words – Page 5

I ♥ Bobby Briggs by Jane E. Thompson

Posted on March 20, 2017March 20, 2017 by thevoiceinmyhands in theatre, words

Lynch directs Dana Ashbrook and Madchen Amick in the Twin Peaks pilot

Really, I’ve found the below much harder to write than it should be. Perhaps because I’m still in the midst of working out what the hell it is I’m doing and I’m not yet ready to articulate it. Excuse me as I bumble through. Read on at your own risk!

To put it simply: I’ve taken a section of a play I’ve written previously but never produced and decided to expand upon it. For the more confused, still percolating thoughts, see below:

Things I’m thinking about when I think about this work:

The Narcissism of Small Differences: is the current title of the play and a term coined by Freud to describe the minute (and often exaggerated) differences we find to distinguish ourselves from others in order to maintain a sense of individuality (as individuals), or create and maintain a common enemy (as groups). It’s used to maintain power imbalance and discrimination.

The Phallic Economy: When I write I like to bring an idea back to some kind of theory that maybe I can read in the hope that something else will pop. In the play, the relationship between two lovers (male and female) is infiltrated by a second man who, through jealousy, tradition and whatever else, polices the behaviour of the young woman and colludes with the young man to maintain affiliation with androcentrism.

I see the motivation in the second man in relation to Irigaray’s phallic economy and her essay ‘Women on the Market’ in which she argues that our society, our culture, is based upon the exchange of women. Men are the ones who do the business, and women are the ones exchanged. Society (men) determines her exchange value, and nature, her use value. Spoiler alert: the woman (commodity) is desired for her exchange value:

“There is no such thing as a commodity … so long as there are not at least two men to make the exchange. In order for a product—a woman?—to have value, two men, at least have to invest (in) her” (Irigaray, p. 181, 1985).

The Bourgeois Myth, via Barthes, Žižek and Lynch: The bourgeois myth relies on both the erasure of itself (ex-nomination) by not referring to itself, and what it must allow (inherent transgressions, no matter how immoral, fantastical, hidden or otherwise) in order to present itself as eternal and natural. The very fact that it needs these transgressions means that it is neither eternal nor natural. Despite this, we persevere with the irreconcilable dualities of bourgeois ideology (morality and immorality) with transgressions considered the fault of the individual and not the system itself.

Bobby Briggs (and Sexing Elvis): In one of the later scenes in the play’s current incarnation the young woman says to the young man: “I used to think, god, what talent he has, look at him. They love him. The way you looked, the way you spoke, the way you were, and none of it was about selling anything except yourself. You’re a genius at it. And I couldn’t work out if I wanted you, or wanted to be you.”

Re-watching Twin Peaks in its entirety (most of which I had not seen since the original airing in 1990/1) I was struck by not so much the pervasiveness of Lynch’s exaggerated, self-conscious representation of binary gender (being a long-time fan of his work), but rather the affect it may have had on me as a 12 year-old viewing it for the first time.

Lynch’s female characters have been written about at length by female critics finding the nostalgic conservatism of his aesthetic combined with the violence done to them regressive and ultimately damaging within the context of the violence towards women in the broader society. While I find some of the female representations on the show problematic (and I don’t want to exonerate Lynch entirely), it must be remembered that he not only co-created the show with Mark Frost but also job-shared with a number of writers and directors – especially when he took a long hiatus during the second season to film Wild at Heart and relinquished considerable creative control. (During which time I find the gender representation on the show most problematic, tbh.)

Anyway, I found my attention drawn in particular to the swaggering braggadocio of Bobby Briggs and I thought, god, how much I loved him —always had— despite his often dodgy ethics. It took me a moment to realise what this was: it was His (the character’s not the actor’s) performance of himself. Bobby Briggs’s construction of himself as the cool, self-assured bad boy of the town is fascinating to me not because of its durability as protective armour, but the opposite— his coolness is constantly being shattered by events and people around him, but he continues nonetheless, the cycle repeating itself, even in the face of James Hurley, one could argue (despite the soap opera) is less constructed (?), less self-conscious (?), more innate? (?)

