The Right Reason to Work

"You have the right to work, but for the work's sake only. You have no right to the fruits of work. Desire for the fruits of work must never be your motive in working...Work done without anxiety about results is far inferior to work done without such anxiety, in the calm of self-surrender...They who work selfishly for results are miserable."

-The Bhagavad Gita

RMO Projects: Short Performances for Audience Research

Some work from The Space made it into a longer evening of pieces. Take note, take it down, and show up if you can.

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RMO Projects:
Short Performances for Audience Research

What: Three RMO research projects are looking for your help to participate in our audience research. We would like to find out about your reaction, thoughts and feedbacks about our work.
There will be three sets of performances. After each performance, there will be a short questionnaire session in order to get your feedbacks.

When: Monday 16th of March, 6.30pm
Where: Studio 2 (Next to the Small Workshop)

We would be really grateful for your help in participating
in our audience research.
Please book your place in advanced by replying to this mail.
Thank you!

Story-telling: Reduction or Fragmentation
by MA Advanced Theatre Practice: Jinhee Park and Wilatluk Sinswat;
The showing of two versions, reductive and fragmentary, of the same story. We would like to compare and contrast the different impact each piece may have on the audience.

Verbatim
by MA Advanced Theatre Practice: Performing - Hedva Eltanani, Matthew Haigh. Research group: Dan Baker, Sara Giafrante, Melissa Langdon
Two edited versions of an open interview. We question the decision making while editing a text for a verbatim theatre.

The Screen Actor's Responsibility to "Truth": Verisimilitude, the Body as Text and the Consumption of Celebrity Culture
by MA Acting for Screen Students: Lauren MacKinlay, Alondra Salinas Pavon, Leah Wagner, Catherine Yearley, Emily Phillips and Faye Knight
Two versions of two different scenes will be screened. The given circumstances of each scene required the characters to either be under the influence of alcohol or be sleep deprived. In an effort to be truthful, the actors experimented performing both scenes in two versions: one literally under the circumstances above and one making use of the imagination and other acting tools. Looking for audience's response to both versions.

A woman of The 21st Century
by Hedva Eltanani (with the help of Poppy Corbet, Ronan McMahon and The Space (in) Between)
Devised monologue which is one out of three parts experiment. The experiment research the relationship between the audience and the performance.

Session 5

Attendees:
Mauro
James
Hedva
Sara
2 guests (belonging to Hedva)
Lea
Leslie

Activities of the Day:

Development:
Hedva actually started the day off by performing the latest version of the monologue she has been working on the past couple of weeks. It was wonderful to see how it has come over such a short time. There should be a performance of it in the not so distant future.

Restrictions:
Lea read a piece she had written in response to the stimulus. She read it in both Italian and Spanish, and then finally in English. One of Hedva's guests remarked, "The English was a catharsis," because Lea had struggle with the pronunciation of the first two languages. The struggle was in part an attempt to consider one of the sentences, and maintain a sense of "live-ness" in the performance. Here is the text:

Sometimes I want everything all at once so quickly that I think I will drown. The space between the woman I want to become and the woman I am is epic. Or it is not. Sometimes it seems like an inch, then I turn my head and it is three leagues off, then four, then a thousand years away, or it already happened. Sometimes I do not know where I am. Sometimes the air reminds me of the exact air that surrounded me years ago, of places I do not remember but can still sense. Sometimes I talk about events like the Great War, or the French countryside, as if I had some knowledge of them, but I was not around then and there, I do not know them. They do not know me. Sometimes I wish I existed only in sound, in a musical note, surrounded by reverberations and breath, and not in this body, just a shell surrounding myself that is still mysterious, and if I could only just see it maybe I would not want anything else anymore.

Feedback:
Mauro shared a play he has translated from Spanish to English, and is currently working to translate to his native Portuguese. It was a short play by Rodrigo Garcia, called Killing the Hours. For an interesting article on a reaction to Garcia's work, please go here.

Leslie shared some images of the work she had contributed to in Germany for the transmediale festival. One of the thoughts the art work focused on was why climate change means cultural change. For the festival's website, go here.


And that's it, friends. No sentences this week, as we have concluded The Space (in) Between for this term. Thanks to all who participated in the sessions. Thank you for taking the time to share your talents, interests, and artistic endeavours with us and letting us help you when we could and when you needed it. Here's to a great third term!

