Amongst other things, Nic is a writer and director for theatre and film...
... so doesn't have a lot of time to update this site.
The piece Fracture (the text tweaking application) created took as its source a monologue of mine, completely unrelated to the 50/50 project, which it split on punctuation, randomly, and assigned to five 'characters', Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue. Since we only have three actors for a piece, Red, Yellow and Blue are specifically assigned to individuals and Orange and Green are shared between their concomitant primary colours who choose, in the moment, whether to take the line themselves or voice it simultaneously with the other actor. It's not as complicated as it sounds.
On the very first reading, we found that we had created without rehearsal a very tight Greek chorus. The emphasis that simultaneously spoken lines gave to certain sections - all entirely unplanned - was eerily correct.
We read it several times, once with the actors attempting to imbue the piece with the sense of an argument, throwing the lines at each other, ganging up on each other, another time with the aid of the fantastically game Kobna who arrived a little late and immediately upon walking in to the room had to contend with me shouting at the actors mid-scene 'Him! Do it to him! Attack him!' Which they did; for the next five minutes.
Another reading for paraphrase proved stilted and frustrating; a subsequent reading discarding the words entirely and replacing them with sounds reached, at its most fluid heights, a sort of homage to Ligeti's most absurdist concerts.
We chatted, post-romp, about what we had learned by doing all this. Firstly the structure it gave to the piece was unexpected, the implicit emphasis and the unintended collaboration between 'the characters' was surprising and pleasing. From my point of view it opened up the piece to a reconsideration and re-imagining that otherwise would never have happened. We all agreed, however, that due to the form of the original monologue, that of one individual's rant against another, trying to create a sense of internal conflict was difficult, frustrating and probably doomed to failure. The piece worked best with a shared external focus for the actors, either another party in the scene or the audience itself. We agreed that given another piece, perhaps with more internal conflict, the experiment would have worked better. This may be the opportunity for writers to create such a piece and try the experiment themselves with more engaging results.
You can play with the piece of software, Fracture, yourself. I've made it available to Factory members online at the following location:
http://www.nicalderton.com/toys/fracture/
Use the login 'thefactory' and the password 'factorymember' to play with it. Be warned, however, that it is rough around the edges and unexpected results may occur. But that should only entice you further...
The second piece was a more ordinary three-hander and part of the previous week's homework which was to write something that didn't feature humans. Or something which specifically featured non-humans. Both. Either.
In stark contrast to Sam's non-human piece, a very funny and deliciously ridiculous piece about the realities of the life of a has-been talking horse, I went for more non-specific, non-human nonsense which focused less upon character development and more, alas, upon structure and the playing of a little intellectual game.
Once again the devil-voice had attempted to sabotage what was a fairly straightforward brief, thus for my year of inspiration in this piece I had written 'All Of Them'.
Again it was great fun to play around with the piece, which featured another sense of 'the chorus', this time with the actors sharing a countdown which they voiced in unison between their own various lines. Part of our experimentation was to explore where in the various beats of the piece these unified lines came; in pauses? Interrupting argumentation? Etc.
This, a three-hander, followed much more familiar cadences and it was easier for the actors to fall into verbally familiar exchanges. When this happens I find that after a few readings the actors begin to extemporise the underlying structure of the exchanges themselves, in a sort of trance-like state in the moment of creation, which leads to individuals making verbal errors which replace any inappropriate or plainly inelegant things I have written with more correct offerings which I greedily pinch from them and add to an amended script. In this case, being a fairly sparse piece, there were only a few instances of this actor-assisted rewriting, but the change in the flow of the scene is like driving off a cobbled road and onto tarmac.
This session being somewhat shorter than the previous there was no time for showcasing anything at the end, but a quick round table discussion of Nirjay's discoveries about writing in slang and my own about Fracture served to round off another excellent session. Alex charged us with a new bit of homework: writing which encompassed huge events off-stage to which we are only privy through the reactions of the characters.
Arriving late, to my shame, I was nevertheless welcomed into one of the largest sessions yet and joined Bedi working on a deceptively sparse three pages.
