Week 3 Half way through

3 days at Laughton and at The Nightingale Theatre Brighton

With:

Me/Antonia Grove

Ben Duke (performer)
Charlie Morrissey (movement director)
Ben Webb (writer)

 

We asked the question again this week, to imagine we had seen this piece (Running on empty) finished and performed already. These are some random, imaginary things we envisaged having seen:

Birdsong, that fucking jumper, desperately trying to catch falling objects in a fishing net, speed, some access and communication problems, trying to run in some very large shoes, a blank page at the end, repeating history, desperately trying to catch falling water in a bowl, ‘you look like a prick’, chocolates, and a snake!

 

Um.

 

Highlights:

Playing ‘the titles game’ using episodes from Murder She Wrote (Ben Webb’s guilty pleasure!), where you find a movement thing/phrase/pattern/physical representation for each title.

Deadly Lady, It’s A Dog’s Life, Unfinished Business etc.

Me and Ben Duke then did them in any order, side by side, and layered dialogue  Ben Webb wrote over the top

- What do you think of me?
- What?
- What do you think?
- I - -
- Of me?
- I - -
- Do you think about me? Do you think about me often?
- I don't. I do not think about you.
- Ah.
- Except my body thinks about you. All the time.
- Ah.

Etc etc.....

The effect was akin to having a conversation with one person doing the dishes in the kitchen and the other person having a shave in the bathroom, but slightly more bizarre because of the nature of the movement.

 

We also dramatically altered the highly sexual nature of some duet stuff we’d been improvising around intimacy and moving to aggression by putting our hoodie’s on and somehow subverting the effect so we became more like twins in the womb. Brother, sister. Slightly ambiguous. A much needed shift for all of us! We are moving into more complex territory in the quest to find out who these people are.

 

We are half way through the research and things are at a pivotal point now. We are all asking why, how and what’s the point? It’s bloody great, i love this bit in a process- the not knowing bit, and the belief that we will know at some point and it will all be fine!

We'll be concentrating on story, narrative and overall context more now we have raw ingredients in our palette.

33

33, the age that Jesus Christ died. The number of miracles he was recorded to have performed in his lifetime. The age my mother was when she had me. The number of vertebrae in the human spine. The temperature water boils at.

According to Al-Ghazali the dwellers of heaven will exist eternally in a state of being age 33. And according to a recent survey on friends reunited, 33 is the age respondents claimed to reach a state of true happiness.

Eva Cassidy

Eva Peron
Eva Braun
Alexander the Great
All died at 33.

This was the age I began running.

 

We haven’t spoken much about running so far, although this was where this whole thing started for me.