This post originally featured in Lane’s List in November 2014.
I spent five days in late November 2014 down in Dartington in Devon, on one of their ‘Immerse’ residencies, in the company of five fantastic actors who were all under the careful guidance of myself and Just Jones &’s Artistic Director, Rebecca Manson Jones, and the designer for the project Jens Cole.
We’re collaborating on a piece of theatre and we’ve agreed that we’re interested in taking on the role of co-writers too (she wrote their last touring venture – a radical adaptation of Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People, which was the first ever UK recipient of a huge award from the Ibsen Foundation in Norway).
We’re exploring the concept of the Happy City, food production governance and ethics, leadership in our cities, and what you’re more likely to do if you’re starving than if you’re not.
When do you take political action, when do you revolt, and what’s that got to do with access to food and the short-termism of most farming policy in this country?
We went in with a gutted re-arrangement of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus as our starting point and a whole load of other texts (TS Eliot, George Monbiot’s rants, Amphitryon, Antigone) along with a host of creative frameworks for the actors to inhabit, explore, create visual art, explore characters, express themselves physically, design their perfect city, be filmed for huge projections… it was a busy time.
Sometime in October Rebecca and I both agreed we would DEFINITELY write something during the residency. It would be stupid not to.
We didn’t know what that would be – maybe not script at all, maybe just exploratory scribblings – but that was a given that as the co-writers we would use the space the company had been awarded to write.
When the funding came in from the Arts Council to properly financially support the whole venture’s R+D period too, it felt like even more of a responsibility.
But then – I didn’t write anything.
Everybody else did – in fact they spent about a day and a half writing in total, under facilitated exercises from me – but I didn’t. Something hadn’t clicked yet. No images arrived, no ‘I must write now!’ impulse. No sense yet of enough ownership or control over the idea.
What I did instead was engage in being a dramaturg. I took on the swathes of material and ideas filling an enormous studio and started to sift and select, looking for the patterns and connections, trying to draw out the shape of this beast of a show which looks like being part-installation, part-participatory performance, part lyrical-poetic script, part-political protest.
I wanted to know how it could all work, what our journey would be as an audience.
I couldn’t see the wood for the trees: so instead I built a map of the forest.
Thank God I did. It was the most useful thing I could have done for the project at this point than forcing something irrelevant out for the sake of it.
I learned that your first creative responsibility is to the idea, and what it requires moment to moment: not to some abstract or pre-arranged responsibility that notionally fits a known idea of what a ‘writer’ might do.
No, I didn’t write words. But perhaps I was still writing.
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