SPACE PROGRAM: Blood Pressure

Hiya,

Slightly belated but, here are some notes I took from the Blood Pressure development with PACT centre for emerging artists. Thanks to everyone who came, gave feedback, acted with us and put up with sitting around a table talking about annoyingly specific uses of language.

These notes are from day 3:

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BP NOTES DAY THREE: New read and first crack at it.

- Stage directions. Pull some of that stuff out. No indication of frantic at the end.

- results/phonebill section

- comb through grapefruit and see if we can cut out some repeats

- duty bit, talking to much, mamma better like kane and keene

- michael holding adam moment. What is this moment. Sanja dislikes it.

- too detectivey

- fucking foyer???

- second eisteddfodd monologue, what is it's purpose for the audience. What does it do for them, what do they learn from it. HOW CAN YOU MAKE THIS CLEARER WITHOUT SACRIFICIING WHAT YOU LIKE ABOUT IT.

ADAM PROBABLY NEEDS A TIME TO TALK ABOUT HIMSELF IN A CONCEPTUAL WAY, CANT JUST BE MICHAEL. LAND OF THE ILL!!!!!!

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I also wrote this scene for an imaginary version of Blood Pressure wherein it was actually just the same as Ashes to Ashes by Harold Pinter.

Scene 4

Devlin: Den I shot him in the barf and he dead now

Rebbecca: Kiss my fist

Devlin: Nah

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So there’s another draft or two to do of this play I reckon but we’ve got time. Exactly until the 17th of July. When it opens. At the Old Fitz.

I hope you liked the photo of Jackson in his underwear.

love,

Mark

x

Vacant Room Week Four (The Showing!)

It is now the day after our showing at PACT as a part of Vacant Room. Shit was so cash. We presented a full rehearsed reading of Soothsayers, complete with fire and flowers, bandages and blood. (And the chalk square too. It made it. Look at those blurry pictures!) After 10 days in the space all up across about a month of thinking about the work, to have built a first draft from scratch feels pretty great.

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Questions we need answered. Still. More things to think about.

1. Did you follow the story in each of the acts and did you get a sense of the external "disaster/catastrophe"?

2. Was this enough to sustain your interest over three separate acts?

3. We're trying to deal with a very real artistic crisis of what right we have to consume and present images and assumptions about experiences that aren't ours, we have tried to include this ethical problem of "distance" in the work itself. Did you get a sense of this? And if not, how would you imagine we could confront it?

4. Where to from here? Where could this work go, what grants, theatres, spaces, residencies, festivals, anything that you guys could suggest in terms of continuing this work's development and aiming for production late next year/early 2013.

5. What should we read/watch/attend/look at/experience that you think could help the project, and did it remind you of anything?

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We're going to keep developing Soothsayers. But mad thanks to PACT: Julie, Cat, Michael, Erica and Joe for the opportunity and support. Our killer team of performers across the weeks: Annie Savage, Troy Reid, Wade Briggs, Alex Millwood, Jennifer Medway, Abe Mitchell, Kirby Medway, Brooke Ellen Louttit, Megan Holloway, Felicity Tchorlian, Theresa Mullan and Jackson Davis. And our brilliant mentor Halcyon Macleod.

We'll get more sexy photos up soon. But now... bring on to Gobbledygook and Debris and The Sydney Fringe!

Mark x

Vacant Room Week Three

Jordan is crying into Alex’s arms.

Alex: We’ll get better at it, we’ll learn, we don’t have any other choice.

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Hey Team,

Third week pretty much done at PACT and it's raining heavily outside. I'm sort of damp and worried that when I leave my computer will get all soaked and the play will be lost (along with everything else). Maybe I'll wrap it in a plastic bag before I go, or just leave it locked up at PACT and collect it tomorrow. I don't know.

It's been a good week and the play is taking shape, and not just in our brains either, actually on paper and on the floor too. It's exciting. Act One and Two are pretty much first drafted, with Three very close. Some of those ethical problems we were struggling with last week now exist in the work too as a kind of strange narration, interrupting the play at one point. No solutions, no answers but if we can get a tiny fragment of the brain crisis we've been going through into the play then that might be enough, we'll see.

I've probably learnt the most about writing, development, performance, drama and how they work in our practice this week, thus the excerpt from the play above. Although the experience is far more uplifting than that might suggest.

We also used TVs and flouros and wet people this week, not just chalk squares anymore.

Mark x

Vacant Room Week Two

Violence is rarely mindless. The politics of a burning building, a smashed-in shop or a young man shot by police may be obscured even to those who lit the rags or fired the gun, but the politics are there. - Laurie Penny, http://pennyred.blogspot.com/

Allo,

It is now the end of week two. We have had to say goodbye to our mentor Halcyon Macleod. We will miss her terribly. Other than that, it's been an excellent and difficult week. Excellent with the actors, difficult with our own brains; with ethics, politics. A few questions. In consuming images of destruction and disaster, are we engaging in a kind of pornography? Are we genuinely emotionally engaged, or engaged critically as artists, ignoring suffering for form, light, shade, framing? Are the riots in London political reality or an image for us to improvise from? Are we vultures? We think we probably are. It's difficult.

We also used buckets, flowers and made shelters out of ladders and blankets. Abe's shelter was clearly the best.

love mark

Vacant Room Week One

First week in at PACT centre for emerging artists as a part of the Vacant Room program working with our totally amazing mentor Halcyon Macleod.

We're developing a work called Soothsayers. Mark is writing. Sanja is directing. There are a whole heap of excellent actors involved. And squares drawn up in chalk. Long range impros with cans of tomatoes, rice and makeshift shelter building. Here are some things that people have said during these impros:

- It's strawberry sauce.

- I've never met someone so stupid, so idiotic.

- Are you fucking rich?

- We need to clean our teeth.

- Annie, use your sense of smell!

- Do you believe everything happens for a reason?

- You come in bleeding from the gut with a knife and you tell me you were just sitting against a wall.

- I spilled juice on my shirt.

It's seriously most exciting. There'll be more pictures and stuff soon.

x

Mark

First Post: testin

Hey this is a test first post on the Bodysnatchers blog, we're linking this with our website since the blog on that site is totally a mess. Hope you enjoy this picure of jackson with a teddy bear.