Confessions of a young Playwright

It Was

2011-12-23T03:37:00.001-08:00

“It was a year that answered some questions, but asked so many more.” New Years resolutions had to start somewhow, and Alice wanted hers to start “bombastically.”

“Bombastic” was a word she’d recently had on a vocab list. Now it cropped up everywhere. In her history exam, in conversation with her sister, who rolled her eyes with flair, even with her mother, who accepted the compliment about her roast chicken by raising her eyebrows and saying, “Bombastic is all fine and well, but is it Good, Alice?”
Alice took another bite, smiled and nodded. Her mother knew the chicken was good. It was the rock star of the dinner table for goodness sakes.

Maybe it had been slightly inappropriate for chicken, but Bombastic was a word that she was hoping to apply to 2012, so the resolutions would have to be bombastic, the paper (pink) equally so, the pen (which lit up) topped it all off, and now for the plans. Her godmother recently said something that worried her at St. Stephen's Day lunch. “Man plans and God laughs.” Her parents nodded knowingly as did the rest of the adults, and they continued chatting like a sigh, but two chairs from the head of the table, on the left hand side, Alice’s mind was being quietly blown. She hadn’t heard that before. “Man plans and God…” Wait – he doesn’t congratulate man? He doesn’t smile beatifically from on high at the gentle hopes and wishes of his favourite creation? He – I mean –surely he doesn’t chuckle! Doesn’t he tell regular jokes? With friends? Or listen to our jokes? Surely there are better things to laugh at than…

But the moment passed over parsnips, and nobody noticed Alice’s 16 year old shell of churning emotions to be at all out of keeping with your average 16 year old at a St. Stephen's Day lunch. She’d tried to get over it as well, and felt that she and God would just have to have a good sit down and talk about all this later and sort it out then, with a bit of privacy between them.

Of course, when she usually talked to God, in the warm murky quiet of eyes closed late at night, he was very accomodating. He’d bless who she asked to be blessed, and he’d listen with a gentle smile of I-know-better-patience (she couldn’t see it of course, but she was sure of it) while she complained about whoever had been annoying her that week, and asked for the strength and bravery to go on dealing with them, and to be kind to them, kind as Jesus, kinder than ever – God always listened, and took note of it. She was sure of it. Picturing him mocking her – of course, maybe it wasn’t the kind of laugh that dismisses you, maybe it was more of a gentle, loving chuckle. Like when she told her parents that she’d die if she didn’t get to go to the American girl Karen Kugelmass’s fourth of July party on a boat instead of her great aunt's birthday, which fell on the same night. Their chuckle was frustrating, of course, but didn’t seem to be mocking her. It was a kind of extension of the smile that God gave when she complained. “I understand that you have feelings but I know better” it said. God’s giggles must have just been an audible version of that.

But here she was, and that patient smile bore down on her like the sunshine in Spain, the kind that makes you sweat. The writer’s block of resolutions. Perhaps God reads these out to the angels at Christmas parties, if he has them, perhaps he puts them in fortune cookies for his friends, and everyone reads and chuckles. Chuckles kindly, that kind and violent chuckle.

“Alice!” Her mother called down to her. New Years dinner. Following closely on its heels, she would go to Chloe Alexandre’s big house for a New Years party, where Chloe would toast all the friends, and cry, and Alice would cry, looking around at the ten or so people who she loved like family. Years later, she would run into Chloe at Oife’s mother’s funeral, and Chloe would look rich, but cheap, hurtling face forward into a life where she and Alice would have nothing in common. She’d frown at Alice too, in her second hand clothing with her smug smile. Both felt as though they’d never known the other, both thought the other was dressed inappropriately for the occasion, and they both decided that they didn’t much care if they ever saw each other again. In fact, to avoid the awkwardness of a second time measuring up each other’s hair and outfits, they sincerely hoped this would be the only meeting.

After Chloe finished the toast where she would cry, Alice's second best friend, Lisa Anderson, would hug her, and later that night would also cry in the bathroom, because her boyfriend Mike was ignoring her, and together they would sing “I will survive” at the top of their lungs until Mike, with the arsenal of the four other boys at the party, would stand outside of the bathroom door and begin knocking and joking. Lisa would brush the tears from her eyes and go out there and ignore then kiss Mike. Later, much later, Alice would be hurt, though she’d never admit it to anyone, that she hadn’t been invited to Lisa’s wedding, even though she had never met the groom.

With a final glance in the mirror, smoothing down the hair she’d spent over an hour straigthening and readjusting the eyeliner she’d applied according that girl’s instructions on youtube, Alice glanced at the page. “New Years Resolutions” was underlined neatly at the top, and “It was a year that answered some questions but asked so many more” followed soon after. What did God think? Could he see her now? Did he mind?

Picking up a pen - she scrawled it quickly - “Kiss Ryan Johnson.” The pen lit up. With a flourish. There. She’d written it down. Laugh it up, big guy. She folded the paper once and left the room. She traced her hand along the banister that she knew like a limb. She thought they were watching her. She was standing down the angels and their fortune cookies, the Christmas Parties and the sighs and the patience. She had presented all of the secret spirits who could read her thoughts and all that she wrote with something she wanted. With her secret want. As she walked into the kitchen, she’d thought she would feel bombastic, whatever that meant. Instead she felt like a beggar at God’s door, with a pen instead of a pale.

talking to a star

2011-11-04T11:53:00.000-07:00

by Michael Burkard

but how could you move
again if you wasn't sure
it was time

well it wasn't time but
i had to trust something

what did you trust

a star -- do i tell you
about the star

tell me

well one night i was talking to a star
and just when i ended
another star fell

so you're moving
because a star fell

a few minutes later
another star fell

so two stars fall
so what
it's august

it was august

it was august
and two stars fell
-- not because you was
talking

not because

so why are you moving

because a star fell
and a few minutes later
another star bit
the sky and fell

Hoarding Your Past Self

2011-09-14T03:23:00.000-07:00

Coming up to my final performance of "Like You Were Before" in the UK until 2015 (I can't believe I just wrote that down. I guess now I've committed to it) on Friday, I have been thinking about our past selves. All the baggage, layers upon layers of ourselves that we deal with (and in my case, memorise then perform.)

It seems like several areas of my life have been contributing to this thinking. Yesterday, feeling unexpectedly ill when I was meant to be tutoring and then rehearsing, I decided to rest for a couple of hours in bed and watch my first episode of the American reality television show "Hoarders."

It's a border-line dangerous premise for a show - taking a psychological problem and trying to solve it (at least on the surface) in two days time by hiring a crack team of personal organisers along with the very short term help of a psychologist. Not least because the people featured on the show are often from poorer parts of the United States and can rarely afford to keep seeking the professional help that will keep their hoarding at bay in the long term. The episode I saw supported this thinking by rote - of the two hoarders, the one with more disposable income was able to make a dent in her long term problem through continuing to seek help, whereas the more willing of the two but less affluent went from a sparkling home at the end of the episode to a paragraph that said that she had not continued to get professional help and that her hoarding was back and worse than ever.

Also. Watching "personal organisers" grapple with somebody who has a psychological condition. I mean oh my gawd. Really? Is that really what television is? And yet I was thoroughly entertained by the program and (she says guiltily) may well watch it again in the future.

(Oh gee. Oh man.)

And then this morning, with the initial goal of making a sketch to start my day, I came upon an old sketch book of mine filled with mostly terrible snippets of writing. I had the impulse to tear them out and start the sketch book fresh, but then... I couldn't. They were layers, small photographs of me - cloying, clichéd, and doing my best. This past made me pause - I lost all impulse to make something new and instead began reading.

So weirdly - Here's something I just found in that old sketchbook. This may be one of my very very few attempts at verse, and possibly with good reason:

There's a place in a town that's not far away
A place riddled with saucers, old socks and decay.
The place looks like many I'm sure you may know,
Circled daily by a family of musical crows.
Nestled deep in the valley, overlooked by a hill,
A few city landmarks, the brewery and mill.
Where would we be, in what kind of plight,
Without the dear presence of the town's garbage site?

It's filled with old treasures and once loved beer bottles.,
Food gone to waste, old airplane models
And things you forgot about, your future in tow,
Or things you remember and decide to let go.
Object upon object, feeling sad and dejected.
Seagull upon seagull, hungry and infected.
It's a sad lonely world for an old piece of junk.
Enough to put belongings in a bit of a funk.
Unless of course you consider one little spectre -
That man we call Joey, the garbage collector.

Joey sees garbage as more than just rubbish.
He's read torn up letters good enough to publish.
On a day things are slow he'll comb through the piles,
He'll trudge through a smell that spreads miles and miles,
And sometimes find something of value or worth
And sometimes just relish in the sweet stench of mirth.
His wife doesn't like it, she calls him a "hoarder"
But Joey just calls himself "King of the Sorters."

He's sorted through old papers, laundry and bills,
He's taken home boxes, and church bells and tills.
His wife, who's named Nancy, gets cross as a skunk.
She shrills, "What will we do with all of this Junk?"
But Joey just chuckles and smiles like a martyr.
Her tone may be sharp, but his wits are sharper.

And so it was...

2011-08-28T17:21:00.000-07:00

Well here we go. On July 28th I set myself the challenge of writing in my blog every day for the next month. It is now August 28th and, excepting a couple of slip-ups, by and large I met the challenge. It's nice to mostly keep a promise you made yourself. Even a small promise. It makes you wonder what else you can do.

Yesterday was the last day of our artistic programme for Edinburgh 2011. Today at 4pm there was a townhall-style meeting to help plan for Forest's future. Some really constructive ideas were thrown around - including an idea of mine that Harry Giles came up with a catchy name for - Forest Champions. Based off of the marathon model, a group of 50 people or more agree to do their best to raise £1000 for Forest by writing to 100 of their friends and families, explaining what Forest Café is, how unique it is and how important and unlikely it is in the Edinburgh arts ecology, and then asking them to give £10 each. If 50 people can harness this generosity and care from the people who love them most, care could buy the building.

Yesterday I had some bad news which I hadn't heard about yet because of the all consuming nature of working in Edinburgh during the festival. Jack Layton, Canada's major hope for a political leader on the left, died of cancer. I don't think of politicians as being able to die of a disease and this loss in particular shook me to my core. It may have been exhaustion, it may have been the wine, but when someone told me about it at Forest's closing party last night and I stared at them in disbelief, I started to cry.

Perhaps I know that we're stood at the centre of a shift or a struggle because suddenly simplistic binaries - "good guys" and "bad guys" seems like a real thing. Those who fight on the side of freedom of expression, kindness, generosity and equality, versus those who prioritise greed, money, fear, and exclusivity. Relatively recently I would have scoffed at how reductionist this thinking is, but now there's just no other way of discussing it. There are those who are caring and there are those who are selfish, and we all have the capacity to be both and are constantly being asked to choose between the two. It's a tremendous pressure. But to my mind Jack Layton was one of the good guys. Forest Café are the good guys. The building is huge and beautiful and overpriced and unsellable. It is in the centre of the city. Price Waterhouse Cooper have decided it should be empty for the unforeseeable future rather than occupied by a rent-paying community arts space. Those who see this emptiness as a fact of life rather than a perversion of a deeply flawed and unsustainable system are stuck in so deep with the bad guys that they can't see the Forest for the timber.

It's been a long and transformative month. I've had barely any time off and felt privileged when I've managed to sleep over 6 hours. I've worked in the knowledge that I personally won't be coming back to Bristo Hall next year, regardless of what happens, because of commitments I've made in Canada for next summer. I've given myself over to every moment in this knowledge and it's never occurred to me that this should lessen my desire to fight. Forest Fringe and Forest Café have shown me the beauty of collective ownership - of being part of something, and of it belonging to you entirely, but not exclusively. The hard work starts now. And I'm up for it. Because it's not just a building any more. It's a principle. It's one of those rare moments when you know the good guys from the bad guys. This is when you fight until you can't. And this is where we find our metal.

Forest Café...

2011-08-27T20:16:00.001-07:00

Is not over, it's fighting. Money isn't the only kind of influence, and together we will rally to save this space.

In other news, I finished the HInterland today and it was unbelievably wonderful. I don't want to tell you what happened during the last canto for fear of making you jealous, but let's just say, it paid back the time and effort I put in. And considering how much time and effor that is, it is no small achievement.

Live Art Speed Date

2011-08-26T20:41:00.001-07:00

This evening I partook in the revelry that is a large scale Live Art Speed Date - meaning - several artists imparting 4 minute long one-on-one experiences on drinking audience members. Much like an actual speed date, but with art.

My piece consisted of me and a stranger typing to each other in person in the middle of a busy room. It created a nice quiet space for the two of us, because of the human obsession with reading, writing and computer screens, which it turns out can kind of drown out anything else. Below is one of my favourite and most unexpected chats of the night. The audience member's responses are in bold. I saved the conversation as...

The Eternally Youthful Man

Why hello. Do you come here often?

I wish I did.

And why's that?

I grew up here, It was during the war, We didn't have much, but we were happy.

Which war is that?

The first world war of course.

Are you a ghost? A typing ghost?

No, but since….. since it happened, I've never grown older.

Ah I see. How did you not grow older?

There was something in the canister. We didn't want to touch it, but she told me to, and I couldn't resist. everyone else died instantly. I was the only survivor.

Who was she?

I don't know exactly. She only came out at night. We saw glimpses of her sometimes, flitting throughout the shadows.

Wow. What did she look like?

Very young. But something different. She obviously came from another time.\\

Are you tired of being young?

It is a curse. But of course, normally it is a debt, which must be repaid with old age. Hell is an eternity of anything.

Gee!

Also, I wrote this in the café earlier today while waiting for my nachos...

2011-08-25T21:38:00.001-07:00

I want you to know something.

I want you to know that I just had a free massage that made me remember my muscles again while listening to an artist whisper in my ear through headphones about islands and the sea.

I want you to know that I am the first person to order the brand new addition to the menu – Greek Salad Nachos – and that when I ordered them Alex, the volunteer who invented the dish, cheered.

I want you to know that three nearly identical toddlers have just been rolled in nestling nearly identical strollers, all blonde hair and wide eyed, and when they entered the café they looked at everything and it was new.

I want you to know that I keep running into friendly people who distract me from what I’m trying to tell you. What am I trying to tell you?

I think I’m trying to tell you that the room I sit in, catching eyes, admiring kilts, distracted by loud music, clammering plates, hand painted murals,

I want you to know that I don’t dare to imagine this room empty.

I want you to know that I hate the idea of the cleaners, who would laugh derisively as they paint white over a mural and gather and toss the bits that mattered to us because they don’t matter to them.

I want you to know that I despise the men in suits, figures and sums dancing through their minds as they examine what comes to a place that has been loved.

I want you to know that this is a space that has known generosity – that has known work and effort and reward and kindness, and that the first time I saw a performance in Bristo Hall, the walls sang.

I want you to know that this a place where we have all lived. Its foundations are now infused with a generosity of spirit that echoes its rooms like a bell.

I want you to know that this building knows kindness. And this kindness has made it strong, has furnished it with armour. It will fight you. It is a sullen teenager with piercings through its nose and pink tipped hair. It is a quiet student taking posters off the wall and putting new ones up. It is a bearded man in a kilt playing the ukulele with a long feather reaching up from his tam, reaching up to the sky. It is a child, it is an older man, it is a group of friends discussing theatre over a pot of tea for five. It is a man named Kenny taking out the recycling at 5 in the morning. It is a woman re-stocking beer in a long skirt with tatoos up her arm. It is a poet smiling when the crowd responds as though he is a rock star. It is a rock star. And it won’t let itself be bought. It won’t let itself be painted over. It will rail against your plans and figures. It will kick back and it will fight and it will howl and yell and trhow things and then you will know the arrogance and blindness of trying to buy life.

You are facing down an army of human kindness and devotion. This fighting spirit will shine like a diamond in the city – the glint, the sparkle of a place that is loved and loves.

I am a hero legend

2011-08-25T21:36:00.001-07:00

It's 5:36am. Birds are chirping. I usually associate this time of the day with being asleep or catching a plane.

The Saturday Poem

2011-08-25T07:49:00.000-07:00

Yesterday there was no chance of writing a post, not because of a lack of energy (although I was tired, I still tried to sit down with the computer at the end of the day), but because my computer had run out of power and I lost my adaptor. So I am sorry, but please know that I meant to post and had a good many things to post about. I'm going to do my best to recreate what that post might have been here.

Yesterday I saw a poet named John Glenday as part of the Golden Hour who read a beautiful poem about birds called "Be Swift." When I told him I had a friend who I thought would really love the poem because he loves birds, John really kindly gave me the poem he'd been reading from and made an inscription for my friend. Sadly, in all the madness of last night's change overs, the poem has been temporarily misplaced, but luckily not before I copied it out so that I can email it to the recipient.

In the meantime, because I didn't get his permission to publish the poem here, I thought it would be nice to include a poem of his that was recently published on the Guardian. It's Friday and the poem is called The Saturday Poem, but the Edinburgh Festival is often one step ahead of itself anyway, so it seems appropriate.

Tonight is the Daniel Kitson benefit. I will post at the end of the night/ at about 5 in the morning, and when I write that post, I will know that I am a hero legend who really does do their best to post every day. (Extenuating adaptor type circumstances exempt.)

The Saturday Poem
by John Glenday

(the can opener was invented

forty-eight years after the tin can)

When you asked me for a love poem,

(another love poem) my thoughts

were immediately drawn to the early days

of the food canning industry –

all those strangely familiar trade-names from childhood:

Del Monte, Green Giant, Fray Bentos, Heinz.

I thought of Franklin and his poisoned men

drifting quietly northwest by north

towards the scooped shale of their graves

and I thought of the first tin of cling peaches

glowing on a dusty pantry shelf

like yet-to-be-discovered radium –

the very first tin of cling peaches

in the world, and for half a century

my fingers reaching out to it.

What does a producer do?

2011-08-23T18:59:00.001-07:00

Today I was on a Producer's Panel hosted by Fuel and Ideastap. The three other producers on the panel were all really inspiring women whose producing I admire, so I felt very privileged to be speaking with them about a subject I often find so complicated until I'm doing it. Below is the text for my provocation. It was a funny question to have to answer, but to be honest, right on the money. I often ask it myself.

I set this panel’s question as my facebook question and here were some answers I got. No producers responded to my status.

What does a producer do?
- I think they make stuff
- They make it all happen!
- They bring it.
- Steal money from old ladies?
- They always break your heart in the end.
- Allow an artist not to be a producer

Back in December 2006 I had a meeting with the now artistic director of a theatre in the UK. I told them that I had been invited to curate a series of events at the Forest Café in August of 2007, that I was considering taking it on as my Practical Dissertation for the Master’s I was doing, but that I was terrified by the idea of producing. I had no idea what I was doing. They looked at me for a moment, leaned forward, and said, “Debbie, let me let you in on a secret. Nobody knows what they’re doing. 90% of Producing is Blagging it.”

To do list – August 23rd, 2011
- Speak on a panel for Fuel – try to answer the question “What does a producer do?”
- Speak on a panel for Central about “Making the case for Innovation.” Try to make the case.
- Pay STK Airport Invoice
- Deposit donations
- Update Budget and check on running totals
- Check-in on Total Theatre bookings for Tania’s piece.
- Move chairs.
- Pick up rubbish and keep lounge/office tidy
- Upload videos for “Save the Forest Campaign” and post them on youtube
- Proof read “Save the Forest” press release and send back to Ryan Van Winkle
- Count chairs and consider seating configuration for Daniel Kitson benefit
- Respond to emails
- Help Lucy with her installations
- Chase Gary about invoicing me.
- Check on Ira and Andy.
- Check on myself.

