On Wednesday I went to see God/Head at the Ovalhouse Theatre. You’ve probably missed the boat unless you’re reading this before Saturday night, if you haven’t, do go see it. I should really curb my habit of only ever being able to fit a show into my life right at the end of the run. Anyway HERE FOLLOWS THOUGHTS. And probably spoilers. Consider yourself warned on both counts.
I’m pretty tired at the moment. Pretty exhausted actually. I have every day up until the 1st of September planned in detail, and only a very few of those say ‘day off’. I’m burrowing into the last 5 month dash of my PhD, training for a triathlon, trying to get people to go to the second Performance in the Pub event, writing an EP with my mate Simon, preparing for two consecutive weekends doing Story Map with the ace Third Angel, gallivanting off to Cambridge and London and Lincoln, trying to find a dress suitable for an observant Muslim wedding. That kind of thing.
This isn’t about me. But it is. Because I’m writing it. In fact to pretend that I don’t feel all of those things, and that they’re not effecting how I react to a show and what I write, is a bit like lying, really. The bad kind. The kind that doesn’t ask you to come with me on the crest of a lie, but that pushes your head under the surface and tells you to breathe in.
I’m pretty tired at the moment. I fell asleep briefly 4 times while trying to read today. I understand Chris when he stands on a stage and talks about a full mind, and yet still filling it with sound, and shopping lists, and having to do those tasks that keep you alive, and then how you’d feel if suddenly, suddenly something continuum-shattering happened to you; ‘I don’t have the time to feel this’.
That was one of my first thoughts when I had my heart broken last year; ‘I don’t have the time to feel this’. This isn’t about me. But it is. Because when Honour Bayes – Chris’ guest for the night I saw the show – when Honour told us about a time when she had lost control in public I remembered fainting in a station in Leicester. I remembered not recognising the new layout of Loughborough station, missing my stop, crying, sobbing, and fainting in Leicester station.
This isn’t about me. It’s about God/Head. Which is a fucking brilliant title, really. It’s a show about a true story. It’s a show that is true, both in content, and about the fact it is a story. It is a show that contained the incredible, brilliant, grounding presence of Honour, who looked out into the audience with her kohl rimmed eyes, and read lines like they were words on a page Chris had written for her. I never saw someone look so much like a boy you imagined in your head as Honour looking up from her page, and fixing us with her gaze that said ‘I’m reading this out because Chris asked me to’.
God/Head is about writing. It is about being God. About being inhabited by God. About words. About The Word. It is about a boy. It is about voice, and the rhythms that infect us, breath, and inarticulacy. Repetitions again and again remind you that you are hearing a story. The weight of God inside a writer. The opportunity when the boy gets to speak to his creator. Theatre as a form of incantation.
This isn’t about me. It’s about God/Head. In which Chris talks about the sound, the rhythms of religion. About dreams, too. And psychosis. Words fall away. Repetition dulls the story. Symbols rise to the surface. Hieroglyphs are performed away from us. And then we’re left with the rhythms, then the instructions, then the objects.
“In this world of states reduced to symbols, phenomena such as sound and light, for which linguistic representations are lacking, are coded and added to the world of objects. As contagion becomes transmission, matter is redefined in terms of the signal, and bodies turn into beams of light” – p.39 Frances Dyson, Sounding New Media, Immersion and Embodiment in the Arts and Culture.
Chris and Honour tell a story about falling apart. At least, that’s what I see.
It felt less ‘finished’, to me, than the work in progress of Keep Breathing I saw last year. I think it was meant to, or even if it wasn’t, it was right that it should do so. ‘This is an unfinished story’, it says, with equal emphasis on both words.
Home, home is nice, isn’t it? I’ve just got back from Manchester, and previous to that, London, for a week and a half of various theatre and performance-related jaunts. D&D, obviously, and then a full week of Flying Solo work at Contact in Manchester. Here’s a really quick summary (for my sake as well as yours… probably more mine, to be honest) on what I learnt from the experience.
Day 1.
Ernie Silva masterclass
A day of learning to perform yourself. It starts with the word; writing exercises, using ‘colour’ words – words that spin you off in one sense or another. Look up Whoopi Live on Broadway. Humiliate yourself in front of people you trust, and never be afraid to look stupid doing a character on stage again. There are 3 people in every solo show – the character you, the narrator you, and the playing-someone-else you. Comedy is a good source for solo work, an easy way to bring people with you. 9 keystones of good comedy: Tags – building on and on and on a joke. Word pictures – comedic tools to describe people/things, mother in law jokes classic example of this (!). Specificty: you’re never just driving a car, you’re driving a BMW/Skoda/Mini/Beetle. Buttons – a kind of ‘moral of story’ conclusion to end a scene/section – Richard Pryor particularly good at this. Lists – the third thing in a list is the incongruous one. Matches – matching tones of voice in answering, etc. Call backs – Eddie Izzard good at this, referencing things from earlier. Reference jokes: common experience/pop knowledge jokes. Rhythm jokes: Something you expect to complete/develop just carries on and on and on…
Day 2.
Daniel Bye masterclass
A day of learning to play with and listen to your audience. Exercises in reading an audience, talking about truth and lies, what it means to make a story out of your life/experiences. Exercises that asked us to listen carefully, exercises that asked ‘what is actually interesting to watch’.
Plus knee tag.
Day 3.
