Different Stages: Working 925

Bursary winner Jay Miller, Director of Match Theatre Company, looks forward to a weekend of working 925 in this exciting site specific piece:

Office 925 is a play set within an office; the actors and the audience all work for the same company. My time over the past week has been spent ensuting the company is fully functioning. I am now versed in the current thinking and practices that dominate the customer outsourcing industry. We now have to make this research an interesting dramatic product, which is quite a task.

I have compiled an induction pack for the actors that guides them through every department of the company, while introducing them to the atmosphere we would like to create in our office.

The design team has been working hard to transform Live Theatre's first floor Gallery space into a functioning office. Northumbria University has kindly given us furniture that befits a modern office. A question that we have asked time and time again is to what extent can our very real space become theatrical. Reconfiguring the desk spaces and finding out where the natural stages re within the office (on which we can perform) has been a case of trial and error. Flo and Anna (the designers) have passed through most stationary shops in the North East picking up biros, staplers, potted plants and wall planners. I have been picking up technology (kindly donated by local businesses) so that our audience can have a fully interactive experience.

We're all looking forward to this weekend and seeing our office come to life.

Different Stages: Festival officially underway

Crikey, the Different Stages Festival is finally upon us and the Theatre is teeming with writers, directors and thesps. My role in this year’s festival has been threefold and I’ve been asked to tell you a wee bit about each of those folds, so, here goes...

In October last year, I began working with a Youth Theatre group of 13-14 year olds with a view to coming up with a fifteen minute response to the themes in The Pitmen Painters. Six months down the line, we’d concocted a show called Jonathan Likes This about a teenager who unexpectedly dies and his Facebook page becomes a touchstone to his short life. Jonathan was one of ten plays, performed as part of Whose Art is it Anyway? this past weekend at Live and, honest to God, they were better than Cats!

Since January, I’ve also been part of the Live’s 2010 Writers Group, which entails a group of writers getting together once a month to have a cultural chin wag. We were each asked to write a piece for the festival and my offering is M&S, S&M which will be read on Wednesday. It’s about three sisters at an Ann Summers party, each with their own particular take on how emotionally autistic men can be, their parents divorce and the practicalities of a Diamante sex toy.

Finally, there’s to be a rehearsed reading of my new play The Chalet Lines at the end of the week. The play began as the desire to write about the tack-fest that is a Butlins Holiday Camp. I wanted to explore how dysfunctional patterns, as well as positive attributes, can drip through generations of the same family and if, at all, these can be broken. I’m as giddy as a kipper for the reading on Friday.

I’m only two drafts into the play so now’s a good time to hear it out loud and work out which bits work and which bits are just cringey and a bit rubbish. My talented pal Amy Golding will be directing and we’ve a stellar cast in the way of Val McLane, Phillippa Wilson, Chris Connel, Lisa McGrillis and Anna Bolton.

And don’t forget to go to all of the festival’s rip-roaring events, including a preview of Live’s Online Introduction to Playwriting Course this Saturday; it’s sure to be a veritable smorgasbord of literary tips.

Different Stages: Nearly there!

Puff, pant, here we are in the middle stretch of Sawdust and Stardust, pech pech, and look at the view already! Check pockets and list treasures collected so far…

1. Our own emerging language within the piece (the attempt being to honestly combine two styles and two forms)

2. The time and the space to really explore our ideas with the unswerving support of Live and The Empty Space (sounds like the Baftas eh?! But the presence of fantastic practical and artistic support plus being made so welcome in the beautiful new building have really counted!!)

3. As Beccy points out, our growing sense of the personal maps that chart comfort/danger zones, tricky terrain and assumed easy going are being drawn and redefined as we go. Hurrah!

All in all a pretty good haul!! So onwards and upwards we go, with the summit in sight. Wish us well and see you when we get there I hope. More sugar anyone??

Laura Lindow
Writer / Theatre Director

Different Stages: Singer-songwriter shares her thoughts

I’ve just arrived home from Live Theatre after day of Sawdust and Stardust development time. This is a solo theatre piece that Laura Lindow and I are creating as a work-in-progress for the festival. In early conversations, Laura and I shared an interest in working together as a theatre maker and a singer/songwriter to create….something! Anything! I remember us talking about how much we both loved language.

So here we are, exploring and discovering things together to make a short work-in-progress. This first week has been exciting, challenging and to me, quite fascinating. I’ve been a gigging musician for half my life, and it’s been almost a decade since I performed in something that wasn’t exclusively music-oriented. I tell a lie - I did play a giant singing panda in a children's show called Extreme Earth last year, which was quite out of my comfort zone, but the 'on your feet' work in Sawdust and Stardust feels even more unfamiliar. I’ve been surprised to find that I have some potent private demons nibbling at my self-belief. These demons have spent the week dancing around the room – mostly scrutinising my ability to do basic things, like move across a stage. Maybe it’s because I usually hide behind my piano, I don’t know, but out of context I seem to have briefly forgotten every useful thing I’ve ever learned (i.e. how to walk) and I’m also forgetting some of the fundamental principles that have underpinned my work as a singer - to know when to ‘get out of my own way’, to go with my gut and that when performing, making a clear choice, even if it’s the wrong one, is better that making no choice at all. I’m relieved that after a week, some of this is slowly coming back. With Laura’s help, and as the piece begins to manifest, I’m learning to take things less seriously, to speak up when I’m scared and to try to be courageous. In fact, I’m learning a lot.