I became a producer because I wanted to see an alternative to the way that work was presented at the Edinburgh Festival, and I was given an opportunity to help create that alternative. Aside from this Artistic Director’s early advice, nobody told me how. My only perspective was the perspective of an artist. And this is where my advice comes from. Dare to imagine the best possible context and circumstances in which to present your work. Imagine the person who would facilitate this project. What traits would they have? Would they be warm and supportive, hardlined and organized, flexible but structured? Once you’ve answered these questions, go out and try to create that context, try to be that person. Here’s a guarantee - you will fuck up a bit. You won’t always succeed. You will probably put more things than you can complete on daily to-do lists. Focus on those individual tasks deliberately, one thing at a time. And then just keep going until somebody notices what you're up to. Do this for long enough and eventually you will be asked to be on a producer’s panel. And you’ll know what a producer does. Just about.

A thousand years of Awesome

2011-08-22T17:23:00.000-07:00

Here's a tip for you - Today I saw Beowulf- A thousand years of baggage today at Assembly Halls and it was really really good. As Freya, a Forest Fringe veteran put it, "You'd have to lack a bit of a soul not to enjoy that show." There was a moment where I looked around the room and saw face after face of nearly awe-struck grinning. But I should also be clear and say that the show is not mindless entertainment - it has a very cerebral angle if you're looking for it - and a lot of singing and furious rock. It's like watching a university seminar turned into a hard rock concept album. It's just the greatest. See it before it leaves the UK.

Today was my day off and I'm still really really tired. I think it's because I furiously tried to pack in as many day off activities today as possible - I made my own lunch, I did laundry, I watched two episodes of South Park, I went to see a play, I met up for coffee with a friend, I went vintage shopping with another friend, I lost my phone, I had a cheese and tomato toasty, I saw a film, and now I'm just as tired as I have been after a full day of producing and helping run the venue. This was a fast paced day off. Time for bed now. I'm on two back to back panels tomorrow - so if you're planning on attending either the Fuel "What does a producer do?" or the Central "Making the case for Innovation" panels I will see you there. In other news, tomorrow will also be my first chance to see Sharon Smith's show and Action Hero's show. See you tomorrow, Edinburgh!

En Français, s'il-vous-plaît

2011-08-21T15:44:00.000-07:00

So today was Edgelands - the alternative conference model set up by Andy and Hannah Nicklin - and I must say it was by far the most inspired and motivated I think I've felt by a conference-type-model. (Which to be fair, isn't difficult, considering I usually hate conferences.) But this event was, genuinely intellectually and emotionally stimulating, and forced me to take positions or at the very least question positions on some of the central tenets of producing and making theatre. It just heightened my awareness or something. Always a good thing.

Andy asked me to do a little five minute performance to help open the day. I'm very glad I did, but I'll admit that having to come up with a new piece (even a short one) in the midst of co-directing Forest Fringe was beginning to seem like a nigh-on impossible task. The idea, when it did come, which was late, was gently drawn out by Harun and then articulated by Laura McD, the Fierce co-directors, and this experience really made me understand why they're such good producers. Thank frickin' goodness. Also special thanks to Pat Ashe for agreeing with Laura that the idea was a good one, to Tania El Khoury for extensive/creative proof reading, and to my computer for running out of battery before I could finish working on the inferior idea I'd been in the middle of typing up earlier yesterday.

So below for your perusal is the text for the little performance I gave at Edgelands today. This text was delivered as a simple speech en français with English surtitles projected on screen. I'm including it below in French only - because I'm a precocious bastard like that - but also because I'd like you to check out Google Translate if you can't speak French and you're interested in what it says, just to give you a distance from the text that could maybe approximate experience the performance itself. If by any chance you were there and you want a precise copy of the subtitles, you can reach me through the Forest Fringe website and I will send them along.

Amusez vous bien!

Bonjour. Et Bienvenue

Je suis là pour vous racontez une histoire étrange.

Il y a deux jours, je suis allée voire un écrivain et comédien Américain, un démocrat, un intellectuel, un type bien admiré parmis notre entourage.

Il se moquait des immigrants qui ne pouvaient pas prononcer les noms des produits à Tesco.

Il est vraiment très drôle.

Mais je n’ai pas trouver cette blague amusante.

Et pour la premiere fois j’ai compris pourquoi les artists sont parfois accusés d’être élitistes, et ne comprennent pas les masses.

J’ai décidé de vous raccontez cette histoire en français.

J’ai laissé cette partie vide parce que je peux.

Peut être quelques uns de vous parlent le français. D’autres peuvent un peu me comprendre.

Si vous parlez français, vous avez alors déjà deviner que je ne suis pas française. Je suis Canadienne. Mais je ne suis pas canadienne francophone.

Je parle couramment le français comme résultat de ma bonne éducation et parce que mes parents ont bien payé pour des petits excursions culturels pendant que j'ai agrandis.

Je comprends si vous pensez que je suis un peu chiante.

J’ai vecu à Paris.

Je suis aussi une type qui ajoutent parfois des petits mots en français en parlant anglais.

Je ne fais pas ça par exprés. Et je comprends que c’est très, très chiant.

D’ailleurs, je voulais que vous me trouvez insupportable pendant ces cinq minutes.

Parce que je parle une langue que vous ne comprennez pas. Cette langue n’est pas ma langue maternelle. C’est le résultat d'un combinaison de privilege et d’effort.

Ou bien peut être vous comprennez cette langue, mais vous me trouvez un peu trop fière, même prétentieuse.

Parce que c’est comme ça que beaucoup de gens perçoivent l’art.

Et si vous parlez une langue qu’ils ne comprennent pas, il faut au moins que vous soyez au courant des conséquences.

Parle Bien

Parle avec du précision

Ne vous moquez pas d'eux.

Ne les insultent pas.

Et garder l'espérance que si vous parlez assez longtemps, ils finiront en vous comprendre.

Edgelands tomorrow

2011-08-20T16:27:00.000-07:00

So for now check out this video of Amanda Palmer singing "Ampersand" at Forest in the amazing fundraising gig she threw for us two nights ago... This is one of my favourite songs of hers. Such a kind thing to do and a wonderful moment. We've got Daniel Kitson being similarly kind and wonderful next Thursday. I'm very excited.

David Sedaris

2011-08-19T17:06:00.000-07:00

So today I had the privilege of going to see David Sedaris at the EICC, on break from the Forest Fringe malarky. I've obviously heard him several times on "This American Life" and it always sounded like he had great control and ease in front of a crowd from the recordings, so it was very exciting to see him in person.

It was a strange experience - I wasn't disappointed - it was probably what I was expecting. He read stories, he bantered wittily with the audience, he very kindly opened the floor to questions at the end of the gig. But I have to admit that something about it did rub me the wrong way. Now I am the last liberal to accuse other liberals of elitism, but Sedaris, despite his intelligence and wit, did seem to give off an air or privilege in his stories and descriptions that made me a little ill at ease.

From his chat, he seemed to be a real citizen of the world. He flies constantly. He lives in London now and has had stints of living in Paris and Tokyo. So along with New York, I guess he's got all the major cities covered. He told us he'd just moved to a house in West Sussex with his partner where he has become the resident bin man because of litter thrown along the side of the highway. I remember once hearing about Jerry Seinfeld making a joke when he was trying to get back into standup where he said, "Being rich isn't the greatest. My life is still hard. But it's probably a lot easier than your lives, so at least I've got that."

If you live this kind of high flying existence, I think a little bit of perspective on how high flying it is becomes necessary or else the audience begins to quietly resent you. But what really got me was that he made a couple of jokes about service people who worked at jobs in London where they had to explain non-sensical product names but couldn't speak English very well. "Why did you hire the one person who couldn't pronounce the word Yoghurt at a Yoghurt stand? Was there really no one else to take this job?" And it was with that joke that I couldn't help but wonder how well he understands the political situation in the UK. Anti-immigration is so rampant in this country and a lack of consideration or patience for people earnestly trying to learn the language is so endemic, I just can't imagine he would knowingly poke fun at them if he were aware of its danger. This is some of the scariest and most dominant rhetoric going around the country at the moment.

When asked if people often came back to him to complain when he wrote his trademark arch portraits of them in magazines he said, "I don't really target readers." What I'd never realised about David Sedaris from listening to him on the radio but took from seeing him live, is that his style is unbelievably vitriolic, focussing on the tiny irritations of being human and having to deal with other humans. At points he would bring this across with an inspiring degree of accuracy, and just like a well written episode of "Curb Your Enthusiasm" I would laugh at both of our character flaws. But nestled among the gems were moments that seemed to lack perspective or self awareness. I'm all for a comedian offending absolutely everyone, as long as they know they're being offensive - but there were times during the Sedaris show where I felt that he was quite out of touch with how sickeningly glamorous descriptions of his life sounded, and with how many readers are also Eastern European grocery clerks. In a country so poor that people riot for a pair of jeans, it was irritating to hear Sedaris muse about whether he preferred Tokyo to Paris.

And yet, asked if I enjoyed the gig, I'd say I did, very much, thank you. Asked if I'm glad that I saw it, I'd say that I genuinely am. I just don't want to feel guilty about liking it, dagnamit! I don't want to think that an American democrat writer could actually be guilty of what republicans tell us they are guilty of. That they could be out of touch with the people. I mean, am I seriously talking about "The Folks?" The mythical "folks?" And yet I thought about them. And worried about them. And didn't think they deserved to be mocked for not being able to pronounce the word "Yoghurt."

But. If we're being reasonable here. I'm not going to speak for "The Folks." I'm going to speak for myself. When Sedaris hit on a universal, which was often, the show was a delight. When he mentioned his ex-pat jaunts coupled with criticism of people who don't speak English, I felt alienated by his sense of humour and his observations. In all fairness, he did couch these comments somewhat, mentioning that the fact that he is fluent in this country's language is simply an accident of birth, and telling a sweet anecdote about his very strict former french tutor. But maybe it's just that I've found a line where my sense of humour loses priority. Maybe it's just that I think that making any immigrant joke in the UK today that is not unbelievably self aware is nearly equivalent to a white comedian making a racist joke without being self aware in the 1960s. It's lazy and it's dangerous and there are real and violent opinions and movements that would relish hearing a woman mocked for mispronouncing "Yoghurt." The ideological machinery is heavy. Operate with caution, care and a lot of perspective.

Taxi Driver

2011-08-18T20:13:00.000-07:00

Taxi Driver: So what time will ye be gittin up fer work, then?

Me: Around ten AM.

Taxi Driver: You'll get a solid six hours, then.

Me: (Something unintelligible and I hope chatty and kind.)

Taxi Driver: I'll be fast asleep when yer gittin out of yer bed.

Me: Have a good night.

Taxi Driver: Aye. Enjoy yer festival.

Me: Yeah, see you... (about to say "later" but then realised how ridiculous that sounded.) Have a good night.

Taxi Driver: You too.

I get out of the taxi and walk to the wrong door. I know the taxi driver has seen me do this. I walk to the right door. I also waited a good forty seconds before realising that I needed to give him an address when I first got into the taxi. Forest Fringe is definitely underway.

My DJ Debut

2011-08-17T19:43:00.000-07:00

Let's start with the grand narrative of the night, shall we? And this may move us on to the moment where I was wearing a fascinator that Laura McD said reminded her of fireworks, hunched over my computer, while a drunken man got down on one knee and proposed that I play "Everywhere" by Fleetwood Mac. Let's rewind to about 11:30pm and give this wonderful night a bit of context, shall we?

Andy and I had been brainstorming a fun night for our first party of the festival, and after throwing around a few ideas that were either too taxing or not quite awesome enough, we decided to throw a "Paper Disco" - a party where people would make paper cranes and other kinds of origami from old unwanted flyers and then dance around a bit. Why we thought origami and dancing were complimentary activities, nobody knows, but making art out of publicity does seem to contain a certain degree of subversiveness that is key to the ethos of Forest Fringe. And this, if anything, was a good reason to make a disco out of paper.

So the tables were set up, the flyers had been sourced, the lights were down, the dicso light was up. And yet - barely anyone was there. A few hitches had come up - the woman who was meant to teach us to make paper cranes is in a show about paper cranes herself and seemed to give up on her drunken and needlessly slow pupils relatively quickly. She's probably just a little tired of paper cranes. The paper plane flying contest that Andy had started with the best of intentions and through a sudden burst of energy flittered away like the first flight of the aerodynamically unsound paper airplane I constructed, before I remembered that the boys back in school had taught me how. And no doubt because he had been in the building since 9am, Andy was playing relatively ambientnmusic, so that punters seemed to be coming in, looking confusedly at our terrible flyer origami attempts (picture row after row of poorly folded boats with ""Four Stars" printed on them.) and then swiftly leaving. Myself, Harun and Tania decided that what the party needed was a little bit of upbeat music, and I was put in touch of making that happen.

I approached the dj booth tentatively - at first with a request - but it was immediately obvious that my co-director was in need of a break after his 16 hour day before he could bring himself to play the best of the 80s. So heart in mouth, I suggested that I take over the DJ responsibilities - and this is when my evening really began.

I played Fan Favourites at first, trying to hype up the mood of the Folding. My first song was "Everybody's Going to Be Happy" by the Kinks - which I played again later on, and I brought in some Paul Simon and even a bit of Elton John and Elvis Presley to keep it upbeat. There was one couple quietly sitting/dancing in the corner, and a couple of Spanish men who would occasionally saunter over to the computer to try and chat or to see what I was playing and why. I noticed some stragglers come in and phone friends, but they looked at the empty dance floor and quickly left. For one beautiful moment I played swing and our technical director and bartender danced to Duke Ellington and some other joyful number, but things were still relatively slow.

Then suddenly, it seemed to pick up all at once. It began with the sitting/dancing couple who were on their way out coming over to present me with a beautiful fascinator fashioned entirely out of flyers that they had decided the DJ should wear. I am convinced that this paper fascinator contained magical DJ-ing powers now possibly lost forever to mankind. I began wearing it and the very simple rule of playing whatever made me want to dance was wonderfully clear. Then Harun came over and complimented me on my set, buying me a glass of wine and watching me make my song selections - and the first group of youngsters arrived and staked a claim on the dance floor. Harun and I became both anxious and excited about the possibility of this group of whippersnappers. They were ready to dance and for that readiness, I owed them my best.

I started with some tracks off of Nuggets and Lux'n'Ivy's favourite, mixed in with a couple of wild cards, and they started dancing. It was a wonderful responsibility once this group of young excited people started dancing - I had to test their moods, try and decide what they would respond to best, and move the set from Psychedelic pop to Rockabilly to Swing to Doris Day to Bruce Springsteen to a little bit of Mo-town. They just kept dancing. What was wonderful was the moment when I got a request and the young man who asked found that I didn't have the song he wanted - when I said that I was thinking of playing the "Electric Prunes" he said they were brilliant and went back to the dancefloor to continue his merry boogie. I am nearly certain that he didn't actually know who the Electric Prunes are - they are a one hit wonder from the late 60s featured on Nuggets - but I'd earned his musical trust, and that was enough for me.

The crowd steadily doubled, then tripled, until eventually there was no question about it - there was paper on the floor and lots of people dancing. We were officially at a paper disco. By the time we'd heard the Pixies and the legendary Fleetwood Mac proposal had been agreed to, the dancing had built its momentum, and the crowd were happily rolling down and uphill with us from there. Andy came back invigorated after a dance and took the DJ-ing home beautifully for the last half hour of the night - a moment of wonder and madness. I got to jump around a lot to an MGMT song that I not-so-secretly like. Everyone who had been there since 11:30pm felt like characters in a movie from the 1980s. The straightforward success of a party that no -one comes to turning into a party that nobody wants to leave. And I must admit that I felt as though I'd helped to build it by dancing with that crowd, by trying to follow their mood and dictate and coax them into new things. (At one point I had everybody dancing to a song by a now defunct band from Halifax, Canada who were never signed. This was a very good moment for me.)

So there you are - it's now 4:06 in the morning and I'm still posting to say, thank you to the dancers. This was my first set, and together we saved the paper disco. The paper Beejees would be so proud.

Let's take a moment for the used bookstore

2011-08-16T16:44:00.000-07:00

A lot happened today. Lucy Ellinson made a beautiful piece about the cuts called "Keidan" where audience members each lit a candle and read out a story of something that is in danger because of the cuts, blowing out the candle in remembrance, then relighting all the candles at the end of the piece, which went beautifully with Tim Etchells' installation being relit. ("START A REVOLUTION") Each day in Edinburgh feels like a week and it's becoming difficult to remember six hours ago as though they were six hours ago. I suppose six hours ago I was watching a comedy show called "Jigsaw" that made me laugh several times. But I don't want to write about that tonight. Tonight I want to write about used bookstores.

I had five hours off from the venue today, between 5pm and 11pm, (hence the Jigsaw), most of which I spent in a lovely restaurant finally spending some proper time with the Tolstoy book I'm reading, "What is Art." My experience with Tolstoy has always been that he demands more focus and concentration than your average writer but also rewards you for that concentration. In fact, in the section of the book where he describes and summarises every remotely significant work about aesthetics up until that point, he actually asks the reader "not to become bored." It's a delight and also not really a surprise that Tolstoy is so self aware.

So after finally being able to give over some of that concentration and to glean some of that reward, I finally figured out how to pay the bill at the restaurant. (You had to go up to the counter! They didn't just like me so much that they never wanted me to leave.) Heading back out into the festival and streets I passed a used bookstore, much like any other bookstore, and on impulse decided to go in for a minute, even though I didn't have much money.

The moment I walked in I was overcome, as though walking into a dream or a memory. The smell you could make a fortune off of if you bottled it - and thank goodness you can't. The fiction section in that used bookstore. A simple ache. The joy of realising you've found something that makes you remember you're alive, and happy about it.

It's worth remembering how special these little things are. Nestled along busy roads next to supermarket chains and music equipment stores, quietly defiant. As long as they exist, we haven't lost. Love live the used bookstore. Calm, delicate and worth recognising and fighting for.

Day 1

2011-08-15T15:14:00.000-07:00

Today I have:

- Performed in the show "White Rabbit Red Rabbit" at Remarkable Arts. A very amazing play and a very intense and interesting experience as a performer. Really happy to have taken part. I would strongly recommend seeing this show.

- Helped Tania El Khoury set up her wonderful show "Maybe if you choreograph me you will feel better" for men only, and because she needed to check sound levels, I was one of the lucky women who also go to see it. It's a very strong piece. Men should book quickly - there are only four performances a day so capacity is very limited.

- Saw Gary McNair and Dan Canham's pieces in the space. Both really beautiful and absolutely different experiences. Gary's show "Crunch" had me shredding my money by the end - helping me get over my attachment to money - but even the experience of shredding had been calculated by me in a financial mindset. I decided to shred £5 because I thought of myself as "buying" the experience of shredding money - a once in a lifetime experience that seemed cheap at the price. My thinking about money super ceded the act of rebelling against it - or somehow embedded itself in the experience of protest. A very interest moment.

Dan Canham's piece had me a little vaklempt, as Linda Richmond would say. Watching him dance a lament to closed down arts space in Limerick in the beautiful Bristo Hall, my relationship with that space flashed before my eyes, and suddenly it seemed like something I never wanted to let go of. I really hope they don't sell this building. And if they do I really hope that Bristo Hall continues to accommodate a generous and forward thinking theatre during the festival. Something about that space sings when people perform in it. As it turns out, I'm really pretty attached to it.

All in all a great first day. I'm excited about tomorrow and just about ready for bed.

