Development of Stowaway show - Winter 2013

Again this is really late but I wanted to share it. Make it more permanent than just existing between my head and my laptop.

STOWAWAY: Development Winter 2013. Supported by Creative Scotland Artist Bursary and Analogue.

Shoreditch Town Hall

In this second phase of development we were joined by our movement director Vanessa Cook. It really opened up the world of the show, even more than we hoped. Vanessa created some incredible sequences around themes of struggle, and flight.  The movement language and physical discipline established in these sequences helped us shift in and out of the most simple of naturalistic sequences, helping us find a device for people to snap into and then shrug off characters in an effortless and fluid way.

Weaving together the choreographed movements with fragments of text and Philip's sound and music started to give us a sense of the aesthetic of the piece. Again the idea of invisible borders and boundaries felt important. We see a bare stage, a scene appears and comes to life, we are thrown into the middle of someone’s life, the physical and social parameters they exist within are traced out in front of us, and then they are gone.

We played with different modes of direct audience address; characters talking to the audience, actors narrating action, actors quoting from newspaper articles. We layered these extracts of text with movement and music, sometimes an abstraction of what was being said, sometimes a juxtaposition, sometimes a literal physical illustration.

The performers we had were again, fantastic. Willing to throw themselves into anything, to keep multiple plates spinning in the air, to keep layering ideas and styles on top of each other until we found little moments which resonated, which seemed to have a little truth and beauty in them.

It was typical of this part of the process, which doesn’t have the dizzying vertigo of the blank page, but it is very far from being anything being contained by a right structure. You’re trying to find the architecture, reaching and listening in the dark to try and get hold of something solid to build on.

We brought an audience in to share our work. A collection of moments we had threaded together. As we opened up the discussion, there was a moment of blankness from the audience, then a few tentative comments. Hannah and I wondered what we had done, and we started to wriggle in our chairs until the debate prised open and suddenly there was so much to say that we only made a dent in the ideas in the 45 mins we had. People, of course, had different passions, different areas of interest, different desires. But this Q and A demonstrated more than that, it reminded us that this show is attempting to do a number of complicated things, primarily: telling the story of a man we never met from a country we’ve only been to once, and asking ourselves how and why are we doing it? which unfurls all sorts of complicated ideas about migration, wealth, the British Empire, nationhood, ownership to name but a few. Playful and intelligent discussion needs to be at the heart of this piece, but it needs to be light; we don’t want to create some smarty pants heartless piece of meta-waffle. We need to engage in all these discussions as makers, through the characters on stage and also somehow create space for the audience to do so to, intellectually and emotionally.

And at the end of the day, we are not creating a documentary piece, we are creating our own story drawn from research. We want to create something vital and human, to honour the spirit and endeavour of this man who made this remarkable journey, and in some way to take his story further around the world.

Taken from Raintree Hotel, Chennai

Development of Stowaway show - Autumn 2013

So I'm very late with putting this up, but it was useful to write, and useful to revisit recently so I'll share it here in the hope that it may be illuminating for others!

STOWAWAY development. Phase One. Traverse Rehearsal Space, Edinburgh Autumn 2013. supported by Creative Scotland Artist Bursary and Analogue.

It was so exciting to finally be in a room, with three fantastic actors, ready to bring to life some of the ideas that had been lurking and swimming around my head for over a year. Myself and Hannah Barker have worked together for something like ten years onv arious projects, but this was a new working relationship for us. The two of us, writing and directing, trying to create work where the lines of those two disciplines are invisible.

The article about a Stowaway, concealed in the wheel arch of a plane on a flight bound from Delhi to London is where it all began. This man froze to death mid flight, and then as the landing gear was released he fell to the ground and landed in a Car Park. It made the papers and myself and Hannah read it, and it stuck. This tragic loss of life, this man who risked everything in the hope of something better.

Since then we have read endless articles on everything from oxygen starvation, international migration to Aeronautical engineering - hoping that some of that detail will be retained and captured in the show. We went to India to meet contemporary dance theatre companies, we got lost in Chennai, we spent 30 hours on a train, we spoke to everyone who would listen about our desire to tell of this man.

And so there we were on day one, with three actors looking at us. We were to somehow gather all these threads and make something of them in this draty converted warehouse in Edinburgh. And the spine that everything hung off was the story of the Stowaway, so powerful yet so unknowable. What made him decide to leave? What was going through his head in that tiny cramped wheel well? Question we can never ask him. His final moments of life so intensely private pressed up against an aeroplane tyre; his first moments in death so public in a Homebase Car Park in a busy part of Richmond.

There was of course nothing to do but throw ourselves right in. There was fragments of texts, physical exercises, we tried to make a plane out of whatever was in the room. Chairs, tables, a window leftover from another set, fans, anything we could get our hands on. We looked at our creation and then took away what we didn’t need. Things disappeared until we just had chairs. Striking across the stage in a diagonal line. Empty chairs each one suggesting a life on that plane, a life in transit. We put our actors our their plane and played around with hearing their thoughts unwind out loud as this long haul flight cut across the sky.

And it seems to gesture towards the our own journey exploring this story, something which feels important and relevant but are wary of becoming the focus. We don’t want it to become our us trying to tell the story of a man from another culture to our own but it feels importantly to somehow lightly weave it into the show. We are the passengers sitting on the plane, whilst underneath our feet a man is dying.

We have always wanted to embrace the multiplicity and elusiveness of this narrative. So many voices and lens which could interpret this man’s actions. A man’s final moments are being played out on the same flight as a few hundred oblivious passengers; with their own hopes and fears.

As we layered different characters lives on top of each other, it became clear that actors playing multiple roles, picking up and dropping characters in plain sight, was a really effective tool for evading naturalism. We were beginning to discover ways to have compelling fragments of dialogue without getting tied to certain viewpoints on the storyworld.

Philip Pinsky was in for much of this phase, sat at the back of the room composing, sampling and twiddling away on his laptop. The lightness with which sound and music could shift the mood and location was so useful and immediate. It became evident very quickly how important this close relationship with Philip will be, and how the sound design will be in constant conversation with the rest of the action as it is created. 

With the soundscape and actors and minimal set shifting across the stage, creating for brief moments, tiny universes populated with people full of longing and idiosyncrasies, we got to thinking about the power of invisible borders. These lines drawn on maps, or through the sea and air. Their potency, there ability to change the course of your live. You are born into these parameters, into these lines, into this body. And it got us to thinking, what happens when you reject that? You reject the life you have found yourself within?

Looking out of the train from Chennai to Kolkata

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