Hugs, kisses and broken-legged wishes to our friend Laura as she fine- tunes her new show, ‘Running on Air’, before its premiere tomorrow (4 August) at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.
We were pleased to be able to give Laura some help with the show, which takes place entirely within the gentle confines of her ‘78 VW camper, Joni. Based on the rough draft we saw some weeks back, the show’s gonna be a corker: intimate, funny and very very fresh.
Joni will make her Fringe home in the bustling Pleasance Courtyard which will add to the fun. Get ur seat in the magic bus now; tix surely won’t last. Book either at www.edfringe.com or www.pleasance.co.uk .
Aug 032010
Aug 022010
From http://reauthoring.wordpress.com
Amused and bemused by Alex Clark’s big feature in the Guardian Review section this past Saturday, chronicling in some detail the rise of scrum-like live literature events so varied in tone and scope that she, wisely, doesn’t even try to slap a collective label on them. But we are more foolhardy: let’s call this movement-ish thing, ‘Cabaret Lit’. And let’s talk about why it’s not the other way ’round.
We at the Re:authoring Project have, in our various guises, attended lots of CabLit events including some mentioned in Clark’s piece. As she notes, they’re often a lot of fun: chaotic, boozily entertaining, occasionally even thought provoking. But I would argue that they’re not really about literature. I would argue that you could replace the ‘lit’ in most CabLit events with most anything else that is nominally thought-provoking–with politics, with psychotherapy, with a troupe of dancing bears–and still have essentially the same experience. The CabLit movement is really about the Cab, not the Lit. At best, it’s about a post-modern retro idea of a bygone literary experience; dark, noisy, combative, vaguely risque…think the Algonquin Club or the Stein/Toklas salon, add some social networking tools and a portable PA, and you’ve got the template for pretty much everything mentioned in Clark’s piece.
I realise that this may sound bitchy, but it isn’t meant that way. Anything that takes a fair swing at opening literature to new audiences is to be applauded, particularly if it is meeting with some success as some of these CabLit gigs clearly are…as I’ve said, they can be fun and interesting. But CabLit is ultimately a conservative movement, a truth that Clark herself is clever enough to note: “Even though readings are shortish and punctuated by live music, they are still essentially readings.”
Within such conservatism, well-disguised as the hip-n-now, Clark highlights something that is more insidious: “What of the writers who can’t, or don’t want to (perform)? Those for whom the words on the page are the thing, not their talent for doing a turn?”
CabLit has no answers to these questions; indeed, the Guardian itself gives the game away by electing to use a photo of Zadie Smith, reading at Bookslam event, to illustrate the CabLit phenomenon. Surely, Smith is the poster child for the CabLit generation: young, beautiful, articulate, writes like a dream, and no more at home than in the limelight. And oh yes, established: no grubbing up the ranks for Ms. Smith, which is what the CabLit movement, like our humble Re:authoring Project, nominally was founded to address.
In a literary world where life really is a cabaret (c’mon, you knew it was coming…) it is increasingly tough for the shy, nerdy, perhaps even physically unattractive writer to break into the limelight…precisely because of the nature of the limelight that is becoming de rigueur. We worry that movements like CabLit create self-fulfilling prophecies: the good performer becoming the lauded writer on the merit of the former skill, not the latter.
It’s still early days here at the Re:authoring Project; we are small and toiling, aspiring to mighty things. But we began this endeavour by stating categorically that our process did not require the author to become a performer, even while it would strive to keep him or her at the centre of the work. Deviser, manipulator, self-effacing deconstructor….sure. But people, particulary writers, are either performers or they’re not. We want to work with them find a unique and compelling alternative live voice for their work…one that is literarily, if not necessarily literally, theirs. We stand by that slice of dogma because it keeps us focused on the writing itself. If that ain’t right, all the rest is noise.
