Clytemnestra

I know, I know... Two blog posts in as many days, how unlike me. I found this poem though, which I wrote when playing Clytemnestra for The Rose Company, and not having looked at it in months I'm still quite proud of it, so...

The Murderess

He was always killing, my second husband. It was the only language he understood.

Words he bent and twisted to mask his intent; gold is a soft metal.

Swords he could speak in, held erect in his fist.

Edges he understood, and partings. Blood he listened to.

He killed my first husband, they remember that. He killed my son.

I'm told that is what lions do.

I never spoke my child’s dear name again. I will not say it now.

I keep the memory, hot and heavy in my womb.

I have swallowed coals.

One coal I carried long - an agony cherished, and then one more; a girl.

I mourn the children lost to sickness, too, and the struggles of the birthing bed,

I carry their weight still, of course they haunt me.

Only my murdered children blaze and burn.

Only the ones he killed consume me.

My boy’s name is forgotten now and mine alone, but hers...

She always wanted fame, my daughter.

He took me away with him, of course. They say he made me wife.

My baby's blood still speckled in his beard when he first raped me.

My brothers swore revenge. So rumour said.

And I, the spoils, rejoiced to hear it.

But kings are practical men, or they die young, and my father made arrangements.

The city his to keep, and in all honour, provided he called me wife and queen, sat me beside him.

I would have rather died - but no such choice was offered.

Revenge is men's work.

I know they say that I was angry to be set aside.

I will not leave that lie behind me.

His concubine, the prophetess, I killed in love.

She laughed and thanked me when she saw the blade, with her own hands she drew it to her throat.

She died a captive like myself, rejoicing in the blood that freed her.

He did not know me at the end. I could not risk it.

He was a strong man still, tempered by battle.

I dosed his wine, and so he died asleep, drowning in blood and water.

I too had learned to read the blade, it spoke as I had honed it; and as for blood,

it’s women’s native speech. He was fool to think that he could out-debate me.

I wish he had not slept so sound, that I had seen his eyes meet mine before I dimmed them.

That would have pleased me, that one look.

Revenge is men’s work. I killed him in the name of my son,

and for Iphigenia.

Playing Keepsie-Upsie.

It’s a truism that live performance, whatever else it might be, is a collaboration between audience and performer(s). It’s a truism because it’s true. It identifies a phenomenon I think we’re all aware of when we’re part of it but which is very difficult to describe or even visualise. 

I  imagine the shape of the show as something we hold between us, lightly, as you hold a kite by the fingertips, singing to the wind in the seconds before you let go. I see it as a sculpture of looks and words and movements, as though we juggled and shaped it among and above us, fluid, hollow, transparent as light. I don’t see it as any of those, exactly, not even all of them together. It's not like that at all. It is kept in the air, though - suspended, like disbelief, raised like a circus tent and kept in the air by ropes held in human hands. And like a circus tent, the more of you there are, the easier it is.

One of the things I do theatre for, ever since I was a kid, is that collective awareness, that sense of being part of a whole that is greater than the sum of us all. What I celebrate in the work I love is the extent to which it feeds that interconnectedness, what I critique in the work I dislike is the way it works to thwart or betray it. And I don’t mean that sense of shared presence as something that’s all sweetness and light, though I think even the bleakest work owes its audience a degree of nurture, of loving-kindness.

Kindness because it’s a kindness people do, when they come to see your work, over and above the price of the ticket, the traveling, the childcare or any other arrangements they’ve made; the simple act of agreeing to give you their attention is a kindness and you owe them at least as much in return.

Outside those immediately connected with the show, 10 people did me that kindness this week. I can see each face as I write, each gaze that connected with mine and fed M.A.I.R.O.U.L.A, and I love them all, a little bit, I treasure their complicity in what I made with them.

But to return to the elaborate metaphors I launched in the first paragraph, I am also very tired, and somewhat drained. Because the fewer you are, the more effort goes into keeping the performance afloat. We did it; my three friends (the audience) and my producer in what I called a ‘dress run’, but was of course a performance on Wednesday in the rehearsal room. We did it on Friday at UCLan; the woman who’d, unfathomably, come all the way from London, my two friends and fellow UCLan alumnae, the performance–maker I toured with once who teaches there now, the man whose face I recognised but name I didn’t know, the event organiser, the usher, the lecturer I never got on with when I was a student. The show, in spite of everything (my mistakes included – I asked far more of them than I intended to, of which more in another post) did stay suspended, and we were in on it together, ‘til the end. 