Something quite magical happened in this session. We ran Sarah's pages several times with a few improvisations, a few restrictions, a moment of feeding the scriptless actors their lines. The scene as performed changed a little here, a little there, like a breeze shaping the surface of a pond. These were subtle modulations of difference, detected by the fixed gaze of the author, a slight intonation here, a different length to a pause there. Finally we were reaching the halfway point and about to swap over to investigate another text; barely ten minutes to go; when we decided that we would ask the actors to run it one more time and to make the thing last exactly those ten minutes.
What was previously an interesting two minute exchange between two people suddenly became an epic of unspoken tensions, silent agony, a kitchen filled with yawning chasms of personal history. It was as if the pond had shrugged off the breeze and curled itself up into a huge watery ball and sat there, hovering in the air, fantastically defying gravity.
In reading these texts we all have a tendency to rush through the words if there's nothing else on the page because - goodness - what will happen if we stop talking for a moment? Wonderful things, it seems. Particularly for this brief, the plasticity of time in these pieces is something we should explore very carefully; of course from a performance point of view but also in the initial act of writing. Although we have been told to be wary of allowing the actors to 'take care of' ambiguous sections of script, for fear of that crutch allowing us to limp the text through to the end without having to rewrite it properly, we should remember that as fascinating a line may be, the delay before the next, the reaction of the other actor, the anticipation of the future, are all equally vital for us as an audience. I urge everyone with a short piece to try the experiment.
One thing I did notice, incidentally, in the case of nearly every writer, was that what was written as a two-hander seemed always to be cast with two actors. That's obvious, I suppose, but after watching what time and silence did to Bedi's text I would have been interested to see what adding a third actor to a two-hander - one without lines - would have done to the dynamic. Something to play around with in a future session, perhaps.
We moved on to exploring the homework I'd brought along: a tale of ethnobotanical transgression interrupted by cataclysmic rents torn in the fabric of reality. Probably. I wanted to continue my developing trend of staying as raw as possible in first draft in order to integrate the actors' input into the writing process, thus I chose to write it very quickly and avoid revising it at all before the first reading.
In contrast to Bedi's sparse pages, my piece was chock full of words and urgent events, which is always fun to rehearse. We managed a few simple on-the-feet readings before the end and it was interesting to see how the actors coped with what starts as a bit of philosophical buffoonery, moves on to simulated intoxication and suddenly turns left into inexpressible horror. In addition to the central problem of the homework; how to communicate a vast, off-stage event through only the text and the reactions of the actors, something despite his protestations I maintain Nirjay did extremely subtly (with the assistance of some excellent interpretations when showing his piece); I was also confronted with the problem of how to deal with implied exits and entrances when we had no stage directions and, more importantly, the actors can't leave the stage.
I'll suspend any thoughts on feedback until I've actually managed to attend a session, except to say that I would imagine the results of working on text produced during the 50/50 project are going to be different from a text produced on my own. It's true that 50/50 has a specific brief and regular elements of homework but they work more as an aid to starting that first, unnervingly blank page. More importantly, the particularly supportive environment the 50/50 sessions have nurtured, and the willingness of the group to permit experimentation, means that rather than being particularly preoccupied with crafting an piece for performance - endgaining - I was much more interested in serving the process of rehearsal. Thus all the pieces arrived in first draft, some of them shredded by a computer, many of them structurally odd.
That's no bad thing, of course, and they have stimulated several ideas for experimental cinematic investigations which I'd like to propose to the Factory and to the writers therein. Again; as I'm still high on the concentrated essence of exploration; they are pleasingly disturbing to the status quo. Collar me at a session and ask me about 'Experiment 14'.
That sort of experimentation aside, though, as a writer I would be most interested to see what Factory actors would make of the more crafted work I have created which is specifically intended for performance in the most traditional sense; and further, I'd be very interested to work with Factory actors on some of the Actor's Nightmare workshops and texts I experimented with last year which seem to dovetail quite nicely with these recent rehearsal session. Perhaps at El Moli? Or over in London. We'll see.
I look forward to Monday.
