outlier-nj

Redirection

2011-06-25T09:54:00.003+10:00

I've been rethinking my use of both blog and website. My website was designed several years ago, so I'm stuck with categories which no longer reflect my writing practice, which is now a bit less theatre and quite bit more prose and poetry and other things. As for the blog, I haven't added anything in months. And of course the whole online environment has changed, and is continuing to change. So I'm changing too. I will no longer post on this blog or run my old website. (Although they will continue to bounce around in cyberspace: the blog for who knows how long, and the website until my current subscription runs out early 2012.)

My new address is http://noelle-janaczewska.com and it's part website part blog. I'm still working out how I'll use it (I've migrated over the odd favourite from the website) but it will reflect my current writing interests and praxis. Check it out.

In praise of complexity

2011-02-12T17:05:00.003+11:00

Less is more and simplicity can speak volumes …

As a dramatist I compose what’s said and what is not, words and silence, into a play or performance text. Keep it simple, we’re so often told—at least, I’m often told that—by dramaturgs, directors, critics and others. Like a mantra. But why? What’s so great about simplicity? Why is complication such a no-no?

I like complexity. I think some subjects and situations demand it, and that simplicity can be reductive and flattening. I’ve read and seen a few things recently that, in my opinion, could have done with a few more complications.

The simplicity I mean here is not that distilled and eloquent simplicity that insightful writers sweat to tease from complexity, nor the iceberg structure of a good poem, but a kind of intellectual laziness.

‘We have to remember that what we observe is not nature in itself, but nature exposed to our methods of questioning.’ Werner Heisenberg in Physics and Philosophy. (I think this line also crops up in Michael Frayn's play Copenhagen.)

Sometimes less is just less.

Readings of jazz poetry from extempore

2011-01-08T14:34:00.006+11:00

I'm part of the Readings of jazz poetry from extempore, along with fellow poets Andrew Lindsay, Lynn Hard, Nigel Roberts and Arjun von Caemmerer. Saturday 15 January, 6:00—8:00, at Macleay Bookshop, 103 Macleay Street, Potts Point.

Hope to see you there.

Shorts & long-term thinking

2010-11-14T15:55:00.014+11:00

Haven’t posted for months. Although I have been writing: a play I can best describe as the third ‘first draft’ of a commission; rough sketches of several poems; copious notes for a major non-fiction project, and a monologue. And I was overseas in September, part family visit, part research. For that non-fiction project, and for a collection of poems that I hope will end up as a chapbook.

I’ve also been thinking a lot about what I want to write over coming while—the next few years, at least. It kicked off with a decision not to do any more 10-minute pieces (7-ON gigs excepted). I’ve written quite a few of these, some went OK, some not so OK, and I’m not saying that I’ll never ever write another one ... But here’s my reasoning: while the 10-minuter has its uses and particular pleasures, for me they stopped being ‘opportunities’ and become distractions from the main game. I wasn’t grappling with big ideas and deep creative and intellectual ambition, I was fiddling about on the fringe, in order to feel that I was still on the list of working playwrights.

I emailed these thoughts to 7-ON and we had some great debates—about the pluses and minuses of the short form, about the proliferation of shows, seasons and festivals of short plays. What this explosion reveals about current theatre ecology; how this snapshot form reflects and engages with our digital world (or not); why we’re seeing the names of more and more established and well-established playwrights in program line-ups (interestingly, a trend not replicated by directors), and what that means for new and emerging dramatists trying to catch a break ...

As working writers we constantly reassess and rethink, try different tacks and ways of getting our work into the world. Explore different processes, genres and even artforms. Post Songket in 2003, I set myself the task of writing quickly: 5 weeks to go from concept to a draft solid enough to send out. I also vowed to redraft only when a company and collaborators made a definite commitment to production. I wrote 3 scripts this way. (Redheads, Mrs Petrov’s Shoe and The Stepping Stars of Bóronkowice, which began as a stage play and ended up on radio.) The cloudburst got 3 works into production … and generated another phase of reflection, this time culminating in a decision not to write any more plays ‘on spec’. And although I still have a couple of unproduced ‘spec’ scripts (written before that decision) that I’d like to see get up, my (live) performance writing has since been confined to the occasional commission, and to monologues or ‘performance essays’ that I've presented, or can present, myself.

I’ve always liked my theatre to be either exuberantly, audaciously theatrical (e.g. Caryl Churchill, the work of English company 1927), or the complete opposite, bare and basic (e.g. the work of American Mike Daisey). I recently saw 1927’s new work, The Animals & Children Took to the Streets, and loved it even more than their previous show, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea. To write for theatre like that would be inspiring, but too much of the theatre on offer falls into a gravelly middle ground that doesn’t particularly interest me.

And so to our infatuation with actors. I suppose it’s part of the whole celebrity obsession thing, but this weekend it got to me. Before I continue, I should say that some very good friends of mine are actors, and this little rant isn’t about actors per se. It’s about attitudes towards them. Why do we mystify their craft, sometimes to the point of infantalisation? Why do a select few earn a motza, while the vast majority work for lousy wages in lousy conditions?

Anyway. In one or other of this weekend’s newspapers (The Sydney Morning Herald and The Weekend Australian) there was a profile of Sydney Theatre Company co-AD Andrew Upton in which he rhapsodised at length about how marvellous actors are. A television reviewer in another article raved about a bunch of actors and suggested that we just let them lose and record whatever they say or do. (I assume—I hope—she’s joking and does realise that actors usually speak lines written by writers and directed by directors.) Elsewhere Griffin AD Sam Strong, when asked who had it tougher, playwrights or poets, replied poets. Because playwrights get to hang out with actors. Why is hanging out with actors better than hanging out with other writers? Or with painters or horticulturalists for that matter? And this reminded me of the previous weekend’s preview/publicity article for a TV series which, if you didn’t know better, would have you believe it was all the work of one extraordinary star actor. (BTW, I’m not blaming individual actors for these misrepresentations, but the machinery, PR and otherwise, that elevates actor to hero.)

Critics, I’ve noticed, like to cosy it up with actors. They’re often way more comfortable talking about performances than they are about such elements as design, music or direction. A production is solely the performances of the actors—that’s what they often imply. Even in film, where so much of a performance is constructed by the camera, or after the event, by editing. Yes, I accept that camera and editing can’t make a crap performance soar, but they can—and do—make uneven performances good enough to win awards. In theatre of course, actors are more exposed and do carry more of the show. Perhaps for this reason, reviewers are generous towards them, in a way they rarely are to writers and directors. Have you ever read a review that said: This was a fabulous play/text, complex and nuanced, but these actors were simply not up to the task? I haven’t. Perhaps critics dwell on actors and their performances because they find character an easier topic to riff on than say, visual style or structure or registers of language?

Back to writing. I plan to finish the monologue that was called Bounce and is now Good With Maps, early December. It explores some quite difficult, and personally confronting material, so it’s taking longer than I’d planned. After that I’ve set aside a few ‘technology days’ to update and switch over various things. (After a computer crash/scare, I’ve decided that clouds are a must for writers, and I now have my files backed up in Dropbox.)

While I was in England, I learnt that a one-act play I wrote for children called The River That Ran Out, was Highly Commended in the Trinity Guildhall International Playwriting Competition (for audiences of 11-years-old and under). That news was particularly sweet because a few minutes earlier I’d discovered that my ATM card had been scammed in London, and my bank account cleaned out! Back home in Sydney The Story of this Moment was one of 6 scripts short-listed for the inaugural 2010 Richard Burton Award for New Plays. It’s a very out there, unconventional music-theatre script, so a surprising inclusion. But very welcome.

Also in December, I begin with the thistles, my big non-fiction project, and I am so looking forward to it. To immersing myself, getting lost in a really big project ...

Unrequited in Melbourne

2010-07-26T14:20:00.002+10:00

Unfortunately Asialink have had to cancel this event. Sorry.

I’m presenting my monologue Unrequited in Melbourne as part of Asialink’s Winter Writing Series. It’s part of their Anti-travel-writing event along with 3 other writers: Linda Neil, Petrus Spronk & Andrew Sant.

Korea captured my imagination in 1993 and has held it ever since. I've tried on several occasions to escape into other countries in the region, but it's Korea—South, North, and the diaspora—which figures most prominently and most often in my writing. From a car crash in Pyongyang on an afternoon so cold the wind blew the words back down my throat, to an encounter with Chekhov in a Busan bar, Unrequited attempts to understand this rather one-sided love affair.

Thursday 29 July 2010, 6:00—7:30 pm

Yasuko Myer Room, Level 1, Sidney Myer Asia Centre, University of Melbourne

It’s a free event and apparently includes ‘winter-warming refreshments’. Interested? RSVP/register online here.

Review

2010-06-08T11:25:00.004+10:00

You had to be there is my review of Penny Arcade's Bad Reputation: Performance, Essays, Interviews. It's published in the latest issue of Jacket Magazine, or you can read it here.

Salt Lemon

2010-05-27T11:48:00.003+10:00

My poem Salt Lemon has just been published in Black Market Review, Issue 2 (Spring 2010). You can read it here.

All lit and no play

2010-04-16T19:51:00.014+10:00

Lot of heat in the blogosphere about the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards judges’ decision that no plays this year are worthy of nomination. Currency Press have issued a media release (which seems to have disappeared from their website, but you can read it here on James Waites' blog), but I think the best discussion is—perhaps not surprisingly—at Theatre Notes. Let’s use the NSW judges’ omission to have a real discussion about performance writing—what it is, and what it might be.

I’ve left a few comments around the traps, including on the Australian Literary Review blog. Unfortunately the responses there (those that aren’t in-crowd chit-chat about the event where the short-list was announced) dump on Australian performance writing. Sigh.

BTW I didn’t enter a play, so have no personal axe to grind.

The most exciting book I've read in ages

2010-04-11T13:43:00.008+10:00

Was going to post on Why I hate the word pretentious and love the word abstract, but have decided to leave that for another time—or maybe something else. Because I’m reading David Shields book Reality Hunger, and what a thrilling manifesto it is. Rousing, affirming, audacious, genuinely un-put-downable. The book has received some harsh reviews from critics who accuse Shields of being anti the novel. But I don’t think he is; I think he’s asking important questions about literary fiction and narrative; about cohesion and fragmentation, about composition and reality; I think he’s putting forward the idea that the novel—that writing—can be many things. Nor do I think he is, as some of his detractors have suggested, anti metaphor and the imaginary.

Here’s one of my favourite sections:

‘For me, anyway, the fictional construct rarely takes you deeper into the material that you want to explore. Instead, it takes you deeper into the fictional construct, into the technology of narrative, of plot, of place, of scene, of characters. In most novels I read, the narrative completely overwhelms whatever it was the writer supposedly set out to explore in the first place.’

Not only novels. How many plays have I seen where exactly that has happened? Where an interesting idea or sensibility has been squashed flat under a ton of plot points, character arcs and narrative crapola.

Reality Hunger is one of the most exciting books I’ve come across since I read Therapy’s Delusions (years ago) and Ethan Watters’s and Richard Ofshe’s contentious argument that Freud’s notion of an active unconscious that affects our everyday lives is nothing more than a culturally supported myth. But that’s another story.

Unperformance

2010-04-08T13:02:00.009+10:00

Screens and projections have become commonplace in theatre. Sometimes the footage is well shot and/or designed, sometimes not. Sometimes they’re imaginatively and deftly used, sometimes not. Sometimes they add, sometimes they diminish.

This recent article in The New York Times discusses the rise and rise of screens and projections in live theatre.

Combining recorded images and on-stage action is a complex and intricate business. As is fusing deferred and live performance. I’ve seen productions with lavish and costly projections that have been pretty ho-hum, and incredibly simple set-ups that worked brilliantly. Success is obviously down to more than technology and resources (although they help).

You’re probably sensing a ‘but’ here …

Screens, both individual and public, are a feature of contemporary life. As theatre-makers of course we want to reference and make use of them. But this ubiquity also prompts reservations. When many of us spend so much of our time gazing at screens on computers, iPhones, tablets, TVs, etc. do we—do I—want to go to the theatre for more of the same?

I have mixed feelings about this, and certainly nothing per se against the use of screens on stage … but there is something unique and compelling about the live, unmediated exchange. I love the directness of stand-up, of spoken word and poetry. Of readings. Of the guided tours you bump into. Of the everyday, happenstance performances you come across in supermarkets and department stores (such as cooking demonstrations) and in malls (spruikers and the like). Although perhaps my preference for these bare-bones, solo forms reflects nothing so much as my current disenchantment with theatre, much of which I’m finding limited, over-reliant on a handful of easy, predictable tropes, even—dare I say it?—intellectually banal.

But let’s end on a more up-beat note. One of the most stunning theatrical combinations of live performance and projections I’ve seen was Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea from UK company 1927. Catch them on YouTube.

And the good news is: they’re returning to Sydney with a new show later this year.

Moving on ...