FINAL SESSION OF THE SPACE

Hullo Spacers and voyeurs of the net-

Last Friday didn't come together in terms of The Space, but thanks to everyone that took the time to let me know they wouldn't be able to make it. It's great to know it's on some people's minds.

In light of the gruelling rehearsal process and work load of both Stage Two Practice and the research projects, The Space's final session will occur this Friday, 27 February at 2PM in PS2. Please prepare the Five Sentences posted from the previous session if you are responding to the stimulus. All in all, it would just be great to see the lot of you and get your feedback in terms of what was useful, fun, helpful, or frustrating about the work that happened for, around, because of, or in spite of The Space.

Thanks again, and look forward to seeing you,
Lea

If you're too comfortable, you may need to ask yourself what you're *not* doing.

"In the end it all comes down to this: you have a choice (or more accurately a rolling tangle of choices) between giving your work your best shot and risking that it will not make you happy, or not giving it your best shot--and thereby guaranteeing that it will not make you happy. It becomes a choice between certainty and uncertainty. And curiously, uncertainty is the comforting choice."

--David Bayles and Ted Orland, Art & Fear: Observations On The Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking

CHANGE OF LOCATION: SESSION 5

NOTE: Session 5 on 20 February 2009 will take place downstairs in the Hampstead Theatre. Be there.

Session 4

Attendees:
Lea
Mauro
Leslie
Maria
Ronan
Loukia
Ariana
Hugo

Activities of the Day:

Restrictions:
Lea started the day off by first sharing her artifact (a photograph of herself and her mother) and then showing a short film she made in response to last week's second and fourth sentences ("Create a story with a pencil," & "Find something extraordinary about something ordinary."). There it is, just below. It has no audio, but is still affective. At least Mauro thought so.

A discussion was prompted by the film about the "silly" sometimes having tragic qualities, and what it is to apply human attributes to inanimate objects. Ronan commented on the ability to impose feeling in the piece with just words: you didn't have to show the pencil moving to show that he was happy. The group touched on alienation for a moment, discussing how the audience is suddenly responsible for that part of the equation<--the inferring of the pencil's happiness, the pen's forlorn look, etc. There is an active engagement there that may not have happened if the photographic segments had actually been filmed action, and without that engagement the viewer may not have been as invested. The topic of audience participation in this manner came up again later in the session. The film Stranger Than Fiction was also referenced.

Hedva brought in a small elephant as her artifact, and he sadly lost his only remaining eye during the session. Ronan gave him new eyes with tape, as you can see.

Photo by Lea McKenna-Garcia

The little guy was from Thailand, and was quite cute up close, it must be said.

Development:
Hedva brought in a monologue dealing further with the experiment she had brought up last week. It was a piece of writing blending Brechtian style and themes with verbatim text, and incorporating as well as discussing a monologue by the character Agrado in Pedro Almodovar's film Todo Sobre Mi Madre (All About My Mother). Various feedback was given regarding the structure and content of the monologue, and we hope that Hedva will bring in the next draft of this work next week for us to see its development. The content of the monologue has been kept out of this blog for copyright purposes. If you are interested in what could come of blending an Almodovar monologue, verbatim text, and Brechtian narrative style, please feel free to join us next week and discover it first-hand. (Assuming, of course, you practice Advanced Theatre.)

Leslie joined us this week, and first handed out business cards for her latest artwork.* Then she showed the beginning of the film Space is the Place, and discussed how she was attempting to develop a piece in the same spirit of the film (psychedelic scifi) for the theatre with some fellow MAers. She hopes to have a large emphasis on LoFi effects and equipment. Again we started talking about what an audience invests if they're asked to do a little work, and the difference between the journey they go on when they have to investigate or bridge a gap on their own instead of having everything fed to them. The proposal of this piece excited many, and we hope to hear more about it as it develops.

Leslie also briefly introduced a project she is helping with called "Society of Molecules ," and plans on discussing that more fully next week.

The idea of the similarity between the labels "theatre" and "live art" was touched on briefly as well, but not expanded on. Perhaps we'll delve into that next week also.

*(Please call 0800 756 6662 for more information.)

The Five Sentences for this week:

SENTENCES ASSIGNED TO BE SHARED FRIDAY, 20 FEBRUARY:

1. You can only use two feet of space (0.6 meters).
   
2. Incorporate a language that is not your native language.
   
3. “The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes "Awww!”
   
