I’ve been getting into the catalogue of Stoke-on-Trent record label Drunken Sailor Records recently - particularly two bands from Canada. No Negative, from Montreal, make an unholy noise that you deserve to hear, and Corner Boys, from Vancouver, write really really catchy punk that I’m 100% into and not ashamed about saying so.
If I had more money I would be buying everything on record and playing it loudddd. You can do it for me, if you like.
I’ve been at a day job for two mornings, teaching a workshop about contemporary adaptations to MA Theatre Practice students at Central School. Who knew that they have studios at Bankside?
It required me to go back through the Daughters of the Sun process, which was done quite instinctively & with very loose associations, and thinking about what choices were made at which point.
The fun of playing classical - why does everyone get very serious & want to do proper acting when a text comes into the room?
Generating a question / questions pertaining to a bit of classical theatre text (in this instance, Hedda Gabler) - now known as your constitution.
Collecting material from the text - anything from the dialogue to the stage directions to the image on the front cover - that associates with your constitution.
Associating material from outside the text - ideas, memories, songs, clips from films, anything.
Ways of treating and defamiliarising found text.
Note on dramaturgy : the importance of letting the audience into the game of the show.
We talked about She She Pop, about Branden Jacob-Jenkins, about Ida Müller & Vegard VInge, about The Wooster Group, about Frank Castorf (briefly, but always), about Rashdash and about the Great Comet of 1812.
They have generated projects that they are working on all week and showing at the end of the week. I saw a couple of clips today - the earliest sketches of the earliest ideas - and there’s a Hedda Gabler/Joan Rivers mash-up in there. And one with Henrik Ibsen as a grumpy lounge piano player.
So there.
I discovered this morning that I can drive to work at East 15 in <30minutes, and it takes >90minutes by train. That, my friends, is an ethical conundrum and one half.
Regardless, Wilbur came into work with me and patiently watched rehearsals.
An early major component of a reevaluation/transitional process has been reconnecting with my influences, and further exploring up their family tree.
The artist family tree is an Austin Kleon idea that I’ve loved. You choose 3 artistic influences, you find out everything about them that you can, you learn from them, and then you find 3 of their influences - and repeat. So you’ve got a family tree, which you’re at the bottom of.
I bought a big sketch pad and I made my own family tree. It’s a long process, so I’ve only completed two branches above myself which is more than enough work to be getting along with.
One characteristic of theatremakers is that we go to see a lot of work. It’s a great thing about theatremakers. We go to see our friends’ work at small fringe theatres and we go to see massive work on big stages and we go to see work that is made abroad. The presence of theatremakers & student theatremakers as ticket-buying audience is an important component of the theatre economy (in London, at least).
But it can mean that we’re all working from a similar, rather small sphere of artistic influence. There has been a lot of work in the past 5 years that looks & sounds (but rarely feels) like Ivo van Hove’s, for example.
And I, personally, came to realise that I wasn’t connecting with influences that I loved, and that there wasn’t a lot of care going into what I was taking in. There was a lot of work - far too much - being taken in, but the pipeline wasn’t especially well curated.
I am open for business again. Tentatively. Well, the door is ajar & it will open if you push it. And that’s something.
I will be, over the coming months, changing a few things about the way in which I work and the types of things that I work on. I haven’t decided much of what any of those things will be, other than I want to make a few changes.
It’s about time for this kind of process; I did finish the PhD and start calling myself a theatre director 10 years ago now.
Stay tuned.