Fergus Evans masterclass
A day of thinking about your work in space. Incredibly well structured; describe in 20 words (exactly) what your show is about, 10 words what you want from the week, 5 words what you want from the day. Exploring space, re-seeing the possibilities of it. I noticed that I am drawn to things that look like they could have been made by one person – like a stage weight – thinking about the person whose hands made it, and also things I feel like I would enjoy taking apart, seeing how they work. Some fun writing excercises – generating phrases such as “lime link the air, sleeping in the caravan the night carbon monoxide killed all the cats” (that’s a thing that actually happened to me). “Attention changes a space” and juxtaposition can change how you shape text. “Be aware of your gestures, conscious decisions about them help you perform yourself”, “Tell your story to other people and ask them to tell it back to you” – learn what is interesting, steal what is better. Surround yourself with people to talk about your solo work to.
Day 4.
Sabrina Mahfouz masterclass.
A day learning how to talk about your work. Of discovering what our particular pieces of work were about – ask yourself why now? Who are you to tell this story? What is it about? Why is it needed? How will you do it? What does it look like?
Day 5.
Bryony Kimmings masterclass.
A day of learning how to not defeat yourself. Tools to beat procrastination, exercises that ask you to tell yourself what you’re an expert at, ways of setting small tasks, of breaking down the big thing of ‘making a show’ into manageable chunks; writing down all of the things a title makes you think of, isolating how best to make an audience understand that; text, act, or participation? “what do the audience get from this?” – what question do you want to ask them, and how best can you ask it? Surround yourself with people to talk about your solo work to. Write out all of the crap, use every moment of the day to jot down things that will make concentrated moments more productive; set writing tasks while you wait for the bus. Steal texts from; lists, TV show scripts, self help books, famous sayings, streams of consciousness, poems, songs/raps, conversations you overhear, distant memories, made up stories, things that your mum/friend would say to you, religious texts, things on the internet, made up facts, letters.
Also, dancing.
Then Day 6 came. We all did our pitches. The brilliant Sophie Willen was selected to develop her piece further, and we all got very exhaustedly, happily drunk.
Thanks of the massive kind to Contact Theatre for the amazing opportunity, love to all of the facilitators, masterclass leaders, performers, Baba, people who came to the pitch (loads of them!), Steve and Aniko who put me up for a whole week in North Manchester, and of course the brilliant, brilliant other Flying Solo shortlisted artists.
Here’s the text of my pitch (up until ‘this is a story about’ I am getting dressed into, and then out of, my typical protest gear.):
RECORDING: I- I’ve always tried to see both sides of the story, and at any protests there is a line where you have to say right, “that’s what people are allowed to do, and they’re allowed to do XY and Z,” be it withdraw their labour, be it peacefully picket, and try and dissuade other people from going to work, in support of their cause, and there’s always an argument whether that cause is justified or not. But for a police officer if you going to deal with people impartially, then you have to say that’s not an issue. And that’s one of the things that the police officers, is that they’re not allowed to take active part in politics. Doesn’t stop them having views, obviously, it doesn’t you know, stop it from obviously colouring the way they’ve dealt with things. But I wish that the line that, allow people to do what they could do within the law, but if the law was broken you then have to deal with that. That doesn’t always mean arresting, or prison, sometimes that is words of advice, sometimes it is saying to simply “right, there’s the line, you’ve crossed it, step back” or “this is the line, don’t cross it”.
I’m told that when I was a baby I had really bad colic. Proper screaming all night nightmareish first child stuff. I’m told that the only way I used to sleep, was flat on my dad’s chest.
One of the earliest memories of my dad, maybe the first I can remember, is of him carrying my brother in his arms, just after he broke his leg sledging down the Big Hill. My brother had considered sticking his leg out to catch on a passing lamppost the best way to stop. I remember my brother, shaking, high up in his arms.
My Father is 56 going on 57, he was born in Maidstone in 1955 to a single parent and had two sisters and one brother. He doesn’t mention that these, I think, were by another father. My dad never knew who his dad was. He doesn’t mention that either. He was brought up on a council estate, attended secondary modern, and after his hopes of being a fireman were dashed by the closing of the fire cadets, with nothing to do at age 16, he joined the other thing with ‘cadets’ in its name: the police. At 19 he was able to join fully. He retired from the police after 31 years in 2005.
I am recently turned 27. I was born in Maidstone in 1984 to Linda and Roger Nicklin. My mum worked with social services and my dad had been in the police ‘regulars’ for 10 years. They met at Open University, both had been married before, and my dad’s first words to my mum were ‘oh, I thought you were a man’ (she had very short hair). I moved away from Maidstone at the age of one and a half and grew up in a farmhouse in Lincolnshire as it was converted. I attended a local comprehensive and aside from various years out working in admin, data entry, kitchens and bars, I have studied to PhD level. My parents divorced in 2001. Over the past 2 years I have been on approximately 11 protests.
The show I’m pitching to you is called A Conversation with my Father
It is a story about:
Fairness
Parity
Bravery
Right and wrong
And all the grey areas between these things
it will look a lot like me, standing here, talking to you, now. It will be based on a conversation I have recorded between me and my dad, about his experiences of policing protest, and my experiences of being a protester.
It will use recordings; of my dad’s voice, footage I’ve taken at protests, but also images of both of us at different stages in our lives; my dad at my age now, me at the age I was when he policed his first riot, the Volvo my dad bought with the overtime he earned policing the miners strikes, and just maybe a rather brilliant picture of me dressed as superted.
I will stand here, and ask you to listen to me and my dad. I want to tell you what it feels like to face a line of riot police. Ask you to listen to him speak about what it feels like to be that line. To tell you how proud my dad is of me for standing up for things. How thankful I am for the courage he gave me. I want to ask you to think about the stories the media tell about ‘them’ and ‘us’
My name is Hannah Nicklin, and the show I’m pitching to you is called A Conversation with my Father
It is a story about:
Symbols
Legitimacy
About the power of stories.
About finding better ones to tell ourselves about the world.
