Falling/Failing: some photos from my Failure Project

I wanted to share a few photos from my project. These were taken during one day of rehearsal; Lara and I were exploring falling, and I also spent some time creating puppets.

photo by Jorge Lizalde Studio Cano

photo by Jorge Lizalde Studio Cano

photo by Jorge Lizalde Studio Cano

photo by Jorge Lizalde Studio Cano

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Failure Project Day Ten: Tonight We Fly

Today, the last day of my research and development, was about revisiting and reviewing work. I had a few people coming to join us in the afternoon, and I wanted to make sure I could give them a good overview of what we've been doing for the past two weeks. So, we did that, and I got useful feedback and had a good discussion about the work, and then Lara and I went out for a drink to celebrate.

Now what? I want to sit down and look over the footage from the last two weeks, maybe transcribe a couple of verbal improvisations. Lara and I will let a little time pass, and then do a post-match interview for analysis. I will do some writing - a script, I suppose, but not one with any particular order. I need to get the various stories knocking about my head into words instead.

And then the task of finding the money and finding the support to get more studio time for development, and somewhere to show the piece. And then...?



Thanks for following the beginning of this journey. I'll keep blogging about the process here, no doubt, so if you are interested then check back here.

This process would have been sad, lonely and probably quite static without Lara Ward; it would have been less comfortable without rehearsal space provided by the Wales Millennium Centre; and it would not have been possible in this form at all without the support of the Arts Council of Wales.

Failure Project Day Nine: Making Friends

I didn't really know what we were going to do today. I'd thought maybe we could return to some of the improvisations I'd done on Tuesday; some of them had reached the point of feeling satisfactory, but others hadn't. But for some reason we decided to start with an object manipulation improvisation - I'd tried to bring in random objects to use in clowning last week, and one of them - a sprinkler - was still hanging about. Improvising with the sprinkler led to a challenge from Lara for me to choose three items from the costume bag to create a "safe space" for the object (I built the sprinkler a nest). That led in turn to animating the object, which in turn led to building a whole puppet out of the sprinkler and costume bits... which led to two more puppets and the passing of the whole morning.

Unexpected, and actually through-provoking. I love puppetry, and I've not had the opportunity to study or explore it much. So it felt in keeping with the failure ethos (I've not forgotten failure) to get stuck in and play without caring whether I was "doing it right". Puppets may also prove a lighter way to explore dark themes - I couldn't help recall a fantastic puppet show I saw at the Edinburgh Fringe years ago (saw twice actually, it struck me that hard) called Lily Through The Dark, which told the story of a young girl so grief-stricken after her father's death that she tries to kill herself and goes on a journey through the darkness to find him.

In the afternoon we explored falling, and stumbling - being off-kilter generally. It's possibly a very obvious visual metaphor in a study of depression, but I'm trying generally to build a physical vocabulary.

I had a photographer with us all day as well - Jorge Lizalde, of Studio Cano. His work is definitely worth checking out. I'll post some photos as I get them

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Failure Project Day Eight: Danse Macabre

one of Hans Holbein's 16th century Danse Macabre woodcuts

Today we focussed almost exclusively on the body. We're looking for what Lara keeps calling the "Big Ugly"; searching for release, movement that feels uncontrolled. We'd found euphoria, dancing for joy yesterday - and we returned to this today (when's the last time you skipped? it's hard to be unhappy when you skip) - but the darker end of the spectrum seems harder to tap into. Who wants to go there, voluntarily? But it seems worth exploring anyway.

We started with the spine, with movement that is initiated from the spine: shaking and spasms. It's exhausting, and near impossible for me to sustain for any length of time, but that in itself is interesting and strikes a chord with some of the narrative content I am considering.

And we worked with skin, and touch - comforting sensations, basic animal contact - the things that can really help a person in a depression. Do any of us get as much of that contact as we need? I'm not thinking about sexual contact. All the other primates spend time grooming each other, don't they?

