097 Walking and listening in the city (Soundwalk?)

Convener: Peter Cant

Participants: MARK TREZONA, DANIEL COPELAND, SHARON SEAGER, GREG WHEAD, Allen O'Leary, Griet Sponhove, Kate Woolmer, Catriona James, Martyn Duffy

Summary of discussion, conclusions and/or recommendations:

A walk in Plymouth
Walk through mindnight until noon
6 km ramble – noticing what you noticed. Coridoors and light
To make a performance that encapsulates the city at night – a sense of all those lives, machine noise, invisibility.
It sounds like poetry
MARINA AMBROMOVICH made a piece in 80s / 90s started with her lover one at each end of the GREAT WALL OF CHINA and walked to meet in the middle
By the time they met their relationship had gone kaput they knew they had to end it
The walkl in Plymouth mapped the China Wall onto Plymouth by a scale of??? 600:?
Guides took us on the route.

Road signs are pointless when there’s no traffic.

With all that stage lighting from the streetlamps.

The experience of the city through the sounds but also continuing the history and building on that

Start and then have others add experience. Collective memory.
Trusting the city sound
Sound like smell
Short circuits language/ words

Give people time to create their own emotions

An invitation to stop and stare. To wait.
The intense theatricality of contrasting space with sounds that don’t belong there.

The lady who records dolphins above and below water

Beating the bounds – They go around the boundary of the parish, to honour boundaries, to repeat

Time being defined by distance. Something primal.
Ramblers vs performance.
Walks: The London loop
It doesn’t have to be time bound?
Do it on separate tracks?
JUXTAPOSITION
One track at a time, a collection of pieces, that can start at any point, forming a symphony.
A character. A lost soul. Who could be our guide.
Sounds and smell circumvent our response to words.

If you use words to make suggestions you need to allow space. As you make a trail you leave something – people should make non verbal contributions.

Will you look at a map?

How people could contribute sounds during the wwalk. Not necessarily words? And that could be added for the next opnes.

Messages left by opther walkers / participants. Leave messages in chalk on the pavement.

Graffiti Tags. An hourglass symbol
A hermit
The hermit

Moments in which you could confront the city with fresh eyes.
To re-engage Stop and hear and see the layers on layers on layers.
Moments to STOP
But how do you bookend these moments of silence?

They liked the connection with the real wold. The car playing music ‘just for me’

Break walls. You think its ion your head?

Which takes it away from being… ??

Just the experience of walking that walk is RICH
Don’t load it up so full. Don’t cram it.
From the moment it starts, thoughts and imagionation get stirred up.
Breathing in moments. Allow them to land for us.

By looking at a square
Hearing of the events that happened elsewhere, in Yugoslavia, a square in Goldsmiths became that other square. I could see a grey empty square but I was described a student setting himself on fire.

THE EGG TIMER ON THE BENCH. Some minutes just to listen

The group ended with everyone listening to the sounds.
Everyone was so generous helping us with our project, listening, responding, nodding, thinking the thoughts in real time.
Thank you so much

Ps. Beware of the lady who told us she’s recording your conversations on the tube. She will make an entire theatre piece about you and you will end up sending her your pants in the mail

092 Making a show about claustrophobia and anti-social behaviour.

Convener: Sara

Participants: Sara, Katherine, Mandy and Lou

Summary of discussion, conclusions and/or recommendations:

Mini discussion about location of the show- in theatre spaces or on estates.

Also, the potential to commit noise pollution and get an anti-social behaviour order while making or performing a show in a residential area.

Ideas for the content of the show discussed.

Lou suggested looking at an exhibition of photographs recently featured in the weekend Guardian: pictures of children lit by their iPods, Wiis and computers.

Discussion on finding a good way to market a show with challenging content that sounds a bit like an issue based TIE show…

072 ‘Lost and Unfound: Exploring Experiences of Loss on Stage’

Convener: Amy Powell Yeates

Participants: People with much more wisdom than I, including a girl with a lovely orange cardy.

Summary of discussion, conclusions and/or recommendations:

This session was held as a means of generating ideas for a twenty-minute piece of theatre I am making through workshopping. The piece, which is in its very early stages, is at the moment concerned with the somewhat broad subject of loss. In the session, I was interested in experiences and observations of loss - in life and in the theatre.

Through references to plays and the film ‘Precious’, group members were very interested in the triumph of sincerity over sentimentality. In such pieces, humour, hope and bravery take the place of morbidity and regret, qualities that we reflected can so easily define a piece that deals with loss. A playwright in the group was concerned that the loss of his protagonist at the end of his play might produce an anti-climax. Unnecessary sentimentality.

So perhaps one challenge is in creating a piece that has no room for regret. It was suggested that on stage, one way of achieving this is by using the narrative as a character’s escape from loss. They might give their audience snippets about the loss that they are attempting to flee, but these are peppered throughout their diversion, which might be a less than tuneful song played on the guitar. You take comic refuge with them. You are not being made to feel upset for the sake of the theatre-maker’s desire to evoke a reaction.

Something that will really stick with me is the simple statement that, ‘loss doesn’t have to be tragic.’ You’d rather find a friend than lose one. But you’d rather lose an enemy than find one.

