Five Feet of Dramaturgy:The Letter Room @ Edfinge 2015

The Letter Room presents

Five Feet in Front (The Ballad of Little Johnnie Wylo)

8 – 30 Aug | 9.25 – 10.25pm

Struggle, survival, sex and live music brewed up into a foot stomping, bath blasting, bone shaking hoedown. A clock, a town, a sunrise on an empty open coffin and the wind. The wind who’s dead set on sticking someone in it by sunset. Down in the dust bowl the air’s so thick folk just can’t see what’s coming their way anymore, all ‘cept Johnnie, little Johnnie Wylo.. A wild and dark, and funny tale about hope and daring to have it in the land of the downtrodden.

The Fringe
What inspired this production: did you begin with an idea or a script or an object?
Alice Blundell: Five Feet in Front was inspired mainly by Steinbeck's novels and also a little bit of Eminem. We can't quite remember how those two came together but we were drawn to the world of The Dust Bowl in America, the struggle of the people, the desperation and the hope that survived. Also, because we work with music, the ballads, the bluegrass and hoedowns were particularly immediate and that was something we really wanted to tackle. The Letter Room devise work, we never start with a script, but we tend to start with a world, a world that we can delve into and a world we can immerse the audience in.

Why bring your work to Edinburgh?
We love Edinburgh, for its eclectic and electric excitement. It's unpredictable and different, and a place you can experiment with an audience you'd never normally get. We're still discovering ourselves as a company and why we make the work we make. We know that we have something unique and something that's not always to everyone's taste. But it somehow seems to sit with an Edinburgh audience...probably because they never know what to expect.

What can the audience expect to see and feel - or even think - of your production?
We hope our audiences feel submerged in a world when they come to see our shows. 'Five Feet in Front' is set in the Deep South and we do hope that it feels hot and dusty they can expect a wash of fiddles, guitars, banjos and six part harmonies. Think O, Brother Where Art Thou meets Lawless.

The Dramaturgy Questions
How would you explain the relevance - or otherwise - of dramaturgy within your work?
As a devising company, we are acutely aware of the critics eye on the dramaturgy of our pieces. We've never worked with a dramaturg and this is the first time we've worked with a writer.

What particular traditions and influences would you acknowledge on your work - have any particular artists, or genres inspired you and do you see yourself within their tradition?
There's always a question of what we do and why we make what we make as we cross a lot of genres and people are still unsure of how to label us, we like that for the moment though. We have a huge amount of influence within our work from graphic novels to Coen Brothers films but our biggest one is Kneehigh. The energy and the music and the stories have huge impact on the work we make and want to produce.

The Musical Theatre tradition is definitely starting to influence our work. Being nominated for a Musical Theatre Network Award meant people started to look at us differently and we started to think about ourselves differently. We'd always described ourselves as making gig theatre with music that drives the narrative and its characters but the MTN recognised our work in a Edinburgh as 'challenging the form'. 

So we do say we make musicals, but then you always have to add

the tag line "but not in the commercial sense, it's not all jazz hands and tap dancing" as there's certainly an expectation when we say we are a musical theatre company. It would be nice if that genre had a wider scope for what it could be.

Do you have a particular process of making that you could describe - where it begins, how you develop it, and whether there is any collaboration in the process?We are absolutely collaborative devisers. It starts with us, the core Letter Room team and we draft in people to work with us from all angles, creative and organisationally. We are not experts, we are still learning and surrounding ourselves with a mix of experienced practitioners and emerging creatives which gives a richness and fullness to our process. It begins with a pitch, we come with an idea for a show and pitch it to the team and then we pick one together (although this year we sort of merged two!) and then that becomes a starting point which we move off from very quickly. It's always evolving, and working with a writer and describing an idea to them then makes it become something new entirely. You can't be precious, you kind of have to ride the wave and trust it. 

We have a period of R&D to explore the idea as fully as possible and to hell clear up what we want to keep and run with. Rehearsal comprises of games, a lot of rule-based games and time limits. We've found giving ourselves time limits we are economical in choosing what we really want to put in the show. Working with a writer has been slightly different, the rehearsal process was much more structured around the script and less about exploring ideas. It has been much more centred about pulling out the narrative and fine tuning what we want to say. The music we write together, making a huge playlist of songs we like and want to be inspired by and then the making happens organically with a suggestion of a chord pattern from one person, a melody from another and lyrics from another.