I surely won’t be the only culturista blogging today about the convergence of arts and technology, having just returned from the very enjoyable Shift Happens conference. The challenge with emerging from such a whiz-bang, upbeat, the future is NOW (dammit!) kinda event is that one can feel quite dazed, in much the same way that too many Christmas presents or too many sweets can make you feel a bit ill at ease (or just plain ill).
Such feelings are, of course, largely misplaced: tech, whether high or low, will not save your arts company from bankruptcy or propel it to a BAFTA, if such things motivate you. Twitter, immersive 3-D, motion capture suits…all merely tools, like a shoelace or a crab pick. But that’s an increasingly heretical view these days in the arts. While no one is likely to brand you as obsolete if your kitchen lacks a crab pick, if you’re out of step with the latest tech there are some who think you might as well float skyward and explode in a shower of light, a la the grim 30th birthday ceremony in Logan’s Run. I’m only half-joking here. At Shift Happens, one breathlessly overconfident speaker asked, in a very shouty way, who amongst the crowd did NOT have Twitter or Facebook at the centre of their life. After a moment, a brave woman limply raised her hand. The speaker was gape-jawed; in the crowd, a silence reigned like that of deep space. If there was an App for virtual tarring and feathering, I would have feared for the brave woman’s virtual life.
For all I know, this Twitterless wonder is a shit-hot artist (I never found out: a dozen men in bright white hazmat suits immediately rappelled from the rafters and bundled her away, reportedly for radical reprogramming). But isn’t it enough to be a shit-hot artist these days, tech or no? I ask not out of Luddishness, having worked for years in the Silicon Valley in jobs that brought me into daily contact with the bleeding edge of purportedly world-changing technology. I have my Twitter and Facebook, my AudioBoo and Beejive. And of course, I have my blog(s).
But there’s an increasingly noisy little voice in my head urging me to turn off (my iPhone and laptop), tune out (of Twitter, Facebook, Skype, Wordpress, Posterous, etc) and drop away from a race I’m not likely to win, nor ever find myself interested enough in to try. The race, I think, is for me to become sufficiently one with my technology so that it guides my personal, professional and creative life, every bit as much as I guide it. To win the race, one has to surrender to the race itself.
Here’s an idea. Maybe it’s time for an antidote to events like Shift Happens and its inspiration, the much-moneyed and ultra-hip TED. Maybe a conference not with high tech or even low tech, but with NO tech! Just minds, hands and voices…y’know, old school, keeping it r-e-a-l. Hmm, this might have legs. A quick round on my Twitter feed, and it should develop nicely.
A lovely little bit on BBC1 the other night about the ongoing ‘human book’ programme run by libraries here and there in the UK. Lovely people doing it, lovely motivations behind it. In short, instead of going to a library and borrowing a book, you ‘borrow’ a person. They tell you something about themselves,and you can ask questions. Ideally, civil and enjoyable conversation is had, never something to be sniffed at in our ever-more aggressive world. As I said, lovely.
But while the folks on offer are certainly human, are they really books? I say no. A book, however it is delivered, is a work crafted by someone with a particular skill and intention; whether non-fiction or novel, it is a work of creativity, a work of art. You might counter that talking with someone can embody the same qualities that motivate literature, and certainly such a debate could go on into the night fueled by bottle upon bottle of one’s favourite tipple. But we’re talking about the differences both in process and product. The act of walking down the street contains movement, expression, motivation, intention and, in many cases, grace and beauty. But is it dance? After writing this, I will walk downstairs with my empty coffee mug, turn on the tap, wash it out, place it in a drying rack, towel off my hands, wander back upstairs, and probably return to my computer to complete some other things that need completing. Is that a performance? The cycle I described has a beginning, middle and end; it contains motivation, story (albeit a dull one), a performer, props, a setting….
