postcards from the theatre – grief lightening: a satire in 78 slides

Dear Jessica,

How are you? Oh my gosh, I can’t believe you bought a place! I’m so bloody excited for you and your feline and human family!

I saw a new work at Fringe that made me think of you. It was Grief Lightening: A Satire in 78 slides. It is a performative lecture, which posits that Grease is a film entirely about death and what happens after we die and I laughed so much that there was actual thigh-slapping.

Part of my fascination with the piece was my own realisation, over the course of the night, that I must know every word of Grease. How? Why? When? And what is it about recognition that makes us laugh so much harder? Why does a joke about a pop-culture fill us with such a sense of communal joy? Is it that feeling of re-realising something we have always known? Why have we always known the 1978 film Grease? What is your earliest memory of it?

Similarly I was so delighted by the simplicity and effectiveness of the format: what a gift a ‘lecture’ is. An expert stands before you and teaches about something they take joy in taking seriously. Each one of these ideas – expert, teach, serious – is so recognisable, so ripe for comedy and so filled with generosity and, consequentially, vulnerability. I thought how every lecture I’ve ever written is a play in itself, which I wrote, rehearsed and performed for an audience of sleep-deprived students, who took notes on the facts but hopefully remembered the passion without writing it down.

Sending all my love and hope to talk soon,

Fleur

Dear Fleur,

Tell me more, tell me more, about existentialism and Grease! I, too, feel like Grease has just been part of my brain and lexicon forever. We watched it in my childhood, when I only understood a quarter of the references, and then I rewatched it so many times, leaning forward, skin humming for the opening chords of those recognisable songs. The moment Sandy walked out in the jumpsuit in the final scene? ELECTRIC ARMS THRUMMING EYES PROPPED OPEN WIDE SOUL AFLAME HOLY MOLY she has FOUND HERSELF or at least a VERSION OF HERSELF and I am here for this journey, here here here.

While I am not a beauty school drop out (I am not even that confident applying liquid eyeliner), I too love a performance lecture. I wonder how many of us miss that comfy ease of sliding into a large lecture hall, knowing you will just listen, and doodle, and think, and daydream for an hour or two. I always wondered how the lecturers filled up all that time with talking. Now I have taught for a while, I realised how much you learn to fill up space while also building little bubbles of confidence and possibility in your students, so they can join the conversation.

I have never lectured the sort of big rooms I used to sit in. I nearly did a school assembly in Singapore in 2020, with a speech about pop culture as an access point to wider ideas. So there you go. You wrote to the right person. (Though COVID got in the way of that plan.)

I have always adored how pop culture allows us to connect to latent feelings and ideas in such an accessible way. Have you seen the Britney Spears doco? It covered sexism, mental illness, conspiracy theories, the legal system, and plenty more, in about an hour. It’d take Shakespeare 5 acts to do the same—and Mamet couldn’t get there if he tried. I hope your beautiful land is flourishing and you, too, in it.

Lots of love,

Jess Bellamy

postcards from theatre: the boy who talked to dogs with paris balla

Dear Paris,

I saw my First Theatre of the year last night and I thought it might be nice, with borders still strange, unpredictable things and theatre itself still a brave new world, to write to friends far away and tell them about the theatre I am seeing. What do you think? 

Last night I saw The Boy Who Talked to Dogs, by Slingsby and STCSA and I thought of you and your approach to theatre for young people. Also, this had (shadow) puppet dogs, like your albatross in Owl and the Albatross. Why does children’s theatre get puppets but not theatre for adults? I love puppets and I’m a very adulty adult. Why don’t I get puppets?

Theatre is still new to me (or re-newed) and I was in awe of every lighting change and set reveal. We were at cabaret-style seating and at times the lamps on each table burst on; a sea of flickering blue stars around the theatre. Every time something like this happened, I would be so transfixed by the magic of the interplay between lighting, sound and action that I would forget to follow the story for whole minutes. I felt out of practice at to watching theatre, overly emotional, easily distracted and a bit hyper.

For a while those lamps on the tables fixated me. They looked like night-lights. In Peter Pan, Wendy asks, “Can anything harm us, mother, after the night-lights and lit?” “Nothing, precious,” Mrs Darling replies. “They are the eyes a mother leaves behind her to guard her children.” But of course harm comes for them. It comes to many children. This was a dark story of a neglected child, Martin, beaten and driven from home by abuse and indifference. There is a dilemma at the heart of the piece (and perhaps at the heart of all children’s theatre): how dark do we go with this story? At one point the musicians tried to move Martin on from tales of hunger but he protested that many children are hungry so the story should be told.

How do you decide what stories to tell children and how dark to go? What would young Paris have wanted on their stages?

Sending you my love from Auburn, South Australia,

Fleur Kilpatrick

PS. Today was the Auburn Market and I was quite excited but it turned out to be more of a garage sale from the local RSL plus one guy selling fish out of the back of his ute.

Hi Fleur,

So wonderful to hear from you and to hear that theatre exists again!

Your letter reminded me of one of my favourite things about working in theatre for young audiences. That renewed newness that we are feeling at the moment, of not quite knowing what the rules of the theatre are, and not being able to sit still the whole time, the awe and wonder of things we didn’t know (or perhaps had forgotten) were possible. It’s almost like getting to be a kid going to the theatre for the very first time all over again without the expectations of what theatre is meant to be.

How great are puppets?!? It almost seems like when we do get to see puppets in “grown up” theatre that it is at the expense of every other part of the show. We can have really awesome puppets worth thousands and thousands of dollars… but only if you don’t care about pacing or compelling plots… While in theatre for young audiences someone will sharpie some eyeballs onto a box, breathe life into it and the box becomes the lungs of the whole performance. Maybe this new-old-newness can help us remember how to do that for adulty adults too…

This letter has taken me longer to write than expected. I had to put it down and think for a whole day about one of your questions. How dark do we go? I think my answer is as dark as necessary, which is very vague and probably unhelpful. To an extent the age of your audience is important here- showing incredibly loud and violent things to babies would obviously be silly because their brains aren’t developed enough to understand beyond “ah loud and scary!!” (same).. However, young people are not automatically exempt from witnessing the darkness of the world just because they are young, so to avoid showing them stories about the darkness of the world also seems silly. If you think that there is a story that needs to be told to young people, a story that might help them navigate the world or understand their place within it, that story needs to be told. Even if it is dark. I think it comes down to how you tell the story rather than if you can tell the story.

Young Paris wanted to see the whole world on stage, the dark, the light and everything in between. Unfortunately, they mostly saw bad panto.

All my love heading right back to you from Bendigo, Victoria,

Paris Balla

P.S. I went to a “farmers’ market” here for the first time, but rather than fresh fruit, baked goods and handmade items, it was truly a market for farmers and was mostly a place to buy tools and crops.

in celebration, in grief, in awe: a year of teaching theatre online

I want to tell you about my year: a year of lecturing theatre and performance online through Covid-19 at Monash Centre for Theatre and Performance. I want to tell you this because what has driven me these last months has been the image of reuniting with my students and colleagues to celebrate all we have achieved together. Two weeks ago, Monash University proposed the disestablishment of the Centre for Theatre and Performance, calling for the voluntary redundancies of most of my colleagues (I myself am on a fixed term contract up for renewal in November so my five year job will vanish without a trace).  Ours is the only school in the university that has been targeted for disestablishment.

With this proposal, I fear that we will never get to celebrate our achievements as a community. So I am writing a celebration, alone and far from my students and colleagues. In this piece, I hope to be able to recognise what we have achieved: through the struggles, we have remained a community, we have taught and learnt theatre online, we have researched ‘liveness’, questioned the essence of our art form, re-imagined the theatres of the future and, above all, we have cared for each other.

