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