(…Or simply more boring? *ponders*)

I realised upon re-watching that I’ve been writing versions of Briggs in my male characters most of my life. That Bobby’s performance of his gender was perhaps more striking to me as a 12 year-old, than say, Audrey’s. Was it an objectification of him? Was it perhaps my way of ‘inhabiting’ him, a construct I felt was unavailable to me at the time? Who knows? But this also struck me reading an essay by Sue Wise on reconsidering her formative years as an Elvis fan; that as a feminist and gay woman, how it was that Elvis (“butch god, sexual folk hero and archetypal macho man”) fit into her life. This led her to question the part of “feminist orthodoxy which, paradoxically, accepts objective and ‘male’ accounts of the world at the expense of personal and subjective experiences” (Wise, p. 13, 1984). How to reconcile her memories of listening to, reading about, scrapbooking and swapping pictures and stories of Elvis with her best friend growing up, with the pervasive (white) male-defined image of him: “the master of the sexual simile, treating his guitar as both phallus and girl, punctuating his lyrics with the animal grunts and groans of the male approaching orgasm. … Rumour had it that into his skin-tight jeans was sewn a lead bar to suggest a weapon of heroic proportions” (Melly, in Wise, p. 14). Perhaps better not to and recognise your own experience as something yours and not some male writer’s version of a moment, an image, an experience which really, is just their subjective experience made objective.

So these are the things I’m thinking about when I think about this work. I suspect I will have to stop thinking about these things in order to actually write it. I hope that happens soon.

In the meantime I thank Liv and Julian for providing the conditions to hear what I have wrought already, out loud, with actors.

Xox j e

Jane E Thompson is a Melbourne-based playwright. She’s has spent the last 20 years in theatre in various roles: actor, playwright, director, costume designer, dramaturg, spectator, sometimes student, sometimes autodidact.

In 2016 she completed a Master of Writing for Performance at the Victorian College of the Arts; and was a recipient of the Besen Family Artist Program Writers’ Development Workshop at the Malthouse Theatre.

a womb of one’s own by fiona spitzkowsky

Posted on February 13, 2017February 13, 2017 by thevoiceinmyhands in words

We are thrilled to be working with Fi Spitzkowsky as our second dinner and a show participant, and are indebted to her for this stunning insight into some of the thoughts driving her new work The View From Up Here.

A WOMB OF ONE’S OWN

a terrible title pun to try to make up for the morally grey (or perhaps offensive) content that follows

Writing this play has been, and continues to be, a struggle. Not just with the normal writer’s block and imposter syndrome demons, but with my own ethics. There are times when I have barged into the living room and said to my housemate, ‘I think I’ve just written the most offensive thing ever.’ This, I hope, is an exaggeration; let’s not forget that people like Mark Latham and Miranda Devine are publishing regularly.

But this play has pushed me to examine the fine line that I tread every time I think, speak and write about women’s bodies and fertility. It is an incredibly difficult subject—the relationship between women, their bodies, and the continuation of human life on earth. Infinitely-faceted, it is a continually transforming beast that intersects with a multitude of difficult questions surrounding gender, ableism, power and science. So deeply ingrained is our cultural link between womanhood and motherhood—despite being inherently exclusive and harmful—that it is a painful and potentially alienating task to wrestle with the notion that personal autonomy often comes into conflict with wider social conventions and an instinctual desire for survival when it comes to reproduction.

Originally, this play revolved around two brothers. Warring brothers, equal and at opposite ends of the spectrum of power and morality seem to be a staple of western history and legends, often at the birth of great cities and civilisations—Michael and Lucifer, Zeus and Hades, Remus and Romulus, Garry and Geoff Abblett (footy joke to appeal to a broader Melbourne audience). I wanted to use this familiar form to explore a millennia-old obsession with family bonds as sacred, and the act of creating and mutating black and white morality, the birth of the hero, the unfortunate necessity of their opposing villain, and the shock realization that if you don’t know who the villain is, it’s probably you.

