Thursday

50+ participants

Thursday was a pretty simple game, and was thrust upon us as soon as we arrived. It (rather cleverly) encouraged people to chat to each other straight away, and also readied you a little for letting go of your inhibitions, as half the time you were asking people just at the Broadway to see a film, and with no clue about what you were talking about. You were given a card with a day on, there were many of all the days, apart from Thursday, the aim being to become Thursday by 10pm. You shifted days by asking “Are you Thursday?” If they were a day that was adjacent to yours (if you were Sunday, that would be Monday and Saturday) then you exchanged cards (advantageously or not). I got to Friday. Frustratingly close!

Dadaist pursuit.

6 players

This was a simple ‘pick up and play’ game, used to fill in the time between games, and offered in a booklet for people to take away with them. Subverting Trivial Pursuit cards, a player would read out a question card, and the task of the other players is to reply with the funniest answer on the reverse of their cards. Whoever the questioner deems the funniest then receives a prize in the question card. Often a lot to do with delivery, I reckon with a few more drinks, an awesome little pick up and play. If I was going to be facetious and analyse it, I could say something about subverting the value in trading on information and education. It was also a lot more fun than trivial pursuit. Less stressful anyway (this may or may not have something to do with the way I approach it).

Vampires

20 participants

Vampires took place out in the streets, around an old church. We were a village within which 2 vampires had insinuated themselves. We had to explore the local area looking for 12 coffin nails and bring them back to the safety of the church, to save the village. Vampires were dealt several ‘bite’ cards, and once bitten, a villager became a minion, and could advise and aid vampires. Suspected vampires could be warded off by holy water (you had to rip up the holy water card and throw it in their face before they revealed a bite card). Holy water and coffin nail cards were all hidden around the space.

I enjoyed this game (despite being bitten pretty early on for trying to take a lead, don’t follow me in the event of a horror movie, kids). It took pretty recognisable rules and narrative tropes and set it in the streets of the city. It wasn’t so much a situationist détournement or dérive, but it did remind you of the spaces you inhabit, the spaces you pass by, and how you interact with them. In a way you realise how the way you experience space is entirely contextual, and a few rule changes, and everything morphs, fear, a new focus (the walls and doors, signs and litter bins were suddenly more important than our destinations). It was fun, very fun, but in terms of applicable uses to my PhD (which obviously isn’t everything), it was more empty play, than it was playing with the cracks between worlds, and beings.

Werewolves

12-20 players

Werewolves was another pick up and play game. And would be an awesome party game (people still do that, right?) There are more complicated ways to play, but the simplest iteration is that there are cards dealt, most of which are villagers, a minority of which are werewolves, and one who is a sheriff. All the villagers close their eyes, the werewolves wake up, decide who to savage, close their eyes and then all wake, to find a dead villager. This is overseen by one non player. It is then the player’s job to work out who to lynch (the sheriff has two votes). This repeats until the villagers wake to find no one dead.

Moveyhouse

Roughly 40 participants.

You enter a movie theatre, as people file through the door their voices hush, there is a table full of odd accoutrements in front of the screen. You sit down. Continue to talk quietly, wait. The screen flickers in to life. Letters flicker, form words, sentences and inform you that there was an intention, an intention to recreate attempt to recreate Claes Oldenburg’s 1965 happening Moveyhouse, a sculpture in light, time and space for the cinemateque at the 41st Street Theatre.

“Moveyhouse was a happening that occured in 1965 in a cinema in New York. It happened on three nights. Oldenburg said he wanted to create an abstraction of a cinema with the addition of a certain amount of fantasy. Moveyhouse lasted for about twenty minutes – the audience stood along one aisle of the cinema and watched a group of performers sitting watching a blank screen – they followed random instructions given to them on pieces of card that told them what to do – to stand up, to put on a pair of Mickey Mouse ears, to eat popcorn. etc. A man carried a bicycle across the seats – when he reached the front the event ended and everyone left.” (Source)

However, we were informed, this was not possible, they, that is to say, They, would not let us.

“The jerks.”

So we were to make our own.

Relaying to us from the film Love Happens in Leicester Square Odeon, several people sat in the audience, reporting what they were seeing, allowing us to re-enact their instructions.

This began with muttering, rustling of sweet papers, talking in the isles. It ended with warring factions between Mickey Mouse and Darth Vader, with hugs, holding hands and mass hysteria.

This was the most interesting, and the closest to performance of all the games I took part in that evening. It was also the closest to chaos, the most unnerving, and at times, the game that made me feel the most like I’d flung myself off a high cliff, into warm waters.