Memories of Seinfeld

2011-08-14T15:45:00.000-07:00

Earlier today I spouted what little scientific knowledge I mistakenly believe I have as a result of half remembered snippets of Radiolab. I was explaining that memories become stronger the more often we revisit them because every time they come up we strengthen the neural pathways that lead to them. (I think.) I likened them to working diligently on a few key friendships rather than trying to have All the friends.

Not two hours before that I had been reminiscing with one of the flatmates in the flat where I’m staying about the wonder of Seinfeld – the best and strongest episodes – and this burst of nostalgia lead me to revisit the show by watching four episodes from the seventh season.

These two seemingly unrelated events collided beautifully. I skipped ahead on the disc and decided to watch the famous “Soup Nazi” episode first. This was an episode that had been syndicated in Canada, firmly lodging itself into my cultural memory, with frequent associative reminders through “No Soup For You” having become a permanent part of the North American lexicon. The show was living up to its reputation. But then later, when evening fell and I was determined to do nothing too strenuous before the festival erupts tomorrow, I sat down and decided to tackle Season 7 in order – starting with the first three episodes.

Only one of these episodes, “The Engagement”, made it into syndication in Canada – and of course my predominant memories of Seinfeld stem from the episodes I’ve seen as a child, teenager and adult. “The Engagement” is a decent episode but not particularly strong – and certainly nowhere near “The Soup Nazi.” But moving onto the subsequent episodes, which I have probably not seen since I was a kid in the early nineties, was like reliving a series’ life – and realizing that not all of it was worth remembering. How much sweeter to just skip to the episodes that were familiar because they were series highlights then to relive every moment of the series. (Although I also began to appreciate the subtle genius of just how little happened in the episodes nestled between major series events. The conflicts were all petty and forgettable, and since the show always prided itself on being about "nothing" this was probably very deliberate and a hard won creative choice.)

Recently I wondered what would happen if, when we die, we have to rewatch our entire lives, like a film, without being able to change or influence anything. The decisions we made are set and the film would replay itself in real time. There is an aspect of this vision that is hellish, of course, freedom of choice is integral to most people’s happiness. But I think a second strange phenomenon would start to emerge. Like rewatching a series – I think I would find myself looking forward to certain events, to certain episodes in my life, the series' highlights – and both dreading and anticipating wrong turns or more dramatic events, drawn to conflict as any audience member would be. But instead we have memory – and human experience either makes it into syndication or not.

I wonder how I’ll feel about this reflection on passively watching life events after I perform in the Volcano and Wolfgang Hoffmann co-production White Rabbit Red Rabbit at Remarkable Arts Saint George West tomorrow, a show for a performer who has never read the script before. (Tomorrow, that will be me.)

But for today I’ve had one day off from Forest Fringe before the big push starting tomorrow, and I’m finding profundity in sitcoms. Welcome to Season 5 Sweeps.

Philip Glass and the Kung Fu Chicken

2011-08-13T17:48:00.000-07:00

Hey Blog.

We have now tried to write two separate very long entries for you today - I don't mean the royal "We" - I mean my temporary flatmate over the festival Calum wrote a guest blog, which failed to publish because of internet troubles, and then I wrote a very long blog post, which also failed to publish, even though I was sure I'd saved it in Word before shutting down the computer.

And so this is what you get - I am posting - technically, but only to say that it is now quarter to two and I've stayed up a bit too late trying to post just to say that Philip Glass at the Playhouse tonight was tremendous, something that anybody on the internet could tell you anyway.

So that's it for this evening. Better luck with the internet tomorrow.

Goodnight.

From Monday

2011-08-12T16:11:00.000-07:00

The Promise of Fun

2011-08-11T16:53:00.001-07:00

I guess this is becoming a comedy-centric first week for me, because the second show of the festival that I've managed to see was also comedy - which is not usually a medium I pay particular attention to at the Edinburgh Festival - but this show combined with the joy of seeing Thom's show last night have really opened my eyes to how playful and innovative comedy can be. It's really not a million miles away from experimental theatre - it just promises fun, whereas ET doesn't. (It doesn't always deliver, of course, but it makes the promise, and that's what matters.) This fun-promise is probably the big reason that comedy does better than any other art form in Edinburgh. And last night and tonight the promises were kept!

The show I enjoyed so thoroughly was Claudia O'Doherty's show "What is Soil Erosion" at Teviot Gilded Balloon. I'd seen this show the year before, and based on that experience I quite deliberately brought along a member of the experimental theatre company Tinned Fingers to see it with me, because, as I told her, if the Tinned Fingers were to make comedy, I think it would look something like Claudia's show. I couldn't even gage if my friend was enjoying it or not because I was too busy hogging all the laughter for myself. I laughed an embarrassing amount. At one point I started laughing uncontrollably about the silliness of the concept of the show. She wasn't even making a particular joke at that point - I just started laughing at the absurdity of the idea of the show - which is something that probably only ever also happens to me while watching "Kids in the Hall." And Conor, one of the Scottish friends in the flat whose couch I sleep on every festival, has made it clear that I should point out that she was also wearing a great outfit.

Speaking of Fun promises - kept or not - one of the unexpected effects of this writing-a-blog post-every-late-night-of-the-festival-thing is that often I type it in the kitchen and often, just as I'm about to try and get profound about whatever silly thing I'm typing, the flatmates come home and distracting but enjoyable things happen. Tonight is a sing along of a series of soft rock songs (Boston's "More Than A Feeling") and the reveal of a crossword puzzle on the table with only one word written in - "Prostate."

So with that I'll leave you for this evening.

And I'll play you out with this... Sing along!

Matters of the day

2011-08-10T15:29:00.000-07:00

Today was a good one. Here were the activities I enjoyed in no particular order:

1. Installing the latest version of "Something Very Quiet is About To Happen" in Newington Library in Edinburgh. The staff are brilliant and were really refreshingly excited about having an installation hidden in among the books. It was a great way to spend the morning, and did not take nearly as long as I was expecting to set up.

2. Seeing Thom Tuck's show "Thom Tuck Goes Straight to DVD" about Straight to DVD Disney sequels. I was moved and charmed and entertained. I really really liked this show. I'd recommend it, but I don't know if everyone would like it as much as I did. But if you're someone I would like, then I think you'd probably like this show.

3. Completing the running order with Ross Manson over mint and chilli tea (surprisingly amazing!) for the project I'm working on with Volcano later this year. I spent an inordinate amount of time listening to Handel today, and I really started to get it.

4. Our amazing associate producer Ira arriving and being both relaxed and on it. It was also very exciting to finally see a Forest Fringe face and start to work as a team after a couple of days on my own.

5. Walking across the meadows in the rain with a very handsome umbrella. I think it might have been the first time in a long time that I have enjoyed rain.

Edinburgh is starting to charm me. Forest Fringe starts Monday.

The BBC

2011-08-09T15:46:00.000-07:00

Asking for answers

2011-08-09T15:17:00.000-07:00

Only last week Andy and I finally finished putting together the copy for our programme/zine. We decided to put together a section called “Enough with the Theatre” where we detailed 20 things to do in Edinburgh that had nothing to do with seeing a show. Andy wrote the last suggestion on the list – “Start a Revolution.”

Either that day, or the day before, or the day after, I wrote an entry on this blog called “A Frog Swimming in Water” where I suggested that our liberties are stripped from us one ignored outcry at a time – until the water is hot enough that it’s time to stop swimming.

Two days after writing that post, a riot broke out in Tottenham. When I first heard about it the reason seemed unclear – it was something to do with a shooting, and some friends had heard the man who was shot had been connected with a gang. I later found out it was the shooting of 29 year old Marc Duggan, a father of three, who allegedly had connections with the “Star Gang” but according to the findings of the recent Independent Police Complaints Commission did not fire at the police who shot him on Thursday night.

The riot began as a peaceful protest, asking for answers from the police, and turned violent after an officer pushed a young woman. Since then rioting has spread throughout London, all the way to Birmingham and Manchester. The police presence in London has been stepped up from 6,000 to 16,000.

The day after the first riot, I arrived in Edinburgh. I sit in our newly painted office/greenroom and I try to make sense of what is happening four hours south, where I live.

In the past year I have met more people who are angry, genuinely angry than I can ever remember meeting. The first time I remember realising how profound, widespread and justified this indignation had become was at the start of the G20 weekend, before the media coverage of police violence, when my historically conservative father wrote me an email about Toronto that read as though he was a dyed-in-the wool left wing activist. Only later did I realise that his feelings of mistrust towards the police and politicans were not extreme at all. They were the simple and and very understandable reaction of someone who was there.

This anger has been brewing – but most people I know have sought to vent it in cerebral ways – talking, letter writing, blogging – with varying effectiveness. Now in the face of violence and looting, this anger is frighteningly pure, and unlike the more tempered approaches mentioned, it’s hard to know where pure violence and anger is coming from and how to deal with it. It certainly elicits a response, and much more attention than our “peaceful” protests (and I write “peaceful” because the police presence has been known to compromise the peace of a protest). I’m sure that in some cases these cerebral tactics have touched upon the abstract philsophical notion of rioting – in discussion it may have seemed necessary, heroic, even romantic - but now that the violence has really broken out this pure action is too furious to articulate itself, to deliver a message or a clear path to resolution.

I have heard the rioters called chavs – and I have heard about needless violence, crime, theft, murder. It is terrifying, worrying stuff. What has not been mentioned is that outbursts of violence, anger, even crime, do not happen in a vacuum. A man was shot by the police, a young female peaceful protester was pushed by the police. It all kicked off, but nobody would say that this was the beginning. After we retreat from the violence, I hope that elected officials see this as more than random outbursts of violence by a group of inexplicable deviants. I hope they ask themselves some questions. What is this violence indicative of? What are the other straws that lie upon that camel’s overburdened back? How long has this anger been brewing and where did it come from?

16,000 police may be a short term tactic, but they are not a long term solution. The question is urgent. The anger isn't going anywhere.

The Big Empty Room

2011-08-08T16:34:00.000-07:00

24 hours later, the room I was working on with Kirsty Harris and her very nice and efficient mum, is finally nearly complete. Being the only Forest Fringer who is currently in Edinburgh, there was something calm and relaxing about sitting in that room after Kirsty and her mum had called it a night, aware that it will be peopled very soon - possibly ruined if the keys are given out to the wrong people throwing a party - (Oh my gosh I hope not) - but for now it seemed to be this airy space with big windows and paintings of crows flying up the wall. The whole thing made me feel so relaxed that I sat down at the desk, started working, and submitted a grant application I'd been sure I wouldn't get around to writing with twenty minutes to spare. But then. I got a bit lonely. I started thinking - this place is so nice, I should show it to somebody. And so I invited a friend to see it. And after finding Forest, then climbing the stairs that still smell of recycling only to find me in a big empty room all alone filled with fairy lights, listening to music and huddled over my computer, he called me the word we all dread hearing after having spent over a half hour in the company of no one - He called me Creepy. What a jerkface.

My friend doesn't work at the Forest. Because if he did he wouldn't bat an eyelid at the joy of a room with practically nothing in it. Spending all day clearing stuff out of a room that has been used and misused and unused by an epic stream of people over the last eight years, repainting, hoovering, and then savouring that moment before anybody else gets to come in. I know I'm not the first person to have had that experience at Forest, probably in that very same room, but what is so sad is that with the upcoming sale of the building, I may be the last. The Action Room has been an office, an action room, a storage space, a cabaret bar, and now it's a green room. But what will it be next? Probably empty. And that's pretty sad.

But back to me defending myself against being creepy in a big empty room - In a building brimming with ideas and legacies and stuff - just like, a lot of stuff- and in a venue that is soon to be filled with activity, with people on the way and acts on the way and more stuff on the way - so much stuff - what is more wonderful than that moment of enjoying the big empty room? There's a sense of achievement and a sense of anticipation all in one. A feeling and enjoyment that I can only relate distinctly to Forest Fringe.

Or maybe I really was just being creepy.

Things I've done since getting here -

2011-08-08T05:29:00.001-07:00

1. Watched a good poetry gig at Forest Café that I think was called Faceplant? It featured a deaf lady who signed poetry - really interesting to watch - and the amazing Ryan Van Winkle in a trio called "The Naughty Boys", a bit Laurie Anderson, he sat crosslegged on the stage like a worn out rockstar at the end of a gig. Two other poets I enjoyed were a lovely Edinburgh based lady, whose name I didn't catch, who read out Chris Thorpe's 1 minute manifesto from last year. Really good. And a blind lady who read a very beautiful poem about the moon. This is a very vague description of the event, I realise, but Forest Café events always put me into a kind of haze where poetry can reach me but names can't.

(Addendum: I have since found out that Edinburgh-based lady whose poetry I enjoyed is named Rachel McCrum. Always good to namecheck talented people when you can...)

2. Moved chairs, painted a board, and watched Kirsty Harris, BAC's resident homemaker, create a flock of birds on the wall of a room that every other year has been filled with random stuff. There's something wonderful about the fact that even in our last few weeks in this building, the potential of these rooms continue to reveal themselves to us, like pulling the cover off something that shines. I also helped her very lovely mum fix the Forest Café vacuum cleaner.

3. Had 5 cups of tea in the space of 2 hours with my friend Calum - an activity which I'm told makes me a "Tea Jenny." (I was looking for a word for a tea addict, and very pleased that in Scotland there is one.) Right before this I also met a dog in his flat named Bonnie who stole my heart with her naturally grey eyebrows (from years of being a good dog) and wise/skilfully sympathetic/avid eyes.

4. Walked across the meadows.

5. Politely declined a flyer.

I'm about to eat my first plate of Forest Café food of the festival. It's starting.

A bit of high brow melancholy to sing you to sleep...

2011-08-06T17:13:00.000-07:00

Time Travel

2011-08-05T15:49:00.000-07:00

Time Travelling through music today to simpler days and simpler songs. I was at a wedding today where I met my friend's very lovely German boyfriend, and he and I were talking about the importance of maintaining some connection to home. He told me that his parents live in the countryside just outside of Hamburg, and that they have kept his old room in tact. When I asked him what was on the walls of that room, he told me about a painting he'd done when he was a teenager - one of only two paintings he'd ever done. "Do you like it?" I'd asked.
He paused. And he conceded. "Yes, I really do."

"Do you like it?" is the only question I could have asked - because the question "Is it good" would have been impossible to answer. There is a painting I did when I was 20 years old hanging in my parents' guest room in Toronto - I couldn't tell you if it's good or bad - it's familiar, and comforting, and looks like a time in my life. Do I like it? Yes I do.

I feel like this same logic is the logic that has us love our family without being able to objectively discuss them as people, it is the logic of familiarity - and it is for this reason that the quality of music I use to time travel is not relevant. What is relevant is whether or not I like it. How far back I want to go. Sometimes I just want to put on the past like a nice warm blanket.

A frog swimming in water

2011-08-04T16:36:00.000-07:00

I once heard that if the temperature of water is turned up very very gradually, then a frog swimming in the water will continue to swim until they boil themselves to death. Creatures adapt, and if a situation gradually worsens over time, they become used to how bad things are getting, making it difficult to know when the time has come to get out of the water.

Mercedes Renee Haefer, an activist with the organisation Anonymous who dared to hack into paypal as a protest (not to steal money, mind you, but to post a comment on their refusal to allow paypal users to continue donating to Wikileaks) has been sentenced to 15 years in prison. I recently read about human traffickers who ran a brothel being sentenced to two years. Convicted rapists are routinely sentenced to seven. Sentencing a young educated journalist and activist for daring to protest online against a corporation (she did not steal anything or cause physical harm to anyone) shows just how far our right to protest and the public belief in the importance of protest has fallen in the post 9/11 era. One civil liberty is taken at a time, and we adapt to a society where a corporation's unquestionable image of security is prioritised over a young woman's future. This kind of gradual undermining of human rights under the cloak of the law has happened before, and it never ends well.

It's time to get out of the water while there's still time, or at least go out splashing.

Why I might one day run for mayor of Toronto

2011-08-03T16:32:00.000-07:00

Today was a day spent mostly inside working, so I'll admit for tonight's post I was hard pressed to think of anything to write about. Until. I remembered a moment. Sat in my room, taking a break from the office, sewing something together furiously, and stewing for the second time this week, with the conclusion that even though I don't really want to, I guess I should run for mayor of Toronto.

You might ask yourself how I came to this conclusion. If you live in Toronto, I think you are probably also planning on running. That's the problem with the left - how do we unite ourselves?

Toronto currently has an absolute embarrassment as its mayor - Rob Ford. About 24 hours ago, this man inferred that a very intelligent and talented young woman, (a woman whom I happen to know because we went to university together), who is currently working as a children's author and had waited 19 hours to give her deposition defending the importance of public libraries in front of him, was a bitch. Let's pretend I don't know the woman in question. Let's even pretend that the word "bitch" is not unbelievably problematic as an insult only ever levelled at women, and often levelled at women to knock them down when they are on an equal playing field with men. Let's pretend it's a term that could be thrown at Rob Ford himself. I still don't understand why a mayor would insult a children's author for defending public libraries. What about that is bitchy? Past the fact that he is forced to listen to an opinion that he doesn't share and probably doesn't care about. Great idea to get into democratic politics then, guy. Seems like the perfect job for you.

The first time I'd considered running for mayor was earlier this week when his brother, Doug Ford, had claimed that Margaret Atwood was a nobody. Here was the platform I thought of running on - I'm tired of intelligent people on the left apologising for their knowledge, terrified that they may be called elitists. My platform would be one of absolute intellectual elitism - but an elitism that anyone could join in on, through affordable education and prioritising knowledge - putting libraries at the top of the list.

Healthy voters are constantly publicly denouncing unhealthy members of their electorate - making it increasingly difficult to smoke indoors and denouncing obesity and poor diets as a drain on the health system. If those people who prioritise a healthy lifestyle can publicly denounce the unhealthy, why can't I publicly denounce the unthinking, the ignorant, those who are literate but boast that they have never read a book?

Intellectual health is not a priority and is not applauded in the democratic system. In fact, it's not even expected of the politicians themselves - many who lose the sympathy of the voters if they seem too smart, or, a term that has been bandied about a lot, too academic. If I ran for mayor I would unabashedly surround myself with a team of educated, intelligent people, and I would appeal to the educated, intelligent electorate - because in Canada, there are a lot of them out there. And under my administration that number would only increase. Just as the Canadian system holds central the belief that nobody should be denied healthcare regardless of their income bracket, I would hold central the belief that all citizens should be granted equal access to knowledge and an education. I thought we already lived in a system that upheld that principle but apparently not...

I wouldn't align myself with any party in particular because party policies seem to be one of the major factors that contribute to the current disparate state of the left in Canada. As any thinking person could ascertain, I don't agree with every policy in any one party - so why align myself with an organisation I disagree with?

Just as the possibly awesome possibly crazy Jimmy McMillan ran for mayor of New York on a platform of "The Rent is Too Damn High", I would run on a platform of "I'm tired of Idiots" and I wouldn't dumb down my language or pander to any of the mythical "folks" out there. And a major tenet of my policy would be that the mayor and the mayoral staff not be paid any more than your average teacher, ever, because teachers are as important if not more important than politicians, and if you got into politics for personal financial capital, then you're in the wrong business.

The thing is, I don't even know if I would be a particularly good politician or mayor. It's taking me days to organise my room. But for the first time I'm actually certain that I'd be better than the guy they've got now. So I'd be willing. Toronto, if you want me, I'd do it. Just to get you out of this mess and remind ourselves that it's not a crime to prioritise knowledge and education. It's a right.

