Theatre Practice

A few people lately have been asking me about how I devise theatre and make new work without a script. So I thought I'd cast a little light on the matter.

My work is preoocupied with human interactions, I'm intersted in the varying levels in trust we place in each other and the responsibilities we acquire. This is a good starting point as the art of collaboration is in establishing relationships with people so I can draw themes and patterns from the process itself. I like to take one aspect of an interaction and explore and highlight all the possible connoatations.

I use movement motifs to creatively tell stories. I workshop loads of ideas through a variety of techniques including verbatim (be this via email, found text on internet forums, or voice recording people to get there responses to situations), improvisation (in the studio playing with ideas allowing anything to happen) and game play. I like to draw my ideas from a wide range of stimuli - music, pictures, past experiences, films, journals, art. I enjoy finding connections between things.

I like to work intensively on projects and generate too much material that I can then edit rather than just making enough and having to stretch it. It is important to me to create and destroy the illusion of theatre in my work, I draw comparisons in the way people trust each other and the way an audiences trusts a performer to entertain. Both can be manipulative.

Instructions form a large basis of the rehearsal process. We pass each other notes with instructions on that can be interpreted in any and at any time, this ensure a playful and suprising studio practice that is always exciting. I like setting rules and parameters also, creating situations where the normal is not allowed and creating a dynamic and focus rehearsal environment.

At Left at the Theatre I work with Rachel McCarter with whom I trained. We both enjoy testing the limitations of the body, the limitations of physicality and the limitations of time in performance. In rehearsals we often go through routines, and physical tasks set by each other until we physically cannot do it anymore. As the performer tires and exhaustion takes over the bodies mechanisms for coping set in and the shapes and visceral experiences make for interesting theatre-the body has to change when it is exhausted. "Acting" is often abandoned and tasks take over.

Taking performance away from the theatre allows Left at the Theatre to reach a wider audience and create a more fluid style of work. Using the space as part of the stimulus for the performance is important to me, true site specificity where the performance and the place are integral to each other is key to creating successful work. We explore the limits of time in performance. We depend on spaces to frame it. The body communicates the relationship between Space and Time.

Quite often I will just take a visual idea and run with it, testing it, interrogating it for mileage and integrity or symbolic value. I scrap a lot of my work, especially things that I think are the best and definately things that I think are precious. A lot of the time personal experience comes in to the work, I blend together fiction and non-fiction and it becomes a game to the audience who are asked to figure out which sections are taken from life and which are made-up; trust again.

We work on more than one project at a time. Often ideas that occur whilst we are attempting to create one piece will be more suitable for the other, so we have to be fluid and allow crossovers. It is a bit like a lego building, you have to find right pieces to stick to each other to make it look right. This parallel rehearsal structure sometimes means quoting our own work within pieces.

I like to set up an environment where no idea is too small or superfluous or silly, playfulness is imperative even if we are performing a sad or low moment it must be done creatively.

What Do You Think of the Gay Scene?

I think @QueerUK (http://www.queeruk.net/) tweeted this question the other day. I clicked the link to their forums which were typically a celebration of the gay community and a series of stories about groups of friends and people that met on the scene.

I guess I've never felt totally at ease on the scene. As a young whipersnapper, or chicken I guess is the animal homolingo these days, I used to sneak out of the house and go to Birmingham on the train as there was a gay scene there. Naturally at the ages of 16 and 17 there was no way I could afford the taxi fare back to my parents in rural Worcestershire so I would make it my perogative to bed a local guy in birmingham and get up early to get the train home. Me and the gay scene didn't get off to the best of starts, I suppose, I put too much pressure on it and often ended up with second rate guys in order to just get a crash pad in birmingham.

I went to university in Leeds and studied theatre, I guess at this point I was pretty contented with my sexuality. A lot of the lads on my course and in my acquaintance were just 'coming out' and were discovering the mainstream gay scene in Leeds, which I must add, is quite limited. I guess I was a child of the grunge generation and I didn't really like the happy poppy music that was associated with these places; all my mates would much prefer the cheese rooms rather than the dance rooms. Don't get me wrong I would still go in the hope of finding someone else stood in the corner scowling and looking distressed, and the 'pound a drink' promotion was also an obvious attraction. As my time in Leeds went on I got more and more despondent to the scene, it got increasingly sex oriented and everytime I went out on it I felt enormous pressure to either be a half naked adonis type or at least have my tongue tickling someone elses tonsils. I got a bit uncomfortable with that being the normal image of a gay man, some sort of sex crazed nympho that works-out too often, so I went in pursuit of something different.

