Are You Here Now?

New title.  New Direction.  Not so much about hard/cold disappearance but the shifting boundaries of absence and presence.  The audience are unwitting attendees of Absentees Anonymous.  It might go something like this:

Possible Sections/Ideas (no real order)

Hello, my name is X, and I am here now.

Introduction to AA:

Brief history and aims… that is, AA is formed/led by those whose addiction to being absent has resulted in damaging or devastating consequences.  They recognise the human desire to be absent at times (like having a tipple with friends) but for them it got out of hand and they are trying to abstain completely.  (One tipple may lead to break up of family, huge debts, WW3?) They therefore advocate complete presence and aim to guide others in being as present as possible in their lives.

Facts, Figures and Theories about absence and presence:

A pottage of personal, mathematical, philosophical definitions.  No doubt with dramatic illustrations.  Anyone understand Derrida?

Socially Acceptable Absence:

Where is the line?  It’s ok to daydream about cheese but wrong to fantasise about shagging your neighbour’s wife? Demonstrate different situations and use a clapometre or sliding scale to classify absences from harmless to abhorrent

Reasons Why People Become Absent (and their excuses):

Eg: ‘I couldn’t take it any more/I got distracted/I took my eye off the ball/ I just can’t help fucking up’ – sequence of direct address?

Conveyer Belt of Boredom – to be explained later!

How We Came A Cropper:

Members/Founders explain/dramatise their past obsessions with being absent and the depths to which it led them.

Demo – what to expect at an AA meeting:

Possibly using audience member as someone to be inducted.  Run through format, tea and toilet breaks (these are challenging sections where presence should be upheld) and reward certificates…. (or whatever… could hand out certificates at end of show)

How to stay Present:

From ‘focus on your breathing’ to ‘lie on a bed of nails’, ’feel your face’, ‘repeat the mantra I am Here Now’ or ‘Do everything with great focus and intensity because this moment will never exist again’ – some of these can be demo’d.

FAQs

(The panel give answers to frequently asked questions and possibly some from the audience)

Reflections/Conclusions

Here or earlier the positive aspects of absenteeism seep out: escaping convention/humdrum existence, breaking the mould, making a new start, reminiscing, jumping into the unknown, ‘I have a Dream’… finish by revelling in absence – or maybe AA members getting increasingly out of control in their absence with the final moment a sober realisation that yet again they have fallen off the wagon.

Another Quote (more back up)

'Bloody Mess is composed in a spirit more akin to that of painting, choreography or even late night channel hopping.  It's about the collision of different worlds and personas - collisions at which sparks fly, collisions that can be both comical and disturbing...

For us, the mess and its structured exuberance is something of a manifesto; an insistence that theatre can be be more than a drab story or literary rhetoric, that its heart lies in play, in liveness, and in the event.

Something happens.  Something unfolds.  And you're there to join the dots and enjoy.'

Tim Etchells

In Good Company

In 1967, an anonymous woman, confused and frustrated after watching a production of one of Harold Pinter’s earliest plays, The Birthday Party, wrote a letter to the playwright:

Dear Sir,

I would be obliged if you would kindly explain to me the meaning of your play The Birthday Party.  These are the points which I do not understand: 1. Who are the two men? 2. Where did Stanley come from? 3. Were they all supposed to be normal?  You will appreciate that without the answers to my questions I cannot fully understand your play.

Pinter responded to the letter with the following:

Dear Madam,

I would be obliged if you would kindly explain to me the meaning of your letter.  These are the points which I do not understand: 1. Who are you? 2. Where do you come from? 3. Are you supposed to be normal?  You will appreciate that without the answers to these questions I cannot fully understand your letter.

Three Positives

1. We are making work slowly because we don't have the time or the money to make it quickly
2. Nobody in this town (or even in this county) is making work like this
3. Performers from different backgrounds with different comfort zones are helping to create this

( I used to think of these things as disadvantages)

New Beginnings?

Dawn:        [speaking into a microphone] Ladies and Gentlemen, would you kindly switch off your mobile phones, ring-tones on pagers, key fobs, electronic dog-whistles, ipods, NHS panic buttons and anything that might mean you can still communicate with the outside world.  Despite the nature of this performance we would like to reassure you that you are very likely to still exist once the show has finished.  Thank you.

New Comments

From trusted theatre-makers:

You no longer have 0 comments. Look there is nothing wrong with a story, it's just very difficult to find a good one - look at all the shit films that are made which have huge financial investments. You want a children's game - it would be worth connecting up with the Early Arts web site, they have a lot of practitioners doing stuff for that audience. Given that you are doing something on disappearance then you could play some kind of disappearing games hide and seek or they could watch you play it. Bring objects out onto stage that disappear under things, or behind things, or on top of things, or in things (eating). That's my lot. Lovely note book.

