An experiment in staging Ancient Greek drama

 

To ancient Epidavros on the Peloponnisos in Greece and an experiment in form and ancient texts. The Imalis Project – a research centre for Ancient Greek Theatre in Epidavros – was iniated by brothers Nicholas and Vasilios Arabos.

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Photograph of Epidavros amphitheatre from web. Photographs of  workshop by Kaite O’Reilly

I have been observing a group of female performers working on a speech by Elektra in Euripides’s Orestes, using the Ancient Greek. Collaborating with Phillip Zarrilli, who has been using his psychophysical approach to training actors as part of the experimentation, they have been exploring how to embody and sound the text in the astonishing ancient amphitheatre.

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Maria Athinaiou and Eleonora Marzani in workshop at Epidavros

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The company gather at dawn and dusk to train with Zarrilli when the intensity of heat and light is not too much for martial arts and physical scores.

Eleana Georgouli

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Roisin O’Donovan and Eleana Georgouli

It has been a meeting of classical Greek text with Zarrilli’s psychophysical process – creating structured improvisations from activating images with resonance to the text and context.

Antigoni Riga in workshop

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I am brought to violent sobbing o country of Pelasgia….

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Epidavros was an important social, cultural and healing centre, with the sacred sanctuary of Asklepios.

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The ancient theatre at Epidavros was erected in the mid 4th century BCE by architect Polykleitos, who built the famous Tholos in the sanctuary of Asclepios. It is immense, seating between 10-15 thousand.

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Rosa Prodromou

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Vasilios tells me when originally built, the theatre would have been of highly polished marble, which must have made it shine like a beacon in the full sun.

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This detail is at odds with any half glimmer of knowledge I may have grasped before and makes perfect sense as we travel inland to the theatre, imagining how it must have resembled a pilgrimage with so many thousands travelling towards this one centre, this literal light house milennia ago.

Phillip Zarrilli  

Revision notes (2) – focus on one thing at a time.

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It may seem obvious, gnomic even, but it is a piece of advice so often overlooked when in the process of rewriting: When revising work, focus on one thing at a time…

Revising and redrafting a script can be a chaotic and ramshackle activity. After finally stumbling through to the end of an early draft, hopefully realising what the play is actually about (which may not be what we thought it was about when we set out…) it’s time to revisit and refine.

So often in my early experience and more recently, with those I dramaturg or mentor, revising can end up resembling the carnage of a kitten caught up in a ball of wool. It is not cute, or pleasant, or the stuff of chocolate box covers, despite its many cliches. In actuality the combination of tender inexpert claws and fragmenting strands of wool is brutal and choking and potentially deadly. Likewise for the enthusiastic or inexperienced playwright, whose imagined elegant and ordered combing through of the various strands of a script can result instead in a cat’s cradle of knots, unintentional dread-heads and confused despair.

I have done this so often myself in the past. I begin reading a first draft and see some improvements I could make in the flow of dialogue between the characters, so mid-read I begin the revision, only to get distracted by the layout, which surely should be indented and double-spaced? (yes please). So I start doing that, but wait, surely that’s a saggy bit there in the middle and the stakes aren’t nearly high enough? So if I just reintroduce the character I cut halfway through the first draft and have her explain – but no, wouldn’t that just make her a cipher? And that’d be telling, not showing – which seems to be what’s happening in that section there – so maybe, maybe if I changed his motivation in that beat and therefore introduced rising action there, I could…. and there I am, hopelessly lost and demented, script dismantled about me, trussed up in my narrative threads like a turkey on Christmas morning.

The necessity of being ordered in the redrafting process came up recently during an intensive workshop at Ty Newydd, the National Writers’ Centre of Wales. I’ve been leading a six month mentoring scheme with nine talented playwrights, and last weekend was our final session, reflecting on process and any final feedback on the scripts.

