Hannah Nicklin

Theatre People I Follow On Twitter

So quite a few people have added me recently after reading my guide to Twitter for Arts Orgs which I put out into the ether. I love that it’s out there getting people trying new tech. Because I know it can be a bit daunting trying to find people to follow at first, I was going to do a quick #theatrethursday to suggest a few fellow theatrical tweeps, but the list got too long, so I decided to blog it instead.CAVEAT: I still think there’s much more value in finding interesting people, before things you are interested in , and also something wonderful in the discovery of new people through serendipity, so please, please don’t add everyone on here. Make sure you are interested in what they are saying. It’s not a networking opportunity, it’s a conversation, that conversation might lead somewhere, but that shouldn’t be the main aim of it. Some of the big names aren’t on here because I don’t like the way they use Twitter, always just putting in plugs for shows, rather than participating. However I obviously do think these people worth following, because I do, so I’m not too worried about putting it out there- just use it wisely :) and if you’re new-don’t fill your stream up too soon!Finally, the list is by no means exhaustive, and I may also have missed big people off if a) I don’t know about them myself, or b) I don’t know a particular person I follow is a theatre person, as opposed to just an interesting person. If you have any to add, tweet with the #theatrethursday hashtag, or comment here and I’ll add them!

So, in order of most recent to oldest follow:

@braduniarts the theatre venues at the University of Bradford
@dastheatre a ‘theatrically confrontational’ Leicester/London based theatre company.
@hellohoipolloi the lovely hoipolloi, presented on their excellent use of video blogging at Shift Happens arts/tech conference.
@EdinburghFringe No explanation needed hopefully, does anyone want to pay for me to go? Please? Pretty Please?
@Goldele theatre maker
@danielbuckroyd Artistic Director of New Perspectives
@trestletheatre my first theatrical experience (aside from Panto) was a Trestle Workshop. Ace.
@stevebct co-artistic director of Black Country Touring, who facilitate and create theatre in the Black Country. Brilliant company.
@untheatre Unlimited Theatre based in Leeds, they did The Moon The Moon recently, which was lovely.

@claireridgway West Midlands creative looking to hook up with local companies.

@RDouglasJohnson writer of plays and text-adventures (he’s done a hillarious Hamlet one, check out his blog for a link) Also has a play ‘Broken Holmes’ on at Edinburgh this year. One of the wittiest writers I know.
@battersea_arts Battersea Arts Centre (the clue’s in the name)
@lpostlethwaite Theatre maker, community artist, and educator.
@AbbigailWright Head of comms at York Theatre Royal (Shift Happen venue, and home to Pilot Theatre)
@KatHetherington lovely, met at Shift Happens, can’t for the life of me remember her title, but she’s a theatre person.
@Jakeyoh young critic-blogger
@scbedford from HoiPolloi, charming.
@Dramagirl theatre lover, actor, voice coach and web 2.0 superwoman.
@Geraldinecoll Apples and Snakes performance poetry – seen at Shift Happens
@scarahnellis another Apples and Snakes type…
@Robintheoffice -Birmingham Royal Ballet New Media Officer, not strictly theatre, but a brill example of an arts organisation using Twitter well.
@Katherine_Ann over saw much of Shift Happens 2.0, organisation queen, like a Tasmanian Devil, but in reverse.
@willsudlow another creative project manager type
@adrianslatcher of the Get Ambition tweeps
@eatsoupandroll Leeds based playwright
@mediasnackers they enable digital participation in lots of areas, including theatre.
@getambITion The ACE digital tech and theatre touring workshop
@hannahrudman queen of the above and cultural leader.
@thisisdavid has a show on in Edinburgh this year
@digijamie Get ambITion and local arts bod
@ammonite pervasive gaming, so awesome, the bleeding edge of digital/performance cross over. If you don’t know what any of that means, go find out!
@IanAspin does a lot of work with creative industries
@WirelessTheatre online audio theatre company – radio plays, stories and sketches for free download.
@Traversetheatre the brilliant new writing theatre and excellent Edinburgh venue
@pcmcreative does lots of things that combine social media and the digital world with theatre
@TWPGoSee Theatre Writing Partnership – new theatre writing in the East Midlands, brilliant company who gave me my first ever taste of playwriting back in 2004 (I currently do some freelance online comms for them)
@citizendan performer and writer
@scriptonline Regional development agency for theatre writers in the West Midlands
@michelleyascapi General Manager of Foursight Theatre, future cultural leader
@Foursightheatre My first ever ‘proper’ job in the arts was as their Administrator. They are a lovely West Midlands based, female-led devising company. Best known for Thatcher The Musical! But they also do some lovely site specific community based work.
@Danielbye writer and director
@uglysisterprod Ugly Sister Productions
@BushTheatre The Bush, look out for their excellent Bush Green new writing initiative – it’s going to change the way the system works.
@easternangles I have much love for companies working the East of the Country – Eastern Angles
@HullTruck well known Yorkshire based company
@markball London based producer
@finkennedy had a big argument with The World about the funding new writers get. It was in the Guardian. Also a playwright.
@Half_Dextrous actor/writer
@CreativeSelby Arts Administrator
@andytfield ‘maker of unusual things’ a lovely fellow
@sohotheatre The Soho Theatre, innit.
@Lizzieroper actor
@bottc Box of Tricks Theatre Company, new writing, they run Word:Play new writing events, [PLUG] in which I am to have a short play early next year [/PLUG]
@librarytheatre Library Theatre Co. Manchester
@c_and_t TIE company – check out their brilliant ‘living newspaper’ project. And an excellent example of how many people can tweet for one organisation. Really on the ball with using new tech.
@arvonfoundation they do beautiful writer retreats with workshops, decent amount of theatre and radio writing opportunities. I wonder if I big them up enough they’ll give me a free place? THEY’RE FUCKING BRILLIANT (Pretty please?)
@DaveMoutrey Arts Manager based in Manchester
@shift_happens THE arts and tech conference in the UK. Run by Pilot Theatre.
@DanRebellato playwright, academic, and general evil genius. Very funny, a masterclass in the subversion of the Twitter ‘form’.
@LondonTheatre Theatre researcher/maker/blogger
@Paul_Sutton Artistic Director of C&T
@pilot_theatre bloody brilliant York-based theatre company. Ran Shift-Happens. Pushing boundaries, making wonderful messes.
@MarcusRomer the daddy of Pilot Theatre and Shift Happens, lovely, generous, and very, very on the ball. A must-follow.
@mzendle journo and critic.
@MBDtweet metro-boulot-dodo are a leicester-based arts organisation. They do a combination of performance, installation, audio tours and site-specific stuff. Ch-ch-check them out.

