Thoughts flowing more freely today and words following, but still obstructed just because nothing is ever easy, least of all the process of creating something from scratch. Thankfully I’m not alone in this and my collaborator is more ordered and less inclined to trust the universe.
There are pricks on a page now. I made them. I’ve started to write on iPad and to make things more easily transferable to others as I still can’t find some of my early notes for this project which were scribbled in one of about eight identical yellow notebooks I saved from the bin on a set break.
Making work transferrable… there’s a skill I need to develop. I like to develop and respond, but in much of what I do the stuff comes out of somewhere squealing into the light. I pull it and dump it steaming in front of you. Then I immediately forget it cos I’m scraping for something else. So I’m trying to write a script for myself even though I’m 100% certain I’ll never come close to the words on the page when it comes to delivery. The points will carry. The pertinent information and facts. But this show I’m making is billed as “immersive”. My grandmother is billed as”immersive”, the loos in the Cirencester Rotary Club are likely billed as immersive. The word lost all meaning long ago and just became a shorthand for “we want you to buy this”. But I want to be able to respond if the audience does anything, and I know from experience that the tester audiences will be the only ones that do nothing honest. So I want to keep the frame loose, but I know that I’m probably in the minority as someone who is happier when I can’t control things.
I’ve been thinking about different ways of breaking things. Twisting and punching and bulging and crushing. The language of destruction and measurement is rich and lively in this project, and ripe for the plucking. I just want to make something fun in a remarkable place, but we also need to make something that has meaning. Something that hangs together. This place is about breaking things and so much has been broken recently. The edges and the limits – we have learnt much more than we expected about ourselves under pressure after what some might call an extended campaign of fear and isolation. Two years, we lost.
I still haven’t found the button. There’s a bit of time left, but without a button we are just showing off in an interesting place but in a way that’s ultimately empty and pointless. I trust my collaborators though and we only have a week of rehearsal which hasn’t even started yet. There’s a heart to this thing and we will reach in like Mola Ram and pluck the thing out and hold it up to be seen, somehow. We just need to know where it is.
With all these bouncing thoughts, I unscrewed my head and replaced it with my Factory head, and went off to walk the verse on Julius Caesar for a few hours in the evening as Mark Antony, as plebeians, as myself.
Joy. Now once more the heated bed. A varied day of thinking. I’m exhausted.
AlBarclay 