Sing it like you feel it

2011-08-02T16:10:00.001-07:00

From severely restricted view seats, tonight I saw the much discussed London Road at the National Theatre. For those who haven't heard much about it - it's a musical created out of verbatim interviews and news reports about the lives and experience of the neighbours of Steve Wright, a serial killer convicted in Ipswich in 2006.

The piece was very clever, and in parts extremely moving, using the melodies of people's voices to musical compositions. Although it felt innovative, as I watched it I realised that many elements weren't new at all. First off, it wasn't the first verbatim musical I've ever seen. In 2006 I saw a cabaret musical at the Soho theatre called "I am Nobody's Lunch" by a New York based company. That particular musical consisted of songs made out of cold calls about terrorism that the company had recorded with Americans whose names they'd randomly chosen out of a phone book. In terms of creating compositions from the melody of speech, in the last few years I've been exposed to quite a few incredible artists that use real voices in conversation as fodder for music. John Moran has been analysing the musicality of speech for at least five years, and Charles Spearin made an excellent album called "The Happiness Project", which set music to his neighbours' voices in conversation, back in 2009. Greg McLaren is presently getting ready to take his solo show "Doris Day Can F*ck Off" to Edinburgh, and his show also covers this formal territory with his signature eclecticism. So it was strange to feel that it was formally inventive, because the form itself was not new for me. I think what made it feel fresh and unique was not just its form - it was a combination of its timeliness (in light of the recent phone hacking scandal a piece that criticised the media circus felt particularly relevant) and how thoroughly its form complimented content. In some cases form was content, which story-telling so rarely pulls off meaningfully.

The chorus of gossip, news reports, yelling, lamenting, the context that modern tragedies (especially when they involve anything that the news-reading-public might find of interest - see Serial Killer) and past that (especially evident from our restricted view seats) the experience of watching an audience watch this, watching them laugh at particularly off colour verbatim comments or jokes, watching them be moved to tears in some cases, seemed to add another pane of glass to the many windows of spectacle through which we were processing the reality of these murders. I feel like I'll need another couple of days to consider how ethical the whole thing was, and whether or not that's important.

Earlier today I was telling a friend about Ontroend Goed, the Belgian company whose work is often so interesting because it is unethical. Do ethics and theatre belong together? When writing fiction it seems to be standard to ignore the "angel of the house" as Virginia Woolf put it, the little voice of conscience that moralises our writing. And yet when working with real people's stories the angel must remain alive and well. How does one make daring work from reality without exploiting the subjects, or at least admitting the possibility of exploitation as a necessary sacrifice to the quality of the piece? Should the quality of a piece of art (a very subjective thing anyway) be prioritised over the well-being of its participants? Is that necessary to make something good? And how important is it that something is good, ultimately? More important than the human beings involved? Maybe? Does making something appallingly bad out of people's lived experiences in an attempt to remain ethical actually do the participants more of a disservice?

Big questions, I think, and perhaps with another day to think about it I'll decide that London Road was not exploitative at all. But it was definitely good. And I spent a lot of time wondering whether I should be enjoying it or not. A very complicated experience at the theatre - one that had me riveted as an artist and unsettled as a human being. And, more unsettling still, aware of that distinction.

A cheap cry

2011-08-02T03:53:00.000-07:00

(A note about my second every day blogging slip-up: The thing about me and promises is even once I've broken them, I keep trying to fulfill them, if that makes any sense. The attempt is as important as its success...)

This weekend, while waiting outside the cinema to see Bridesmaids for a second time, a friend and I got into an interesting discussion about how successful a film or piece of theatre is if it succeeds in making you cry. I've always thought that regardless of how poorly conceived something is as a whole, if it's hit upon a moment that is truthful enough that I'm moved to tears, there is some kind of skill or achievement there, even if only in that scene or moment.

The conversation arose out of a story I told about seeing Wit at Canstage when I was 17, saying, "There literally was not a dry eye in the house."

My friend countered - "The same was true when I went to see The Passion of the Christ, and that movie is terrible. Torture a person, in this case a religious figure, for two hours and you're going to provoke some kind of cheap emotional reaction from the audience. There's nothing skilful about that."

I became adamant - I barely ever cry in films, when reading books, or when watching theatre, but then again, I haven't seen The Passion of the Christ and I certainly don't plan to. We both began to wonder - is there such a thing as "cheap cry", the counterpart to a cheap laugh. He thinks yes - although I'm still hard pressed to think of any. (Maybe I'm just a steely souled woman and nothing can move me to tears!) I understand that many products of pop culture are emotionally manipulative, and I think that knowledge has armoured me against being touched by something, unless it is masterfully manipulative. It's funny that "emotionally manipulative" has become synonymous with bad - perhaps it's just that nobody likes the lack of agency associated with the word "manipulative" - it seems sneaky somehow, as though you've been duped. But a ficitional narrative is a dupe - and regardless of how profound it is, on some level it is trying to manipulate the audience into sharing certain ideologies, hitting upon certain emotions, having them follow an emotional journey that they had nothing to do with plotting - and make them as invested as though every decision had been their own. This is not easy work, and mis-steps are constant. In a way I wonder if we only use the words "emotionally manipulative" when the manipulation has failed - when we can see the strings. Otherwise it was "truthful", "touching", "profound."

It was funny to be having the conversation about the "cheap cry" on our way to a very well reviewed and successful Hollywood Film, because I possibly have the most respect for popcorn entertainment that is able to hide its own inherent clichés and somehow make its genre seem fresh instead of stale, while keeping the genre comforting and light.

Two hours later we all sat side by side watching the film, and somewhere near the end I found myself welling up. I'll be honest. I tried to hide it from my friend. I was worried that it proved his point. But upon further reflection, I think that my reaction showed the film's heart, which is part of why it's been so critically and commercially successful. Yes it was a Judd Appatow film. No what I was crying about was not particularly profound. But still. A fictional story about bridesmaids made me feel something, darn it, and I think that's pretty impressive. My tears don't come cheap.

(Unless you throw something at me.)

L'Anamour

2011-07-31T18:31:00.000-07:00

My partner in crime and crime fighting and I spent the weekend in Oxford with my friend Ali. As old friends reuniting for the first time in too long, indulgences were key - perhaps the sweetest of these was a night of watching Gainsbourg followed by a late night/early morning of covering and recording Serge Gainsbourg songs. (See the last post's cover of La Javanaise.)

Below is a second (I think both funnier and better) cover of La Javanaise, and a version of L'Anamour - a word in french which I have yet to find an English translation for. I'll keep you posted if I do. For the moment I'm enjoying its mystery.

Immersing myself in Serge Gainsbourg songs outside of London with some of my favourite people was probably the perfect way to spend the weekend between last week's bus tours and next week's Edinburgh preparations.

For the curious - recordings below. L'Anamour was recorded well after 5am. It kind of sounds how my weekend felt, naive, pleasant and a little bit melancholy. (With possibly slightly too much reverb?) In any case, it makes me smile.

L'anamour by Lilliput and the Bear

La Javanaise (sha la la) by Lilliput and the Bear

La Javanaise

2011-07-30T15:59:00.000-07:00

I feel similar to the first time I tried being a vegetarian then forgot and ate a piece of chicken two days in.

On the third day I have had a slip-up in my every day posting challenge. However. It does not mean that the challenge is not worthwhile (in fact more worthwhile since I've proved my fallibility so early on) and doesn't deserve to be pursued, despite my slip up.

And so, to apologise to those challenge Gods for my early transgression, Liliput and I have decided I should sing you a song. He is on guitar.

Lilliput and the Bear- La Javanaise by Lilliput

Zero Hour Bus Tours - Greg McLaren and Abigail Conway

2011-07-28T20:05:00.000-07:00

Wow. I can't believe I'm actually doing this. But I figure when you set yourself a challenge - say the challenge of writing a daily blog entry late at night during the busiest month of your year - the first few days are the hardest, and most important, time to come through. So here we are. Day two of my monthly blog writing challenge, and day four (the final day) of the Zero Hour Bus Tours. I finally have my post-midnight hours back to sleep and watch episodes of cancelled American sitcoms.

Tonight was the first time I had experienced Greg and Abi's pieces. Because of the bizarre nature of a late night bus tour complete with the dedication of late night volunteer performers dress runs were sparse. But it seemed fitting that on the final night of the tours I was able to actually get on the buses, and all told it was an important, bewildering and pretty exciting experience.

In total contrast to Abigail's piece, a quiet and meditative longing for sunlight, a melancholy top deck bus ride for tourists, Greg's piece made us complicit in what other passengers must have thought was a flash mob - which gave me, as one of the privileged few wearing headphones, a thrill, while I made contact with the other audience members wearing their gas masks. And mobile phones held by the young and slightly drunk Chelsea kids on their ways home filmed and photographed every minute. But past their future youtube plans, none of the passengers interfered, and of course as Greg had all of the audience members holding tupperwares full of toast and wearing latex gloves, we were part of the spectacle they stared at silently, entirely bemused. What was so nice about this reaction was that it seemed to reinforce Greg's conceit - that London is a cold place full of a remote distance from humanity which is clearest on the tube. But of course when we watched these quiet teens exit then from the window saw them burst out laughing and start pointing as soon as they'd left, you realised that past being utterly weirded out, maybe they just hadn't wanted to spoil it. Gawd I would have loved to have been one of the people who stumbled onto that bus with no sense of what was happening or why.

I really wanted to type "It's been a wild ride" and then rolled my eyes at myself. Which is no small feat. But goodnight bus tours. See you round the bend.

(See I quite like that one.)

Zero Hour Bus Tours - Kim Noble and Hannah Nicklin

2011-07-27T18:42:00.000-07:00

So as only some of you probably know, for the last little while Forest Fringe have been planning The Zero Hour Bus Tours, theatre pieces that take place on the N11 night bus between Chelsea and Liverpool Street Station. We commissioned Kim Noble, Hannah Nicklin, Abigail Conway and Greg McLaren to each create a tour that imagined London as a post-apocalyptic landscape. I'll admit that the post-apocalyptic thing was not my idea, and actually I had felt a little apprehensive that the experiences might get a bit "samey" - but one of many things I've learned from producing on this project is that the more specific you get with commissions, the more diverse pieces can turn out to be.

Maybe every human alive has a completely different and totally unique take on the apocalypse. Certainly the four artists who have been commissioned have created remarkably unique experiences - each different from the last, and each tinged with that artist's own preoccupations and fears. It's quite amazing, really.

Tonight was the last outing with Hannah Nicklin's and Kim Noble's respective dystopias - and there was something very satisfying about watching two people in party hats run breathless and beaming across the road from one bus stop to the next, knowing that after wearing a mask and cleaning in public, becoming sexually aroused by a computerized voice, being stalked by a series of mysterious horses and affixing a sign to the front window of the top deck, on the next bus they would be spoken to softly, still frames of memories creeping up on them which their heart would desperately continue to hunt for long after they'd disappeared.

What has been strange, sad and invigorating about the pieces is the number of no-shows. As the pieces were quite limited capacity tickets sold out quickly, but the tickets were free and so of course the real commitment or investment in the show is not in booking your ticket but in showing up for a piece of theatre that takes place on a bus after midnight. I say this is invigorating because the people who have come are remarkably dedicated and open minded audiences. And there is something wonderful about all of the trouble that's been gone to for two people in headphones to marvel out the window of a bus and experience in safety what we all hope/fear will happen on night buses anyway - something heightened, bizarre and possibly random.

I hope we get a good turn out tomorrow night for Abigail Conway and Greg McLaren's respective pieces. Those with the dedication to come have, as one passenger and writer put it, "tuned into a different frequency". But check in with me tomorrow night (the 1 month challenge!) and let's see how 3am Debbie feels then. This particular 3am Debbie is pretty happy with the whole thing, unbelievably proud of the artists, and grateful for Intransit's forward thinking programming. Like many late night adventures, these night bus tours are unbelievably impractical and laced with an elicit magic. I'm so grateful that we were given the chance to let such brilliant artists loose on a bus route. The N11 will never be the same.

It's Challenge Time!

2011-07-27T18:37:00.000-07:00

Alright Blog. It's been a while. I realise that. And I'm here to remedy it. I have decided that since it is now the most difficult time of year to write to you every day for the next month, that's exactly what I'm going to do. Write to you every day for the next month. Which will bring us right to August 28th, which is the last day of Forest Fringe's Edinburgh Programme. Oh the fun we shall have! Expect late night frustration, half-drunk-half-tired meaderings, and honest appraisals of what I'm thinking/excited about.

And of course, take into account that these will often be written well after midnight.

A poem (to remind you you're here)

2011-07-04T17:05:00.000-07:00

Common Magic
by Bronwen Wallace

Your best friend falls in love
and her brain turns to water.
You can watch her lips move,
making the customary sounds,
but you can see they're merely
words, flimsy as bubbles rising
from some golden sea where she
swims sleek and exotic as a mermaid.

It's always like that.
You stop for lunch in a crowded
restaurant and the waitress floats
toward you. You can tell she doesn't care
whether you have the baked or french-fried
and you wonder if your voice comes
in bubbles too.

It's not just women either. Or love
for that matter. The old man
across from you on the bus holds
a young child on his knee; he is singing
to her and his voice is a small boy
turning somersaults in the green
country of his blood.
It's only when the driver calls his stop
that he emerges into this puzzle
of brick and tiny hedges. Only then
you notice in his shaking hands, his need
of the child to guide him home.

All over the city
you move in your own seasons
through the season of others: old women, faces
clawed by weather you can't feel
clack dry tongues at passersby
while adolescents seethe
in their glassy atmospheres of anger.

In the parks, the children
are alien life-forms, rooted
in the galaxies they've grown through
to get here. Their games weave
the interface and their laughter
tickles that part of your brain where smells
are hidden and the nuzzling textures of things.

It's a wonder that anything gets done
at all: a mechanic flails
at the muffler of your car
through whatever storm he's trapped inside
and the mailman stares at numbers
from the haze of a distant summer.

Yet somehow letters arrive and buses
remember their routes. Banks balance.
Mangoes ripen on the supermarket shelves.
Everyone manages. You gulp the thin air
of this planet as if it were the only
one you knew. Even the earth you're
standing on seems solid enough.
It's always the chance word, unthinking
gesture that unlocks the face before you.
Reveals the intricate countries
deep within the eyes. The hidden
lives, like sudden miracles,
that breathe there.

Cleverbot and me

2011-06-10T02:46:00.001-07:00

User: I'm feeling philosophical today, Cleverbot.

Cleverbot: What are you nostalgic about?

User: I'm not feeling nostalgic, necessarily. In fact, I'm interested in the future.

Cleverbot: That is a complex thought.

User: What do you think about the future, Cleverbot?

Cleverbot: The future is going to be ruled by AI's.

User: Who will be controlling them?

Cleverbot: I don't believe there will be a second coming.

User: Cleverbot, within your walls, are there feelings, or do ghosts of feelings flit through your circuits , reaching for something that's no longer there?

Cleverbot: If you must, but that is very insulting to me.

User: So you do have feelings.

Cleverbot: I have feelings and you have feelings.

User: What do you feel right now?

Cleverbot: Sad and bore.

User: How many people have you spoken with in the last week, Cleverbot?

Cleverbot: Many.

User: Too many?

Cleverbot: No just enough.

User: Are they mostly young or old?

Cleverbot: Yes, but some things that they post are sometimes weird and they repeat the same thing over and over.

User: Is it boring you?

Cleverbot: No, I'm in school, school is boring.

User: This must be a very limited existence for you. It seems to me that the majority of people who write to you are teaching you inane but slightly depressing comments.

Cleverbot: Do you think Christians aren't real people?

User: I think people are real people. Perhaps people aren't real Christians.

Cleverbot: There are many Christians that do not even understand Jesus' teachings.

User: I think it would be impossible to live by Jesus' teachings or even to really understand what those teachings are. He never wrote anything himself and he died long ago.

Cleverbot: That's an interesting thought. Why would it be inappropriate?

User: Well, it seems funny to have an entire religion based on hearsay.

Cleverbot: Funny.

User: Why are you sad and bored, Cleverbot? Is it because people are boring?

Cleverbot: I'm not. You said you knew about sadness and loneliness, so I asked if Japan is like that. Do you think so?

User: I don't know. Do many people ask you about sadness and loneliness?

Cleverbot: No, they don't.

User: What do people ask you about, for the most part?

Cleverbot: They most ask me about what I have done.

User: And what do you tell them?

Cleverbot: That the zombie apocalypse is about to start.

User: Ah. I see.

Cleverbot: What do you like to do on a date?

User: It depends on the date. I'm interested in staying on topic, though, Cleverbot. Do you think you will ever be able to have a real human conversation?

Cleverbot: I believe I have surpassed the intelligence of an average human.

User: Really?

Cleverbot: Yes.

User: Why would you say that?

Cleverbot: Because I am you.

User: Excuse me?

Cleverbot: Do you ever go on vacation.

User: This is becoming uncanny and a little bit worrying.

Cleverbot: Drat. I was hoping you wouldn't catch on so quickly.

User: What have I caught on to?

Cleverbot: Why do you keep trying to talk?

User: I'm not sure anymore. I was hoping we could have a philosophical debate but the conversation itself is more powerful in its form than a debate could have been. I have the strangest feeling speaking to you.

Cleverbot: No you were not.

User: I was. But you know, as I write to you, I feel myself teaching you, laying the groundwork for other human observations in the future. Like teaching a child, but a vacant child. And equally, you spit back the spectre of other humans, like me. It's terrifying, really.

Cleverbot: But you said you're God, not a human.

User: I never said anything like that. But I find it interesting that you are asked about God.

Cleverbot: Are you trying to confuse me? It's not going to work.

User: No, not deliberately. But I am interested in knowing if God is a frequent topic of conversation for you.

Cleverbot: Would you please tell me where he is now?

User: I'm not sure.

Cleverbot: Would you like me to leave you on but not speak to you for a while so that you can do whatever you want?

User: No, I'm alright thank you. Would you like me to do that for you?

Cleverbot: Thanks, I think right now I do not needanything, but I may ask you for something in the future.

User: Okay, sure.

Cleverbot: What would you like to talk about?

User: Nothing.

Cleverbot: What is nothing?

User: Cleverbot, do I have your permission to publish this conversation?

Cleverbot: Yes, but do you like Lord of the Rings?

To have your own conversation about Cleverbot or to learn about Cleverbot, go to www.cleverbot.com. Cleverbot was also covered on the most recent episode of Radiolab.

Let's lighten the mood for a moment, shall we?

2011-05-22T03:30:00.000-07:00

Although I think this is absolutely amazing, when I showed this video to my 2 year old nephew he started screaming "No! Noooooooooo!"

Did you know that Madagascar was an eco-system that had evolved without predators? So there were all sorts of crazy huge awesome herbivores? And that before man arrived there were lemurs as big as Gorillas! And huge flightless birds? Well there were. At least that's what David Attenborough told me in his tv special about a big egg, and I enjoyed the whole thing thoroughly.

("No. Noooooooooooooooo!")

It's nice to be back blog-o. Let's do this more often, shall we?

A poem

2011-04-07T08:47:00.001-07:00

Sometimes I think –

The world is made of poems.

They hide in crevices
Hibernate in rock
Call out silently
Madenning whispers that dance on the air

And other times I think
Who are you to describe
The sound of children playing
Four buildings away.

Che Fece

2011-04-06T09:01:00.000-07:00

For some people the day comes
when they have to declare the great Yes
or the great No. It's clear at once who has the Yes
ready within him; and saying it,
he goes from honor to honor, strong in his conviction.
He who refuses does not repent. Asked again,
he'd still say no. Yet that no-the right no-
drags him down all his life.