2010-02-18T14:19:00.025+11:00

Stories from the 428 moves on. Here we are, the 8 of us Week 2 writers with Gus at our first script meeting last week.

Photo: Leah McGirr

It's been interesting and deeply enjoyable to meet the other writers and hear their work; not to mention creating my own 2 short scenes: Pass and The Party. And realise that although our contributions are all quite different, there are echoes and overlaps—in content, voice and style.

Both my scenes, but particularly Pass, have an underscore of loss and mourning. Today, the 18 February, was my father's birthday. He died 18 months ago. In that time I've come to understand something of the subtle, complex, nuanced, insistent, unpredictable nature of grief—but it's not all bad, because I've also come to understand that, strange as it may sound, grief allows me to continue a relationship with my father.

Now for another jump-cut or whatever the writing equivalent of that is:

Recent anxiety: Am I endlessly rewriting the same material? And if I am, is this a problem, or do most artists return, perhaps obsessively, to mine their core material from different angles? What is my core material?

Recent reading: Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger. To remember was once difficult and costly and forgetting was the norm, but in our digital world this has flipped, and now remembering is the default.

Recent listening: Don Byron plays the music of Mickey Katz. Can Jewish musicians play jazz, can an African-American clarinetist play klezmer? Absolutely.

Stories from the 428

2010-02-10T13:55:00.017+11:00

I’m one of 16 writers involved in an unusual project called Stories from the 428.

It’s the brainchild of the dynamic Gus Supple, and this is what she has to say about it:

Thousands of people everyday travel on the buses and trains of Sydney—to work, to school, to meet friends or family. Though a necessary part of life in the city, public transport is an unknowing catalyst to creation. Many of us use our train or bus rides to message friends, read a book, write a card, read a newspaper, make notes in a diary. And the buses become a form of mobile office, taking us from A to B while we make plans or take notes.

Harnessing the talents of some of Sydney’s most dynamic writers, Stories from the 428 finds the sublime and extraordinary in the everyday bus ride and transports it on stage.

Inspired by conversations, scenes from the bus window, overseen text messages or perhaps the person sitting across from them, a group of 8 playwrights per week will collaborate to create a unique and surprising theatrical experience centred around the 428 bus route.

I was drawn to this for a number of reasons, but 2 in particular. I’m a passionate advocate for public transport, (I haven’t had a car for years) and in the late 1990s I lived in Dulwich Hill and travelled frequently on the 428 bus. My second main reason for joining Stories from the 428 was that it was all going to happen fast, fast, fast. We’d catch the bus, write our scripts, rehearse, and put them on over the course of a couple of months. When the gap between starting to write a play and opening night can stretch for years, this appealed to me. By way of contrast, I began Songket early 1997 and by the time it finally went on mid 2003, I had to work hard to rekindle my interest. To paraphrase the announcers on the London Underground: Mind that gap!

Stories from the 428
Week One: Wednesday 24—Saturday 27 March at 8:00 pm & Sunday 28 March at 5:00 pm.
Week Two: Wednesday 31 March--Saturday 3 April at 8:00 pm & Sunday 4 April at 5:00 pm.
Sidetrack Theatre, 142 Addison Road, Marrickville. (The 428 bus stops just outside.)

In the meantime, check out the project’s website: http://www.storiesfromthe428.com/ and Facebook page.

Absolutely no sofas

2010-01-25T12:13:00.010+11:00

Let's begin with sofas and how much I loathe them on stage. Especially ratty brown ones. I often write ‘absolutely no sofas’ in the production notes of a script, and with one terrible exception (an armchair) back in 2000, I’ve managed to keep soft furnishings out of my work. If you want to see couches, go to Ikea.

To me, sofas on stage are the theatrical equivalent of bookshelves in documentary films—the expert interviewed in front of his packed bookcase. This is not because I’ve got anything against domestic or office décor per se, (I love books and have crowded shelves of my own) it’s because a sofa represents a certain kind of play and production.

At various points I’ve tried to write these more traditional narrative dramas with plots and character journeys and naturalistically-inclined dialogue. The kinds of plays that get programmed in subscription seasons. What usually happens though, is I get to about page 5 and complete anarchy has broken out—I want to introduce a robot or a flock of singing sheep, or I find that one of my sensible characters has flipped his arc to riff on the difference between moths and butterflies, which, BTW, is not night and day. From time to time, generally when I’m looking at a 2-digit bank balance, I’ve berated myself for not trying harder to write this kind of play. But not any more. This is the year I finally admit that I don’t much like conventional narrative drama, and I don’t want to write the stuff. It’s not my shtick. So my motto for 2010 is: embrace your inner maverick.

Speaking of which, I saw Tim Key’s show The Slutcracker on Saturday. A wonderful and wonderfully idiosyncratic mish-mash of poetry, performance, film, philosophical nuggets and improv. It’s daggy and meandering and clever and funny, and best of all, utterly unpredictable. Unlike the STC’s Tot Mom. After 5 minutes, I knew where that was going. The critics loved it, as did a number of friends and colleagues. What can I say? It had a lot of chairs of the hard, un-upholstered variety, but at least it had no sofas.

Research fever

2010-01-23T14:55:00.013+11:00

Years ago, for fun, I did an online psychology test designed to reveal your particular character strengths and inclinations. Curiosity came out as my number one, which perhaps explains why I find myself, not yet 4 weeks into the new year, in a research frenzy. Other writers talk about ‘research fever’, but I fear I’ve gone past the fever and into the frenzy. The reason?—weeds.

My desk is a Manhattan skyline of books about weeds. Texts recent and old, scientific pamphlets, surveys, fieldguides, fictional weeds, Australian weeds, foreign weeds, even sci-fi weeds. The floor is awash with printouts and pages of notes, my computer loaded with databases and login codes for various libraries.

A bit of backstory: Weeds are a long-standing interest of mine, and I’m researching them now for 2 projects. One is a personal essay/non-fiction piece for radio called Weeds Etc. The other is one of the 2 projects for which I’ve got a New Work grant from the Australia Council Literature Board: an unconventional memoir in 11 parts.

The difficulty—my difficult—is that everything I read suggests several more things to seek out and read, suggests other avenues of inquiry, spreads into new areas of imagining. And it’s all fascinating and absorbing and I just want to keep on finding out more …

So how much is enough? How do you know when to stop with the research and start with the writing? Begin drafting that first rough version of the script or chapter or poem? How do you decide what is necessary, and what is overkill? Can research become a way of avoiding the harder task of actually writing? Something like:

Research = relatively easy + comfortable
Writing = difficult ∴ put off for as long as possible

Although of course, the equation isn’t that simple. Because research is not only about digging for information, it’s also about thinking, about ideas marinating, about living with the material and its myriad possibilities. It’s about letting your sensibility permeate your findings, it’s about sticking one thing to another, and about the deep pleasure of discovery.

Nevertheless, I shall have to draw the line at some point and move into the writing phase. (Which may require further research because the 2 phases do not exist each in their neat separateness, but are parts of the one, somewhat elastic process that is writing ...) To that end I will stop this post here. (Is blogging another way to avoid writing the script or poem or essay in hand?) And return to the strange and captivating world of weeds.

Download Eels ...

2009-12-17T17:19:00.004+11:00

My 2008 radio feature There's Something About Eels ... is part of ABC Radio National's Beachpod, a selection of recent programs from their documentary archives. This means you can download Eels ... here. Happy listening!

Dramaturgy & Dramaturgies #4

2009-11-17T14:04:00.009+11:00

Following on from something in my previous post—the relatively limited dramaturgy available in this country to writers at the less traditional or more experimental end of the theatrical spectrum, I received an email about Dramaturgies #4 an event taking place in Melbourne in February 2010. Here's what they say:

'Dramaturgies #4 will be a national gathering of artists and arts thinkers working over three intensive days to explore new ecologies for dramaturgical practice as we face the challenges posed by shifting theatrical forms in the twenty-first century. The gathering will include daily working groups to discuss specific questions of dramaturgical practice that require a detailed examination and response … '

Here’s what I’d ask: If hybridity is the destiny of our 21st century world—and I think the jury is still out on that, for every trend there is a counter-trend, etc., etc.—then what kinds of dramaturgical ideas and strategies do we need to develop for the modular script? For transcultural, bi-lingual and multi-lingual writing? To deal with open texts, site specific theatre and promenade pieces? With flash mobs, spoken word and the many and various forms of solo performance? With emerging music-theatre genres, with web-based, online and games-inspired forms? What happens to a story when mobile technology takes your writing outside the theatre space? How does the architecture of a place shape or subsume your narrative, determine characters, amplify voices, cast its shadow on the way you write? What happens when your ‘stage’ is full of unrehearsed passers-by, subject to inclement weather and random happenings?

Sounds like Dramaturgies #4 is going to address some of these issues.

For more info or to register your interest, go to their website: http://www.dramaturgies.net/.

Enough with the 'Shoulds'

2009-11-15T12:33:00.019+11:00

I’ve been working on Random Red, a radio drama script, the brief for which is to revisit an old text in some way. Text is interpreted very broadly—it could be anything from a novel to an inscription on a gravestone—but it does have to predate the invention of radio. And my use of this text is equally open, so it can be an adaptation, an audacious reworking, or I can simply use the original text as a springboard to something else.

After a couple of false starts I decided that my old text would be Isaac Newton’s early notebooks, in particular his 1659 notebook with its colour recipes. Newton's interest in colour was enduring; he is famously the man who unwove the rainbow, and fractured light into its 7 constituent colours.

I got carried away, reading biographies, books about the history of colour, of calculus, of alchemy and astronomy. I carried out research in Cambridge and London during my stay in England. The only problem was, everything I read branched out into more possibilities, more tantalising leads to investigate. Which meant I arrived at a point where I had enough material and ideas for half a dozen scripts—but no clear story world for the one I’d been commissioned to write. This no doubt reveals something (perhaps rather too much?) about my writing process, but it’s a situation in which I often find myself. On the up-side however, I’ve found some of my best ideas while immersed in research for other projects.

I’m not, and never have been, a writer who plans out their script before they write it. I usually start with a collection of ideas, themes and metaphors. Sometimes with a musical form. Occasionally with a character or characters. Rarely with a detailed narrative. Never with plot. I begin writing to discover what it is I’m actually writing about. This time I began with 2 things. A form or style: I wanted to combine narrative and real-time dialogue, and a hazy sense of one character: I knew he was male, well into middle-age, and some kind of scientist. As points of departure go, this is loose and vague—even for me. So, not surprisingly, the writing has been stop-start.

All this is by way of a (long) preamble to explaining why I’ve read a lot of theatre reviews and blogs this last week. And been dismayed (and exasperated) by the overuse of one of my least favourite words: ‘Should’. Especially when directed at playwrights. Too many critics, bloggers, whoever and their dogs, telling playwrights how they should write and what their plays should do. Why do playwrights cop so much of this? No one seems to tell actors how they should act or designers what they should design to anything like the same degree. But it seems par for the course to bombard playwrights with ‘shoulds’.

Bit of an aside: why have we adopted this medical terminology of ‘script clinics’, ‘script doctors’, etc.? One London theatre company recently sent out a newsletter promoting their script clinic with a big red cross and the question: Is your writing practice in need of a check-up? What message does this give playwrights? All it does for me is conjure up the ridiculous image of a waiting room full of sick and bleeding plays.

Back to the ‘shoulds’. First reaction is that I’d like to tell those dispensing these pearls to stop telling us what we should do and write their own damn plays! A second, calmer, response is that question: why do playwrights get so much advice? Collective insecurity? The need to court those who program? Getting carried away by the collaborative nature of our work? Or perhaps it’s because, unlike say, playing the cello or performing somersaults on the trapeze, everyone feels they can write? Anyway, whatever the reason/s, I think a contributing factor is the notion of ‘rules’. Personally, when I hear the word ‘rules’ I run for the door. No, but seriously, the problem I have with ‘rules’ is (a). that they are predicated on the assumption that there is some universal notion of the perfect play, to which we all subscribe, (b). that ‘rules’ are not neutral and value-free, but derive from particular traditions and ideologies, and are answerable to certain interests (read the work of Trinh T. Minh-ha and Raúl Ruiz from the 1980s for more on this), and (c). despite what are no doubt the helpful intentions of many script gurus and dramaturgs, rules are often about control and gatekeeping as much as they are about the craft of theatre writing; any work perceived to be ‘breaking the rules’ can be safely shifted to the margins.

Of course this raises issues of dramaturgy, and a recurring preoccupation of mine: the relative lack of dramaturgical strategies and vocabulary for more experimental theatre writing, for work which is not primarily or essentially narrative drama, for work which is not about character arcs and plot progression. But now I’m starting to rant. Enough said.

BTW I’ve almost finished the first draft of Random Red. As for process here’s a favourite quote from Isaac Newton: ‘I keep the subject constantly before me and wait ’till the first dawnings open slowly, by little and little, into a full and clear light.’

extempore 3

2009-11-06T13:29:00.004+11:00

extempore 3 is out. The journal is edited by Miriam Zolin and this issue includes a bonus CD of contemporary Australian jazz, including a track by the wonderful Way Out West. Their 2002/3 CD Footscray Station remains one of my much-played favourites, and—directly and indirectly—has inspired performance texts, poems and spoken word pieces. You can also read my poem Learning (to love) the clarinet in this issue of extempore.