When did I become the black sheep of the family?

Tied up in this is a fascination with the way that the ideals of family, of forgiveness an unconditional love, allow abusive relationships between siblings to flourish. I wanted to interrogate the way that social structures—like the family unit—that may have begun as a survival strategy can become oppressive as the natural necessity for those ties become obsolete.

But quickly, as all things family-related do, the play became messy; ouroboros. The brothers became sisters, which they were always meant to be, really. And when the spotlight is on women, it always seems as though the stakes are raised, ethics are muddied. Because when women are involved, power and creation is not just about building cities, it is about creating life. Or so it would seem.

The female form is so often depicted as a divine vessel, a kind of sacred objectification which is widely relished by women, joyous (at times) for the unique and beautiful experience of growing life. But then is tearing at the womb with anything other than a child somehow sacrilegious? When we start pulling on this thread we realise how deeply it is woven through our culture. Taken to extremes, we are faced with a conflict between present, natural reality, and the infinite, possible future that is embodied by the womb.

And here I found myself pausing, as I often have with this piece, thinking, wait, is my internalised misogyny showing?

The play takes place in a world where the father has removed himself, and left the mother and daughters to live alone, independent and autonomous. But when a new, vulnerable and malleable man appears on the scene, familiar pressures of fertility and motherhood and endurance emerge. The play asks, how do we leave behind that system, when it created the lives we lead? Even if all traces were dead and gone, are we able to escape that which pumps through our veins? Simone de Beauvoir (and many more recent, radical, diverse women I am sure) believed women find it difficult to unite and shake off our shackles because we are so deeply ingrained and woven into patriarchal structures.

“women lack concrete means for organising themselves into a unit which can stand face to face with the correlative unit. They have no past, no history, no religion of their own; and they have no such solidarity of work and interest as that of the proletariat.[…] They live dispersed among the males, attached through residence, housework, economic condition, and social standing to certain men – fathers or husbands – more firmly than they are to other women”

For proof of which we only need to look at the recent U.S. elections. How can we escape this heteronormative devotion to the nuclear family unit without burning it all to the ground? How do we rebuild that without the instincts to reproduce, to nurture, to ask some portion of the population to carry a biological burden? (or gift, I suppose. Each to their own.)

Am I just being sexist?

At the heart of the problem, for me, is the constraint of language. Leonard Shlain’s The Alphabet versus the Goddess presents the fascinating, but ultimately unprovable proposition that the spread of literacy correlated to the fall of matriarchal societies, as the source of authorial knowledge shifted from women with their oral storytelling and old wives’ tales, to the men with their books and scrolls. With this came the power to create cages out of words and linguistic structures. Language ties women to their bodies and the natural world—hysterical, shrewish women are among the obvious examples. But there is a strange slant in the way we cherish and compliment women as well. ‘Handsome’ is primarily defined as referring to a man, a human being, and is secondarily noted as being imposing or of considerable size. But ‘beautiful’ can be applied more widely to objects, and refers to the enjoyment of the observer (Macquarie Dictionary. Words are fun).

We all know beautiful men and non-binary people, and everyone loves a good compliment, but there is a niggling thought in the back of my head that the forgotten, even defunct gendered etymology burrows into our subconscious and sustains the pressure for women to correlate their worth with their desirability and fertility. Even in the (hopefully) progressive world we live in today, a woman’s body and fertility are inescapable facets of their public existence. We see this in the commercialised lives of the Kardashians, unarguably powerful women who control vast empires built upon image. And in the very first press conference of the new NSW premier, Gladys Berejiklian, who was almost immediately asked why she was childless. This begins to explain why bad-ass women like Katerina Minola (to use my favourite Shakespearean example), who are constantly told they are undesirable because of their shrewishness, fall dangerously into the arms of the first man who calls them beautiful. Is this vanity or an inescapable result of the role gendered language plays in the creation of self-identity and self-worth?