There was something deeply interesting about making the audience not only participants, but acknowledged actors, or rather, enactors. We understood we were enacting the happenings of another space, and another time, we were replicating, but it didn’t feel prescribed, because all of the parts were up for grab. If the relay said that a couple put their arms around one another, it was up to two people to do so, but it could be anyone. The actions started small, leading you in, rustling of sweet wrappers (provided), coughs, laughter, but it escalated and though the journey (‘narrative’ or ‘story’ don’t really apply) often felt like it was ricocheting about off mundane or gloriously ridiculous actions, there were also moments of time travel, of a speaker (that feels write, texter, writer, also applies) who wondered about the outside world, about past worlds, a small hush in the hubbub that grabbed your breath. I liked that although we were peering through a textual frame, to a reflection built by our representations, we were also reminded of all the other worlds, spaces, that we weren’t in, and to which we weren’t happening. For that reason it felt grounded.

Moveyhouse was a conversation about reiteration, about cultural experience, memory, and tropes. It was messy, and bits went wrong, but there were moments when I was more wholly involved in it that I have felt in a conventional theatre for a long time. I think I need to think more about it. Why? Out of all of the games and experiences I took part in that evening, Moveyhouse was the most interesting, and the most incomplete. I say that because I didn’t want it to end. I wanted more, I loved the piece of theatre that we had built. I felt sad, after only 20 minutes, to leave it. The piece felt like a rehearsal process. I wanted to do the final piece. And then I went outside, and realised that that’s probably real life.

“Theatre is live, handmade – reactive, ephemeral, messy. It is at its best when it shows its workings, when it acknowledges the processes that went into making it: the conversations, the long walks, the ideas, the wrong turns, the moments of improbable luck. It’s when this happens that theatre becomes not just art, not just entertainment, but a dialogue – an open invitation to think and talk about how we get on with things.”(From the creator of Moveyhouse, Andy Field).

Andy is currently developing Moveyhouse, and many more weird and wonderful theatrical experiences. You can follow him on Twitter, here.

The final, really interesting part of this evening for me, was seeing the open source ‘sandpit’ model in action, volunteers running the games, games built and altered in testing and on the wiki. I’m extremely interested in working (what I’m currently, and loosely terming) wiki-art into my research, more ideas on which will follow soon.

Like the idea of the evening? Run your own – all of the games on the wiki are creative-commons licensed. Reclaim play, reclaim your cities, your spaces, give it a go.

Listen to the Audioboo here

Let me know what you think! (RE product as well as process). It was a really, really interesting collaborative process, and the final product is by no means polished. But that’s not the point, is it :)

And the text:

I grew up here. But I don’t recognise it. It changes the land, the rain. After a while you just don’t see it.

I don’t know where all the water comes from. It’s like money, y’know, no one ever explained to me how there could be more in one place, and not use it up somewhere else.

Ice I spose. Like banks.

I wish you could see the sky.

It’s like darkness. Fuller than the sea. And warm. I don’t like that. It grates. The salt makes your face feel like its burning.

I lost you.

That’s a stupid way to say something, it’s not like a map would have been useful.

You died.

And I can smell you on my hair. You grabbed hold of it and you pulled me out of the water. Screaming past. Pushed me on top of the car. The red metal. It were slippery.

Very Titanic.

Do you remember that film?

I walked here. Everyone were walking in the opposite direction. I don’t know how many people I passed. The stones clinked on the path. People had used all of their words up. Wasted them shouting, saying ‘evacuation were ridiculous’ to committees of nervous looking councillors. There were always this feeling that somehow we’d be able to make it not true if we shouted loud enough.

And now they’re all the same – just a white sea of eyes walking past. Brown to me – your brown eyes. The way they, when you laughed. You look out of every face I see, but I know they’re not you, because they’re not laughing. And it’s not just you – because I know, I know now, you don’t realise. But we’re all connected. It sounds like hippy crap, but when you actually see people, when you actually see them, and this much, hurt, you feel it. You know we were always connected. Our breath. But now you breathe, and it doesn’t feel like you have. The air’s so wet.

I’ve given up on staying dry.

I’ve given up.

So yes, I’m pretty tired after a long day of travelling, but happy to be in France. Went down to the Louvre and surrounding area after we got here, just a bit of exploring, then tea, and back.