‘Try and work through the full draft, focusing on only one thing at a time’ I instructed, preparing them for the next draft. ‘One read-through you may be looking at the journey of each individual character – and don’t try to do several in one reading to save time, as you won’t. Focus and comb through that strand, separating it from other considerations, and really pay attention. Then another read-through may be taking the dramatic temperature of the whole – the presence of tension or pace or rising action. Another read may be looking at effective dialogue – and so on.’

It seems simple and obvious advice, yet somehow most of us manage not to absorb it. We try to be economical with time, but end up instead squandering it, giving ourselves headaches and small crises of confidence.

In redrafting, be specific and focus on only one thing at a time.

Be patient and calm.

Above all else, enjoy.

Your inner kitten will thank you for it.

In the republic of poetry (5) a debutante and a book launch

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Photograph of Rosie Bailey, Chris Kinsey and Kaite O’Reilly by Liz Hinkley.

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It’s been an extraordinarily creative week. To Newtown in Wales on Thursday for the book launch of Chris Kinsey’s new collection of poetry, Swarf at Oriel Davies. It was my debut at a poetry reading/spoken word event and I was in terrific company with R V Bailey, Andy Croft and Jane Dards reading work, alongside the indomitable Chris Kinsey.

What impressed me with the evening Chris curated was the mixture of voices and styles from the guest readers, structured around themes explored in her collection: observations of the natural and human world, the immigrant experience, Traumatic Brain Injury… The collection is rich and varied, dense with wisdom and thoughtful provocations.

One of the greatest pleasures was to appear on the same platform as R V Bailey, who I have admired from a distance for some time – and admire even more now, close-up.

‘So, you’re a debutante’ she announced later, over a glass or two of the hard stuff. It may have been my first poetry reading, but I have a feeling it won’t be the last.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Swarf-Chris-Kinsey/dp/0956417523

The universe is made of stories, not atoms: Things I wish I’d known when starting out (2)

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Further things I wish I’d known when starting out:

Writing is the greenest profession – everything is used and recycled. Nothing goes to waste – not even the large sections you edit out.

 Be the best you can. 

Know what kind of writer you want to be but also be prepared to adapt and change – always be open for a new challenge.

Creativity comes from solving problems. 

Write the play you want. Write what you are passionate about. Never try to write what you think ‘they’ want. ‘They’ want passion, freshness, a new perspective, talent and hard work.

If work starts to eat at your soul, no matter how financially rewarding it is, get out before the iron enters your soul.

Be prepared to be ‘discovered’ many times.

Try not to be cynical. Grow a thick third skin (second isn’t thick enough). 

Don’t take it personally if a script is criticised, or disliked. Be professional. Listen. You may learn something. 

The play is not you. It came from you, but it is not you. 

Never forget how fortunate we are to be doing what we are doing.

Remember; ‘The universe is made of stories, not atoms.’              (Muriel Rukeyser, poet)  

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In the republic of poetry (4) Slouching towards Guantanamo – crip poet Jim Ferris

Two disability culture books arrive in the post, and by long standing friends, allies, and/or cadres.

The first – and the focus of this blog – is an outstanding book of poetry from Jim Ferris, who I have admired since encountering his seminal collection The Hospital Poems in 2004.

“…Slouching Towards Guantanamo is kind of holy, more than a little Whitmanesque when Jim Ferris writes, “This is my body. Look if you like.” And so we do in these funny, lacerating poems, veering from pain to pain. They sing the body derelict, the body “merely” different. Intensely physical, surprisingly musical, capacious and elegiac at once, Slouching Towards Guantanamo is thrilling work, though things fall apart, as do we all…”

–Paul Guest, My Index of Slightly Horrifying Knowledge

Such reviews of the book make me long to leap straight in, but there is a pile of other books waiting to be reviewed first, and I know some of the poetry will already be familiar to me. As is the case for other poet friends, like Chris Kinsey, Jim is immensely generous with his work and has shared work in progress with me over the years.

One of the great achievements and attractions of Jim’s work in my opinion, is how each poem is seeped through in disability experience. If asked to identify work which is quintessentially crip culture, as well as retaining its own singularity and identity, I would immediately point to Jim Ferris’s work. His wry humour, his extraordinary communication skills, the knowledge of bone-pain from deep within the marrow and his ability to translate that into sublime language all – regardless of impairment or not – can understand is why he should be better known outside his native US.