Even if women are in charge, as they seem to be at the beginning of this play, guiding an illiterate young man through the labyrinth of learning language, the echoes of patriarchal control can still be heard. The word ‘beautiful’ still has a power over women. This brings to the fore an idea that I am wrestling with at the moment: the notion of silence as a feminine form. Perhaps we don’t need to change that form — perhaps we should embrace it, speak through silence, rather than translate our stories, our lives, to re-assimilate into loud, bustling patriarchal structures.

If silence can be accepted as a radical form of feminine language, can the empty womb, an absence, be the ultimate rejection of the patriarchy? And on an individual level, is it possible to extricate this personal choice from the political implications? Are women’s bodies a commodity, necessary to keep the human world turning?

Is my internalised misogyny out again?

This might seem extreme, objectifying and self-hating, but there were times in 2016 (when rape was described as ‘20 minutes of action’, when there was talk of being grabbed) when I couldn’t shake the feeling that everywhere the world was shouting, ‘Your Body Doesn’t Belong To You’.

In Nocturnal Animals Amy Adams’ character is tormented for making a choice regarding her body, one that undeniably affected her tormentor, but was undeniably hers. Where does our responsibility to others begin and end? And what if the choice is not just about timing or prioritising careers, but a deliberate response to the state of the world, a rejection. To take it to the extreme: at the end of the world, or perhaps the beginning of a new one, does someone’s personal choice matter as much as the survival of a species? If we look to popular culture and social trends, the conclusion seems painfully clear. Margaret Atwood provides a glimpse at the world of ‘no’ in The Handmaid’s Tale. And childlessness has long been the lazy man’s go-to for vilifying women, from the wicked stepmothers of fairytales to the trolling of female politicians.

When did I become the villain?

Even if we accept these women as villains, can we embrace them? If we are able to stomach the wicked ways of the men who just want to watch the world burn (our favourite Oscar-winning villains), can we find some place in popular culture for the women who just want to watch the world slip quietly away, in defiance of the pressure to consume, to reproduce, to persist? Or is this kind of passive destruction too much in a world dominated by the ideal of woman as the nurturing mother?

The ultimate goal with this play is to prompt a conversation, a difficult conversation. (And if you’d like to take part, I’m always up for a coffee and a chat). I’ve been struggling with this conversation by myself for years, and I’d like to spread the love.

Are our bodies our own? Even at the end? Even at the beginning?

Should I have kids just to make my Mum happy?

Is survival always ethical?

Am I a bad feminist?

Does it matter?

Fiona Spitzkowsky is a writer, editor and theatre-maker. She has worked as a producer for Attic Erratic, creative producer for the Emerging Writers’ Festival and assistant producer for the Festival of Live Art at Arts House. In the past she has directed Taming of the Shrew (MUSC, 2015) and [Lady] Macbeth (Twelve Angry, 2016). As a writer, Fiona has worked extensively with Australian Theatre for Young People (National Studio 2014, Voices Project 2015, Fresh Ink Program 2015), while also penning scripts for Sprung Festival and Disability Media’s What’s Wrong With U?. In 2016, Fiona is a member of the Voiceworks editorial committee, has presented work at Crack Theatre Festival and Critical Animals Festival and her short work,Top Up, will be staged at Testing Grounds in November.

an essay on failure by angus cameron

Posted on January 16, 2017January 23, 2017 by thevoiceinmyhands in theatre, words

15111043_10154873669858900_4135294599365542655_o — *in the mirror, darkly* by Angus Cameron being read at The Festival of Homer 2016.