You might argue that I’m making a proverbial mountain out of a proverbial molehill here; you might even be right. But in a world in which books are increasingly devalued–and in the UK, can’t we say the same of art in general?–it feels ok to be a bit reductive, perhaps even a bit pedantic in defending even the smallest, even the most innocent of further degradations to the idea of artistic process, intention and engagement. This is not about the form of the book: previous posts have laid out my position therein, which is that the medium is changing and in the process changing the message and how it is received and interpreted by audiences. That’s all fine. But if we can argue ’til dawn about when a book is a book, surely the lines must be clearer about when a book is NOT a book? Engaging someone in conversation, however valuable it might be, isn’t the same as engaging with a professionally crafted narrative. That’s chat, not literature. More than ever, it’s important to shout out the difference.
Apr 162010
cross-posted from http://reauthoringproject.wordpress.com
Funny, the conversations you can find yourself sucked into while casually perusing a distant friend’s Facebook site. And so it was for me earlier this week, as I innocently replied to a posted article about the future of books; or more specifically, about the future of books as seen in these early days of Apple’s much-hyped iPad.
It was a thoughtful (if somewhat disjointed) article, the basic premise being that writers who start writing ‘for’ the iPad or Kindle or any other device as if it were merely a snazzier conveyer of a traditional form were doomed. The future winners of the Darwinian scrum now consuming the publishing world, the article concluded, were those who would think about how to tell their stories in a way that took maximum advantage of how new technologies engaged with their audiences. Making the story part-read, part-game, for example; or offering clues in the text that lead to embedded story enhancers on the web.
I’m all for such things as long as story remains paramount, which was the article’s primary point, and it was in this spirit I that offered a ‘huzzah’ on my friend’s FB page for bringing this tidbit to light. Alas, I was quite immediately flamed by another of her FB friends, who said essentially that he wondered what I was smoking. Surely, the flamer said, books were books and e-books or any other ‘e’ interpretation of text was something other than a book, and therefore not to be spoken of in the same hallowed tones as we must, so the flamer said, surely speak of ‘proper’ books.
As the flamer and I traded broadsides, a spot of Googling revealed him to be a rather accomplished and reasonably well-known author himself. The broadsides gradually morphed into a kind of detente as our (rather long) exchange moved to the diminishing opportunities for professional authors, and particularly authors who focus on non-fiction, which requires great expenditures of time, research, and travel, and therefore money (as in, literary advances) to produce. The flamer, whose work generally falls into this category, noted sadly that he’d seen his advances go from livable to laughable to non-existent: this despite prizes, press, and decent readership.
We concluded our exchange with a virtual handshake of sorts since I, too, know several writers with roughly the same literary profile and trajectory. I didn’t tell my nemesis-turned-(sort-of)-comrade-in-arms that some of these writers, rather than howling about a changing publishing world, had made conscious choices to do things differently. I didn’t say that some of them were beginning to reap dividends from doing so. I left that exchange wondering if I’d ever see the flamer’s name on a book again. I hope I do; he clearly does great work.
I feel fortunate to have retained a fair amount of flexibility in my thinking about writing and its changing forms and audiences. But it’s all too obvious that there are many writers out there who cannot see past ‘the book’, or even a very specific idea of what makes for a worthwhile book. Exhibit A: at one point, amidst an exchange about self-publishing, the flamer wrote that surely if one’s book doesn’t crack the Amazon top million, it isn’t worth much creatively. A dubious assertion indeed in a publishing world dominated by the likes of Dan Brown and JK Rowling.
The author of the article that started this whole saga, who proudly admitted to being only 21, said with great enthusiasm that if George Orwell had had an iPad and other tech gizmos to enhance his writing arsenal, he would “have blown our minds.” Maybe: would 1984 have been any more potent had Orwell decided, say, to embed a tiny webcam in the e-book version and have readers surreptitiously eavesdrop on each other? Discuss!
But at the least, one likes to think he’d have understood that just as sheepskin gave way to papyrus, and painstakingly-rendered monkish script gave way to Gutenberg, the form, function and use of ‘the book’ is changing again. But people still want stories, and they always will. Every writer should find solace and light in that idea.