Phew! Have I missed you? I’m sorry, there’s only so much space in my brain! Comment, and I’ll add you :-)

I’m all hyperlinked out…

Graduation

Me and my brother

Graduation

So graduation was pretty standard, and don’t worry, I did all of my commenting on how dull and full of pomp it was on Twitter. A lot of my comments might have seemed a little snarky – and for the most part I don’t apologise for that; my BA graduation was at least free of swords and sceptres, and nor did we have to stand for the national anthem (not that I did), though both included a good deal of ‘how awesome are we?!?!’ speeches (which is to be expected) and continuous clapping (which is fine). But I have to say that I felt very little sense of accomplishment with this event, and so thought I’d take a bit of time to reflect on my experience of being on the (properly prestigious) University of Birmingham Playwriting Studies course.

I was accepted without issue on to the UofB playwriting Mphil, but after a stressful and ‘you have to jump through hoops but we won’t tell you where they are’ failed funding application to the AHRC, it really was touch and go whether I was going to be able to fund my place on. In the end it seemed like too good an opportunity to pass up, and the interest I was getting in my writing made it seem like the right time to be doing it, so me and my mum both took out loans so I could afford it. To be honest the lingering debt (works out at about £150 a month for me, which on a freelance/temp wage really does sting) is, I think, the one things that’s making the experience a little painful. I’m really really bored of being poor.

On the course you don’t really feel like you’re a part of the University, you are on a disparate campus, required to be there only 2 days a week, nor do you feel particularly connected to the department. On a logistical side of things you’re frequently bombarded with training you’re supposed to attend about research, unfortunately the ‘Mphil(b) research masters’ title means that you can’t avoid it, though it is almost entirely completely useless RE the course’s actual content.

But I really didn’t mind any of that.

The course was structured into two main strands – one was a series of essays and portfolios of short creative work, which you had to pass on, but that didn’t count towards any final mark, and the other was the writing and development of a full-length play, and an accompanying 6000 word analysis of the process of writing it. This thesis play is really the main project of the year you spend studying.

What you do get, is a group of 14 or so people, from all over the world (Amsterdam, Sweeden, Chicago, Tamworth) who are all proven, and passionate about writing for theatre. The youngest in my year was 21, the oldest late 50s. There was such a wealth of experience and styles, of different backgrounds and approaches. And they travel every tribulation with you. There was one point after the first draft deadline over Christmas, we all came back looking more than a little shell shocked. I (half) joked about my very real thoughts of ‘I totally can’t do this, I’ll just give up, I can totally give up, it has to be easier to give up than write this bloody thing’ and suddenly everyone was talking quite seriously about how they’d felt exactly the same thing, that they’d been on the point of phoning the uni, or had cried on the phone to their partner, or had been working out how much of the January fee payment they’d have to try and get back… But we were also there, still standing. It was wonderful to have human proof that it doesn’t just feel so insurmountably impossible for you. It doesn’t just feel like fingernails over the blackboard of your mind for you. It doesn’t just make you feel like you want to scream, and throw something, and cry, and that every key fall is just dulling your use of the English language into a deeper, more meaningless nonsense.

