In Response

New Ways of Working?

This entry was posted in In Response Thoughts and Flirtations on by

To get to the point: the ROH‘s Twitter Opera – genuine attempt at opening up Opera to a new demographic or an easy way to seem ‘on trend’?

Unfortunately I couldn’t get to Covent Garden during the weekend to see the final product and there’s yet to be a film of the production uploaded so I can only go on the initial libretto, and the clips here and here.

The ROH are certainly not the first to harness user-generated content on Twitter; the New York Neo-Futurists regularly get people to tweet a play in 140 characters (It’s not as insane as it sounds given that it would leave plenty of room for Hemingway’s famous  ‘For sale: baby shoes, never worn’), whist Resonance FM created a (yet to be recorded) radio play with dialogue first posted on twitter. But in terms of the freedom – and the size of the platform,  a performance in the Paul Hamlyn Hall is not to be scoffed at – the ROH’s experiment certainly has something a little bit unique about it. Not to mention that it’s an opera and, well, if theatre has problems about seeming inclusive then Opera is in another league.

The ROH likened the process to those Adventure books you had as a child where you picked which option you wanted to take and thereby created your own story. Only this story had (at last count on its twitter page) 2,134 followers and therefore people chosing to ‘take the path by the river’ (or suchlike). How many of those contributed I don’t know – though I would like to see the stats (and those about the percentage of lines that were directly quoted tweets)- but what is clear from the tweets is that there was real imagination and sense of spontaneity in those who contributed. And let’s be clear – weird stuff happens in Opera and, crikey, does some weird stuff happen in Twitterdammerung (confession time: its name made me chuckle. I am clearly a geek).

Given the fun the creators had with it I suspect that this project will be most successful in the journey rather than the destination. I am willing to be surprised but I suspect the whole process for the ROH has had very little to do with the final result (we are, after all, still waiting for the video of it…).

The test is in what the ROH does next. As a one off stunt it would smack of opportunism (and the ROH have garnered a lot of press from its sheer novelty value), but it does point to a different way to engage with an audience. How might that be taken forward? Could the ROH link twitter creativity to its main house output (stories for minor characters, on a theme etc)? Part of the joy of Twitterdammerung was how open the brief was, but is there ways to structure the brief to provide a less unweildy creation (or would they even want to)? Then there’s the issue of archive and how this is recorded (if at all). Certainly a presence on the main website rather than only the wordpress blog would be a good start.

And then the rather meaty question of whether the ROH believes that something artistically viable can come out of twitter (in the manner which Resonance FM clearly do) or whether it is simply a way of being more inclusive (in which case, a discounted performance for those tweeting?).

I’m intrigued to find out…

Ever Decreasing Circles

This entry was posted in In Response and tagged Postgraduate Study on by

On Thursday evening I had a conversation with a Designer/ Director about the relative merits of Postgraduate study when it comes to the arts. I paid out my £4,000 worth of fees and took the Postgrad route, she didn’t. Could the benefits of a year spent with people who share your interests and being immersed in your ‘subject’ be balanced out by a year of doing small projects, learning on the job as it were? Neither of us were able to come up with a definitive answer, dependent I’m sure as it is on the individual concerned.  So when I saw 99seats post on the insular young-writer it immediately struck a chord.

I should set my stall out – I did an Undergraduate degree in English at a University that does not even have a drama department (and was recently bashed over on the Guardian Theatre Blog for that very reason). I then left education, moved myself and my overdraft back to Leeds and spent the next three years working in a theatre (with a couple of sojourns to spend hours photocopying in an office and to get stupidly drunk and sunburnt whilst working for a touring theatre company) doing jobs that are as far away from the creative side of theatre as it is possible to be whilst still residing in the same building (or field). Then I moved to London, went back to Uni to do a Masters in ‘Writing for Performance’ and, as it stands, pay the bills by working for two different theatres, again doing jobs that have little to nothing to do with the act of creating theatre.

As such I straddle the camps of learning by doing and learning by study. Back in 2006 I did a new-writing programme where, possibly as the common denominator, the examples we were given to ‘study’ were from television shows. It drove me insane. How could someone possibly understand how to write a play if they hadn’t even read Hamlet? Or Chekhov or Ibsen or Pinter or Stoppard or Hare or – I could go on. And how can you write for performance in Britain if you don’t know what Punchdrunk or Kneehigh or Complicite are doing? My time “in the classroom” is something I fundamentally believe has improved me as a writer.

Yet, I decided when I was 18 that I wanted to write a play. I didn’t write my first one until I was 20 (and no one but the drawer of my desk saw a copy of said play until I was almost 22). What I did do though, was get involved with making theatre. I stage managed, I produced, I promoted. I knew, even then, that there was no way I could possibly understand how to write a play if I didn’t understand the process. There was no way that sitting in a classroom could teach me about the power of rustling bottoms as I learnt when I spent a year ushering in a Rep theatre.  And during my MA the most useful single moment in the entire course was when actors got their hands on my script and I could hear the moment words came out of their mouths what worked and what didn’t.

