Director’s Blog \ Blog Cyfarwyddwr: The Good Earth

Written by Rachael Boulton, National Theatre Wales emerging director. 
See The Good Earth in the Weston Studio, 16 & 17 April, 8pm.

Wedi’i ysgrifennu gan Rachael Boulton, cyfarwyddwraig newydd National Theatre Wales.

Dewch i weld The Good Earth yn ein Stiwdio Weston ar 16 a 17 Ebrill, am 8pm.

The development of our piece first started last November, when I submitted an idea to the centre’s Incubator programme. If you don’t know too much about Incubator, it’s a programme that nurtures new work, giving emerging artists a safe environment to try out and develop their ideas.I didn’t quite know what the outcome of the piece would be at the time, but I definitely knew that I needed five exceptional actors with a passion for play and improvisation to work with me, and help bring this story to life.

The story is inspired by true events that took place in Wales back in the seventies. Nestled in a small ex mining community near Tredegar, a group of villagers fought to save their homes and mountain against outside forces for almost twenty years.Using this as a springboard for our story, we worked as an ensemble for ten days to create fictional characters, improvising dozens of scenes each day before discovering the plot.

Since then, Wales Millennium Centre partnered up with us to coproduce the next stage of development, while RCT theatre’s, Arts Council Wales and the National Lottery Fund also came on board to support our development. We’re thrilled, to say the very least!

We’re now embarking on our second stage of R&D, devising for 15 days, before presenting our work in the Weston Studio on the 16th and 17th of April. I can’t wait to get back in the rehearsal room with such a brave, generous and talented ensemble, and while working from scratch with no script is beyond challenging, it’s possibly the most rewarding.

The Good Earth combines Welsh song, physical theatre and new writing, resulting in an hour of explosive and moving new theatre. Well, that’s what we’re saying on the tin, but, we’d love to get your feedback on the piece, so please come on down and chat to us after the show. Or, if that’s not your thing, you can tweet your thoughts to #thegoodearth.

We’ll be posting updates, footage and photo’s from the rehearsal room over the next few weeks, so ‘til then I’ll say, “Ta’ra for now then.”

Read more here... http://fragments.ie/people/rachael

The Good Earth is a new play in development by National Theatre Wales’ emerging director Rachael Boulton, co produced by Wales Millennium Centre. Devised by Fragments and directed by National Theatre Wales’ emerging director Rachael Boulton.



“Moving on every level”
Audience Feedback from Incubator 2013 / Adborth Gan Gynulleidfa Deori  2013

Darn newydd sydd wedi ei gynhyrchu a’i ddatblygu ar y cyd â Chanolfan Mileniwm Cymru yw The Good Earth. Mewn cydweithrediad â Gwasanaethau Diwylliannol RCT ac wedi ei gefnogi gan Gyngor Celfyddydau Cymru. Wedi’i greu gan Fragments a’i gyfarwyddo gan gyfarwyddwr addawol National Theatre Wales Rachael Boulton.

Q & A / Cwestiwn ac Ateb: Clerke & Joy

We caught up with Clerke & Joy to find out more about ‘part performance, part lecture and part school science experiment’, Volcano. The show comes to the Weston Studio on 4 April.

Aethon ni am sgwrs gyda Clerke a Joy er mwyn darganfod mwy am ‘y perfformiad, darlith ac arbrawf gwyddonol’ y cynhyrchiad, Volcano. Bydd y sioe yma yn ein Stiwdio Weston ar 4 Ebrill.

What’s your inspiration behind the show?
This is a nice story. Volcano comes from a few different points, which were somehow combined over a pizza called ‘Etna’ at a London Pizza Express sometime in December 2011, and made sense of in many rehearsals between then and May 2013 when we premiered the show at Brighton Festival.

1. Rachael is notoriously difficult to buy presents for. When her family visited Iceland they didn’t know what to get her, so brought back some ash scooped up from the base of Eyjafjallajokull. It’s the show’s magic ingredient.