Poetic Dialogue

2009-10-07T16:45:00.005+11:00

Got back from England a week ago. My body clock has finally caught up with me on this side of the planet, and I find myself overcome with the urge to clear out—clean out over-stuffed filing drawers, old clothes, herbs and spices past their use-by-dates. I’d like to think this cleaning frenzy is simply a time of year thing—it is spring, after all, but I suspect I’m avoiding a radio script that I should be working on. It’s at that stage where I’ve done a lot of reading and research and made a lot of notes, but still, frustratingly, have no solid narrative or clear story world. Even the characters are fuzzy. Let’s hope inspiration comes to me as I fill garbage bags with papers and faded T-shirts …

Today I extended the cleaning jag to my computer and started deleting old emails. That’s when I came across a link to a 2007 article from The Guardian by Anthony Neilson. He’s basically telling playwrights not to be boring. No argument there. But this paragraph towards the end of the article caught my attention:

‘ … there’s a lot of poetic dialogue around. Sometimes a play is narratively accessible but the dialogue is mannered to the point of incomprehensibility. Some people like it, but I’m suspicious. Poetic dialogue, done badly, leaves no room for subtext. A lack of subtext is fundamentally undramatic. And boring.’

As a writer whose performance work is often described as ‘poetic’, my initial reaction to this statement was to disagree. I find naturalistic dialogue, when done badly, thin and pedestrian. It reduces theatre to work-a-day TV without the locations. Poetic dialogue can be subtle and work by suggestion and association; it can use metaphors to convey internal emotional states; it can sculpt language like designers use space or lighting designers compose with light; it can draw on and make manifest the inherent musicality of theatre.

Many years ago when workshopping Historia at an ANPC Conference, a dramaturg told me that actors find it hard to be emotional in non-naturalistic or poetic text. When he said that, I wanted to ask him: where does that leave Shakespeare? Not to mention those Jacobean dramatists I love like Webster, Middleton, Tourneur and Ford. Think of the candlelit and treacherous universe in which they moved, of sin unpunished, of innocence destroyed. Even the titles of their plays are strangely seductive, trapdoors to something beautiful and wicked that trickles beneath the surface of mortality: The Malcontents, The White Devil, The Broken Heart.

Since then, I’ve thought a lot about poetic dialogue, and I think Neilson’s got a point. Kind of. So here’s my riff on the pitfalls of the poetic in performance:

When a script gets labelled ‘poetic’ chances are its poetry and poetics won’t receive any further comment or critical input. This is unfortunate.

Poetry is a distilled, economical form of writing that can be many things—active, introspective, muscular, analytical, moving, funny, whimsical or robust. It can be direct and it can be plain in its syntax and metre. It can also be elusive. It requires discipline on the part of the playwright. It is not an excuse for a mud of adjectives, overblown description or a lack of dramatic action.

Whether I’m working on my own script or someone else’s, these are some of the questions I ask about the play’s poetics: Is the poetic lexicon sufficiently distinctive and varied? Or is it limited and predictable? Can it cut to the quick when it needs to, or does it circle aimlessly? Does it drift, or is it sharply focused? Does it invite the spectator into its world?

There’s more to say on the subject, of course, but I really should get back to that radio script. And to ‘keep myself on task’ here’s a favourite quote from Robert Wilson:

‘My ideal theatre would be a cross between the radio play and the silent movie. The problem with most theatre buildings for me is that they form a tight frame, the picture frame of the proscenium stage, which constricts and limits the fantasy. But when I listen to a radio play, I can look out the window and look at an airplane or a couple of lovers or the birds.’

There's Something About Eels ...

2009-09-01T07:39:00.007+10:00

There's Something About Eels … won the 2009 AWGIE (Australian Writers’ Guild) Award for best Original Radio Script. It was produced by ABC Radio National and broadcast on Radio Eye (a program the ABC management—for some mysterious reason—saw fit to axe at the end of 2008) on the 16 August 2008. Written & narrated by me, it was produced by Sharon Davis and sound engineer Russell Stapleton.

The eel has an image problem. Koalas, giant pandas, dolphins, butterflies, kittens—some of nature’s creatures are Hallmark-cute and appealing. Others inspire respect and awe. But some—like the eel—make us shudder. A slippery fish that lurks in the mud of river beds, or coils up from the ocean floor to scare divers. But there’s much more to the eel than meets the eye. It’s an elusive creature, and a tasty one—eels are one of the human race’s survival foods. A creature with not only a remarkable life cycle, but also one with a long cultural history across cultures and continents. There's Something About Eels … combines science, literature, history, anecdote, reverie and culinary art in a radio portrait of this maligned, misunderstood and unusual creature.

Dark Paradise

2009-07-29T17:13:00.010+10:00

You know how some ideas haunt you? Well, this photograph haunted me from the moment I first I came across it several years ago. I knew that at some point I would write about it—and now I have.

Jō and Ichiko Takasuka, Victoria 1914/5

DARK PARADISE is a radio piece, the story of Japanese immigrant, Jō Takasuka, who grew Australia’s first commercial rice crop in 1914/15—as told by a benshi or silent film narrator. From the moment the Takasuka family arrive in Melbourne in 1905, they have to battle not only a harsh physical environment, but also a hostile political climate, thanks to the notorious ‘White Australia’ policy. DARK PARADISE is a fictionalised account of such a time and place.

DARK PARADISE
Written by Noëlle Janaczewska
Produced by Jane Ulman
Music: Chis Abrahams & Jim Denley

Sound engineer: Andrei Shabunov

Performed by: Kuni Hashimoto, Linda Cropper, Asako Izawa

Ivar Kants, Felix Gentle, Gerard Carroll, Ian Scott, Gary Bryson, Hamish Daniel,

Andy Scott, Barbara Smith, Garry Hogan, Nicholas Field & Yuki Matsuura

ABC Radio National: Airplay
Sunday 9 August, 3:00 pm, repeated Thursday 13 August, 7:00 pm, and available online for 4 weeks from first broadcast at www.abc.net.au/rn/airplay

And I haven’t finished with this material—neither the story of the Takasukas, nor the figure of the benshi. Over the coming year, I’ll be continuing to work with it for new projects in print, poetry and performance.

Noëlle on Another Lost Shark

2009-07-23T06:57:00.004+10:00

As part of the run-up to next month's Queensland Poetry Festival (where I'm reading), I did an online interview about my writing process, and the performance/poetry nexus, with Queensland-based poet Graham Nunn. You can read it, and my poem Local Customs: Tips for Refugees on Graham's Another Lost Shark site.

Minnie Mouse Redraws the Line

2009-07-14T16:28:00.004+10:00

Listen to my short piece Minnie Mouse Redraws the Line on ABC Radio National's Airplay. Thursday 16 July at 7:00 pm or on-line for 4 weeks from Sunday 12 July.

The piece is a playful speculation on the relationship between Mickey and Minnie Mouse of Walt Disney fame. Minnie finds herself under house arrest in a rundown hotel in Sydney. The studio suits at Disney want her to lie low for a while. Mickey is at the peak of his fame and the knowledge Minnie has of the 'real Mickey' risks a cartoon catastrophe.

Performed by Lucia Mastrantone. Produced by Libby Douglas.

The Need for Imaginative Space

2009-07-11T16:58:00.004+10:00

The last month has been one of workshops and deadlines and struggling with questions of structure. It's been a crowded, busy, scheduled month, so these words from Doris Lessing's 2007 Nobel lecture about the space you need to think and write seemed particularly apt.

‘Writers are often asked, How do you write? With a wordprocessor? an electric typewriter? a quill? longhand? But the essential question is, “Have you found a space, that empty space, which should surround you when you write?” Into that space, which is like a form of listening, of attention, will come the words, the words your characters will speak, ideas—inspiration.

If a writer cannot find this space, then poems and stories may be stillborn.’

Read the rest of her lecture here.

Cluster

2009-06-15T16:23:00.003+10:00

There’s a new interactive blog for playwrights—to discuss, debate critique, create, inspire and connect—and it’s called Cluster. It’s the brainchild of Joanna Erskine, an enterprising Sydney-based ‘emerging playwright’. The ‘emerging’ bit is her term not mine, and she explains it as: ‘This means I am in a kind of artistic limbo. I am on my way to where I want to be, but have not made it “there” yet.’

Joanne, that probably describes how a lot of us feel—new, emerging, established, whatever …

The City Lorikeets

2009-05-11T10:31:00.004+10:00

My essay The City Lorikeets was one of the 2 runners-up in the 2009 WILDCARE Tasmania Nature Writing Prize. Publication details to follow.

Savage Minds

2009-04-30T15:58:00.004+10:00

A long time since I studied it, but I try to keep up with what's hot and what's not in anthropology.

It's not in any way about 'keeping my hand in', but it is more than idle curiosity, because anthropologists and anthropology-related themes have featured in a few of my radio scripts and plays, most notably Songket. And quite a few years ago I also wrote a couple of drafts of a novel in which 2 of the central characters were anthropologists. Very wisely, I binned that manuscript; decided to let it become ‘compost’ for other writings.

Anyway, this link has nothing to do with writing. It's a group blog on matters anthropological, it’s called Savage Minds, and I find it interesting reading.

Playwrights, Directors, Auteurs ...

2009-04-19T10:32:00.013+10:00

‘Don't let auteurs take over in theatre. Elevating the director to cult status at the expense of the writer is the road to Hollywood's creative bankruptcy: keep the dramatist at the heart of the creative process.’ That’s not me, that’s the intro to a recent blog post from Britain’s Michael Billington. Hmm …

I’m a playwright, so of course I want space for writers to practise and develop their craft. Support for writers to initiate and develop their own ideas, as well as work on projects dreamt up by others. Opportunities to collaborate with different artists in the creation of work across the whole spectrum of theatre and performance. But what troubles me about Billington’s post is his notion of 2 discrete entities: a ‘writers’ theatre and a ‘directors’ theatre. And the implication that the rise of one presages the decline of the other. Isn’t it time we chucked this division in the bin? Isn’t it more useful to think instead of the whole ecology? Speaking for myself, I want to write for a range of forms, and work in a range of ways with a range of other artists. And maybe this is naïve or overly idealistic, but isn’t it far more likely that really good work in one area will encourage really good work in another, rather than jeopardise its existence?

This issue has particular currency for me as I’ve just returned from Melbourne and a week’s workshop with The Eleventh Hour on a new theatre project with the working title Debts. Drawing inspiration from Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, and from the various incarnations of Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin stories, including the film Cabaret, the project is looking at debt and notions of indebtedness. The concept is the brainchild of the company's artistic directors; as the writer, I am also contributing ideas (as well as text) and will help shape the piece; the actors likewise have input into the development of Debts. In other words, the work is collaborative, and is being created not solely by the playwright, not solely by a director or auteur, but by a team of artists with specific skills and roles. And isn't this the case with most theatre? Even if you sit in front of your computer and write a play with no involvement from anyone else, you're going to rely on collaborators to realise it as theatre, and unless you're a total control freak, those collaborators are going to participate in the creation of the work as theatre.

Last week's workshop was the first stage of our creative development, and I had a great week with directors/dramaturgs Anne Thompson and William Henderson, and actors Jane Nolan, Rodney Afif and Greg Ulfan. I’d contacted the company about 18 months ago, because I really liked what I'd read about them and thought they sounded like a company of substance rather than PR hype. (Which they are, by the way.) The invitation to collaborate on Debts came out of this initial dialogue.

Naturally we discussed our ideas for the piece around the table, but every day also involved plenty of work on the floor. Experimenting, trying out things, exploring possibilities, looking at what happens when you crash and juxtapose different texts, genres and styles. For a playwright this is fantastic, because I get to see how things might work theatrically—or not. It forces you to think performatively, of bodies in space, of words in mouths. It reminds you that sentences and situations that read brilliantly on the page may not be effective on stage; it encourages you to wrestle, question and rhapsodise. You bounce ideas around the room, off each other, and those ideas keep on bouncing around in your head as you board QF462 back to Sydney, as you do the weekend shopping, and days later as you walk along the foreshore at dusk.

2 more workshops/creative developments are scheduled for July and August.

Wine & Cheese in the Amazon

2009-04-03T11:22:00.019+11:00

Since the end of the 1990s I haven’t written much in the way of prose, so to get myself back into the groove, I wrote this piece, Wine & Cheese in the Amazon, about a trip I made a couple of years ago to the Brazilian city of Manaus—not a crap place, but certaibly a curious one …

France was at the top, then Italy, followed by Germany and Spain. Australia was at the bottom in a generic ‘New World’ category, with Chile off the list altogether because this was 1980 and Pinochet was in power. Like many people my age who grew up in England, wine was an exotic tipple associated with special occasions, continental holidays and bohemian proclivities. Although by the time I was at university, this was changing, and I could navigate the cheap shelves of the off-licence with confidence: Black Tower, Blue Nun, Bull’s Blood from Hungary, and Mateus Rosé from Portugal, which came in distinctive, bulb-shaped bottles to be recycled into lamp-stands and candle-holders.

