The Remarkable Dramaturgy of Robert Desnos: Clare Muireann Murphy and Daniel Morden @ Village Storytelling

Clare Muireann Murphy and Daniel Morden
perform the Remarkable Tale of Robert Desnos on Wednesday 5th July at 7pm, CCA Glasgow. Produced by Adverse Camber.

DANIEL MORDEN:

What was the inspiration for this performance?

I wanted to share a stage with Clare for an hour at a festival last year. I had seen her work and thought it would be fun to trade stories.

Being a great maker of rods for my own back, I suggested, why don't we tell stories about Fate/luck?

She said,

'There's a true story about a surrealist poet in a concentration camp. Could we use that somehow? I have been wanting to tell it for years.'

I said,

'Yeah, great, let's!'

We made the show by email/skype. When we performed it at the festival, it got a standing ovation.

We did it again, and got another standing ovation.

'Hmmm. Maybe we are onto something here.....'

Is performance still a good space for the public discussion of ideas?

*When you hear a story told well it acts like a trojan horse. It sneaks stuff into you without you noticing. It infects you with ideas.

It circumvents the concious mind and goes straight to the heart of you.

*And, in these straitened times, it is cheap! All that's needed is a slient space and a willing audience. I like that low-tech, DIY aspect of it, probably because I am an old punk.

*It is a political act to leave behind netflix and share an experience with others.

How did you become interested in making performance?

When a theatre-in education company transformed my junior school hall into a jungle by saying, ‘We're in a jungle!’

Is there any particular approach to the making of the show?

Clare and I were selfish. We wanted to have fun. We weren't overly worried about the outcome. What was the worst that could happen?. It was going to be a one-off. We figured we'd perform it at the festival, shake hands and go our separate ways. Then a producer picked it up.

Does the show fit with your usual productions?

It is a departure. Never worked with Clare before. She's a hoot!. She makes me raise my game. It is a while since I had this much fun onstage.

What do you hope that the audience will experience?

The show is about the power of stories to change our reality. We hope this story will change the audience's reality. It has changed ours.

I hope the audience will have a cracking night, and emerge from the theatre with sweaty armpits.

What strategies did you consider towards shaping this audience experience?

I don't know how to shape an audience's experience. I wish I did!. Our creative process was more instinctive than that. We made a piece we thought we would enjoy if we were watching it. We told stories we were itching to tell, in a way we thought was exciting. It was a glorious surprise when the audience liked it as much as we did!

CLARE MURPHY

I was raised in performance, my father was an actor, my mother is a poet.  In 2003 I witnessed someone standing still telling stories, and with only this, they transformed my world.  

Storytelling strikes me as something tangibly good, something that quantifiably makes a difference to people's wellbeing, their thoughts, the way they interact with the world. 
Storytelling, when it is good, goes far beyond entertainment into the realm where we, both audience and performer, wrestle with meaning and our place in the world.

I've been at this 11 years now, and my aim is to keep developing as a performer and an artist for the rest of my life.  

International festivals include Fabula Festival Stockholm, Out of the Box Puppetry Festival Singapore, 10 Days in Dublin, Times Cheltenham Literature Festival UK, National Storytelling Festival Jonesborough Tennessee, Ondas de Contas Lisbon and International Storytelling Festival Toronto.

What I Know about Dramaturgy: Sonia Gardes @ Village Storytelling Festival

Sonia Gardes presents

What I Know About What My Grandfather Didn't Know 

a brand new commission created especially for the Village Storytelling Festival. 

When political disagreements with her whole family became the centre of her life, Sònia started wondering about that mysterious figure in the story of the family who had gone on exile 80 years ago and who nobody talks about.

What was the inspiration for this performance?

There were some artistic inspirations and some practical facts which all of them together eventually took me to develop this performance.

Firstly, the performance "Ragazzo", by Lali Álvarez and Oriol Pla was a very deep inspirational experience on how to approach political stories about police brutality and those who daily fight back from a point of view which helps any kind of audience empathise and connect with the issue and those who support it.

Secondly, tired of my accent to be an issue, I was really looking forward to develop a performance where it would not only not be a problem, but actually an artistic plus to the story. I don't think it is necessary to have a story happening in Spain for this to happen, though.

While these two more artistic facts influenced what my next project could be like, there was the personal need to research about my Great-Grandfather, as it is explained in the performance. Even though Franco died more than forty years ago, and the Spanish Civil War happened eighty years ago, the law for historical memory is just ten years old, and my generation is being the first or second one feeling still close enough to need answers and emotionally far enough to find them.

