EDINBURGH

WE ARE HERE!

THE SHOW TIME AND PLACE FOR ALL THOSE WHO DON'T KNOW IS

C +3 11.05AM FROM THE 4TH TO THE 30TH (NOT 16TH)

We had our tech today. Moved into the new apartment (we'd been staying with friends for the first few days; Thanks for that guys). We've done some postering. We've sorted out props. We've looked at scenes. We're tired. It's wet. But we're here and we cant wait to get started properly. See you all soon! x

Pause. Rewind. Play.

I remember when I was a child my parents (having decided that I was capable of operating a tape player) bought me a collection of fairy tales (Grimm’s, Christian Anderson’s and Irish folk tales) that I could listen to on cassette. You could say that my parent grew tired of reading me the same stories over and over, being told not to skip any pages (I knew a lot of the stories off) and never being pleased with just one story. You could say that (an there probably is a hint of truth in it) but for me it was fantastic.

The tapes allowed me to listen to whatever story I wanted, whenever I wished, and stop when I’d had enough. It allowed me to skip to the bits I liked, pause when I needed to and rewind as often as the batteries allowed. Pause. Rewind. Play. Stories began to flow into each other; merging and melding beginnings and ends and lots of middles. I wandered between forests, seas and clouds. Worlds were created and found to encompass not one but all the stories I listened to.

In our development of some of the scenes for the show we have all been racking our brains, playing and talking out the possible solutions the ‘need-to-be-tweaked scenes’. Children’s stories were a big base for the play. Ideas, images and questions all flowed from the stories we told each other when we started working on the play. In the tweaking period nothing has changed. When we find the right tweak we know it. It's like finding your favourite part of the story. You find it and the rest is there between the lines.

Pre-Edinburgh show!

EXTRA DATE ADDED - DRAMSOC THEATRE UCD - TICKETS FOR STUDENTS ONLY 5 EURO - EVERYONE ELSE 10

the ladder & the moon
Monday, 26 July 2010 at 19:00
Dramsoc Theatre, Arts Block, UCD

FOR ONE NIGHT ONLY - THE LAST CHANCE TO SEE 'the ladder & the moon' BEFORE ITS EDINBURGH RUN

Tickets are €12/10 and €5 for children.

Followed by drinks in a SECRET (but very cool) LOCATION...!

Tickets are available from the Tain Theatre Box Office at

An Tain, Town Hall Theatre
Crowe Street
Dundalk
Co Louth

Phone: +353 42 933 2276
Fax: +353 42 939 2910
Email: info@antaintheatre.com
Website: http://www.antaintheatre.com

http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=335299&op=1&view=all&subj=646150003&id=100000502003485#!/event.php?eid=133055650060157&ref=mf

The (un)Finished Product

“By sophisticated materials, I mean anything too finished.” Nessa

When we found out that we needed to write the script down in order to enter the Fringe it was –and not just for me –a strange realisation. To write down the piece we had performed about eight times and yet not once -apart from the title of each scene- written anything close to resembling a script. It became a process that, for me at least, altered my understanding of the play; what we had done and were still trying to do.

As we developed it we remembered it. We formed characters in our heads. Scenes were written on napkins, scribbled on scraps and then developed and occasionally kept but only in our memory. The need for a script never came up. In the application process we could only apply with ideas. Why write down what we were doing when we were developing short scenes that stuck with us. If we all liked something (which was rare) they were easy to remember in a one word summery -'chase', ladder/moon' etc. We were writing the movements as we made them; each individual wrote their own and they were written into the space. If it didn’t work we told each other. We watched ourselves and then watched each other. Movements were changed, amended and altered until it made sense to all. Having written all the movements (more or less) we began to work on lighting, scenery, stage-management and all the other bits that go into a show. We began to work blindly; reacting, responding, trusting. We forgot ourselves and traced the movements.

About a month before the script needed to be handed in I began to write. I wrote it as it happened. Ian moved downstage-left, Nessa moved upstage and I jumped. It was technical and precise; finished and with little left to the imagination. It took a long time to write; too long. When I emailed it to Nessa and Ian to send off they didn’t like it. It was what happened not what we needed to happen. Without telling me Nessa tore it up, shredded it, cutting, pasting, altering and erasing. By the end it was I’d wrote, what Nessa had fixed and Ian had added to. It was the basic outline; moments, images, lines of narrative and threads of characters mingled with gaps that we would fill as we found the movements.

When Nessa wrote me (the day after she had sent the script in) I asked her what she had found wrong with what I'd written. She said it was too sophisticated. I didn't understand what she meant. When I asked her she wrote: “By sophisticated materials, I mean anything too finished.” We were making a play about imagination; why give them the finished product?

Poster, Teaser and Tickets

http://www.youtube.com/user/loosethreadtheatre
(Here is a little teaser of what's to come. It might not make much sense but that's part of the point. Enjoy)

http://www.edfringe.com/whats-on/theatre/ladder-and-the-moon
(Here is the link to the Edinburgh Fringe site if you want to book tickets)

Theatre and Technology: "my imaginary problem?"

A week or two ago as a way to battle the pre-exam-study-boredom a strip of masking tape placed on someone’s t-shirt for the duration of the day/night (at times hours, minutes, seconds) developed into some very funny, strange and at times magical moments. In my flat in Barcelona we began to created stories that grew and developed as our lives –granted, in the confines of our flat –progressed.

