We have pretty busy schedules when we arrive for these residencies. As a result, we rarely if ever have shared time when we aren’t working, and if we do we need to have someone incredibly organised to maximise it, or we all just spend it resting.
This evening, Tuesday night, was the only evening that all five of us were definitely free to go in together and see what’s what in Little Rock, the capital of Arkansas.
Joanna is on this tour with us, praise be. She is the still point in a chickenshed of ADHD. But she is also extremely organised and focused, and full of mischief. She has been taking and processing all the various recommendations we have been receiving and then shyly suggesting itineraries the like of which bitcoin millionaires pay lifestyle coordinators thousands for.
Today started with a long and really elucidating Q&A about working in this way on Shakespeare. It was given the time it needed. We were unsure about it at first, not really feeling any spotlight was needed on us, but actually it was clear very quickly how useful it is as part of a training for them to have people coming in from a different culture and saying things that back up their teachers. When I talked about the Laban efforts I’m using to differentiate Silvius from Jaques I could see one of the teachers pop out with pleasure. Of course though, of course. We teach through those who have taught us. Laban, Litz Pisk, Gabrielle Roth… Physical gifts to future actors recorded for all time in book or audio form. The people who helped form my craft such as it is – dead or alive… it would take a whole blog to write the lot, so I just mention these three who I never met but who helped an intellectual kid embody muscular texts with enough confidence and clarity that I can travel with my work now.
There are so many people who I am naming in my classes as the ones who taught me this or that. I couldn’t list one of them without listing all of them and I’ve started to realise that 25 years in this game really actually is a long long time. We pick up so much from teachers, from our fellows, from people we teach, from that squirrel we watched last week. But sometimes people who teach us write books that get famous, or go viral. And sometimes people we are friends with go stratospheric. It can happen and when it happens it happens fast.
Nobody is inherently special. But some people are lucky, persistent, well placed etc. I’ve aligned with a few of these people and I sometimes hear their names coming from my mouth as people who have taught me stuff – because they have and I’ll name them as often as the people nobody has ever heard of who have taught me stuff. Because I like to give credit where credit is due. But yeah, you can’t do twenty five years in this game without running across some humans who go big.
One of my mum’s boyfriends kept on going on about people he knew who were famous, to the extent my friends and I would laugh about it. But actually, he was my age when he was doing it. And if I wanted to be accepted by you and you were going into acting and I was having great sex with your mum, I might be tempted to drop some of the inevitable convergences I’ve had with people who are doing very well in the industry, to try and make you … like me more. It just made us laugh back then. Every time we named a band he said he knew their manager. One night we were going to a warehouse party and Pascal’s Bongo Massive were playing. “Oh, enjoy it. I know their manager,” he predictably said. No he fucking didn’t.
I went to see him on his death bed though, and saw him off at his funeral, and was sad to see him go. Bono didn’t show up, as I might have been led to expect as a teenager. But we are all capable of being full of shit and still good people.
It’s nice to talk about craft to future practitioners. Minnie managed to get Al Pacino to speak at Guildhall and she smuggled me and Jonjo in. I still refer to some of the things he said to the third year students at the time. But there I go again.
AlBarclay 