The performance includes many other contemporary topics such as how do we as a society welcome refugees, and which are the long term consequences of not doing so.

Is performance still a good space for the public discussion of ideas? 

Yes, definitely. Not the only one, but it is a really good one. Performance doesn't present only an idea or a story, it can present the emotion that makes that idea happen and it can awaken it in people who haven't felt it. The experiential potential of performance is a very powerful tool for that. 

It helps creating bonds based on empathy, and in a world where discussions many times become about proving one's right, it offers a comfortable space to sit down, listen and experience, without anyone judging how you feel about it. After this emotional experience, opening a discussion can have such a different result.

How did you become interested in making performance?

Performance has been in my life from a very young age. As a child, my mum would take my brother and me constantly to see children's theatre, and the three of us loved watching puppets. We also had loads of puppets at home to play with.

As I grew up, I loved going to the theatre and how it would touch me. However, I never wanted to perform. Looking back now, I'm pretty sure that gender restrictions from growing up in a small town where being a visible woman was not well seen had a lot to do with that.

What I did instead was being interested in anything in theatre which would be the invisible work. I studied make-up and hairstyle for theatre, and also costume design and making. In Fine Arts I specialised in sculpture for theatre and giant puppets. 

And in my first professional years in Barcelona I was finding work successfully.

It wasn't until I came to Scotland and lost my safe network that I started considering creating my own work. I had been very active politically, and I had been working with children as well for a long time, so I became interested in developing those ideas and values for children's performance. 

After that, I started becoming more interested in developing adult work, and that's when the project "What I know about what my Grandfather didn't know" started.

Is there any particular approach to the making of the show?

The performance is a commission for the Village Storytelling Festival, and therefore it is designed as a storytelling performance. However, my background as a visual artist and performance designer always ends up appearing.

Since there are so many images that are important to the story I started developing the introduction of life-streamed projections and collage. Gavin Glover has helped me in the process. He's an amazing creative person, and it has been a really inspiring experience.

Does the show fit with your usual productions?

It does in terms of topic. It fits with the values and topics that have appeared previously. However, it is the first time I do it for adults, so there is a big jump in the way I have approached certain aspects of it. The rhythm is very different as well.

I have also explored very new ways of developing visual arts and visual communication. So I would say it is very new exciting work to me.

What do you hope that the audience will experience?

I want the audience to connect with the personal experience of a refugee and the impact this choice of survival has in others, specially relatives. I would like them to become more interested in their own past and the importance of historical memory through listening to my discoveries.

And of course the importance of being the ones writing our own history through listening to our survivors, because if we trust those who are writing history we might get a very perverse and confusing point of view. Ultimately, the performance is a shout for hope, which we so much need at the moment.

What strategies did you consider towards shaping this audience experience?

The introduction of silence to the story has been a key element for that. Communicating through images and giving some time to the audience to connect with their feelings and not only with the verbal information they are being given is a key aspect of it. Collage plays a big role doing it. When doing collage, we are building a fantasy, through merging realities. 

And fantasies tell us so much about fears, hopes and frustrations. Music also plays an important role creating atmospheres and time for the audience to connect to what they have been experiencing.

Considering the audience socially and culturally was another important thing to do. Scotland and Catalonia are territories with many similarities, yet still different territories with different stories and experiences. It has been very interesting to think of a story which has so much of the common cultural knowledge in the history from where I was born adapted to somewhere which has its own history and doesn't necessarily know mine.

Circumnavigating Dramaturgy: Ian Stephen @ CCA

‘This pursuit of the optimal way-speed was, I came to realise, in keeping with all that Ian does. In action and speech, he is formidably exact. He exemplifies what Robert Lowell once called ‘the grace of accuracy’, and his poetry too, is distinguished by its precision. Minimalist but not gnomic, it extends his commitments both to exactitude and communication. There is no surfeit to it. His poems are short and taut as well-set sails. Poetry represents to him not a form of suggestive vagueness, but a medium which permits him to to speak in ways otherwise unavailable.’


Robert Macfarlane, The Old Ways, Hamish Hamilton and Penguin, 2012-13



What was the inspiration for this performance?
Starting point was the chance to get immersed in the Morrison manuscript - transcriptions of oral stories –  held at Stornoway Public Library and the printed version in the National Library of Scotland  when I was 'Reader in Residence', Western Isles Libraries, in 2011. 

