Tuesday 22nd: Walking Workshop

I've come down to Norwich for a few days because of a very exciting opportunity. Robert Wilson's Piece Walking is being transferred to Norfolk for the Norfolk and Norwich Festival, and they need people to be 'Angels', so there was an open audition/workshop for people to come along to to see if they were interested/right for it/capable etc. So I got myself on an overnight coach after Monday's rehearsals to go to it!

Because Robert Wilson.
Obviously.
*freaks out*

I was very hot and sweaty before we even get to the venue, british summer has ARRIVED and I was tired and buzzy after taking in a whole new city and wandering around in the sunlight for hours dragging my suitcase behind me.

We arrived at Open and find ourselves utterly enclosed in an airless, windowless black space (space is at a premium during the N and N festival ), the absolute opposite to the project we are auditioning for, which will take place outdoors along the through the Norfolk countryside and along the coastline. Boukje (one of the artists who worked with Wilson to create it) talked to us about what the project was, and what they needed from the participants. The idea is that we'll stay in a hostel near the project for three weeks, working in shifts on the project for part of the day and then using the rest of the time to collaborate with each other, arrange lectures and skill-shares and so on.
We all introduced ourselves. Most of the other people there had a background in visual and fine arts rather than performance, but everyone seemed to do a lot of work with or inspired by the landscape.
I never thought much about it but a great deal of my work has been inspired by it in some way. Joe and Petunia was inspired by the ocean, and Little White Dresses current project is inspired by the night sky. It would be amazing to explore such a different landscape to mine in the pennines. To be somewhere so flat and open...

The workshop was all about spatial awareness and ways of leading and guiding.
A lot of the games and exercises we did were similar to those I've been doing with Red Ladder but  where with Red Ladder we've worked on building energy, stamina, and focus, here everything was on learning to fully experience what we was happening to us.

We began with simple games.

• Say your name. Look to your right, visualise yourself in the space. Give the space your name. Step into the space, claim it, and say your name again.
• Make eye contact with someone across the circle, say their name and move to inhabit their space. They have to say someones name and continue before you get to them. Then repeat game just with eye contact.

We then started walking around the space, placing hands on the base of peoples backs to energise their walk. Once we found our own 'energised walk' we had to link up with other people, joining in their walk and then returning to our own. We then started an exercise we have done with Red ladder, saying your name, starting to fall and everyone gathering to catch you and put you back on your feet, building up to them laying you right down, and eventually picking you up and carrying you around. The feeling was very different with a group of strangers in an 'audition' situation. Everyone seemed very tentative and not ready to trust everyone yet, whereas with Red Ladder the problems came when too many people fell at once!

We had to learn to trust each other pretty quickly though as the nest exercises all involved someone having their eyes closed!

We built from letting one person wander around the circle with closed eyes and us keeping them safe up to several wanderers who we had to keep safe from each other. We experimented in the ways we guided them, using voice or touch, being gentle or forceful. As staid as saying left, right, left, to the playfulness of waltzing around.

We then split into pairs, and took that work, using it to guide one another on a journey through the room, choosing a small number of images for them to see. (Something about having your attention focused on one small object after a long time blind makes that object far more precious and memorable. I looked at an old shoe and a poster, my partner at a wheel and an apple core.)

We continued the blindfolded work with some more playful activities, such as leading them blindfolded through two rows of people enacting, through touch and sound, a place (we had a river, a rainforest, a factory and a playground), with the blindfolded then guessing where they were.

The next half of the workshop was directed at building our spatial awareness and exploring the possibilities within it.

We started this with some physical exercises.

1.   Standing with feet parallel and legs unlocked feeling gravity work on us, and letting it ground us.

2.   Feeling bubbling energy rise through our bodies pulling us upwards, whilst still being grounded, stretching us vertically as far as possible.

3.   Feeling a magnetic force pulling us first to the left and then the right, stretching us horizontally.

4.   Feeling waves pulling at us, drawing us forward and backward.

5.   Letting energy push our arms up (making sure to let it happen, rather than forcing it to happen, as though helium balloons were underneath our arms).