What do you feel the role of the audience is, in terms of making the meaning of your work?
Our audience is the adventurer, journeying into and being

submerged by a world. There's always a give and take between us all of how much to give to an audience and how much to keep. What to leave unanswered and ambiguous and how to help spell out our story. It's a fine balance, and a difficult one to find when you devise the work together with a writer and director (and with music) one finds themselves to close to the work...which is when a dramaturg becomes hugely useful. The company would absolutely benefit working with a dramaturg for a next show!

A New Recipe For Old Scraps

The genius of Gob Squad’s Kitchen is in its ability to provoke radically different interpretations. On one level, it is another formal exercise in testing the limits of the fourth wall: members of the audience gradually replace the players, and the use of a large screen, upon which the actions of the play are projected, highlights the expected division between stage and auditorium. On another, it’s a eulogy to the spirit of the 1960s, a close-up on the moment when the potential of the age was about to become a radical questioning of social and aesthetic values. And it is a complaint about the way in which this energy was dispersed, until the imaginative gestures of Warhol’s art became a series of mannered tropes, replacing the genuine inquisitive approaches with a series of recognisable strategies.

Gob Squad set out their idea quickly. They are going to recreate the filming of Warhol’s film, to get back into the state of mind that allowed the cast and crew to abandon the usual details of creativity – stuff like learning lines, or having a plot. There are several lengthy monologues that fake excitement for this past – usually with an undertow of anxiety and fear – and a couple of interludes that ponder how even getting sexy is fraught with irony, these days. At the height of the performance, the cast wig out, in a horribly rigid way, pretending that they are either at an orgy, or on LSD.

It is so terribly melancholic, with the overwhelming sense that the good times have long since disappeared. Knowing that the same people who were Warhol’s superstars went on to become casualties of their freedoms undermines an unabashed celebration of sex and drugs.

From this very self-conscious foundation, Gob Squad manage to come up with something original. By taking younger members of the audience to play them, they set up a delicious tension between their younger selves and their more knowing present identities. A woman questions her stand-in about the difficulties of balancing “the rock’n’roll lifestyle” with the desire for a stable family life. A man tries to fake hipness, only to have details of his real life beyond the stage revealed which deconstruct his veneer of cool. The constant play between “the real” and “the performed” undercuts both Warhol’s attempt to capture the authentic in art and Gob Squad’s journey back to an innocent time.

Most tellingly, Gob Squad use an apparent exercise in art archaeology to comment on cultural

anxiety. While the 1960s promoted the belief in change, its triumph only replaced one set of expectations with another. In particular, Warhol’s Factory was the nexus for a certain sort of experimentation, a social and artistic experimentation so successful that it became a bohemian establishment. Revolutions, both artistic and political, are exposed as a natural process that might change the surface details but can never depose the tyranny of time, which revolves the provocative into the predictable.

The various speeches appearing to praise the adventure of the 1960s are ironically the bitterest condemnations. Speculating on a future audience, which looks aback at the filmed moments as the origin of a brave new world, Gob Squad emphasis the failure of the experiment. The very performance they present, for all its wit, good humour, generosity and imagination, is, in itself, an almost ritualistic repetition of the past, another attempt to break free of influence, doomed to failure. 

No, I'm going to see Macbeth: Vile and Karoulla face over over Black Sun Drum Corp

Black Sun Drum Korps: Macbeth
as part of Arches LIVE 2012
Fri 21 - Sat 22 Sep 2012 | Fri: 6.30pm, 9pm | Sat: 6.30pm (30 mins) |£8/£6

SEX, MAGICK AND BLOOD. Warpaint masks and animal skins. Light the fires.

Led by Drum Major Russell MacEwan (Ron Athey & Company, US) and Glaswegian industrial trioBlack Sun, witness Shakespeare’s Macbeth as you’ve never seen it before – cut up and reworked to black metal standards.

Inspired by the automatic writing/cut up technique made famous by William Burroughs and Brion Gysin, highlander rhythms, dark magick and industrial witchcraft combine to create a primal, visceral and very loud experience only for the strong of heart.