January: My first day on campus, I am wearing a facemask. Smoke makes Monash glow orange. The Centre for Theatre and Performance is teaching a summer unit – Presentation Skills – to 150 students from across the university. At first they look taken back by our passion, our humour and Professor Jane Montgomery Griffith lecturing on rhetoric barefoot but soon they love it. I hear the word ‘wow’ a lot. They linger to talk to us and tell us this is nothing like anything they have experienced before.

As I teach, I run from one side of the room to the other, brandishing a microphone, making students who have never thought they could have an opinion on art, argue over Marcel Duchamp’s famous artwork, ‘Fountain’ (a urinal bearing a made up signature). “Are you going to let her say that?” I yell, and charge across the room to thrust the mic into the face of another student. Again and again I lead the class in applause, celebrating their peers for having an opinion and stating it clearly.

One student has lost the family farm to the fires. Ironic, she tells me, because they moved to Gippsland after the fires at Kinglake. Kneeling beside her, I walk her through the process of applying for Special Consideration.

February: We have our first ever staff planning retreat. Gathered around the kitchen table, we write a new ‘About Us’ section for the website. It begins like this:

The Centre for Theatre and Performance is a creative hub where we introduce our students to all aspects of theatre and performance and nurture people who can use their talents in a variety of theatre contexts, as well as in all aspects of life. Through our robust research and teaching programme, CTP:

• Prepares students for the range of roles they will perform in theatrical contexts, in their everyday lives, and in diverse workplaces, including those yet to be imagined.
• Uses performance as a way of thinking, feeling, and addressing the most critical questions facing us and our planet.
• Sees theory and performance as vitally connected, offering valuable tools for understanding social problems and devising innovative ways to solve them.

We eat beautiful cheese. We complete a puzzle: rows of rainbow houses. I remember feeling terribly optimistic: we were heading into a new year with a clearer sense than ever of who we were and what we valued.

March: We have One Day of teaching in person. I teach two first year tutorials, back-to-back. I come up to my office to gather my things for my second year Music Theatre class and find my colleagues standing in the corridor, a metre and a half away from each other. It is over. The university has made the call to cease all in-person teaching. They’ll be emailing students shortly. I have a class now, what do I do? Go and teach it. The university will make the announcement soon.

I go. I feel high. It is the History of Music Theatre. I tell them that the history of music theatre is essentially the history of 20^th Century America, a time and place of massive social and political upheaval. It is the history of an artform responding or failing to respond to the moment it is created in. I wonder if my hands are shaking. We lay out butcher’s paper on the floor. I assign pairs of students to each decade and we draw a timeline of the 20^th Century: wars fought, abortions legalised, rights given and taken away, free education given and taken away, disease, musical theatre and recession all laid out together.

Part of our ill-fated timeline.

Then the email comes.

Months later my music theatre students tell me that they have been thinking about our One Day. They told me it was frightening: the abruptness of it all and my total lack of clarity once the email was read to the class. I wish I could go back to that day and tell them: we will do this. I’ll get you Educated and you will hold yourselves together as a community with such dignity and care that I will tell you to write a How To guide: how to create community in your online classroom when you have only met once in person.

April: I update Zoom, which turns out to be a big mistake. For a week, it boots me out every time there are more than two people on a call. I teach a first year class from my mobile and then a borrowed iPad and then it updates again and it is fine.

I re-write all assignments for music theatre so that they can be either online or in person, depending on how the semester plays out. My two sessional staff, a married couple, Adam and Dee, work like Trojans, adapting choreography and acting classes for living rooms on the fly, all whilst home-schooling a four-year-old.

May: We are doing it. At the start of the year I had held printed pieces of paper up to the screen in place of slides. Now I move fluently between slides, videos and audio. I create online quizzes. I film lessons on essay structure in my backyard. Break out rooms are our friends. Emojis are our friends. The chat bar is our friend. Polls are our friends. Students being friends are our friends. The online Mystery Play Cycle made by the First Years is a great success. So are the students’ self-tape auditions. There is laughter in class. There is actual joy.

Essay structure.

I strain the rotator cuffs of both my shoulders hunching over my tiny laptop. I teach with heatpacks, like giant shoulder pads, jammed inside my jumpers. In the evenings, I pace the garden on the phone to first years, counselling them into staying at university, finding solutions. “Can you speak to your family about needing space and time during your classes?” “What are your support systems?” “You are entitled to free counselling. Hold on, I’ll grab you the number.” “I’m going to send you some breathing exercises.” “Just send me what you’ve written. It doesn’t have to be perfect. This is 2020.”

June: The students submit their choreography assessments. In one moment the screen fills with a kickline: their beaming faces at the top and a row of high-kicking fingers as legs down the bottom: an Exquisite Corpse of a dance.

A first year who nearly dropped out writes to me. He wants to be a teacher: “I will definitely learn from how easily you comforted me when I was at my lowest,” he wrote.

Somewhere in there the government announces their plan to increase Arts fees by 113% and I spend my break writing and speaking about this. I campaign for my students, not knowing that a few months later, they would be campaigning for me.

Writing for Artshub about funding cuts. With a good view.

July: I do draft after draft of the music theatre schedule. Firstly it is all online. Then I get the go ahead: one week online, one week in person, back and forwards for the whole semester. I love the pedagogical challenge of this: what is worth my students’ travel time? Then the second lockdown begins. I write another schedule: online until week six and then we begin the alternating weeks. It takes what feels like an eternity to confirm that I will be able to get the sessional staff I need. I have a panic attack on the floor. I want the students to log onto the unit and see: in the midst of this pandemic, Fleur has a plan. But bureaucracy works slower than I re-write subjects. Finally, five days before semester, my teaching staff are confirmed.

In September I will re-write the subject twice more: once to include just two hours a fortnight of optional in person teaching from week eight and then again to get rid of it.

But it works. The students hold weekly games nights. One sends me a hat she crocheted. I am teaching what I love: playwriting and theatre making, and both are translating to the online world with ease.

September: At my last playwriting class before the mid-semester break, a student confesses that they are anxious: I talk constantly about how everything we put on stage is a political choice and her work just isn’t political. Would I hate it? I told her that, in the year 2020, to entertain – to make people feel great – is one of the greatest ambitions an artist can have and that to choose joy this year is political and necessary and generous.

That was the last class I taught.

Except for the one, taught by a sessional, that I ducked into because my students were in tears having just heard that the university is proposing to disestablish their school and end their major. I, still in shock and grief myself, tried to guide them. Still confused by terms like ‘targeted voluntary redundancies’ and ‘consultation period’, I tried so hard. I hope at least that I did a better job than I did on that One Day in person.

Saveourctp.com, a student run campaign, unaffiliated with the staff or university.

I love my students. I am in awe of my students. Again and again I see them chose to make things better. I see them prioritise diversity, inclusion and care. I see them work with rigour and passion and innovation. Watching them this year I have thought often of those exercises everyone does at drama school: You go for a walk around a room, filling available space, watching out for each other, being light on your feet and changing direction suddenly and yet with grace. This has been their year: a year of changes – constant and unstoppable – but they have found the available spaces, moved with grace and flexible, planning only for the next step and watching out for each other.

I celebrate them and all we have achieved together.

To support their campaign go to saveourctp.com. The campaign is entirely student organised and run and it is such a stunning testimony to who they are as people, students, arts advocates and artists and the nuanced way they view the world.

on starting your own company and working with friends

It is that time of year where students are leaving us and we are all just really hoping they don’t take our jobs too soon. 

Most years, as they get ready to leave us I send out an email filled with self-care tips sourced from the broader arts community. But this year’s cohort have had me rattle on about self-care a lot and since they are already filled with excellent collaborative teams I decided that this year’s parting email could be crowd-sourced tips on starting your own company. And I thought I would share it here too because the wisdom of the crowd is beautiful, thoughtful and generous. 