In Slouching Towards Guantanamo, Jim Ferris continues to challenge the way we have all learned to think about disability and people with disabilities. These splendid poems navigate between the light touch of tender irony and the arresting perspective disabled bodies can offer our common understandings.

–Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Staring: How We Look

I manage to see Jim once every couple of years, the last time in spring 2010 in the endless cornfields of Indianapolis. Some years before that, he attended a rehearsed reading of my play The Almond and the Seahorse, about survivors of TBI (Traumatic Brain Injury) as part of the Madison Rep Theatre New Writing Festival, and having a fellow crip in the audience added somewhat to my enjoyment of the ‘Q & A’ with the audience.

Afterwards, he intimated he had  experienced two plays simultaneously – the emotionally-charged mainstream play and the radical disability culture play. I agreed. I call The Almond and the Seahorse my Trojan horse. It is my most conventional script, a character-driven well-made play deliberately designed to appeal to mainstream theatres – a vehicle to be wheeled on to a mainstream stage – with disability politics in its belly.

Back in Wisconsin we discussed how we are sometimes working on several levels simultaneously – the work is layered, almost palimpsest. I find that there is a ‘secret’ code in some of my work – a sensibility, a perspective, a way of being in the world informed by my disability identity, which infiltrates and is communicated, at a subtextual level, to any fellow crips who encounter it. Perhaps this is the same for all minority groups, or sub-cultures, but it is one I feel intensely in my engagement with the disabled community.

Jim’s poetry epitomises the shift in perception which great work can achieve. As Terry Galloway (‘Mean Little deaf Queer’) coined it, when analysing Jim’s poem ‘Poem with disabilities’:

“This poem, like so many others in this heartfelt and expressive compilation, exhorts us, beguiles us, charms us; and suddenly, as we’re reading along–just as he promises– our “angle of vision jumps” and our “entrails aren’t where we left them.” A precise and eloquent unraveling of life’s knottier complexities.”

I give you Jim Ferris.

Poet of Cripples

Let me be a poet of cripples,
of hollow men and boys groping
to be whole, of girls limping toward
womanhood and women reaching back,
all slipping and falling toward the cavern
we carry within, our hidden void,
a place for each to become full, whole,
room of our own, space to grow in ways
unimaginable to the straight
and the narrow, the small and similar,
the poor, normal ones who do not know
their poverty. Look with care, look deep.
Know that you are a cripple too.
I sing for cripples; I sing for you.

(c) Jim Ferris

Reproduced from http://www.mainstreetrag.com/JFerris.html

Other resources for Jim Ferris on-line:

http://www.vsarts.org/x2275.xml

http://www.wordgathering.com/past_issues/issue2/essay/ferris.html

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1541556.The_Hospital_Poems

Revision notes – writing is all about rewriting (1) Some differences between theatre and prose

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Interviewer: How much rewriting do you do?
Hemingway: It depends. I rewrote the ending of Farewell to Arms, the last page of it, 39 times before I was satisfied.
Interviewer: Was there some technical problem there? What was it that had stumped you?
Hemingway: Getting the words right.

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(Ernest Hemingway, “The Art of Fiction.” The Paris Review. Interview, 1956)

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Perhaps I’m perverse, but I love rewriting. It can be desperate and infuriating and impossible, plunging me into teeth-grinding, ulcer-inducing frustration, but when it comes out  ’right’, which it does, eventually, nothing else gives me that sense of completion, of  satisfaction from getting the words right.

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And getting the words right involves so many factors – not just dialogue, or syntax and grammar, or what’s known mysteriously as ‘good writing’ – but a plethora of other elements including pace, rising tension, tempo-rhythm, fully-realised characters, a coherent narrative (if, indeed, a coherent narrative is the aim)… So much is involved in getting the words right, the phrase is appropriately Hemingway-esque: a masterly example of the understatement.