Read the post and you're absolutely right about not needing structure or through line. The audience will do it for themselves and you and the performers will find a rationality to it at some point too.

I know what you mean about lack of time and looking at creating a text/script as a way of planning it all out so that less time is needed with everyone together in the space!

I think this is why 'well made plays' are so appealing/popular. They're so much more of a safer bet.You can make the fragmented nature of the material a feature should you wish to do so! You could show it as work in progress.

It is going to come together and one night a week can be enough.

Bear with me

I am very impressed with the performers I am working with.  After each session we walk away with a few creative nuggets in our hands.  These practitioners are open-minded, committed and talented. So, a delight really.  Despite this there is a sense that both we and the process are (in management speak) finishing with 'forming' phase and moving towards the next expected one: 'storming'.

We talk about the need for an overriding concept, a narrative arc, a structure on which to hang our work about disappearance.  The audience expect it, the performer(s) are nervous we may end up with a series of unconnected fragments if we don't find it.  Imagine watching a series of fragments for an hour about disappearance without knowing or experiencing what the arc/narrative/structure is...

Mmm

I have been struggling to find one of these (they don't hang on the rack like desses in a department store unfortunately) but I have also been struck by what could be thought of as a radical thought: We don't need one. At least we don't need one yet.  Perhaps... we don't need one at all?

I am tired of theatre that is formulaic and contrived.  I am tired of seeing shows where the actors do their best to bring to life a carefully crafted script, a well made play, a masterpiece of exposition, crisis, denouement and resolution.  I am even a bit tired of stories (autobiographical, told through dance or delivered as a performative lecture) and the recent mode of dramatising fairytales with modern, upbeat twists... it seems to me too much like something you'd set a secondary Drama class at the end of the winter term to do (and I should know).

But all of this does not explain or excuse my stubbornness in not pursuing a through-line.  I know the exam board would mark me down.  I know I am liable to stand accused of creating a work that is undeveloped, incomplete and unfinished (especially by those who aren't familiar with contemporary performance practices that seek to create a real sense of dialogue with their audience).  And I do feel uneasy about leaving my performers to feel exposed in this, and yet...

• An arc/concept/through-line (coat hanger) should emerge through the process, not be imposed.
• The better the belief in, and the excitement about the ideas and resulting fragments we produce, the better the (coat hanger) will be.
• The real excitement of this piece will be the audience creating connections and interpretations for themselves.
• Before we stage the work we will have made our own connections- within, between and across all fragments.
• These connections not being made is impossible.

And yet... I wish we had more time.  I wish we had a solid month together to really explore and kick about disappearance; kick it til it had no life left in it.  It feels like we are skimming surfaces with our once weekly meetings and the scope is as wide as the ocean or outer-space. So the temptation to get that coat-hanger on which to hang everything is tempting, n'est pas?

So what, oh Dionysus, is the way forward?

*********************************************************************************
Bear with me

*********************************************************************************
I have just skim-read the working script of the piece which I set aside once I started working with my four new performers.  It strikes me by looking at it that something has been lost. I feel a jolt of recognition as I view my self/my work in an artistic mirror.  I realise I was wandering out of view (disappearing?)  Well, maybe that's a fitting act in this process, but in the script I see...

Bite and energy.  It stirs things up.  It is raw in places, gentle and sombre in others, heavily ironic with anti-performance twists ( a recorded voice starts the proceedings and the performer posing as the magician's assistant excuses away the fact that she's just pretending).  Most of all, it is heavy with the emotional weight of disappearance. There is no escape from it.

I suppose I have been pretending.  That is, I have pretended that in the time available to us the performers and myself can throw ourselves headlong into a devising process in which everything can be explored, played with, caressed, tossed about, then selected or rejected.  That would be marvellous, but the fact is we just don't have that luxury of time. 

So the artistic finger is pointing heavily in my direction.  Yes, ok - I do see it.

I am returning to my script as my inspiration.  It is an anchor from which to write more and yes, devise more, but within stricter limits.  I can't say quite that I have my coat-hanger yet, but I know we are looking at people and situations who are standing on cliff edges (real or metaphorical) from which the view is the gaping cavern of disappearance, of unalterable change... those gut-sinking moments, when through bravery or cowardice, wisdom or inexperience, the only tenable answer seems to be to leap into the unknown.

You could say such a leap is a bit like the theatre-making process really, but maybe in this case a little bit of what you have done before (but forgotten temporarily) does you good...