6.   Gathering that energy from our arms and pulling it down into our bodies (similar to a sun salutation in yoga).

7.    Shaking all that energy out of our bodies in all directions.

8.   Twisting and spinning our arms around us, letting a pendulum force take hold of our bodies so the movement happens with no energy expended on our part.

9.   Bringing this pendulum motion together with another person, standing back to back and spinning around to clap hands together.

Next we built on this back-to-back relationship, walking around the space backwards, bumping into people (backwards) and feeling them through your back, rubbing against each other like bears scratching on a tree! Eventually we found partners and spent a long time back to back with them, figuring out how to move together, really trusting each other to take our weight. We were then told to very slowly break away from each other, still feeling that connection between us as we moved further and further away. Eventually we turned to face each other, making eye contact and moved, slowly (always slowly) together again., feeling with each step how the experience felt, moving as close as could be until we were standing nose to nose, still making eye contact. We stayed their for a long time, experiencing that closeness to a stranger, taking time to really notice them, notice their presence, and how it felt to be that close to a person. Finally we were told to break away once more, to maintain eye contact but to walk away from each other, feeling that presence shift again. It’s a very intense sensation, holding eye contact with someone for so long, and we spent a long time discussing how little eye contact is made, how it’s often seen as a threat, or as an immensely emotionally sensation, and  (edit: writing this after I got my email telling me I’ve been selected! ARGH!) I’m looking forward to working more on this project, and seeing where this work leads us!

Monday 21st: Promised Land Rehearsal

This was another rehearsal with just the sweatshop people. We played Chaos again, which felt easier this time. We are becoming more attuned to each other as a group.
We also did some vocal work, singing various phrases up and down the scale (cheese and biscuits, weetabix for breakfast, vinyl linoleum, various football players names, etc...) and then singing that 'I like the flowers, I like the daffodils' song and 'Blue Moon' in a round, walking around the space.

Unlike last time we were working on the riot scene which does actually contain the entire company, the idea being that's it's easier to work intensively with a small group, who can then help lead the scene next time making it easier for the rest of the company to pick up. It also helped us become more confident with the scene as every single person needs to be aware of cues and able to lead group moments rather than being reliant on one or two strong voices.

Rod was concerned that the scene wasn't threatening enough, and I have to agree it felt long and dull, just waiting for the next cue to start shouting abuse. This was again about finding ways to keep the stage 'alive'. We split into pairs and threes, and had to find each other across the space, muttering a constant, quiet, tirade of hate - about whatever we wanted (who needs a therapist when you can vent as much as you like in rehearsal!)- and then move into the mob, continuing this level of muttering throughout, giving us a sound to build on and fall back to when necessary, just adding in words from the main speeches being given to keep them sounding relevant. There is enough vitriol in the words written without needing to shout and scream everything, so bringing the whole scene down to a much quieter level actually made it far more insidious and creepy, and oddly helped keep the energy up.

One of the most difficult challenges with this scene is that the mob has to change between the 'local' people, looking for a fight, determined to reclaim 'their' city and kick the Jews out, and the Jewish immigrants in the sweatshop, hearing the mobs gather outside. We worked on Meyer and Rosa taking the power and using their speeches to rouse the immigrant mob up so we have two distinct mobs, both looking for a fight, but one negative - trying to get rid of people, and one positive- determined to stand up for themselves.

This scene has now become more interesting to be a part of, understanding the complexities of the situation and allowing for subtlety in what could easily just be a scene of 'LISTEN TO ME SHOUT AT YOU'. We talked a bit about how hard intervals make shows as you have to work from scratch to gain the audiences attention again, and I think these changes might just make that effort easier for us.

Sunday 20th May 2012: Promised Land Rehearsal - A Study in Muscle Memory

Sunday’s rehearsal proved to be, above all else, a lesson in muscle memory! 

We started with a warm-up lead by the wonderful (and sadistic) Pauline (just kidding, I love you, please don’t make me do planks again!). We started with yoga which I REALLY need to start doing on a regular basis as it always makes me feel fantastic. * Note To Self: dig out my yoga mat from Nancy’s yoga sessions at uni and start reliving those sun salutations. Amazing American accent optional. *

When we were all stretched out, and slightly dizzy from so much deep breathing, she set about teaching us a dance full of outstretched heels and folk-ness.

