Greetings from light-filled Glasgow, where it is never sunny yet never dark, most friendly and most violent city in the UK, and the birthplace of healthy black humour and cynicism. I have hopped the 45 minute Scotrail rollercoaster from the castle-packed, Gothic fantasy, old/new town hybrid of Edinburgh to study directing at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama for a year, and now, with four months to go, realised the world definitely needed one more blog and thought I'd stand up for the cause.
It's currently my absolute bona fide pleasure to be co-devising The Sugar Factories with Rose McPhilemy. The basis of this venture into the possibly pretentious world of one-on-one theatre was a fascination with live-art and/vs pop-art and the fanciest of forms clashing with the most wonderfully mundane of aims - to engage, even maybe entertain. We co-joined our practice-lead research papers for the year into a hybrid animal: I am examining the contemporary theatre audience as part of a director's process in an attempt to examine new forms; Rose is looking at verbatim theatre and the range of possibilities within verbatim as stimulus for making performance. Armed with dictaphones, we've been collecting memories, offered by friends, families and strangers, from the ridiculous to the poignant, and transcribing them so as to approach them as a unique kind of text. I've always been obsessed with remembering and being remembered, with being marked and leaving marks behind, and the importance of the material as being memory - these ideas collate and conflate in the Sugar Factories in all sorts of heightened ways.
We are only one rehearsal in - this morning we formed basic structures to the two part piece and began testing our options, primarily by simply telling stories. The memories that we have collected, typed up with a single name above them, are revealing and potent and seem oddly important no matter how banal they might first appear, and we're working our way through the ethical issues of using these "borrowed" words. We're also examining the best way to collude with a single audience member. So far, Christmas trees, beach furniture, protests and tea have all been noted on our post-it note wall of ideas - as part of the experimental aspect of this process (the festival is all works in progress), we're aiming to lock down what we are definitely using as late in the day as possible. Genuinely quite live, genuinely quite nerve-wracking, but always fantastic.
Visual art is always a key part of how I think, and today we were talking Jenny Holzer, Tony Ray-Jones and the distinctive worlds of Tim Walker, and how they can show up in the piece. We talked about bold statement, unacceptable views and how easily we forget whole sections and structures of society. We'll see what actually ends up in the piece on the 21st June at The Arches...
So more musings and hopes and updates to follow.
To finish, fellow director from the course, Andrew McGregor, came in and filmed us chatting about the project today:
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