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