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…