Small Pleasures
Was rather pleased to discover today the name of the ‘street’ which our shop in Brixton Village is on:
I’ve put up some other photos of the market on to our Flickr page – which you can see here.
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Brixton Village Transformation
If I’ve been a little quiet over here recently then it’s been for good reason. The last few weeks have had rehearsals and workshops and meetings and applications. There was even a day or two when it looked like Charlie was going to cancel Christmas.
More than all that, however, has been the fact that we’ve been waiting until we could announce our latest project and, having had confirmation of our dates today, this means I’m officially allowed to write about it on here.
From Monday 25th January until Saturday 6th February 2010 Write By Numbers will be participating in what is currently the UK’s largest empty shops project and taking over a shop in Brixton Village Market. Taking our inspiration from Ovid’s Metamorphoses we’re going to turn the shop into a grotto of live performance and interaction, staging short adaptations of and responses to Ovid’s stories of love, hope, terror and transformation.
We’re a writer-centric company but we also want to encourage writers to work in unsual ways or form unsual connections so not only will our writers have to work to the space, we’re also encouraging cross-art form collaboration and participation, with performers, spoken word artists, musicians and visual artists (to name a few) being invited to take part.
In addition we’ll be encouraging Brixton community (and indeed anyone who feels like wandering into our shop) to take part in the transformation of the space, contributing to our wall of change. We’ve also got a couple of other ideas we’re hoping will slot into place (including some workshops and the opportunity to create your own writing for performance) which we’ll announce as we finalise details.
I’ve been excited about the Brixton Village Market project since I first heard about it just over a month ago. There’s a real energy and commitment to regenerating and reimagining a space where (at present) 20 shops remain empty. And this isn’t just about a temporary plaster for the area, but a means of showing a viable, alive location with either projects proving themselves sustainable or the location becoming atttractive to other businesses.
For Write By Numbers it’s a chance to try something we wouldn’t have the resources to do elsewhere (our ‘shop’ will be open full business hours, Monday-Saturday), pulling performance outside of an auditorium and giving writers and theatre-makers the opportunity to do something completely different. Because why shouldn’t you be able to do your shopping and then pop into a ten minute performance?
The result of all of this? We’ve got seven weeks to create the project before we open our shop for the first time…
One Hundred Days
I saw One Hundred Days To Make Me A Better Person on Facebook from someone I went to University with (the first time round at the Uni where we argued about Beowulf and Dickens rather than the second time round at the Uni where we argued about Pinter and gratutious use of rope climbing in plays for children). And as soon as I saw the project I knew that I rather loved it.
Josie Long’s idea’s simple enough. Pick one thing. You then do that thing for one hundred days, hopefully documenting it along the way for us all to share in. Then after one hundred days glory will be yours and, hopefully, you may be a tiny bit better as a human being. Or, at the very least, you’ll have done something which made you/ a friend/ a stranger/ your dog smile.
And, drum roll, my pledge is:
‘Once a day for one hundred days I will write a postcard (and, where appropriate, send it to the person concerned)’.
I’m going to write properly about why I chose this over on Distant Aggravation though I shall undoubtedly pop over here to bask in triumph/ never mention it again when I fall flat on my face on day 37.
But – 100 days? That’s a lot of postcards. And let me not think of the stamps.
So – what are you going to pledge?
On Ambition
By a stroke of chance (and the availability of two returned tickets when we strolled up to the Barbican) I happened to spend Friday night watching the TEAM’s Architecting. Which means that not only did I see the same production as Matt Trueman discusses on the Guardian Blog I also saw the same performance.
I’m with Matt in as much as I’ve never read or seen Gone With The Wind (though I did know it was a novel, but then I am a Book Geek as well as a Theatre Geek) and when I came out in the interval I couldn’t work out if I was enjoying the show or not. Because though I’d seen moments of brilliance Architecting lost me when it got deep into Gone With The Wind – and, yes, I did feel that my lack of knowledge of this particular American classic was proving a barrier to my engagement. I could sense that an important point was being made, that the text was being re-interpreted, re-visioned, questioned but I couldn’t for the life of me work out exactly how.
Perversely, by the time I came out of the second act I had become convinced that I had seen one of the defining productions of my year (I might even go as far to say it might one day make that list of productions that make me the writer I am). All the strands – and the TEAM hadn’t exactly scrimped with them given they’d taken on Gone With The Wind, the relationship between North and South USA, reconstruction, individual genius vs community, race, the effects of Hurricane Katrina, feminism, the American psyche…well, I could go on – were pulled together. Architecting is a play with huge – epic – ambitions, reaching out to questions that truly need space to breathe (and, indeed, filter through your brain). Yes it is flawed; it is too long, at times too self indulgent and, at least in my opinion, too reliant on direct engagement with Gone With The Wind in its first 90 minutes. I felt in times it was a play in need of a Dramturg. But I would gladly see a play with those flaws which had even half of the aspirations, intellectual clout and sheer exhilarating presence as Architecting.