But I could not have imagined the journeys suggested without the experience of navigating  the waters described. I'm very fortunate to be able to have sailed often to St Kilda, once in my own sloop El Vigo, once in Song of the Whale with the Cape Farewell project and many times as professional crew on a charter yacht, which also took me to North Rona. I have  sailed to the Shiant Islands and to Sula Sgeir and Orkney in traditional Lewis open boats. 

I can relive aspects of these adventures as the stories unfold and see the spectacular geography in the mind's eye with the hope of sharing the experience.

How did you go about gathering the team for it?
I knew Peter Urpeth first of all as a writer. Once he saw a short video I made and said, 'I could play to that.' That's when I learned he also had a career as a pianist, both in improvisation and in composing  to film. 

Our collaboration in poetry and piano combinations led to an appearance at the 'Without Borders' festival in the Czech Republic and at 'The Read Bed', Belladrum. It was natural to extend this relationship to storytelling with piano.

Christine happens to be my wife but we also have an ongoing collaboration as the artist known as Stephen Morrison. That 'artist' often makes visual and text-based work in response to voyages. We met when I took the Masters students in Art, Space and Nature (Edinburgh University) sailing, as a volunteer skipper with traditional Lewis vessels. 

Our voyages together in our own classic wooden sloop have taken us to residencies in Shetland and the Rathlin Sound Festival in Northern Ireland. We have also shared residencies in Saskatchewan and in Tasmania, though we didn't sail to either of these places.

How did you become interested in making performance?
Storytelling was in my family background, on both sides. My mother and her brothers were a major influence, passing on a tradition from my Lewis grandfather Murchadh Iain Fionnlagh Mac a Gobhan. I met Hamish Henderson and Stanley Robertson when I went to Aberdeen as a student. Both of these friends encouraged me to tell Lewis stories in public. 

I would go to the TMSA festivals, at Keith and Kinross but I also went with a group of performing poets to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe as early as 1979.  Since then I've alternated between the lonely craft of making poems and prose and the stimulating act of performing poems or stories, often in combination with music or visual elements. My poetry has also been set to music by two different composers.


Was your process typical of the way that you make a performance?
Yes. It was an open dialogue between three equal artists although in this case, the shape of the linked stories was already in place - 
given a form by the narrative which joins them. Rehearsals have been informal dialogues. The stories must remain improvised and not fixed as a script but the timing has to be secure. 

Certain elements cannot be missed (like way points in navigation). A slip on these would present problems for both Peter, on his variations, some based on melodies from Gaelic songs and Christine, who has edited and arranged the images. Both of these elements will further the narrative as well as build-in mood and detail. 

What do you hope that the audience will experience?
I hope we will travel time together as well as move from land to sea and back. But I hope no-one gets seasick. It will be great if those who have not yet experienced the geography first-hand, gain a sense of it. Like a novel, the aim is to share a human experience that might not be physically possible for all the audience.

What strategies did you consider towards shaping this audience experience?
I would say it's more about trust than strategies. Both between the performers and between us and the audience. The three of us hope to make something that is more than the sum of the three elements. If we are sensitive to each other's art then we can hope that the audience is fully engaged and so plays a part also. 

Do you see your work within any particular tradition?
Yes. Although in this case contemporary elements are included – digital projection and electric piano – I hope that the storytelling has the same intimate ethos as that of my eloquent grandfather. 

Other questions that would bring out the role of the dramaturgy?
I would always ask myself a question as I attempt to splice strands of stories together: 
Will the process really result in something that is more than the individual elements?

My novel, A Book of Death and Fish has been described by Robert Macfarlane as 'stories within stories' as well as 'a celebration of the oral tradition' (Donald Smith). But I have to keep asking if the over-arching story can distort the character of the common currency of the stories within it. 

The dramaturgy is really nothing more than a sniffing and sensing for the shape that is already suggested by the timeless chosen stories. These are only slightly arranged, helped by music and image, to emphasise the route they describe, when placed together.

Clockwork Dramaturgy: Katrice Horsley @ CCA

Clockwork
A 90 minute show that explores the corsetry of social constructs upon the human form. Meet the Wordsmiths who each night chant their words of power and enchant our dreams as a consequence. Meet Nousha, a young girl who experiences sound in a different way to others and meet Edna, a woman so old she has a pubic comb-over but who knows the importance of belly laughter in our development as human beings.

What was the inspiration for this performance
My main inspiration was working with young people who saw themselves as lacking due to the social narratives that exist with regards to beauty, success and status. I wanted to do something to redress. One of the main themes in my work as a narrative consultant is to do with becoming the narrator of your own life. This performance is very much about that. 

