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