New Year's Green Resolution

It is freezing outside.  Second day back in Ireland, first day back at work and it's really cold.  Had to go up to Derry this morning to drop off scripts for the second-year students working on two plays with me next week and it was cold, grey and miserable.  Both ways.

We were going to go to Thailand in 3 weeks time.  Not just for the warmth and sun, but because I spent part of my childhood there and wanted Anthony to see it, get to know old family friends, eat beautiful tropical fruit and dabble his toes in the warm water.  I miss swimming and the thought of being in a warm ocean swimming every day seemed enough to make all the winter darkness bearable.  But then I read HEAT by George Monbiot over the Christmas break, especially his chapter on "love miles" about the way we fly to reaffirm our connection with the people and places we love, and how WE HAVE TO GIVE IT UP.  Even if we recycle and lower our heating and insulate our lofts and get worms in and buy organic and pay for light bulbs to help the third world... WE HAVE TO STOP FLYING.  Altogether? Or just not so much?

And I remembered Jared Diamond's fantastic book COLLAPSE in which he looks at why societies that have wiped themselves out in the past couldn't stop the things that were so obviously hurting them.  Diamond says that they chose not to, because those activities defined who they were.  And yes, I guess loving places all over the world and having friends who live there that I want to visit defines who I am. Born in India, growing up in Thailand, Canada, Switzerland and Indonesia.

So.  We're not going to Thailand.  We're going to go by public transport - mostly rail - around Italy.  In February.  And yes it will be cold - but hey - I'll be with Anthony, and it's almost a dead cert it will be fun and unhurried and satisfying and then I will have taken the first steps to wean myself off the old habits.  But ARGHH! After 15 years in the Theatre I'm finally making a bit of money to pay for travel and I'll just pause if I may for five minutes to say that selfishly, guiltily, RIGHT NOW, I wish I didn't have to change?

Art that Speaks to the People

Yesterday I sat with friends on a typical Irish 23rd of December evening: the fire was lit, and we were perched on chairs in the warm kitchen, enjoying a comfy, red-wine fuelled, conversation about art.... or perhaps I should say "Art"?  It moved from art to ART the more red wine we drank.

I was wrestling with the process of artistic expression, two other people in the room were debating how far they should go to be musically accessible - speculating out loud about whether the international Brazilian artist with the crack ensemble of top musicians from some of the best bands in the world would EVER be able to take his rightful place in the face of competition from the local amateur fire-in-a-petshop classical orchestra (currently out-selling the Brazilian in our local arts centre 4 to 1), the local Christian rock group, the local... oh look around you and substitute what you will....  The conversation swung back to me and  I flourished my sense of joyful artistic release that comes from not having to programme the local theatre any more, but being able to be based here in Northern Ireland, happily soaking up the influences and thoughts from all around me. It was great, I said, using the internet to find collaborators in Hong Kong, Quebec and Beijing, and looking for outlets in the same way: the Adelaide Festival? Letterkenny? The Hong Kong Arts Festival? Edinburgh?  Who will buy?  Who will buy? Who will buy my sweet oranges?

Suddenly there was a pause in the conversation and one of my host's adorable, hip, bright, talented, London-based sons said: "but surely Andrea it is a question of  making work that speaks to the people of Coleraine?".  And my brain seized up like someone had dumped sugar in my gas-tank.  Is it?  Is it? This is not just a question for Coleraine, or even for Northern Ireland!  It is a question for everywhere.  Substitute Pisa, Kelowna, La Roche Sur Yon, Yogyakarta for Coleraine.  If you live in a place, do you have a "duty" to speak to the people of that place?  I think you have a duty to know yourself, and that will INCLUDE thinking about why you have chosen to be where you are, but do the results have to speak to your neighbours? What if you find that there is a public for your work in Paris, but not Kabul, where you live?  What if you love Kabul? 

Is the question I was asked only one that only someone from London, Paris, New York (substitute any large sophisticated metropolitan centre with a critical mass of enquiring artistically experimental people live) could ask, because they've never experienced small town life?

What if people don't know what speaks to them?  What if what speaks to them is Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible?  What if what you do speaks to them and they decide they hate it?  How far does the duty go?  If you take this argument to its logical extreme, it becomes art for the sake of the involvement of thy neighbours, not art to express thine creative urges.  Was that why my motor seized?  Because I smelled service not freedom of expression? 