Growing up in Midwestern America, amidst the trailing moral vapors of its Puritan origins, I was consistently trained to be on guard against hubris. Any form of braggadocio, so it went, was catnip for bad fortune, an invitation for a wrist-slap from god, a hair-trigger for the sky to fall. We learn only later, of course, that this is bollocks: some of the most powerful, most successful people on the planet, whether good human beings or not, also display a clear penchant for bigging themselves up.
Still, if you’re schooled from the cradle to hide your light under the proverbial bushel, it can be hard to celebrate the good stuff…even (gasp!) to brag about how great it feels when things are going well. But sometimes the bushel simply can’t contain what it’s meant to hide. Sometimes, ya gotta just say, ‘Huzzah for me/us!’ and disregard whatever existential jeopardy might ensue.
It’s been a banner few weeks here in the jolly Nimbleverse, said banner-ness coming after many months of furious creative activity. We’ve been running this way and that, developing ideas, cajoling creative friends, explicating concepts, enthusing upon themes…the usual, in other words, except more so because we’ve just been a-brim with new stuff of late.
It’s fun to be so in the flow, to have the ideas just a-comin’ and a-comin’. Arguably the only thing better is to have several ideas grow into projects, which is the happy situation we’ve found ourselves in of late; either because we’ve decided one way or t’other that they’re viable, or because someone has decided it for us and is giving us the resources to make something happen (resources are always nice, of course…). Both results feels really, really good…so good, in fact, that we just couldn’t resist shouting, ‘Bully for us!’
We’ll talk more soon about the specifics of what we’ve been fortunate enough to put into play of late. But today, share with us a big ‘Huzzah!’ and a virtual glass of fizz. (And knock wood, of course, that the Fates take our joyful outburst for what it is. We’re a humble bunch here. Honest…)
Mar 312010
This may be the only entry in the blogosphere to offer a creative comparison of the mega-blockbuster-smasheroony film Avatar and the economically more humble yet equally riveting French school docu-drama The Class. This is not a film review, though. It’s a consideration of high-stakes creative risk-taking.
Starting with Avatar, which I saw only last night, being surely among the last cinema-goers in the world to do so. A long New Yorker article published last year offers the best overview of the new film-making technology and processes invented–not adapted, invented–to create the wonderfully visceral world of the film. Of course, incredible sums of money were applied to making Avatar and we now know (as the article didn’t) that incredible sums of money were returned from adoring cinema-goers around the world. Fair play, really.
Say what you will about Avatar creator James Cameron, he took some remarkable risks to make the film, and to make it in such an uncompromising way. The New Yorker piece points out that Cameron hadn’t done a film in more than a decade, since the titanic Titanic. But that story, being practically legend, almost sold itself; by contrast, the eco-fantasy of Avatar was totally unfamiliar, with leaked early screening feedback making it sound like the extraterrestrial lovechild of Dances with Wolves and Mogambo (my favourite early review: ‘Smurf porn’). The money, the tech, the weird alien world with its decidedly terrestrial references…as a risk of, er, titanic proportions Avatar could have gone horribly wrong. It didn’t, but Cameron and his backers didn’t know that at the start.
And so, to The Class (warning: spoiler alert!), a risk-taking exercise not about technology but around narrative development. The film’s process began with a non-fiction book by former teacher Francois Begadeau, which chronicled a year in the life of a challenging school in the Paris suburbs. Director Laurent Cantet then worked with Begadeau to adapt the book into a fictional script to be filmed for the big screen So far, so Dead Poets Society.
But then Cantet decided that he wanted real students, without any acting experience, to play the part of students in the film. He engaged an average (meaning, not BRIT School) French high school in the project then ran devising workshops that riffed on the script…and of course, ultimately changed it. The students became, in the film, devised versions of themselves, hence the film’s enigmatic blurring of documentary film and high-quality fictional drama. Begadeau also played a version of himself, and the teachers in the film are teachers at the school…although not necessarily, in the film, playing themselves.
The Class didn’t earn Avatar’s billions at the box office but it did earn the Palme d’Or at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival (the first French film to do so in 21 years) and has become almost required viewing for educationalists across the planet. It represents a different kind of cinematic thrill ride, a different kind of story.