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Writing is all about rewriting. Writers serious about their work know there is no avoiding this fact.

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I am discovering, as I work increasingly across various media, that rewriting takes different forms, depending on the medium. My approach to rewriting prose is similar but different to my concerns when revising a play. There are criteria in common – dramaturgy/structure, hooking an audience/reader, compelling stories to tell, coherence and internal logic – but there are also discrepancies and clear partings of the way. Perhaps I’m mistaken in this, but I doubt few would say the following in a critique of a short story or novel, the feedback to a playwright I wrote today:

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‘There is a value in being messy – sometimes you have to lose control a little more – you have to be more emotionally messy and less controlled, which can also be thrilling for an audience.’

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Radio and novels are writing for an audience of one. It is the most intimate, sly, seductive of relationships – insinuating your ideas and your voice right inside the reader’s head, in the heart of their imaginations. Theatre is different. Traditionally it is a medium for an audience of many – all those strangers sitting there, shoulders rubbing together in the dark. It is a communal event, and one which expects and demands some form of participation. Unlike film and television, which can be inherently passive, with live performance you can’t get away from the live. You have someone there, now, right in front you, now, this very minute, doing something. That person can sometimes see you. You can sometimes smell them, if it’s a physical performance and you’re lucky to be close enough.

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What makes live performance so devastatingly exciting and present and corporeal is the fact we’re all in it together, breathing in the same air, sharing the same space, collectively becoming older by each minute we remain in each others’ company. There are some theatres and styles which try to create distance – that barricade of air, the fourth wall – and there are many productions, I’m sure, which, although well-meaning, are deadening and dull. But in its absolute essence the fundamental parts of the equation, as outlined above, are the same. A group of humans in a space watching another group of humans pretending to be other humans, telling stories about humans. It is barking, totally, wonderfully, mad. Which is why I love it and keep going back for more, despite that occasional deadening and dull production. It’s also why I think in its most essential aspects, writing for live performance has very different criteria than writing, say, a novel.

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So here are a few other pointers, relevant to the stage but perhaps not other forms:

• It is happening NOW. Characters must be active and full of action (and please note, we are not talking car chases here: a thought can be an action).
• When writing for live performance, you’re creating dynamic – an energy that is shared and moving through the cast and hopefully out into the audience.
• Beautiful reveries, exposition, flashbacks and backstory can block the artery of live performance, stopping the flow and resulting in something dull and deadening.
• Performance is ephemeral.  This particular show will never happen again. The composite experience of any particular performance will be created as equally by the audiences’ engagement, commitment and focus, as by what the people on stage are doing. Be aware of this communal act. Be aware of this extraordinary event.                          Now write words worthy of it.

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(c)kaiteoreilly 6/9/11

Living well is the best revenge: things I wish I’d known when starting out

Some years ago I was asked by literaturetraining what advice I’d give to writers early in their careers. The following is a small excerpt from a longer essay which I was commissioned to write in 2006.

 

What I wish I’d known when I was starting out:

A career doesn’t have to be London-based or even in the UK. A writer is mobile; our work doesn’t have to be tethered.

One of our main tasks is to find the people who love our work, as they will eventually make it.

We live in a large world, full of possibilities, so it’s essential to broaden our view and keep informed. With the internet and free e-bulletins from new writing development agencies and theatre companies,  it’s easy to follow changes in personnel, funding, opportunities etc.

Directors won’t come knocking on your door, so get your work out there – go for every initiative and competition you can. Apart from providing useful deadlines and seeding new projects, it means there’s always something ‘out’ and therefore hope.

Keep as many irons in the fire as you can, it takes dexterity and good management, but some will eventually get hot.

Know your market.

The harder you work, the luckier you get.

Imagine that you are creating a library of your work – enjoy it, be the best you can. It takes the same amount of time to make something good as something bad, so go for quality and longevity.

Evolve, grow, keep asking questions, keep learning.

Good writers work on their strengths, but great writers work on their weaknesses.

Keep alive your curiosity in styles, aesthetics and developments in the arts.