Twenty-five-plus years later and 1,600 kilometres up the Amazon, I’m drinking Mateus Rosé again. And I’m not the only one: the ubiquitous pink is on the up again, benefiting from a recent surge in popularity of rosé wines.

‘Fondue & Wine Night’ at this particular restaurant in Manaus is a step back in time to that pre-cholesterol era when cheese was healthy and wine was sweet. It’s my last night in Manaus before I fly back to Rio de Janeiro, and I’ve come here because—well, a place advertising a ‘Fondue & Wine Night’ must have wine on offer. And with all that cheese to keep cool, I figure they’ll have that other essential: air conditioning.

Three degrees south of the Equator, Manaus is an oddity: a city of almost two million people in the heart of the Amazon. On the map it’s six boldface letters amid a swathe of green; on the ground, the humidity is crushing.

‘Because of the evaporation, Manaus is always evaporating,’ the taxi driver explained as he ferried me from the airport to my hotel.

Travel guides are not kind to Manaus, describing it as dirty and overcrowded, an oily blot on our rainforest fantasies. But I like the buzz and frontier ambience of this river port. I like the cast iron Municipal Market where biodiversity comes alive with tentacles and spiky rinds. The waterfront where porters run cases of guaraná and transformers to waiting barges. And the old district of Educandos, named after the teachers who were some of the city’s first migrants. Where one morning, I watched a businesswoman in high heels climb to her bus stop across a system of planks and makeshift bridges. And wondered why, despite housekeeping services and modern plumbing, I was sweaty and crumpled, while people living in the most basic of circumstances were immaculately turned out?

With this in mind, I’ve dressed up for the ‘Fondue & Wine Night’, applied lipstick, and taken a cab to the up-market Vieralves neighbourhood. But already my shirt looks as if I’ve slept in it.

From a few doors down, a band in full stampede. 2/4 syncopation loud enough to stagger the pulse of the neon sign across the street. Or maybe the power is about to short out, the way it did my second day here?

Around 4:00 pm branched lightening sprang from a black curve of the forest. Thick clouds, purple, grey and silver-edged, began to drop spots the size of tennis balls onto the path, and within seconds rain was pouring in sheets so opaque it was impossible to see the tree a couple of metres away—let alone the Amazon beyond. Straight down, taps turned on full capacity, the monsoon that swept in about the same time every day was especially intense that afternoon—my second in Manaus. The lamp in my room sparked, the fan stopped; there was nothing for it but to head for the lobby and a glass of chilled white wine.

That’s when I discovered the hotel bar didn’t serve wine. Only beer and spirits and a raft of soft drinks. The barman however, tried to oblige, rummaging under the counter until he found—

‘Red?’ he asked, holding up the remains of an unidentified bottle.

‘Uh—no. Thanks.’ I mean, God knows how long it’s been sitting there!

Later, in the café, I tried again.

‘Sorry, no wine. Would you like a Coke instead?’

I could, I discovered, order a bottle of wine on room service. There’s Local or Imported. Imported from where? France, Chile … Uzbekistan? I called to ask.

‘From overseas, madam.’

I opted for the local white.

Ten minutes later, a waiter arrived with a tray and two glasses. Only to hesitate, confusion crinkling his brow, reluctant to open the bottle for a single senhora.

Is this the lot of the solo traveller? Or is it a wine and gender thing? ‘[T]he assumption on the part of wine waiters that women are too frail to consume or too stingy to pay for a whole bottle,’ as Elizabeth David put it. Whatever the case, I ended up pouring most of that room service Chardonnay down the sink. Not because it was unpleasant, but because I realised with the first sip, that what I really wanted, was to enjoy the drink of my choice in a public space.

Like its cuisine, the décor at the fondue restaurant is pure 1970s. In fact much of Manaus’s appeal is retro—not reconstituted heritage, but the real 70s deal. Take concrete. Like their colleagues elsewhere, the architects of modern Manaus embraced concrete with a vengeance, and everywhere you go, there it is: smooth concrete, bumpy concrete, windowless concrete, textured, moulded, weed-sprouting concrete. Is it an aesthetic choice? Or an attempt to combat the weather, the decay that creeps up every façade and pillar, the moisture that softens everything?

Manaus is a boom and slump sort of place, and if the concrete jungle is the design legacy of the boom that began in 1966 when the government declared the city a free-trade zone, then the pink and white opera house is the most visible reminder of that earlier boom, what translator Leandro calls ‘the rubber time’.

‘Everyone,’ he announced the first time we met, ‘has a certain size to their life, and you can refuse to fill it or use it all.’

A philosophically-inclined man with indigenous bone-structure and expressive hands, Leandro talked with affection of Eduardo Gonçalves Ribeiro. State governor during the final decades of the nineteenth century, his flamboyant determination to bring ‘light into the dark forest’ was a source of inspiration for Werner Herzog’s 1982 film Fitzcarraldo. Ribeiro’s tenure coincided with the rubber boom. A period of monopoly when entrepreneurs and bosses lived in outlandish luxury. When Camembert and raspberry jam arrived on steamships from North America; when horses were given vintage Burgundy to quench their thirst, linen sent to Paris or London to be washed, and ladies donned gloves and fur coats to hear Verdi’s latest at the newly-opened Teatro Amazonas. Although, as I sat in that theatre, in my red velvet seat, listening to a string quartet rehearse, I wondered about the truth of these stories, which seem to become more baroque with each retelling.

We were outside the theatre, taking photographs, when a boy appeared at the top of the steps. He was about ten or eleven-years-old, barefoot, pushing a battered wheelbarrow full of pineapples. Another vendor attempted to shoo him away; trade in tourist hot spots is strictly controlled. The pair of them yelled insults at each other, until the vendor marched up to the barrow and kicked it over. Wheelbarrow and pineapples tumbled down the steps, but Eisenstein wasn’t there to record for posterity that image of falling fruit. Or the dignity of the boy as he picked up his livelihood.

‘He’s probably left the interior for the future,’ explained Patrícia, an architect from São Paulo, here as part of a scheme to provide in-town housing for the region’s native peoples. Housing that will acknowledge their traditions whilst accepting the fact that they are now urban dwellers.

Buy a Nokia phone in Recife or a Samsung TV in Porto Alegre, and chances are it was put together in Manaus. Drawn by the promise of tax relief, multinationals moved into the Distrito Industrial, and at night you can see their corporate logos lording it over the city. The aristocrats of this second boom are executives from Europe and South Korea, but unlike their predecessors, the majority of them will never actually set foot in Manaus. As for the workers, many of them hail from remote communities off the radar for all but the most intrepid anthropologist.

By now I’d given up looking for wine by the glass or half-carafe in favour of a bottle of anything I could imbibe in a public venue, rather than alone in my room. A quest that took me to the poolside buffet of a nearby hotel.

‘Can I see the wine list?’

The waiter handed me the standard menu: cocktails, spirits, beer and non-alcoholic options. I repeated my request, this time in Portuguese. He sighed and made for the waiters’ station. Surely I’m not the only wine-drinker in Manaus?

The list when it arrived, was short and predominantly Argentinean. ‘I’d like the Brazilian Riesling, please.’

‘Blanco ou tinto?’

I don’t think Rieslings come in red, do they?

A bottle of Marcus James was brought in an ice bucket to my table by another waiter, a stocky, older man, his face overgrown with fatigue. It turned out to be a rather bland, thin-bodied drop—No, let’s be generous and call it ‘refreshing’. Besides, after all that hunting, I was determined to enjoy it.

Wine grapes were introduced into Brazil by the Portuguese as far back as 1532, but encountered various environmental problems and failed to flourish. As did the Spanish vines planted by Jesuit missionaries along the Uruguay River a hundred-and-thirty years later. It was not until the 1880s that Brazilian viticulture got going in the southernmost state of Rio Grande do Sol, thanks to the know-how and persistence of Italian immigrants. Wine grapes are now also grown in north-eastern Brazil, and the upper São Francisco valley is probably the most important tropical vineyard in the world. This would certainly surprise the Victorian explorer Richard Burton, who visited the area in 1867 and wrote: ‘Grape growing will hardly be possible in this climate, where the hot season is also that of the rains.’ But a hundred-and-fifty years after Burton, this scrubland of stunted trees and prolonged droughts is producing millions of litres of wine. The vines depend on irrigation for survival, and on restricted fecundity for quality control. Doubts remain however, about the wisdom of the enterprise; the suitability of grapes from tropical climates to produce anything more than vinho de mesa or vinegar. What isn’t disputed, is that each hectare of cultivation provides much-needed employment in this desperately poor part of Brazil.

In contrast to the wine drought, I’ve never in my life been offered so much cheese. Or to be strictly accurate, so much gorgonzola. It’s there for breakfast, there for lunch on pizzas and pasta; it’s dug into mashed potato, stuffed into fish, even disguised as soup. Tourist agencies could use it on billboards to promote the town: Want to gorge on gorgonzola? Come to Manaus!

In a satirical essay, G. K. Chesterton observed that poets have been curiously silent on the subject of cheese. Not so the contributors to Wikipedia, where cheese is apparently one of the on-line encyclopaedia’s most reworked topics—along with Fidel Castro, deconstructivism and Israel. I recognise the controversial nature of the other entries, but why does cheese inspire such passion? Myself, I regard cheese as politically neutral, although there is that pre-gourmet association with parsimony and spinsterhood, captured so succinctly by Barbara Pym: ‘I went upstairs to my flat to eat a melancholy lunch. A dried-up scrap of cheese, a few lettuce leaves … A woman’s meal, I thought, with no suggestion of brandy afterwards.’

Today, my last in Manaus, I hired a driver and went to the Adolpho Ducke Reserve and Botanic Gardens on the eastern outskirts of town.

‘Not long ago you saw only the forest from out here,’ said Amir, as he parked the car. ‘Now look! Skyscrapers and buildings.’

I couldn’t tell if Amir regretted this change or welcomed it, but not much more than twenty kilometres from the traffic snarls and Internet cafés of Centro, the road ran out. Literally. You’re in the middle of nowhere with forest in every direction. Amir turned off the engine, and a heavy press of silence descended. Was it only a few minutes ago that we passed gardens cut out of the bush? A makeshift church? Huts selling cachaça and cans of Coca-Cola, clothes drying on wire fences?

When the military took over in 1964, national security became a government priority, and the Transamazônica Highway was designed to link the Atlantic coast with the Peruvian border. A grandiose project in the Fitzcarraldo mould, the motorway remains unfinished. Of the 2,500 kilometres so far constructed, much of it is unpaved, making it not only impassable in the rainy season, but also prone to reinvasion by the forest.

Except for the road to Boa Vista, 450 kilometres to the north, Manaus has no sealed roads linking it to any other city.

‘Do you ever feel isolated?’ I asked Amir.

He was puzzled by the question.

I explained that I once spent several months in Perth on the edge of Western Australia. Often referred to as the most geographically isolated city in the world, I was aware of its remoteness, the desert breath of the Nullarbor on the back of my neck, the whole time I was there.

Amir shook his head. Manaus is different. ‘Because of the river.’

As we were leaving the Reserve, I spotted a kid in a Star Trek T-shirt kicking a football back and forth across a dirt track pockmarked with puddles. This was indeed the final frontier, and at least by road, there was nowhere else to go—boldly or otherwise.

‘May I have the bill, please?’

The head waiter darts over. Is everything is all right?

The food was fine, the service prompt, the wine—well, there’s only so much ‘blush’ or rosé a girl can take, despite new packaging and ad campaigns aimed at encouraging us to ‘Drink Pink’. When I was a student we drank Mateus Rosé because it was cheap. Perhaps for today’s twenty-somethings, it is their way of rebelling against their parents’ tastes?

Outside the restaurant, the street crackles with anticipation, diesel fumes and barbecuing fish; crowds throng open-air bars pumping out competing rhythms, and impeccably dressed couples saunter along, seemingly impervious to the evening drizzle. I feel scruffy and unironed again, but I am starting to understand something about those rubber barons and their laundry.

When I get back to the hotel, I grab a big, golf umbrella and sit for a while on the wall behind the car park. The Amazon on that last rainy night offers no horizon, rolling unbroken into a wet, inky infinity. Sky and river in unison. Miles out, I can see the silhouettes of tiny boats as they bob among the churning water, like dragons on a medieval map.

‘Quando ele volta?’

Suddenly, behind me, a loud voice. A businessman paces up and down, shouting into his mobile. A snake slithers between two vehicles and into the garden. The man’s foot misses it by inches, but he’s too engrossed in his phone conversation to notice. Or too blasé. To be familiar with a place is, after all, to be blind to the strangeness it presents to outsiders.