For the first time ever I was grateful for the weird little ‘modules’ they always added onto my ballet exams, character dancing, Russian dancing, Polish dancing. It turns out all of that training was going to be useful! Two of the songs in this show, both the Yiddish-gospel style songs, will have dancing in, and having the moves already hidden away in my muscle memory has made learning them a hell of a lot easier. A lot of the cast members (painfully accurate to the stereotype, almost all of the men) were complaining about being unable to multi-task, trying to combine the percussive rhythm we are beating out, the song we are singing, and the dance we are… well… dancing. Personally I find it really helps me to both remember lines and lyrics, and to get into character, to combine them with rhythms or movements. At college I used to make songs out of lists of things I needed to remember as a revision technique, and can still remember a lot of them now so it obviously worked! 

I remember watching an excellent documentary about dyslexia with Kara Tointon (guilty pleasure alert: I LOVED her in Strictly Come Dancing), and they helped her to learn her lines by associating each line with a movement so that they became linked with her muscle memory, and thereby surpassing the section of her brain affected by her dyslexia making it vastly quicker for her to memorise dialogue. I’m not dyslexic but I HAVE been dancing and playing music from a very young age so I guess that’s had an impact on the way I work! Humans are funny things, aren’t they?

I always like to get off script as early as I can, I remember lines much better once I’m actually IN the action rather than reading it and imagining it. One of my favourite ways of working was when I did Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (as Veruca Salt. BEST. ROLE. EVER.), and we just had the script printed out large and stuck to the wall so none of us had to hold a script and got into the habit of performing out to the audience. A good thing too as that particular interpretation was just monologue after monologue… Most people are starting to get off the book now and the show is feeling vastly smoother for it. There are a lot of big speeches in this show too, but now they are being performed rather than just read, everyone is being a lot more playful and experimental and everything is getting a lot more interesting! I’m really starting to understand and, if not exactly enjoy (racism and football hooliganism are never going to be my cup of tea) then at least inhabit the world we are creating.

We managed our first full run of the show today (though it really was a stagger-through as we were missing Paul who is playing Nathan, the protagonist of the show) and there is still a lot of work to be done but I am really excited with where it is going. I actually felt really emotional watching some of the scenes today, I think we’re on to a winner.

P.S. This blog was written from a coffee shop on a macbook on the way to an audition and I have never felt more pretentious in my life. I kind of love it. I R HIPSTER. (and now I just want to watch that thing with I R BABOON. What was it? Some kind of wonderful cartoon…)

Brief Encounter

My lovely little local cinema is doing a very special screening of 'Brief Encounter' tonight, one of my all-time favourite films. I'm dressing in my finest vintage gear, curling my hair and piling on the waterproof mascara. Yes it's a film, so why am I talking about it on a theatre blog?
Because it's inextricably linked to two of my fondest memories of the theatre.

This time last year I had just finished performing 'Joe and Petunia Hold Their Breath', my final show at uni. I cried almost constantly in-between our performances, and that show was everything I could have wished it to be. It was, and may well remain, the strangest most fragmented, fun, risky, bizarre show I've ever had the pleasure to be part of, because if you can't take those risks in the relative safety of an educational environment, when can you? I am a firm believer of education for education's sake and am furious that the rising tuition fees mean so many people are going to be unable to take a few years out of their life to go and learn something JUST BECAUSE THEY LOVE TO LEARN. Only the rich will be able to afford this luxury, and otherwise university will become somewhere only populated to those whom it is necessary to gain a degree to pursue their chosen career.
Sorry to rant there, I digress.
But I have been reminiscing about Joe and Petunia and one of the things I loved about it was its kitschy-crafty homemade aesthetic. I made the majority of the costumes out of recycled materials and have very clear memories of sitting on my living room floor on the day of the royal wedding. I tuned in for 2 minutes to see the dress then remembered I don't give a crap about the royals and turned over to Film Four where they played Brief Encounter and then Amelie. Instead of joining the hype of the rest of the country watching two people I don't know and don't care about getting married I watched two of the most beautiful and unusual love stories ever told, whilst sewing odd socks onto an old slip to make a flapper dress.
A perfect day.