Today

So... we both want to see and review Black Sun Drum Korp's version of Macbeth. I think that there is only one way to settle this, in the spirit of both critical discourse and Black Sun's brutal re-imagining of that hoary old myth...

The live battle of the critics. Who can come up with the best argument for being the chosen one to go tonight...

I'll start, since you seem frightened by the challenge. I deserve to go to see the show because I interviewed the drum major, and we share an enthusiasm for the loud, aggressive music of the 1980s. Although you have a taste for fiddly heavy metal, Black Sun, and the Vile Arts, approve the violent, measured savagery of No Wave music... and this Macbeth has its roots in that ferocity.

Well, yes, but I'm interested in the theatrical aspect of it - not only the music. I'm curious to see how they compressed the play's plot into what sounds like a half-hour metal manic's dream. Besides, you did say you thought you'd seen enough of Macbeth during the Fringe.

That's a fair point, but the drum major said that he aimed to annihilate the text. My complaint against Macbeth was the over-familiarity with the script, and Black Sun Drum Korp won't be pausing to give us some speech about "is this a dagger." They'll be hitting the shit out of their drums.

Surely for them to call it Macbeth, they are looking to follow the storyline? I'm intrigued by this annihilation of the text - there are plenty of modern warfare adaptations of the Scottish play as well as other Shakespearean plays. An adaptation of a story without the original text, but with that same, ferocious, dog eat dog message sounds exciting!

Macbeth is a historical figure: why do we need Shakespeare at all? But I think that the play does provide a starting point... however, there are plenty of other influences in there. All of which I have a stated track record of liking. I have referenced William Burroughs as an influence in my critical writing - especially the cut up technique, which Black Sun are using to deconstruct Shakespeare's text. There's only one person here who will really understand this version, and he doesn't have a wolf as his profile image...

Yes but if you already like them, how are you to review them critically? Perhaps a more honest response to their work would be from someone who doesn't know what the cut up technique is and who has only vaguely heard of No Wave music?

I am sure we would both be honest... and the point of Arches Live is to enter into its overall spirit. Black Sun are experimenting with forms - they are better known as a very heavy Glasgow band - and "critically" is this case does not mean "without liking them." It means bringing to bear the writer's knowledge. So I win.

oh- and the cut up technique? Try this, sunshine...

"without liking this,
of Arches writer's are known as a very heavy Glasgow Black Sun are mean with forms - bringing to bear critically the knowledge. sunshine... So I technique? win It means and the cut try bans Live is to enter up into its overall spirit. they - and "" is this case better does not experimenting

How does knowledge of that technique enhance the experience of the audience though? Your knowledge of it could inhibit your understanding in some ways, as well as increase your expectations for it, hence disappointing you personally (especially cause you met the drum major). My lack of knowledge in this case might allow me to go in uninhibited and without expectations. Besides, liking them would lead to bias, and i think we've established that we both like the idea of this version already.

You are still going on about bias. But the Radical Subjectivist Critic not only acknowledges bias, but embraces it. However, I take your point... and ultimately, neither of us has the "best" critical voice. We have different voices. You would see it from one position, I another. So, I guess, either one of us would be an interesting critic to write about it.

However, I would like to remind you that this Facebook argument is supposed to be an imaginative way to preview Black Sun - an example of the Radical Subjective approach to criticism that privileges the entertainment value of writing over some notional "right way" of writing about theatre... and we are supposed to be saying why we want to go and see it, not arguing about who the best critic is...

And since you got into that course and I didn't, we know that is you, anyway.

You didn't apply for it though. It would certainly make a change from dance performances (or physical theatre) you've been throwing me into since Last Orders. Black Sun are interesting to me because they are not a theatre troupe, but originally started out as a 'subterranean metal' band. How does one interpret Macbeth as a non-play and something that is hopefully not a musical?

Okay. We need to wrap this up and get the tickets. I'll tell you what. We'll both go to Alien War at half five, and if you don't shit your pants in fear, you can cover Macbeth. But you have to edit the interview I did with the drum major for the soundcloud in exchange.

16:43

Ok, sure.

God Love Her...