This is just what it feels like to be a writer.

On this course I also learnt how to do proper redrafts, before what I thought we redrafts, were just tweaks and shuffles. A proper redraft is a ‘new document’ in word. It’s a whole new play, written about the same story.

And the writers. The playwrights, screenwriters and industry professionals who came to speak to us, Dennis Kelly, David Eldridge, Dan Rebellato, Douglas Maxwell, David Nicholls, David Edgar, radio producers from the BBC, directors from the Birmingham REP. They all came and talked, and answered all of our tremulous questions. We learnt that everyone hates writing for TV, even those who do it. That a good printer is of more use to a writer than a good computer. That writing books is fun, and that adapting them for the screen isn’t. That TV and movie writing pays a lot but everyone but Paul Abbott and Russell T Davies only do it so they can afford to write for the stage. That you should never lie down in press photographs. Douglas Maxwell actually brought a file in full of rejection letters, about a hundred of them, and told us about the whole cabinet he has of them at home. Dan Rebellato talked about getting Michael Palin to play a character in his radio play, and how he somehow balances an academic career with one as a playwright (insane idea that it – oh, wait). Dennis Kelly talked about coming into playwriting comparatively later in life, while David Eldridge swore softly about becoming a so-called overnight success. These writers were all quietly kind, answered all of our questions, were realistically encouraging, and without exception, very very funny. Story telling is something that leaks into your conversation too. There was no ‘how do you do this’ answer that came from their talks – because you can’t map creativity for anyone but yourself – but the two things they all emphasised and embodied were resilience and a sense of humour.

I would have liked to have seen more writers who weren’t white-male, but I do know that’s (sadly) a real minority of writers.

Then there’s Steve Waters. Steve was the course convener, he oversaw it all, and was our constant contact. As well as being a very accomplished and successful (quietly political) playwright, Steve is an immensely generous, thoughtful, passionate man. He saw the value in each story, in each style, he encouraged and questioned, rather than criticised. He was firm when he needed to be, and sympathetic when your voice was quavering with the weight of it all. I don’t mean this to sound scyophantic, but that course is built or broken on the back of the convener. And we were very lucky that Steve was that.

And then I wrote a play.

Set in the Future. About a group of people playing the largest online game (MMORPG) ever. And their meeting the founder of the online world, and a famous, renegade hacker. Who gives them the option of destroying the world, but you’re never sure which one. But instead they tear themselves apart. A play that took in different realities- people playing avatars of different ages, sexes and ethnicities. A play about people who live and die in virtual worlds, and what it is about this one which pushes them out.

It was very, very hard.

And I’m still not sure I got it.

I set myself a massive challenge. But more than anything, the Playwriting masters gave me the undivided time, and the tools with which to tackle it.

If you’re interested, you can read my thesis play Being Someone Else here

I think I could have progressed to where I am now in about 5 years of hard, part-time graft. I would have probably stuck at it. I don’t tend to let myself fail if I can avoid it. But what the masters gave me was a fast-track. Of course I have everything still to learn, and everything left to lose,in my pursuit of a writing career. But that year escalated my learning, built me a wider support network, and more than anything showed me that to write, is to hurt, and to write, is to laugh and carry on regardless.

To return to my opening project – of wanting to examine why I don’t feel as though I have achieved much – I think it’s because the course wasn’t meant to do that, it isn’t on the course you achieve, but (I suppose like in all university learning) your are given the tools with which to do so. But the end of this particular course also marks the point at which you are – more than before – on your own again. Which is perhaps why it feels a little sad, which is perhaps why I feel a little bereft. And perhaps why I was also itching to get out of there, why I found it a tad irrelevant, because I want to get started, I want to be heard, I want to be staged…

And sooner than all that, I must to bed, as in 4 hours I’m leaving for Paris!

Bonne Nuit, and watch this space.

xx

Speak Up

Speak Up

On Saturday over 2,000 people came to stand up against a new dirty coal power station on the Kingsnorth site in Kent. A mix of people of all ages, families with babies, old ladies, teenagers, university students all came together to form the mili-band – a direct call to Ed Miliband to hear our collective political will. Back at the fete afterwards we heard a few speakers and a couple of musicians (see the end of this post for a video of Sam Duckworth from Get Cape Wear Cape Fly [apologies for poor quality of the beginning of the video]). I was glad to see there was a decent balance of female-male speakers. And I was also really moved by a speaker from Bangladesh.