Seeing both films recently reminded me that only by stepping off the creative ledge does one generate the potential for bringing something really new into the world. But stepping off the ledge isn’t enough: once over the abyss you can’t afford to look down, lest like Wily Coyote you realise just what you’ve done and proceed to fall painfully back to earth. In this sense, both Avatar and The Class are not only about risk-taking; they’re about total commitment to the risks taken.
We all know the reference, don’t we? It’s not about what you’re called but who you are.
And so it goes with Nimble Fish. While we do love sushi and consider ourselves to be pretty flexible thinkers, the name ’Nimble Fish’ is apropos of nothing in particular: it’s a moniker that just came to us when we were pondering the launch of our grand enterprise, way back in the salad days of late 2006. We might have given our company any number of similarly fun yet essentially nonsensical names–Elastic Elephant? Supple Salamander?–and yet we hope that the work we’d have done, and have done, would have made us just as proud.
But describing what we do–the company equivalent of ‘who we are’–has always been more of a challenge. The conversations would often go as follows.
Q: ‘So, you create original performance work and produce new performance work by others. You’re theatre-makers, then?’
A: ‘Er, well sort of. Except that we mainly create work for grubby shop spaces, roadway underpasses, the back of container lorries, places like that. Oh, and we do most of our work in schools and community settings.’
Q: ‘So you’re Theatre In Education?’
A: ‘No, we’re not TIE at all. We don’t write plays for schools and we don’t perform plays in schools. And we don’t have a touring van.’
And so it would go.
So, we’ve changed our front-page ’shingle’ to offer a new description of Nimble Fish as Cultural Producers. Traditionally, the term has been used fairly literally, a cultural producer being any person or organisation that ‘produces’ culture, as in arts, media, etc. But there’s an emerging idea around cultural producing that moves it to a more meta-aware level. Here’s a decent description, as found on the website of an Austrian university delivering an MA in this newly-defined field:
” ‘Cultural producer’ describes the new self-image of today’s cultural worker as producer, impresario, practitioner and cultural conveyer. Cultural producers are found within the traditional arts of music, theatre, dance, literature and painting and even more often in fields owing their development to new technological possibilities. They can be independent entrepreneurs or creatively active in cultural institutions, free thinking enterprises or private companies. They are, doubtless, producers possessing an uncanny sense of hyper-textual self-understanding, focused on the interrelationship to “users” and active proponents of narrative structures encouraging dynamic interaction with audiences.”
“Hyper-textual self-understanding”….love it! But we wouldn’t be a “free thinking enterprise” if we didn’t offer our own definition of Cultural Producing. Here it is:
“Cultural Producers establish, implement and manage a self-generated creative vision, typically outside the purview of traditional performance or gallery spaces. Cultural Producers are rarely restricted to a single artistic form, preferring instead to work with whatever combination of forms best suits a particular idea or theme. Cultural Producers often seek to animate or re-interpret public spaces in the context of the communities they serve, and consequently their work often has a strong component of community participation or co-creation.”
In the spirit of being, ahem, “active proponents of narrative structures encouraging dynamic interaction with audiences,” we would like to offer this definition as a work in progress, and invite your input, objections, amendments, etc. We think we’re onto something quite special here and we’d like to build on it, in the Nimble Fish spirit.
Lest this all sound too arrogant, we’re not making out like we’re the only cultural producing company on the proverbial block. But even if we’re not trailblazers, we like to think we’re on the trail while it’s still new enough for the surrounding view to be fresh, and the possibilities thrilling.
Posted 16 March 2010 to http://reauthoring.wordpress.com
Even as the literary world laments the erosion of attention spans in the digitized world (see previous post), it seems that the theatre world is demanding epic new levels of concentration from its audiences, as underscored most recently in this New York Times article describing a 12-hour-long, single-showing adaptation of Fyodor Doestoyevsky’s novel The Demons as part of a summer theatre festival in the Big Apple.