When I was much younger I read the Wikipedia page for the Ingmar Bergman film Persona. I identified with it instantly and knew it was going to be one of my favourite films. I had a moment of inspiration and I wrote an idea down in my journal of ideas. It was a film (or play, if that was even possible!) about a male director remaking Persona with two women, one older and one younger, without them knowing — as a comment on misogyny, obviously. As with many, many ideas that were written in my journal, I promptly forgot about it. Nothing from my journal of ideas was turned into an artistic object beyond the perfect product in my mind. I always assumed that one day I would be a famous playwright. But I never factored in the actual writing, working, rewriting, reworking and solitude of it all. I lost the journal. Time passed.

One day I bought the complete collection of Ingmar Bergman films on DVD. I read somewhere that Žižek—or maybe Simon Stone, or both—went away for a couple of years and read a lot of philosophy, the former, or watched a lot of movies, the latter. Through osmosis they became masters of their craft, they said. This seemed eminently plausible, and better yet, achievable, so the purchase was easily justified. Plus, I figured the collection already contained many of my soon-to- be favourite films. So I sat down with an enormous compendium of DVDs and put on Persona.

When I read the synopsis and the ‘themes and interpretations’ sections on the film, I was drawn to its focus on psyche, the Other, language, gender, and queer sexuality; not to mention the grounding in Elektra. The film itself cared little about what I was drawn to and presented me with images, in concatenation and simultaneity, sounds and a psychological thriller of a narrative. Viewing the film was an altogether different experience to what I was expecting; it was a more impenetrable machine than I expected. Not that it’s a difficult film but a demanding one. After it finished, I figured that that was enough Bergman for now. I put the compendium away and don’t remember the last time I saw it.

The film stayed with me. Images. Moments. A sense of unease. It slowly became if not one of my favourite films, one of the most memorable. The film had really burrowed in and my original idea stayed with me for some time, without giving me the impetus to actually write anything. In fact, I had not written anything at all. I assumed that fame and a body of work would just come. This is not the case. One day I realised that people would never consider me a playwright unless I . . . well, unless I wrote a play. This seemed harder than watching movies (which I had somewhat failed at) but it also seemed unavoidable.

My first play was a critical disaster. I left the country and my theatre company. All those years of not writing plays meant that I could not write a play. I was disappointed, to say the least.

The Malthouse Theatre used to run an event called, maybe, Thirty Thursday, where artists were encouraged to come and drink and mingle in the afternoon. One such afternoon, I spent some time talking to a lovely young woman. She told me she had come back from New York, where she worked with the SITI Company, and I nodded as though I knew what she meant. Then I told her about my critical failure. She was very polite and listened to my story.

Soon thereafter, the Malthouse Theatre had a production of Persona, after it had a run at Theatre Works (and maybe Belvoir?). The creator of the show was an up-and-coming star, Adena Jacobs, with whom, it turned out, I had spent a large amount of time talking about myself and not about her or her work at all; although the answer to my question about whether or not Persona could be done on stage was a resounding yes, I had missed an opportunity to find out how this came to happen and it was a rather final nail in the coffin to my idea.

In 2015, midway through a Masters of Writing for Performance, we were set a challenge of writing a play in a weekend; there were no restrictions but it had to include a number of elements: a non-heterosexual love, something falling out, characters with an age difference and a tangerine — there may have been more but they’re largely irrelevant. I failed at this challenge. However, I failed better. I wrote one act of a play. It was about two women brought together by a director to remake Persona. It was called Tangerine. It was well received in the class (as much as a writing exercise can be) and I felt encouraged to write the second act. I gave myself another weekend. The first act set up a situation, the second act tore it down. The lines between the remake and the original blurred. Once it was finished, I rewrote it again, for good measure.