Or perhaps the productive that comes out of loss is the vacuum that it leaves behind. What might the need for this gap to be filled provoke? How far do you think about acting upon something unless there is a space, a hunger for it?


Actors, somebody pointed out, are often asked to ‘lose’ their natural habits. ‘Adopt a physical neutrality’ trainers or directors request. ‘Clear your mind’ the tai chi or yoga instructor asks. Take on momentary losses in order to find something else. Loss produces gaps for a replacement.

Maybe the thing that fills it isn’t productive. Maybe this represents another loss entirely. Loss producing loss. Or maybe the gap remains forever, its contents perpetually unfound.

But this is not the worst case scenario. What if you lose everything? The way we deal with loss, it seems, is by diverting our attention to what we haven’t. What does it look like, feel like to have nothing?

Maybe it’s funny. Loss can have you in floods of tears one second and laughing hysterically in the next. And it’s a relief to find solidarity with a character and their experience of loss.

Because most of the time, we try not to talk, or think about it.

Sometimes loss can inhabit new bodies, new realities. One group member had a picture of a friend that had recently passed away on her digital camera that she hadn’t backed up and it got deleted. She described the feeling as horrific. ‘It wasn’t even real, I couldn’t even hold it.’ Is this about responsibility? If you feel you might have been able to prevent a loss, your attempt to digest it is magnified or extended, or both.

It is not necessarily about the thing that is lost. But how, why and when.

Thank you so much to everyone who participated, I would welcome any other suggestions or comments to en07arpy at leeds.ac.uk

018 Staging A Last Tango in Paris

Convener: Lawrence O’Connor

Participants: Lawrence O’Connor, Dodger Phillips

Summary of discussion, conclusions and/or recommendations:

Themes discussed:

• STORY
• CHARACTERS
• AUDIENCE
• MORALITY
• ETHICS
• LOGISTICS
• OTHER STORIES
• PHILISOPHY
• TEXT
• POLITICS

CONCLUSION

Probably the most effective way to communicate what we agreed was beautiful and interesting about this story is to stage, in very truthful terms, the basis for and the process undertaken during this Open Space Session no. 18 to unearth what it is that we find of value in the story and, using snippets and extracts from the text/film, enable the audience to take that journey with us.

THE STORY

Components of the telling of The Story:

• Exploration
• Animality
• Animals have no need for…
• Worry
• Self-justification
• Living outside the moment
• Humanity
• Beauty
• Why it needs to be told
• Why it is difficult to tell
• Reactions to it
• Reactions, obstacles and challenges to the telling of it
• And those described in the following themes…

CHARACTERS

• Flawed***
• Worlds
• Inside (together)
• Outside
• Need to be understood
• By
• Themselves
• Each other

AUDIENCE

• Chooses to…
• Question
• Judge
• Reconcile
• Story accesses…
• Their personal experience
• Their images

MORALITY

• This is the personal world view that the story tellers and the audience will inevitably bring and that will enrich the giving and receiving of the story.

ETHICS

• This is the social & political external, cultural dimension that will inform and, at times clash with and contradict the personal morality of the story, its tellers and of the audience.

LOGISTICS

• Simply staged
• Lectern
• One actor
• Flip chart and large space on which the map of the story will evolve.
• Screen for projections of movie snippets

OTHER STORIES

It seemed helpful to look at other stories that include some of the elements that we wanted to address in this staging:

• The Piano & Blair/Iraq
• Flaws
• All the main characters are flawed**
• Voyeurism + revelation
• Key moments seen through…
• Slots
• Holes
• Gaps
• Self-destructive
• Privately
• Publicly
• Need to be:
• Discovered
• Understood
• Swimming to Cambodia by Spalding Gray
• Useful model for staging.

PHILOSOPHY

This is where we spent most of our time in discussion – it was a way of unfolding what the ideas were that made staging the story of A Last Tango Appealing and getting beyond the common perception of the story as only about ‘fingers, butter & bottoms’.

• Human evolution
• Existentialism
• Process
• Choice
• Possibility
• Beauty
• Risk
• Being Wrong
• Disapproval
• Nihilism
• Dark aspect
• Satre
• Typical, general perception
• Responsibility
• Light aspect
• De Beauvoir
• In the moment
• Absence of ‘worry’

TEXT

What will be the content…

· Extracts

o Screenplay/script

o Research about the original film/story, the making of it and the impacts of it having been made.

· Story of the story of…

o First encounters/impressions of A Last Tango’

o Finding beauty in the story/emotions/tears.

· Impro

o Engaging the audience

POLITICS/CULTURE

One of the things that will make the staging of the story of the story is interesting is the context in which it is told, the tensions between that and our current social politics and culture and the disconnect between them and the themes of A Last Tango’.

• Rules
• Other People
• Who are they anyway?? (we bearly know ourselves, how can we ever claim to ‘know’ other people???).
• Social
• ‘Inclusion’ it is a futile and sometimes destructive exercise to set out to attempt to ‘include’ everyone. People will include or exclude themselves based on their choice.
• Important to remember that, on one level, people are organisms.
• The importance of:
• Time
• Place
• The story staged must be personal and truthful to be a sufficient antidote to the challenges above and enable the interest & beauty to be revealed.