AFTER HERO, photo by Sarah Walker

To kick them off, a couple of tips from me: firstly, talk about money! I think the biggest mistake I made early on was not spelling out what things like ‘profit share’ actually meant: it doesn’t mean we split 100% of the box office takings, we split 100% of the profits, so all the costs of the show are taken out of that. One simple conversation could have made that clear.

I would also advise that you follow up phone conversations with venues and organisations with an email:

‘Thanks for the phone call. Just to put in writing what we discussed…’ Leave a written record of everything.

Now for smart words from some generous artists:

Anastasia Ryan, production manager:

Contracts! Even if you’re doing it with your best mate, just a super simple 1 page thing saying what each persons job is, the expectations and the agreed money (if there is any) helps so much.

Nithya Nagarajan, neo-classical Indian dancer, producer and arts educator:

Go to grant writing info sessions, often hosted for free by City of Melbourne, Australia Council for the Arts and Auspicious Arts. And if you go into arts work, keep your arts administratior and performance maker hats very, very separate.

Rebekah Montague, playwright and (strange combo) financial educator:

Have a separate bank account for your art.

Izzy Roberts-Orr, poet, playwright and artistic director of Melbourne’s Emerging Writers Festival:

Clear communication, structured meetings if that’s your style, and a record – get things in writing (e.g. minutes / letters of agreement / emails clearly stating what’s happening) it feels silly having meetings / agendas / defined roles as you’re starting out, but before you know it you might have actual money on the table and need a bank account or be running projects at a scale where everyone needs to know their role in order to do it. Also if they’re your friends, make sure you have friend hangs outside of work! Plus space as friends to talk about your work practices if needed, and make sure you’re still nurturing each other in both your role as a collaborator and your role as a friend.

FIGMENT, photo by Theresa Harrison

Tim Byrne, arts journalist:

Try your very best to temper ambition with a tiny bit of clear-eyed perspective. One (or two at the most) little shows a year, honed into perfection, are worth far more than some grand vision of cultural dominance. That ties into money too: the greatest art comes from thinking your way around obstacles, so treat lack of funds as a challenge. Oh, and don’t give all your time to your work, even if your work is your love. Get a walk in there, or some lying about watching trees. Perspective.

Patrick McCarthy, director and playwright:

I’d say most of the problems people run into early on (and even later) occur because not enough time was spent talking in the lead up to the project. Spend as much time as you can talking with your collaborators, about practical things like money, schedules, venues, personnel, marketing, publicity, insurance, etc. But also spend as much time, if not more, talking about methodology. How are you going to work together both in and outside of rehearsal, how will you communicate with each other, who has decision making responsibility around what elements of the work? Have some rules about how your process/room will operate (including things that need to be zero tolerance, even if they seem like they should be obvious). Schedule time to sit down and talk throughout the process, to see how everyone’s tracking and problem solve things that aren’t going well. Eat together. Have alone time if you need it. Have a review process once the season’s done to figure out what worked and what didn’t so you can adjust for the next show. Don’t let things fester.

Mohammad Hash, theatre and film producer, now living in Cairo:

Delve into diversity and create minimal sets that spell big works. Understand grant applications and go to as many arts talks as possible. Australia Council is fantastic support and always look for international opportunities. It worked for me.

Indira Carmichael, visual artist and community arts administrator and advocate:

MOUs (memorandum of understanding) are great if contracts between mates seems a bit heavy. It’s a good way of getting everyone on the same page. Sometimes you don’t realise that your motives for doing a show are different to others until it all falls apart.

THE DRESSMAKER: A MUSICAL ADAPTATION, photo: Sarah Walker

Goldele Rayment, director and company director:

Don’t be afraid to let projects take time. There is less rush than you think. It’s less stressful and more satisfying to take a bit more time with development and forward planning. Be kind, be gentle, be generous but also learn it’s ok to say “no”. I don’t like that creatively, that’s not for me or please don’t treat me like that.

Pippa Bainbridge, venue manager and production manager:

Values. Interrogate what they are for you, and make sure they are aligned with those of your collaborators and of each project you work on. Values. Articulate them, share them, uphold them, tend to them…and you’ll never be disappointed with what is returned.

Mike Greaney, animator:

I think the thing that is really important to work out early on is set in writing the structure of ownership over the venture. Have the hard conversations at the start when you are talking about % ownerships of nothing, because once money and ego get involved down the line, those conversations become very difficult. Talk about these things with your collaborators as well, and make clear what they are trading their time for/ getting out of working with you.

Stephanie Speirs, producer, production manager and venue manager of the Fringe Hub:

When you agree to anything (a new venture, the mission/direction of your project, helping someone out, donating stuff/money/time) be explicit in what that agreement entails. If you can’t stomach writing things down yet, at the VERY LEAST make sure you’ve all said out loud what you understand by what’s been said, and clarify exactly what that means to you. Any project will possibly mean hundreds of hours of work for those involved – so be sure that everyone with a stake understands WHAT those hours of work are and WHO has agreed to do them. (Or if NO-ONE wants to do the work, then the project shouldn’t happen!)

Libby Klyse, performer, writer, manager:

Know who is the boss for each project. Someone needs to be the director and/or producer, with the ultimate decision-making and budget control.

Georgia Carter, performer:

Understand budgets and pay attention to the numbers. You need to have someone that understands it… and audiences don’t just happen. They take work and strategic planning is essential.

Ramona Barry, artist and writer:

Written agreements – I’ve seen many a friendship fall foul of business mistakes. Even if you are the very best of friends get it all in writing

Natalie Wadwell, arts administrator:

Get a shareholders/partnership agreement, friends don’t always make best business partners and skill sets should compliment not duplicate, talk about money. To add to that really talk about your personal and business values. Where do they see themselves and the biz in 1, 3 and 5 yrs time? Do it separately and then discuss. Have an exit strategy upfront and a plan of what milestones you need to hit to maintain working together.

 

ALL THAT IS RIGHT, photo: Sarah Walker

Individually, these are great tips for professional practice. As a whole, they mean something even better: they mean that all of these artists want to see you succeed. They want to see you build partnerships and careers that are sustainable, caring, productive and healthy. It is easy to think that you have to fight your way into the industry (and it is a tough industry) but remember that people wish you well. Great artists support artists, advocate for artists, mentor artists and enjoy the successes of artists. Remember you’re not alone out there. Hold onto the relationships you have made and get ready to meet some amazing new people who are excited to see what you make next.

Wishing you all the best,

Fleur

on waiting, loving, competing and the bachelor s17 e5

I don’t think I’ve ever seen an episode of The Bachelor but I must have imbibed it somewhere along the way. Because every time a rose appeared on the stage of the Mechanics Institute in The Bachelor S17 E5, every time the music stated the exact magnitude of the drama, every time The Bachelor asked ‘can I steal you’ or a girl turned to the camera to call another girl ‘fake’, I recognised it. This world is simultaneously alien and deeply familiar.

It is July, 2018. I am in Australia. On the other side of the world The Bachelor is between seasons and Bachelor Arie Luyendyk Jnr. is engaged to Lauren Burnham, the runner up of Season 22. As they plan their wedding, a motley crew of contestants in Melbourne stare into the audience. They are here for love. They are here for a rose. They are here to win and they are “not about to be bypassed by some other lady making a better connection with him.”

Watching them, this video pops into my mind: David Bowie and Mick Jagger, Dancing in the Street with all the music stripped away. The sound of breathy lip syncing and the shuffling of their feet make their once explicable actions (they are shooting a music video) ridiculous, hollow, painful; two grown men writhing, sexlessly in the night.