From skin, we went back to bone, considering the fragility of our bodies. In one of my depressions I became so aware of my partner's skeleton, how close to the surface it lay, how vulnerable to breakage and exposure. I was terrified of losing my partner in some way, and this fear tortured me through this awareness of his fragility. I definitely think it is healthy to be aware of and to consider death - that's why I've always liked the medieval ideas of Memento Mori and the images of the Danse Macabre, like the one above. But these thoughts should be life-affirming rather than paralysing, right?

I'm finding our process interesting as well. We get stuck, and we have conversations around ideas and follow tangents and look things up on the internet. There's always a niggling worry in my head that maybe we're wasting time. Then suddenly something comes to me or Lara, and I try an improvisation that reveals a lot to us, and I realise that we've only arrived there because we took that circuitous path. It's a good reminder that creativity can't often be forced. And I should worry less generally.

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Failure Project Day Seven: Gliding Through The Sea of Silent Euphoria

Today felt immense. Yesterday felt immense too, but in a weighty way that I found hard to shake off in the evening - Lara had to remind me today that improvising movement while someone shouts negative things at you (it made sense at the time) will take a toll on a person.

Today we continued with physical improvisations. I do the improvisations, and Lara has taken on more of the role of director/movement director. We're trying to explore the physical and emotional sensations of depression. It is actually quite difficult to recall, when (like now) I am not depressed, the specificities of those feelings. But I know how I have described them to myself in the past, and so we have begun with that. As an example, we spent a lot of time today trying to pin down the feelings and physical sensations that underly the social anxiety that grips me when I am depressed - trying to find the word, the image, that seems closest. I think we got close by the end of the day.

We're also exploring contrasts and extremes - I spent some time today dressed as a giant golden sausage - and this afternoon we started to tap into movement that expresses euphoria and a sense of release. Thinking about euphoria led us to thinking about the things we do to connect to each other, and how depression is often a severing of or inability to make those connections. We closed the day by watching an absolutely classic TED talk by Jill Bolte Taylor - "My Stroke of Insight". If you haven't seen it, and you can spare 20 minutes, just watch it right now.

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Failure Project Day Six: What I Mean When I Talk About Failure

I spent the weekend thinking about the work we'd done last week, and trying to decide what to do with the week ahead of me. Some of the provocations from the observers I'd had in on Friday afternoon stuck particularly in my mind, especially a suggestion I'd had emailed to me on Saturday: "define to yourself what specifically you are exploring about failure". Would that help? Of course. Blindingly obvious, again, now that I consider it. I've spent a lot of time asking other people what they think about failure, and what kind of shaping force it plays in their lives. It has led to a lot of insightful conversations. But ultimately I need to know what I am making a piece about.

Ultimately, failure is secondary. I think I need to make a piece about depression - I've actually been thinking about it for years now. Failure is a major part of my experience of depression, mostly because it is easy for me to use perceived failures as weapons against myself. I guess I've been avoiding stating that with decisiveness, because I often tell myself that "personal is not the same as important". Most of the time it isn't. But perhaps, with regards to mental health, it is.

(I'm aware that I'm still not sounding entirely certain, with my "I thinks" and "perhaps"... I want to leave space to change my mind in the process of exploration).

So this morning Lara and I began by having a chat about how I wanted my exploration of depression (and accompanying failures) to inform our physical work. I brought in an excellent picture book called The Red Tree by Shaun Tan - I can't emphasise enough how much I think it's worth getting your hands on a copy - because the illustrations have always seemed to me to express some of the experiences of depression that are difficult to put into words.

We spent the rest of the day exploring the movement of impulses around the body, and minimalism in movement. This was really to address my concern that I can't dance depression, because nothing happens. So we tried to answer the question: how little can I do and still be doing something?

It's not going to be all unhappiness. My life isn't all unhappiness. I just happen to have this thing that rears its head up occasionally and seriously affects my experience of the world. So I need to explore it in the way that I know best.

As a side note, it sounds like there are some interesting shows about mental health at the Edinburgh Fringe this year.

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Failure Project Day Five: We Want to See You Fail

photo by Lara Ward.

A shorter blog post today, because it's late and I'm tired.