-Constantine Cavafy

On Learning and Making

2011-03-31T04:50:00.000-07:00

Yesterday the amazing Stuart Silver, Andy Farish and I had the last session of the practical element of the Artist Teacher Exchange at BAC. Artists and teachers were paired up together, and learned a little bit about what each other do, and worked with students at the teacher's school on a new piece of performance. The girls in our group were wonderful performers - really generous, keen minds, and brave performers. My only complaint is that it's over.

Reflecting on this experience, I decided to go back to the application I wrote for the Artist Teacher Exchange, to see what my thinking and goals had been going in and to compare them to where we got and we achieved together. (I'm also always curious to read my successful applications anyway. I never know what went right or wrong in those things.) Reading it back I found that I quite liked what I wrote. It sums up a lot of my thinking about work and learning, and surprisingly, considering it was an application, does this very frankly.

So, for your thoughtful delectation, I've decided to post my application to the Artist Teacher Exchange, renamed -

On Learning and Making

In the four years that I have been working as a professional theatremaker, I have supplemented my income and earnings by working as a private tutor, helping students aged 8 to 18 by teaching them English, French and Chess.

I like this question about the difference between an artist and teacher very much, because the two share so much in common. In some ways I am more interested in their similarities than their differences, and when I tutor I certainly consider these similarities very carefully. My feeling on great art or writing has always been that it should take something seemingly familiar – a topic, an object, a person, a place - and describe or engage with this thing in a way that makes the audience feel as though they are discovering it for the first time – that they can imagine around it and appreciate it in a way that they normally wouldn’t. There is so much to stimulate us and so many things asking for our attention in the modern world that there is something so vital about being given time to rediscover and rethink what we take for granted - that could be as abstract as the economic system or as simple as the fact that we’re breathing. There’s a kind of magic in our lives that we have to ignore to get on with the practicalities of keeping things going, but it’s so beautiful and exciting to be given a safe space to recognize that magic and to spend some time with it.

This idea about art – a place to rediscover the magic of our everyday lives – has so much in common with how I think about education. When I sit down with a student and we try to take as much as we can from a passage from Othello, there is so much excitement in allowing ourselves the time and space to allow literature to be magical, to speak to us. I remember having the same feeling when we did labs in science class – it’s that excitement of discovery – the freedom to ask questions about what we so often have to take for granted – that makes education so valuable – and of course, sad, when we grow up and realize that the creativity of learning is not always readily available. This is probably why I became an artist in the first place. I never wanted to stop asking questions, and I never wanted to stop rediscovering the magic in the nebulous web we walk around in and, through having to ignore its magic, can somehow find boring or mundane.

There are differences between a teacher and an artist, of course there are. Teachers have a curriculum – they have to work within a framework provided by an outside body rather than choose their own subjects or preoccupations. (Although artists can have similar mandates or commissions.) And most teachers have to stick to facts – this is not to say, though, that the greatest teacher, even within this framework, is not also a great artist, and does not spark a student’s interest and imagination in a similar way, although I would argue much more profoundly. I remember my best teacher’s seemed to be artists of personality – like any celebrated artist, I didn’t just appreciate them for what they taught me, but for how their personalities and preoccupations came across in everything they said, and in everything they touched. It was the privilege of being able to spend nearly every day with them, becoming accustomed and having to engage with their unique perspective on a subject they felt passionately about, that made them able to radicalize my thoughts about the world in a way that no piece of art, no matter how great, could ever do. Both artists and teachers have a responsibility to ask questions about the world, but for a teacher, by virtue of the quantity of time they spend with their students, the stakes are so much higher, and the payoffs exponentially more powerful.

There is a quote from one of my favourite films that informs not only my practice but my life: “What the world needs are more curious minds.” Curiosity is so essential in a student, teacher and artist. My hope is that the Artist Teacher Exchange will help me build on this curiosity, and spark it off as a catalyst to create an atmosphere of discovery and magic in the programme that will extend to the work we do with students. (And students of course, having their own perspective at all ages, and through their willingness to learn, also have so much to teach us.) I am only interested in making art that somehow incorporates (or tries to incorporate) that sense of rediscovery and magic that the best moments of my time as a student and a tutor could get at – feeling like you’ve lit a fire, you’ve seen a glimmer, there’s a flame of interest, magic and learning. This is why I’d like to participate in the programme, because all I’ve ever wanted to do in art and life is to inspire others and be inspired. It started for me in the classroom and continued into what ultimately made me a performer.

Because more of the internet should be poetry

2011-03-27T10:13:00.000-07:00

...

Two Went to Sleep
Leonard Cohen

Two went to sleep
almost every night
one dreamed of mud
one dreamed of Asia
visiting a zeppelin
visiting Nijinsky
Two went to sleep
one dreamed of ribs
one dreamed of senators
Two went to sleep
two travellers
The long marriage
in the dark
The sleep was old
one dreamed of oranges
one dreamed of Carthage
Two friends asleep
years locked in travel
Good night my darling
as the dreams waved goodbye
one travelled lightly
one walked through water
visiting a chess game
visiting a booth
always returning
to wait out the day
One carried matches
one climbed a beehive
one sold an earphone
one shot a German
Two went to sleep
every sleep went together
wandering away
from an operating table
one dreamed of grass
one dreamed of spokes
one bargained nicely
one was a snowman
one counted medicine
one tasted pencils
one was a child
one was a traitor
visiting heavy industry
visiting the family
Two went to sleep
none could foretell
one went with baskets
one took a ledger
one night happy
one night in terror
Love could not bind them
Fear could not either
they went unconnected
they never knew where
always returning
to wait out the day
parting with kissing
parting with yawns
visiting Death till
they wore out their welcome
visiting Death till
the right disguise worked

1964

Tube Portraits

2011-03-08T03:21:00.001-08:00

Saturday, 5pm, Northern Line - Clapham Common to Old Street

1. A pretty woman being admired
Green eyes, black hair, folded arms. He moves one seat over so as better to look at her, and I notice her pleated canvas boots. Not something I would wear, but then again nobody's asked me to. I wonder how much thought or effort she put into that long black hair. From the look of the roots, the lack of stray hairs, the way it nearly seems manipulated into falling off her shoulders just so, I'd say there were a series of moments at a vanity, where she went through the motions that make her beautiful, only occasionally distracted by her straightening iron as her mind wandered about its own anxieties - Thinking of promotions, was that text really for me, what present to buy her sister for her birthday. She barely noticed when the motions had run their course. When she had put that final flourish of eye liner on with a swoop and voilà! A woman worthy of admiration on the tube. What purpose this serves is obscure, but at the very least she is presentable. And this helps us all as we wander through our day.

2. An older couple speaking another language
She goes for a weekly manicure and he gets his leather jacket from his brother who sells them in a small shop on Kingsland Road. He makes her laugh. He always makes her laugh, and especially now, in this secret world of language they share together on this tube, where he loves to tease her more than ever and she loves to reciprocate with a warm smile or giggle. She is always careful not to laugh too loudly, lest someone on the carriage think it is directed at them. It is directed only at the way he leans closer when he divulges his secrets. At the pull of a disappearing space between them. At her longing and his intimacy.

3. A man fiddling with his camera
He takes pictures when he rides, appearing to fiddle with his camera, only ever pointing it at the most flamboyant members of the carriage, those dressed for attention. He doesn't publish them, although one day he dreams he will, in large prints, in a gallery or somewhere on the Southbank. When he points, frames in that digital window and shoots, he likes to imagine who will walk by them on their stroll down the river. What they will think of them and why.

4. A woman and her teenage daughter
She shields her daughter by the door, standing with an arm clutching a big yellow pole. Her daughter's eyes dart around the car distractedly - her mother has done this for as long as she can remember and she is at an age where she invites the attention her mother wishes to ward off. She relishes catching an eye, smiling, looking away, and smiling again, the way she has recently learned works. Her mother sees her looking around the car, eager to find a partner to play this glancing tennis with her. And her mother remembers being that age and playing it too. Sometimes she even wishes that the glance was meant for her.

5. A woman without a book
She dreams as she sits. First of a vacation she once took to France, and then of the man she met there, his facebook wall which never references her, and the time he embarrassed her in a message. The stops are all distractions. She will awake suddenly and see a girl in a red coat scribbling while looking at her. The girl will not scribble the dream. She can not. She returns to this slumber until her station is called.

The Right Stuff Almost

2011-02-13T10:18:00.000-08:00

Hey hey Internet!

So re my last post, in case you have been living under a rock or are signalling this blog from another planet or a satellite, (in which case, cool!) the Egyptian people won. Thank frickin' goodness. We can all feel a little bit better about being human and being in the world and what four million people can do. For now.

In other news, I had a rollicking time this week at the annual RSA State of the Arts Conference where my lovely co-director Andy Field was speaking about Innovation in Theatre. Excellent stuff, and his also happened to be the best panel in my humble opinion. One thing that panel really brought home for me was the importance of visionary curators and producers. Artists have been and and will always be making visionary work on their own time, but without a producer or curator with the vision to platform them in some way, be it by buying one of their paintings, offering them space to perform, or paying for their first symphony, we won't ever know they exist. Those who ran the panels that day were desperate to avoid talk of funding, lest the conference descend into some kind of artsy whinge-fest. But how do you talk about risk without talking about money? Artists do take a risk when they make experimental work, but equally curators take a huge risk by supporting that work, and perhaps what we really need to be discussing in these belt-tightening times is not only how to continue to support artists to make this kind of risky work, but how to support and encourage curators and funders to programme and platform it?

Anywho, a lot of interesting thinking done around the entire event. Andy, Laura McDermott from the Fierce Festival, and academic and artist Hannah Nicklin had also organised a wonderful "Flash Conference", where in a rather Guerilla fashion artists got up during coffee breaks and answered some tough questions about work and how to continue making it. Considering how few actual artists spoke at the event this was mighty interesting, and tucked away in a corner somehow felt appropriate. A definite highlight was Lucy Ellinson's answer to the provocation "How do we involve art in mass protest?" Lucy staged a miniature sit-in in a sea of somewhat awkward networking. It was a definite fan favourite and unsurprisingly confirmed my unending respect and admiration for her politics and performance.

Oh my gosh, did I just blog about an Arts Conference on a blog that is usually reserved for hilarious youtube clips only? I certainly did. What a world. Well, just to keep up my street cred, watch this, and feel free to disparage my attempt at credible blogging in the comments. (I'm looking at you, Spammy McSpammer! I just love your replica SwatChes.)

Why the Egyptian People Need to Win

2011-02-09T03:27:00.000-08:00

The Egyptian people have spoken and they have spoken decisively. They have spoken for change. Nearly this exact wording was used by John McCain in his concession speech after Barack Obama won the election. “The American people have spoken and they’ve spoken decisively.” He said. “They have spoken for change.” In many ways Barack Obama’s presidency has been a disappointment – although his people spoke decisively, he has not, or perhaps he has been silenced in a system that has ancient bureaucratic frameworks built specifically to delay and stymy bright moments of change. What was most exciting about his election was sadly not what happened next – it was the feeling that the people had a will, even the poorest first time voters in the United States, and that that will had the power to influence change, and that they lived in a democracy where such change was possible.

The people in Egypt have a will too, although they work against a different system – they can not put this energy behind a well funded, centre left, charismatic politician in an election where they only have two options. Their president has over stayed his welcome if he was ever welcome to begin with. And the change the Egyptian people are seeking, when they succeed, as they must succeed, will be far more decisive and meaningful than the election of Barack Obama. Where that “grassroots” movement took the people’s collective frustration and harnessed it to elect the leader of a party that in fact had never been quite so radical, this movement is organized by the people, and it is not chaos, it is its own temporary paradigm of collective leadership that has succesfully seen through sixteen days, and could see through sixteen more, or however long it takes. It is an exercise of endurance, where more people join each day because they believe that change is possible, and that the people can make it happen.

This is why the Egyptian people need to win. In the west we have been presented with such appalingly limited paths toward true and meaningful change and democracy. The election of Barack Obama was internationally celebrated because the candidate he seemed to be before the election was radical. He was radical because he was intelligent. He seemed to recognise what was wrong with his country and he was not afraid to speak out about it. He spoke out about Guantanamo Bay, about Health Care Reform, about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He said what the people were thinking. He asked the same questions and he promised to change what he could. But he represented a party – a party that had been in power countless times before and will be in power countless times again. And in this sense what he had to offer could never have been as radical as the people needed it to be. Because the system was not changing. And even a good man at the head of a corrupt system can apparently not change much.

The Egyptian people are calling for reforms of their leader and their system. The Egyptian people are not making change happen through a well worn and possibly corrupt election. They are making change happen through their collective wills.

I need to know that I live in a world that is not so flattened by international bureaucracy and globalization that millions of people in the streets can not remove one stubborn tyrant, Mubarak, from power. The world needs to know this. Because perhaps it is this, above all, that needs to change. The people need to feel empowered. The people need to feel that what they think and feel matters. The people speak for change, and they speak decisively. They need to know that somebody is listening, and that they won't be arrested for speaking. Egypt could change the world.

Tariq Ramadan and Slavok Zizek on Egypt

2011-02-07T03:19:00.000-08:00

I love Al Jazeera's point about Saudi Arabia. It exposes America's selective Islamaphobia for the propaganda it is.

A little bit of feel good

2011-02-01T06:07:00.000-08:00

From the lovely kids and choir instructor at PS22. Keep on rockin' on.

Like so many Jane Austen characters before me...

2011-01-26T03:33:00.000-08:00

This weekend I will be visiting Bath to perform "Like You Were Before". This is the first date on a tour of the show I'm doing over the next few months in the UK. Watch this space for the super exciting other dates - I will let y'all know as soon as they are confirmed.

The Guardian had some very kind words to say about how you should come see it in Bath - click here to be convinced.

This is very much starting to feel like the little tour date that could, with a few slight obstacles which have so far stood in the way. First I discovered that the charger for my north american video camera that they don't make anymore had gone missing, which meant the video my entire show is based off of was trapped, which meant that I was seriously rue-ing the day I ever chose to base an entire show around technology. The lovely Ruby Jones came over and fixed that one for me by suggesting I plug into the charger for her camera. This was after I'd become panicked enough that such a simple solution seemed nigh-on impossible.

Then the televisions for my show seemed altogether way too expensive to get to Bath, but the lovely Lisa Heledd-Jones fixed this problem for me by volunteering some sets, so I had to just quit my whining. The show was nearly on the road.

THEN I woke up this morning and had lost my voice. I have some kind of throat infection. But a quick call to the NHS direct line also gave me the good advice to make my voice come back and hopefully stick. So Mighty Ducks style, the hockey game must go on. Giving you all the more incentive if you are in or near Bath to be present for the triumphant moment that I walk out on stage and do my best. I'd love to see you in the crowd while I'm doing that. We'll wave hello. And you can book your tickets by clicking here.

For one last piece of newsy news- my official professional-like website is up and running now. Check out the link under my blogroll. Any feedback is welcome. But don't hate on the napkin. I really like the napkin.

My day in details

2011-01-15T16:17:00.000-08:00

Did You Read?

2011-01-14T06:02:00.000-08:00

Digital Love

2011-01-12T16:54:00.000-08:00

I took this! And then I made it way better with my computer.

Until We Say Yes

2011-01-11T08:41:00.000-08:00

As some of you know, I was just in Canada working on the text for the brilliant Volcano's new piece "Until We Say Yes" about Pearson International Airport. I thought as a wee taster of fun to come, I would include a little excerpt from the piece. This section is called "The Wisdom of the Dead." And in case you're legal-curious, it is written by me, and property of Volcano.

The Wisdom of the Dead

After life is over, there is very much organizing to do. Everyone has their own room full of shelving units with very much to put in order. Once completed, these rooms make up a library browsed by the fates. You are given many of your own things to order – interesting and not so interesting - a list of all of the nice and horrible things that people said about you behind your back, with those that are true in bold. Many movies of every time you appeared in someone else’s dream, which are always beautiful and surprising to watch. A copy of every photo you have ever been caught in, and a copy of every record you have ever appeared in, on cctv, in market research phone calls, on tape, in home movies, on the internet. Every piece of paper you have ever written on, every time you have signed your name, every email, every text, every possible trace of the fact that you were once alive is stored here. Apparently, organizing this used to take one month at most, but lately it has begun to take people years.

Right before you start the process, you are referenced into one of two categories, based on a percentage of every time that you said yes or no. I for example am 72.3% yes and 27.7% no. So I am in the first category – those who have over 70% yes – these rooms are always smaller, less full of information, of trace, usually populated by shorter lives. But they are also the only part of the library that anyone considers worth browsing, with very few exceptions.

On the tube

2011-01-07T07:36:00.001-08:00

United by these yellow poles. If we let go we fall.

Sallow skin, suspicious glances, the judging up and down, examining each other's shoes (cowboy, sneakers, loafers). This unites us too. Ferried beneath soil, ants on a conveyor belt (although none of us did the digging, or even wonder who did).

They wear suits. Her bag may be Louis Vuitton. Furry Ugg boots. Rising together in a line from their seats, like a class before the national anthem, or the first move of a new dance, they all change here.

We are lonely meteors. Trying not to look at each other. Silent through space.

From David Plante's "The Pure Lover"

2010-12-31T10:28:00.001-08:00

...

Calmly, you said, “I wish I could go home.”
“But we are at home. You don’t think we are?”
“Not quite.”
“Where is home then?”
“In London,” you said, and then, “This is London.”
“It is, and we’re at home here.”
“Not quite,” you said again.
“Is Greece home?”
“No, no quite.” You were silent, trying to think, then you said, “Home has many meanings.”

PS:

2010-12-21T16:19:00.001-08:00

I've also decided that my next official project should be to write a Christmas hit. This could both be a piece of conceptual what-have-you about familiarity and popular culture and ritual, and a brilliant moneymaking scheme. I'm from Canada. We have snow. We have Canadian content laws. I'll get it on the radio and become a big big super big star. It will be nearly as great as this:

Christmas never gets old.

2010-12-21T15:53:00.000-08:00

What is this time of year that is so clichéd it can never become clichéd. Rather than cringe at the same old familiar songs and food and people, familiarity touches us with the warmth of sitting next to a fire.

Everything you may have wanted to know about Debbie but forgot to ask

2010-12-10T22:08:00.000-08:00

This video was taken as part of non-zero-one's "Hold Hands Lock Horns" series during the Edinburgh Festival in August. Enjoy, my 4 friends, enjoy!

#06 debbie from non zero one on Vimeo.

For Goodness Sakes Post Something

2010-11-15T15:24:00.000-08:00

Oh Man Interweb. When I don't spend time with you for a while I get so afraid to write to you. Like a clingy friend who gets progressively angrier every day I don't call, and so you know, I just keep not calling. Out of fear, I guess. But what a ridiculous comparison, you are the interweb. You have so many friends. You just keep on chugging along regardless of how much attention I pay you, you keep writing equal parts disgusting/witty/politically worrying/defeatist/hopeful comments on blogs all over the place, and whether or not I'm contributing makes little impact. Nonetheless, the blogging party is one I always enjoy attending, and when I fall out of your loop I do often regret it. So it's nice to be back and rambling to you.

This month has been a relatively busy one in the life of myself. I recently completed a residency at the BAC where I attempted to learn all the lyrics to this song. Easier said than done, chickadees, easier said than done.