Certainly I’m keen now to go out and do, try things, make mistakes and learn along the way. But I feel everything I’ve learnt so far supports this and I’d be loathe to have to give up any of the things I’ve learnt in that setting. And I suppose that almost where I ended up in the conversation I was having on Thursday night. This is what has gotten me here, it need not be the same route for everyone.

99seat’s observation about the closeted circles playwrights work in is even more pertinent, though. I agree entirely that some life experience along the way is vital – I needed those years between my degrees to go out into the world and meet people, and screw up, and get screwed over just as I need more of the same, as each year of my life makes the world a little less black and white and I am forced to re-write my path each time. But I knew instinctively what 99seats meant when she wrote:

there’s another metaphor, too: the Amish. Insular, slightly backwards and odd, incestuous. That’s what I fear the whole field is becoming. We spend so much time with each other that we’re all we can talk about.

Certainly not all of my friends are involved in the arts, but the overwhelming majority are. Of my London-based friends the percentage rises dramatically. And I’ve seen the incestuous, odd world of such a group close up in the last year.

Is that necessarily limiting? Or is it unavoidable that we’re going to gravitate towards each other (particularly with people at similiar stages of their careers) and as writers and theatre makers we just need to remember to turn our eyes outward?

Tears Before Bedtime

This entry was posted in In Response and tagged Almost 10 Hamlet On Emotion Pornography The Musicologist Scores on by

Over on the Guardian Theatre Blog Tim Etchells discussed what makes an audience cry (or indeed laugh) and it couldn’t help get me thinking about my own experience.

Let’s get one thing straight: I’m a crier. There are very, very few people in my life who haven’t seen me cry. In my living room, in the cinema, on buses, in trains, in the middle of darkened streets, I’ve cried in buildings I’ve worked in, in front of people I really shouldn’t have and during pretty much every year that Tim Henman lost at Wimbledon in some close-fought five setter. So why, given my prediliction for crying at adverts and Neighbours and even, Lord help me, reality television show auditions, do I cry so rarely in the theatre?

I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve cried in a theatre this year (which might sound excessive but when you count up the number of times I’ve cried whilst reading things on the internet then you might realise that it’s somewhat out of proportion). Oddly enough two of the five times I’ve cried have been in the last couple of weeks (see, you open up the dam and this is what happens).

The first show to get me was Almost 10 at the Pleasance Courtyard during the Edinburgh Fringe and the reason it had me sobbing into my hands was just how unexpectedly its narrative changed. I’d come to expect one thing and then it took me somewhere else entirely, with barely a pause as what I’d thought was entirely a comedy that made me cringe with the memory of being a nine year old girl turned itself into a tragedy that looked you in the face so unflinchingly that I could do nothing but face it and cry.

Next up, Simon Stephens’ Pornography at the Tricycle (yes, we had some fun tweeting that one) when it wasn’t the actual production which got the tears rolling (though it did kick me in the stomach and left me with the feeling that this is an absolutely incredible play) but the footnotes on those who died during the 7/7 bombings which were projected at the end of the play. I sat, hardly able to read them as they flashed by so quickly and were obscured by set and moving audience members and techies beginning the clear up, and felt the tears begin. But this was hardly theatre (indeed, in what was really my only criticism of the production, the projections seemed more of an afterthought, and I was slightly horrified that all but maybe ten or eleven audience members left before the end of them), this was starkly, vividly real life. And it was for real people, not fictional ones, that I cried that night.

I cried during a performance once more last week but that was something rather different: during Michael Nyman’s The Musicologist Scores at the Royal Albert Hall. There’s something about such music that I can’t (and hope I never can) fully express that pierces me and makes me cry for reasons I can’t quite catch. It’s the same thing that captures me in the best of Wayne McGregor‘s choreography, when I cry for everything and nothing.

Of course, some times, the money moment gets me in theatre as much as it will get me in a film like Titanic (oh, yes, we could have a long conversation about how much that film makes me sob but it would be rather embarrassing for both of us). I’ve seen Blood Brothers enough times to be able to pretty much get up on stage and take over from a Nolan should Bill Kenwright need me to. But every time, Willy Russell pushes those buttons and I cry. Same with Les Miserables. But there’s part of me that, though I enjoy it, I rather resent the button-pushing nature of it, oh cue every time. It doesn’t take me by surprise in the manner that Nyman, or even Almost 10, did.

Neither am I immune to a bit of good acting and some rather good writing – David Tennant had me sobbing, tears dripping down my nose, the second time I saw him play Hamlet (but not to anywhere near the same extent either the first or the third time).

Maybe Etchells is right and there rarely is the space to cry at theatre, the reverse side of that, however, is that unlike all those other things that make me cry when theatre does I remember it explicitly. And that, I suppose, is what makes it a little bit more special.