We spent today trying more exercises pairing movement tasks with verbal improvisation. In the morning we tried to make the improvisation about successes in our lives. We raided the costume pile again as well, trying to dress for success.

In the afternoon we had a small audience of invited guests for an open rehearsal, and we continued the exercises of the morning, but changing the verbal exploration to failure instead of success.

Useful provocations included the observation that I appear quite good at these exercises. How do I find a way to fail, or come close to failing, in performance, without contrivance? Do I need to do this, if I am making a piece about failure? I don't really have the answer to that. I could attempt to do many things I'm not any good at, but is that actually creatively interesting? One of many questions to consider this weekend.

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Failure Project Day Four: Unquantifiable Failures

Today felt oddly difficult. I suppose I am tired, and Lara is too, and yesterday's work had started to stir up the darker currents that run through the topic of failure.

I've had the (blindingly obvious) personal revelation that dancers probably use emotional recall as much as actors do, so we spent the morning looking through all the questionnaire responses that I received, searching for words that resonate. A recurring word was "expectations" - our own, other people's, those of society. I definitely connect to that; I make a lot of effort to manage my expectations of myself, mostly because I often find other's expectations of me too uncomfortable to bear. We spent some time exploring weight and resistance in movement as a result.

Yesterday we'd also spent some time talking about times in our lives that we've both felt trapped and constrained, so today we decided to take that further. We explored improvising with actual constraints: how can I move if I strap one leg up, with my calf against the back of my thigh? How about if I connect my wrist to an ankle?

We also returned to an exploration of text and movement, because at some point I'm going to have to consider content if I go ahead and make a piece out of this. Again, working with personal stories of my own, we explored movement that works with the text, and movement unrelated to text: how does the content affect movement, or movement affect content? When do they complement each other, and when is there tension?

I feel like we've moved from quantifiable failures at the beginning of this week - i.e. can I get this choreography right? - to unquantifiable ones. How can you express an experience like depression through movement, when the experience of it seems so much about remaining in stasis?

I know I said that we'd return to Sergei and Beyoncé, but I have a feeling that they have served their purpose for now. Never say never, though - I'm still bringing in my heels every day.

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Failure Project Day Three: Be the Best Version of Yourself

Today we finally cracked into the sackful of costumes I've been dragging into the rehearsal room every day. We dressed up and played a clowning-game as a kind of failure warm-up. Then I set us an exercise I first encountered in a workshop led by Greg Wohead: create the Best Version of yourself - the artist you would be and the work you would make if you could back and do everything again. It's always insightful, because it makes me think, why don't I just make that work now? And it can be reassuring as well, to realise what things about myself I would never want to change. I feel like if I want to think about failure, then I have to to consider success as well, and this exercise seemed a good way to examine what we personally consider indicators of success.

Lara and I interviewed each other's Best Versions, and then, interestingly, we moved into a discussion of our actual selves and the journeys leading to where we are now - the opportunities we didn't get, either because they didn't exist, or we were advised otherwise, or simply because we didn't grab them. It seemed organic next to work on physical improvisations around those journeys, to explore what success and failure feel like as qualities of movement. We did individual improvisations around difficult times in our lives and the transitions out of them, and I also explored telling a personal story while moving, and allowing the movement to effect the story and vice versa.

It's felt like quite a substantial day, and it's given me a lot to consider about how I approach movement improvisation - how the tools I have as an actor are transferrable to a different practice.

We've not forgotten about Sergei and Beyoncé of course (how could we?), but it was good to take a break from them (and think about what we want to do next with those dances).

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Failure Project Day Two: was that as hard as you expected?

Today Lara and I were both quite tired and sore. I think we sprinted into our first day with a lot of enthusiasm yesterday, and... well, it's not a failure to admit that our bodies have limits.

We continued working on our impossible tasks regardless. It's funny how  - even knowing it is not possible, given the person that I am - I still want to get the dance routine right. And I feel frustrated that I can't get it right. This is also the person that I am. The alternative to getting it "right" is to make the dances our own, somehow. Lara observed that there is a childlike quality to me, as I watch the music video and simultaneously try to copy it - a little girl joyously imitating her hero... when I can be joyous about the process. I don't think I was unafraid of failure as a child - I didn't like getting things wrong, and I hated being laughed at. It's still a struggle willingly to make a fool of myself, which is probably why I need to do it if I want to examine failure.