Also I have a form of synaesthesia, that I thought would be interesting to include. The last inspiration was all of the older woman who were around to help shape me into the woman I am now. This show is very much a celebration of their ribald humour and infinite wisdom.

How did you go about gathering the team for it?
There is not team - just me.

How did you become interested in making performance?
I was looking a lot at Rabelaisian humour and linking that to the Goddess Baubo - I wanted to explore what that means to us as a connection point in a world where we are supposed to be ‘sophisticated,’ and how that was seen as better than crudity.


Was your process typical of the way that you make a performance?
I call myself a percolator - I have one little idea/concept float up from the depths of my unconscious and into my imagination - I put it onto the the shore of possible working island - then I wait and another idea floats, and I place it on the the shore, and another and another, until I start to piece the fragments into whole structure. Then I start to add the poetry, the links, the sensual language.

What do you hope that the audience will experience?
I want them to feel. I want them to resonate with the plight of the characters, to laugh, to feel despair, to recognise themselves within it all, to start to question how they came to believe what they think is true about themselves.

What strategies did you consider towards shaping this audience experience?
I wanted an emotional palette to work with. Quite often, if you have laughter you can then plunge deeper into despair, people know they will come up for air so they are willing to plunge fully in with you.

Do you see your work within any particular tradition?
There are 3 very traditional stories within the main frame narrative, so I would see this piece as traditional storytelling.

Once called the 'soul-diva' of storytelling, Katrice is a captivating performer who has a range of specific one-woman shows as well as a repertoire of over 300 traditional stories from all across the globe.

In her performances she enjoys taking people out of their comfort zones - just for a while - before returning them into the safety of being an audience member again!

Some of her work can challenge assumptions made about fairy tales - you will never look at Beauty and the Beast in the same way again! She has performed around the U.K. and overseas in theatres, schools, Literature Festivals and National Parks.

Four Chambers of Dramaturgy: Cat Gerrard and Tim Ralphs @ Village Storytelling

Village Storytelling / Cat Gerrard, Tim Ralphs

VSF16: Four Chambers of the Heart

Thu 24 March 2016

7pm, £10 (£8), Theatre

Ages: 14+ accompanied by an adult

The Village Storytelling Festival

Tue 22 March — Sat 26 March 2016

The heart has its own strange and wonderful ways. Some are well known: the regular beat of your everyday love stories, tales told so often their patterns becomes ingrained in the imagination. But the heart has other rhythms - it sends some down paths that have been kept secret by society, by collectors of stories, by the subjects of these complicated loves. 

Storytellers Cat Gerrard and Tim Ralphs are pilgrims on these hidden pathways to passion and heartache. Listen as these wordsmiths bring you an evening of exquisite lesser-known tales from around the world that will make your heart thump, break, beat and flutter.



What was the inspiration for this performance?
Cat Gerrard and Tim Ralphs both say:
The Four Chambers of the Heart began as a conversation about our sense that traditional storytelling - the telling of myths, legends, folktales - was profoundly heteronormative - and that this lead to an omission in content and themes. We were telling stories that did not reflect the diversity in our audiences or our identities and this left us with a sense of injustice. 

We're often saying that traditional storytelling has to reflect the needs of society today, and The Four Chambers became a project to radically expand the shared repertoire and to put queer themes front and centre in our work.

How did you become interested in making performance?
Cat: As a child I was entranced by theatre and art, from a performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream I saw at the age of 7

which made me fall off my seat, crying with laughter, to the puppets and stories in Jim Henson's The Storyteller. I started making performance at school and continued, fitting it around my studies until I decided to put it at the centre of my life. 

I tried to do other things but creating is a vocation and I couldn't really do anything else. More here: 

Tim: As a child, I was taken to lots of folk festivals and fell deeply in love with storytelling as an art-form. I started my first storytelling club in my school library. My interest in performance is born of a love of stories as something shared, created between teller and listener, and a passionate love of traditional material. 

Was your process typical of the way you make performance?
Cat: I don't have a typical process in any piece that I make so this is typical in being atypical! Working with Tim in a first collaboration means we are finding our own way of working together and our own process. 

How I make performance depends so much on who I'm making it with and what it is that we are/ I am making. The few things that always feature for me though are: play and improvisation; construction; reflection; and going into and staying in the unknown for as long as possible.

What do you hope that the audience with experience?
Cat and Tim: We're both fascinated by ritual, and we'll be looking for ways for the audience to participate in the show. Our hope is that our audience will be delighted with these stories, that they'll feel a sense of opening up - both internally and externally- and that they'll touch a sense of wonder.