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.
Thursday, 30 September 2010
Tuesday, 28 September 2010
(Re) Accustomed to your ways
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?
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?
Tuesday, 31 August 2010
Edinburgh and everything after
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...
(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...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