Writing about Milwaukee

2009-03-24T08:35:00.006+11:00

Lithgow, Detroit, Kellyville, Goff's Oak ... Continuing my preoccupation with ‘crap places’, I’ve been writing about Milwaukee ...

Downtown Milwaukee

According to my brother, who lives in the US, the best thing about Milwaukee is its proximity to Chicago—about an hour and a half’s drive. But I disagree, I like the place.

Jones Island, Milwaukee

Those old industrial towns and cities have a particular geography and civic architecture that remind us of the forgotten social contract between the ‘brotherhood’ of workers and the company bosses.

Writing Matters

2009-03-18T08:11:00.007+11:00

In the wake of another blokey take on Australian history from ABC television, I’ve been thinking about the relationship between politics and writing. Not so much ‘political theatre’ which tends to get narrowly defined, but the broader notion of writing as a social practice. The role of writing—and not only journalism and reportage—in the circulation of ideas.

‘ … in many ways, I think what playwrights do is more important than what most politicians do. Being a dramatist isn't just about writing. That part often takes just a few weeks. But we do spend a long time thinking about how people behave, how they live together, how they might live together better—as well as the great cruelties they are capable of. And we're constantly testing language, time and space in our work, to extend the possibilities of human experience. Politicians are concerned with the pragmatic business of running the world; artists, meanwhile, dedicate themselves to finding new insights into our existence. Most of the insights are feeble or crackpot—but some are visionary.’

Read the rest of Mark Ravenhill’s piece here.

In the meantime, as I begin to formulate my 7-ON Old Texts Revisited project, I'm thinking about Australian history. Having neither grown up here, nor gone to school here, my ignorance of this subject is admittedly vast, but there's got to be more to it than a chronology of important men and portraits of men at war—surely? So how about adding a bit more of the female experience to the picture? And let's think past the predictable (prostitutes and gangsters’ molls). What about the domestic workers, the shop girls, the milliners, the midwives, the music teachers, the post office clerks, librarians, hospital cleaners, social activists, florists and baby-sitters, the back-street abortionists, book-keepers, barmaids … ?

Excerpts x 2 from Eyewitness Blues

2009-03-10T08:17:00.017+11:00

2 excerpts from my radio script Eyewitness Blues which was produced by the BBC as part of their The View From Here project.

Fifty-something jazz musician, Jac, and 15-year-old schoolgirl, Gia Nghi, both witness a botched robbery at an outer suburban 7-Eleven. Their statements to the police however, reveal more about themselves than the crime.

Excerpt 1:

JAC
The loan that built the house for me and the ex, wasn’t big enough to buy the paint or plant the garden, so I took a second job. For extra money. To put down roots.
Pig Face, Acacias, Native Fuchsias. Not that you’d know that to look at it now. Wind-blown rubbish and dandelion clocks, more like.
But nothing took, no water-wise plants, no family, no tree.
And she’d say: I never see you these days.
And I’d say: It’s only temporary. Til we get on our feet.
And then she was gone, along with the kids, leaving me alone with the desert and the Camels …

Excerpt 2:

GIA NGHI
Sometimes, the wind off the desert makes it hard to swallow.
Over there’s where you get the bus to the city, and that way—nothing. Few kilometres north, the land crumbles to desert. It used to be under the sea or a lake or something. Before it dried up and went salty.
Sometimes, at night, I imagine the extinct animals in a sort of reverse Noah’s ark. Leaving 2 by 2, through a door in the back of the world.
Or the camel on the cigarette packet walking off in search of water.
Ghosts have trouble with water, my Gran says. I reckon Australia must be ghost paradise then. Because it’s so dry.

Procrastination

2009-02-26T13:49:00.010+11:00

‘On his deathbed, they say, Leonardo da Vinci regretted that he had left so much unfinished.’

Procrastination. Something I know intimately, as I suspect do many other writers. Although I’ve come to accept it as an integral—and perhaps necessary—part of the creative process, I still often berate myself for wasting time and not getting on with the task at hand. Since reading this delicious essay How to Procrastinate Like Leonardo da Vinci by W A Pannapacker, however, I’ve decided to stop with the scolding and embrace my “inner procrastinator”, because ‘Leonardo, it seems, was a hopeless procrastinator ... ’ and who am I to argue with Leonardo?

‘Of course, the therapeutic interpretation of Leonardo—and, perhaps, of many of us in academe who emulate his pattern of seemingly non-productive creativity—has a long history. Leonardo’s reputation spread at exactly the right time for someone to become a symbol of this newly invented moral and psychological disorder: procrastination, a word that sounds just a little too much like what Victorian moralists used to call “self-abuse.”

The unambiguously negative idea of procrastination seems unique to the Western world; that is, to Europeans and the places they have colonized in the last 500 years or so. It is a reflection of several historical processes in the years after the discovery of the New World: the Protestant Reformation, the spread of capitalist economics, the Industrial Revolution, the rise of the middle classes, and the growth of the nation-state. As any etymologist will tell you, words are battlegrounds for contending historical processes, and dictionaries are among the best chronicles of those struggles … ’

Read the rest of W A Pannapacker’s article on the Arts & Letters Daily website.

The View From There

2009-02-22T16:51:00.014+11:00

In the second half of last year I worked on an international project called The View From Here. My contribution is a 12-minute radio script called Eyewitness Blues, and I'll probably put a short excerpt from it on this blog post its BBC broadcast. This is an edited version of information on the project website.

The View From Here is a collaboration between London’s Slade School of Fine Art, the Bartlett School of Architecture and the BBC. It explores notions of cultural translation and trans-positioning by artists working in different media, drawing from the 3 key project terms: transmit, translate, transmute.

For Transmit 4 visual artists, from Australia, China, Israel and Uganda, each filmed a 12-minute video in a locale connected to their work, under the title The View From Here. These works were then sent to a writer in the artist's country to author a radio drama inspired by it. These 12-minute dramas have been recorded for broadcast on the BBC World Service on 28 February 2009 in the final stage of the project. The artists are: Barbara Bolt (Australia), Xioapeng Huang (China), Shuli Nachshon (Israel), and Daudi Karungi (Uganda). The writers are: Noëlle Janaczewska (Australia), Dinos Chapman & Simon Wu (Hong Kong/UK), Katie Hims (Israel/UK) and Charles Mulekwa (Uganda).

Translate: Eleven PhD students from the Slade and Bartlett made a series of works, in response to either those 4 works or the theme. The works will further inspire other students, invited to the event as respondents, to reshape, translate, transpose the original works through a text/image/audio/performance piece of their own.

Transmute is a combination of a BBC Broadcast and a Live Event on the 27 February. This final event will combine the broadcast, the original films and the resulting re-interpretations.

It's all happening at the Slade Research Centre, Woburn Square, London WC1.

Watching the Lorikeets

2009-02-08T15:41:00.011+11:00

Their rowdy chatter wakes me up in the morning, and at dusk, when they return, I sit on the balcony and watch them. Until the dark enfolds them and they're lost to view.

Ferdinand Bauer: Rainbow Lorikeets, 1802

I knew absolutely nothing about rainbow lorikeets when they first caught my attention, but after a couple of trips to the library, a few book purchases, and a lot of looking, I'm a lot better informed—not only about lorikeets, but the parrot family more generally. This research has led me into some interesting areas and, as random, freewheeling research so often does, it's also given me ideas, stories, and material for other projects. One of which is a 7-ON commission for ABC Radio National. We've all been asked to write a half-hour radio script on the theme Old Texts Revisited. We can interpret 'texts' broadly, the only proviso being whatever text/s we chose to work with must predate the invention of radio. Being obsessed with maps, I was intending to look to cartography to supply my 'text', but now, thanks to these birds, I'm going to use something quite different.

australianplays.org

2009-01-30T11:25:00.003+11:00

Check out the new website australianplays.org, which is promoting the work of local playwrights at home and abroad.

From Taishō Chick

2009-01-26T19:42:00.015+11:00

This is an excerpt from Taishō Chick, a cabaret/spoken word piece I wrote for Asako Izawa as part of the Art Gallery of NSW 2008 exhibition Taishō Chic. It came to mind as I began thinking about Shop Girl, another short script I'm writing for Asako and koto player Satsuki Odamura. Shop Girl is the story of a Japanese woman who defects to North Korea, hoping to find movie stardom in the Stalinist state. It's evolved from a creative development we did a couple of years ago (funded by the Theatre Board of the Australia Council and Sydney University Department of Performance Studies) and from my enduring interest in North Korea. Our plan is to produce Shop Girl in 2009.

Here's that excerpt from Taishō Chick:

…
In times of change I open the dictionary.
Not literally, but to open a crease in the language and reveal what we couldn’t say yesterday
in public
we drummed out syncopated rhythms with chopsticks. Drew cartoons with cold coffee on table tops.
Painting was my way of walking into the heart of the world without anybody knowing I was shy.
A taxi over the bridge, a little avant-garde introspection in the shade of the willow trees, and rice riots—that’s rice, R-I-C-E, not race. The poor were being bossed around by the high cost of rice.
For the not-so-poor
It was the age of silk stockings, foxtrots and all that jazz.
Of department stores and opinions—remember, long before the iPod brought music to our ears, the I-novel brought us first-person narratives.
I look for myself
and find
a café waitress lining up her future. Irie Takako starting her own film production company. Journalists reporting the latest from Paris or Shanghai. Young men in suits tailored British style.
And the key to all this activity?
The city.
The adventures and affairs of the metropolis …

Guerrilla Gardens

2009-01-18T14:43:00.017+11:00

Something’s happening in the beds of Pyrmont. Someone’s filling them with herbs and vegetables. Probably several someones in fact, and they’re doing it in several park beds. Some of these plots are down to the Pyrmont and Ultimo Landcare Group, but there are other intriguingly anonymous ones sprouting silver beet, tomatoes, curly parsley, and of course, marigolds to deter the bugs.

Pyrmont is an inner city suburb of apartments and recent redevelopment a hop, skip and jump from the Sydney CBD. Many of us live in units with garden areas shared by the whole building. Gardens designed and laid out when our blocks of flats were constructed, and thereafter maintained by contractors. So it does more than jazz up my walks around the neighbourhood to discover that local residents have dug up verges and sections of public space to plant rosemary and rocket. Or apartment dwellers reclaimed their manicured borders and sown lettuces between the body corporate's shrubs.

Didn't realise it when I began taking an interest in the Pyrmont plots, but guerrilla gardening is a growing urban phenomenon. According to Wikipedia it’s ‘political gardening, a form of non-violent direct action, primarily practiced by environmentalists.’ But from a quick online trawl the term seems more of an umbrella one to describe different kinds of community gardening, with differing mixes of social and horticultural ambition. (Guerrilla Gardeners is also the title of a forthcoming Channel 10 program. Haven’t seen it, but here's how I’d guess it goes: instead of feral kids, wayward pets or ailing back yards, a photogenic, predominantly blonde team makeover scrappy public places. Lifestyle activism or protest lite for a primetime audience. But hey, maybe for once those TV executives will surprise us … ?)

Anyway, the guerrilla gardeners of Pyrmont have sparked my curiosity, and I'm going to keep my eye on their plots—who knows, I might even join them for a spot of midnight night spade work? In the meantime, check out GuerrillaGardening.org

The Hannah First Collection, 1919—1949

2009-01-10T15:58:00.008+11:00

Here's some info about my latest performance essay ...

A performance essay with PowerPoint images and a display case of ‘memorabilia’ we presented The Hannah First Collection, 1919—1949 as part of the Zendai Museum of Modern Art's Intrude: Art & Life 366 project in Shanghai in November 2008.

The work charts my quest to discover and reconstruct the life and journeys of the early-to-mid 20th century anthropologist and traveller, Hannah First. Drawing on the traditions of the old-fashioned ‘family slide evening’ and the ‘illustrated lecture’ as well as the blog and social networking sites, I follow Hannah from Amsterdam to Oxford. Check out her trips to Ceylon and Singapore, and her fieldwork in Central Europe, Palestine and the palm-fringed Tikabar Islands of the Western Pacific. To do this, I use not only photographs, notebooks and artefacts, but also my own life experiences—finding considerable symmetry between myself and this intriguing and improbable anthropologist …

In the last part of the performance, following an important revelation about Hannah First, I move on to explore our preoccupation with nostalgia. Why has nostalgia become our preferred mode of reckoning not only with the present, but with a strangely depoliticised past?

Conceived, written & performed by Noëlle Janaczewska
Directed by Sally Sussman

In Shanghai we presented a bilingual version of The Hannah First Collection, 1919—1949, in English and Chinese.

Chinese translation: Wu Chenyun
Chinese performer: Yao Mingde

This project was supported by the Australia-China Council.

Time To Refocus

2009-01-01T15:59:00.025+11:00

2009. I’m not much of a resolution-maker, but there is something about the new year clicking over that prompts reflection and assessment. And outlier-nj has been on the rethink list for a while. I began the blog with the intention of training myself to write quickly. I have enough experience writing plays, scripts and performance texts to be reasonably efficient, but when it comes to prose, I was, still am, a slow writer.