I recently became interested in how sports players and managers talk in their post-match interviews: the language they use, the way they can say a lot without actually saying anything of substance, the often pointed questions about failure they have to answer.



We spent some time watching these interviews today, and then tried to make our own versions - breaking down the many ways in which I am not Beyoncé, and Lara is not Sergei Polunin, but using the language and shape of a post-match interview. We looked for post-audition interviews to see if they are comparable, but it seems that the world of competitive arts (Britain's Got Talent etc) just borrow from the sports world, and ultimately it feels a lot more manufactured and not as interesting.

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Failure Project Day One: I Am Not Beyoncé.

I'll be blogging here about my failure project, on a daily basis (time-permitting), and cross-posting to social media and the NTW community. 

How to begin?

One of the sources for my interest in failure was the music of the Portsmouth Sinfonia, an art-school orchestra in the 1970s, whose members were unable to play their instruments. They went ahead and recorded popular classics anyway. They are worth looking up  - there are plenty of recordings available on youtube. I love the glorious way they embrace failure, turn it around, and make some astonishing art in the process. I didn't really know how to do something comparable.

On Sunday I was sitting in my garden, enjoying the sunshine and reading the Gob Squad Reader, and skipped to the final chapter "On Failure". This jumped out:

"I'm not interested in ability, but rather the feeling of empowerment; that one empowers oneself to do something. Especially when you can't actually do it. You tell yourself, 'Even though I can't do it, or even though this is now a technically bad do-it-yourself situation, I'll do it anyway.' And this [...] is what is emotional about our work; it gives people a good feeling [...] Because as an audience member, you have the feeling that possibilities are opening up, rather than doors closing. That is the problem with ability. You see it and think, 'that is perfect, but what does it have to do with me?'..." (pp. 119-120)

The chapter goes on to describe "impossible tasks" the company set themselves in their work, and that sounded to me as good a starting point as any.

So today Lara and I started by setting impossible tasks for each other. In the spirit of the Portsmouth Sinfonia, I thought we should aim for something that people might recognise. I chose for her a music video that went viral in the last year or so - Sergei Polunin dancing in Hozier's "Take me to the church" -  because I thought that although Lara's a dancer, trying to approximate the work of a male, Royal Ballet dancer would be pretty challenging:



Lara chose Beyoncé's "Single Ladies" music video for me, specifically the choreography of one of the backing dancers rather than Queen Bey herself (only because she stops dancing to sing at certain points):



It's been such a fun day. It feels really freeing to throw myself into something that I know I have little chance of perfecting. We're both pretty sore as a result, and I need to bring some high heels in tomorrow properly to do justice to the choreography.


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My Failure Project

I am interested in failure: mostly in my attitude towards failure and how this attitude affects my behaviour. So I am planning to make a one-woman show about failure. I am right at the very beginning of this project, and in addition to figuring out my thoughts on the subject, I would like to hear what other people think. 

If you are interested in helping, please fill out this survey on your own relationship with failure. I'm fortunate to have some time coming up when I will be able to think about this project almost exclusively, so if you are able to respond within the next 3 weeks, that will be particularly helpful (but replies after 3 weeks will not be too late). It's entirely anonymous. Even if I have emailed you this page directly, I won't know which response is yours. I hope this means you can be honest and open in your answers.

It's early days, so I don't yet know what shape this show will take. But there will likely be storytelling, and movement and, I hope, lots of laughter.

See you when we get there!

thanks, Catriona 

From the Jungle.

Why do all journeys begin really early in the morning? I'm sitting in the front room of a flat in London, looking out over a stunning night time view of the Thames and the great white blister that was the Millennium Dome and now is called the This-Company-Paid-A-Lot-To-Have-Its-Name-On-Me Centre or Arena or Something.

Anyway.