Know trends, but don’t follow them.

Take up new challenges and try not to always play it safe – fortune favours the brave.

Life, like food, can be sour or sweet, it depends on how you want to season the pot.

It is within your gift to live a good, happy, enjoyable life, despite the profession’s frustrations and unfairness.

Living well is the best revenge.

The above is from a longer essay, Fortune Favours the Brave, but Chance Favours the Prepared Mind, which I was commissioned to write in 2006 for Literaturetraining as part of a wider series, HOW DID I GET HERE?

HOW DID I GET HERE? is a fantastic series of essays, with case histories and advice from a broad range of writers and literature professionals, from crime writers to publicists, poetry therapy to gameswriting.

Sadly, Literaturetraining has since bitten the dust, but the material, alongside The Writers’ Compass, a bulletin of opportunities and courses, is now available through NAWE, National Association of Writers in Education.

The essays are available as pdfs you can download at:

http://www.nawe.co.uk/the-writers-compass/resources/how-did-i-get-here.html

(c) Kaite O’Reilly 2006

Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working (2): Ty Newydd

I’m reading a collection of short one act plays by a group of writers I’m mentoring as part of an initiative for Ty Newydd, the Writers’ Centre for Wales. The house, dating from the sixteenth century, is near the Snowdonia National park, set between the hills of Eifionydd and the sea, on a green baise lawn with what estate agents call commanding views over Cardigan Bay. It is astonishing and lovely, a perfect place for inspiration, the last home of Lloyd George.

The former prime minister and one of the architects of the Welfare State died in what is now the centre’s upstairs library. It is easy to imagine him perched high in a bed, bolstered by pillows, looking out onto the devastating view.

I’ve been teaching residential courses at Ty Newydd for around fifteen years and the Centre’s director, Sally Baker, is both resilient and visionary, eager to create new experiences for writers. She has indulged my experiments – playwrights working with visiting directors (Jenny Sealey, John McGrath, Phillip Zarrilli, Mike Pearson) – site-specific work, with a dozen writers taking over the house and grounds, making performances in every unlikely location, and the likely ones, too. She has even indulged our late night carousing and my ghost stories, particularly my insistence that Lloyd George’s spirit can be sensed in the upstairs bathroom, what had been his personal privvy. I mean no disrespect, I’m merely repeating what I’ve been told,  with a few tiny embellishments, which is to be expected at Ty Newydd, where stories take flight.

The great man is not buried in the Llanystumdwy churchyard, but down the lane from the house in the wooded valley of the Afon Dwyfor, under a huge stone. It feels Celtic and pagan and immensely appropriate. There is a hush around his memorial, as though the birds themselves have taken a moment to reflect. Whenever I walk down, there is always a writer, pen poised, breathing in the dappled air.

The mentoring course is taking place over a six month period with developmental workshops either end, March and September. The writers then develop and revise their plays between these two points of contact, with dramaturgical feedback from me on their drafts.

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When we first met in March, the weekend coincided with Theatre Uncut, an initiative set up by Reclaim Productions, with theatres and groups across the UK responding to the coalition government’s spending cuts through a series of play readings, ‘bringing protest to the stage’. One of the writers on the mentoring course, Sandra Bendelow, brought our attention to the event and shared with us the seven short scripts by Lucy Kirkwood, Dennis Kelly, Laura Lomas, Anders Lustgarten, Mark Ravenhill, Jack Thorne and Clara Brennan. ‘Why don’t some of us participate in the weekend, and do a reading?’ Sandra suggested. She chose Mark Ravenhill’s script, which explored the dreams of a past generation through the 2010 student protests. Marge and Fred, figures from the past, celebrate the birth of the Welfare State whilst a contemporary character observes the plans for its dismantling.

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And so we found ourselves standing around Lloyd George’s grave at dusk, reading him Ravenhill, telling him what was happening to his extraordinary achievement, the audacious dream which had been the envy of the world for so long.

Afterwards, we trailed back in the gloaming, reflective and silent.