Rules and Regs: Yokohama 2013

A week ago today we had our ‘outside eye’ day where we shared our work with each other. It’s safe to say that since then time seems to have upped its game and changed the speed at which it passes. I have just returned from KAAT (The Kanagawa Arts Theatre, where we perform) where the tech team have been rigging lights and setting up kit all day. It’s an impressive operation!

I think the outside eye day galvanised everybody a little, or at least changed the focus of our actions somewhat – it definitely hit home that we were going to be presenting our explorations in front of an audience. We also had deadlines for any text that needed translating into Japanese, and deadlines for tech requests. Therefore much of the last week has been a process of narrowing down, refining, decision making, finessing. For me at least. This has been both sad and thrilling. Sad, because I was enjoying the experimentation, and was a little reluctant to make some of those decisions or commit to some things so soon. Thrilling because the live moment in front of an audience is the reason I make performance, and so there is an excitement in thinking about that too. Perhaps inevitably I feel a little that, with the pressure on, I have reverted to some of my more comfortable or familiar modes of making and shaping material. But not all of them, and the beginning of the process was certainly different to my habitual one, so I hope this will be apparent in the work on some level. Or maybe it actually doesn’t matter whether or not it is…I am not sure.

Post the showings last week I had some very useful conversations with Seth about where the piece was at, and how I was working. And I really wanted to blog about our discussions, but the ‘thing’ got in the way. Maybe I will find some time after the performances are done, to come back to those ideas and write about them.

The biggest thing for me was that I felt like I had made ten minutes of stuff that would serve as a good introduction for an hour long show. And although I knew I wasn’t making an hour long show, it didn’t really register until that moment that I had to think completely differently about how that material would sit as, for example, a ten minute chunk of a twenty minute show. What the journey for the audience was going to be, how the piece would resolve itself in this shorter time frame. Or I had to even change my way of thinking about the idea of ‘resolution’.

It came back to structuring. I’d had an idea of recurring two minute ‘chunks’ in the piece – related to the idea that if you survive a plane crash, you then have approximately two minutes to get off the crashed plane alive before smoke and/or fire kill you. I liked the idea of this ongoing two minute countdown, in which different (sometimes quite abstract) responses to ‘two minutes to get off the plane’ were acted out. And also a related idea of ‘your last two minutes alive’. So I worked with building the piece around a structure of two minute sections, and that is what it is now.

In a way, right now I wish I hadn’t worked so hard to try and ‘resolve’ the piece, and left it more open or somehow without a distinct ‘ending’. I think maybe the two minute structure could have carried the work, without some material I’ve added in that maybe points too explicitly to what the audience should interpret or feel. BUT I guess we will see how it feels in the performances this weekend. And then, we have the opportunity to spend a bit more time reworking or reshaping before we present the pieces in Brighton – so it could all change again!

Ira Brand

Last night we gave a talk about R&R to a group of Yokohama artists at the project space where we have been staying. There was some good discussion around the relevance of the rules to the audience, and the concept of a “pure audience”.

We’re now only a few days away from the performances and things are speeding up… In addition to preparing their pieces, the artists are all grappling with the thorny issue of translation. What is the best way to convey the meaning of any spoken English to a majority Japanese-speaking audience? Surtitles? Live translation? A script in Japanese as a programme insert? Even Kiguchi, our native-Japanese-speaking artist, has long English passages in his piece. There has also been a great deal of discussion around the cultural implications of some of the elements in the various pieces. Flipping a coin, for example, is loaded with very different meanings in Japan than in England…

– Seth Kriebel

My work is planned to perform along with the audience. But there are some issues that should be thought in advance for that.

I’ve been thinking how to direct the amateur on stage without losing attraction of piece.

In general, theater is the artistic form based on trained actors who can play with elaborate words.

But I think, theatrical training way is formed by our historical consciousness. Ways which we have now are like strong species that survived the battle for survival.

If environment changed in past, We could see probably organisms that have never seen. By thinking that way, I’d like to find other ways to create works.

_ Kiguchi

now I’m thinking about difference of such metaphorical existences… GHOST and ZOMBIE, DOPPELGANGER.

And this living thing gave me many suggestion.

Emerald cockroach wasp

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emerald_cockroach_was…

– Kiguchi

Some things about not being in the studio:

• Today I heard somebody use their car horn for the first time (we have been in Japan for over a week).
• At some underground stations bird song is played on the platforms or escalators.
• Everybody waits for the green man at road crossings, even at the smallest roads. A symptom of a polite and respectful culture.
• But you have to negotiate sharing the pavement with bicycles.
• There is no clear way to say ‘no’ in Japanese. ‘Iie’ seems to be a polite way of declining or disagreeing, but is not the same as ‘no’ in English.
• Almost everything I purchase at the supermarket is not what I think it is.
• I saw a watermelon that cost the equivalent of £14.

Some things about being in the studio:

• I have acquired some wings!
• The title ‘Desire / Disaster’ is floating through my mind as possible for the piece. I have been thinking about aeroplane crashes and death and violence and a need to be loved, and this seems apt.
• The space I think I have chosen at the theatre we are performing in is a traverse stage. I have not made a work with the audience on both sides before. I like the sense of length this gives to the space, and it seems to heighten my awareness of how I am using the ‘stage’ space, how I am mentally laying out material.
• I asked for some lights and a data projector to experiment with in the studio. Ironically, I feel like these technologies that are ‘conventions’ of a theatre space are making it harder for me to continue experimenting. They seem to want me to commit to things, to set them.
• We are going to have to deal with a language barrier when we present our work here. We might have a translator, or surtitles, or a written hand-out. I thought about displacement and belonging (or not-belonging), and about a show that is deliberately performed in a language that is not the primary language spoken. So here, I perform it in English, back in the UK I could perform it in German.
• Over the last two days I have done a lot of dancing. There is a point in almost every process where I make a dance, and I never know if it is actually good as a moment of performance, or if I am just being hoodwinked by enjoying dancing. I usually take the dance out. Maybe this will be the piece where I don’t.

Ira Brand