I travelled here today from Cardiff. Tomorrow morning, very early, my friend and I are going to get up and trek across town to Heathrow, meet another couple of friends and then fly to Borneo. I'm quite excited about this, though it doesn't quite feel real just yet.

Sad to say, right now I'm even more excited about the fact that the cruise ship the Clown has been working on for over a week stops in Southampton tomorrow (Rome to Southampton, oh the glamour), which means I actually get to hear his voice before I have to put my mobile away and get on a plane. That feels real. More excitement will follow.

I will try to blog as much as I can from Borneo. I'm going to be working on this project.

We'll always have Aberystwyth.

This is the eve of our little trip to Aberystwyth to perform the last show of this particular run of Serious Money. There may be life in this show yet, but much further down the line I suspect.

Here are some more fantastic photos of the show, taken by Cardiff-based photographer Jorge Lizalde.

Here is our glowing review in The Guardian. The print copy was out today and featured a photo of yours truly and fellow actor Tom Mumford. Ironically, I can't actually afford to withdraw any money to buy a newspaper. Ah the glamour of an actor's life...

And another great review in Buzz magazine.

Serious Money

Some great photographs of rehearsals for Waking Exploits' Serious Money, taken by Simon Broughton.

The show's opening in just over a week at Chapter in Cardiff.

a tale of two (very different) plays

I'm working on two theatre projects right now that could not be more different from each other. But it's interesting (to me at least) to observe how they're feeding each other.

The first is Death and the Maiden, by Ariel Dorfman: a play simultaneously about the aftermath of torture/oppression on an individual as well as a whole society. I'm working on this with Bambo Soyinka, who is involved in a sort of director's mentorship programme with Living Pictures, and the focus is on the process rather than a production. For me, it's been an experience of re-learning (or perhaps just learning!) the art of subtlety. I haven't worked on a naturalistic play in years, probably not since drama school. Drama school has been playing on my mind, as lessons that my particularly sodden course leader tried to impart on us keep dropping like the proverbial penny in my head (he also said that this would happen) as we work through the process of discovery in rehearsal. Just listen to your partner on stage. Just react. Don't "play" anything. Just communicate, actually communicate. All so simple, and so bloody difficult at the same time.

Case in point, the other project: Caryl Churchill's Serious Money, which will be staged in three weeks here in Cardiff. The play moves at a break-neck speed, the characters seem caricatures (and there's so bloody many of them!) and every day in rehearsal feels like two by the time we get to the end of it. I'm playing, primarily, a wealthy Peruvian business woman called Jacinta Condor. It's early days still (but also not, as finances dictate short rehearsal periods) but I feel as though I am casting about for a foothold. I'm turning to the work I've been doing with Bambo to see if that will help me; not that I'm sounding great psychological depths with this role, but because there has to be a degree of truth beneath even the most extreme caricature. Right?

I'm quite stressed, but it also feels good. I thought for a while that only devising work could provide the level of satisfaction I want from theatre-making, but I can see how wrong I was. Not that I am going to give up on devising - the right idea or project will come along at some point (with any luck it will be something like the film I made in Poland last year, which was a brilliant experience). It feels good to be doing something nominally different though, and to see what connections there are.

More thoughts may drift to the surface over the next few weeks.

the cat sat on the mac

The woman thus had difficulty typing.

It's a Friday night, in London. I've just finished a shift in the call centre, and I'm "home", in my temporary home for this week, house- and cat-sitting for a friend. I've got one emotionally needy kitten on my hands, who is clearly convinced that anything I am attempting to eat or drink must surely be her next favourite food if only she could try it.

I've been busy, and therefore mostly silent. It's been a while since I've had properly full days. It's been even longer since I've felt like I've got the energy to tackle them. I realised just the other week: I feel like myself, and that brought home to be just how far I've been over the last year from the self I enjoy being.

The cat's playing an energetic game of catch with herself. At this time of night, that doesn't bode well. This morning I woke with a start, opening my eyes to the surreal sight of the kitten sailing, in what seemed like slow motion, gracefully over the bed. She appeared suspended for a moment, but hit the ground in an explosion of frenetic energy. I now understand the phrase "bouncing off the walls".