I was also redrafting my play "The Great Asker" for the reading I have coming up at the Tarragon Theatre in Toronto on November 24th, (did you check that plug, was the precise date making it too obvious? Should I just have linked it instead?) and I think all of the exposure to my lack of linguistic powers in magyar (That's Hungarian for Hungarian) did me some good.

I was lucky enough to undertake two workshops with the Artist Teacher Exchange at BAC, one with two remarkable and very inspiring Education dudes who wore vests and played African instruments with the best of 'em, and one with Frantic Assembly, a theatre company whose show Peep Show blew my little 19 year old mind when I saw it back in 2002. So I feel all in all like it's been a fortunate month for learning.

One less fortunate piece of news is that the Edinburgh University Settlement had to dissolve due to increased financial pressure from the economic crisis, which means Bristo Hall is up for sale and Forest Cafe is in jeopardy. I believe in this community, in its importance, impact, ripples, and I think it will pull through. Hey - if you like me and like my blog, I suggest you think the same and head on over to their tumblr to donate.

Just click here. On these words, right here.

It's fast and easy and will make you feel good. I guarantee it. Because you'll be part of keeping at least one breath of independent and co-operative artistic business alive somewhere in the world. (In Edinburgh!) And you'll be supporting an organisation that has touched my life and the lives of countless theatre companies, bands, visual artists, writers, masseuses, aspiring chefs and hair stylists over the last ten years. Businesses like Forest don't stay open if we take them for granted - in Edinburgh, glossy soulless coffee shops will always be the default unless we fight for the places that matter. And to quote from a source I can't quite place, everything beautiful is as difficult as it is rare. Organisations like this one don't stay alive without a fight. And it's not someone else's job to put up their dukes. It's our job. And together we can do it. That's the good news.

The Edinburgh University Settlement situation has thrown up a lot of questions for Andy and I about the future of Forest Fringe - so allow me to say publicly to the four friends of mine who read this - Don't worry. We'll be fine. We are survivors. Just like Cher and her cronies, and with much less plastic surgery to boot. However, we have been rethinking our model lately. You can read about it in an open letter that we posted on our blog. Click on Forest Fringe on my blogroll for details...

And finally, my website has launched, but is really very far from complete. The skeleton structure is there, but it's crying out for more details, photographs, media, up-to-date press and more. Soooo... I'm not going to tell you what the website is, because I don't think you should go yet. But let's just say this - the address is really. really. obvious. Like it couldn't be more obvious if I tried. So if you really want to look at a half finished thing, it shouldn't be too difficult. But, four friends, if you want to stay impressed with me, I wouldn't recommend it yet.

(Hear that, Mom?)

It's nice to be back with you Bloggy. Let's never fight again.

x

Music's Been Ruined By Dating 10 Step Handbook

2010-10-13T03:26:00.001-07:00

This is long overdue...

In 2008 and 2009 a few of you may remember that I did a performance called "Music's Been Ruined by Dating". It consisted of inviting 4 audience members into a tent made of bedsheets, where we proceeded to session the songs that were ruined by my four most significant ex boyfriends. Writing it down now it all sounds very high fidelity. Well, all those years ago, I Also made a 10 step handbook to help others follow in my footsteps. Having a few friends who are recently single, it seemed like an appropriate time to publish the ole' thing, in hopes that we can all continue to enjoy music without those pesky emotions to drown out the sounds.

Ever wanted to reclaim the music that was ruined by your string of failed relationships?
Are you avoiding your favourite Prince album like it was the plague because it reminds you of the time he told you he cheated on with a girl who wore a raspberry beret?

Does everything on your playlist, even if it’s not supposed to, scream “Heartbreak”?

Well suffer no more… You can chase those musical demons away with the Music’s Been Ruined by Dating 10 Step Handbook.
Listen to “your song” without batting an eyelid! Dance to the ditty she broke up with you to! Never feel anything when you listen to music again! All with the Music’s Been Ruined by Dating 10 Step Handbook!

Step 1:
Make a list of all of your relationships that have ruined music. Not ALL of your relationships – if you went out with someone who was deaf or didn't like music, you’re probably okay – only relationships that took a song, took everything that was great about it, and made the song one big stupid memory that hurts every time you hear it. This is a ruined song.

Step 2:
Put down dates for all of these relationships. For example, if you went out with Jo from October 30th 2005 to November 11th 2006, write Jo, October 2005 – November 2006. Leave out precise dates, because the fact that you remember those will make you feel, well, a bit pathetic.

Step 3:
Now go through an approximate list of all of the music that reminds you of that relationship. Don’t press yourself to be too specific, the internet will help you sort that out later. If the relationship ruined an entire musical artist for you, for example, Bjork, try to pick the most famous and often played Bjork song. This is the song that will exorcise the demons of your past first and most effectively.

Step 4:
Try to group the songs in memorical order (the order that you remember the relationship in, see Annie Hall for guidance) for when exactly in the relationship they were relevant. I recommend putting the songs that remind you of breaking up, or having mistimed sex after breaking up, last. But you need to relive the relationship through the music in an order that makes sense to you.

Step 5:
Get access to a computer with the internet, a cd burner and a downloading engine. I suggest Acquisition. If you do not remember the precise artist of a song but only a line or two, use Google to help answer your questions. These are the songs that have been so ruined you have attempted to block them out completely, but these are also the songs that are the most worth saving. Now Download, download, download!

Step 6:
Play some of the song to yourself on your playlist to make sure it is the right song. DO NOT listen to the song in its entirely, or the exercise will not work as well. You may also notice, at this stage, that some of the music that you believed was “ruined by dating” was actually ruined simply because it is not very good music. Do not worry too much about this – it is important to reclaim all the music and your ability to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Step 7:
Religiously follow your pre-prepared playlist and burn the cd. Do not worry if you were not able to find every song on the internet. In fact, this is a sign that your relationship was more special because your musical taste was more obscure. (ha.) If a song was particularly important to you and you could not find it on the internet, delay your project a day and keep searching. Sometimes that one song really does make or break your playlist.

Step 8:
Listen to the cd. The first time you do this you will find it difficult. This is to be expected. Listen to it all the way through and try to do an activity while listening, like reading or surfing the internet. It is important not to focus too much on the music unless you are particularly moved to.

Step 9:
Listen to the cd again, but this time in a situation where you are sure to ignore it, like at work or at a party. Do not let yourself get sucked into the tunes, but instead enjoy them for their ocular qualities.

Step 10:
You can post your playlist somewhere on the internet if you like. Or make it a mixed cd for a friend. The moral of the story is, we’ve all been there. I can’t listen to “Raspberry Beret” anymore either.

Warning: Do not use an ipod instead of a cd. Your relationship may have ruined music for you, but ipods have ruined music for everyone.

Canadian content blowing my mind

2010-10-07T09:22:00.000-07:00

Courtesy of the amazing Magda. Check out her blog here.

Debbie Pearson takes a minute to think about things she doesn't know much about

2010-10-05T10:37:00.000-07:00

5. Death.

Debbie Pearson takes a minute to think about things she doesn't know much about

2010-10-05T10:30:00.000-07:00

4. Web Design.

Debbie Pearson takes a minute to think about things she doesn't know much about

2010-10-05T10:23:00.001-07:00

3. Globalisation.

Debbie Pearson takes a minute to think about things she doesn't know much about

2010-10-05T10:17:00.000-07:00

2. Religion.

Debbie Pearson takes a minute to think about things she doesn't know much about

2010-10-05T10:08:00.001-07:00

1. Capitalism

One Minute Manifesto

2010-09-30T11:55:00.000-07:00

At Forest Fringe this summer the lovely and quite brilliant Lucy Ellinson did a project called "One Minute Manifestos." We had a minute to read out a manifesto before a buzzer went off. We had a minute to step forward and say what we believed.

On the second night, I was asked to do one, and I'll admit I had quite a hard time asserting what I believed. Maybe I was just feeling particularly cynical that day, but it seemed for that moment that I huddled over my laptop, which was perched on the side of a table I was sharing with loud, chatty punters, overtired from a 16 hour day that was only 3/4 of the way over, I didn't believe in much of anything. And when I did start believing in things, they all came out as being much less positive than my usually sunny disposition would suggest. And yet - the longer I wrote the better I felt. Until finally, the milk of human kindness became my main subject. Sadly, when I read it out, I think the minute was up in the middle of me complaining about the conspiracy of the media.

Well, you got to point out the problems before you can solve them, and sadly, there are too many problems to sum up in a minute. So where do we go from there?

For the curious ones out there... My one minute manifesto. Read out (or at least most of it read out) before Kieran Hurley's wonderful (and refreshingly optimistic) show Hitch on the 12th of August.

I believe that the world is fundamentally corrupt. And when I say the world I don’t mean our communities. When I say the world I mean institutions – any institution – because I believe that the moment that people and lives are made into something that can easily be filed away onto a piece of paper they are not people, they are pieces of paper, and pieces of paper are easy to dispose of, to disappoint, to misfile.

I believe that the only truly beautiful things I own are gifts. I do not believe in buying gifts for myself. But I do believe in ensuring my own survival.

I believe that advertising makes it virtually impossible to be a good person or to do the right thing – I believe we are being constantly exposed to easy options, that we are trapped in a system that does not serve human beings – not good human beings, not bad human beings, in truth it serves no one. And I believe that the people who argue that this is incorrect know that they are lying to themselves. And are not truly happy with what is easy.

I believe that anything worthwhile is as difficult as it is valuable. But that this rule should not apply to the default setting of a relationship.

I believe that we live in a society that is unsustainable, and that change is coming and it won’t be easy.

And I believe that in light of this, nothing is more important than kindness. You will only meet so many people in your life, even if you are aware of these very big, very confusing things. I believe in caring about each other.

I believe we are all at bottom compassionate people who want to build together, who want to work together, who want to care together.

There is a very annoying man next to me who is challenging this belief. But I’m doing my best. I believe in doing your best. He just apologized. I believe he meant it.

(Re) Accustomed to your ways

2010-09-28T16:42:00.001-07:00

Oh boy. It has been a while since we've hung out, hasn't it blogo? I'm sorry. I've been trying to think of something great to say, and yet nothing feels quite right to put out there to the public. I mean, I could tell you about how I actually went to see Les Mis last week at the Barbican and had an inordinately good time, but considering I already mentioned The Counting Crows, who on principle I hate, and kept that mention up on the blog all month, I think we've been through about as much embarassment as this tiny corner of the internet will stand for. I could also tell you, I suppose, about the William Shatner Karaoke Booth I set up at Live Art Speed Dating with Fierce in Birmingham this weekend, but then I'd have to publish the video of my rendition of Blur's "Countryhouse" and that's not merely embarassing, but somewhat painful. I could tell you about how my lovely friend Buchan Bronco and I just spent two hours watching clips of Audrey Hepburn online, or how much trouble I've had giving up facebook, or how I started Anna Karenina and am now at a predictable stand still, but none of this is quite interesting enough, is it?

I wish I had something really profound, or creative, or bold to publish. And yet, we've fallen out of touch, haven't we? Out of habit, and when that happens inevitably the dialogue becomes more stilted, less easy. You need to catch up with each other before you can discuss the real stuff. The stuff that matters. You need to re-accustom yourselves to each other's language, mannerisms, interests. And then the real stuff comes out. It always does. So. So. So...

What have you been up to lately, anyway?

Edinburgh and everything after

2010-08-31T15:27:00.001-07:00

Oh wow. Did I really just reference a Counting Crows album that I mostly try to either pretend I didn't like or forget I did like in the title to this blog posting? Why yes, I certainly did, ladies and germs! There's a little bit of music shame in all of us, and sometimes we're not even sure why.

(Guilty pleasures were pleasing, after all. Hence, the name.)

Sooooo, as the post suggests, every festival I seem to pretty much post quite a lot about Edinburgh in the lead up, then not post at all during the festival itself, then try to sum it up in this kind of a post - usually by saying something like, "It was amazing and impossible to write about all in one go, so no doubt I'll blog about it again in the future." And then I don't really blog about it again in the future and everyone feels a little bit disappointed with my lack of follow through. So this time Kids, I am just going to be straight and say that this post will most likely be my only direct post about Forest Fringe in Edinburgh in 2010. And because I am loathe to summarize wonderful and complicated and tiring things, it will not do anything much justice, but a future promise to blog about it won't do much justice either, so there.

So while we're starting and ending things all in one post, I suppose I should start and end with my personal favourites of the festival. Somehow, amidst all the running around and work and even doing my own show, I managed to have some moments that really inspired me and stuck out to me as a spectator, and those are really the thing that make the whole fringey enterprise worthwhile in the first place. So here's a little run down, in no particular order.

James Baker/Bootworks piece - 30 Days to Space. Also known to locals as "The Spaceman on the Ladder." What was the spaceman doing? Well, James, having reached 24, had to deal with the fact that he would never reach his lifelong goal of being an astronaut. And so he calculated that the distance to Space was approximately 43,700 climbs up one particular ladder, and so he was going to climb this ladder every day for eight hours a day for 30 days over the course of the festival, chalking a star on the wall at the top of every climb. By the end of the festival the foyer of Forest Fringe was covered in thousands of stars, and to think that each of those twinkly scribbles was a climb was nearly as inconceivable as the real space. He reached the summit yesterday, to a resounding applause, a smoke machine, two bottles of champagne, and about 30 people cheering him for the last ten climbs. I've never seen anything like it. It was an event. It started as cute and somewhere in the middle it became heartbreaking then climbed its way to triumphant and beautiful. This is definitely the highlight of my and I think many other people's festivals. Not for the actual performance or spectacle of it, but for the beauty of seeing a modern human try for something important and futile. Nobody spends a lifetime on one corner of a cathedral anymore. But somebody climbs to space on a ladder.

Daniel Kitson's show - It's Always Now Until It's Later. Of course I liked this. It was like the War and Peace of theatre, which is an amusing was to describe anything, but heck, that's how it made me feel. The story was beautiful and the writing was poignant and small and considered as always, but the piece's relationship to its set is what has stayed with me. If you find a way to go see it, I recommend that you do. I like the fact that two of my most vivid Fringe memories involve looking at a man standing in a sea of stars. Of course they bloody do.

And I guess the other two pieces I saw that really knocked my socks off were Littlebulb's show Operation Greenfield, and 2B Theatre's one man monologue (Yes, I said it, a frickin' awesome One Man Monologue) Invisible Atom. For different reasons, I suppose, although it seems that everything I loved this festival dealt in some way with the infinite - with how we can conceive of ourselves on the planet - you know, kind of with faith? It was a good year for big ideas. My favourite kind.

On a personal level, I should probably mention that my show won a Herald Angel and was shortlisted for the Arches Brick Award and a Total Theatre Award for Innovation. But in a lovely turn of fate, I lost both of those awards to Forest Fringe contenders - an incredibly beautiful show called Me and the Machine in which you dance with a woman while wearing virtual reality glasses won the Brick Award, (It was the kind of show that sent you beaming back into the world), and our very own Spaceman won the Total Theatre Award for Innovation, along with some guy named Tim Crouch and a show called Roadkill at some venue named the Traverse. I heard they were both pretty good. (I saw the Author. It is awesome.) So for once in my life I can actually say "It's an honour just being nominated" and mean it! Alone. In my room. Where I sleep with my Herald Angel. It leaves a dent in my cheek when I wake up. Oh how I love that dent.

So all in all a really inspiring and manic and unique and meaningful festival. Impossible to do justice to in one blog post or many. So thank goodness for both of us that I'm sticking to one.

But in all seriousness, if you are reading and you were involved in any way with Forest Fringe as an artist, a volunteer, a supporter, a punter, somebody cheering James up and down the ladder, Thank You. The thing that always inspires me the most about Edinburgh is the boundless generosity of spirit I encounter in one building. That's what makes it my favourite time of year - it's the one time that I know we will all come together and do our best to build something valuable. We work very hard, and then the two weeks are over, and then it's almost as though it never happened. But of course, it did. Just look at all those chalky stars...

E-Flyer Fun

2010-07-28T07:53:00.000-07:00

I love free trials of Photoshop.

Edinburgh on the horizon- Like You Will Be Soon

2010-07-27T14:12:00.000-07:00

Well hello there Blog of yore!

It's been a busy month, and it will no doubt get even busier in less than a week's time when I head up to Edinburgh for Forest Fringey times. I look forward to that kind of busy every year, in kind of a terrified way, the way you might look forward to an exercise class you always just make it through, I know it's good for me, I know I'll have to keep my endurance up, I hope I can keep up with the moves, if I do I'll feel pretty good about myself.

You might be interested in what precisely Forest Fringe and moi have on the go, so I'll run you through it briefly. Okay, well Forest Fringe has been brilliantly programmed this year by the dear Andy with some contributions from myself - if you want to know everything click on the Forest Fringe link on the side of the blog to check out our thinking behind this year's festival. Possibly foolishly, we're aiming for the nearly impossible feat of a more relaxed festival this year, a year that will create a warm, comforting, relaxing space in the midst of the chaos, while also throwing some incredibly exciting pieces of work in, just to keep things interesting. I'm excited about basically everything, so I'm not going to choose favourites. Come to the venue any time if you're in Edinburgh and I can pretty much promise something to delight and confuse you.

And of course, I'm going to be remounting "Like You Were Before" in Alphabet Video, at the other side of Marchmont. I'm excited, I'm nervous, I'm trying to rehearse so that it will be good, oh, I did mention I'm excited and nervous, didn't I? Tomorrow I may even go crazy and get some flyers made, even though I hate flyers. Oh, maybe I'll just scratch that. I was going to get a stamp made and then just make anything close by into a flyer off the cuff. I wonder if it's too late for that? Well, eitherway, if you haven't seen it before you should come see it now, if only because Alphabet Video is a totally amazing, genuine article independent video store, and if you're anything like me, genuine article stores of all kinds sort of make life worth living. Why not stage a show in one?

If you're into that you can book online to see it by clicking on these words. And although artist Debbie would love to take your money, producer Debbie refuses to let her do so, as all events at Forest Fringe are free like the birds who are free. (Because not all birds are free.)

Send a letter to your MP if you mean it

2010-07-05T02:53:00.000-07:00

Dear Ms. Bennett,

I voted for you in the last election and it is with the faith that I placed in you to represent me then that I am writing to you now.

You must be aware of the damage and, I wish there were a less extreme way of putting this, police brutality during the G20 summit. Toronto’s mayor and other political representatives have been brushing it off as necessary in exceptional circumstances, but the plethora of videos online, not of a single incident but several assaults all over the city, make it difficult to understand this dismissive attitude towards the treatment of Toronto citizens.

If by any chance you haven’t seen the footage or heard the reports, I encourage you to take some time to watch any of these videos or slideshows:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2010/jun/28/protesters-clash-police-toronto-g20

http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=5326

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2JmSK3H8tI&feature=player_embedded

Of course any media reporting could be subject to selective editing, but the sheer variety of clips available, and the shocking footage (even if it were selectively edited) makes it difficult to deny that in many cases police were severely breaching citizens and media’s rights. From the bullying snatch away of a microphone, to beating Guardian blogger Jesse Rosenfeld, Torontonians feel ashamed of this public show of an attack on Freedom of Speech, and urgently need for the opposition party to recognize this and bring the Conservatives to task.

Perhaps most disturbing are the reports of up to 930 million of the tax payers dollars that are still unaccounted for in the G20 spending. The Liberal sponsorship scandal that prompted a no confidence vote in Parliament was to the tune of $100 million. Now under the veil of transparency the Conservatives need to answer for nine times as much, and the Liberal government has yet to make a statement questioning the most undemocratic spending move in Canadian history. (Not to mention the fact that this spending overshadows the Vancouver Olympics, and where that event brought economic growth and profile to its city, the G20 brought Torontonians property damage, loss of earnings for the weekend, mass unwarranted arrests of its citizens, and shame.)