4. Revisit a sentence from a previous week and re-examine it.
   
5. All art is personal and autobiographical.

Don't worry if you're surrounded by an ocean...

"One doesn't discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time."
--Andre Gide

Session 3

Attendees:
Lea
Loukia
Ariana
Ronan
Hedva

Activities of the Day:
Bit of a late start to the day--the snow has delayed everything this week, including our diligence regarding time it seems.

Restrictions:
Ariana started us off by reading a list of things she wrote of things she had faith in. Then she discussed the aspects of relatability in the first definition of "congeniality" and how that figured between the ideas of death and inevitability.

Ronan read a piece of writing he composed about his family listing off his father, his sisters, and his brother, at one point stating, "I have faith in what I make," all while cutting cardboard and piecing it together with sellotape. Below, you can see this congenial, personalized, humorous chair:

Photo taken by Lea McKenna-Garcia

Lea shared a piece of writing she had started but not completed, that would have been meant to been a voice over to a piece of physical movement that involved a chair. She also offered an opening image for the piece, and experiments with a body and chair that she had worked on at home. Below, one of those images:

Photo taken by Heidi O'Connell

Development:
Hedva discussed looking for a monologue written in the style of Brecht (one that had elements of alienation, a journey, and a moral at the end) for an experiment she is trying. None were thought of during the session, but perhaps by next week we may have come up with an answer for this. (Have a suggestion? Please leave a comment on this blog post.)

To end the day, Ariana explored a little physical work with a chair, while Ronan read aloud a small piece of text she had brought in:

The Five Sentences for this week:

SENTENCES ASSIGNED TO BE SHARED FRIDAY, 13 FEBRUARY:

1. Bring in an artifact.
   
2. Create a story with a pencil.
3. Write the line before and after this statement: "I haven't started yet."
4. Find something extraordinary about something ordinary.
   
5. All art is personal and autobiographical.

Reaction to the Five Sentences from Session One

Here are two images Lea created in response to the first Five Sentences issued at Session One, and presented during Session Two on 30 January.

The text from the first image is from Hamlet, and the second from the Brecht poem, "The Legend of the Harlot Evelyn Roe."

An argument against piddling.

Excerpted from a letter written by Charles Bukowski, the American poet and novelist, to the editor William Packard, dated 8 November 1991, 11:29PM.

"I believe what we have to fear is the feeling of the general public toward poetry and/or art. They have no idea what it is but they have the thought that anybody can do it if they feel like doing it. They feel that way too--they can do it, after Jill and Bobby finish college and the mortgage is paid. In fact, many of them already label themselves as Artists. "Oh, Bobby paints...Jill writes..." And they even might have little stacks of listless and off-hand work about. They may even have attended classes. They are the piddlers in the field and most of the field are piddlers. These won't lay down any blood to get their work done, they won't gamble with madness, starvation in their need to get the work done. They don't feel it that way. They want fame and name but they won't give up their comforts and their securities. They claim to be Artists and somehow feel that it will all come together for them. Meanwhile, they might live on hand-outs from relatives instead of having the guts to score for an ugly 8 hour job and to try to break the walls from there. The public has this big soft toad concept of Art, they see it as being done by nice scrubbed intelligent pretty folk with French, German or especially English accents. They have no idea that it can be done by a bus driver, a field hand or a fry cook. They have no idea where it comes from. It comes from pain, damnation and impossibility. The blow to the soul of the gut. It comes from getting burned and seared and slugged. It comes from being too alive in the middle of death. It comes from...new and awful places and the same old places...It comes..."

Session 2

Attendees:
Mauro
Lea
Caitlin
Ariana
Rasheeda
Hedva
Hugo

Activities of the Day:
The Five Sentences for next week were introduced to the group then assembled. These are listed below.

Both Mauro and Lea presented their responses to the Five Sentences from last week. Mauro's response consisted of two monologues that were meant to be inter-cut. He decided that he would continue to develop the writing by using the Five Sentences for this coming week. Lea's response consisted of a short piece of writing, discussion of purgatory, and some images she both found and created (to be posted soon).

Ariana presented and explained a rough storyboard for a piece of theatre she is trying to create. The piece would include actors staged live, as well as the possible use of film or projections. Much discussion about airports, immigration lines, and limbo ensued.

