Auditing the creative process
How do you make tangible and tactable – and indeed digital – the unconscious or inexpressable process of generating art? Theatre is at least better at manifesting creative labour as materially available than most art forms. You can ‘see’ part of it happening if you really want to (cf. this current talk of embedded criticism: Daniel Bye, Postcards from the Gods). But I don’t mean ‘what happens in a rehearsal room’. I mean the labour that happens to get you to that moment in the first place; so the work of the creative imagination. The work of the idea.
Well it just sort of happens doesn’t it? Hmm. Well maybe yes. But that might not be good enough for very much longer. Due to the nature of the audit culture of financing in the arts, it is becoming increasingly necessary to have something materially ‘to show’ for your work beyond the product of art itself – arguably the final product is the least significant thing. You need to have products all the time, ‘tangibles’ along the way, so that you are continually ‘engaging’ in materially accountable ways, and you are seen to be doing so. You need to turn every part of creative labour into something with a recognisable output, which can be documented and, in the current zeitgeist, ideally, made digital.
The problem is that it is the nature of artistic creativity that it necessarily only finds its materiality in the final product. That’s why you do it. If you could make that expression continually and in myriad easier ways, you would. Wouldn’t you? If making art wasn’t the only way of getting all this stuff out, you would do everything else, and not bother with the actual art bit because it is too hard.
But that doesn’t mean we won’t try. And so begins a great experiment: to find ways to make the intangible tangible. To find ways to think in outputs. To create in outputs. To output your way to the actual output, which is subsumed by the torrent of outputs from which it is constituted; and of which it is, at best, only the last output.
Whilst I look to solve this little quandary this blog may take a little hiatus, to be replaced by something more accountably of output.
Why some actors are more “real” than others
This week in my theatrical and academic work I’ve been thinking about the construction of selfhood. A few years ago I watched The Overwhelming at the National Theatre. Tanya Moodie was in it. She was great. (Hi Tanya.) So was the shady American from Spooks. There was a young kid in it too. I don’t remember so much about him, except that I think he might have been bumped off in the first scene. Or at the very least, threatened. Most seriously. Anyway yesterday I learned that young actor had been Andrew Garfield, our once and future and Spiderman. And then I thought, if The Overwhelming was being staged now, not only would Andrew Garfield have been the big draw with the piece being sold on his name, but I would also have remembered something about his performance.
It really brought into focus the strange complexity that operates when you watch a piece of theatre in which the social narrative of the actor overrides their identity as a character, or at least where it brings a peculiar (additional) attention to it. So if The Overwhelming was on now, it would ‘matter’ how Andrew Garfield did. Now in one sense (the most obvious one) this is a function of fame, but I am interested in the complexities of the social circumstances of which ‘fame’ is only a particular iteration. Because I wonder that it is not just that Andrew Garfield is famous now (it’s time to let go of him: please insert your own equivalents from now on): it is that in some way he seems more real. We know him. He is somehow a more deeply established self than the others. His ‘real quotient’ is higher, somehow and he weirdly matters more. There are of course huge paradoxes here, with not the least being that if the ‘real quotient’ of an actor is so high, it threatens the integrity of the work – even the very best. And secondly, of course, the increased self-hood that he seems to have (that is making you care disproportionately how he does) is, of course, a fabrication: part media, part self-construction, somewhat designed, all in your own head.
Yet the narratives of those that make our theatre, as opposed to the narratives of the theatre that they make, seems to be so important. We go and see the work of our friends, our peers – not because of the stories they are telling, but because of the story that they are. And our witnessing of their theatrical work is an attempt to mimetically claim ownership of their own personal narrative, to make it part of ours. I think we go and see XX in whatever because unconsciously we think it means they are going to be our friend, so that when we subsequently self-make ourselves, we too are more real. And all this means we probably missed the play.
Food for Thought: American Capitalism
I am just on the way back from York Theatre Royal where I have been discussing the future life of Under A Tree At The End Of Time with Artistic Director Damian Cruden. He is very excited about the project and about Real Circumstance’s continuing relationship with the theatre. We’re hopeful of collaborating with YTR through to Spring 2013, fingers crossed.