Cat-watching aside, I've also been rehearsing this show. After the madness that was the film shoot in Poland, this called for an abrupt change of gears. I'm making theatre in a very different way from usual - "usual" being devising for me. Now, we have a text! We have a director! We had a set before we started rehearsing! We have someone else worrying about what the heck we're all going to wear on stage! It's a pleasant novelty. I miss devising though. Perhaps it's a good thing to learn that I relish a certain amount of chaos and unknowing in what I do.

how to sprout a pea.

I'm touring the latest incarnation of our family show PEA with my theatre company again - our website's over here if you want to check it out.

I'm getting fonder and fonder of this show. I had an idea about a show aaaaaages ago, a shaky line-drawing of a thought based on a book and a song, and the show that we made didn't quite fit that original idea, which definitely made me struggle a bit. That's just the reality of collaborating with other people though, and I definitely value that more than dreaming up ideas by myself - without the rest of the company this little pea shoot would never have seen the light of day. Weighing me down as well, however, was the fact that I somehow didn't feel "qualified" or even particularly good at making family theatre (I like that term better than children's theatre - I want to make shows that adults are happy to watch too).

PEA is turning more into the show that I originally hoped we'd make. It's loosely framed around the fairy story of The Princess and the Pea, but really it's about two sisters who at first only have each other; it's about the importance of the family you're born with, sure, but also the equally important family that you find on your journey through the world.

And I'm growing in confidence about making theatre for young people. We've been highly fortunate to be taken under the wing of the Night Out/Noson Allan scheme run by the Arts Council Wales, which encourages communities to book theatre shows by taking away the financial risk involved. This has given us the chance to take our original rough draft of a show and build upon it. More importantly, it means we've been performing in areas where theatre is not a regular part of day-to-day community life. In fact, we might be some of these children's first experience of theatre. Ever. There's a thought to make me pause.

So we have experiences like last night, when we performed in a school in which the event was also organised by a group of "young promoters": students guided through the mechanics of promoting and producing a night out at the theatre. They had enthusiasm in spadefuls. It was overwhelming. We were struggling to load into the school hall, set up, rehearse some bits that appear to change with every new space we encounter AND run a cue-to-cue. These things seemed very important to us. But actually our little show was a tiny piece of a much bigger event, which was an experience that was giving these young people a sense of personal agency, control and ownership. For that, I'll happily endure again what was perhaps the most chaotic pre-show I've ever experienced. It was more rock concert than evening at the theatre, with audience energy at peak levels and appreciation - when we earned it - granted at high volume. And that, I think, is the way it should be.

And look: these kids knew their stuff, there were even backstage security passes AND a post-show photo call. We've arrived.

Devoted, but less Disgruntled.

I began this blog offline, on a train out of Paddington, heading home. Now I’m back in the comfortable solitude of my room, a typical Welsh day throwing sunshine and rain against my window. The memory of the tedium of my work for the last three weeks has faded; I’ve got a measure of residual anxiety about some personal affairs tugging at the back of my mind, but even that appears manageable right now. I’ve had a bloody good weekend, at the Devoted & Disgruntled Open Space organised by Improbable, and I’m feeling inspired and, well, stronger.

So many aspects of the weekend stirred me up that I’m not sure where to begin. Perhaps with Open Space technology itself. This was my first encounter with this framework: it enables a large group of people to discover the interests of its individual members, draw like-minded souls together, and provoke discourse and action. It is, as Improbable’s Phelim McDermott points out, just the way life is anyway.

Just the way life is anyway. You follow your interests, attend the sessions on the topics closest to your heart, and gradually a network of kindred spirits forms itself around you. One such spirit observed to me, “you meet the people you’re meant to meet”. And, as my friend Lang pointed out, it’s an expression of belief in the power of the group. Aside from that, running an Open Space confers responsibility on the individual - you only get out of the experience what you’ve taken the trouble to seek out or create.