In the back of my mind though I was beginning to reach an impasse. Although one of the aspects that drew me to the text originally was how queer it seemed, I began to see clearly that a man wrote it, and some queer sexualities are a female experience — a ground-breaking revelation. In particular, there is a moving monologue in which one of the characters details a sexual encounter between her, another woman, and two young men, on the beach. There is an undeniable energy to the text; however, there are moments when male authorship is very apparent — the way in which the main interlocutor seems to orgasm immediately upon penetration, for example. My play wanted to interrogate these ideas, subvert them, blur them and so on, so I was coming from a place of wanting to do good. But I started to think, maybe this was not a story for me to rewrite. Perhaps orgasming upon penetration is a common experience (it is not mine), so it’s not out of the realms of possibility but I started to see that there was an insurmountable hurdle to me writing it — no matter how ‘authentic’ my writing was, no matter how many women I spoke to, there is a shortcoming to my ability to write these characters.

Some would dispute this. I spoke to a range of people about my quandary (paying special attention to female responses to the work), many of whom pointed to the number of men who have written good female characters, feminist texts, and said that as long as it’s ‘good’ then it’s okay. While I respect these opinions, the power as author to put words in other people’s mouths still niggled me. My play did not sitting well with my outlook. Of course, all of these fears were compounded by the best of intentions and the desire to write compelling, complex female characters and address the sexism that I could see in the industry. Like Ibsen, when he said he simply wrote the truth when he wrote A Doll’s House I argued that it didn’t matter that I was a man as long as I was writing the truth, and writing the truth well. But still, more than ever, I began to question if this was the right way for me to engage with these ideas; and as I sat at my MacBook I had to ask myself, is my desire to interrogate, also a desire to exploit?

It’s a simple fact that art always fails. It might not fail you, or me, but it will fail someone. Great works of art can speak to myriad peoples, across time; however, there is always going to be someone for whom it does not resonate. That’s why Plato wanted it out of the republic; it is mimetic, too far from the idea of things; it is untruthful. Once a chair is put on stage it comes to represent all chairs, and that becomes problematic when you want to see lots of different representations of chairs. And one piece of art cannot represent all chairs. So, art fails. Cast it out.

Unfortunately for Plato, many of us also recognise that art still serves a function. If we accept that art will fail, then we can turn our attention to how it fails, who enabled it to fail and who else gets a turn at failing. The dilemma of my play became a question not of can I write this play, but should I write this play. Whether or not the play I wrote was ‘good’ is beside the point. Art always fails; and so, we must have many people, many different people, making many different kinds of art so that a multitude of experiences are available to the community. While my engagement with feminism, my writing of complex female characters and all the rest are worthwhile pursuits, my rewriting of Persona to redress gender inequality, explicitly looking at ageism, motherhood, body image, and female queer sexuality, is not really necessary. And that’s okay.

Unfortunately for me, I had told The Festival of Homer that I had a play for them. It was a reworking of Persona, I told them, which definitely touched on the Elektra narrative, and yes, it would most certainly be ready for the festival in late 2016. The truth was, there was no such play that I was comfortable showing to a public.

Sometimes I struggle to see the point of an adaptation. Because I think all theatre is adaptation. Season to season, show to show, moment to moment, a piece of theatre changes to suit its environment and everyone involved; that’s what sets it so firmly apart from cinema. A production of King Lear is different in London, to Istanbul, to Beijing, to rural Australia. And ask anyone who has talked about how different an audience is on a given night and it’s clear that there is something that shifts within the theatrical space. Peter Brook talks about this in The Empty Space, in the chapter on the deadly theatre. This quality curses theatre to struggle within our capitalist paradigm; it is too ephemeral, too costly and too specific to be monetised effectively (there are, of course, incredibly successful shows but by and large, theatre struggles). Moreover, a new play evolves from the mind of the maker, to the page (or straight onto the floor) and constantly remodels itself to suit everyone’s needs and the outcome of the project, finally altering itself when presented to an audience. So, new play or old, for me, it is all adaptation.

And if all theatre is adaptation, isn’t it the point of the theatre maker to adapt a text for performance? What else are they doing? Admittedly some may require more than others but personally, an ‘adaptation’ offers little reward (NB: future theatre companies reading this, I will gladly adapt something for the right price). One day the nuances and pleasures of an adaptation will make themselves known to me and I will completely change my position but today is not that day. Sadly, I was in a position whereby I needed to provide a festival with an adaptation and almost no impetus to do it.