Katrina Cornwell and Morgan Rose’s production sits in the silence, the waiting and the weirdness of love as game show and lovers as candidates. In this version of The Bachelor, the images that burn aren’t the kisses – performed on loop like terrible gifs, two beings lip at each other, too little and too much – it is the contestants waiting in silence.

It reminds me of images of American high school dances: the girls not chosen, the rejects, sit in a row along the side of the gymnasium. But this is worse than that: Each time Sean leaves (‘can I steal you away?’), The Others are made non-people by his absence. We feel how disinterested a TV camera would be in their silent, uncomfortable wait. Without the presence of the man they are competing for, these women will be left on the cutting room floor. But in this production they are centred. The Bachelor told through the female gaze is all about the waiting, the silence and the unasked questions:

Why him? We see nothing to recommend Sean as a human being. In fact, this production makes him and everyone around him barely human. The stage is full of half-people: more role than reality.

Why her? For the duration of the show, I forget that there will in fact be a winner of this season of The Bachelor. (Catherine. It was Catherine. She sat on his lap.) There was no way in which to distinguish the competitors on that stage and no reason for him to chose one over the other.

It reminded me of a brief stint on OkCupid: each time I went home I would think to myself, “yes.. I could see him again.. Or, never again.”

“Habitualisation devours work, clothes, furniture, one’s wife, and the fear of war… and art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make the stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. “ Viktor Shklovski

After 22 seasons, The Bachelor is part of our DNA. That’s why I recognised the music, the straight-to-cameras, the yearning. Our habitualisation to its tropes has made it seem like a reasonable form of entertainment and made us accept that, when someone says ‘this is the man/woman you’ll be competing for’, we’ll be ready: we will not be bypassed by some other lady/man/lovesick human building a better connection than us. This production makes us all David Bowies and Mick Jaggers dancing in silence.

Last night, frying zucchinis, I had a moment of shock. Shock that there was a man cooking beside me and that, of all the people in the world we could have cooked zucchini with, we had chosen each other.

Later. We went to bed and read our books beside each other. Later – this morning – I wrote these words when I was meant to be drawing a naked woman but my astonishment at love outweighed my desire to get my money’s worth from my Sunday life drawing class.

I think of Sean and Catherine. What a power imbalance they started their relationship with! Six months of being told ‘I could chose someone else.’ Could you ever cook zucchinis with the man who put you through that? What is a relationship like when the competition has been so obvious? When you have been lined up again and again with a group of ever-diminishing women, knowing that this man may be about to send you away from him, can you read a book next to him in bed?

She is in this relationship because she auditioned, fought hard and won. He is in this relationship because he was the one she fought for. So maybe that’s the difference: in the real world you both audition. You both fight hard and maybe, if everything lines up you both win.

And I think of the moments we’ve all been left on the cutting room floor. I mean, at least Lindsey, Ashlee, Desiree, Lesley, Tierra, Daniella, Selma, Robin and Jackie got to milk a goat, see Glacier National Park and drink champagne along the way. At least they got to look in the camera and say ‘I’m angry’, ‘I’m shocked’, ‘that bitch’, ‘This hurts so bad’. In life we lose in silence.

All photos by Sarah Walker. 

I am friends with Katrina Cornwell and Morgan Rose but don’t worry: I would have written self-indulgently about cooking zucchini and competitive love even if I had never met them. 

on fiction and climate change

This is something I wrote for the symposium Narratives of Climate Change at Newcastle University, July 2018. It is part of a longer speech using my new play Whale as a way to talk about the role of theatre in climate change and the responsibility of the playwright. I thought this bit was nice and stand alone. Also I had to trim it a fair bit for Newcastle so wanted to share this full thought. Enjoy.

I want to talk about the role of fiction in narratives of climate change. It may be a bit of a dirty word here, I’m not sure but the word ‘narratives’ already suggests both a shaping of story and a multiplicity of ways in which we could shape it. Shaping does not mean fictionalising but it means controlling. It means choosing your weapons. And my weapon of choice is fiction. So this is a question I’ve had to ask myself: when the facts are so urgent, is there room for fiction?

I’ve gotta admit: I’m really not much of a researcher when it comes to my plays. I used to be. I once filled two journals with research on objectum sexuality before deciding that no one needed that play. These days my plays usually start from fluff like ‘memories’ and ‘feelings’ and ‘images’.

I wrote a play called Terrestrial for State Theatre Company of South Australia. The poor woman putting together the education pack to accompany the work asked me for any research I had used and I told her I mostly just googled how to spell words.

Which isn’t totally true. I also stalked mining towns on google satellite view. I’d start zoomed right in on them – Leigh Creek, Roxby Downs – then zoom out and out until the desert around them looked like mars and the mines were a deep blue gash on the surface of the planet. ‘It looks like a wound,’ I thought. And I’d write.

With Whale I was offered a scientific adviser and I said ‘sure I’d love to chat but you realise the islands are largely made up and… have you read the ending?’

And to clarify: when I say ‘fiction’ I am talking about a play that reveals just how fictional it is. The rules of this world leave no one in doubt. I am not trying to pass fiction off as fact. That stops the instant the Host explains the rules: ‘we’ll hold a vote and whichever island loses will be sucked into the ocean instantly, no time for evacuation’.

But the Host also tells you ‘none of this is real’ whilst denying one of the realest facts of this century: ‘The oceans aren’t really rising and no communities will vanish into the water’. And she tells us this again and again – Judas to Jesus in the pre-dawn light – these denials make fact of our fictions. Make that encroaching whale an amalgamation of blubber and fantasy.

I want to tell you about a play called Stoning Mary by English-Afro-Caribbean playwright, Debbie Tucker Green. In it, a couple – both desperately ill with AIDs – fight over the one prescription they have for AIDs medication before their argument is cut short by a child soldier who kills them with a machete. He is, in turn, killed by the couple’s daughter – Mary – who then is sentenced to death by stoning.

At the front of this play Debbie has slipped an instruction: this play is to be performed by an all white cast, in the accent of wherever it is performed.

Older sister: 12

12 people signed.

Put their pen to your petition. 12.

Younger sister: 12’s after 10, right?

Older sister: After 11

Younger sister: Which is after 10, right?

How many did I need?

Older sister: 6000.

S’after a lotta tens Mary.

In a parallel universe, there exists a non-fiction version of this play and a Debbie Tucker Green who threw herself into research and characters each modelled on a real person. This play is almost certainly performed by a cast of people from African nations. But this play says something different to the play she wrote. It says ‘this is happening in Rwanda and tonight we are going to sit in that fact.’

What Stoning Mary says is something quite different.

Debbie wants the visibility that comes with whiteness. And she wants to interrogate it. 90% of HIV positive people live in developing countries. Who these stories happen to changes the narrative. And it can be the difference between being heard and not being heard.

“I’m a black woman,” she says in the Guardian, March 2005. “I write black characters. That is part of my landscape. But with Stoning Mary I was interested in questioning what we don’t see and hear. The stories of people who would be in the headlines every day if what was happening to them was happening to white people.”

There is an alternate reality version of Whale too. One in which I have been to each real island, consulted, maybe asked a representative from each to come up on stage and have a bunch of – largely white – audience members vote whether or not they survive. That play is gripping, and potentially pretty traumatic for all concerned.

So what do I lose in this fact-based Whale?

I make the problem far away. Suddenly there are kilometres involved and maybe what fiction can do in this moment is remove those kilometres. Make these global neighbours your actual neighbours. I make it a problem that exists and potentially is solved in your suburb.

Here’s another thing: Islander leaders have already come here and pleaded for the right of their island to stay above the water. And the response was so quiet. I think it is our turn to plead on their behalf.

Kiribati, Getty Images, 

A moratorium on the killing of actresses

Okay. What if, for one year, no actress was killed or raped?