Shorbanu Khutun, a survivor of Cyclone Aila from Gabura in Bangladesh, had been brought over by Oxfam especially to speak (through a translator) at the event. She barely made it to the middle of her speech before bursting into tears, but she stood on the small stage, her head high – as if it was all she could do to stand up – and talked. She told us about the flooding, the cyclone that destroyed her land, the loss of all of her possessions and clothes, the subsequent land grab, and how her husband had to go into the jungle to make their living. How he was killed there. She spoke directly about our actions – how it was the developed west that had wrought these changes on her life and about our responsibility – how we are ending people’s lives.

“It used to be cold in the winter but it is not anymore. All year it is hot, too hot. The levels of the rivers are always rising and previously we used to grow vegetables and rice, but because of the salination in the water, nothing will grow anymore.”

She used her sari to dry her eyes and stood tall again as she carried on talking, only her voice wavered as she told us that she is the proof that climate change kills, and that it is our responsibility to stand up, to speak out. It was powerful stuff.

Speak Out

And then on the journey home, as two people were wheeled out of the train station, unconscious with heatstroke, to a nearby ambulance. I picked up a magazine to pass my journey home, the New Scientist, in which this article caught my eye: “Sea level rise: It’s worse than we thought“

“In its 2007 report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) forecast a sea level rise of between 19 and 59 centimetres by 2100″

Apparently this figure is now thought to be a gross underestimate, “even before it was released, the report was outdated. Researchers now know far more”

Combine sea ice melt, with thermal expansion and the gases released from glacial melt, and you get between a 50cm and 2m rise in sea level. What does that get you? Well it knocks out most of Lincolnshire, much of Cambridgeshire and Norfolk, and a good amount of London when the storm-surge protection is no longer viable.

“most conservative estimates are now higher than the IPCC’s highest estimate. [The scientific] community is comfortable expecting at least a metre by the end of this century [...] about 60 million people live within 1 metre of mean sea level, a number expected to grow to about 130 million by 2100.”

We are coming up to one of the turning points in the tale that is humanity – in Copenhagen this December governments from all across the world will come together to work out a global deal on climate change. It is recognised that the key to keeping us from ‘catastrophic climate change’ is the 2°C mark. What does that mean in terms of cutting emissions?

“To obtain a 50% chance of preventing more than 2°C of warming requires [an] 87% cut in global emissions per person. If carbon emissions are to be distributed equally [...] The UK’s emissions per capita would need to fall by 91%” (source)

The UK is currently aiming for 60% cuts , when we need 91% cuts by 2050 for a 50/50 chance of securing the survival of the human race.

A 50/50 chance.

Would you get onto a plane with those odds?

But what action can we take? I mean you recycle, right? You turn off lights, and unplug your phone chargers – but you’re just one person, what can one person do?

Take action

Speak up. Shout out. Government exists, primarily, to stay in government. They will only ever be as strong as the will of the people. Attend marches, make yourself heard, agitate if it’s in you – scale power stations and stop trains – and if you’re not up to that – demonstrate. Hold banners, write letters, attend marches, make contact with mainstream organisations like Oxfam, Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace. They have emails you can send, pledges you can make, all of which will get your political will known.

Act out. Grassroots action is change from the other direction. If the government won’t build you an eco-town, make your town as environmentally friendly as you can. Organise better recycling and swap meets, work on your councillors and mayors until they provide bicycle lanes, get employers to provide showers and facilities to sort yourself out after a bike to work in the rain, reclaim land for allotments. There’s so much you can change with a bottom up approach.

Live right. We do not live sustainable lives. We simply don’t. Even if we were to get all of our power from a combination of renewable (on and offshore wind, tide, hot rocks, solar power fields taking up a 1/3 of Britain) and nuclear power stations combined, we would be nowhere near supplying all of our transport, power and consumable needs. If you want to see the science/maths behind that I urge you to watch this video by Dave Mackay, speaking at Warwick University.

What we need is a complete change in the way we live and structure our lives. We cannot afford to continue eating meat in the way we do, building and discarding goods and clothing the way we do, travelling and consuming power in the way to which we’ve become accustomed. Yes we need massive changes, but they start with little ones. You could eat meat only a couple of times a week, you could buy fruit and veg off the market, you could give your clothes to charity shops, and buy good quality clothing, less often. You could take the train, or the bus, or bike. You could not fly. You could buy solar chargers for your gadgets, or install photo-voltaic panels on your roof. You could cultivate a veg patch. These are not impossible things. These are, in fact, things that between us, me and my mum are doing. We do a lot of bad things too. But it’s something, it’s a beginning.

We have to make ourselves heard, by the government, by Ed Miliband, in the run up to Copenhagen this December. We can’t wait; the decisions and connections are made in advance of these summits. Time is really, truly, running out. For people like Shorbanu’s husband, it already has.

Our generation is bearing the last and greatest of this burden, we change, or we die. Take action.

Sam Duckworth (Get Cape Wear Cape Fly) at Miliband nr Kingsnorth from Hannah Nicklin on Vimeo.