My other brief encounter with Brief Encounter was with Kneehigh's exquisite adaptation of the film for the stage. I actually saw it twice with two different casts, once in London and once on tour to the Lowry, but I'm really just going to talk about the London version. It was truly one of my most memorable theatre experiences ever. A classic story, told well and creatively, within a very special sort of world. The theatre was beautiful, the ushers in authentic era-appropriate costume became the band, in the interval 40's style adverts were screened and cucumber sandwiches offered around. So many little details adding up to create a wholly immersive world.
The truly magic moments for me were the ones where homage was paid to the film, as the show literally moved between the stage and the screen. Laura running out from the audience through a giant screen and appearing in her living room. A screen pulled across stage with a train projected across it as she debates jumping. Just... perfect. Utterly perfect.
I've been lucky enough to see a lot of excellent shows (and god knows how many mediocre ones) but the ones which get marked down in my mental list of 'best things I've ever seen' are rarely there because of artistic merit alone, but because of that special quality belonging entirely to the theatre - ephemerality.
They are shows which I have seen at the exact right time. An excellent production of Peter Pan at the West Yorkshire Playhouse, which would simply have been 'really good' if it weren't for the fact it was the last play I would see as a teenager. 'The Life and Death of Marina Abramovic' last summer as a sort of comic-con for contemporary theatre, showing me just what I wanted to achieve, just as I was leaving Uni to try and make my own mark on the world of theatre!
And Brief Encounter. I saw Brief Encounter after having broken up with the first person I'd ever truly been in love with. And it let me deal with all the emotion that goes with that in a way I hadn't quite found the way to express til then and the tears I shed for Alec and Laura were cathartic and necessary and so a show became something more to me. Something terribly special. (And yes I did just get home from watching the film, continued writing this and am describing things as 'dreadfully this' and 'awfully that'. I do apologise. It's hard to stop...)

I think that is something about the theatre which we can never really get with films. A film we can love, and it can be beautiful and wonderful, and we can watch it over and over again until we can quote it line for line, and that can be a great thing. But a piece of theatre you only ever really see once, as it is subject to so many little variations, and so when the right show comes along at the right time it will be indelibly marked upon your experience on this planet, and that... that is magic.

And all I have to do is hear these opening notes and I am right back in that theatre.

Promised Land Rehearsals (Monday 14th May 2012)

Promised Land is a big show with a big cast so the rehearsal process so far has been full day rehearsals on Sundays with everyone, working on crowd scenes, songs, and just getting a sort of 'rough and ready' version of the show together, with 'smaller' scenes with the main characters being rehearsed on Monday and Tuesday nights, ready to slot in at the weekends. The idea has been to get everyone knowing the feeling and flow of the show before focussing on precise details and blocking.
I'm part of the chorus, half of which is going to be more prominent in the football scenes set int he 1970s, and half of which is more prominent in the 1900's sweatshops. I'm a sweatshopper.

Up til now we've spent a lot more time on the football scenes but on Monday night all the sweatshoppers were called for our first focussed rehearsal on one of our scenes.
The rehearsal was spent working on two key areas.
The first was to keep the sweatshop 'alive' during scenes when Avrom, Rosa, Jimmy and Meyer are all talking. This will be infinitely easier once our props and sewing machines have been made but we did our best with what we have! Aahh the powers of mime-sewing...
We started the rehearsal with some games to get us all focussed and aware of everyone in the space.
We started with a clapping game which looked deceptively easy but which proved incredibly hard. Standing in a circle a clap is passed around. First it is 'caught' from the person next to you, and then you 'throw' it to the next person. So you clap twice, once to your left and once to your right. Eventually you build it up to throwing and catching it across the circle, or you do if you haven't had a long day at work and your mind isn't on your dinner like most of ours appeared to be that night...
Next we tried another game, 'Chaos', an old favourite of mine. This game has three parts.