But mostly what we talked about was American Capitalism, and an American way of life that was like a boat in the wash of an underwater earthquake; the big wave is still coming but the boat thinks it has already passed. And maybe now, now, America is just beginning to realise that it hasn’t. I think what is hardest for me to remember is that every behaviour – every political and social act – is read morally in America. So success is morally good, it marks the good self, as well as rewarded/rewardable self. And in this, America remains within a zeitgeist of Puritanism: the working self is also the morally good self, and therefore the absence of labour (which might be read as the absence of opportunity for labour) is rearticulated as a mark of immorality: the immoral, unsuccessful, unworking, poor. Failure in America cannot be articulated except morally; a moral failure of the individual to individuate him/herself.
Similarly, ‘more/less’ is morally gauged – I would argue as a function of Capitalism’s capacity to render itself fractally through social life. More is good in America, resulting in (to us/me/Damian) a celebration of excess. Just too much stuff. Too much food. Damian reckons it’s a race-memory (well, not a race memory, but a culturally embryonic memory) from old Europe; of literally being scared that there wouldn’t be enough to eat. But at the same time, now, in NYC, as food almost literally spills into the streets from every store, there are posters up saying, “Please give food. 1 in 7 people in Manhattan are starving”; and middle-class professional people are living in the woods in New Jersey (google “Tent City”) because they cannot pay their rent. Food for thought. Too much food.
Visiting Time
Indiana is cold in February. A sort of dry cold cold. It actually sort of burns. We travelled out to Indiana to visit the actual town upon which our fictionalised town, Time, is based. Time is about three hours from Indianapolis, three hours from Chicago; a little dot in a big empty Republican flatness. In a way it wasn’t so geographically dissimilar to East Anglia with its big open skies and its distinct absence of anything remotely resembling a hill. But there was a lot more of it, with little towns such as our adopted Time dropped seemingly sporadiacally amongst the tundra. A lot of people, including our brave local taxi driver, Ralph, who trekked out with us and acted as our bemused, slightly scary guide and local security officer (‘yeah, I keep snakes, lots of ‘em’; ‘yeah I got a gun, lots of ‘em’; ‘yeah I taught my daughter to handle a gun when she was 5’; ‘yeah don’t get busted for drugs in Indiana, they’ll throw away the key’; ‘don’t worry people tend to point before they shoot’), have asked: How did we find the town? ‘Was it random?’ ‘Do you have family there?’ ‘Are you writing a book?’ ‘Did you just drop a pin on the map?’ All basically polite ways of saying ‘what on earth are you doing here? Even we don’t go here, and we live here.’
The answer is that it has been a mixture of economics, logic and intuition. We knew the sort of size community we were interested in – one that was really small – and it needed to be far enough away from anywhere else that you really couldn’t leave easily, especially if you were a child. It also needed to have a particular economic set-up: now basically farming but with an historic dependence on the railway for its existence. And it needed to be in the Mid-West, with Indiana for preference (determined to some extent by accent). Those factors limited the selection pool, and then Tamsin Joanna Kennard, who made the final choice, realised that actual Time really did have a massive old tree that had served as an historic (now non-existent) focal point. At that point, intuition takes over (the intuition of luck) and so a town ripe for fictionalisation becomes emergent.
Having spent some time there, I am still reflecting on what I learned. Certainly it really is isolated, but it’s a particular cultural mindset more than anything: a commitment to really traditional American values of individualism, somehow tied to the land, and reified in the Constitution. Being an American in Time is very dependent on owning a bit of Time, and nobody else has rights over you on that land. This also correlates with the both big and small ‘c’ conservatism that people seemed to use to orientate themselves. And then of course there was the minutiae of life, the specifics of which are so important for Real Circumstance’s work: the types of building; the cars, what people actually drink and eat; how much they earn; how far they have to travel to go to school; the racial demographic; what colour the sky is; how you hunt; what happens if you shoot somebody on your land; how far away the doctor is; what it might mean to be a child there, under a tree at the end of Time; the particular sort of cold. Details.
