3rd February 2007

I arrived just after dawn, which was supposed to be at 7.49 according to halesowenweather.co.uk, but I think that civil dawn came earlier today because all objects were most distinguishable by at least 7.30am. (Civil dawn is when the sun is 6 degrees below the horizon; objects can be seen and out door activities can commence.) I recorded 'The Grassmarket' as accurately as I could from that point until approximately 12 noon. By then my fingers were too cold to write, even inside my sheepskin gloves and I was very tired. So I came home. I fell asleep on the sofa. Our boiler broke three days ago, so it's actually not much warmer indoors.

I've decided to do the next four-five hours tomorrow, which should take me until sunset. I realise now that the experiment won't be complete until I've done the night shift(s) too.

I kept on meaning to create and implement a system for this recording, but kept getting too interested by what was actually happening at that moment, to make up, or keep to, any rules. I felt in part like a detective, gathering clues, in part like an obsessive and unconventional taxonomist, and finally and most worryingly, that even the objective of creatively representing something real, doesn't sufficiently explain this kind of behaviour.

Best from the bench.

Clare

Grassmarket January 2007

It's very strange how uncomfortable this blogging buisness is. I feel very self-conscious about every word. However, I'm compelled finally to post a little something as I've been thinking very hard about Rough Mix for the past month...no conclusions as yet unfortunately. But I do have an invitation. I'm planning to take up a day's residency in the Grassmarket, probably on one of those benches by the trees in the central reservation on Saturday, all day. Material will be created and then something else will happen...probably. If you are anywhere nearby do come and say hallo.

Best wishes
Clare
x

inter-artist

Hope Christmas went well and all the best for the coming year to all Rough Mix players. Just to say I enjoyed very much meeting everyone involved. The venue was very relaxing to be in with its varandas and ready coffee access to the Grassmarket. I don’t usually drink coffee?
Just to say about the speedy two weeks, it was challenging thinking how to integrate the expertise of the contribitors into the Feral Child idea I came with and actually an awful lot did happened. The music/sounds gave me lots to ponder. I don’t know how much, if anything, I gave to others but I was able to test tube the micro bit of script I came up with and got good feed back. The workshop told me a ton about the character dynamics I was trying to fathom in my project and how to do ‘it’ with a bit of original spin. So it was great that we had actors so ready to dive in the deep end.
What I enjoyed was the serendipity that engaging with creative people throws up and seeing the subtle ways in which everyone influenced everyone else. An ‘unstructured collaboration’ is how it felt, which is excellent for an event so much work went into setting up and doing.
A willingness to just be there and allow something to go on seemed to me is what happened. Rough Mix sharpened up a few ideas and I’ve got a sketch to think about, Carrot and Salty-Dog. I think it’s refreshing to get out of your discipline/box, see other possibilities and meet others intrested in creative stuff likewise. It would be good to continue some inter-artist (not a football team) connections and friendships made.

Tuesday - day 7

Rosalind did a gentle and insightful warm-up and we then had a half hour crash course in breakdancing from Nico. A key part of Rough Mix is about sharing skills so, as I felt fairly safe in assuming sure that none of us apart from Nico had ever done any breakdancing, I asked him to give us an introduction. He spoke fascinatingly about the social and political background to its emergence in the 70s and then led us through the basic principals, including the strong element of role-playing and competition within it. It was a great workout and, while I don't imagine my skills will be much in demand with Dance Bases's regular B-boys and girls, I enjoyed it and judging from the number of times I noticed others trying out sly little breaks during the day, so did everyone else.

Dave, Ewan, Clare Ronan and Debbie worked on Dave's piece in Studio 3 until they couldn't hear properly any more and decided it was time for a break - Dave seemed really happy with the progress it's made. The rest of us worked with Tristan and Charles exploring a close off the Cowgate, under the library and George IV Bridge. Marisa and I videoed reactions as the actors came into the close one by one with the instruction to react to how the location made them feel. Over lunch Tristan and Charles watched the tapes and then worked with Dave and Clare in the afternoon.

