Some work from Week 2

Below is a slideshow of some solo compositions made by the four performers, which were then merged into a group piece.

Storytelling

What I've come back to in the making of this piece is the joy of storytelling. The audience and the theatremakers come together as a collective to share in a storytellers - some are the caretakers of the telling, some are the recipients of the story who will take it forth with them into the world. As caretakers, we must make sure that each moment of the tale is strongly planted in the audience's imagination, so that the story takes life beyond this telling, this theatre. The words we use to tell it must be such that they acknowledge their own insufficiency, so the audience is not left with the words but with the story. We want the story to overpower the production, not the other way around.

To what extent is this story our story? And why do we choose to tell someone else's story and not our own? The joy I'm finding in the myths and fairytales we've been looking at throughout this project is our ability to place ourselves within the stories without colonising them. The stories have origins, but they dont have owners. In some way we dont have to do them justice; we can use them as lenses through which to view our own lives, but always put them back on the shelf at the end of the day for someone else to look through.

The Pigeon's Bride is about communication, the public event, and the importance of listening to stories. One week out from the first public performance of our work Of feathers and skin, the self-reflexivity within the fairytale is subtly emerging; a hidden joy in the piece. Bridget and I have worked throughout this process with a great openness to possibility, to accident, to what might come to us as we simply bring an audience into a welcoming space and try to tell a story as best we can. I've been flexing my storytelling muscles on this work - The Pigeon's Bride is a more obscure fairytale, and I've been telling to select people in private corners to find the best words to excite the imagination and endow each event, symbol, action and revelation.

Trying to crack one of the text's more elusive symbols, we're on the verge of making a bold choice with this piece that will see it become 'ours'. We will bring our stories to the Bride's story, and I'm nervous to think that our imposition will knock it out of the sky. I want to fit our stories within this legend - the myths speaks volumes more than our stories, but I dont believe we can perform this piece without locating ourselves inside it.

So here we go. To tell our own stories. And perhaps we will hear a new story in return.

finding a place from which to speak

What is the performative body? We train actors to have the power to transform, to be chameleons. Not the real chameleons that blend into the beige of shower block wall, but the rainbow chameleons of my childhood imaginations who have the power to transform beyond recognition. The training responds to a desire to see expressive bodies on stage, who can channel and give life to the experiences occur beneath the surface.

On the otherhand many theatremakers are working to capture the authentic self onstage, the non-performative body. The drama school dropouts are coming out of the woodwork - in this emerging style of performance the inability to shapeshift is becoming a strength.

Bridget and I are looking to investigate a whole range of performance bodies - the authentic body engaged in task, the expressive human body in dramatic action, the animal body, and hybrids traversing all of these. Interesting within this is the place from which we feel comfortable to speak, and the voice that comes from that. Working so investigatively through the body, text has been difficult to hook into and unleash. Always the hesitation, the adjustment, the reallignment, and the safety mechanisms go up. We are yet to find words in this work. Perhaps we dont need to have them, perhaps we cant have them now. We need to rediscover the free voice, so that we can speak from any position, in any body, in the heat of the moment.

The beast in man

"You must be able to transform yourself into an animal to play characters, to go into the unknown."

-Juliette Binoche

Photo by Mark Pritchard

Bridget and I are exploring the animal body in performance, working with our actors an ensemble of pigeons who transform into humans, and not the other way round. Involuntary transformation in fairytales is usually the result of a curse, and works as a confinement or restraint for the character. For example, the beast in Beauty and the Beast, or the prince in East of the Sun and West of the Moon. In The Wild Swans, a story that partially parallels The Pigeon's Bride, the evil queen is the villain of the piece, and the breaking of the spell is the heroinne's task.. In The Pigeon's Bride it's something different.

We meet the pigeon amid a chorus of birds singing and chirping in the treetops outside the princess' tower; she longs to hear what they are saying to eachother. The magic spell that the pigeon is under doesn't receive the focus one would expect - it reads as merely a fact of life that must be respected. The eleven other pigeon princes dont seem to concerned about the spell they have been placed under: they bathe in milk, transform into humans for the day, and go off down the street laughing, arm in arm.