Reflections on the Improvisation Period and writing in Indiana
Dan writes…This entry is my reflection on the period of improvisation held in January at Lakeside Theatre. Firstly it was an absolute success. The nature of the work requires an incredibly dedication and craft from the actors with whom I collaborate and the cast were impeccable: clever, creative, imaginatively accurate, and hard-working. A lot of material was generated and imaginative avenues opened up.
I have talked before about the imaginative scale of the piece – I want particularly to comment on a notion of depth: the imaginative world of Under a Tree at the End of Time is ‘deep’ – that is, it goes down a long way within the lives of the characters, and it is this quality that separates it from my previous work, and most fundamentally gives it the possibility of imaginative scale as a theatrical piece. A comparison with Our Share Of Tomorrow’s process might be useful: then, the characters were fully and richly constructed but because they had no pre-existent relationships with each other, each could be built in isolation. Also, in Our Share of Tomorrow, the oldest character was 40, and was – in terms of the direction of the imaginative life of that character and the behavioural logic it entailed – relatively linear. In Under A Tree At The End Of Time, the oldest character is 65, so that’s 25 years more ‘life’ to make than I have ever made before, and in the same period of time. There are also more characters, and most significantly there is a series of very well-established pre-existent relationships that had to be developed and made real before the narrative proper – for want of a better word – might incite: a whole marriage between Caitlyn and Jimmy. There is Ray’s life with his daughter Robyn. There’s Ray’s life before everybody. In short, there is a lot of world; but the result is (and has been) that the work we generated in this period is deep: it carries within itself an imaginative weight and consequently is of a different scale – a vertical rather than a horizontal scale, where horizontal might index ‘scale’ in a purely performative sense (think massive set, chorus lines, hundreds of people). And it will make the finished work more interesting. More complex. More real.
There’s lots of work to do now. I am going to Indiana tomorrow to (amongst other things) visit the ‘real’ village of Time, to take lots of pictures, and to begin refining and writing the material we generated into the play that Under A Tree At The End Of Time will become. As I intimated, a lot of interesting avenues appeared through improvisation: now we start to put it all together.
Day Eight | Improvisation Period to build “Under a Tree at the End of Time”
Raymond last had contact with his daughter Caitlyn when he went to visit her in Dublin. She was four years old. They played together in the park. Thirty years later, in 1981, he sends her a letter. These are their letters.
Caitlyn,
I have carried you with me all of your life. I am getting older and you are now a woman. I remember you told me I spoke funny. Please write back.
Raymond
Dear Da – Raymond.
I got your letter…
I remember you put me on your shoulders.
I am having my own baby.
So much to say..
Caitlyn Ellis (I am married)
Dear Caitlyn,
You probably thought I’d forgotten you. Sorry for that, but it was very difficult with your mother and your uncle Conor always against me. I was very happy and surprised to get your letter. When I wrote I was hoping you’d reply but I did not think it was very likely. The time you were born was a very difficult time for me. I felt bad about a lot of things including not seeing you. I would like the chance to find out something about you. I am glad you remember some of what we did and I have never forgotten you.
I bet you haven’t changed.
As you wrote, there is so much to say. I will tell you what is important now. I live in a large house in Time, Indiana, a wonderful town in the most beautiful state in America. My father built the house and I have made changes. I lived here with my wife Constance but we are no longer together. I am very pleased to hear you are expecting a baby and that you are Mrs Ellis. I am sure you have chosen a strong man.
America has been kind to me and I am successful. I remember Ireland well and the challenges of living there. Perhaps I could help you, Caitlyn, in a way I could not before. There is opportunity here. I can support you and if Mr Ellis is a willing worker he will find himself welcome and prosperous. I know people and am well-respected. I know we do not know each other but I recognised myself in you and that is what I believe can make a home. This is my offer to you, plain and simple, as am I.
Da (Raymond)
Day Seven | Improvisation Period to build “Under a Tree at the End of Time”
What has become very clear to me is that the making of Under A Tree At The End Of Time is the biggest project I have undertaken by some distance. This is a designed outcome: processually the challenge is to absolutely make a step change in terms of scale and complexity from our previous work; but in direct comparison to my previous play, Our Share Of Tomorrow, the implications of that step change are becoming much more obvious.