I’ve been thinking this for a while. For the last two years I’ve been looking around, often on opening nights, often with wine in my hand, and wondering ‘If I were to ask her right now how many times she’s been killed on stage, what would her answer be?’ Often. I forget. The first time I was 18. Strangled. Stabbed. Shot. Drowned.

Two years ago, I decided to stop writing her death and violation. I didn’t suggest that others do this because there are plenty of valid reasons to depict these horrors on our stages. These stories are a massive and hideous part of our society and isn’t it the role of art to examine darkness and demand change?

Well… yes.

But maybe my awareness is already raised. Maybe I’m reading enough accounts of real assault and violation happening off our stages and on them. I am bearing witness. Maybe paying money to see that actress have her knickers pulled down or that one pulled by her hair (carefully choreographed of course) feels gratuitous when a man really could assault actresses in front of an audience of 2000 on a Melbourne stage in 2014.

Actors are gutsy people. And most know how to look after themselves in the wake of dramatised violence. I have nothing but respect for the women who can do this and stay sane. I couldn’t. So I’m not saying this because they need my protection, by any means. But maybe the support would be appreciated.

Because ours is not the only industry where violence against women happens. But for better or for worse in the last 12 months female actors have been on the front line. They have been incredible and we have all benefitted from their courage and determination. And some people have praised them. Others have called their courage a desperate attempt to make money, grab fame, jump on bandwagons.

Now I know my ban won’t happen. Theatres have programmed their seasons and you’ve signed your contracts. Maybe you’ve even pre-booked. But for a second just imagine a world where we said to female actors ‘thanks. I think you’ve done enough. We won’t ask you to not only be the loudest voices, not only to put your jobs on the line and risk your professional relationship but also to physically represent the violence of our society nightly. How about we do this other play. These other twenty plays in which you get to survive and thrive. Take a break. We’ve got this.’

It won’t happen. And fuck, imagine how much of the canon would disappear instantly if it did. But I like imaging a world where it might.

brutality, brittleness and some merciless gods

So I’ve been thinking a bit lately about what we can ask of our audiences. About hardness, culpability and the hurt that words can bring. A few weeks ago I saw Roslyn Oades’ Hello, Goodbye, Happy Birthday and I felt so grateful to see a piece of theatre that was new, innovative and at the forefront of its field just be gentle. New and innovative so often means jagged.

I’m aware that theatre happens both onstage and in my body – the body of the audience – and I am aware that the theatre that is me goes through phases: sometimes I can take whatever you have going and other days, for whatever reason, I am more brittle.

Last night, at Merciless Gods, I was brittle from muscular pain and painkillers. This brittleness (and my fun drug cocktail) in no way clouded my vision: I saw a stunning production. I saw actors perform with incredible control, intensity and generousity. I saw a lighting design that made me gasp and I heard words that cut. And I was shaken because it was hard and jagged and I was brittle and tired.

Charles Purcell in Merciless Gods. Photo: Sarah Walker.

A few weeks ago, I wrote this scene (edited down here) for my new play, Whale. I doubt it will make it to the final or even third draft because dramaturges seldom have time for this sort of wanky self-doubt, but this scene was in my head last night.

WRITER:

I think I need a break

Does anyone else need a break?

MAN:

Are you okay?

WRITER:

How much is too much to ask of theatre?

MAN:

I’m not –

Sorry

Not following

WRITER:

Like

We want it to be relevant and have a message

We want it to say the big things but

Like

Right now relevant means fucked

It means

Give them a shitty night

I just

Think that maybe there needs to be a moratorium

Maybe we need to ask our audiences

Do you want us to be relevant and frightening

To put shitty decisions on your lap and force you to feel culpable

Or do you want to come here and forget about it?

MAN:

Okay I hear you

I just think

Now you’ve started

Maybe you need to finish this one

Okay?

You can write a comedy next year

Would that make you feel better?

Yeah, that’s definitely not going to make it to draft three.

Every time I ask people these questions, their answers blow me away. So – prompted by Merciless Gods but in no way entirely about that show – I wanted to give people a chance to answer the questions that I keep coming up against. Here, in an act of beautiful generosity, artists and critics answer my questions:

Photo: Sarah Walker (again)

How much is too much?

Sarah Walker: You know, I think there really isn’t an answer to this question. Because I’ve seen shows that have depicted horror – true horror, but they’ve cared for the audience in that space. Given them a sense of power. Whether it be to politically empower people – say, this is happening but it can be stopped and you can do something to stop it, or to just fight horror with love, with hope – to say, just feeling is an act of rebellion. Loving is a weapon against hate. Those are the shows that have justified their brutality. I think the problem comes when a show brings you darkness but doesn’t give you a way out. That is the work that shuts people down. That makes them feel powerless.

Myron My: I don’t believe there can be such a thing in theatre because ultimately it is all make-believe. As long as it’s done with care and respect. I think it’s important that while we yearn for love and happiness it’s really important to explore and reflect on the darker elements of life, and what better way to do it than through theatre.

What purpose does brutality serve of our stages?

Eliza Quinn: I think sometimes its the escapism of theatre that can feel brutal – like “Oh, I just spent two hours in this nice warm theatre and I went into a totally different world that made me feel something that might have been vaguely euphoric or sublime, and now I’m outside and it’s cold and wet and I don’t know how to reconcile what I saw in there with what I know is happening out here.”
Sometimes it’s like a performance is asking too much of me by being so wonderful and joyful. Then I exit the theatre and go home and turn on the news and there is no joy.
Like I feel as though the performance or text or whatever didn’t give me any tools with which to navigate the world outside. And I ask myself if that’s the point of theatre? If it is there to give you the tools to deal with the real world or if I should just be grateful that a whole lot of people put in so much effort to entertain me. Sometimes it feels like I am asking too much of theatre.

Sarah Walker: I think of all artists, theatremakers particularly feel this responsibility for their work to interrogate, to challenge and to reveal. We’re okay with film being entertaining and silly and comforting, but I think theatremakers feel like that isn’t enough – feel like they have to ask the big, awful questions with their bodies and their text. Perhaps it’s something about the liveness of theatre – the reality of the human figure sweating and fretting and heart-beating in front of you. Something about that dynamic seems to force us to try to create work that makes people feel, and it feels wrong or cowardly to just make people laugh or feel delight. It’s not, of course. The ideal work is one, I think, that acknowledges that the world is terrifying and brutal and cruel, but reminds us that there is beauty, there is hope, and that we can cultivate those energies and emotions in a way that isn’t just ignoring the bad.

What did the brutality of Merciless Gods do to you?

Bridget Mackey: I think that we should see brutality on our stages. There’s a brutality that exists in our world and I think that we should be made to look at it. I think that Christos Tsiolkas is a writer who makes us look at things that we, as a society, don’t want to look at. And Little One’s production of Merciless Gods has skilfully dramatised the quality about Tsiolkas that I appreciate. To be honest, there’s a brutality to my own desires. I’m talking about both sexual desires and things I’d like to do or say when I’m angry or frustrated. Of course, I am sometimes ashamed of these things and don’t act on them. Sometimes I act them out in a safe way. I figure other people are the same. So, I think the stage is a good place to explore darkness and brutality. Sometimes when we look at things closely we see them for what they are, and realise we are not alone in our experiences.