Hugo asked if it would be all right to bring outside people to The Space, and it was decided that this would be fine, provided that said individuals were there with a specific purpose or offering, not simply to fill their time as spectators.

Wonderful feedback from all in attendance.

The Five Sentences for this week:

SENTENCES ASSIGNED TO BE SHARED FRIDAY, 6 FEBRUARY:

1. Finish this statement: "I have faith in..."
   
2. The work must have a list.
3. You must use a chair in an unconventional way (ie: do not just sit in it).
4. You must read and use the Oxford English Dictionary definition of "congeniality." Any edition. [Here's the online version.]
   
5. All art is personal and autobiographical.

"Freedom"

Freedom is not following a river.
Freedom is following a river,
though, if you want to.
It is deciding now by what happens now.
It is knowing that luck makes a difference.

No leader is free; no follower is free--
the rest of us can often be free.
Most of the world are living by
creeds too odd, chancy, and habit-forming
to be worth arguing about by reason.

If you are oppressed, wake up about
four in the morning: most places,
you can usually be free some of the time
if you wake up before other people.

--William Stafford

Session 1

Attendees:
Mauro
Lea
Loukia
Hugo
Max

Activities of the Day:
General explanation of the purpose of the Space. The Five Sentences are given for next week's presentations. It is decided that these things will be e-mailed to the course at large so as to reach anyone who wasn't able to make it do to a scheduling conflict, or for those who are still by and large too curious to have committed to this session. The e-mail content is below.

The Space is broken up into five scheduled categories:

1 - Restrictions - (You get offered 5 sentences each week that will inspire you to create work to be shown the following work)

2 - Lectures (Tell us how much time you need and come to talk about a topic that interests you - teach us something, get feedback, new ideas)

3 - Workshops - (Want to try out a workshop?? Need a group of people to try it out? Just let us know)

4 - Development - (Have a piece that you want to develop, need collaborators, or just ask where to go next?)

5 - Feedback - Want to show your latest work and just want people to tell you what they think?

Everything is valid. Just tell us what you want, how much time you need and we can book a slot.

The Five Sentences for this week:
We start with 5 sentences. The following week, you have 15 minutes to show a piece, a monologue, or an idea for work--bring a picture, draw a picture, whatever! The idea is to SHARE.

SENTENCES ASSIGNED TO BE SHARED FRIDAY 30TH:

1. The words "once," "upon," and "time" must be used.
2. Honesty is key--it must consider what makes you human.
3. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,/Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
4. I'm not good at being noble, but it doesn't take much to see that the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.
5. All art is personal and autobiographical.
   

Let's start with a little exposition, shall we?

Central School of Speech and Drama's MA course in Advanced Theatre Practices is made up of several different strands. Each one of these strands varies in focus/discipline (performing, directing, scenography are but a few) and number of artists--anywhere between one (writing and visual media, respectively) and sixteen (performing). Over the course of the first term, in various lab assignments, we were all mixed about each week, and sent off to work in small ensembles to fulfill whatever assignment we were addressing. (See that picture at the top of the page? That's several of us, hard at work during week four on the stage of the Embassy Theatre.) The hope was that by the end of the first term we would have gotten to work with everyone else on the course, have a sense of their aesthetics, artistic interests and agendas, and know each other pretty well.

This was not entirely successful.

As it happened, many of us found we'd missed a connection somewhere (and not in that creepy or romantic Craigslist way), that we hadn't gotten a chance to work with someone we thought we'd mesh with, or were left feeling we didn't know the full potential of our classmates. The frustration that sprung from these issues brought a few of us together at the end of our first term, during an Open Space session modled off of Improbable's Devoted and Disgruntled event. Our answer was:

The Space (in) Between: Let's not be strangers!

(The subtitle is optional.)

The Space was set up as the ultimate sharing ground for our course, where people can throw out any ideas they may have, develop them a bit, rip them apart, and maybe start over from scratch. The Space is safe and supportive, and in these ways we hope it will be also productive. The Space respects that we are eachother's greatest assests. It's a way to keep the creative juices flowing, even when we think we're all dried out from the research during our second term. It's also a great place to start thinking about festival work that we'll be producing and mounting at the end of our third term. So stay tuned and up to date on this forum of the things going on, but understand: all the action is happening first hand in the Space--so show up and join in! It's there for you, and the door is always open.

Provided, of course, that you practice Advanced Theatre.