1. Beginning by standing in a circle, one person walks over to another and taps them on the shoulder. That person then walks to another etc. By the end of this round everyone must have walked and tapped another person. No one should have gone twice. You have built two relationships, with the person you are tapped by, and the person you tap.
2. Trying to avoid the people you have already built relationships you say someones name, then they say someones name, until everyone has said a name, and also been named. You now have four relationships, The person you're tapped by, the person you tap, The person you're named by, the person you name. Now continuing the naming pattern, the walking pattern starts again, so you have two different things to focus on.
3. Once everyone seems confident in those two patterns a third pattern is introduced. One person throws a ball to another person, again trying to avoid the people they already have relationships with, that person throws it to someone else, etc. There should now be six relationships, the tagger, the person you tag, the namer, the person you name, the thrower, the catcher.

AND GO! Try running all three patterns simultaneously. The only sounds being made should be the names. A great deal of focus and awareness is required to keep this going.

Rod (the director) added a new level to it which I haven't ever tried before but which I will definitely use in future!

He asked us to play the game as though we were in the sweatshop, hearing the mob gather outside, planning to run us out of the city. We weren't given any specific emotion but allowed to feel our way into a character. Some people became militant, some angry, some frightened and a diverse range of characters was built. The names being called became orders, or cries, a search for reassurance. The walk became a path to find friends and allies, the ball became something we could use to fight against the mob. And the game became something more, something serious. Nothing was dropped, no one giggled or stumbled, everyone knew what they were doing and why they were there to do it, and a game became a tool.

We did some basic blocking for the scene, and to keep things 'alive' started building relationships up with the other sweatshoppers, crossing over to them, borrowing or giving things, etc, and identified points in the conversations where we could react or become involved.

The second aim of the rehearsal was trying to figure out how the songs were going to be worked into the scene without feeling clunky.
It's been easy to fit songs into the football scenes, as chants and songs are something which happens quite naturally in that environment. One person starts off singing 'Marchin' OOOONNNN TOGETHERRRRRRR' and everyone will join in.
However, in a work environment it's a lot less natural so we spent a lot of time building up a percussive section and figuring out when pieces of the set would be moved on and offstage, and how we could work them into the percussion.  We also tried to figure out ways for the songs to start organically within the sweatshop rather than being started by the band, so one worker whistling becomes a cue to sing, and Meyer tuning his violin can give us starting notes. We looked a little at the emotions behind the songs as well. At the end of this scene Rosa leads us into coming out from our machines, spurred on by her mission to get the workers to unite against the bosses, rather than fighting each other.

Lessons Learned:

1. Clapping isn't always easy.
2. Games aren't just for fun.
3. A living stage is an interesting stage.
4. It's really weird that the closest real life gets to musical theatre is in a football stadium.

It started with a BANG!

'It started with a BANG!'
Those were the words I opened the first show in my year at uni with, proceeding to detail at a rapid pace, the entire history of the universe.
It ended with an ocean of tears, exhausted, spent, and cathartic.

I've been drifting on that ocean all year.
First the current dragged me into the first ever Flare Festival, serving, for me, as a half-way house between the course and the 'real world'. It was intense and inspiring and utterly intoxicating both being on the team running it as well as bringing my theatre company Little White Dress to perform at it. Flare is going strong and we are currently working up to 'The Flare Weekender', a mini-festival of sorts in a few weeks time.

Little White Dress drifted out to sea, floating between festivals and performing wherever we could.
We've now found an island where we can stare up at the stars all night and are slowly but surely building a new show.

I've also been building my bridges from that island and am currently rehearsing 'Promised Land' with the rather amazing Red Ladder theatre company, which we'll be performing at the Ludus Festival in Leeds at the end of June.

I really miss the sheer amount of writing about the theatre I was doing at Uni, and so rather than just writing dribs and drabbles on various scraps of paper and in the margins of scripts I decided to create...

THE ACTRESS IN THE ATTIC
(Because I'm a girl-shaped human what performs stuff, and due to a severe lack of finances I'm living in my parents attic. Again.)