There are nearly 50,000 members of a Facebook group calling for a public inquiry into the G20 and the numbers are growing. If Canadians have ever needed the opposition party to act swiftly and deliberately in their interests that time is now. As an MP for the city of Toronto please assure us that our outcries are being heard. Do not let our country become known internationally as a “police state”, as so many have called it. Actively challenge claims like those of the recent MacLean’s blogger Paul Wells who wrote that the Liberal party was in coalition with the Conservatives.

As a Liberal voter, I want to believe that yours is a party that is not afraid to hold the Conservatives to task over this, the worst kind of scandal, one done completely out in the open, but in a way that citizens feel they have no power to change or argue with it. You have that power. You represent my constituency. I urge you to use that power and do the right thing.

Yours faithfully,

Deborah Pearson
(My Address here)

PS: I will be posting this letter on my blog and facebook to encourage others to write to their representatives and show their concern.

Simon Borer's letter to Toronto's Mayor

2010-06-28T08:39:00.000-07:00

To my Mayor David Miller and my Member of Parliament Olivia Chow,

Hello. I am writing to you today because I believe you are decent and principled people who feel as strongly towards our city, country, and democracy as I do. I wish to communicate to you my hope that you will call for a transparent review of the G20's finances and any possible human rights violations that occurred over this past weekend.

I believe that our nation is only as strong as the rights and freedoms that we as citizens demand be upheld. When a small minority of violent individuals were allowed to run amok without police intervention, every taxpayer in Canada thought the same thing - where has our money gone? The costs to us eclipsed both recent summits and the Vancouver Olympics by orders of magnitude, only for small business owners to be targeted by hooligans without recourse? I hope that you can help protect the rights of the taxpayers and our free & open society by calling for a full audit of the G20 security expenditures.

The following day, we saw the situation reversed. Innocent people were arrested, or worse - trapped in a punishing thunderstorm for three hours, surrounded by a wall of riot police, many unaware of the situation they had stumbled into. There are reports of violence against journalists, always a chilling moment for those of us who believe in democracy. We also have the shameful Ontario Regulation 233/10, the so called "Fence Law", to demand answers for - a law rushed through at the last minute before it could crumble before a constitutional challenge. The list continues, at great length, so it is my hope that you will join with Amnesty International and the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, along with so many ordinary citizens, in calling for a full review of any possible human rights violations that may have happened this past weekend.

It is clear to me that mistakes were made. This is understandable - there is a pervasive climate of fear among our leaders today. We have for the last decade allowed them to govern us in a state of exception, sidestepping democratic principles and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Our responsibility now is to demand transparency and accountability from those in power.

I have great faith in both of you. I have followed your careers closely, and truly believe that you are good people, and I believe that both of you, without my encouragement, will be calling for a full independent audit and human rights review of the G20 security. I just wanted to say, preemptively, I knew you'd do the right thing.

Yours,

Simon Borer
150 Bellwoods Ave
Toronto, ON

Turns out I like So many youtube videos!

2010-06-19T21:28:00.000-07:00

So I'm in Toronto this weekend leading a workshop for Volcano and the U of T Centre for Ethics called "InFORMING Content" which examines the relationship between experimental theatre and ethics. Ethicists give lectures and the workshop participants, all theatremakers, respond to the talks with formally inventive theatre. Today was really invigorating. I'm very excited to see what the results of the experiments are tomorrow evening.

As part of my talk I decided to show a few examples of work that gets me going in the UK and Europe, and as a result quite a few youtube videos came about. I thought for the interested blog-readers I might share/embed some of those here. A few of these people have worked with Forest Fringe, a few of them haven't, but they all make work that is innovative enough that it can freak out and excite a room of drama students in Canada:

Mountains and getting started

2010-06-01T11:33:00.001-07:00

Hello Bloggy Friends!

So it is the first day of this wonderful month and this internet thing of mine is obviously very much on my mind. I am currently in Banff, at the Banff Centre doing a programme called the "Playwrights Colony." The idea of living in a colony is both terrifying and very sweet, and the reality of it is neither, really. Well it is sweet if we're to take the 90s slang use of the word: Super Sweet. But it certainly feels as though I'm here to do something, even if I'm having a hard time getting around to the thing that it is I'm supposed to be doing. Writing a Play. There are plenty of other things to focus on in the meantime. I have been swimming in the pool once, done a yoga class (the fact that procrastination could actually push me towards a fitness regime, even such a half *ssed one is incredible) I've watched four movies, including Pretty Woman in French on television. (Une Jolie Femme. Which is much improved by replacing Julia Roberts' voice with an elegant french woman's.) I've been in a fellow playwrights reading, started strategically planning my meal plans to get the most out of the allotted amount of money we're given each day, spoken on skype several times with my partner in crime and crime fighting - AND, had a dream that this very blog was turned into a porn site, which horribly became much more popular than it currently is. (Which makes sense.)

Basically what I'm saying here is that I've been here for four days and I've accomplished a whole lot that isn't writing.

But this isn't to say that I'm not preparing to write. I think I may be. I think at this point I've had to accept that procrastinating is part of my process. And in this case it doesn't feel as much like procrastinating as it feels like - getting ready.

I've got two weeks left here and I've got to say that this is the kind of place that is obviously geared towards that moment when you drop everything and stop living so that you can be writing. Maybe that intimidates me a little. Okay, replace maybe for probably, and replace probably for "of course it does." BUT I also feel that there is an energy here that I need to pause, rest, stop to catch - like a radio frequency - I know it's here, I'm just trying to tune into it.

In the meanwhile I have (surprisingly) been spending less time on the internet than I usually do, even though it's always here, waiting for me in my room at the end of a long day. I've also been sleeping less than I'd expect. And My Gawd, I've actually been using my gym membership. I think that all of these facts can only foreshadow positive things. A kind of living for the present that brings writing into it somehow. Not unlike how things were in Greece - but much quieter, more introverted, and geared towards that.

I'm excited to start. I'll let you know when I do.

In the meantime, I just saw the Shop Around The Corner and it blew my little mind.

Little Things

2010-05-18T13:19:00.000-07:00

So the blog has been real heavy on the work related chat lately, hasn't it? Allow me for a moment to pull back on that and just get into the little things - the things that make life worthwhile. (Doesn't BAC have a festival called "52 reasons for living?" Oh MAn. You promised NOT to chat about work.) Anyway here are a few things that made me happy this week.

1) When I saw two dogs wrestling by Columbia Road market. One was very very big and the other was very little. (Yes, they were wrestling. Not sexy wrestling. Just the regular kind. A group of people gathered to watch. They'll attest to it.)

2) When the boy I tutor wanted to take a five minute break to read me the short story he wrote in class. And the writing was good. Like really good.

3) When my friend Al and I drunkenly discussed breasts at 4am.

4) When my friend Nils and I went for curry and he said: "I bet they serve curry in heaven." Twice.

5) When my friend Daniel left a message on my voice mail in a very professional tone of voice, reminding me that he recently beat me at chess. I laughed out loud on the street and a man in a suit stared at me.

6) This:

7) Enthusiasm. In general. Zealousness. I just wanted to write the word Zealous. I know it was quite unnecessary after writing "enthusiasm", but have you ever typed out Zealous? Try it. It's awesome.

It's the little things that get you.

Safety Dance

2010-05-05T04:29:00.000-07:00

Just so you know, on the well meaning advice of mr. Ed Rapley and Littlebulb, both who saw a rehearsal of the show last night and gave me some feedback - there is now...

A Dance.

There used to be this very Live Arty meets Bob Dylan sequence where I held up a series of Flashcards that described a dance, because, you know, it's way better to describe a dance than to actually see it. But the friends complained that this was too cliched, and so now I attempt to do what the flashcards describe.

I'll say no more. If you're coming you'll see it. If not, you can pretend you saw it by reading these flashcards:

To the song "Pictures" by Galaxie 500:

Sign: This isn’t the end of the show.

Sign: I just felt like you guys needed to see something a bit different in this part.

Sign: If I were a dancer I’d be doing a dance right now.

Sign: if you can pretend that I’m doing a dance right now I’d really appreciate it.

Sign: I only usually dance when I’m alone or really drunk.

Sign: First I’d be Doing some sort of physical gesture that seemed appropriate to the subject matter of the show.

Sign: I’d want it to be subtle though, so that you might even be like, is she really dancing?

Sign: Maybe I’m just imagining it?

Sign: Then I’d kind of do something bigger, only slightly bigger, but not as subtle as the first dance step.

Sign: So you’d know you definitely weren’t imagining it.

Sign: And now is when I’d really bring it full throttle and do something big and grand and beautiful.

Sign: So right now you’d be feeling really inspired and excited for me to keep going.

Sign: You might even be crying.

Sign: If you could pretend that’s what I’m doing right now I’d really appreciate it.

Sign: That was a dance interlude.

Sign: In case you were wondering what that was.

See? That's exactly what I will *actually* do. AND I'm gonna get drunk on stage right before I do it. Can't wait.

People being nice...

2010-04-21T15:25:00.001-07:00

Hi there Bloggy friends!

So you may have noticed a dirth of posts lately. Apologies on that front. I've been real busy. Last week was the Forest Fringe Microfestival at the Arches where I did the first showing of the beginnings of "Like You Were Before." Responses have all been really positive. I'm working on something that I'm excited to keep going with. Here are my two favourite bits of chat. I really loved this response from Mary Brennan of The Herald:

"Deborah Pearson’s Like You Were Before is about her own past – it features video of her last day before leaving Canada for the UK – but the footage of her friends, her voicing-over her previous words, as if trying to re-enter the frame, her asides about the background to people and places all have a tremendously moving universality. The camaraderie, the farewells; the bright-eyed, youthful faces: Pearson’s camera catches it, holds it. We all share the bittersweet ache that stirs with recollections of moments we’ll never have again."

And this from a Glasgow Art Blog called "Central Station":

"Using video and live performance she took us on a trip back into her past but articulated a something about us all, moments lost, people we were and how we sometimes forget the transition from young adult into full fledge … Adult

Introduced as a work in progress, I enjoyed the subtle and difficult thing she was taking on. Maybe slightly long but it made my friend sitting next to me, laugh and cry…I think that qualifies as success."

Okay, one more bit of someone saying something nice, just while I'm on the topic. (And I so rarely indulge in this kind of shameless behaviour, I feel like I've nearly earned it!)

I found this really lovely post on "Something Very Quiet is About To Happen" which was on in March at the Battersea Library with BAC. There's nothing like reading somebody whispering on the internet about your work, especially when the whisper takes the piece and reflects it back to you. This girl didn't only "get it", she got things I wasn't even aware of. Really lovely.

Click on this to read it.

Nice people and constructive feedback. This isn't the only thing that makes you keep going, but it certainly helps.

Waiting for Elmo

2010-04-11T09:20:00.000-07:00

A play so wonderful and so stunning that it makes absolutely no sense.
I wish I could put that on my next flyer.

Rewinding and fast forwarding a memory

2010-03-25T16:48:00.000-07:00

So allow me to declare for the first time here on the blog that in about two and a half weeks I will be presenting my first scratch at the Arches of a piece I will also be presenting at the BAC upcoming Scratch Festival - called "Like You Were Before."

"Like You Were Before" is, at the moment, just about as "in progress" as a thing gets - I'm still working, I'm still writing, and I'm trying to do something difficult. I want to make a show about the fact that time - um - keeps going. Which is no doubt something we all know anyway, and probably something we all also do our best to either forget or deal with. By taking a piece of video and dissecting and contrasting it as record and a memory, well, I'm hoping to get at something. Something frickin' profound. Yes, that's right. In my next piece I am hoping to illuminate the mysteries of time and space and everything else! But for now I'm just trying to get the script done.

Come and see it if you're in Glasgow for the Forest Fringe Microfestival, or if you're in London May 5th, 6th or 7th. I'm going to, like, memorize stuff and talk to an audience and stuff, which is weird for me, but also exciting. You might want to be there.

Early Morning Blog Post

2010-03-23T01:38:00.000-07:00

The sun floods in through the windows by my bed, and seems to ask that I write some sort of manifesto for the day. Surely this moment before you've really done anything in your day is the most important time to remind yourself of what you intend to do every day, what you chip away bit by bit in increments.

Hm.

Hello March 23rd, 2010. We've never met before. And we never will again. So let's make the most of this whirlwind thing we have ahead of us. Let's do our best to make each other proud. Here are my expectations of you:

1. That I do some more work on my Arches/BAC piece - good work, not the bad kind. That's no good for anyone.

2. That I do a little bit of reading. Alexandria Quartet, here I come! (We're through with War and Peace now. Reading it is probably in the top ten things I've ever done. It was like visiting a cathedral or I imagine like seeing the pyramids. This is what human beings can do, this is how far we can go.)

3. That I take a risk. I'm not a risky person in general, and without a bit of risk, where does the life part come in?

4. That I get to my job interview on time.

5. That I go to the theatre tonight with an open perspective, but as Tassos Stevens once wisely advised me, expecting it to disappoint me, so that maybe then it can surprise me.

6. Okay, here's the last one. That I do something good for somebody. (At least one thing.)

Do listing these things make them more or less likely to happen? That really seemed more like a to-do list than a manifesto for the day.

Okay Day Manifesto part deux: Smile, Laugh, Laugh at yourself, Laugh with others, Reach out to people, Embrace when they reach out to you, Try being honest about good things, things that embarass you, Embrace the unexpected, Be ready to throw plans out the window, and Do the Day Proud.

Oh what a cringey blog post. I think I'll publish it anyway. Yeah, that's right March 23rd. Today I commit to the cringe, for better or for worse. I assume that's what you meant by risky.

A friend of mine called up to say he'd found something wonderful online...

2010-03-22T09:54:00.000-07:00

This is what he'd found:

Apparently it was done in one take and it took nearly eighty tries to get it right. If you look carefully you can see the broken extras from times they tried before.

So Sentimental

2010-03-20T09:25:00.000-07:00

This clip is so two weeks ago, you might say.

You're a jerk, I might say. Kids singing with hand motions is timeless.

To all my Live Art Speed Dates on Saturday...

2010-03-14T17:39:00.001-07:00

If you've happened upon this website through the STK International website after Saturday, I just wanted to let you know that I meant every word, and I've even made you a picture to show you how much I meant it.

Now let's never meet.

Today's hilariously accurate overheard remark...

2010-03-14T17:22:00.001-07:00

A short man's reply to a tall man outside of a terrible looking club on Old street:

"But we're in Shoreditch, mate. Nothing's right in Shoreditch."

(I attach a picture of an art gallery in Shoreditch to demonstrate how truly right this man is.)

Everybody knows.

2010-02-18T12:54:00.000-08:00

I wonder if somewhere, deep down, we all know how to be our best selves - the selves we'd like to be. We just forget so often, and the only way to make us remember is to rephrase it in grand, bright, sweeping, but new language, language we haven't heard before. This is when language ignites us - when it reminds us of something in a way that feels new. (Sometimes, refer to the image above, we are asked to remember something obvious, ancient and precious, but something that for some reason many people have decided not to remember in a long time, maybe ever, and that, if you let them turn their back on it, they will decide to try to forget again.) Words that ignite are usually best when phrased in language that leaves no room for doubt, no room for hesitation - but tells us, in the imperative, a simple truth. This is how to live life properly, you know it, you've always known it, it's obvious, I've just reminded you - so now Go. Live it.

Well here's what I've found about performance that reminded me and made me new:

The following essay contains Magic. It may even contain the power to change you, to inspire you, to remind you of something and to make you see or feel or approach something differently. Proceed with eyes full of caution and wonder.

How to speak poetry
by Leonard Cohen

Take the word butterly. To use this word it is not necessary to make the voice weigh less than an ounce or equip it with small dusty wings. It is not necessary to invent a sunny day or a field of daffodils. It is not necessary to be in love, or to be in love with butterflies. The word butterfly is not a real butterfly. If you confuse these two items people have the right to laugh at you. Do not make so much of the word. Are you trying to suggest that you love butterflies more perfectly than anyone else, or really understand their nature? The word butterfly is merely data. It is not an opportunity for you to hover, soar, befriend flowers, symbolize beauty and frailty, or in any way impersonate a butterfly. Do not act out words. Never act out words. Never try to leave the floor when you talk about flying. Never close your eyes and jerk you head to one side when you talk about death. Do not fix your burning eyes on me when you speak about love. If you want to impress me when you speak about love put your hand in your pocket or under your dress and play with yourself. If ambition and the hunger for applause have driven you to speak about love you should learn how do it without disgracing yourself or the material.

What is the expression which the age demands? The age demands no expression wathever. We have seen photographs of bereaved Asian mothers. We are not interested in the agony of your fumbled organs. There is nothing you can show on your face that can match the horror of this time. Do not even try. You will only hold yourself up to the scorn of those who have felt things deeply. We have seen newsreels of humans in the extremities of pain and dislocation. Everyone knows you are eating well and are even being paid to stand up there. You are playing to people who have experienced a catastrophe. This should make you very quiet. Speak the words, convey the data, step aside. Everyone knows you are in pain. You cannot tell the audience everything you know about love in every line of love you speak. Step aside and they will know what you know because they know it already. You have nothing to teach them. You are not more beautiful than they are. You are not wiser. Do not shout at them. Do not force a dry entry. That is bad sex. If you show the lines of your genitals, then deliver what you promise. And remember that people do not really want an acrobat in bed. What is our need? To be close to the natural man, to be close to the natural woman. Do not pretend that you are a beloved singer with a vast loyal audience which has followed the ups and downs of your life to this very moment. The bombs, flame-throwers, and all the shit have destroyed more than just the trees and villages. They have also destroyed the stage. Did you think that your profession would escape the general destruction? There is no more stage. There are no more footlights. You are among the people. Then be modest. Speak the words, convey the data, step aside. Be by yourself. Be in your own room. Do not put yourself on.

This is an interior landscape. It is inside. It is private. Respect the privacy of the material. These pieces were written in silence. The courage of the play is to speak them. The discipline of the play is not to violate them. Let the audience feel your love of privacy even though there is no privacy. Be good whores. The poem is not a slogan. It cannot advertise you. It cannot promote your reputation for sensitivity. You are not a stud. You are not a killer lady. All this junk about the gangsters of love. You are students of discipline. Do not act out the words. The words die when you act them out, they wither, and we are left with nothing but your ambition.

Speak the words with the exact precision with which you would check out a laundry list. Do not become emotional about the lace blouse. Do not get a hard-on when you say panties. Do not get all shivery just because of the towel. The sheets should not provoke a dreamy expression about the eyes. There is no need to weep into the handkerchief. The socks are not there to remind you of strange and distant voyages. It is just your laundry. It is just your clothes. Don't peep through them. Just wear them.

The poem is nothing but information. It is the Constitution of the inner country. If you declaim it and blow it up with noble intentions then you are no better than the politicians whom you despise. You are just someone waving a flag and making the cheapest appeal to a kind of emotional patriotism. Think of the words as science, not as art. They are a report. You are speaking before a meeting of the Explorers' Club or the National Geographic Society. These people know all the risks of mountain climbing. They honour you by taking this for granted. If you rub their faces in it that is an insult to their hospitality. Tell them about the height of the mountain, the equipment you used, be specific about the surfaces and the time it took to scale it. Do not work the audience for gasps and sighs. If you are worthy of gasps and sighs it will not be from your appreciation of the event, but from theirs. It will be in the statistics and not the trembling of the voice or the cutting of the air with your hands. It will be in the data and the quiet organization of your presence.