I worked on Ronan's text in the afternoon - like Walden, this is incredibly rich text and we spent a lot of time trying out different possibilities. Its style is simultaneously both realistic and stylized and finding a way not to swamp the evocative language is tricky - the text has the rhythm and sound of raw Glaswegian but a vocabulary that is entirely unique, both familiar and strange. We didn't really crack it, but opened up some avenues.

Week 2: day 6

A weekend away and the arrival of Monday seemed to spark off a shift towards outcomes rather than experimentation. Clare and Ronan had both written scenes, and Tristan and Charles had come up with four possible ideas to pursue. In the morning, Clare worked with Keith and Pauline on her scene (latterly joined by me) while Dave and Ronan worked with the other actors recording some of Ronan's chorus dialogue. Tristan and Charles went off in search of interesting locations with Marisa. In the afternoon I directed a rehearsal of Clare's scene and also had an invaluable session on Walden with Ewan, Clare and Debbie. The problem with Walden is also the reason why I want to do it - it is an apparently simple yet astonishing complex piece of writing. How do you communicate all those ideas? I'm trying to find a number of ways of performance that reflect the different modes of the book - we only did two tiny fragments of the text today but made a big leap in terms of understanding what it possible. They feel like studies of what is possible. At the same time in the other studio, the others worked with Marisa on her piece, which combines a huge live video projection with live action - eventually spread over two studios.

Day 5 and week 1 summary

Day 4 had felt like a bit of a dip, but I think that this was partly because we were all tired and also in need of quiet time to reflect on the next step. So the work that I did felt very tentative in the sense that I didn't know where it was going. On Friday it felt like there was a fresh impetus to move forward. Ronan went away and wrote in the Green Room - I asked him to approach it almost as automatic writing and to write what came to him having absorbed the previous day's work. In the afternoon we all worked together in Studio 3 on Dave's project - he set up the basic elements of a drum kit (two drums and a bass drum with foot pedal) and a mic and we explored the extraordinary and occasionally painfull world of feedback. Ewan stood at the mic trying to speak into it while Dave coaxed feedback to interrupt him - we played around with various set-ups (drums played by separate players one on either side and the third behind Ewan, all in a line behind Ewan) and different intentions for the interrupted speaker. The feedback behaved very strangely, seeming to actually move around the room, sometimes vibrating the floor astonishingly.

The week as a whole seemed to have worked - everyone had worked with everyone else at some point and I could already sense the crossovers that were starting to happen. Next week we'll all get very focused on the showing.

Day 4

Thursday/ day 4 (written up on saturday) began with a warm-up, then the actors watched the Feral Children doc before working with me, Ronan, Debbie and Ruth. Ronan and I had talked about some ideas beforehand, but ended up following a line of enquiry that came up in discussion. This was to do with sensory deprivation - Pauline noted that Jeannie was different to many of the other cases because she didn't have any substitute for the lack of human contact (such as living with dogs, which is quite common with feral children). I think everyone who knows about it is always struck by Harry Harlow's research with monkeys which demonstrated that baby chimps would always choose comfort and warmth over food - there's no reason to suppose that humans are any different to this. We set up a series of exercises in which the actors tried to follow an instruction (such as "find a place to hide", "find a place to shelter", "find a means of escape", "find a source of comfort") while, for example, blindfolded and left in a re-arranged studio. Sight was the easiest sense to remove; sound was more tricky but we tried to do it by playing music very loudly (anyone else read "The Men Who Stare at Goats"?). The only music CD I could find was a bizarre remix/mix-up of Toxic and All That Jazz (I suppose it was a dance teacher's class CD that had been left behind). It seemed strangely appropriate in the land of Rough Mix.

In the afternoon I carried on working with the actors on the same project, though without Ronan as he had to go to the dentist. I gave them words that they had to communicate without using language (though abstract sounds were allowed). The words were things like "weather", "yesterday", "freedom" - concepts rather than objects, as this seemed more difficult. After they had created a sequence that they felt communicated the word, they had to teach it to another actor, again without using language. The second actor then had to perform the sequence to the group without necessarily knowing what they were trying to show (or maybe with the wrong idea if they had tried to guess). I was intrigued to know if movement aided the process of guessing but it didn't seem to. We then tried the same thing but with an added difficulty (e.g. without moving your legs, or without using your arms) and with everyone given the instruction that they weren't to use eye contact.