Absolutely no sofas

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

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 ...

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

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'

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

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

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.’