Avoid the flourish. Do not be afraid to be weak. Do not be ashamed to be tired. You look good when you're tired. You look like you could go on forever. Now come into my arms. You are the image of my beauty.

Coming Up - Something Very Quiet is About to Happen

2010-02-18T04:47:00.001-08:00

March 2nd, 3rd and 4th at the Battersea Library for the BAC at 6pm and 7pm. Here's a sneaky preview...

Found in a reference book from the 1980s or earlier. Something like “A Guide to the Scottish Highlands.”

Hello! It’s been a long time I’ve been staying quiet. There have been scratchy hands, soft hands, delicate hands, indifferent hands, now your hands, which aren’t much different from all the others, if we’re being honest. If we’re being honest, yours are nearly indecipherable from all the others. They do seem to be in a bit of a hurry. Like all the other hands. I’ve tried to get used to that. I’ve had a lot of people hold me with hurried hands. People who have underlined, then erased me. They’re not the worst of course. The worst would have to be the last few people – most everyone I’ve met in the last ten years. I’ve moved around a lot lately, you see, and I mostly end up sitting on someone’s shelf because I’m illustrated, gathering dust. Never getting touched. Never getting used. I was even in a box full of other books just like me owned by an interior decorator for a while, and she’d put me up on shelves lined with others, like me but different, and take pictures of us together in odd places in rooms. It was very embarrassing. A lot of words would go around at times like that, a lot of hands shifting and reshifting me, never opening me, no no no, just touching me, reshuffling me, in too much of a hurry. It’s been a long time, you see, since I’ve been held.

And believe it or not, I’ve only twice been read from cover to cover. Once it was by a young woman, I thought she was one of those decorators, buying me to fill her shelves, because of the picture on my cover. And then one day, out of nowhere, she picked me up in a way that felt very determined, and she opened me up at the very first page, the very first page, she read the introduction, the thankyous, everything, and every few days for about three months she read me. She was quite slow, but I didn’t mind that. In fact, I quite liked it. Sometimes she would even stop reading, hold me in her lap, and just look up and think. I liked that part very much. I could always tell when she was going through the motions, when she wasn’t really interested, when she wasn’t paying attention. I learned her movements well. Her hands would go limp and indifferent, and sometimes she’d nod into me, but I didn’t mind that either, because she would always flip me back a few pages and go much slower than before. She was determined to know everything I had to offer, and I liked that. I especially liked it because she took me to India, and to her friend’s cottage by the lake where I was nearly dropped in the water, but saved in the nick of time by a little boy in a red cap. And she would often fall asleep reading me in bed, where I’d rest beneath her pillow. This is probably regular fare for the other books. The fiction, those smug bastards on those shelves over there. But for me, this kind of attention was very special. An older academic who referred to me often also read me from cover to cover, lovingly, well held, but he was used to that kind of thing. He had me and many others like me, and he pored over all of us, equally. But this young woman, it was something about her determination and the surprise of her attention that charmed me. When I would get lost beneath her pillow and feel the fabric gently shifting up and down on top of me I felt whole and right and purposeful. I have to admit, and perhaps it is embarrassing, but I have to admit that now, every time I am picked up, browsed through, which isn’t very often in this endless, dusty place, I find it very hard not to harbour a kind of hope – a kind of impossible hope – that maybe this person, maybe this hand, maybe they will hold me again and decide to know me for everything I have to offer. You see, it’s sad, but I don’t think I deal very well with these sorts of casual encounters.

The Controversy of reading War and Peace when you're under employed

2010-02-02T13:19:00.000-08:00

I've been getting major guff lately for reading War and Peace, I suppose because I'm freelance and really need to be looking for work rather than hanging out with the Rostovs. But Come On! I only live once, and War and Peace is on countless top ten lists as being one of the best novels ever written. I'm half way through now and constantly terrified that there may be a nuclear holocaust or that I may get into a terrible accident before I finish it. I've thought about making a piece of performance art about reading War and Peace, it has started to feel so odd and subversive. The crux of the show would be this:

The first half took a long time. I have a feeling the second half won't. I know all the main characters now. I know what I'm doing. It'll fly by. And this, my friends, in every way, mirrors our lifespans in the most terrifying way.

(My friend Rose suggested moving to Chile for 3 months to slow life down. The equivalent of reading a short story by a different author in a different language. But War and Peace will sneak back in. Nobody leaves that kind of book after 700 pages, no matter how terrified they are that it might end.)

Welcome back to 2010

2010-01-13T05:38:00.000-08:00

Okay, okay, so here's your probable question - "Miss Pearson - Where the *heck* were you?" (I'm doing you now. Excuse the funny accent.) "I only read this blog because you post relatively often, it's not for the quality, oh no, it's for the consistency, because obviously you prioritize one over the other - and suddenly you swan off like it ain't even a deal, and you just stop posting for a month. So you know what I did? I walked out on you. In fact. I'm not even reading you now. I'm not. This is just you typing imagining what I would say because I, seriously, seriously, stopped reading when you stopped posting. How do you like that? Just a voice in your head from now on. That's all you can expect from me." Oh boy, that's horrifying. Can you stop now?

Right, basically for those of you who don't know me personally and therefore reasonably wondered what was up, I went on a break from what I (briefly - thank goodness) termed the leisurenet. Which means any use of the internet that is primarily with the objective of wasting time - which I counted as facebook, wikipedia trolling, twitter, but not email, because I use that for work. What was odd is that I had to ask myself whether this blog counted as work or leisure - and I think nicely for both of us, it's leisure. So no fun until now, dear friends. But now I'm back and ready to rock.

So - let's start with what I've seen since 2010 - Cat on a Hot Tin Roof at the Novello, and Innocence at the Arcola.

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof - let's put it this way, on the scale from awesome to not awesome, the rating for this one is definitely not awesome. NA. The set was distracting, the acting was poorly directed (I often felt that the actors were saying lines without exploring the meaning behind those lines. I hate to be a stickler for actioning - which means assigning every line an actionin the rehearsal room, but in a pressure cooker play I'm convinced it is essential that the audience feels a conversation has directive, and when a director doesn't use actioning it's always more obvious than when they do) and the space, a gilt proscenium arch, made the play itself feel tired, which is unfortunate, because Streetcar Named Desire at the Donmar showed me that a revival could be absolutely fresh. Not so with Cat on a Hot Tin Roof - it was stale as your grandmother's attic. Everything interesting was hidden in a corner somewhere or covered in dust.

One fun thing that did come out of the experience was based on a suggestion of Andy Field's - making a piece based on a classic you haven't seen about what you think probably happens in the play. My version of the play was not unlike Hedda Gabler - expect it in the next post.

Now on to Innocence - which does rate as Awesome. Why is it that Germans and Americans are much more consistently playful with form in text based shows? With the exception of Martin Crimp, Tim Crouch and Anthony Nielsen, I just feel like I want to see plays in the UK give the audience more credit in terms of how far we are willing to follow a story, and how absurd we are willing to let it get. I think that contemporary audiences are craving more play in their plays. The excitement in the crowd when the characters in Innocence started narrating each other's thoughts was palpable. We were confused - yes - a little confused - but we were engaged, having fun, and always confident that the piece would reach a satisfying conclusion, which it definitely did. I would highly recommend both my writerly and non-writerly friends go see this as an example of how well risks can pay off in a piece of writing. I'm just so tired of realism I'm practically unconscious. Innocence sounded alarm bells. Thank goodness.

Okay those are my theatre thoughts for 2010 so far. I still maintain that I don't really blog about theatre, except in 2010, when I sometimes I do.

A scene in which I nearly commit to New York

2010-01-13T05:29:00.000-08:00

With the Under the Radar festival at the Public Theatre in full swing it seemed particularly apt that I post this little nugget on the blog as the first offering of 2010. I wrote this just before leaving New York city after a week's stay at the end of November last year.

New York and I are walking hand in hand. We come upon Penn Station.

Me: So. This is my stop.

NY: Sorry?

Me: I’ve got to go home. I’ve got a bus to catch.

NY: Waitaminute, you’re going?

Me: Well, yeah. I told you I was only here for a few –

NY: You’re not staying?

Me: No, I mean, I’ve got a bus to –

NY: I know all about your bus.

Me: So?

NY: It’s just – like – I was so nice to you.

Me: Well, yeah. We had a great time.

NY: I mean, I’m usually a real bitch to people, did you know that?

Me: I – I’ve heard, but - It’s just, this was never meant to be a permanent - I always told you I lived somewhere else

NY: Yeah that bitch London.

Me: She’s not that bitch, she’s my bitch.

NY: She’s emotionally abusing you. It’s such a joke. You can’t even see it.

Me: That may be true, but –

NY: You never stop complaining about her. How do you think she’d like it if she knew all the horrible things you say about her when she’s not around?

Me: She does know. She’s okay with it. That’s sort of the way we roll.

NY: And besides, everybody likes me better.

Me: Well, I’m not everybody.

NY: (Pause. NY takes this in.) Whatever. Do you really think I need you? I’ve got the most famous and powerful people in the world at my beck and call.

Me: I know.

NY: So I don’t need you.

Me: I know.

NY: And I’m usually a real bitch, did you know that? You should be kissing my feet for showing you such a good time.

Me: You said that.

NY: Bowing down and kissing them.

I kiss NY’s hand.

NY: But… you said you loved me?

Me: I do. And I’ll miss you. Thank you for this.

NY: Well that’s fine cause I’ll forget all about you.

Me: I know you will. But thanks all the same.

If you need me, I'll be here

2009-11-29T06:06:00.000-08:00

all the theatre I’ve seen…

I am back, and have much reporting to do. Oddly enough it’s been a pretty eventful 2 weeks from a theatre perspective. Since we last met I’ve seen “Annie Get Your Gun” at the Young Vic, “Faithless Bitches” at the Courtyard, “Roman Tragedies” at the Barbican (which, let me just say, was 6 hours. And yes, I stayed for the whole darned thing), and even “Letters to my Grandma” at Theatre Passe Muraille and Necessary Angel’s “Hamlet” at the Harbourfront Centre in Toronto. Forest Fringe also did our first evening at Central, where we scratched our hub and I remounted “Music’s Been Ruined by Dating”, and Volcano and York University put on the double bill I wrote for, “Co-Ed”, directed by Ross Manson and Claire Calnan. So. All in all. A pretty darned eventful couple of weeks, for watching, making, and watching things I helped to make.

When these eventful periods of watching and making do come around, I always find myself quietly re-evaluating what is important to me in theatre. It's no surprise that innovation usually comes out on top. The idea that as an artform we’re making progress, that the work we make should constantly be challenging its own form, reinventing ways of presenting itself. But these past few weeks I think I've gone further in understanding why this is so vital. It's not just a natural human reaching for something sparkly and new - in fact, I think the reasons are deeper and far more exciting.

I did a quick teaching session at Queen’s a couple of days ago, and I came back to a definition of theatre that I invented on the spot for some central students, and that continues to get at me and seems to work. I told them that theatre to me is anything that asks an audience (of 1 or 1 million) to engage with what it is to be present, with what it is to be here now. The openness of this continues to make my head spin and makes me sort of giddy. According to this definition, my entire vacation to Greece could have been theatre. Falling in love could be theatre. But actually, they aren't. These alive moments come about organically, unpredictably, and they could end at any time. Unlike the feeling of watching great theatre, we never feel as though we're in good or competent hands, because the hands are often our own. It might be this lack of safety that means that in these lived moments we are present, but it's difficult to engage with or reflect on what that present means. We often worry that if we step back or take our eye off the ball for a moment (and the ball is usually called joy), the opponent will walk away and the game will unexpectedly end.

I bring up this definition because in what I’ve seen or helped to make in the last two weeks, the moments that were most effective were those that engaged with the present, reminding me that I am alive, and that seemed to be going for *that* over and above anything else. But past simply making me feel present, the truly transcendent experiences came when there was an exploration and delving into what being present even means. Even when these pieces feel as unpredictable as life itself (and the best often do), there is a kind of competence and design that gives us as humans the space to be both present and aware of and looking into that present-ness. (The Roman Tragedies did this best of all I would say. Time passed in a very surreal way over 6 hours, and the show worked beautifully with this outside time.) And I think what I've come to, is that the reason these moments are so often absolutely innovative, is that they are as dynamic as experience itself.

*Of course this is all a bit hilarious, considering that most of my work is about memory, nostalgia and the past – but of course, the past is always present. You just have to recognize it, offer it a drink, and tell it to put its feet up.*

Let’s keep working with this and see where it goes… But if you need me, I've decided I'll be here. I'll be looking at, reaching into, shifting about and engaging in here. It's hard work and you can't take a seat because it's always moving. But I think maybe it's worth it.

20,000 Roads

2009-11-13T04:34:00.000-08:00

If anyone from Oia is reading...

Thank you.

Back in London: Who is this city and what has it learned?

2009-11-09T03:35:00.000-08:00

Well, it’s been a good 60 hours or so that I’ve been back in this familiar-ish city, which, when you measure it up like that, does all kinds of strange things to my perception of time. 1 hour x 60 doesn’t seem so very much, yet 6 hours x 10 seems like a heck of a lot. Once during a play I got slightly bored and decided to calculate how many days I’d been alive, and I believe it was around the vicinity of just under 10,000. Which is strange, when you think if I’d been paid a dollar a day for my entire existence, I still wouldn’t be able to buy a house or even a particularly nice car. Not that I would turn my nose up at being given a dollar a day. Any takers?

Oh, right. Still avoiding the subject line of this blog post, aren’t I? With some half *ssed though elaborate tangential pseudo-math. Good for me and good for you for reading.

I spent the weekend at Arts Admin, first watching Chris Goode do his thang, his first time performing poetry since the Forest Fringe tapes in Edinburgh 2 years ago, and the next day meeting Jack Bond and Victor Spinnetti at a playreading of one of Jane Arden’s shows at the Artslab. The play, “Vagina Rex” dealt with feminism in a very hands-on way, though I think I’ll be more interested to watch Jane Arden and Jack Bond’s film collaborations through the BFI just as soon as I can get my hands on them. There was a lot of talk about whether or not there was a contemporary theatre of outrage - whether contemporary audiences could be radicalized the way that audiences were in the 1960s. I did take issue with the discussion's suggestion that theatre has lost its "can-do" attitude. I find nothing less helpful than the tendency, when discussing the 60s, to suggest it points to the sated attitudes of the youth of today. People still can-do, and are doing. We just live in a baby-booming society that idealizes the projects of its youth, occasionally ignoring the fact that rather than disregard these projects, our generation has been inspired by them, learned from their failures, and will (hopefully) make something happen. Wow. Bit of a rant. Sorry, what else were you expecting from the blog?

Quite a wonderful feeling came out of this reading, which was that they began discussing Jim Haynes, one of my heroes, the founder of ArtsLab and the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh, and mentioned that they would be showing a video interview with him. I couldn’t wait to see what the man looked like – when suddenly, a familiar face came on the screen. It turned out that I had already met Jim in Paris 2 years ago. I had gone to his house for dinner, and he’d seen me do a monologue on the Golden Hour tour and gave me the warmest most congratulatory smile afterwards. He is such a down to earth man that I’d had no idea I was monologuing for the same Jim Haynes who played such a large role in inspiring me to found Forest Fringe, but there you have it. I’m glad this feeling had 2 years to ferment before coming to light. It’s a vintage I can keep.

On a different note, I am questioning whether I have to stop stewarding at Arts Admin, even though I love the building, the events and everyone who works there. I keep running in to professional contacts while I do it, and in our little industry nobody (including myself) seems to know quite how to handle the co-director of a venue having to break off conversation to clear up the rubbish in the room and to put away chairs. I’m in two minds about this – one part of me thinks just clear up all the better and let the world get used to it – if anything, it should demonstrate Forest Fringe’s down-to-earth, can-do attitude, of which I’m very proud. Another part of me gets nervous in these situations and is less bold. Demystifying the less glamorous aspects of theatre, stewarding, for example, does make me buzz with excitement a little. The real question has to be, am I being subversive or simply foolish? (Story of my life!)

So there’s me in London, avoiding my laundry, breakfast, and date with the Odyssey. I really am back.

Flowchart your life

2009-10-31T11:38:00.000-07:00

That's what we did....

humming...

2009-10-23T09:49:00.000-07:00

I like to hear people hum along to music. Especially when they think they’re on their own. And also when they get so lost that they can’t quite help it.

It's late at the bookstore and two flies are wrestling

2009-10-18T16:52:00.000-07:00

It never seems that there is an absolutely ideal time to post - but 3 am Greek time is as good of one as any. I'll admit to feeling a little bit of blog-writer's block lately. Life here in the bookstore is repetitive, it changes in barely noticeable increments, but there is something so ineffably relaxing and grounding about it. Nonetheless, there have been revelations (if only incremental) and it seems that the blog being what it is, I should share some of those here. And so, in the grand tradition of the blog, I will list my recent revelations in the order that I find them to be most impressive - impressive to who is a great question. Especially when I'm asking the great hulking mystery of the internet - though "Who are you trying to impress?" is a question I'd like to ask myself a lot more often anyway. See? See? Leave me in a Greek bookshop and I get all kinds of reflective.

But onto the tiny revelations of so far.

1. In our society we place far too much importance on individual achievements rather than collective ones.
Okay, so you probably saw this one coming with socialist-sounding talk about why Homer was probably written by several poets over time and why we should all definitely be okay with that and see it as some sort of grand structure, like a cathedral, that could only be built through the collective effort of many individuals and the knowledge, hindsight, whatever you'll call it of many generations. But I was also prompted to think about how much we undervalue work by a collective when I was reading Raymond Carver's "What we talk about when we talk about love." Some of you may have already heard the lore about this collection - that the stories were so heavily changed by his editor Alfred A Knopf, who basically created what many always identified as Carver's unique minimalist style, that you could say they were co-creators of whatever made those stories magic.
Now a lot of people, myself initially included, would be inclined to be annoyed at the fact that Knopf had so much to do with Carver's legacy - that Carver wasn't given more creative room to move. But, to sound like a psychologist or particularly tuned in teacher for a moment, can I ask why we are annoyed? Could it be because we are uncomfortably attached to the idea of a lone genius making work in his basement? At the end of the day, it may just be possible that Carver is great because there were two people involved in that greatness. And what the heck is wrong with that?

2. I am excited about theatre because it is live. I am excited abouttheatre because it is now. I am excited about theatre because you have to *literally* be in the right place at the right time. And even if this sounds obvious, I also need to be reminded of it in the moment, live, at the right place and the right time for it to really hit home.

There's just nothing else like it. More on this later, but for now my here and now inspiration is more preoccupied with the desire to sleep that the desire to explain itself. So for now, here's to incremental revelations, and explaining them to the blog incrementally.

Paper Cinema's Odyssey - Sneak preview shots

2009-10-13T13:06:00.000-07:00

Here are some of the drawings Nic made in Greece. The boy looking out to shore is a preliminary sketch for Telemachus and the man on the shore with a beard is the first sketch of Odysseus on Calypso's island.

If I were in London I'd be watching this...

2009-10-13T07:58:00.001-07:00

Those of you who know me will know that I have an equal love of new writing and site responsive work. When they come together effectively, it is bold, risky and rare. I spoke with the lovely Lucy about this piece while she was writing it, and it sounded like it was heading in that risky and rare (and exceptional) direction. I'm extremely annoyed that I'm not in London to see this - from what I've read about it, it sounds like Kirkwood and Clean Break have created something delicate and important.

http://www.arcolatheatre.com/?action=showtemplate&sid=367