And of course we’re not in the business of perfection, we’re in the business of experiences that live and enrich. So perhaps it shouldn’t bother me so much that I wasn’t able to add as much nuance and detail as I’d like, not even close. That I dropped one of my favourite moments, and failed to shade things that needed shading, just because there was so much of me used up in keeping the show in the air. Those small audiences were tired too, especially Friday's. They were with me all the way to the end, but they were tired. And that though M.A.I.R.O.U.L.A is fed by this week, the show is awake again and ready to fly, I am a hollow thing, drained, a husk, holding some insights to herself from the experience, some tasks, but no euphoria. I did know that performance doesn’t owe me a high. I knew. But having a show go well and feeling empty... well, there it is.  

Keep me honest, willya?

How did you learn all those lines?

                        At least one member of any theatre audience anywhere.

It's a question actors roll their eyes at. Line learning, after all, is basic. Wondering at an actor's ability to learn lines is like being impressed by a football player's ability to kick a moving ball. Sure, for a klutz like me, it would be quite an achievement, but to a professional it's entry level stuff. It's basic, like a chef chopping onions or turning on the gas; stuff that any fool can do if they put their mind to it. This particular fool finds it quite easy; much easier than learning blocking or choreography of any kind. I sweat blood to learn movement scores, getting my left and right and my forward and back thoroughly muddled, and no amount of description can help me find my way through, only repetition. In contrast, words in order don't need much to stick in my memory. In an ordinary rehearsal process I need only to read the scene through a few times in advance, and after a handful of rehearsals I know not only my own lines, but everyone else’s too.

Yes, it’s obnoxious, and yes, it makes me cocky. Recently I was performing a horror story at a literary festival, and changed my mind about which story two days before the gig. I adapted the new story into a 10 minute monologue, which took most of the first day, and spent the second day, performance day, learning. It took me about 5 hours of solid work. I got away with it, because my cockiness is not without foundation - and because the director trusted me, she didn’t panic, at least not visibly. It went well, and people said nice things about the show as a whole, and about my part in it. Still, in those last minutes of silent panic, frantically going over the lines in my head as I waited to start, I thought: This has to change. I used to be well-prepared as a matter of course. I didn’t used to put such strain on the equanimity of directors. When did I get like this? Too many last minute gigs, too many shows still devising the day before tech, too many semi –professional shows with their usual mix of dedication and coasting, too many cabarets, too much seat-of-your-pants-theatre.

I don’t think I can get away with that with M.A.I.R.O.U.L.A. It’s sixteen pages long, single-spaced, or about an hour and a half of uninterrupted speech. The  director has asked me to be off book before we start rehearsals in April. She’s right, I know she’s right. But it’s not just cockiness that makes me play chicken with my own memory, it’s also a sort of procrastination that only the sheer terror of an unmovable deadline can pierce. If I were to proceed in the way that’s become my habit, I’d look at my calendar sometime in late March, panic, and spend a week or so cramming the text into my brain all day every day. It would more or less work, it would be okay. But okay is not good enough for M.A.I.R.O.U.L.A, for the show I’ve been working to get made for over a year. I picked a very ambitious text, I’ve translated it as well as I can, I have the good fortune to be working with the best possible people to be doing it with – I’m going to learn it. Properly.

That was what I decided, about a month ago. I set myself the goal of learning two pages a week, a nice, relaxed schedule. Too relaxed; there was no fear to keep me working. And there was life. Life happened, as it does, and brought disappointments and exciting developments and a health crisis among my dearest and nearest, and in short, I do not have eight pages under my belt. I have three. This is not a disaster. There’s still all of March to go. If I learn 3 pages a week, I’ll be in good shape for April.

Good shape! That reminds me, I’d also linked a get-performing-fit resolution to the line-learning schedule. I would time my workouts, my much-needed the-last-time-I-was in-good-shape-for-physical-theatre-was-before-my-son-was-born-and-he’s-eight-years-old-now workouts to fit the lines I knew, so that as I learned more text I would spend longer on my fitness. No, I didn’t do that either. It was a good idea though, right? Right. So I’m doing it, now. And to keep me honest, because something has to, I choose you, oh perusers of this blog

I now know the first 3 pages of M.A.I.R.O.U.L.A. By Monday the 4th of March, I’m going to know the first 6 pages. And I’ll be able to engage in some cardiovascular activity (probably that knee-to-opposite-elbow thing that’s used a s a hip warm-up) for as long as it takes me to recite them. I’m going to post here to say so, and in honour of that at-least-one audience member, I’m going to tell you how I did it too.

