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