What started out a simple comments on the state of the persons mental health –“exhausted lover of chocolate and green things in general in search of inspiration from a higher being or failing that from someone taller or failing that with a better idea or failing that a cup of tea with a chocolate biscuit followed by a sleep" –to a more elaborate playful characterisation –"Eskimo, sad, returning home with an empty fish basket".

Although at times stupid, ridiculous, bearing no relation to anything -and often more a reflection of the person writing the ‘tapped-on-tag’ -occasionally they would give you a perspective you’d never seen. In a way they gave you another person’s abstracted perspective of the person they were labeling and in doing so built a situation around them for anyone else watching. (I’ve no idea if that make any sense but just hold on it’s trying to go somewhere). If you can open up another way of seeing something by simply putting a tag on it how does that affect the stage and people making/viewing the action and space?

We are making/viewing theatre in an age where most theatres have multi-media facilities that can project any backdrop onto the stage, where functioning houses can be built in theatres, where settings can seem more real than what exists outside the theatre. But if the audience don’t have to invest anything in believing what they want to see and the performers aren’t worried about provoking the audience’s imagination are both loosing something?

Fragments of stories

We started with ourselves, with poetry we were read, with stories we were told, with memories we had and memories we were told. We talked about holidays, about ice-cream, about making cakes, about the smells of mud, pets, and our bedrooms. We thought of the toys we played with, the ones we had, the ones we wanted, the ones we were glad we never got.

We went to the space and played; we didn’t think about any of the things we had before. We gathered bits of whatever we could find. We played games. Made up rules we didn’t follow, fought when the rules didn’t make sense and then changed them until it didn’t matter. We forgot about words; got lost in stories. For hours we didn’t know where we were going or what we were doing.

We found the story we didn’t know how to tell. We played some more; got more and more lost. Forgot the story we had found and started telling something else. Kept playing. Kept lost. Then we stopped and looked at what we had made in our play.

We finished with fragments we had unknowingly found. We were still lost but we knew where we had come from. We had told our version of the story we didn’t know how to tell. The story was all us. Fragments of us.

conflict and tea

"-What's wrong with it?

-I don't know. It's just not right.

-That's not helpful.

-You're not helpful."

i think it's fair to say that working creatively, with a short time-frame in mind and 'strong-minded-people' (for the kids, you know) makes for a stressful and conflict rich environment. i don't know whether it's fair to say that such environments allow for more interesting work but in the case of our show it was certainly a factor.

i remember disagreements, raised voices, fights, screaming, tears, Ian going to get a sandwich and a tea with a little milk, returning with a bar of chocolate, 3 teas and a pleased-with-himself-smile (usually because he managed to carry the tea without spilling any) to a simmered-down conflict zone and a little bit of progress made on, what would often become, an irrelevant point of argument.

to say myself and nessa disagreed frequently would be an understatement the size of my ego at the time of an argument (i can hear nessa saying 'all the time, you mean'). it would often leave ian exhausted, pissed off, wondering what the hell he'd started, if he had enough money to get another tea and, probably, trying to figure out what the hell the argument was about because he'd heard one very similar the day before.

but it wasn't our disagreements that were shocking. the scary moments were when we all agreed, when we saw one of the others do something or develop a scene in a few seconds and then for a split second seem to make it to the moon and everything in that what-could-be-three-seconds made sense to all of us.

it didn't happen often (well i guess it happened often enough for us to make a show) but it was enough to keep us going. below are a few videos that inspired us, provoked us, made us argue, laugh, and wonder what the hell we were doing. hope you enjoy them.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-B0dJQ35rDs
http://www.youtube.com/user/dancingbrick#p/a/u/0/FlQHwn3bxG8

from scratch

i remember when we were writing up the application, or the proposal, or whatever it's called, for the show myself and nessa were trying to figure out how we could explain what we were thinking of doing. i mean how do you convince a panel of people to give you the theatre for a week when you have nothing to show them --especially when they are used to getting a script with all the directors ideas(or at least most of them) written out. it was a 'well-we-want-to-make-a-show-about-imagination-and-at-the-moment-you-just-have-to-use-your-imagination' situation.

i feared they would think we were going to take the piss and put up a show with an empty stage, no actors, no props, nothing and then have the audience make it up in their heads. it was a running joke for a while that the audience would come out and say it was shit and we would just say 'and who's fault is it that you didn't enjoy it?'. we knew that we had lots of good ideas (or so we thought at the time and in some cases still think) but we didn't know how to communicate them to the panel. we figured we would work that out when we started to develop the show; the 'figured-out-bit' was going to be the play.

i remember that this video was a big help. we wanted to play with cardboard boxes that came to life, fly to the moon and chase shadows. in a way we could have just said that. but we didn't. we did however tell them to look at the video and then trust us... to our shock, amazement and horror they did.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUCrM5i_W3c

LATM in the Edinburgh Fringe

11 o'clock in the morning starting time...oh, the horror.

That means we're going to need lots of tired and hungover people to help us do some early morning advertising. Hurrah!

We begin I suppose... a message from Big Brother

It is 4:53 in the morning, Thursday 20th of May. I've been back in Barcelona for a little over 24 hours. Having been in Dublin for a few days --one of which was to sort out some of the logistics for bringing a show to the Edinburgh Fringe (oh god!) and a second was an exhausted attempt at a rehearsal --I can honestly say this is going to be hilarious, stressful, exhausting, all of the above, below and etcetera etcetera etcetera...

the ladder & the moon

Loose thread theatre

Coming to a blog near you soon....