On Sunday, we performed about 30 minutes of brand new
material at Camden People’s Theatre.We’ve been developing new ideas there since January, as part of CPT’s
Starting Blocks scheme.We’ve also been
meeting with the other artists on the scheme every Monday, to share our
experiences of making work and to find out more about each other’s creative
processes.
It was fun to perform and we’re excited about how the show might develop from
here.There are some big creative
questions to answer, in terms of how we tell this story. But we’re confident that it’s a good story to
be telling and we have a clearer idea of why we’re telling it and the shape of
it.
(I’m being deliberately non-specific
here because I don’t like saying too much about a show before it’s finished!)
A heartfelt thanks to Camden People’s Theatre and our fellow
Starting Blockers.
Over the past few
weeks, Hannah and I have been working on a new show, rehearsing once or twice a
week, with help from Camden People’s Theatre’s Starting Blocks scheme.
The show is about a
relationship I had when I was fifteen. It was the first time I’d fallen in love
and it was wildly exiting and often euphoric.
But I spent a lot of time struggling with the fact that this girl (who we’re calling ‘Kate’) was both anorexic and bulimic.
In lots of respects,
it’s been a pleasure to revisit my teenage years because, generally, I was
pretty happy. We’ve been digging out the
records I listened to – mainly raucous ska punk – and they still sound
great. We’re trying to use some of it in
the show, although it can be hard to keep up with the riotous shouting and
thrash drumming!
I’ve been reading my
teenage diary, which is horrific. It seems amazing that I didn’t know at the
time how much I sounded like Adrian Mole.
This morning, I found ‘poems’ scrawled in the back pages. (‘Over-written’ doesn’t really being to cover
it.) What’s remarkable is the sheer
intensity of emotion. Two out of three
sentences end in an exclamation mark. I
use the word ‘WOW’ excessively. The pages
are a riot of capital letters and emphatic underlinings, veering in an instant
from euphoria to rage to utter banality.
This resonates with my memories of that relationship. Joy.
Worry. Fury. Frustration.
Repentance. Love. Joy again.
Often, all before 8.45am, when school started.
We’re lost in the
middle of all that right now, with a ska punk soundtrack of power chords and
trumpets in the background. We are
looking for the right form to express that feeling. That time when, according to my diary, all I
did all day was FEEL. We haven’t found
it yet because we’re still lost. But
lost is often the most exhilarating part of the process.
As tends to be the case
with our work, we don’t have a fixed deadline for opening the show. But we’ll be sharing some of the new material
at CPT’s SPRINT Festival, along with the other fantastic Starting Blocks
artists, on March 29. Tickets are
available here. David
