second day of the second development, second post on a first class blog...

so far, our ideas for this show are proving remarkably solid; so far. i guess its only day two, so no-one's pulled out the knives yet.

what they have pulled out thus far has been great; straddling, ventriloquising, world class craptastic keyboards, contemporary dance cock punching (so you think you can what?), and exceptional catering care of an interstate guest artiste.

so, all in all, things are looking good. a 90 minute grilling this afternoon of the structure of the show resulted in clarification; articulation; refining....but no real changes, yet. the tossing around of this story that nic and i have been doing for a while now have seemingly shaped it okay.

looking forward now to going back in and screwing with it; how to communicate tales of antiquity through the language of vaudeville's chico chico from puerto rico.

love,
kieran

LDNTDay2

Kieran and I have renamed our durational performance band 'Fathers_of_Dead_Europe' (formerly Po/Mo-Art/Pop). We haven't done any performances yet, but our ideas are solid (like all great contemporary artists, I suppose). This is due to the further work undertake today. Spent afternoon working on the structure of the end of the show. Finished the day with establishing all the song ideas for the entire show, as well as nutting out the end of the work. The Fathers of Dead Europe is a concept we have added to the original myth on which Last Days is based. As such, I think we will end up spending a while figuring them out. 

Essentially, they are gods. Roman or Greek gods, not like these infallible ones running around today. The end up making things worse than before when they stick their noses in. The work may have set out to evoke the tradition of vaudeville, but also seems to edge closer to the ancient plays. All the action takes place in a day; the gods intervene and fuck it all up; mankind learns of the tragedy of self-awareness. 

More to come. 

x nic

LDNTDay1

Beginnings is beginnings. 

What is it? What will it be at the end of the two weeks? How'd it start? Where is it now?

All the questions we ask ourselves on day one. 

Went through the myth; the starting point. 

Watched some shitty vaudeville. Got some great ideas.  Song and dance and animal routines. 

Justified some narrative. Everything takes place in one day now, and starts with the Dead Fathers of Europe requesting Romulus and Remus to return to bombed-to-fuck Europe to reboot it. Trouble is, today they decide to form their own little civilisation. TENSION. 

The next two weeks will be dense. 

x nic

Last Days's First Days...s

Back on the train. 

Tomorrow we kick off Last Days of the New Theatricals. Our latest work that is brand new. So brand new we haven't made it yet. Thus, the development. 

LDNT is the story of Romulus and Remus, the mythic founders of Rome. Instead of the two boys being suckled by a wolf, then being adopted by a shepherd, then kicking Latin arse and founding Empire of Cunts 1.0, we're imagining a world where the she-wolf (Lupa) absconds with the twins at the bequest of the Dead Fathers of Europe to an outpost of the colonial realm (dusty rural Australia), where she raises them as the demigods they are in her clapped out corrugated iron brothel. Here every hour on the hour they perform vaudeville sketches for no-one but themselves. 

It's a musical! Sort of. We're continuing the examination of theatrical conceits in the contemporary performance landscape, I suppose. Last time was the 'heroes journey'- that is mainstream narrative - amongst the plague houses of 17th century London. This time, we're tackling vaudeville and variety in the guise of Rome's foundations set in rural Qld circa 1945. 

So Kieran and I will be joined by Penny Everingham as Lupa, Neridah Waters as Romulus and Kevin Spink as Remus. Dave Heinrich of the Border Project and Lions at Your Door will be doing the music. 

Enough spiel. Come back for daily blogging over the next fortnight to find out how it's going. It'll be your last chance to hear from us before we subject everyone to our travel blog in July. 

x nic

i can't believe i used a fucking exclamation mark. 

Day Ten, Friday

The end of the new beginning. 

Despite everyone's best intentions to have a break-up day of watching movies and gossiping about summertime dreams, we managed to do an incredible amount of work based around the working draft. 

Time being against us as we ran towards the end of the week, we went through everything line by line, everyone voicing their opinions on what was overwritten (most of it), didn't make sense yet (some of it) and what worked (getting there). 

A long time ago I realised I wasn't a playwright. It came, fortunately, around the same time I realised I didn't want to make plays anymore. The act then of writing for performance, attempting to distill an epic idea into some text the actors can speak onstage, is incredibly difficult. No matter how much comes out of improvisation, or how much you supplant image for text, eventually you will still have to sit down and write some goddamn dialogue. Something I've never been able to embrace. 

All that said, the work on the text opened up all the possibilities for where we need to go. We have a show ready for production. This is what we set out to do. And all involved seemed excited to now go and actually stage it for an audience.  

Fun fun.

x nic

Day Nine, Thursday

Filming all day. 

Theatre on repeat. A bizarre thing. When you shoot something for film, the act of repetition is a given. You do it, do it differently, shoot it differently, move on. 

Theatre/Performance/Whatever I'm calling it today is the art of creating something for a live act, and exchange between creator and whatever witnesses is near enough to see/hear it. This manufactured live act becomes subject to repetition on a daily basis, eight shows a week. 

What happens when you take a theatrical moment and repeat it over and over for an audience of one, straight down the barrel of the camera?

Interesting to observe today. The ephemeral nature of  live work, a bitch for continuity. 'Do it the same again' is the very thing we avoid in theatre, albeit subconsciously. There is no 'same again'.   

The art of filmmaking provides the other source of great creativity- idleness. There is  that great moment in filming that is not unlike the tech rehearsal- the performer is onstage, in costume, under lights.  Sitting around waiting for the next setup, some of the best jokes of the process emerge. The kind of humour that audiences don't get to experience; in-jokes, light-hearted abstractions of their characters put in absurd situations. A conversation three days ago about obese people buying two plane tickets finds itself returning when an actor in a fat suit tries to sit in the seating bank. A brief glance at an amusing cover on a community newspaper gives birth to a new character that, once given a funny voice, provides entertainment to outlast any change of lighting state.   

It's so often that at this point you realise you have just watched a group of performers turn into a company. A little family that will break apart at some stage in the future, but for now is all the tribe we need. 

I must be getting sentimental, tomorrow is the last day and we've all but accomplished everything we set out to do. 

That means that tomorrow we will go out of our way to fuck it all up. If we can ruin it all with completely different ways of doing absolutely everything, and it all survives and strengthens, then we've done our job. 

x nic

Day Eight, Wednesday

Rehearsed today. All day. 

Tomorrow we shoot some scenes in a black space for the promo DVD. An odd shift from create, refine, question, disassemble to rehearse it for an outcome. 

We intentionally didn't have a showing at the end of this development so that we can focus on the work. Often, the last few days of a development are spent rehearsing something for the audience as opposed to serving the work. So it was odd to get our brain into a deadline place. 

However, still made some great discoveries. We said goodbye to the Colonial Oriental speed dating in Plague in London (sad to see it go, but for the greater good). We also invested even further in the preface- the moment at the start when the characters (not the actors) come out onstage and announce the rules. Much more gets revealed about the work in that moment now, a warning for the audience and at the same time a welcoming. 

The old friend we rediscovered was Pig Tit Farm. This was the audience favourite last time around, and you can see why. The fact that the actors remembered the scene almost without prompting is a sign of a god scene, and in the case of this development where so much is changing, it was a nice instance of 'if it ain't broke...'

So tomorrow we move into a theatre, and surrender ourselves to a camera. Can't wait.