Sarah Walker: When Stephen and Dan were interviewed on Smart Arts, they both used a word to describe the stories that made up the show, and that word was ‘tender.’ And I feel like that was what I took away from that production – this sense of profound tenderness. I will admit that I watched it partly through a camera lens, which always distorts my experience of a production. But what I felt during those vignettes wasn’t the stark, clinical slap of brutality. It was the ache of love, of longing, of people desperately trying to figure out what it was to be human. What it meant to be alive in a cruel world that took things away that you cared for. So many of those characters were just aching – aching, but in the space that absence or pain carved in them, that ache became something of substance. Became love that filled the hole and defined it. My overwhelming takeaway was that humans can be hideous, but they can also be so, so tender. So human. And that that love and tenderness wasn’t just a response to pain. It was a force just as strong as the horror. There was something I found comforting in it, because I’ve felt that pain, that loss. Not in the circumstances of the characters in the show, but I recognised those feelings. And knowing that we all feel those things – it helps to make us feel a little less alone. And the more complex pieces – Petals, for example, still had moments of profound beauty. Pete Paltos singing, his voice filling that huge space, brought beauty to a monologue that is otherwise horrifying. That a character who could be so brutal could also be so beautiful was meaningful, and complex, in the way that the world is complex.

Have you seen a show that has asked too much of you?

Jessica Bellamy: I have seen shows that asked too much of me, but for me, that “too much” was along the lines of: pretend you can empathise with the couple trying to buy a house, give a shit about that wedding, laugh at those jokes that to you are not funny, not relatable, not coming from a world that empowers you. The last show that asked too much of me was The Odd Couple. I sat in the middle of the theatre, surrounded by a room of half-tittering and half-snoring white hairs and I felt tears run down my face because I knew this sort of theatre and this sort of “comedy” is what so many people want, and what I should be reaching for if I want to make the sweet big money out there one day, but does it have to be within a tapestry of middle class sexist bullshit? When I see plays like this, where the wise and witty and weird are mocked and ignored, I think: theatre can be a bully sometimes. Theatre should be a refuge and a solace, but plays like this just remind me I am not welcome. There is no place for me in a canon like this. I did not find Merciless Gods brutal. I found it refreshing, honest, sad, ugly and beautiful. I heard voices that we do not often hear, do not listen to, that get lost under the weight of those who are amplified too often.

Merciless Gods is by Dan Giovannoni from the book by Christos Tsiolkas​ and directed by Stephen Nicolazzo. It is playing at Northcote Townhall until August 5th.

Brigid Gallacher, Photo: Sarah Walker (as always)

2016// a year in moments

January // I write a letter to Sarah. I don’t send it for another ten months.

Dear Sarah,

Otis Redding sung me down into London with a voice like tears. I found him on the aeroplane’s playlist called ‘Western Pop: The Latest Pop from the World’s Biggest Stars.’ Also on the list were Bette Midler, Duran Duran and a group called ‘Purity Ring’. London appeared like a ring of candles encircling the horizon. Otis purred to Old Man Trouble.

In the town I’m staying in, there is a statue with its head and half its chest lopped off. My sister guesses casually that it may be the work of Cromwell’s men. Now it stands guard outside the Pizza Express. History is so visible here. Even the violent, ugly parts.

Love, Fleur.

England. With family.

February // I wander into a museum, tucked inside a university in London.

It is one of those working museums, with desks pushed up against glass cabinets and the notes of students and researches covering every surface not already covered with Eygtian relics. I find the coffin of a woman named Nairytisitnefer. Written on a piece of paper beside it is a translation of the hieroglyphics craved into it.  The paper says that these were words spoken by Nairytisitnefer, who was true of voice. She said this: that she got her heart from the house of hearts and her soul from the house of souls but that “the mind of Nairytisitnefer belongs to her, and she is content with it.” I loved that.

Back in Australia, my mother walks up on stage to collect the Jill Blewett award on my behalf from the Premier of South Australia.

March // I give up counting.

Usually I count how many times I sleep without medication, times I see a doctor, shows I see, times I cry, people I kiss, books I read, scripts I read, productions I worked on. By March I was already too tired to count.

This month I call 65 passionate young people and tell them they will not be a part of Slaughterhouse Five. I call 10 and tell them they will be.

Lonely Company, brand new in 2016.

April // I’m walking down an empty corridor and then it is no longer empty.

Three meters away, a young woman turns a corner and we see each other. Our eyes meet for a millisecond, we avert our gazes, both say ‘sorry’ and walk on. After, it occurs to me that this is perhaps the most female interaction ever: None of this myth about women competitively judging each other with a glance. This is women: We share a space for a moment, make no physical or emotional contact, mutually apologies for our presence in this corridor/world and walk on.

May // We are working on the final scene of Slaughterhouse Five.

It’s the first time we’ve looked at it so I’ve asked the actors to bring in something it made them think of. We go out onto the lawn, sitting in a slightly lopsided circle to make space for Liam’s wheelchair, and this beautiful group of young people respond to a massacre, 71 years old. We pass around print outs of paintings, people read poems from their iphones and I play Lark Ascending by Vaughan Williams and from The Singing Tree, by Kate Seredy. Then we read the final scene of Slaughterhouse Five. 

And somewhere in there was springtime. The corpse mines were closed down. The soldiers all left to fight the Russians. In the suburbs, the women and children dug rifle pits. We were locked up in the stable in the suburbs. They left us there. We ate the hay. And then, one morning, we got up to discover that the door was unlocked. The Second World War in Europe was over.

We wandered out onto the shady street. The trees were leafing out. There was nothing going on out there, no traffic of any kind. There was only one vehicle, an abandoned wagon drawn by two horses.

Birds were talking. One bird said, ‘Poo-tee-weet?’

Slaughterhouse Five. Photo: Sarah Walker

Things I learnt this year //

How to sew scrunchies.

That my bosses support me, even when a crazy man emails them saying that I’m the worst thing ever.

That my boyfriend loves me.

How to edit audio.

Every word of Not Throwing Away My Shot from Hamilton.

That The Macarena was a 1993 pop hit and not, as I had previously thought, a folk dance.

June // I blocked someone.

Facebook opened a new page and showed me a list: the three people I have blocked, including the newest addition. There, in the midst of my frustration, I saw a beautiful thing: those other two names, both of which I’d given barely a thought to in eight years. ‘Oh yeah,’ I murmured, ‘I guess that was a shitty, sad moment eight years ago.’ I love time and how it passes. I love knowing that one day I’ll probably come back to this list again, look at the third name and think ‘oh yeah, I guess I remember when that happened’ before getting on with the rest of my day.

This month my niece and I build a museum. We careful position toy dinosaurs on Duplo blocks, make a tiny doll’s house into a café and she writes a sign: Welcome to Museum. Like the Adelaide museum, we need a giant squid, so make one from ribbon and a blue wooden block. We suspend it in an empty glass, using a chopstick and a rubber band. I don’t know which of us is more proud.

July //  My mother and I, on a couch in Adelaide.

We are studying four photos of the Beirut convent where my great-great grandmother, Thekla, was raised. Thekla was just three when her mum froze to death in a vineyard and now, here we sat, my mum and I, studying the four photos in the book for signs of what her life was: the Germanic dorm rooms, with their straight lines of identical beds, the orphan’s embroidery, the nun with her tight press lips and tighter habit.

“I hope they were kind to her, that little girl,” said mum, and we both cried a bit.

2016 resolutions //

To find what it is that I need in each project or job to do it joyously. Follow my joy. Work with joy. Articulate that joy. This actually worked wonderfully. While there were still projects I struggled to find the joy with, I did seek it out. This resolution also played a big part in how we made Contact Mic: we begun by asking what we all needed from the project in order to do it joyously and used the answers to create a work flow.

Glorify balance rather than overwork. I think I did quite well at this. I was still very busy but there were also mediation and picnics.

Love courageously. Nailed it.

Go to yoga 180 times. Did not nail it.

Favourite man. Photo by Sarah Walker.

August // A man screams at me over the phone.

‘Who even are you anyway?’ I tell him he knows who I am. I am Fleur, we’ve met and I’m the artistic coordinator for the Academy. ‘Well that’s just a title!’ He retorts. Then, a moment later ‘so you’re the one who would be making this decision?’ Yep. So I guess it isn’t just a title. He yells some more and eventually I tell him that I will not continue the conversation and will email him with my decision. He yells ‘don’t you dare hang up on me’ as I hang up. I’m surprised by how unshaken I am.