When do you give up?

Warning: This post contains self-pity and may also contain traces of hyperbole. This post was manufactured in a body that wasn't feeling very well at the time and may derive much of its substance from said indisposition.

When do you give up? When do you say, I'm 41 years old, I started trying to earn a living in theatre in my 30s divorced and with a small child, I have no agent, no producer, no ally, no commission,  no funding, no projects off the ground, no prospects, no hope. I'm lucky to be teaching youth theatre which is fun and rewarding, if emotionally exhausting. I'm lucky that my small town has two semi-professional companies who are talented and nice and a pleasure to work with so I can keep doing shows, and who knows, maybe someday they'll be in a position to pay me something against the costs of childcare. When do you say, I haven't been paid for acting since October (though I did get paid in May for presenting a pervasive game so that almost counts) and I'm tired of paying for casting websites, and I'm tired of  applying for festivals, and I'm tired of traveling to one-off gigs that don't even pay my expenses, and I'm tired of writing shows I don't know how to get produced, and I'm tired of talking to people I hope will help me, and I'm tired of busrsaries for the under-25s and free courses in London, and development support for emerging artists in other regions and other forms; and I'm going to give up. I'm going to hang on to the teaching and the semiprofessional gigs for which I only have to pay childcare and not travel as well, and I'm going to give up on anything more. When do you say that? More to the point, when do I say that? Not yet, but I think it may be soon.


Because I have no agent, because I'm 41 and foreign, my strategy for getting my needy ass on stage has involved writing or adapting shows for me to be in. Last year, I applied to six different festivals with three different short performances I'd written. I didn't get in to any. This year, I've written a full-length verbatim piece and translated a monologue. Both have received very encouraging feedback, the monologue even found itself a director. We had a Development Day. I didn't know what a Development Day was, but it clearly had capital letters. What it turned out to be was me reading the script out to people at a venue, who said, in a way that was difficult to dispute and impossible to resent, that it wasn't for them. Then we spent a few hours working on the text. Then I read it again, much better, to an invited audience of one friend and my mother, who both loved it. Then the director went back to the complex pending project that's taking up most of her time, and I took my script home and started tweeting questions that I hoped might lead me to another venue. They did, or at least to a meeting with another venue. I talked about the monologue to someone I really enjoyed talking to, I left her with a copy. She said she was too busy to read it now, but would get back to me in two weeks; that's tomorrow.

My distress may seem premature. Two weeks rarely means 'exactly 14 days', certainly it doesn't when I say it. And 14 days is tomorrow. And if they do say no, there are other venues, there must be other avenues. It's a great script, and I'd be very good in it. And the other one, the verbatim script, I know how to fix it now, and it's got legs... I just don't know how I'll ever get it to a racetrack. I'm just running out of hope, or faith, or energy, or stick-to-itivness or whatever. I'm tired of pushing boulders up foothills and having them roll down again, tired of hoping to someday try to push one up a mountain. Most of all, I'm tired of doing it alone. Every now and then, I find someone I think might be an ally for a project, who'll believe in it as I do, and we'll be a team. I'm tired of having these alliances fall apart, so tired that I'm not really leaning on either potential ally I have now. Because they have more urgent projects, because I can't promise either of us will get paid, because I don't have a producer's skills and I can't afford to hire someone who does. 



I think I'm assuming the venue will not want my monologue, the Mairoula I wax lyrical about in my previous post. And I still love it, believe in it, I'm still aching to perform it. Properly. With time, and direction, because it needs it, it's not the kind of script I can direct myself in. And I don't know where to take it to next, who to talk to how. I never even wanted to get my scripts produced. I'd have been perfectly happy performing other people's words forever. But if Mairoula doesn't find a home tomorrow, I'll keep trying, somehow, though I don't know how. I haven't given up, not yet. But I've started to wonder when I will.

The Translator And The Actor At Cross-Purposes

I don't know how to write about this. If I'd intended to blog about the process of M.A.I.R.O.U.L.A. I should have started months ago, at the beginning. Now I need to think - and by think I mean write- about last night, but I can't start there, or nothing will make any sense. I'll have to start at the beginning after all, and see if I can follow my thoughts to where I stand.

