the tele had she not been so busy preparing for Christmas Day in the kitchen. On that day I was free to wander into the fantasies provided by black and white films (David Lean's Great Expectations sticks in my mind).
We were both excited by this starting point because it suggested a momentous event in childhood but we weren't sure what exactly, and both the title and image stuck! That was back in the early Spring of 2009; we were still performing our first piece - Last Night I Dreamt My House Was Leaking.. and we started work on this new piece by letting other material drift into consciousness which seemed somehow connected. There were lots of films (Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?; Volver; The Dreamers; The Piano Teacher; Marnie; The Night Porter), novels (Austerlitz; The Unbearable Lightness of Being; Peter Pan), theory related to photography (Barthes), memory (Sebald), transgenerational trauma, Jung's 'shadow self', stories about our mothers, and any number of dreams which involved both Mary and myself finding 'new' rooms in houses that we were living in, or were about to live in.
Throughout 2009 we worked through the material that insinuated itself into the process. We have learned to trust the dream sequences that emerge when we work on a piece, and we follow 'hunches' when introducing new material (the novel Austerlitz became an important part of our work after we kept encountering the 'Rue d'Austerlitz' on a weekend trip to Paris). We don't throw anything out but some of the sources 'wither on the vine' and disappear from consciousness although they remain for reference in the blog (Whatever Happened to Baby Jane disappeared abruptly after we'd both had a go at performing the dance!)
By the beginning of 2010 we had a lot of fragments which had emerged during the previous year but no sense of how these fragments might cohere. The piece felt fragile and precarious; we both talked about 'knowing something about what we were doing' in the rehearsal room but this would evaporate as soon as we then re-integrated into our family and work life. Over the past few weeks we have returned to our recent dreams and discovered two things: first, every dream in which Mary and I appear together references our adolesence in their 'tone'(we're discussing boyfriends, talking about nights out, worrying about getting pregnant), and second, each dream involves a betrayal of trust (Mary's too busy with her boyfriend to rehearse, I'm going out but haven't invited Mary). Most significant was a dream in which I had decided to give up on creating theatre and had begun a career in stand-up comedy. Worse than this, my routine centred around jokes at the expense of avant-garde theatre. The big decision a couple of weeks ago was to trust these prompts from our subconscious and deal with adolesence and betrayal as themes within the piece. We had no idea how these linked with motherhood or daughterhood but it has always been our practice to work ideas through in the studio as a means of testing their relevance. We think differently when we're 'doing'.

Amanda
www.famousanddivine.org

Famous & Divine

Famous & Divine is a fairly new company comprising two fairly seasoned performers – Amanda and Mary. We both started out as performers/devisors back in the eighties and since then we’ve had babies, worked in Higher Education, engaged in research and now – as our children hit their teen years – we’ve carved out the time to start working on the creation of new experimental work once more. Our first piece Last Night I Dreamt My House Was Leaking…premiered at Bath Spa Live in 2008 and toured in 2009. We’ve been working on our new piece The Day That My Mother Forgot About Me …since 2009 and it’s due to premiere in November 2010 at Bath Spa Live.

We work intensively one weekend every month on the piece and in-between times we maintain our connection to the creative process through a blog. Sometimes we’re blogging frantically, at other times we’re sluggish and the blog ticks over. We include ideas, extracts from things we’re reading, dreams, stories from our own lives; anything that informs the work we’re making. Our blogging has provided a rich resource for the process of making work and we trust the material that turns up there more and more. We’ve been particularly interested in the ways in which our dreams seem to ‘tune in’ to the work we’re doing and a number of them have featured in both pieces.

Our ideas blog is a personal resource which we have kept private. We are now, however, excited to open up a ‘process’ blog ‘ to record the way we’re working on our new piece and, in particular, the way we shape the material over the next few months. This is an ‘upping of the stakes’ for us as we haven’t shared our creative process prior to this, nor have we reflected regularly on our work as it happens so we’re treating this as an experiment.

For us the most important function of this blog is to help us to write clearly about the work we do. So we’d love to receive your comments or questions… If you’re interested finding out more about our first piece our website has photos, a trailer, extracts from the resource blog and reviews.

Amanda
www.famousanddivine.org