Author: Kate Foy

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Review -Blackbird: 23rd Productions

Blackbird singing in the dead of night
Take these broken wings and learn to fly
All your life
You were only waiting for this moment to arise. (Paul McCartney: The White Album)

Two people in a room locked in a battle of wills; menace under a veneer of (relative) politeness; conversation peppered with mundanities; phrases cut off; topics shift; and the air hums with tension.  They could leave, but don’t.  Harold Pinter?  No, it’s David Harrower and Blackbird, the latest from the feisty 23rd Productions in La Boite’s second offering for their 2010 Indie series.

The ghost of Pinter lurks around the edges of this Brit psycho-drama and 2007 Olivier Awards Best Play winner from Scotsman, Harrower.  It’s easy to see why.  There’s something terrible haunting the protagonists, Una and Ray; something from their past has taken over their lives.  Obsession, betrayal, blame, grieving, a fling at healing – all drive the play’s action as each rakes over events from years long gone.  Every beat is masterfully crafted into a duet that probes society’s notions of morality set in counterpoint with individual desire.  Continue reading “Review -Blackbird: 23rd Productions”

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World Theatre Day Goes Digital Again

This is the second year in which theatre lovers around the world have used online social networking apps to hook up, promote theatre, and have a generally good time celebrating the art form we all love.  World Theatre Day is held on March 27 each year, and last year Brisbane companies joined in with gusto.  This year, the global organisers are hoping more groups and individuals will come on board again for what turns out to be a very long day of celebrations.

In March 2009 NZ and Australia were among the first in the world to begin the global party on the stroke of midnight.  As the day extended others joined in from round the world and posted up images, audio files and videos via the WTD Tumblr.  This year there’s talk of Skype-hookups and live streaming of improv performances, even a bit of  invisible theatre on a couple of contentious political issues right now; someone wants to have a crack at internet censorship in Australia, for example.  Now that we all have smart phones, this is a distinct possibility.

The WTD blog site is the hub of all this activity, and it’s here that you can find ideas for your group as well as to read the history of World Theatre Day, which is sponsored by the International Theatre Institute (ITI).  By the way, it’s a tradition to have the WTD address (which is written each year by a prominent theatre person) read out before performances, alternatively to be posted in foyers and company bulletin boards on the day, or just generally acknowledged on theatre’s ‘one day of the year.’  Last year’s was written by Augusto Boal.  You can read Boal’s address on the ITI page.  I think Augusto would have approved of all this global networking – especially the invisible improv and political theatre that some UK and Aussie groups are cooking up.

This year a WTD Facebook page had over 500 800 fans the last time I looked. Why don’t you become one as well, and pass on the word via your own networks.  It would be wonderful to have theatre in Queensland well represented on Saturday March 27 for World Theatre Day.

Of course WTD has a Twitter stream @WTD10 and a hashtag #WTD10 if you post there.

The organising group had a ball last year in our own necks of the woods, enough to want to see the online celebrations of WTD continue, so we dipped our toes into the Google Wave app for our initial meetups earlier this year.  The upshot is that we as the dealers give you the ideas and the forums to publish, but you’re the pushers – you get the word out and do what you do in your own way.   Check out the blog, the FB, Twitter, and let us know what you are planning.  It’s even better if you integrate WTD into something you’re already working on; everyone is flat out, and the idea is not to do something additional, but to mark the day and share your celebrations.

Over to you!

PS   You can read a bit about how I got involved in a post on my own blog Groundling from last year.

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“Shut up, listen, and just do the work!” Kathryn Fray and 23rd Productions (Interview 1)

K_Fray

It’s late morning, and I’m interviewing Kathryn Fray via Skype. The artistic director of the Brisbane-based independent theatre company 23rd Productions looks and sounds … well … almost too perky for someone who is in the middle of producing a brand new play.  She’s clearly busy; for a start her Facebook status has been showing ‘Living in the land of Pinter’ for a while now. The Pinter in question is, of course, the one and only, late and great Harold Pinter, British playwright and Nobel Prize winner. The play in question My Night With Harold is a new work, a team-written “massive challenge and wild experiment” she says, “which we were unsure we could pull off.  It was a great idea, but there was nothing really for a producer to hang anything on.”  That initial idea has already gone through a creative development process, and is now in the middle of rehearsals for its first full production.  Whether or not Kathryn and 23rd Productions pull it off will be known at the end of this week when My Night With Harold opens as part of the Under the Radar independent theatre festival within the wider orbit of the Brisbane Festival.  On opening night 19 September 23rd Productions will be very much front and centre on the city’s theatre radar. Continue reading ““Shut up, listen, and just do the work!” Kathryn Fray and 23rd Productions (Interview 1)”

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On personal branding and being a business on two legs

This is one out of Groundling’s archives – May 2007 in fact – but it’s worth a face wash and a review. I’m gone from academe but I see the need more and more to ‘become your own mouthpiece’ as an freelance artist. Greenroom was established (in part) to introduce people to the power of digital networking.