Well, that was the theory. The practice was that last year I posted a mere 4 times. There are a lot of reasons I can give for this: lack of time, pressure of deadlines, the imperatives of paid work (doing it and looking for more), other commitments, the ups and downs of the freelance life, perfectionist tendencies … the usual suspects. To which I’d also add: the wrong direction—for some reason I’ve ended up focusing too much on arts issues and policies—and the death of my father.

My father died in September, and I’m still grieving. He taught me to value the life of the mind, to love questions more than answers, and the quest more than the goal. He put the wanderlust in my soul and didn’t complain when it took me to the other side of the world. And he had a talent for spinning stories out of the mundane, and infusing even a simple stroll with a sense of mystery. I remember one night when I was still at primary school, Dad woke us up, myself and my brother, to go for a walk to see a badger set and listen to the call of owls. The badgers proved elusive, but the owls were in fine voice. Reflecting on that incident now, I realise it was probably not terribly late at all, but as a 7 or 8-year-old, it felt as if I were being woken in the middle of the night to go on a magnificent adventure.

Me & Dad

In the days immediately after my father’s death I wrote like crazy. On the long flight from Sydney to London I used my laptop, and when its battery ran out I continued writing with pen and paper. After the funeral however, the words ran out and my mind fixed on questions of time—time being finite, time running out, how I wanted to spend my time ...

3 months later, this is where I’m up to:

I might have a lot of opinions, but an opinion column is not what I want to spend my time writing. (There are others more engaged with and better placed to critique arts issues than I am.)
I don’t need another unpaid writing gig.
If time spent blogging is time I could be writing other things, then why not use the blog as more of a writer’s notebook?

So I’m going to use this blog somewhat differently. I’m relaunching it in a looser, more flexible vein. It will be more of a notebook, there for process, a place of personal reflection, a place to jot down snippets and random ideas or start new trains of thought. I may post excerpts, report news and comment on work that I have seen, heard or read—and I may not. I will post as often or as infrequently as I wish and give myself the latitude to look outside theatre and write about whatever sparks my interest.

For example, in March 2008 I saw an exhibition of photographs at the National Maritime Museum: Steel Beach—Shipbreaking in Bangladesh. I’ve long been fascinated by certain kinds of documentary photography—Sebastião Selgado, et al. And these photos of a huge, muddy ships’ graveyard in the Bay of Bengal by Andrew Bell completely captured my imagination. I wanted to write about them, not a review, but a more personal, poetic kind of response to his images. I didn’t—for a whole bunch of reasons, not least because: where would I place something like that? So I’m going to use the new, realigned outlier-nj for things like that.

Another ongoing interest is architecture and urban geography—reignited in November when I went to Shanghai to present The Hannah First Collection, 1919—1949 as part of the Zendai Museum of Modern Art’s Intrude: Art & Life 366 project. Zendai MoMA is in the Pudong district of Shanghai, so that was where we were staying. In his book Concrete Reveries, Mark Kingwell describes Pudong as an area of ‘shopaholic emptiness’. True—to a point. But my stay there got me thinking, and now researching and writing, about skyscrapers and the migration of the early 20th century American skyline to other parts of the world. Not sure yet what form this piece will take—will keep you posted.

Pudong's 'shopaholic emptiness' November 2008

So what else for 2009? As well as projects with 7-ON, I’m concentrating on the Performance Essays. I hope to find a venue/context to present The Hannah First Collection, 1919—1949 in Australia, and I’m writing Bounce, a new performance essay about the history of rubber and how I wanted to be an explorer when I grew up. About my recent trip to the Amazon and my father’s journey through Parkinson’s Disease to the great unknown of death. Oh and I’m also branching out with projects across non-fiction, fiction, spoken word and poetry.

Happy 2009!

The Producer's Breath

2008-08-17T13:27:00.004+10:00

I’ve entered one of those dreaded, worst nightmare situations—well perhaps not worst nightmare, but definitely one of those situations I think we all fear as playwrights and scriptwriters. You’ve been commissioned, given what appears to be an open brief to decide story, characters, style, form, structure, blah, blah, blah, you write a first draft that you’re reasonably happy with, and send it off. So far so good. Until you get the producer’s response, and discover that they don’t like any of your choices. Although they don’t express it quite so bluntly, in essence they want a completely different script from the one you’ve written. Your day, which had started off so well, crashes.

My first thought—fortunately not acted on—is to dash off an email saying something along the lines of: Thank you for your email. We obviously have very different sensibilities and ideas, so let’s cut the crap and call it a day. My second, slightly calmer, thought is to remind myself to thank God I don’t work in film or TV where this sort of scenario would be commonplace. The third thought is that this is a paid gig, I’m a professional writer, sometimes this comes with the territory, so suck it up.

Two days later I arrive at thought number 4, which is a mash up of the above: I need to make this writer/producer relationship work. This will involve finding a way to accommodate (some of) the producer’s feedback and suggestions, whilst hanging onto as much of my original script as possible. Will the resulting script be better? Suffice it to say: it will have the producer’s breath all over it.

That Development Sceptic Again

2008-07-27T11:31:00.020+10:00

It’s been so long since I’ve posted that I’d forgotten my password. But have been flat out with radio works for the ABC and BBC, Taishō Chick, a cabaret script for Asako Izawa and the Art Gallery of NSW, poetry, and the script of Disappearance for The Border Project. Then out of the blue 7-ON received a grant from the Theatre Board of the Australia Council for the first stage development of our adaptation of Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, which we are doing with the School of Music & Drama at Wollongong University. No reflection on our grant-writer’s skill, but none of us for a moment expected that application to be successful, so it wasn’t factored it into our work schedules … Anyway, that’s the reason for the long gap between this and my last post …

Have been intending to expand my thoughts on play/script development for ages, and a recent e-newsletter from Playwriting Australia, and a conversation with a colleague, reminded me of that. This colleague’s experience with the ‘free-floating’ dramaturgy/workshopping offered by script development agencies was remarkably similar to mine with Songket. At some point after our workshops, we both reverted to versions of the plays that were pretty close to the drafts we entered the workshop with. I doubt we are the only writers who have done this—which begs the question: what is the value of such programs for writers?

Should clarify here that I am absolutely in favour of the creative development and workshopping of new work—with the company and collaborators who are committed to producing the piece. What I am less enthusiastic about are the various script development programs and agencies who are in on the act. Film has a whole host of development initiatives, most of which seem to exist to (a). provide an income stream for assessors, script editors, program directors, administrators and others, presumably while they try to get their own projects up, (b). generate activity and create the illusion that your project/screenplay is progressing, and (c). to explain why things can’t or won’t happen. i.e. why your screenplay won’t get funded or produced. To what extent is this the case with theatrical script development organisations? Despite the skills and best intentions of the personnel involved, I’d say: to a quite considerable extent.

Richard Nelson’s address, (see link in my 19 December 2007 post), eloquently expresses a lot of my concerns about not just the practices of script development agencies, but also raises important questions about their underlying philosophy. So I’m not going to reiterate them here. Instead let’s consider the alternatives. What if these script development agencies didn’t exist? What if the money currently channelled into these bodies were available for small-scale productions of new writing? And by this I mean writing across a whole spectrum of performance contexts and styles, from straightforward storytelling to wild experiments with form, structure and language. Moreover, it’s not only writers who would benefit from this, but directors and actors as well. Directors because they would be exposed to a much bigger range of writing, and through that develop not only the skills, but also, importantly, the willingness to tackle those interesting and idiosyncratic scripts that all too easily get dismissed as ‘too difficult’ or ‘impossible to stage’.

Nothing beats production. No amount of round-the-table dramaturgical discussion, readings or workshops can possibly teach you as much about writing for performance as collaborating on a production and seeing your work in front of an audience. As a playwright of many years’ experience, I have come to the conclusion that the best way to support new writing is to produce new work—across a range of performance and production environments. To paraphrase New York company 13P: Don’t develop plays, do them!

OK, we need to see our work up—but in a context appropriate for a new script’s first public outing. A kind of first draft production/season, with modest production values, cheap ticket prices, and publicity kept suitably low-key. Is this a writers’ theatre? Yes and no. Yes, because the focus is firmly on the development of new writing, and no because I’m absolutely not suggesting setting up yet another administrative infrastructure topped by an Artistic Director or CEO. (We're not children, and I think many of the prevailing structures—unintentionally, no doubt—infantalise us.) What I think I’m after is something much more grass roots, much looser and far more flexible. Something able to move swiftly, a quick response scheme, perhaps?

Taishō Chick was written, rehearsed and had its first performance within the space of about 5 weeks. While I wouldn’t want to create all my work this way, it was an exhilarating experience. The energy and enthusiasm that sparked the piece wasn’t lost in ‘development hell’, and I’m refining the script as it is being performed. This is also possible because there are no reviewers or critics invited to pass judgement on this initial season, and the marketing and PR has been minimal and about providing simple information rather than hype.

More From The Development Sceptic

2008-03-11T16:35:00.005+11:00

Of several pitfalls I see in a lot of script development initiatives, 2 of the most significant are (a). pushing the work to fit the needs of the organisation’s or program’s development process, and (b). pushing the work to conform to existing templates and expectations at the expense of its distinctiveness or originality. Why does this happen? Perhaps because once a company or organisation settles on an agenda, or into a particular way of working, it runs the risk of imposing comfortable strategies on recalcitrant material—or writers.

While I gather more thoughts on script development programs, here are Nineteen Hopes For An Activist Cinema from the UK magazine Vertigo. I find they translate easily to theatre and performance. See what you think.

What Makes a Character?

2008-01-29T13:11:00.001+11:00

‘A great deal of nonsense is written about characters in fiction—from those who believe too much in character and from those who believe too little. Those who believe too much have an iron set of prejudices about what characters are: we should get to “know” them; they should not be “stereotypes”, they should “grow” and “develop”; and they should be nice. So they should be pretty much like us. A glance at the thousands of foolish “reader reviews” on Amazon, with their complaints about “dislikeable characters”, confirms a contagion of moralising niceness. Again and again, in book clubs up and down the country, novels are denounced because some feeble reader “couldn’t find any characters to identify with”, or “didn’t think that any of the characters grow.”’ James Woods, A life of their own, The Guardian, 26 January 2008.

I’m with James Woods on this; the reason I find Brecht’s character Mother Courage interesting is because despite all that happens to her, she doesn’t change—or ‘grow’.

Anyway, as I work on script segments for Disappearance, and Fearless N goes into rehearsal, I’m still thinking about this whole vexed issue of script development; trying to articulate why I have such profound misgivings about ‘free-floating’ script development programs and initiatives.

Interestingly enough, both Disappearance and Fearless N have been developed with the companies and collaborators committed to the productions, and in ways that don’t focus exclusively, or even primarily, on the written text. Instead, creative development periods have been used to progress the design, explore sound and musical ideas, and try out various approaches to performance. Discussions have dealt not only with the written component, but with the interaction of all the works’ theatrical elements.

Will post some more thoughts on script development soon.

In the meantime, here’s the link for James Wood’s article about character/s. Although he’s talking about characters in literary fiction, his comments offer food for thought to playwrights, dramaturgs, and anyone involved in the ‘script development’ industries.

The Development Sceptic

2007-12-19T12:08:00.000+11:00

‘ … perhaps the greatest threat to the playwright in today’s theater comes from not those greedy and ignorant, but rather from those who want “to help.”’

Like American playwright Richard Nelson, from whom that quote comes, I’m a development sceptic.

Last week I received a request to complete a survey about script assessment, and it got me thinking about those sectors of the theatre industry dedicated to ‘script development’. Are they really about getting more and better new performance scripts into production, or are they about exactly the opposite?

I’ll come back to this topic in a later post, but in the meantime, here’s the text of Richard Nelson’s 2007 Laura Pels Foundation keynote address, which asks: Why do playwrights’ need so much ‘help’?

Why Do Some Ideas Last the Distance, and Others Don't?

2007-11-18T17:42:00.000+11:00

My study is a study in chaos. I’m leaving for Singapore tomorrow, and then going on to London and The Netherlands. On my desk is a jumble of lists, reminders, papers, the Lonely Planet guide to Amsterdam, cups of half-drunk cold tea, more papers, and a huge tangle of chargers, leads and adapters for all the electronic items I now need to cart around with me. On top of that, I’ve got 2 deadlines: one next Friday (for a second draft script), the other late December.

But aside from worrying about deadlines, what’s been occupying my thoughts this week is the question of why some ideas endure, while others have limited longevity. What does an idea have to have, what kind of idea does it have to be, to sustain my long-term interest? Is it a matter of topicality? No, I don’t think so, although obviously the issue going off the boil, (or conversely heating up so much that it’s the subject of every second play) can contribute to waning enthusiasm. Is it about the length of time between concept and theatrical realisation? Well, that can be a factor, but it doesn’t explain why some ideas capture my imagination and refuse to let go, while others are what I call ‘firework ideas’.