                                                       *                  *                   *

The beginning came courtesy of Phoebe, an old friend in Athens who is a journalist but used to be an actor. She reported for the BBC World Service on Greek theatre's response to the economic crisis, discussing several plays that sounded intriguing. Selfish motives foremost in my mind, I asked if any of them might be suitable for translation and performance in English. She replied that the best thing she'd seen in Athens last year was not notably political, but, come to think of it, it might suit me perfectly. It was Μ.Α.Ι.Ρ.Ο.Y.Λ.Α a one woman show written by Lena Kitsopoulou and performed, to great acclaim, by Maria Protopappa.  I asked another good friend, Maro, who also has a deep knowledge of theatre and excellent taste, though different aesthetic preferences from Phoebe. She too, said the show was very powerful, though she warned me it was full of wordplay and references to Greek culture, that it would be almost impossible to translate.

I had to read it. I contacted Lena, whom I didn't know, with some trepidation, but she was warm and friendly, cheerfully sending me a copy of the performance script. I loved it. It surged off the page with a reckless, flamboyant energy; fascinating, exasperating, as alive as any text I've ever seen. I wrote to her again, being perfectly frank about my near total lack of resources;  nevertheless we agreed easily on the terms by which I could use her work. It's not necessary to like a playwright whose work you're dying to perform, but I like Lena very much. Even if M.A.I.R.O.U.L.A. never gets off the ground in English, I'll have had the pleasure of getting to know her a bit.

                                                       *                  *                   *

I'm not going to say I didn't struggle with the translation, because I did to some extent, particularly with a section in the middle that's made up almost entirely of punning acronyms. For this section, I sought, and received help from a mixed group of Greek friends and family, who got me unstuck and on the right track more than once. I also had a wonderful time doing it, and found it much easier than I anticipated. I've worked as a translator on and off, it's a natural occupation for someone brought up bilingual, but I'd translated marketing bumf, academic texts, a coffee table book, never a work of art. I loved translating M.A.I.R.O.U.L.A., it was the most fun I've ever had at my desk. If you're reading this and you know anyone who might need a literary translator - Greek to English- please put us in touch. This isn't really a joke; I could use the work.

I won't talk about the content except in general terms. It's a rip-roaring rollercoaster of a stream of consciousness monologue, whose clever, self-aware protagonist tries to conceal her own truths under a slew of great universals and outrageous jokes, some deft, some clunky, and ends up revealing more than she thinks. It's a lovely play. It's also a play that requires a great performance; something with depth, comic timing, a huge emotional range, nuance, layers. Nothing less could carry it, could even begin to approach the power of the words on the page.
 
                                                        *                  *                   *

It's also a play that strikes very close to home for me. Like me, the protagonist is an actor in early middle age. Like me she is single, language-obsessed, unhappy - unlike me she is childless. There are so many mistakes to make in the performing of it; melodrama beckons, and glib reliance on the wit of the text, so does a cathartic self-indulgent wallow. Now, I didn't come back to acting, my first love, in my 30's because I was scared of a big, juicy, complex part. And I didn't spend two months translating M.A.I.R.O.U.L.A. to balk at playing her. But neither was I unconscious of the scale of the difficulty, of how very much dedicated character work it was going to take to do it properly, nor stupid enough to try it on my own.

I was going to need a director. Not only a very good one, but one who cared about new writing enough to take on this odd and entirely unknown text from another culture,  and would be willing to entrust the acting to me, an odd and entirely unknown actor from another culture. Fortunately, I knew an excellent director, whom I trusted aesthetically and as a person, and she'd seen me do a short solo piece I was quite proud of. It would serve as an audition. She is Louie Ingham, Associate Artist at The Duke's Theatre in Lancaster, where I live, and recently director of one of the most moving things I'd seen there. I sent her the script. She loved it, we agreed to apply for funding, to try to make it happen. I was thrilled, thrilled and impatient to start. Also slightly incredulous, needing the reassurance of a starting date to believe it was real. But Louie's schedule was packed. The earliest we could start development was mid - May. Rehearsals were unlikely to begin before autumn.

                                                      *                  *                   *

There I was, with a freshly translated play I was itching to start work on, and no director for weeks or months yet. And there came an invitation to a scratch night, issued by undergraduates at my old university. This, I thought to myself, was a great opportunity to try out  a short extract from the script. Undirected of course. I wouldn't attempt to play the character, just speak the words in a way that made sense to me, to see if my translation actually worked in English, spoken aloud. Even just learning it would help me understand how the words felt in my body, in my mouth. It would allow me to further polish the translation, to make sure it was a dramatic text, not just a literary one. I would have no ego riding on the performance because I would have put very little into it. Just learned the lines, played a bit with word stresses, come up with a bit of business. There was no point in trying to do character work, no point in going into any depth without Louie's guidance and support. It was just text, not acting.