2. Around the same time Jojo sat opposite a man on the train to Hither Green. He was wearing a suit and listening to music on his headphones, and crying. His music was turned up loud - he was listening to Jennifer Hudson’s And I’m Telling You, which is a really epic love ballad. He became our pilot.

3. There is a really great book by the Glasgow based artist Ilana Halperin, called Physical Geology, which is about the relationship between human time and geological time, and also about geological processes that happen within the body, like the forming of kidney or gall stones. This was our inspiration and excuse to use humans & volcanoes as parallels, with equal importance. It’s also where the show’s original title - A Volcano Perpetually Erases Its Own History - comes from.

The show is described as ‘part performance, part lecture, part science experiment’. What can we expect to discover from watching the show?
Well, we hope that different audience members will have different experiences. The show has a lot of contrasting elements within it, so we tend to find that some people come out understanding how volcanoes work for the first time since primary school, whereas others will be moved by the story of the pilot, or excited by the visual effects created on stage (we’re constantly amazed by how much you can do with talcum powder and a desk fan.)

You’ve been described as ‘bending all the rules’, can you give us a taster of how you do this in Volcano?
That’s a hard question. We’re never totally sure what the rules are, so you can only ever be about 50% sure you are bending them. We studied together at Dartington College of Arts (before and during it’s merger with Falmouth University) - an institution that is pretty renowned for doing away with a lot of rules altogether. We like to think that gave us a very open attitude to what we can and can’t do in our work.

In Volcano we worked with Dr Mike Cassidy, who is a volcanologist, and have an actual volcanology lecture in the show. We also work with Adrian Spring, (who plays the pilot) and have him standing on stage almost totally still for the whole show. It works because he’s an amazing performer - you’d never expect anyone to be so engaging whilst doing nothing, and we think it really makes the show. That’s probably the bravest thing we’ve done. There must be a rule against having someone doing nothing on stage for so long! It feels like something very much borrowed from the live art world, that we don’t see so much of in theatre.

Where do the Righteous Brothers fit in?
They are the eruption… you’ll have to come and see.

What do you want audiences take away from the show?
A connection with the pilot. The karaoke version of Unchained Melody stuck in their heads. The smell of talcum powder and vinegar. An understanding of volcanoes. A lump in their throat.

Describe Volcano in three words.
Tragicomic, naive and… oh go on, explosive.

Catch Clerke & Joy: Volcano in the Weston Studio on Friday 4 April, 8pm. Click here for full details and to book.

Dewch draw i fwynhau cynhyrchiad Clerke & Joy: Volcano yn ein Stiwdio Weston ar nos Wener 4 Ebrill, 8pm. Cliciwch yma am ragor o fanylion ac i archebu eich tocynnau.

 

Q & A / Cwestiwn ac Ateb: Dan Canham

We caught up with choreographer Dan Canham to find out more about the creation of dance-documentary piece, Ours Was The Fen Country, which comes to the Weston Studio on 30 March.

Rydyn ni wedi bod am sgwrs gyda’r coreograffydd Dan Canham i ddarganfod mwy am y gwaith sydd y tu ôl i greu cynhyrchiad dawns-ddogfennol, Ours Was The Fen Country, bydd yn ymweld â Stiwdio Weston ar 30 Mawrth.

What was it about the Fens that captured your imagination and inspired you to base your production on them?
Ours Was the Fen Country is an ensemble piece of dance-theatre built from a series of interviews I’ve conducted with people of the fens in East Anglia. The fens are a unique landscape – mile upon mile of unbroken fields with precious little to distinguish any of it. In the past, I’ve walked there for hours on end and seen no one. On a good day it is a stunningly peaceful place and on a bad day it’s bleak as the end of the world. Many of the people who live there are the sort of people you don’t really find anywhere else – with ways of life on the edge of existence.