In Our Share Of Tomorrow, essentially I had to build only three lives, who all lived in isolation; and the action of the play was instigated by their meetings. Similarly, the oldest character was 40, while the protagonist was only 16, creating manageable upper limits on ‘how much life’ had to be made. Under a Tree at the End of Time has a cast of five. The oldest character is 65; and the pre-existent relationships that exist before the inciting incident of the play (forgive my Mckeeism) are much more extensive with complex mutual histories that all have to be established with integrity. The outcome of all this is that the world is much, much richer; but it makes the task of making it more demanding. Finally the action of the play covers a much greater span of time in an imaginary sense (years rather than days) and is also more ambitious in terms of structure and in terms of what the audience actually see. So it’s probably a longer play as well. This is all ‘a good thing’, and I am learning and adapting actually ‘how to do it’ everyday.
Hard work though.
Day Six | Improvisation Period to build “Under a Tree at the End of Time”
A selection of Robyn and Ray’s early memories
1964, February 14th – Robyn is born.
1967 – Robyn is 3. She is wearing dungarees and sitting in front of the television, which is showing an episode of Tom and Jerry in which different cats arrive at the gates of heaven, there are three kittens in a bag. She is building a tower with wooden blocks, the red blocks are always at the top. Ray arrives home, walks through the front door and goes to the cupboard at the back of the house. Connie is cooking in the kitchen area, she has a big pan of potatoes. She is obviously agitated. She says;
“What are you doing?”
“Cleaning my boots.”
“Where have you been”
Ray keeps repeating that he is cleaning his boots. Connie will not leave him be. He moves quickly towards her and strikes her. The pan of potatoes crashes to the floor. The tower falls down.
1968 – Robyn is 4. Robyn, Ray and Connie are sitting around the dinner table. Connie is crying and saying something about Robyn. Ray is eating slowly and looking down at the table. Robyn puts her peas in a line.
1968 – Robyn is 4. Ray runs a bath for himself and Robyn. Robyn has to answer a question correctly to have bubbles in the bath. Ray washes himself under the shower head, Robyn uses a flannel to clean her face. Ray sings to Robyn, who learns the song and joins in. The song becomes the bath time song.
Early 1969 – Robyn is 4, nearly 5. Ray takes her outside to look up at the flag they have hanging on a pole that sticks out the side of the house. He teaches her the pledge of allegiance. It is cold and raining but they stay out there until Robyn has learnt it. Connie is inside but does not interrupt.
1969 – Robyn is 5. Robyn and Connie arrive home from the store. Ray is relaxing on the porch step with the dog. Robyn says, “Look daddy, I gotta popsicle.”, “Where did you get that from?”, “The man at the garage.” Ray takes the popsicle and drops it on the dirt. He tells Robyn she must never speak to that man, that he is a bad man and a liar. He tells her to put her head down and say “Yes sir,” if he ever tries to talk to her again. Ray storms indoors. He sees Connie talking to Robyn, Robyn shakes her head and kicks dirt over the popsicle.
1970 – Robyn is 6. Robyn asks Ray if he is God. He laughs.
1971 – Robyn is 7 – Ray drives Robyn. She attends Attica Elementary School. It takes 17 minutes to get there. Connie is working at the diner almost every day and night apart from Monday evening, when she is home and cooks dinner.
1972 – Robyn is 8. Ray is outside cleaning his truck. Robyn throws a bird out her bedroom window and it lands on the front of the truck. It has cardboard and popsicle sticks stuck to it.
Ray shouts;
“What are you doing?”
Robyn tries to explain that the bird didn’t have any wings and birds have to have wings so she was trying to make some for it, so it could fly again, because birds have to fly because that’s what birds do.
Ray stamps on the birds head, to put it out of its misery. He says;
“I can tell you, there are some things that you just can’t fix.”
1972 – Robyn is 8. It is Christmas. Ray cuts down a tree to put in the house. Connie and Robyn make paper snowflakes and other decorations to put on it. Robyn hangs all the red baubles in a vertical line down the front of the tree.
1972 – Robyn is 8. Robyn asks Ray what he did in the war. Ray shuts down the conversation. He says Europe is bad and that Indiana is the only place to stay.