The first indication that I might be deluded came as I re-read the script, looking for a good bit to do, an extract that had a shape to it, that gave some idea of what the play was like, without requiring any of the depths I couldn't yet supply. I chose a couple of bits, read them out a few times, started learning the one that sounded best. And stopped. I couldn't learn it. It was too far along. I'd have to start at the beginning, that's where actors start learning monologues, at the beginning. Fortunately the first two pages were pretty self-contained, almost an overture. I started learning them.  I did redraft as I learned, finding the places that didn't flow out loud, and that was good. I learned it more easily than I've ever learned any text, probably because I'd already broken it down into thoughts in order to translate it, or maybe just because I'd worked on the English words for so long that I already knew them a bit.

                     

                                                 *                  *                   *

Which brings me to last night, to that scratch night, where I learned that it's one thing to say you don't care about your performance as such, just about speaking the words in English to an audience, and another thing to actually not care about your performance, as such. Don't get me wrong; I held the audience, they laughed in the right places, even got a little bit tense in the right places - a little bit.  The text certainly worked, some decisions about it that had troubled me had clearly succeeded, and my core skills in speaking text didn't fail me. But, it was empty when it should have been full, a husk instead of a ripe fruit. In Mairoula's terminology - the title is both a name and an acronym- a watermelon that was a bit unripe, not very juicy, a bit bleah.

And I hated it. I hated not giving my baby - Lena's baby - the care it deserved. It hurt. It hurt during the performance, and it still hurts. A few years ago, in the depths of an ugly depression, I spent a lot of time being emotionally distant from my young son. I'm better now, and I feel like shit about those times. It's not the same thing of course, but the flavour of that guilt is like the taste in my mind right now, the taste of having betrayed a precious, tender creature in my trust. I betrayed M.A.I.R.O.U.L.A.; not grossly, not irrevocably, but I betrayed it. And it haunts me. I've spent all day writing this just to get to these two paragraphs where I can say: How stupid of me to think I could  not care about the performance, even for the sake of the translation. I may be both translator and actor here, and who knows what else, but I can't be both at the same time. And I know it was a scratch, and presented as a work in progress, and it's not the end of the world. I know. But all the same, I'm ashamed of myself. In my enthusiasm, I volunteered to do that little extract at another couple of events. I'm cancelling those. I'll go through the rest of the text reading aloud, making changes like the ones I made in the first two pages, and that's that. The rest can wait, and I can stand waiting much better than I can stand letting the material down again.

Mainlining Irony : Theatre, technology, and me.

A few weeks ago I attended an event at Contact Theatre. Convened by iShed , it was aimed at theatre people interested in combining theatre and pervasive media. The workshop, as it was described, was organized along the lines of an open space event, with participants splitting off into self-selected groups to discuss particular ideas. Each idea was a candidate for a 10,000 pound R &D commission to explore a new and exciting way of using pervasive media in a theatre project. Discussing one idea, someone remarked on how useful it would be if there were a system, based on galvanic skin response perhaps, or EEG readings, to monitor an audience’s response to a performance and tailor the performance accordingly. I couldn’t resist. “I know a system that does that” I said, and added, in the eager silence that followed, “a company of actors”. The workshop participants were nice people; nobody shouted at me, and I got a few chuckles.

I knew my interjection wasn’t going to be taken seriously, but I wasn’t joking. It seems silly to me to look for technological means to do things that human beings already do well, with skill and pleasure. It seems more than silly; it seems wasteful, and, as the reality of our unsustainable energy consumption dawns, wastefulness will soon become the least acceptable of social habits.

What, you must be wondering, was I doing there? Why would a person who felt that way attend such an event? Less than a year ago, I wouldn’t have. I would have said that what I treasure in a performance is the individual and collective virtuosity of actors, the relationship between actors and audience, and the bond among audience members experiencing the same show; that technology disrupts these connections, atomizing, distancing, undermining everything that I love about theatre.