My hope is that we make a piece that has the energy and immediacy of a song itself, whilst really doing justice to the storytelling and the theatre of what we are creating.

I’m guessing that come March 13th, despite the dancing demons, it’ll feel a lot like singing a brand new song for the first time, and I’m really looking forward to us all making new discoveries together.

Beccy Owen

Singer-songwriter

Different Stages: Get Voting

Well, I’m still up to my eyes in the mountain of paper being created for the festival; scripts to consider, contracts to send out, event registration forms, evaluation forms... my desk has just about enough space for me to perch my keyboard on. But the administration all seems to be coming along nicely and with the festival just under two weeks away everything is pretty much taken care of (I hope). So, I can finally start looking forward to all the incredible new writing events we have coming up. Especially the talks and workshops where new writers (like me) can gain insights from some fascinating British playwrights like Tim Crouch and Simon Stephens. I participated in a Simon Stephens workshop on redrafting in Liverpool a couple of years ago which was just brilliant. He’s written some really exciting plays (Motortown, Harper Regan, Punk Rock) so this chance to hear him discuss his approach to the playwriting process is a definite must-see. I’d love to join in with Fiona Evans’ Young Writers’ Workshop but the passing of time has pushed me into the wrong demographic (i.e. I’m not so young anymore) so I’ll immerse myself in Jeremy Herrin’s workshop What Happens to New Plays? – which looks at how new plays make it from first draft to final production (Jeremy used to head up Live’s literary department before leaving us to join The Royal Court as Deputy Artistic Director). There are so many fantastic events to choose from but I’m especially looking forward to Your Favourite Live Theatre Short Play – if the current voting is anything to go by my favourite short play by my favourite writer might just clinch it – I’d love to be more specific but I don’t want to sway anyone else’s decision as there is still time to vote for your favourite.

Degna
New Writing Administrator

Different Stages: If you build it, will they come?

It’s mid-February and the opening of the Different Stages new writing festival is looming. The final bits of the jigsaw are being put into place with the dexterous use of a pair of scissors and a rubber mallet. The publicity is out, the opening event invites are sent and the final e-flyers are ready to go. I’ve found that if you stare at the brochure long enough, tickets go flying out the door.

We’re very excited to have assembled such a stellar cast of theatre practitioners for the three week programme. We’ve got the two emerging artist Bursary Winners already using space in the building, and we’re looking forward to seeing their creative use of sound and text (Sawdust and Stardust by Beccy Owen and Laura Lindow) and the innovative use of the old gallery space, with technological innovation and audience interaction (Office 925 by Match Theatre).

This week we’ll be booking actors for the variety of rehearsed reading events and script-in-hand performances. It’ll be great to welcome back some familiar faces and, as The Pitmen Painters has just finished its national tour, we’re hoping some of the actors in the production can fit us in en route to Broadway. The pieces chosen by Richard Bean in his Desert Island Plays include a few American plays (including work by David Mamet and Sam Shepard) so they’ll be able to acclimatise here beforehand.

Friday is also the deadline for the second draft of scripts from our Writers’ Groups for the festival. Having read and provided feedback on 27 first drafts, members of the Literary Department are bracing themselves for the next wave. The scripts chosen will form part of our two evenings of work by the two groups: (The 2010 Writers’ Group on Wednesday 10th March to be directed by Festival Co-ordinator Tess Denman Cleaver and the Live Writers’ Group on Tuesday 16th March to be directed by Live’s Literary Officer Rosie Kellagher).

We’re all planning to draw breath again after the festival’s final event: Your Favourite Live Theatre Short Play. This event gives you the chance to cast your vote. Please have a look at the candidates and choose which one you’d like to hear again. It’s the first time we’ve tried something like this online so we’re really interested to see how things turn out. Have a go because, as they say on all TV audience phone poll programmes, the voting is incredibly close.

That’s it from me. Next week it’ll be the New Writing Administrator, Degna Stone blogging our weekly Different Stages update. Make sure you check out the other events in the festival programme - we hope there’s something for everyone. I’ll get back to the scissors and mallet.

Gez
Literary Manager

Different Stages: 24 days and counting...

With a month to go until Different Stages begins we're beginning to gather together some exciting acting talent from across the North East and beyond to star in the many readings and illustrated talks taking place during the festival.

Later in the week the Office 925 team will be visiting Live to hold some castings for their unique participatory piece – I look forward to finding out who will be recruited to work in their ‘office’ and aid the development of this exciting new work-in-progress.

Last Thursday saw the first reading of Shelagh Stephenson’s A Northern Odyssey in Live’s Studio Theatre. The play was really well received and the reading process proved to be a useful experience for all involved in the development of Shelagh’s script. To hear more about this process and ask Shelagh your own questions on playwriting, don’t miss her Q&A on Thursday 11 March.

Tonight Gez Casey (Literary Manager), Rosie Kellegher (Literary Officer) and I will be catching up with the Live Writers’ Group who are in the process of redrafting their own scripts for the rehearsed readings featured in New Plays from the 2010 Writers’ Group.

On the favourite play front, Wittgenstein on Tyne is currently in the lead with 41% of the votes. However with three weeks to go anything can happen. Don't forget to cast your vote and book tickets to come along to the festival’s closing event on Sunday 21 March to watch a rehearsed reading of the winning play.

Next week it’s the turn of Gez to update you on all things 'festival-like', but in the meantime find out more by visiting Live’s website.

Tess