I found a night called Suck My Left One put on by a feminist/queer collective called Manifesta. This night seemed much more up my street. DIY in appearance and policy, operating in a demacratic social space, relaxed, no dress codes, no pressure and a much more interesting and dynamic range of music featuring riot grrrl, punk, indie and alt sounds. I don't really believe this existed as part of an intentional 'gay scene', but was created as a sort of anti-scene by people who were fed up of the way the established scene represented them as mindless sex-bots. I think the thing that seperates the two realms is politics, the Suck My Left One crowd definately consisted of more activists, and people committed to equal rights in all aspects of gender and sexuality. It was definately more queer than gay. In a way I began to feel attached to this community as it felt progressive rather than regressive and still enjoy it when I discover a club night with a similar ethos or aesthetic. I've been searching about for nights like this London but nothing seems to have stood out, unskinny bop at the Star of Bethnal Green is trying but isn't quite DIYenough, so suggestions are welcome.


Throughout this time I had been attending psytrance and techno raves at house parties, squats and fields around Leeds and further afield. I thought this to be the ultimate dancing experience, and I still do, to be honest. My heart is here but I craved being in a place where homosexuality or at least a queer sexuality was normal and not just accepted. I believe I would be happy if I could find a gay techno night that was playful, less masculine than the bear-heavy clubs of vauxhall as I find being that far down the s'traight-acting' scale actually is a bit scary. I think the whole scene needs to take the prettiness of boys less seriously, I cannot help but associate vocal house with a picture of toned twink type waving his arms about and vocal techno with a skinnheaded cub dancing away. If i could find a gay psytrance rave I'd truly have found my ultimate gay scene experience, I get the feeling this wont ever happen.

What do I think of the gay scene? I think it needs to cater for more music tastes than cheesy pop and vocal house. I think it needs to present itself less as a meat market where man meets man and then pound each other in the toilets. I think it needs to be less patronising to it's clientele and let them know that actually its okey to read up on your LGBT and Queer history and theory (even if that is just by watching Sean Penn in Milk). I feel cheated by the gay scene in a sense, I thought it would be this lovely loving community of acceptance and equality but what I actually found was some very snide and bitchy scene queens, cliques, arrogance and a pre-occupation with prrettiness and fucking. Perhaps I've just always been into the alternative and therefore feel more myself in somwhere that feels a bit different, but these places seem harder and harder to find, and even more difficult is finding a gay group of mates who would want to go with you. I find that on the psytrance scene going it alone is much more acceptable and wish this trend would follow through into the gay world but I would probably just get branded as one of those guys that hawk for a shag at the side of the dance floor. Still, I will keep searching for the ultimate gay-scene or anti-gay-scene leisuretime experience, and still, I will most likely enjoy the experience which ever side of the line it falls on.

Awesome Pics from up and coming Visual Artist Bunty May Marshall

Exclusive interview with Bunty May Marshall coming soon

For National Poetry Day

Odd socks.

Together we packed up our bookshelves
Nearly got stuck in the stairwell
Found an allen-key from a neighbour
So we could take ourselves apart
And our knowledge fell off the shelves
Tumbled to the floor from three flights up
Last time we did this
Betrayal bestowed
And trust fled
This time we share tea
And smile at each other lovingly
You wear my socks sometimes
But we don’t pair up these days.

drawings and doodles from the crevices of my cranium

some guy

some gay


some girl with a twiddling stick

would you like a cigarette, or my hand upon your shoulder

robots are girls in dresses

Apologese for the quality not really got access to a scanner, so these are photos of drawings.

east End Phone Pics

Things I have seen in the East End over the past few months. Pretty pleased with my camera phone, technically its rubbish but it seems to be doing the job.

What Counts as Real Rape?

What Counts as Real Rape?

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Sociological Images is possibly one of the best internet finds. A site that allows you to put any image or vid clip up that you think says something sociologically.

I think Whoopi here is trying to make a cultural relativism case, however, liberal as I am, I still believe that there are some universal wrongs (castration, rape, povery, gender inequality). It just seem to me like pally hollywood types are trying to cotton wool Roman Polanski into innocence based on artistic credibility rather than the facts and effects of the crime.