This kind of marathon theatre (not a bad genre tag…you read it here first!) is not necessarily new, in that multi-part sagas like Angels in America and The Kentucky Cycle have been demanding hefty commitments of both time and money from audiences since the ’80s. If you count Shakespeare’s history cycle (Richard II through Henry VIII), the trend is an old one indeed.
But ye olde Bard certainly didn’t intend his grubby fans to sit, or stand, for more than a few hours in the presence of his work (even seeing the three Henry VIs back to back, which I did once upon a time over two days, requires Herculean stamina). The new Doestoyevsky play, while offering meal and potty breaks, is a one-shot deal: no coming back tomorrow, no ducking in and out. Enjoy the show…all of it at once, or none of it at all. There will be a mere two performances, meaning that for those so inclined (and there will be many) it is already a hot and surely expensive ticket.
I missed the last theatrical epic of this sort to plow through London, Robert le Page and Ex Machina’s nine-hour Lipsynch. Friends who did see it gave it mixed reviews, in some cases because…well, it takes an awful lot of patience and energy to take in nine hours of anything in one fell swoop. Apparently, even the great le Page couldn’t pull off that kind of focus for everyone. But Lipsynch could be experienced in pieces, with no requirement to down it in one draught.
One wonders, then, what the producers of The Demons are hoping to prove, let alone achieve. Doestoyevsky is not light fare in the best of circumstances, and the producers admit that The Demons is even denser than many of the novelist’s works. It begs the question, are the producers doing the book justice? Only time and the show itself will tell, but it does seem a strange thing that while I can’t think of anyone who’d try to consume a Doestoyevsky novel in a single sitting, there are audiences who will be scrambling to do exactly that come this summer in New York.
Given the dense, time-consuming nature of reading a Doestoyevsky novel, maybe this production of The Demons represents an exercise in foreshortened attention spans after all. What’s next, a 24-hour-long War and Peace?
Mar 122010
You might argue that everything that 4-year-olds do is site-responsive: what do any of us do at that age but respond, viscerally and playfully, to the world as we find it? And at that tender age, we have no particular concerns about health and safety, no worries about risk assessments (not even by instinct, yet), no concerns about whether or not our work will withstand aesthetic meta-interpretation. As has been said before (and probably more eloquently), those are the days in which we inhabit a kind of creative Eden, unaware that adulthood will soon gradually erect fences of inhibition that we will then spend the rest of our lives hiding behind and, if we’re both brave and lucky, gradually tearing down so that we can return to the place we started from.
None of this new, none of it Earth-shattering. Still, finishing up a lovely project with little tykes this week–focused on creating narrative and story in non-traditional school spaces–reminded me just how rewarding it can be to put oneself in this kind of headspace. Over a period of weeks, the children and I created a sequel to that children’s classic ‘Room on the Broom’, in which we asked lots of questions about what might have happened next…after the icky mud monster had scared off the red dragon, after the witch and the cat and the dog and the frog and the bird magicked up a deluxe broom and whooshed off into the moon-set. It was easy work for me: I just laughed a lot, asked loads of questions, and let the children do the rest.
The result? The Witches of the Mall and the Silly Dragon Family (cousins of the scary one…a bit of black sheep, he, as it turns out) travel to the London Eye, China and ultimately to the beach for a picnic, where they find that a group of pirates has stolen the water and sand (a beautiful, unconscious metaphor for climate change). The witches and dragons work together to get them back and then fly back home to their safe homes and warm beds. In their outdoor play space, using a few ‘found’ props and some sweeps of colourful chiffon discovered in a store room, we created these worlds and their journey. The children weren’t done, though, as they spun off even more sequels involving caves, castles, robots, trains, police cars and fire engines…you get the picture.
If anyone ever manages to harness and focus the creative power of little children as a tool for social change, folks like us would be out of business. That’s a thought I don’t mind very much. As the man once sang, what a wonderful world it would be.