I have this theory that it’s always the project ‘2 projects away’ that is the most attractive and exciting. Not the next one, getting closer by the day to the moment when you’re going to have to knuckle down and do the hard slog, and definitely not the current one. No, it’s the one after the next one which is so enticing. Still open and brimming with possibility …

Time to go and pack. I think I’m going to have to come back to this question of why some ideas persist. Perhaps when my brain isn’t cluttered up with things like travel insurance and trying to find those gloves I bought last time I was in a Northern Hemispher winter. In the meantime, here’s an interesting article On Myth by Marina Warner, which looks at the staying power and elasticity of myths. It also reminded me to reread one of my favourite books: The Book of Imaginary Beings by Jorge Luis Borges.

Artistic Downshifting

2007-10-26T11:20:00.000+10:00

Just read Surviving New Labour as an artist: Artistic independence and the pitfalls of state funding by British artist Jan Bowman.

The debate about ‘doing it yourself’ or ‘artistic downshifting’ in the words of writer and film-maker Kathryn Millard, goes on. As technological developments create new platforms and possibilities, and government funding becomes scarcer and more prescriptive, there’s a lot to be said for writing outside the system. A couple of years ago I spent several weeks writing applications, several weeks hard-chiselling round pegs to fit into funding bodies’ boxes. Only afterwards did I wonder about all the time spent filling out forms, composing punchy synopses, and justifying processes; time I would otherwise have spent writing a script or an essay, a story or poem—something real, and useful.

Postcard from OzAsia

2007-09-26T14:41:00.002+10:00

Just back from the OzAsia Festival Symposium, and thinking about that whole vexed issue of using economic arguments to justify support for the arts. This was a tension throughout the weekend—and not always an underlying one.

In the last few years the favoured argument seems to be that a robust arts community increases the ‘liveability’ of a city or state, increasing its attractiveness for business investment, thereby providing jobs, et cetera, et cetera. What concerns me is not so much the truth or otherwise of these assertions, but the fact that we’ve jettisoned the language of culture and aesthetics in favour of the language of economic-impact studies—the language of politicians, in other words. And I think this concession, this shift to economic rather than cultural argument, is dangerous.

It’s dangerous because—thanks to widespread cultural illiteracy and a largely debasing mass media—most Australians have no idea why public support for the arts is worthwhile. So even though politicians tell us we’re living in an era of unprecedented (material) prosperity, the arts are starved of vital subsidy, and arts education is sidelined as irrelevant to the New World Economy. Then in a stroke of Orwellian cunning, that lack of appreciation is used as a rationale to continue not funding the arts.

Back to OzAsia, an excellent and much needed initiative, putting a bit of cultural diversity back onto the arts table. A table which—after a brief 1980s/early 90s flirtation with rye and pitta and Vietnamese pork rolls—has reverted to white sliced. (Although I must admit that when I read clunky sentences like: ‘Australian artists that identify with an Asian heritage’ various bells start ringing.) The symposium brought together practitioners, academics, arts administrators and representatives from a range of funding and state and federal organisations. So saying … when governments use the arts to spearhead trade programs or diplomatic initiatives, what companies and kinds of work do they chose to sponsor? Large dance companies, classical music ensembles, circuses? Productions guaranteed to make a big splash. But what about that small group of independent artists developing a more risky or experimental project, or beginning a long-term collaboration? Thank goodness then for Asialink, who seem to understand that professional relationships are built slowly, and that good work, especially that which crosses the boundaries of language and geography, takes time as well as resources.

The highlight of the symposium for me was undoubtedly the keynote paper from Calcutta-based writer, theatre director, cultural critic and independent scholar, Rustom Bharucha. It’s difficult to summarise because of the wide range and complexity of the issues he addressed. But here goes … Drawing on his 2006 book Another Asia, he exposed the capitalist bones of this hugely heterogeneous body called ‘Asia’, queried the word ‘enmeshment’, explored issues of nationalism, exchange, creative process, community, intercultural dreaming—and much, much more. It was passionate and provocative, eloquent and erudite, and I only wish there had been more time to discuss some of the ideas he raised.

Seems appropriate then to end with this favourite quote from Edward Albee: ‘Theatre tells us who we are, and the health of the theatre is determined by how much we want to know.’

Writing Korea & Questions of Connection

2007-09-18T07:54:00.000+10:00

I’ve been writing UNREQUITED these last couple of weeks. Immersed again in the singular and surreal reality that is North Korea; obsessed with the huge concrete shell of Pyongyang’s unfinished Ryugyong Hotel. Why a reclusive society like the DPRK, with an economy in cardiac arrest, would need a 105-storey, 3,000-room hotel is—well, a mystery. In a country of mysteries.

Also reconnecting with the plugged-in world of the South. Remembering for some reason, the omnipresent fatigue: In a Seoul café a 40-something man nods off, his coffee going cold on the table in front of him. Sprawled on nearby benches, students take a nap. While on the subway, I’d often find myself the only person in the carriage who was awake. Remembering too those conversations I had with people about traditional culture and globalisation. A recollection prompted, I suspect, by reading Nayan Chanda’s Bound Together: How Traders, Preachers, Adventurers, and Warriors Shaped Globalization, which offers more than the usual economic perspectives on this topic.

Anyway, getting ready to present UNREQUITED at the forthcoming OzAsia Festival in Adelaide, I’ve been thinking about questions of tradition, authenticity and that oft-repeated mantra: art is a universal language. Here’s where I’m up to:

Cultural traditions are porous; authenticity, like El Dorado, is a myth. For any tradition to thrive, the old and the new need to engage in a dialogue with each other. And it goes without saying that what constitutes tradition can be difficult to gauge, and even more difficult to agree upon.

I wouldn’t deny the power of art as a universal language, but would suggest that it’s a more complex contention. For example, the only time I can honestly say that I’ve ever connected with Ibsen, was through a production of A Doll’s House performed entirely in Bengali. I’ve lived happily through King Lear in Korean, and a Vietnamese adaptation of the Albert Camus play Le Malentendu gave me real insight not only into local issues specific to Hanoi at the time of the production, but also into the original 1944 context of the work. In all these cases however, what was transmitted were the storylines, themes and moral dilemmas the playwrights wished to communicate, not their manner of conveying it. So I’d venture that substance is what makes art universal; style places it distinctively, and uniquely, in its own culture.

Playing Yourself

2007-08-29T16:38:00.000+10:00

The Royal Geographical Society, London, circa 1930

David Hare has been in my study again. Not so much as a writer, but as a performer—or more accurately a writer moonlighting as a performer. In 1998 he became an actor—something he hadn’t attempted since he was a teenager. But performing his monologue Via Dolorosa proved a lot more difficult than he’d anticipated, and as a way of coping with the unfamiliar role, Hare kept a diary of the process: Acting Up. It’s an interesting read, not for the famous names he drops, but for the in depth way it explores the tension between the words you write on the page, and the words you speak in performance. What is the difference between acting and performance? And how do you play yourself?

I was re-reading Acting Up as part of preparation for F.R.G.S. A 10-minute Performance Essay for the PowerPoint Age, and my contribution to 7-ON’s The Seven Needs. A piece I wrote for myself to perform; a piece in which I play myself. F.R.G.S. is my second Performance Essay, but the first to be learnt by heart rather than read. For me, this act of memory was the source of greatest anxiety: Yeah, I might be word perfect in my living room and in rehearsal, but what if out there in front of an audience …

Forever ago in London I played the clarinet and saxophone in bands, cabaret groups and fringe theatre companies, but it was obvious to me—and it certainly was to anyone who heard me—that I was never going to be the next Lester Young. So I started writing to escape my limitations as a performer. Now on stage again (fortunately this time minus musical instrument), the experience proved terrifying and empowering in just about equal measure. My sympathy for actors has increased tenfold!

I hit on the idea of these Performance Essays for a couple of reasons. One: I’d always been interested in the traditions of the illustrated lecture and ‘slide night’, and having written some pieces for ABC Radio Eye which mashed documentary, the personal essay and performance, I was interested in adapting that genre for live theatre, and two: I was looking for a solo performance form that would work for me as a writer, i.e. it had to be cheap, portable, and involve absolutely no funding applications whatsoever.

More on this later. In the meantime, back to David Hare and the art of public speaking.

Representation-lite

2007-08-12T18:35:00.000+10:00

With the publication of Lee Lewis’s Cross-racial Casting—Changing the Face of Australian Theatre, and an article about the issue in a recent Sydney Morning Herald, questions of representation are in the spotlight—again. This time the focus is on actors of non-European background, and their absence from main stages. Miss Saigon no doubt excepted. Anyway this flurry of interest got me thinking about representation more generally. An exchange in June in Theatre Notes, Back to regular programming … discussed this vexed issue in relation to gender. The dialogue sprang from an article in The Age about Joanna Murray-Smith, who had apparently written to the Sydney Theatre Company to ask why they weren’t programming her plays. Well, you've gotta admire her chutzpah ...

OK, here’s a view from Sydney on the STC: Yes, it certainly seems harder for a woman to get her foot in the door, even in the (relatively) small door of the variously-named Wharf 2 programs, where from Michael Gow in the early 1990s, to Brendan Cowell in 2007, the artistic directors have all been male. But why is the STC copping all the flack? Wasn’t it Belvoir Company B whose 2005 season included not a single female playwright or director? The perplexing thing there was that no one commented on this—at least not publicly. Does Company B’s strong record of supporting indigenous work buy them immunity from criticism on matters of gender?

Yes, women writers and directors are under-represented on our better-funded stages and over-represented in back rooms and pub basements. And many non-European performers struggle to get cast as anything other than gang members, refugees, and—for Asian actors—doctors. But I wonder how useful it is for us to keep chewing over this issue? Regurgitating essentially the same arguments? Plus ça change and all that. Perhaps in the words of Freedom, it’s time to ‘think outside the square’?

So here are a few thoughts:

· After a brief period in the spotlight, interest in inter-cultural work has waned. We still see overseas examples in festival programs, but for everyone here it seems it’s business as usual. Meaning artists from non-Anglo backgrounds get space to perform their own life-stories, but rarely a space to explore the questing, theatrically transformative agendas available to their White counterparts. (Why has interest in cross-cultural work declined? Would be interested to hear opinions about this … )

· It’s but a small step from representation to the heavy clay of identity politics, and escalating notions of ‘authenticity’. While I appreciate that autobiography and documentary are important genres in post-colonial societies, in that they are often the first places from which marginalised voices can speak and be heard … there’s a world beyond self-portraits.

· Is there really any point lobbying main-stage companies to represent our reality in anything other than a fairly tokenistic way, when they program for a conservative subscriber audience who, it seems, wants above all to see film and TV stars up close and personal? By all means send them your plays, and if they decide to produce them—fantastic. But if their door won’t budge, don’t waste too much energy trying to prise it open.

· Let’s remember that not all theatre writers and directors want to tailor their work and creative practices to fit main-stage imperatives. Sure, we’d like a share of their resources, but sometimes our artistic choices are better served in other contexts.

And finally—

Representation is too often posited as a destination rather than an ongoing process of engagement with the contemporary world. A destination reached through targeted initiatives and programs which can be rolled out like a carpet over any terrain, no matter how unsuitable or inhospitable. (I’m researching carpets at the moment, so they’re on my mind.)

Were these initiatives effective in the past? Maybe. To a degree. But the straight-talk about access and equality of opportunity that was once part of feminist, queer and post-colonial discourses of empowerment has given way as bureaucracies, universities and arts organisations have embraced the rhetoric. Today’s softer, more conciliatory calls for ‘representation’ have none of the rough edges of older demands for justice and transparency. So it should come as no surprise that what these well-meaning exercises produce is rarely any substantive or lasting engagement with diversity, but more often ‘representation-lite’.

Part of Being Australian is Feeling Part of Somewhere Else

2007-08-03T17:31:00.000+10:00

2 things converged this week. At a 7-ON Playwrights meeting last Tuesday I learnt that the New Theatre in Sydney is celebrating its 75th anniversary with Art is a Weapon (the theatre’s original 1930’s slogan), and I started reading David Grossman’s Someone To Run With. These days I don’t read much literary fiction (far too many family secrets unravelling on windswept coastlines somewhere or other for my taste), but there’s a major dog in a new play that I’m writing, so I’ve been seeking out dogs in literature, and Someone To Run With features a stray Labrador. Anyway, browsing the Internet to locate a copy of this novel, and—thanks to the New Theatre—ruminating on the language-war nexus, I found this:

‘I once thought of teaching my son a private language, isolating him from the speaking world on purpose, lying to him from the moment of his birth so he would believe only in the language I gave him. And it would be a compassionate language … I wanted to take him by the hand and name everything he saw with words that would save him from the inevitable heartaches so that he wouldn’t be able to comprehend the existence of, for instance, war. Or that people kill, or that this red here is blood. It’s a kind of used-up idea, I know, but I love to imagine him crossing through life with an innocent trusting smile … the first truly enlightened child.’