Though a co-production with the National Theatre of Scotland (having seen four of their productions now I would trample over people to get tickets for their shows) I honestly don’t know if new writing of this nature would be created in England, at the very least it isn’t created for the major theatres. Which is a challenge if ever there was one.
As for Matt’s question as to if theatre can be too clever for itself I have to say that the question is a fairly flawed one. What is “too clever”? Something I don’t understand, or you don’t understand, or that the person sitting next to you doesn’t understand? At no point when I wasn’t getting the references did I think that Architecting was too clever. I thought it wasn’t properly edited. More so this is a play concerned with America and me, a 26 year old from the North of England, well yes – I may lose things in translation.
Are Hamlet or King Lear too clever because of their intellectual gymnastics? Arcadia? Katie Mitchell’s production of Attempts on Her Life? And where do we stop – is The History Boys too clever because it has a scene largely performed in French?
The notion that there is a level of “accessib[ility]” that theatre should include is blatantly a non-starter. We Will Rock You is accessible, that doesn’t mean I’m beating a path to its door. Content can create accessibility, but so can theatricality. There was a moment in Architecting when the space around me transformed (I’m not saying how as it’s still running and I wouldn’t want to spoil the moment) that made me understand absolutely, to the very core of my being. And should we, as theatre makers, have our main concern be having every audience member understand every moment every single night? Maybe because I found theatre after I found books (which are certainly not scared about understanding) I never assumed this was the case. Plus, I work on the basis that the audience is (at the very least) as clever as me. And I love it when a production or play treats me in the same way, even if it leaves me running after them (I still run after Hamlet to this very day, and I love it all the more because of that).
There is of course the question of audience numbers. Architecting would never support a West End run (well, maybe if you stuck David Tennant in the middle of it and even then it had better be a limited run). Did everyone in The Pit at the Barbican on Friday night love it as much as me? Matt Trueman’s article proves that isn’t the case. And that’s almost inevitable with Architecting‘s ambitions – and should we limit aspiration on that basis?
I think not.
Reason No. 2
It was one of those quirks of timing that on the day that my (and indeed Charlie’s) results for our Masters degrees were released we found ourselves putting Reasons For Listing through its paces for the first time.
I’ll be honest – I love and hate first readings in probably equal measures. Maybe it’s just me as a writer but the desire to crawl under the table at some point is fairly overwhelming. Because – however witty or poignant or clever you think your words to be when you sit in front of your computer screen chuckling to yourself there’s nothing like putting them in the mouth of an actor to make you reach for the delete key. Or the rubbish bin, depending on which is nearer (the latter also being handy for the overwhelming desire to vomit). Conversely, when you’re not jabbing things into your eyes, there are also those moments which just work. And when you hear those for the first time – and everyone in the room stops and has the same feeling too – there’s a tiny (okay, a huge) amount of joy in that.
Aside from the time a few years ago when I got together a group of friends in the backroom of a pub, made sure everyone had alcohol in their glasses and got them to read the first draft of a play I was writing, the first reading of Reasons has probably been my most pain-free of first readings. It’s a pleasure really to sit around a table and know pretty much instantly that everyone is on the same page (literally and metaphorically). Putting a script at what is a relatively early stage in its development (in my strange numbering system the script for today’s rehearsal was labelled 0.75) is a new experience for me. But I felt very much when Charlie and I decided to start Write By Numbers it was because we (and other writers we knew) wanted to work in a different way. It feels entirely natural and liberating to open the script up at this point, a collaboration between all of the people sitting round the table.
And, wonderfully, it pretty quickly became apparent that we’ve got a bloody brilliant actor at the centre of it playing Joseph. Which always helps.
Now, after a day of imagining all the places Reasons could go, tomorrow it’s back to the computer and, word by word, getting down to finishing Draft 1.0.
Museum In A Day
There are few things I like more in life than ideas which can be filed under ‘I’ve got this crazy plan…’ and thus when I heard about ‘Museum In A Day‘ I immediately loved the idea. As the name (almost) suggests this crazy plan was to build a museum website (from scratch) in 12 hours and document the entire process. So not only could you follow along, the tools will be there to help you go out and build a website for your [fill in blank as appropriate]. Crazy and helpful – it’s a winning combination.
The resultant 12 hour website for the fictional The Future Museum (incidentally, what a cool idea for a museum) is here and though its creators admit that there’s still things they’d like to have done it’s a testament to what you can achieve with very little money and even less time.