I still cherish the same things, but I’m no longer so sure that technology necessarily weakens them; it’s just that most of the ways I’ve seen it used do. I began to believe that it was possible to use technology, particularly the new media, to serve what I love about theatre, perhaps even to draw new audiences to it. Instead of saying that I dislike the use of technology in theatre, I started asking how theatre is affected by the rapid pace of technological change. There are two sides to the question. How can theatre bear the comparison, and the financial competition, from the highly realistic and easily available media of electronic entertainment? To what extent can theatre make use of these newer media for its own ends?

To answer the question, in either formulation, in words, that is, in theory, I’d have to unpick the assumptions out of which they’re made. I’d have to ask further questions, “What is technology?” “What is theatre?” and “What can possibly said to be ‘it’s own ends’? Even then, I don’t think I would have gotten the kinds of answers I needed, answers I could immediately apply to the shows I was making, the shows I wanted to make. I’m on a practice-based course; I wanted to answer the question in practice, in theatre.

I decided to avoid the troublesome issues of narrative, text and character and defined theatre for myself, very loosely, as live and proximate performance. Since September, everything I’ve made has been a theatrical response to the challenge posed by current technology. If I were good at graphics, I could plot them on a chart for you. One axis would be marked from most to least theatrical; the other would measure the sophistication of the technology:

One of my approaches was to attempt to rival the beautifully rendered imagined realities of Hollywood and the gaming industry with the ancient techniques of storytelling and puppetry and the best SFX department on Earth, the human imagination.

Explorers:
An intimate Science Fiction show staged a round a pub table that uses simple, readily available props to illustrate its story. First performed in December 09, this is the most frugal and flexible of these projects. It needs no technical support, the props fit into my pockets and it can be performed just about anywhere.

Sales Pitch
Another Science Fiction show, this will most likely be both less frugal and less intimate but it will still be very low-tech. At the moment it is a work in progress, and very near the beginning of that progress, consisting of little more than a draft script and a casting choice.

Something else I tried was to explore the effect of actor on audience by putting the illusion of virtual presence right up against the reality of physical proximity.

I’m Listening:
A one-on-one performance that is also an installation, I’m Listening has received support from the Green Room. It puts a performer in a small space with a monitor playing a DVD suspended in front of her face, facing the audience. The screen invites the watcher to tell a true story, whether significant or trivial, then cuts to a recording of the actor’s face. The recording shows that face listening to a story. Inevitably, this is not the story that is actually being told at the time of performance and the reactions are either out of sync, or otherwise inappropriate. At the same time, the actor behind the screen is listening as openly and as compassionately as she can. The conflict between the subtle human signals conveyed directly and the recorded ones on the screen is what the experience is all about.


I've also been looking at the converse effect; how audiences influence actors. I call these shows experiments in crowdscripted performance.

A Little Bird Told Me . . .
Like I’m Listening, this is an attempt to illuminate the relationship between the digital and the material by putting them up against each other, and it came out of the improvisation workshops I convened at Lancaster University. A collaboration between three performers, (one of whom is also a computer scientist) and a visual artist, it looks at private and public communication through the media of eavesdropping and Twitter. This show is durational, task-based and partly improvised and will be performed for the first time at the ‘pool side Emergency festival on May 22nd at the Bluecoat.

The Request Robot:
This is a solo performance with a very simple premise: the robot does only what the audience want, conveyed to her by text message, twitter, or perhaps some other technological medium. I wont explain further because I’ve written about it extensively in these posts.

The Remote Clapping Game
As the title suggests, this is not so much a show as a game, albeit a very theatrical one. I discuss the classic form of the game here. My first attempt to make it work at a distance will be at Manchester’s first Sandpit, a testing ground for social games. This will take place at Contact Theatre on May 15th as part of Play Everything in the Future Everything Festival.

This version of the game will be quite low-tech and only relatively remote. Eventually, I would like to develop it to the point where it has a dedicated website and can be played internationally, either with teams competing simultaneously in different countries, or with audience in one country and performer in the other.

The Crowdscripted Play
This was the very first thing I came up with when I started trying to think of ways to use technology that actors would find interesting. It is also what brought me to the event I mentioned at the beginning of this post. The idea is that a performance text would be projected into the space, which the audience could change during the course of the performance, leaving the actors to improvise what they would do with the new lines and stage directions.
I don’t know yet whether it would be an intervention on a well-known play or original material, or whether it would be scripted by the audience then and there. I don’t know whether contributions would be from the audience as a whole or a few selected writers, or whether there would be a selection process for the incoming text, or what such a process might be. There are a whole lot of things I don’t know about how it would work. That’s why I’m applying for the R&D commission.