My big plan is for tomorrow – intention is to do the Cimetiére du Montparnasse (definitely have to find Simone De Beauvoir) then the Eiffel Tower (because you have to really, don’t you?) and then Musée d’Orsay (I’m an impresssion/expressionist kind of gal) before lunch in the Jardin des Tuileries, Notre Dame, and if time permits, the Musée Picasso… Probably impossible, but worth a go.

Weather was pretty changeable here, warm breeze, showers etc. I am consoled by the fact that by the look of Twitter, it’s probably raining more in England.

[View with PicLens]

With me, waiting, the
Leaves clatter about. A chill in
The air, winter soon.

The perfume I wear
Because I know you like it
Smells like rushing snow.

You gaze at me, eyes
Grey like the clouded sky, and
That touch of Autumn.

Kisses that steal our
Breath, skin that shimmers, moves, like
Sunlight through bare trees.

Your scent, as it clings
To my skin. Rain, and leaves
Listen at the window.

Flashes, as I sit at
The screen. Like thunder, I sigh
At the memory.

Hallo!

History is everywhere for this generation. It is potentially at our fingertips, on every 24 hour news channel, the internet, our mobile phones and pdas, but the wars happen elsewhere, we see things on our screens, and for all of it, the horror is never really a part of our lives. Do you remember what everyone said when the planes hit the Twin Towers? “It looked just like a film”. For many it was an individual experience, each person saw it in front of their own little screen.

Everything is mediated, comes through one channel or another, and people live in new worlds to avoid this one as it fights to get at you. Fights to tell you how to live, what to buy, what is ‘in’ and why it’s necessary for you to Please Your Man. So for this generation, drowned in the sound of a thousand cries, history is nothing- there’s too much to hear and the distortion is so high that it seems too far away to matter. Everything is like white noise, beyond noise, beyond silence. And no one hears a single cry.

I believe that we need a way of making people hear again, and to do that we must make people feel uneasy, unsafe. Away from the Hollywood endings and day by day narrative imperative there needs to be a form of expression, a way of telling stories that is particular only to the theatre.

When you watch theatre, when you believe in it, you invest in it a part of your life; you credit it with a small but important part of yourself. A play is built of a hundred little volunteered hours, it is a rift in the space time continuum, a coming together of a hundred hours into one. This is why theatre can make you gasp; make the breath catch in your lungs for the life that you see onstage, because it is, in a small and immense way, a part of you and all around you. For some, theatre their first taste of a collective experience.

I believe that it is not history, but the future that we now need, in order that this generation might see themselves here, and nowhere else, and crucially, here with the ability to change what might happen. The future is a land often spoken of; however it is one of the only places that a news camera cannot go, and a place that film cannot lend the same breath of life or genuine place that the theatre can show. So I believe in Theatre.

I believe that theatre in Britain needs a movement, a movement built of new and old writers of all ages, genders and races, but one that decides, to visit schools, sixth forms, offices and universities, homeless shelters, prisons, hospitals and shopping centres, we need to take theatre out, draw people in, with Pies or Pints or promises of other kinds, because theatre speaks, it lives and dies and is so fragile a creation that you strive to listen to its voice. We must – as has never really wholly been done – bring theatre to The Masses, acknowledging that The Masses now are not a whole, but are united in only one thing, a lingering discontent. The modern malaise of never quite being, doing or saying, everything you think you should.

History has gone. No one listens to it anymore. Nor do people listen to the present, because it is still recorded, history the second that it happens. Instead I believe in Science Fiction. In Science Fiction, theatre could find an unfamiliar world that renders familiar things real to a new generation of people bereft.

I want to write a kind of play set 100 years in the future, in the middle of electromagnetic warfare, or the fall of America, the trial of some British war criminal, a future that really criticises religion, new-liberalism or the media, a future torn apart by war over the last supply of natural gas, or where China is the universal super power. I want to issue a new political theatre of such scope that it makes people gasp, cry, and stare wide-eyed at something truly engaging. I will write about love, and music, singing, that kiss that hurts so much because it can never happen. I will write about the worlds where people live because this one brings them too much pain.

I will do this.

LEFT HANDED POLITICS
(Towards a Science Fiction Theatre)

I am currently reading a book formed of collected pieces of prose and speech by David Hare called ‘Writing Left-Handed’. It is so called in reference to his finding prose a ‘left-handed’ form of communication – his natural or ‘right-handed’ form is the stage play. I particularly picked up this book because the Chapter 2 (sub) heading caught my eye: On Political Theatre. (p.24)

I am always interested in reading peoples’ opinions on the nature of political theatre. However I am never quite satisfied when I read these pieces, they frustrate me. Not out of poor or dull or angry writing, but rather because inherent in politcal theartre is an urge, a desperation, a need to lift up the corners of that rug society likes to sweep the nasty bits under, and hear the voices, an urge which tears apart my heart also.