September // A message from Liam pops up on my Facebook screen.

It tells me this isn’t Liam. That Liam is dead. Could I let people know? I write back some words – love, sympathy, thoughts – and facebook tells me that Liam sees them. But I don’t think that is true.

I write to students. I tell them Liam is dead. That he is no longer in pain. That it happened yesterday. I ask them not to post about it publicly until the family do because that’s the kind of thing you need to remind people these days. I tell them I’ll keep them posted about the funeral.

I cry a bit, a couple of short, confused sobs. I walk down the street with an empty shopping bag. I return with an empty shopping bag.

I go back and read Liam’s last message to me. Back when he really was Liam.

I’m out of hospital and the surgery went well. Unfortunately there is no good news on the cancer front, but such is life. My breathing is still a bit dodgy but slowly getting better.

Sorry I’m just really distracted by this election. I think safe schools is so important. If I had had safe schools in my school I would have been more comfortable being my authentic self earlier. I would have understood that I wasn’t alone and isolated and that there were so many people like me all around. I also don’t want to die without the right to marry. Sigh. I don’t know.

Anyway, just had to vent. Thank you so much for checking in! Very kind. I think of you often and slaughterhouse! This actually reminds me, I was going to message but forgot but wanted to say thank you for havjng me on the production. You took me as an AD despite havjng little practical experience, and I really appreciate that opportunity. I really hope I was of some help and I just felt so happy being involved with such a talented and kind creative. It was truly a beautiful and intelligent piece.

I cry a lot then. I go back to the students. I write ‘This is shit. I’m so sorry. I’ll organise flowers.’ And I do.

I drive across the city. I am hugged by beautiful, teary women and then they do their vocal warm ups and I warm up the lights and we do a show. I am drinking at the op desk, shutting my eyes between cues and taking deep breaths. I thought he had more time.

My favourite moment of theatre I made this year. Photo: Sarah Walker

October // I go for a drive.

It is dark and the streets are almost empty. I’m actually very calm. I pull into a side street next to a Synagogue because it looks at good a street as any to sit in and be quiet. To listen to Dan Savage on the last of my phone battery, take deep breaths and try not think about the yelling and crying I left behind. My mum calls. I say it’s fine but I need to go because my battery is low. I say I’ll go home soon. Then I sit some more. Dan Savage chats on, talking sex and politics until the screen goes dark. I drive home. The next day I make an appointment to see a counsellor.

November // We cook dinner.

I shell the broad beans, he blends the hummus, I roll out the flat bread, he mixes the salad dressing. We smile a lot. We clink glasses. We eat. We finish and we drive to the opening night of a show I’ve worked on for three years. In the car I say thank you for the lovely, distracting dinner. I say let’s make this a pre-show tradition. I say really though, making art is weird. I say, but in a way I’ve already done my job and peers have already said I’ve done it pretty darn well. I say I just hope I like it. I say hold my hand, please.

Contact Mic. Kieran, Sarah and I.

2017 resolutions //

See friends on purpose and for no reason. If I have a nice conversation with someone, tell them I enjoyed it and organise to make it happen again.

Budget. Save money and then spend it going to England.

Create less waste.

My niece wrote her first sentence in 2016.

December // We enter the room.

My face tries to cram thirteen different emotions on it at once. I tear up. The room is full of light, sound and finches. Perhaps fifty finches fly about, landing on beautiful, coathanger structures hung from piano wire. Each tiny landing adds to the soundscape. We sit on the blond wood floor. We watch the birds. We hold hands. We watch new people enter the room and try to cram multiple emotions onto their faces. And I feel so, so lucky for a year of sights, adventures and experiences with this man.

 

Ending and beginning.

I end the year with $4500 debt and a persistent Internet stalker. I also end it with a development of a new play for the State Theatre Company of South Australia locked in. I end it with 12 episodes of a podcast I have made with two of my dearest friends under my belt and 12 applications from playwrights wanting to work with Lonely Company in my inbox. I end it running Lonely Company with two of my other dearest friends. I feel very lucky in my collaborators.

I start 2017 hopeful and pretty calm. In an hour I’ll ride a bike to a New Years party and I’ll smile a lot, kiss a lot and supervise the barbecuing of haloumi and mushrooms. I’ll probably be asleep by midnight or at least 12.30. I’ll wake in the morning to a new year with old friends and maybe some new ones. And I’ll do my best.

December 30th, 2016

in conversation: f. by riot stage youth theatre

When I came to record audience conversations of F., (my first in a long time, apologies) my SD card was full of a previous conversation: 

Interlude 1: Setting, an outdoor courtyard of a Geelong cafe. A confused 90-year-old sits with her granddaughter. 

Her: What’s that?

Me: It’s a microphone recorder.

Her: Oh really.

Me: Yeah. You were telling me such good stories on the –

Her: Pardon?

Me: You were telling me such good stories in the car on the way here so I thought –

Her: Was I?

Me: You were.

Her: I don’t think I was.

So my SD card was full the night I recorded with random audience members for F. and I only recorded two incomplete conversations, presented here with interludes from my grandmother. 

Know that this production resulted in some beautiful conversations, not all of which I was able to capture. Know that I feel privileged to have had these conversations with these articulate young people, reflecting on growing up with the internet in the 21^st Century. Know that I was thrilled to have been so provoked and unsettled by the teenagers of Riot Stage and that it was a delight to see them owning their voices and stories. Know too that my grandmother would never in a million years understand any of it. 

Photo: Sarah Walker

Conversation 1: Setting, sitting on the floor of a corridor outside the theatre. Two eighteen-year-olds, who have never seen theatre like this before, sit holding hands. They have just finished year twelve exams. 

Me: So what just happened in there? What was there?

Nelly: That was confusing at times!

Me: What do you think happened to you?

Zac: Just discussing issues sort of facing teenagers and that. Yeah. And just the chaotic vibe of it and yeah it’s… you can sort of relate to it I suppose. Um. Yeah.

Nelly: We’ve seen school musicals and stuff but it’s not like that at all. Our school plays are like Pride and Prejudice and stuff. This is like, really different.

Zac: Seems much more relevant and real I suppose. Much more relatable than the perfect pictures that TV and that paint.

Me: Big question but how do you feel about the internet? It’s our whole lives, I know.

Zac: Me and her sort of started being friends on the internet. We were in the same class but I was really shy. I just won’t talk but online I was really loud.

Nelly: Like he had two personalities.

Me: So if it was thirty years ago, when introductions were all walking up to someone and asking them to dance at a mixer, you’d never have talked.

Zac: Nup. That’s why the Internet has a lot of negative aspects but at the same time, it’s very useful in connecting people. We wouldn’t have this connection without it.

End conversation 1.

Photo: Sarah Walker

Interlude: 

Me: You were talking about Nelson and your uncles playing cricket.

Her: Was I?

Me: Yeah. Did granddad play any sport?

Her: Oh… He usually played golf.

Long pause.

Me: Did you ever try golf.

Her: I don’t think so.

Me: Those sons of your must have got it from somewhere.

Her: Do they play golf?

Conversation 2: Setting, a square of lawn outside the venue. My legs are pink with grass allergy and will continue to sting for an hour afterwards.

Me: What happened to you in there?

Jules: I think I was reminded of the distance between being a young adult and being a teenager. And what it’s like to be a teenager. It’s amazing how much you forget even in a couple of years. I’m twenty-two and it was amazing just to be like, there’s definitely –

A parade of motorbikes roar past.  

Me: We’ll give them a moment.

More motorbikes.

Jules: Okay. Rude.

We wait. They pass. We resume.