Early 1973 – Robyn is 8. Robyn tells Ray that the dog should not be called Teddy as he is not a Teddy, he is a dog. Ray tells her that the dog is named after President Roosevelt. From then on Robyn refers to the dog as Dog.
1973, Summer - Robyn is 9. It is Saturday, it is hot and sticky. Ray is sitting at the table. Connie and Robyn are by the sofa. Connie hits Robyn round the head, because she will not wear the dress she has bought for her. Robyn nearly tore the dress in half. It is a pink and green summer dress with flowers on it. Connie starts to cry and runs upstairs, Robyn stays on the sofa. Ray says nothing.
1974, February 14th. Robyn is 10. Robyn gets in the truck after school. He says;
“Good day?”
Robyn says;
“Yes.”
The engine makes the whole truck shake and vibrate.
Day Five | Improvisation Period to build “Under a Tree at the End of Time”
Friday’s work was building towards a major improvisation between Jimmy and Caitlyn – the details of which I will have to keep relatively secret because I suspect it will make it into the finished play in one form or another – and it was a success; the culmination of an intense week of work, and leading us into the second week with a very solid foundation from which to build. This stage of making work is always exciting and stressful: whilst I have been working with the actors for some time building up to this period, you never know if they can actually deliver accurate improvisational work until they are required to do so – hence the first few days of the first week are something of a processual leap (a series of leaps) into the unknown as we actually see whether the company can work as required. And fortunately each actor has been a great success; and working fanastically hard. The material has included events that I never could have imagined, and this necessarily shapes the potential storylines of the ultimately finished piece.
So we enter the second week with great enthusiasm. We will be joined by the wonderful actor Lawrence Werber, who will be working with Jot Davies in the imaginary life of Ray. There is a processual neatness about bringing Lawrence in at this stage, as he has a degree of ‘absence’ in the knowledge of what ‘Ray’ was doing last week, which – due to the direction the story seems to be going – is going to be very useful. (SPOILER ALERT! How do you improvise losing your memory? By legitimately not knowing…shhh.) Dr Martin Holbraad’s contributions in the first week were both extremely insightful and helpful: his particular attention to how the dissemination of knowledge operates in this process of work strengthens and refines our approach: something Real Circumstance takes extremely seriously as we continue to experiment – in situ – to become the most effective playmakers we can be.
Day Four | Improvisation Period to build “Under a Tree at the End of Time”
Caitlyn and Jimmy live in the flat. Jimmy cuts down his hours at the betting shop in order to spend a lot of time with her. He buys her a picture of a vast landscape with a solitary tree in it. She is elated. Jimmy can’t believe that Caitlyn has never been to the cinema before, and takes her to see “An Affair to Remember”. He buys her a vintage red dress. At one point Jimmy wakes up and leaves: Caitlyn panics that he has left and they argue when he returns.
They spend Christmas together. Caitlyn buys Jimmy a copy of “Catcher in the Rye” and illustrates it with a drawing of a solitary tree with two people underneath it. She signs it Caitlyn Ellis – Jimmy’s surname. Caitlyn tells Jimmy she wants a baby. Jimmy, who has secretly started to gamble again, is shocked and says he is not ready. He says he loves her and Caitlyn is appeased. Time passes and their love deepens. Caitlyn shows Jimmy love. Caitlyn asks Jimmy to marry him. Jimmy says that first he wants to visit his mother’s grave. He goes alone to his aunt’s house to get the address. He travels to the coast with Caitlyn to a churchyard. Caitlyn introduces herself to Jimmy’s mum. Jimmy breaks down.
Robyn continues to experience Ray’s changing behaviour, over a period of two years. Robyn and Ray go hunting. Ray – who is a good shot – misses everything. One night Robyn sees Ray outside in the middle of the field in his nightclothes and she doesn’t understand. Robyn decides that her dad’s strange behaviour is because he misses her mum. She and her friend Oliver realise that if they spin themsevels round the tree they can go back in time and bring her mum Connie back. They practice on Dog. It seems to work. Robyn goes back in time and – elated – runs up to her dad’s attic where she is forbidden to go, to tell him that it’s ok, she can bring mum back. Ray has no idea who the person coming into the attic is, and pushes her down the stairs.