You know how the old saying about mothers goes …. they’re sociologists, counsellors, tutors, managers, chauffeurs (add your own personal favourite). So it is these days that I find my role as a university lecturer diversifying in the oddest ways. Now this has probably got more to do with the nature of the discipline field … theatre, and preparing young artists for a professional role in the entertainment industry. Most of my classes are involved with training students for careers as actors. Yes, I teach and direct, but also (and for nearly 10 years now as the industry has changed its face) I’ve been training them to think about themselves and their work in a business-like way – empowering them to engage in what the economists like to call disintermediation and which, in the arts industry, means extracting yourself from the middle man and the control they can have over your work (aka agents of all kinds). The jury’s out on whether or not it’s a good thing to cut the painter entirely, and let’s face it, actors wouldn’t be actors if they didn’t have an agent to blame for most things.

Which brings me to something I’d never have thought about even 3 years ago (make that 5 7 now!) but which seems pretty important right now. I’m finding that I talk a lot more about the importance of establishing and taking care of your online-identity. Now this was not even vaguely on the horizon until a year or so ago, and nor was that ghastly ubiquitous term ‘branding’ … that was something stockmen did to cattle as I recall. Now it’s everywhere. Anyhow, it seems that personal branding is also something a start out professional needs to tackle. Want to know more? Try the discussion on a post from Michele Martin on the issue of online identities. There’s also a great slide stack from R. Todd Stephens on professional personal branding, and whilst I might find the term distasteful, the advice is sound.

There are some other fairly basic things that anyone in business or the public eye should consider: a professional-looking email address … ditto a voice mail message on the phone. It’s also smart to take care what appears on your Facebook or Twitter accounts. Embarrassing tweets, apps and messages under your name on any site may never go away. It’s also getting almost mandatory to consider a personal webspace or at very least an e-portfolio to promote your work.

The bottom line is that artists and creatives more and more these days act as producers and freelance agent-distributors of their own work. They need to start treating what they do as a business and to think of themselves as CEOs of their own companies. I coined the phrase a small business on two legs years ago, and it pretty much still holds up. The days of the disempowered ‘artiste’ are on the way out.

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Working on text – the early phase of rehearsal

UPDATE – this is an out of the archive post reworked a year or so on. If you’re a regular here or to my other blog Groundling, from which this is taken, you may have already read my rehearsal and performance posts for the Empire Theatre’s 2008 production of Cabaret directed by Lewis Jones.  I played the role of Fraulein Schneider. You can find these posts elsewhere on the site. Just type ‘Cabaret’ in the search pane, and stand back. I’m revisiting some of my posts on actors’ process, which I hope you may find useful. This one looks at text analysis.  As always, I would love your commentary.

Sunday’s rehearsals swung into a first shuffle-through of the play scene by scene. This was table talk about character, backstory, and relationships followed by a work through of a couple of scenes in which my character first appears.

First appearances are critical for character revelation. For a start, an audience starts to make up its mind about how it relates to a character. First appearances are also where a play’s obligatory exposition is revealed. A good play will give out the information on who, what, were, why and so on via character interaction and dialogue that hopefully doesn’t beat you over the head, as well as through other subtle clues in the script. These are things the actor needs to pick up and feed the character.

Text analysis for the actor is a bit like the forensic analysis of a crime scene. However, there is something you also need to bear in mind, and that is to balance what the character knows with what the actor knows … or as it’s often expressed, don’t play what’s on the ‘next page.’ I got a bit carried away myself today wondering how significant the first mention of Jewishness in the play would be to my character. Of course the audience is going to prick its collective ears at this point … ‘Uh oh, we’ve got an issue here that is going to come back later!!’ but the characters themselves are at this stage, blissfully ignorant of the fate in store.

This is what I like about these early turning over the text rehearsals … playing with possibilities and making choices, and seeing where they lead. It’s good to have a director like Lewis who allowed me to stumble my way around the set, getting its geography and furniture layout into my head, getting the feel of ownership that the character would have; it’s my house after all – it was once a large home and where I was born and where I grew up. Alas, nowadays it’s been converted into a boarding house. Yes, this was one of the creative choices I’ve made, along with what has brought Schneider to where she is right now … New Year’s Eve 1929.

I’m really going to enjoy the next phase of rehearsals, and it’s going to include something I’m not all that familiar with … making the transition in and out of a musical number. I’m sure it’s going to be all about finding the right energy level and bridging from speech to song, though handily all of my songs tend to do this with quite a bit of ‘spoken in rhythm’ appearing on the score. Although we are not singing within scenes yet, this finding the right heightened energy was something the director worked on quite a bit during the final run-throughs of the scenes this afternoon.