These conversations took place in response to an invitation from Kaleider in Exeter to take part in their Kallisions Artist Development programme. As a total technology and digital theatre novice (and long-time cynic), I wanted to learn more about this world that forms a large part of many writers’ work, so set up a few conversations to try and find out more.
Photo from Calling the Shots Website
Co-founder of film production company Calling The Shots with Steve Gear, Jeremy started off his career helping to run the Bristol 1980s music club the EEC Punk Rock Mountain. He then made pop promos, worked as a freelance editor and then documentary director for the BBC, Maverick TV and ITV West. At Calling The Shots he’s produced films for BBC3, BBC4 and the UK Film Council and managed talent projects for Channel 4. He’s got a PG Diploma in Script Development from the National Film and Televison School (which he’s not afraid to use) and is a Visiting Lecturer in Scriptwriting and Documentary at University Of Bristol and the University of West of England.
I haven’t had much of a pull towards technology as a writer – what’s the attraction for you?
I’ve spent most of my career as a film-maker, then as a documentary maker, film editor…I’ve always liked technology, I’ve always been very interested in it and love new developments, particularly as they relate to visual technology and photography. But actually, as I’ve got older…well, as a film-maker I did documentaries and was quite good at seeing the story within things… now I’ve come round to thinking that although technology is great, the idea is the most important and powerful thing.
I did a post-grad in story development at the National Film and Television School about three years ago and that really solidified my thoughts. And running a company too you really get used to the idea of IP (Intellectual Property) and as you get older, I think the ability you have is to spot patterns and what will work less well or far better than other ideas.
So it’s not so much about technology but about structures, project structures, which makes it sound very boring and reduces it to something quite administrative – but really, I think all projects, stories, they all begin with an idea of something. All decisions about technology – and I include writing within that definition – come after that.
Can you talk a bit more about that definition for me? I had a similar conversation with Jerome Fletcher about the performativity of language – that text always performs a role beyond its surface meaning: communicating ideologies, bias, identity, gender politics and so forth…
The class of language yes, who you are, who has the power to speak. But from a very practical point of view I think it’s a technology because it’s something that we use as humans as a means to an end. We use it in order to instruct or tell, that’s what a written document is for: to be handed on to somebody else and thus completed.
I did a lecture at UWE once about intention: that the point of those things, the writer’s intention, the idea, is the way it should be seen by the next person who encounters it. That’s the challenge. It’s a technology – a gravestone is an example of a technology. It was invented for a reason, to communicate something.
For me that rearranges the status of ‘technologies’ so that the digital is on a par with the written. It makes it as prominent as the words we can use.
That’s true – and probably helpful in some contexts – but the problem is that largely, with technology, that people are using it for its own sake. Most apps are created and nobody uses them, it’s just because a company has said ‘okay, let’s have an app with that’ and there isn’t any reason to have one, it’s just that they’re in awe of technology, of the power of ‘having an app’ and the first websites were like that too… people had them but didn’t really know how to use them.
What we were trying to do with our recent Future Cemetery project was to find writers to fill this bigger idea – about people engaging with the cemetery – with their own ideas, and use old technology (writing) to see how we could connect with audiences: which combination of technologies was going to be most satisfying for an audience, that’s all it was really. Which is why we said ‘okay, write something – now here’s a bunch of technologists’ – and that’s important, that technologists themselves bring the experience of connecting with all sorts of people.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mr3DE1iqOmk
What did you feel you learned about the technologies that people were drawn to?
I think what we were ultimately trying to find out was whether or not people were prepared to pay for things to happen in that site. But a lot of people go to that cemetery anyway, to walk their dogs, visit dead relatives – they do weddings there now – and they have storytelling and plays; but actually when we were doing the project, they were worried that people wouldn’t be coming there.
So what we tried to do was look at our ideas and ask (a) did they like it (b) did it freak them out that it was about death and (c) would they pay for this sort of experience in the future? Some of the technology was static, potentially permanent, like projections and audio triggers – and some of it was old-style: a promenade performance with an actor where people were led round and made to step on graves, and another one was about going into the crypt.
What did we learn? That it was okay to talk about death. People want to talk about it, as long as you approach it in a respectful way. Though we had people – actors – interrupting the performance deliberately and audience members trying to wrestle them off graves, and the plays engaging with the ideas of desecration – and people thought that was great for making them think about the subject matter.
Projection was a bit of a revelation as far as people engaging goes – because you can contemplate it, and watch it, and have time to consider it. It was quite beautiful. And people were writing their own six word epitaphs and they were being projected too: people liked that, recreating what they’d seen outside, contemplating a big subject through a small interactive focus.
That switches me on, the idea of technology creating something contemplative for an audience: that technology can open up a different way of experiencing things, open up a different space for seeing.
Again, Jerome Fletcher talked about the ‘performance’ of the programmer, or mechanic, of the physical technology: almost like they perform a dance with the end-user – so there’s this new vocabulary that accompanies this exploration which, for me at least, is also about a new way of seeing and expressing ideas of performance composition. So whether it’s hidden or visible for an audience I don’t know, in terms of what I might set out to make…
I think the analogue/digital relationship is a bit like that, that they’re always working together. You have something that you have to do, which is tangible and tactile, but it activates something that is digital. You experience the two together.