Jules: I just thought it was a really beautiful representation of being a teenager.

Doug: To me it was sort of this mish-mash collection of snippets, just reminding you of what it’s like to be a teenager. And I mean, I’m 19 so I’m closer to being that teenager but there’s still that incredible distance that forms when you hit uni and you leave that whole high school mentality. I think this did a really good job of reminding me of that and how it feels to be in that claustrophobic environment. It reminds you of all the weird things teenagers do and how their brains work.

Photo: Sarah Walker

When I was a sixteen-year-old I didn’t know how to express myself very well. It was a lot like in the show, you’d have characters just switching topics almost on a dime, just talking awkwardly. It was a lot like that. Now I find it a lot easier to structure what I’m trying to say and separate my thoughts.

Me: Could you express yourself better online?

Doug: Yeah, I think so. It was useful because it sort of gave me time to think about what I was trying to say.

Jules: It is this weird Schrodinger’s Cat thing of being heard and not heard. You can scream into the void but there might be someone listening. If you feel like you can’t express yourself properly at high school or with you friends or family, you end up with this strange sort of dynamic where you simultaneously might have someone hearing you and understanding you and saying ‘it’s gonna be okay’ but you also have this freedom just to say whatever you want because there might not be anyone listening. It is a strange dynamic.

Interlude: 

Me: When you were a teenager, working on the farm. What did you do for fun?

Her: I think they took me shopping with them. Thursday was a shopping day. I don’t know if it was much fun.

Me: Did you like reading?

Her: I never did very much reading.

Me: What was your favourite thing about Granddad?

Her: Granddad?

Me: My granddad.

Her: Your granddad? He was away at the First World War, granddad. He didn’t have a very happy life afterwards.

Me: That’s your dad? Is there anything you remember doing with him?

Her: No, I don’t think so.

Photo: Sarah Walker

Conversation 2:

Me: I really loved the scene early on: the two boys chatting with the text behind them and just how understated it was: ‘I came out to my parents, we had tacos,’ that kind of thing. I’m 30 and this was a great reminder how, in such a short time, what was a big deal has changed and become a regular part of adolescence. Still, there are people for whom coming out is a big deal and is traumatic and has frightening and very real consequences, but for a lot of young gay people, that’s not the toughest part of being a teenager. The main difficulty for that teenager was just being a teenager: being caught in that land between autonomy/self-realisation and that childhood dependence on others.

Doug: I remember when I came out to my mum and she just turned to me and said ‘oh I know’. I was like ‘oh okay.’ I was fifteen or sixteen. I’d been expecting more drama I guess. She’d always been very accepting but yeah it was… odd.

I think the scene that’s sticking with me the most is with the two girls that were sitting watching porn and just that raw discussion of sexuality and their vaginas. When you’re a teenager with a trusted friend and you haven’t really explored these things before, you just talk about it. She was talking about how she wanted to change how her vagina looked and stuff – that really introspective stuff that adults are a lot less likely to just let out because it comes rooted in insecurities and things like that. I used to talk a lot about things I didn’t feel great about. Mostly to close friends, a lot of them I only knew through the Internet, which I think really helped. Like, I don’t really know this person, so it won’t matter as much if I just talk openly with them.

Me: The first time I saw porn I was talking to this guy a couple of years older than me on Nine MSN. He was this gay guy –

Jules and Doug: Oh MSN!

Me: And he was like ‘this is the kind of guys I like’ and he sent me this link. Suddenly my screen was covered in all these naked women. I worked out ages later that I must have got a pop up but at the time I was like ‘he’s a gay guy, he would know what men are’ so I was looking at them going ‘so these are men… so he likes men with make up and… boobs and small thingies’. They were so clearly female bodies. Very naked, very female. But I didn’t have any idea what gender they were. The colour scheme was not what I associated with naked women. It was all pink and gold and shiny and slippery and just… didn’t look like the naked women I’d seen in my life. And I wrote to the guy and was like ‘this is the kind of men you like?’ And he was like ‘yeah’ and I was like ‘men with boobs?’ and he was like ‘what? Men like the men I sent you!’ We worked it out after a while. But that was my first experience of Internet porn: just not even knowing what I was looking at.

Photo: Sarah Walker

Doug: I got tricked. This was in primary school. It was one of those gags that was going around. People were saying ‘if you go to redtube.com, it is like youtube but it’s in HD!’ So I hopped on our family computer that was out in the living room at the time, typed in redtube.com and up came these… not youtube videos. It took me a second. I scanned the page and I started scrolling down and I was about eight or nine, I think. I’d just been given permission to use the computer –

Me: And you blew it, straight away.

Doug: I blew it straight away! I scrolled down and I saw all these images that I didn’t really understand. My dad came over and understandably he was sort of ‘what are you doing?’ I told him that I’d been told this was HD but it didn’t look like the youtube videos I normally watched. He closed out of the browser and we had a little talk about what porn is. I think he just said ‘it’s videos of people having sex on the internet’. My parents never glossed over things. They never talked about genitals with weird words, it was always ‘penis’ and ‘vagina’. I think I was probably four or five when I asked where babies came from and they just straight up told me.

Me: I remember asking what ‘cunt’ was and my mother said ‘it’s another word for vagina’ in such a matter of fact way that I thought for years it was a more polite word – like the medical terminology! Not that it came up in conversation because it didn’t but yeah, I was like ‘oh, that’s the grown up way to talk about vaginas! Good to know!’

Interlude:

Me: Look at that. They’ve got a chandelier hanging in the greenery. Looks like you might be able to find some monkeys here.

Her: What’s that?

Me: I was just saying, it looks like you might be able to find some monkeys here.

Her: Oh.

Silence. Knives and forks clatter. 

Me: What are you most proud of?

Her: Oh. (A long pause.) I guess… most proud of family life. Mum and dad and the family. Mum kept the family together really. Dad was good too but… aftermath of the war, I think. He drank a lot of alcohol which was a worry, not only to mum and myself but the rest of us.

Me: Was that part of the reason you never drunk alcohol?

Her: I suppose it might have been part of it but I never took a liking to it anyway. Anything I tasted I never liked. You wonder how anyone could ever like it.

Conversation 2:

Me: I think the scene that really wrecked me was the scene with the two actors on opposite sides of the stage. The first night I was sitting with two straight men and they were watching the boy and I was watching the girl. I really noticed the different ways our heads were turned. I think that is a scene that is so heartbreaking for both characters but you do experience it very differently as a male or female. I don’t know. And I don’t know how different it is as a gay man either. I think a lot of heterosexual men move through the world with this deep fear of taking advantage of a woman.

Jules: I didn’t know where look: whether I should watch one of them, whether I should not watch any of them and just listen. I thought it was really interesting that they chose to make it very dubious as to what actually happened but very clear that she didn’t want it. I feel that that’s a situation that happens all the time and far too –

End conversation 2, with a full SD card.

Photo: Sarah Walker

Interlude:

Her: We had two or three horses we used to ride. Might have been more than that at times. The neighbours – they lived four or five miles up towards the boarder and eh – they had a lot of shetlands. They were half broken-in and they used to pass them on to us to ride. Some of them were very good to ride but others were very cheeky.

Me: Yeah. Yeah, that sounds hard work.

Her: I forget how many we would have ridden all together.

Waiter: Spinach and feta borek?

Me: That’s me. And the lamb is here.

Waiter: And would you like a knife and fork with that one?

Me: Would you like a knife and fork, grandma?

Her: No. Thank you.

Waiter leaves. Silence.

Her: A knife and fork would be handy.

End interlude. 

F. is by Riot Stage and was presented as part of the Poppy Seed Theatre Festival of 2016. It was directed by Katrina Cornwell, written by Morgan Rose, performed by a cast ranging from 15 to 19.