Negotiating this fundamental question of artistic freedom and belonging, seems to me one of the most thorny issues in area of modern artistic expression.  Particularly when we add in the huge up-surge of moral crusading and religious censorship currently washing all around us.  At the moment, I think the healthiest stance I can take is just to say: sorry folks, if you don't like what I got to say, well, them's the breaks.  If what I have to say bores you, them's the breaks for me (and watch me starve or leave). The burden of figuring out what I need to say, and saying it as well as I possibly can do, is all I'm willing to deal with right now.

Speak to the people? Go have a another glass of red wine! 

The Harvard Implicit Association Test

I was re-reading Blink ,the new book by Malcolm Gladwell, (it's one of the books listed left under great books) and came across the Harvard Implicit Association Test.  I've decided try out my own version of the male/female preconception test in a training tomorrow to see if I can shock my trainees into being a little more aware of their own implicit ideas on how to categorise people.  It really makes my hair stand on end - the idea that even if you want to be liberal unbiased and fair, you will find it easy to allocate concepts to say...categories "female/domestic vs male/career" and much much more difficult to function when you are asked to allocate concepts to "female/career vs male/domestic".  Gladwell who was raised in a family with one black and one white parent describes his own dis-ease when struggling with allocation in "african american/good vs white european/bad".  The cultural forces that shape our implicit associations are so strong that we seem to not be able to help being slowed down, "confused" for a fraction of a second.  Apparently we don't choose to make these associations, but they are all around us, so our subconscious soaks them up.

If you want to try the test for yourself, Gladwell says you can log on at: www.implicit.harvard.edu. 

Sponsorship - the Difficult Concept of "You are Worth It"

Today my students at Magee made their final presentation to us, modelled on the idea that they were an arts organisation pitching for sponsorship to a major company with a Northern Ireland profile.  In many ways they got it pretty much right.  Well-dressed, they presented themselves with clear missions and aims for their new companies, an understanding of why sponsors might want good PR, a broad sense of who their target market was, the beginnings of clarity on sponsorship as a meeting of equals, where one company proposes a brand alliance to another for mutual benefit.  The place where they fell down however, was the place that most artists seem to founder: The Ask.  They just couldn't ask.  They couldn't say "this is an excellent package, we believe it meets your needs, it is worth x".  And what is more they couldn't price all the things they were offering the sponsor and then ADD yet more to the price of the sponsorship for the sheer naked opportunity to access their precious audience. Even though we have talked about it. They understand that a sponsorship agreement is a meeting of (different) equals but in their bones, they don't feel equal.

 What is it that makes artists, and theatre companies feel this way about their work?  That it isn't worth as much as other professions?

Belfast Baby Grand Studio - Intimate Theatre or What?

Forget in-yer-face theatre, last night's opening of our play Out of the Box at the Belfast Opera House's Baby Grand was just very-very-very-very intimate theatre.  Talk about knowing your audience. We could tell what they had for dinner.  We could see if any of it had dropped on their shirt fronts.  We could reach out and polish their spectacles.  Any closer to the audience and Nuala would have been able to give them beauty advice on the state of their pores.

The inside of the new Opera House is great, the staff are adorable, and having all that space after fighting one's way through the old lobby is wonderful.  I loved the combination of rich colours and the simple almost utilitarian materials.  The Studio walls are dark aubergine, for heaven's sake!  And the doors are Moroccan red.  It's gorgeous. As soon as we arrived in the Baby Grand I was dying to take my boots off so that I could run around in just my socks on the silky 4 inch wide planks of the studio floor, but there is no denying that your audience are CLOSE.  Wooo-ee.  It certainly puts the dilemma of sweet-eating into perspective.  Forget the noise of unwrapping wrappers, we could see the state of their teeth!

We're going to have to focus during this week at the Baby Grand.  For one thing, when the audience are that close, it feels harder for them to get permission to laugh when someone is talking right in front of them, about fairly intimate material.  Over-18 rated, in the big city, and in your lap.  I think there's a word for that kind of work?  But I digress!  Because this show walks a tightrope between humour and darkness, the laugh-per-evening count can't veer too far off target. But then we have to accept the newness of this experience. Nuala is having to sit back, relax, and find a way to make the audience come to her - like the little chipmunks of art that they are.  The mop and oven mitts are having to work on their motivation.  On the other hand, normally the struggle is to connect to people who are far away, in the darkness, so this is refreshingly different. And at the end of this week, I get my domestic accoutrements back for the first time in 14 months!