And so, without really knowing why, I responded to this evocative place by riding my bike and walking around the fens, seeking rare and uncommon characters with whom to discuss the place, their lives, their thoughts on the world and pretty much anything in between. It took around two years to shape the resulting audio material into a piece of theatre. In the show, we use some of the words and interviews I’ve collected alongside music, dance, lighting and sound design to articulate some of the strong feelings and atmospheres you find out there. It’s a show about a specific landscape but that landscape has become the frame for a far wider ranging piece of work about rural ways of life, transience, loss, the power of nature, the disappearance of small things and the nervous system of the eel (among other things).


You worked closely with the people of the Fens, using their stories as a basis for the show. Who was your favourite person that you interviewed?
I was so privileged to speak with many of the people I met and to be given a brief glimpse into their lives. It’s hard to pick a favourite but Peter Carter from Outwell was particularly good to speak with. He is an eel-catcher and when it came to trying to actually get an interview he was as slippery as his catch.

He’s a bit of a local legend as his family’s been catching eels on the fens since 1475, and he’s the last of the line. He was a hard man to pin down and it took many missed calls, facebook messages, emails and about 40 miles on my bike until I managed to get to speak with him. I reached his shop in a last ditch attempt to meet with him, only to find it closed. I staked it out for a while before he happened to emerge - at which point I jumped him for an interview and having admired my persistence, he willingly obliged. He actually came to see the show when we toured to Ely (of all places) and it was a great experience – the first time he’d ever been to a theatre.

I’ve also spoken with pedigree horse, cattle and bantam-cock breeders, young farmers and a wonderful fenwoman of 92 years among others. The process of meeting and talking with people with whom I would never normally come into contact with, has been both a humbling and amazing experience in and of itself.


How did the piece change and evolve through the development process? Did you discover anything unexpected along the way?
We use dance in the show to help tease out and expand upon some of the atmospheres and feelings the words suggest. The challenge of turning the words of quite practical people into something that might suggest the poetic and artistic was an exciting one that led to some beautiful surprises.

With one man, Ralph Sargeant – a nature reserve warden for 35 years – I’d sat and spoken to him on the fen for a hour or so and not felt particularly happy with what was coming up in the interview – where I was looking for poetic meditations on the power of nature he would give me lists of animal species. It wasn’t until I listened back to the interview that I realised there was a poetry in and of itself in the way he spoke about animals. Adding music to the interview unveiled a whole other element to it and finally adding choreography and movement to that music deepened it even further.

On the whole that has been our approach – to honour the words of the interviewees and seek theatrical ways to enhance the words, without getting in their way.

Ours Was the Fen Country looks at ways of life that are dying out. What do you hope audiences will take away from this performance?
It’s a piece about the world and our place within it and so it’ll act as a mirror in some way to some of those wider thoughts we all have. It’s also been designed for any audiences to appreciate – including those that might not have ever heard of the fens – and so I hope there is some overlapping of the themes with rural communities all over the country. It’s also got some funny bits, and beautiful dancing.

Three words to describe the performance...
"An exquisite evocation".  (Lyn Gardner)

See Ours Was The Fen Country in the Weston Studio on Sunday 30 March, 8pm. Click here for full details, and to watch a short video with more details on the research and development of the piece.

Dewch draw i fwynhau’r perfformiad Ours Was The Fen Country yn ein Stiwdio Weston, ar nos Sul 30 Mawrth am 8pm. Cliciwch yma am ragor o wybodaeth, ac i wylio clip fideo sy'n sôn am y gwaith ymchwil a datblygu.

Q & A / Cwestiwn ac Ateb: Victoria Melody

Ahead of Major Tom on 18 March, we caught up with Victoria Melody to find out more about the true story behind her hilarious new show.

Cyn Major Tom ar 18 Mawrth, rydyn ni wedi sgwrsio â Victoria Melody i glywed am y stori wir y tu ôl i’r sioe newydd ddifyr yma.

What inspired you to make this show?
In Major Tom I immersed myself into the worlds of championship dog show handling and beauty pageantry. I became an active participant and a physical embodiment of the people I was hanging around with in order to take part in their rituals as research for my work. Rather than recording, documenting and commenting on Britain's clubs and tribes, I actively participate by becoming a member and metamorphasising myself in the process.