Show Name: God Loves a Trier
Artist: Victoria Bianchi
Venue: Arches LIVE 2012
Date: Mon 17 - Wed 19 Sep 2012 | 8.15pm (1 hour) | Studio | £8/£6



Description (from Arches website): Are we capable of seeing things through to the end anymore? What happens when we don’t get immediate results?

Finding herself at the age of 23 without any particular talents, Victoria Bianchi will attempt to learn three skills previously given up on – playing the piano, speaking Gaelic and tap dancing – as she invites the audience to call in and embrace their own notions of talent, success and failure in a society obsessed with all three.

Gareth K Vile: What has been your route into making theatre, and how does your piece express your roots?

Victoria Bianchi: I think the reason I started writing my own work was that I tried everything, and this just seemed to fit best. I have done a bit of musical theatre; some acting in classical plays; some directing; as well as starting (but not completing) degrees in psychology, law and languages. None of these things seemed to quite fit, but when I started writing my own material it just worked for me.

Maybe because I like to talk a lot - I'm turning my penchant for chatting into a career. All of these stops and starts, well that's what God Loves A Trier is all about. Why didn't I keep working at these career paths? Why didn't I commit to any of the hobbies I've taken up at various points, like dancing or ice-skating? Were they wrong for me, or was I just being lazy?

GKV: Are there other artists or work in arches live that you feel have an affinity with your piece- and why?

I think that #neednothing by Rob Jones and Michael O'Neill has something in common with God Loves A Trier. Amongst other things, I'm trying to figure out what impact the internet and TV have on young peoples' ability to put the time and effort into learning. We have everything we need at our fingertips, and it's so tempting to just mess about on Facebook or watch a whole TV series in a day, rather than working hard and learning a skill. 

#neednothing looks at the power of social media specifically, and its powers of manipulation. I think that there are other works that, like mine, are about finding yourself at a point in your life where you don't quite know how to fit in to society, two that spring to mind are Peter McMaster's Wuthering Heights and Lucy Hutson's Make Do and Mend Myself, although these are more concerned with gender than my work. Peter and Lucy are asking how to be a man/woman, I suppose I'm pondering how to be an adult.

GKV: It's interesting how you've describe your life so far,  and now you are making a work about how we can be distracted... But aren't you articulating something special about the way we are now socialised... And is there really a problem with being eclectic?


I don't think there's anything wrong with being eclectic, as you put it, but I've found that my habit of continually trying things out then getting bored with them has left me without any real skills. If an eclectic person has a few different things they are alright at...well that's not me, because I can't do very much at all. 

You know, I think I started to make this show because I was studying in London and it felt like everyone around me was bilingual or a gymnast or something else amazing AND they could make theatre. So I guess I started to want to create this show because I wanted something I could show off about. It was only when I started to write it that I realised it was a reaction to the point I'm at in my life - the transition from student to worker bee - and how I've gotten to this point without becoming exactly who I wanted to be. 

It's all about personal satisfaction, if you're happy with having little bits and pieces here and there that you can do rather than being outstanding at one thing then that's great. God Loves A Trier is about me realising that I'm not happy with that state of affairs - that I'm not satisfied with my current self.

GKV: But in an age where information is so freely available, and distraction is just a mouse click away, can theatre cope with such swift turn abouts as the net offers?

I have never seen the internet and theatre as being rivals, I think the internet can be manipulated for theatre and vice versa. It's also important that you know I'm not condemning the internet. I love the internet. I love TV; I love fast food; I love all these little things that make our lives easier and more fun. 

I can't really blame these things for the fact that I never stuck with any of my hobbies. I didn't have the internet in my house until I was 12 or 13, and I had given up on ballet, tap and jazz dancing as well as learning the clarinet well before that. Internet surfing or watching TV, they're my guilty pleasures, and I'm going to keep them around for the foreseeable future. 

I'm just hoping that I can find more of a balance now, find a pursuit that leaves me with something to show for it, rather than just being able to recite what's happened to the cast of Friends since it finished. The work I make is always a conversation. I'm not telling the audience what's right or wrong, I'm not trying to send out a message about how they should live. I'm just talking with them about where I'm at, because I reckon that's all anyone can really do.