I have always wanted to write political theatre. The first piece I ever wrote was a 20minute Brechtian examination of the Iraq War (I was a very precocious 17 year old). A question you are often asked in playwriting workshops and by dramaturgs and directors is “what do you really want to say?”, “what kind of play do you really want to write?”. And I always, always feel in my heart a terrible tension, and I know, I know that I want to write political theatre. I want to write for life, on stages that are bigger than you can see all at one time, I want to write for barricades and riots, for whole 20 year histories and huge and complex, terrible and beautiful stories. This is not a good way to get yourself produced.

Hare, too, talks about writing histories, he talks about presenting “those strange uneasy factors that make a place here and nowhere else” (p.34) on stage, as part of his political theatre for a “generation who are cowed, who seem to have given up on the possibility of change” (p.35). I think at 23, I was the very last of that generation. If you sit in universities seminars now, and watch the pain of the lecturer as they try to extract some kind of discussion from their beleagured students, you realise that this genertaion, the ones who grew up with the internet, the ones with so much information at their fingertips that it just doesn’t seem important, have never really known the possiblity of change. Never understood the true meaning of the word.

History is everywhere for this generation. It is potentially at their fingertips, on every 24 hour new channel – but importantly – separate from them – through their mobile phone or their television set or their connection with the internet the wider world is never really a part of their lives. The areoplane hitting the second of the Twin Towers was real the first time you saw it, but after it had been reproduced, the 20th time you had seen it that day, every newspaper cover the next week, after a year when it was dissected by conspiracy theorists, after all the back and forth- it was just another piece of media, like a show that makes you laugh, you download, but then you’ve seen it a couple of times and it just doesn’t get you the way it did. Everything is transmuted. Changed, and if you will allow me to take liberties with the etymology to form a dual meaning for the word, changed as in rendered: Trans- ‘beyond‘ muted- (mutus “silent, dumb,”) silence.

And for this generation, drowned in the sound of a thousand cries every day, history is nothing new- there’s too much to hear and the distortion is so high that it seems too far away to matter. Everything is all the same thing, it blends together and change is impossible, everything just flows. The cries are beyond silence.

So what does interest this generation? What stories do they buy? I have rarely seen some people so engaged, as when playing Bioshock they inject themselves with a genetic-enhancement and electrocute another few genetically altered and crazed psuedo-zombies that were foolish enough to be wandering through an icy pool. Harry Potter got countless young people reading their first book. The latest cult hit TV series being frantically downloaded through University servers all over the country was Heroes, a far ranging show about ordinary people developing genetic irregularities that enable them to, for example, read minds, regenerate, fly. I believe that in Science Fiction, theatre could find an unfamiliar world that renders familiar things real.

“I write love stories. Most of my plays are that. Over and over again I have written about romanatic love, because it never goes away. And the view of the world it provides, the dislocation it offers, is the most intense experience that many people know on earth.
And I write comedy because … such ideas as the one I have just uttered make me laugh.”

(p.35 ‘Writing Left-Handed’)

I think that because Science fiction renders for the audience a vision of the future, it could be key in rejuvanating British Political Theatre. The best piece of political theatre I have recently read is Caryl Churchill’s Far Away (2000) it is very short colection of 3 vignettes which slowly slip into fantasy, they begin recognisable, parody everyday styles of speech and discussion, but at the end of each scene the characters are rendered as part of a terrible reality and you see yourself reflected in their eyes.

I believe that we need a way of making people uneasy, a form of expression, a way of telling stories which just doesn’t seem to sit right, which niggles at your senses; a left handed politic. I believe in Science Fiction Theatre. I believe that it is not history, but the future that we now need, in order that this new generation might see themselves here, and nowhere else, and crucially, here with the ability to change what might happen. The future is a land often spoken of, more so as global warming takes hold, however it is one of the only places that a news camera cannot go, a place that can be lent the lives of actors, a place that the theatre can show.

I want to write a kind of play that is like David Edgar’s Playing With Fire but set 100 years in the future, in the middle of electromagnetic warfare, or the fall of America. I want to issue a new political theatre of such scope that it makes people gasp, cry, and stare wide-eyed at something truly engaging.

I will do this.

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