So here’s a brief summary of what I did over two and a half days: sang some secular gospel, emptied my pockets with a group of strangers to see what the contents might reveal, argued about circus & theatre, discussed writers, got inspired by soundwalks and an aural landscape project, sat in a silent circle listening to the session buzz around us, chatted about the concept of home, got distracted by a spontaneous wrestling (wrasslin’!! see picture!) match, pondered the meaning of devising, considered the performance possibilities of virtual space.

Conclusions were many, but chief amongst them: we appear to get quite hung up on Capital Letters and genres and semantics, necessary I suppose in order to explain ourselves to each other. I think the best performance work I have seen, however, has generally been impossible to categorise within a genre. And the same applies to people: I’m not only an actor, and I’m aware that every time I introduce myself as such the term summons a definition in most folks’ heads that has little to do with the work and art I make (“Have I seen you on telly?” “I dunno - how extensively do you watch crap telly?”). I’m a writer as well - not just because of something like this blog, but also due to the fact that I devise theatre (there was quite a lengthy discussion as to what this means. My definition is, to make a piece of work for performance that previously did not exist. Improvisation is one tool used in devising). I have a cabaret act that dances on the line between performance poetry and song, so I suppose I’m a singer and poet too. I’m also a runner. And I’m fairly obsessed with cooking for people. I’d consider these last two part of my life-work as well. I met a number of people over the weekend who either used the term “performer” or “theatre-maker” to describe themselves; I think I prefer the latter, if I have to decide. It’s pretty self-explanatory I think, and if it’s not then it will at least provoke an interesting conversation.

Maybe I’ll get new business cards made.

My favourite thought of the three days came in the closing circle, and was spoken in the context of what prevents us from realising our dreams: “if we talked to our friends the way we talk to ourselves, we’d have none”. If I were at all into body art, I’d get that etched on my wrist.

The closing of the Open Space on the last day was moving: we rose, turned around, felt the mass of people at our backs, and walked out of the circle. I hope the sense of gentle propulsion that gave me continues to carry me forward for a while.

reason for it all

I watch a lot of theatre. Most of the time it feels like hard work. I often feel disillusioned and frustrated, or worse, indifferent (for a truly inspiring piece of writing about this feeling, read this blog post by Amanda Palmer). And then, occasionally, I'm fortunate enough to have an experience that reminds me why I've thrown myself into this whole theatre malarky in the first place.

One of those experiences was this past week at the Barbican, watching The Team perform their show Architecting. They are astounding. They are unapologetically ambitious - the themes they tackle are epic in scope: reconstruction - personal, national, global. They are for the most part excellent performers. And they are also my age. I was at the theatre with the Texan - we run a theatre company together with a few other people we met at drama school. We left the show near speechless, shaking our heads. It felt like a wake-up call, reminding us that we also should be making theatre like that: we have the abilities, but perhaps of late we have lost the drive. We need to sit down and reassess why we want to make theatre. I don't think there is one correct and constant answer to this - we discover new reasons for working all the time - but the question is important and one that we need to ask ourselves repeatedly.

We need to make theatre from material that is close to our hearts and deeply personal. I don't mean the stuff and drama of our daily lives, although I do not dismiss that either. I mean our ideals, our politics, our beliefs. We need not to be afraid of taking ourselves seriously. The Team take themselves seriously, and so they should.

The day after seeing Architecting, I went to a free exhibition at the Museum of Everything near Chalk Farm. This was also deeply inspiring, a collection of outsider and folk art. Most of the artists never thought of themselves as such and were unrecognised in their lifetimes. I wandered around the exhibit, and felt somewhat in awe of our human desire to create, without hope of an audience. Pieces of art made because they must be made, and then in many cases shut away for years without anyone ever seeing them. Scattered throughout the exhibition are pieces written by contemporary artists; one struck me in particular for the way that it summed up how I felt about watching The Team. The artist described his first encounter with his fellow's piece of art, and said that what he felt was envy, but a positive kind: ultimately he was glad that this work existed.

So, all in all, a thought-provoking few days in London. I'm back in Wales now for a week or so, and glad to be back. I cross the Severn Bridge with palpable relief; I like there is such a tangible boundary between where I've come from and the place that is my home for the present.