With theatre it’s absolutely about people being there, seeing it, holding it, doing something with it – rather than being distant and passive, and I’m interested in that. The other thought though, that lingers from the Future Cemetery, is about commercial imperative – which I think is connected a little bit to your writing and how you’ve expressed to me the idea of writing full-time as a future desire – and that’s IP again.
I’ve seen a lot of performance stuff and… it’s the iterative stuff that actually has potential to be commercial. And I know you don’t have to be commercial, but sometimes you do have to make a commercial argument for things. And if you can only do it (a performance) once, and you can only do it unreliably… well, the thing is that Future Cemetery took us a year, and we’ve just created an App on Google Play and we’ll launch it soon, and there’s so many problems attached even to that – so I suppose the question I was trying to look at with the project was ‘look, if you can connect something to a space, that is one way it can be performed and performed and performed and will always be part of that space somehow, even if it goes off and is reinterpreted somewhere’ – like the J. M. Barrie Peter Pan thing, that every time it’s performed now, money goes to Great Ormond Street – that’s a piece of IP that’s attached to a place. If you can attach IP to theatres or performance spaces themselves, maybe that’s a way of creating income and building a commercial argument to create work.
It reminds of The Monsterists in the mid-noughties. They were a pressure group of playwrights writing large-cast plays who suggested a dead writer’s levy be paid against performing Shakespeare and so on. That would then go into a pot that was used to support new writers to have large-cast plays produced – because it was getting harder and harder to conceive of new productions outside the coterie studio audience model of three actors in a play.
So this end-user idea too, of downloading a fixed text, a fixed performance, creates a potential income stream for a venue or company that commissioned it – as well as the writer. Tawdry and mucky and capitalist as it might sound, it’s part of what technology can give creative artists. It enables us to fix.
If you write a play for Spike Island say, you’re commissioned to write it, and if they buy it from you – that play, that thing, that text, can be re-recorded and re-used in multitudinous situations and purposes. Installation, radio, audio clips, as performance online… all sorts of different things. In the film business, when we make productions we always commission original music and the reason for that is that we can pay for it on a small percentage commission, and we can use it again and again and again and again. If you look up there, behind you in that cupboard, there’s a huge stack of sound that we have to pay for every time we use it. I suppose it’s almost like creating your own digital artefacts or digital exhibits.
The commercial in relation to the digital – it’s quite unfashionable for artists I think. And maybe it’s a mind-set. My wife is basically launching her business through the internet alone and is always confused that I’m not doing more stuff that requires me NOT to be there in person i.e. online course, e-books, downloadable content and material, and it’s almost like I have an allergic reaction to the suggestions.
She’s way ahead of you, listen to her! But I think as you get older this sort of thing does become appropriate to consider, perhaps more than when you’re younger and you just want to get on and make the art or whatever. There’s less future to worry about. Again, I do find with technology that the idea is the thing, the design of the project, that’s the thing that occupies the biggest part of our brains, or should be: how you deliver it, that arises rather than leads.
I think Future Cemetery was different because we were just given carte blanche to do what we wanted. The main thing really was ‘do people want to talk about death’, and how far can we go with death, and is there anything here – in terms of the IP commercial theory – that would stick to Arnos Vale specifically.
As this is one of my last conversations, I’m reflecting now that I’ve absolutely come at this R+D because I’ve assumed I want to make a piece with technology – starting with the form rather than the content, which I’m often veering other people away from… that it’s a structural exercise and a bit hollow, unless you’ve got the idea to start with, as you say. But now, I think I’d actually defend the fact that the idea can arise from the form – because the forms I’ve encountered over these conversations are so potentially radical that surely impactful content could follow.
Some forms are so powerful that they supersede anything else. Ann Jellicoe’s community plays, for example, she was somebody who got whole communities galvanised to put on plays – she got people moving around a space, got everybody involved, every generation – and I think that sort of form is completely justifiable sometimes, because the activity, the piece was about the form, the idea was the form.
There’s a project online at the moment called Know Your Place, and it’s a digital map, and the form there absolutely leads – the form invites content and grows outwards from there. It was set up by the Bristol Records Office and it’s a way of plotting archive against place. So you can go there and look at where bombs fell in the war and so on, and it’s very beautiful, you can overlay an 1820 map of Bristol over the present day and so on… now we’re trying to create apps upon which you can upload your own information onto those maps, with certain tags and so on, and you’d be able to create your own stories as well.
The other reason I mention it now, this visibility and engagement via the app, is a thing about digital archives: that there’s possibility of losing all this stuff in a vast ‘content grave’ – which is the term people tend to use – maybe a good title!? It’s that nobody knows where it is, what it is, or why you would go there. It’s all very well having technology, having digital stuff and so on, but how are you going to connect it to people. 99% of people won’t know that Know Your Place is there, there’s no signposting for it. And that’s down to budget and politics and all sorts, but how do you combat that?
Content graves are one of the biggest problems, because we are continually creating stuff that we don’t use. We suffer this terrible problem here at Calling the Shots, because we have tons of archive footage that we can’t store – and somebody has to make a call about what’s ‘worth’ holding onto.
There’s footage of kids in Bristol playing in the street from twenty years ago and so on… but what’s going to be of value in the future? How do I know? We can’t save everything. It’s somebody’s job to shape history by editing out the stuff we don’t think we need in the future – but we can’t be sure of what’s going to be valuable.
That’s a really interesting place to leave it – thank you so much.