That’s David Grossman, quoted in The Guardian, 16 August 2006. His son, who was in the Israeli army, had been killed a few days previously.

I’m not quite sure why, but Grossman’s plea, and the New Theatre’s resilience, both reminded me that a part of being an Australian is to feel a part of somewhere else.

The Desk and the Dreaming Space ...

2007-07-26T17:21:00.000+10:00

Pusan, 1999

Today I’m surrounded by skyscrapers. Simultaneously immersed in the Cold War theme park that is North Korea, and in the high art/high tech landscape of South Korea. On my desk are pages of notes on the history of concrete, a polythene-covered Penguin Classic, photos of the port city of Pusan, and my notebook from 1999—in which I wrote about an encounter with Chekhov on a winter evening in one of the city’s waterfront bars.

What am I doing? I’m working on UNREQUITED, a 30-minute Performance Essay for the PowerPoint Age which I’m presenting in Adelaide in September. No idea—yet—how I’m going to combine these various strands into a coherent whole. The piece is still in what I like to call its dreaming space: that exciting, early research stage, when curiosity is paramount, and you find yourself pursuing ideas and lines of thought for no apparent or discernable reason—just to see where they might lead …

So apropos of this meandering, here are my 3 favourite tenets from Bruce Mau’s An Incomplete Manifesto for Growth:

6. Capture accidents. The wrong answer is the right answer in search of a different question. Collect wrong answers as part of the process. Ask different questions.

8. Drift. Allow yourself to wander aimlessly. Explore adjacencies. Lack judgment.

9. Begin anywhere. John Cage tells us that not knowing where to begin is a common form of paralysis. His advice: begin anywhere.

Factual Theatre—A Few Thoughts

2007-07-15T20:14:00.000+10:00

A couple of weeks ago I was sorting through a lot of enigmatically-named Word files in an attempt to free up some more disk space, when I came across the following paragraph. It’s either a quote, or something I’ve paraphrased:

‘A workable specimen of the kind of thin-sliced play that our theatres currently find most feasible, is not so much a text as a pretext. A slim excuse brings together 2 people with conflicting views, and their confrontation gives a handy opportunity for supplying information, exploring issues, and ping-ponging badinage till they both part, changed to varying degrees by their encounter.’

Unfortunately I didn’t note the reference, so apologies to its author. Anyway, I clipped it out because its sentiments struck a chord, and got me thinking about ‘journalism for the stage’. You know the template: On the one hand there’s Character—or Group—A, passionately committed to one point of view, on the other, Character or Group Z shouting the opposite. But what happens to theatricality when you make the stage the domain of rational debate?

Is metaphor suspect in our age of flux and insecurity? Ditto poetic imaginings and wild flights of dramaturgical fancy? What’s behind this hunger for factual theatre? ‘What these plays offer audiences is an open door into a subject whose density might otherwise be difficult to negotiate’, writes UK theatre critic Lyn Gardner in Does Verbatim Theatre Still Talk the Talk? True, but aren’t there other—perhaps more theatrically adventurous—ways of dramatising the material for audiences? Look at what playwrights like Caryl Churchill, Mac Wellman or Martin Crimp do—they take a topic and recompose it into an accumulation of fragments, glimpses, about-turns, and fraught, emotional encounters.

As I’m writing this however, I’m starting to wonder if my concern here isn’t thinness, rather than theatricality … the ‘thin-sliced play’. After all, I’m a huge admirer of David Hare’s Via Dolorosa, and Lawrence Wright’s My Trip to Al-Qaeda—although both of these sophisticated pieces are what I’d term ‘performance essays’ rather than plays.

I remember an article in The Sydney Morning Herald almost a year ago (29 August 2006) about verbatim theatre. One of the interviewed writers identified his problem with the genre: that often the characters don’t change significantly during the course of the play. My response: Does this matter if the audience experiences a journey? Or in the case of a community initiative, if the participants’ involvement is transformative?

Verbatim or not to verbatim … ?

I’m no expert here. My own experiments with verbatim are partial, to say the least. In REDHEADS (2007) I created a 1950s background for a contemporary drama, via the presence of 2 historical figures, General MacArthur and R. G. Menzies, who spoke a collage of their own words, all taken from documents on the public record. While the final scene of MRS PETROV’S SHOE (2006), in which we hear the insights and comments of a parade of fictional witnesses, is written in mock verbatim style.

Tragic, or at least serious, events seem verbatim’s strong inclination. Be they a tribunal, a small-town murder, or the demise and rebirth of a sporting team. (Are there any verbatim theatre scripts that are primarily comic? Or does comedy writing require a manufacturing or refinement of material incompatible with the verbatim ethos?) And in common with most classical tragedy, we usually have a pretty good idea of how the story ends. We know for example, that King Lear’s decision to divide his kingdom will result in disaster. That the incestuous Giovanni and Annabella in ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, will die. Our interest is in seeing how these narratives unfold, and what resonances Shakespeare’s or John Ford’s way of telling arouses in us.

The verbatim approach, together with its close relative, storytellers’ theatre, both spring from oral history and community arts. I wonder if some of the criticisms now circulating about verbatim are a consequence of taking these works out of context and putting them onto mainstages at $40+ a pop? The productions I’ve seen have been heartfelt, hardworking, and deftly staged. They have revealed the triumphs of theatre that aspires to documentary status—and its key dilemma.

Do recent events, recent history, digitally translated for endless replay, restrict the possibilities for theatrical intervention? Limit metaphorical strategies, comic innovation, or poetic reworking? Maybe. Or at least they present a different challenge. We know the facts, can pull up images, sound-bytes, court transcripts, first-hand accounts, with the click of a mouse. So the task then for playwrights is: What can we add to, or do with, the facts to make the theatrical experience bigger and more meaningful than a montage of news clips or a magazine article?

Have We Created a 'Prize' Model of Arts Funding?

2007-07-12T10:51:00.000+10:00

We’re all familiar with Australian Idol, and in Britain, reality TV has done the same for playwrights and wannabe opera singers as well. Scanning the newspapers last weekend, I read about the State Library of NSW’s contest for poets and aspiring poets. Enter their 2007 Poetry Slam and you could win $10,000. ABC Radio was also advertising last week for entries in its short story competition for regional writers. (10 first prizes of $700 + broadcast.) And that got me thinking about competitions for new writing in general, and the implications of this recent proliferation: Have we developed a prize-based model of arts funding? Has a ‘hit-and-run’ culture in which one winner is rewarded for weeks or months of endeavour, while any number of others are not, crept in to replace the steady development of new work across various fronts?

The Sydney Theatre Company, when asked what it does to support new and local writing, invariably cites its Patrick White Playwrights’ Award—by far the largest cash reward for an unproduced play in Australia, but by no means the only contest for such scripts. Under the heading of ‘Fellowships’ Arts NSW runs an annual competition for historians, translators and writers. Glance at the ‘opportunities’ section of any writers’ organisation e-newsletter, and what you’ll see is essentially a list of competitions.

The accepted wisdom is that contests bring talented unknowns out of the woodwork. That’s the positive spin. The negative is that companies, broadcasters, producers and publishers get to tick the ‘new work’ box without having to pledge commitment. So my question is: Do these prize-orientated models serve the artists and artforms, or are they a way of managing scarcity? And I’m talking here about money to creators and interpreters to make new work, not dollars channelled into arts marketing and management. Take NSW, for example. Unlike most other states, NSW has no funding program for individual writers to generate new work. Instead they offer one—yes, that’s right, one—annual ‘Writer’s Fellowship’ open to playwrights, poets, essayists and novelists. When I’ve raised this with the relevant project officers, their explanation is that they put their literature dollars into writers’ centres and organisations, because that is the way to benefit the maximum number of writers. Hmm … not convinced. Aren’t you then supporting administrators, infrastructure, and promotional activities, rather than the actual writing?

Look, I imagine that initially these competitions were considered a bonus or supplement; one possible door into an overcrowded industry for newcomers. But I wonder if now these awards and ‘Fellowships’ with their attendant fanfare and publicity, aren’t in fact smokescreens? Helping disguise what seems like an ever-diminishing amount of arts funding (to creators and interpreters) in real and relative terms. I worry that when we replace ongoing support with one-off rewards, we are privileging the short-term over the longer term, fashion over longevity, a quick career-boost over genuine commitment. Ongoing funding allows theatre companies and individual writers to experiment, forge new processes, take risks, and develop projects whose scope and ambition may require many months, even years, of dedicated work.

I also wonder if the prize model doesn’t—subtly—encourage the view that writing is not real work which deserves to be remunerated, but a kind of lifestyle choice? A hobby to pursue in your spare time, when you get home from your ‘real’ job.

Then there’s the whole question of what kinds of work do prizes favour? Playwright Timothy Daley once said—can’t remember where, sorry—that comedies never win awards, and he’s pretty much on the money. You’re far more likely to make those shortlists if you tackle a topical social issue, preferably one which has been in the news headlines, and tackle it in a fairly straightforward form. Does this produce journalism for the stage? Hmm, this is a bit of a pet topic of mine, and I’ve got a lot of ideas about this whole vexed theatre/current affairs relationship, but I think I’ll leave that subject for the next post ...

Redemption Sucks

2007-05-26T16:32:00.000+10:00

Ah, redemption. Don’t you love it? Actually no, I don’t. There might be thousands of Internet users who say they’re suckers for redemption stories, but I’m not one of them. In fact, I’m starting to think redemption sucks. At least the way it’s being served to us by coffee-shop authors and talk-show participants looking for Hollywood contracts. (Note to all those wannabes slaving over screenplays: forget Final Draft or Dramatica, and get yourself, your dirty little secret, your struggle, and hard-won deliverance, onto confessional TV a.s.a.p.)

I’m an early morning writer, and by midday or thereabouts I’m usually craving a break from whatever it is I’m working on. If I’m at home I’ll switch on the TV and eat lunch with Dr. Phil or Oprah. And a procession of unhappy or reformed guests looking to turn their lives around, or spruik their new tell-all book: How I Overcame Drugs/Abuse/Obesity/Obsession/Whatever. Oprah’s guests are frequently ‘celebrities’, while Dr. Phil’s tend to be Christian whitefolks. (You’d never guess the USA was the culturally diverse place it is from watching Dr. Phil.)

OK, so journeys from sin to redemption, adversity to success, are a popular theme in American culture. But where does this appetite for these kinds of narratives come from? Has it always existed, or is it a more recent hunger? Is it a by-product of the self-help and recovery movements? (See sociologist Frank Furedi’s article An emotional striptease in Spiked about the rise of ‘misery literature’.)

What I find particularly ironic however, is that although audiences and readers like the idea of redemption (and by extension, forgiveness) on stage, screen and in print, in reality we’re much less open and forgiving. And then there’s that murky political undercurrent … The right likes stories of redemption, because they validate their work-and-individual-responsibility agenda: If this person can pull herself or himself out of poverty or misfortune, then why the hell can’t everyone?

In a letter to his brother, John Keats introduced the wonderful concept of ‘negative capability’. We are, said the poet, ‘capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.’ I think my real problem with these narratives of redemption is their simplistic view of the world, their narrow notion of storytelling, their reductive, plot-point understanding of human behaviour and experience.

Perhaps I’m naïve or overly idealistic, but I believe that literature and art structure the collective experience; help us make sense of the world, stretch our horizons, and enable us to see ourselves in new ways. So if we’re going to have these tales of redemption—and their popularity doesn’t looks like waning any time soon—let’s go for the truly insightful and extraordinary. And top of the list I’m going to nominate St Augustine’s Confessions. One of the first autobiographies ever written, and a searching and disarmingly candid account of one man’s journey from a quagmire of crime, lust and hypocrisy to a new life in God.

Paying the Writers—or not

2007-05-10T09:29:00.000+10:00

Do I have this wrong? I hope I have. PlayWriting Australia, the new script development organisation created by the Australia Council to replace Playworks and the ANPC has put out the call for submissions for its 2-week Canberra workshop.

According to the press release, selected writers will receive the following:

· return travel from their normal place of residence to Canberra.
· two weeks’ accommodation.
· daily meals or allowance as appropriate.

Yet again it seems the writers will not be paid. (Neither the ANPC nor Playworks paid the writers whose work they developed—don’t know about the state-based agencies.) Why won’t the selected playwrights be paid for their 2 weeks’ work in Canberra? Can anyone tell me the rationale for this decision?

Isn’t it a sad irony? We have an organisation ‘whose mission is to develop great new Australian writing for performance’ (that press release again) that chooses not to pay the very constituency it’s been set up to service and support. I presume the administrators, actors and directors will be paid for their 2 weeks in the ACT? I appreciate that funds are limited, but still …

On a more cheerful note, credit where credit’s due. Some development programs do pay writers. Breakout at Parramatta Riverside Theatres in Sydney, for example. So come on PlayWriting Australia, you’re a new organisation—what better time to chuck out old, unfair practices and start afresh?