I went back to the theatrical origins of the story and reread Elektra. I read the Sophocles and the Euripides and The Libation Bearers by Aeschylus. I also read Jane Griffith’s introduction to her adaptation of Antigone. In addition, I spoke to her about Elektra, as it’s one of her favourite texts. I even went back further and did some light reading of The Iliad and The Odyssey but time was not on my side. The Wikipedia pages were most helpful.

It became clear that there was a story at the heart of the narrative but there was no one-way of writing it. Various playwrights had drawn out specific themes to illustrate one aspect or other of society but—and I should have listened to my own thoughts on adaptation and taken them to the extreme—there is no singular Elektra. It became a question of figuring out what, to me and to others, makes Elektra ‘Elektra’ and then to use that as a backbone, a model, an idea in my head for the play that I was to write.

By fusing the two ideas in my head, the old play and this new one, I told a story of a famous family—which went a long way to repositioning my focus on ‘women’ to ‘the lengths people will go to for notoriety’—and set about finding a new mode of delivery. The style in which I wrote the play lost its attempts at naturalism and instead adopted an epic register. The Kardashian-esque family was suddenly imbued with tragic speech, which, hopefully, reinvigorated the narrative by fusing the classical story with an invitation for contemporary audiences to connect with it.

The play was presented at the inaugural Festival of Homer, in the Hellenic Museum, in November 2016. The endlessly enthusiastic and supportive Olivia Satchell directed it. Hamish Irvine, Christian Taylor, Cariad Wallace and Marissa O’Reilley acted it. And Keziah Warner, without whom half my 2016 plays wouldn’t exist, was the dramaturg.

No doubt I have failed once again. And yet, with every failure I get closer to producing something that will one day become a Wikipedia page. If someone reads the synopsis and gets an idea, then my job is done. Art is a response, one of many possible responses and one that contains within it even more multiplicities; it doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and when it’s produced it makes people ask questions. Those questions can become new responses. It’s a cycle. As long as there is equal access then we can all fail together. I can only hope that whoever responds to me fails a bit better.

Angus very kindly allowed his play in the mirror, darkly to serve as a prototype for VIMH’s dinner and a show and, even more generously, offered this essay as a reflection on his experience with this work.

dinner and a show #1: christopher bryant

Posted on January 9, 2017January 10, 2017 by thevoiceinmyhands in theatre, words

This is Chris.

Neptune’s Great Dark Spot.

Heaven’s Gate recruitment video. HG was an American UFO religious millenarian group based in San Diego

For our first official dinner and a show for 2017, we caught up with our first official D + S writer Chris Bryant through a cheeky Q&A.

What writing have you brought to dinner and a show?

A piece I’ve been working on for the past couple of years on-and-off, The Great Dark Spot. It’s an odd little science fiction piece about the aftermath of trauma, and I haven’t quite worked it out yet! I have a strange relationship with it as a piece of my work: it’s changed form and focus about three times, and I constantly feel I’m returning to the first draft stage. It’s really only in the past year or so that I’ve connected with what I want it to be.

Why is it important to you?

The main characters in the piece, Hattie and Kyle, have grown up with only themselves to rely on after their mother disappeared when they were children and their father consequently abandoned his parental role. It’s quite a personal piece of work that looks at living in the aftermath of trauma. I wrote the first draft in the aftermath of my own trauma – I nearly died in a car accident in 2014, and I’m also adopted – so there are a lot of strangely personal elements to its story, which is also why I haven’t quite been able to let it go.

If you could have dinner with any artist (living or dead), who would it be and what would you ask them?

John Waters. I wouldn’t be inclined to ask much, only listen – however, I would ask him his advice for making art in such artistically austere times. He eschewed traditional funding and studios to make his films (in particular his more transgressive earlier films); I think he’d have a lot to say on the matter. I love his films, his books, his anger, and his humour.