The world of the pigeon and the world of man are certainly separate, but the pigeon seems more embarassed about being a human than being a bird.

Photo by Mark Pritchard

Actor training often employs the animal body as a way of finding the essence of a character, anchoring the choices from a primitive centre, while allow the performer to take choices to the extremes of possibility. By beginning from a place far outside the social frame, and cultivating the animalism in the performer - their responsivity to thought, feeling, sensation and intuition - we unlock a more detailed authentic core in the performer. The return to human form and the social frame is always a wittling back, a restriction, a subsidence. To be human, in fact, is to be less free.

The Princess describes the Prince's transformation as being an enchantment placed upon him by force, he is trapped in this secret cycle of transformation. But I am drawn - through instinct, backed up by articulation - towards an alternate reading: what began as a curse may have become something else.

Image

Coming to this project straight off the back of our one-act plays, we are engaging with the difference between the playscript and the fairytale text. The focus is shifting from characterisation and the spoken word in the social frame, to the nature of storytelling as a transaction between teller and witness. We are engaging with symbol, image, discovery, revelation, repetition, and how we shape this through time. The language of the telling - its images, symbols, motifs - has more importance than the so-called truth of the action. The flights of fancy are much greater in mythic tales, but the images chosen must sing with a connection to the collective consciousness of the community it speaks to.

We decided to begin work with the performers by working with them on layers of textures, provocations, images or motifs, before exposing them to the specific story we are looking to tell. We as storytellers wanted to see the actors take time with images in isolation, giving the pigeon or the bath of milk or the wooden shoes their full attention. We developed their sensitivity to the images of the piece, and so the first reading of the text focussed on the potency of each moment. When they read that the pigeon bathed in milk, it conjured up physical sensations and memories in the performers. It is this sensation that we want to bring to the audience - for the symbols to tap into the dream world and unlock imagination beyond the literal or the real.

Storytelling

"We live in story like a fish lives in water.

We swim through words and images siphoning story through our minds the way a fish siphons water through its gills.

We cannot think without language, we cannot process experience without story."

— Christina Baldwin,  StoryCatcher: Making Sense of our Lives Through the Power and Practice of Story.

The tale so far

Mark and Bridget have banded together to devise a new performance work drawn from a fairytale text. As a starting point, we've chosen to take The Pigeon's Bride, a tale of Jugoslav origin, and have a team of four performers working with us to bring it to life. At this stage all options are open as to the form it may take, but as a provocation the text is rich. We are excited to tell this story; its female protagonist is fascinating, beautiful and bold, and the images are strong.

The thematic territory of the piece struck us:
- restraint
- isolation
- a broken promise
- abandonment
- determination
- communication
- transformation

And the texture within it were inviting:
- the tower
- milk
- pigeons
- 3 pairs of iron shoes
- mountains, deserts, forests
- a bathhouse
- a rooster with wooden shoes

 The narrative of the piece is strangely unified - not everything is explained or wrapped up, but the writers finds unity in its disunity. It avoids overt moralising, and allows the tale to speak for itself.

Outside the story, I as a maker have brought my own objectives to this project. I want to work physically as a primary entrypoint from which to build the work. I'm interested in animal physicality, finding the expressive and gestural animal bodies, and the gradual transition between animality and the human form. How can animal work help us unlock the physical body, outside and inside the social frame?
I'm interested in task-based work, and its value as a technique in physical storytelling. I have dealt with task in isolation: the body under endurance, the non-performative body, the immediate body. I want to start using this as an expressive tool in storytelling, as part of action or as an image in the mise-en-scene. For me at this stage this becomes a question of bridging the gap between the performative and non-performative body; the expressive and the practical. Does the language of one disrupt the other? Does seeing the actor sweat and struggle undermine the expressive fiction? Can we watch an actor portray an animal doing a task?
When do we stop suspending our disbelief? How grand can the expressive language stretch without losing the live body on stage in real space and time?

Lets find out.