The idea for Major Tom originally started when I got a dog and was instantly given membership to an exclusive members only club of basset hound owners. Dog owners, especially the obsessive ones that participate in dog shows, were a tribe that fascinated me and I wanted to make work about them. During fieldwork for Major Tom I was driving back from a dog show after Major Tom (my basset hound) had just come last, and the judge told me I should buy a new dog. I was annoyed because Major's personality wasn't taken into consideration; it was purely about him measuring up to a breed standard, anything unique about him was seen as a flaw, an imperfection that lost him points. It didn't count that he is so absurd and loving that he has earned the name "walking Prozac" from my friends because he makes everybody happy. It was on that journey home from the dog show that I came up with the idea to enter beauty pageants. That was the moment when the whole project made sense. The show manifesto wrote itself - it had gone from a show about in-group behavior and Little England to a show more about the beauty myth and its oppressive function.

What is it like to be a beauty pageant participant? Did you feel exposed or vulnerable at all?

The competitive beauty world is not a scene I have ever had the desire to be involved in, I certainly never envisioned that one day I would actively compete in an attempt to become Mrs UK. In my youth I was a Goth and did everything to avoid the gaze. I would have laughed in your face if you told me that in my mid-thirties I would wear a swimsuit on stage in front of a panel of judges.

Obviously I enjoyed having a team of specialists fussing around me with the sole purpose of making me look good. But I started to lose my identity, I didn't look like me anymore and a strict diet/exercise/beauty regime meant that I rarely socialized. One particular time sticks out - when I had spent 4 x hours getting ready for Brighton's gay pride parade. I was participating in the parade as Mrs Brighton (my beauty queen title). Mitch (husband) was waiting for me, after his patience had waned - he looked at me with my big fake tanned, made up face and huge bleached blonde hair and shouted, "This isn't you!" But that was the point.

  

What's your opinion of beauty pageants? Obviously they objectify, but do you personally see this as a problem?

Participating in beauty pageants was an extreme way of experimenting to see how closely I could get to a universal physical ideal. There's been reams written on beauty being an ugly business that makes billions out of women's insecurities. It's in the media's interest to promote images of tall, skinny, young homogenised stereotypes to make normal women and men feel insecure in them selves so that we will buy into the diet, cosmetics and cosmetic surgery industries. Throughout the preparation for the beauty pageant, I became a "project" for many people including plastic surgeons and hairdressers. The show proves that physical beauty is a currency system and I was being sold the skills and products that would enable me to become the "ideal" me.

But I created Major Tom to be purposely ambiguous. The audience is left to do their own thinking. The only criticism is of myself in other people's worlds. Of course I have opinions, I have strong ones or else I wouldn't be making the work that I do. But I would rather let the work speak for itself.  In the shows I use humour as a tool to get to those difficult and taboo places. I like this quote from Rosemary Wagg of Exeunt magazine "Major Tom proves something I had always suspected: that the best politics come heavily coated in humour and everything is better if a dog is involved."

How easy is it to perform with a dog?  Is Major Tom well behaved on stage? 

Major Tom does exactly as he pleases on stage which is mainly sabotage the punch lines of my stories by looking at the audience and yawning or walking off stage. He is very comedic and every performance is different because you never know what he's going to do. 


Has all the fame gone to Major Tom's head? 

He wags his tail when he hears applause he thinks it's for him, even if it's coming from the radio.

What can we expect from you next?

My next project is called Hair Peace. I am attempting to trace the real human hair extensions on my head back to the humans who grew them. A well-meaning hairdresser applied the extensions when I was competing as a beauty queen. It's a show about global trade, traceability and the search for the story behind my (well - someone else's) long flowing locks. 


Describe Major Tom (the show!) in three words.

Funny, political, under-dogs

See Major Tom in the Weston Studio on Tuesday 18 March, 8pm. Click here for full details, and to see the trailer.

Dewch i weld Major Tom yn Stiwdio Weston nos Fawrth 18 Mawrth. Cliciwch fan hyn am y manylion llawn ac i weld hysbyslun.