A bit about Chris:

Christopher Bryant is a Griffin Award nominated playwright (Home Invasion, 2015) and NIDA graduate (Master of Fine Arts (Writing for Performance), 2014) who has worked with a range of companies including Malthouse Theatre, MKA, ATYP, Apocalypse Theatre, La Mama, ACPA and Monash University. Recent work includes The Mutant Man, shortlisted for both Belvoir’s Philip Parsons Playwriting Fellowship in 2014 & the Arch and Bruce Brown Foundation’s Playwriting Competition in 2015, making him the first Australian nominee in the award’s history. In early 2016 his “talented and thoughtful” play Intoxication played to sold-out audiences at the La Mama Courthouse in the Midsumma Festival. He is the current & inaugural recipient of the Russell Beedles Performing Arts Fellowship at the State Library of Victoria for his play The Other Place.

part four: the changing room

Posted on October 19, 2016October 19, 2016 by thevoiceinmyhands in words

I swim a lot and so spend a lot of time in swimming pool changing rooms. These rooms are a space that seem, to me, to be unique. I don’t know anything that makes me feel the way I do there – safe, where my body is just that and very little more, and I feel like I am just one of many similar to me.

There’s always an old seal of a woman sitting naked whilst she gets her breath back. A baby girl singing to the hairdryer. Two pre-teens staring in close-mouthed wonder at the hips swinging around them in full view.

I have had exchanges with strangers in this space that could never occur outside. I have helped middle-aged women heave their breasts into tired cotton and stretched elastic. I have shared hairbrushes, deodorant, swim-stroke advice.

I have seen three generations of women help each other get dressed.

–

We’ve been talking a lot in rehearsals about the materiality of the female body. This materiality is the sense of my body, your body, being just that. There is no ‘othering’ gaze, no self-consciousness foisted onto it by appraising eyes and the reactive instinct to make it smaller, to lessen the space that it takes up in order to minimise the threat of engagement (violent, unwelcome, or otherwise).

We’ve also been talking a lot about recognition. About the way women see each other. We do not know what has made this seeing possible, but it is something that all three of us has experienced; the ability to drop into a well of familiarity with another woman because of some unspoken code that you both have access to.

It was there when I was in a car full of girls I didn’t know. We would have been 18, 19, and someone made a joke about a tampon and we all burst into laughter. We spent the rest of the car trip in earnest conversation about our sexual health.

It was there when I was struggling to stand upright on a packed tram with a friend’s birthday cake and an extremely pregnant woman offered to balance it on her belly for me.

It’s also there in every pool changing room I’ve ever undressed in.

For me, the changing room space allows the meeting of this recognition and this materiality.

It is a space that can hold the possibilities of female intimacy without the deluge of the public sphere.

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I’ve set I sat and waited but you were gone too long in this very particular social space because I’m also interested in the dramaturgical potential of female presence. This decision was inspired not only by the work of Toni Morrison but also by Melbourne writer-director Jenny Kemp and her focus on a ‘female dramaturgy’. This dramaturgy is identified partly by an interest in vertical rather than horizontal time – in plunging down into a moment rather than moving forward through a traditionally conflict-driven masculine narrative.

At the recent National Play Festival, Michael Gow spoke about the necessity of dramatic conflict in his keynote address The Agony and The Agony. He spoke of wrestling, of ‘agon’ (the ancient Greek term for struggle or contest) and of characters butting up against each other as being a constituent force of great drama. A female dramaturgy sits in a ‘something else’ space alongside this. This space is by no means devoid of conflict, but it is not a meeting of external forces. Both Woman and Girl experience an internal struggle – the wrenching, self-obliterating force of grief. But there is no locking of antlers here.

Instead, they sit together, experiencing this recognition and plunging down into the moment of their encounter, allowing their struggle to be borne for a moment by their companion.