Trustees Wanted

Yellow Earth Theatre (YET) are looking for Trustees for their board. As are Company Three and Kali.

It's a wonderful opportunity to help a small charitable arts company. You will pick up non-executive boards skills as well as expertise in working on strategic matters and under a charitable framework.

Most suited for those with a London base or regularly access to London. Woman, BME and other diversity actively encouraged to apply. YET is a theatre company with an East Asian focus.

If interested, best next step is to have an informal chat with Artistic Director Kumiko Mendl  (Kumiko at yellowearth.org)  and, or, the Chair Wai Yun Moon (or even me!)

YET have recently been given core funding (National Portfolio Organisation funding, NPO) from the Arts Council of England (ACE). It's a great moment to help YET scale and leverage to the next level. If that doesn't too much like business consultant speak gone through a mangle (am not feeling sharp enough to express it better).

Please share for those who might be interested. Further information can be found here.

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Company Three creates a space in which young people can talk to adults, and in which adults will really listen. Originally formed as Islington Community Theatre in 2008, we are a company of 75 young people aged 11-19.  We make theatre through long-term, intensive collaboration between our members and professional theatre-makers.  They are also looking for trustees (deadline 18 Sep)

dirty butterfly. debbie tucker green.

dirty butterfly by debbie tucker green  

Part of an ongoing series examining the beginnings of plays.

Modern playscripts typically start fairly differently from other writing art forms.

Today, the play has to grab a reader (to bother reading on, probably a director or aspiring director before you find an artistic director or producer) but also an audience.  A bad start is hard to recover from.

While a good start is important in the poem, pop song, journal article, novel etc. I think a play has a unique challenge matched only by its sibling the film script.

Review (Lyn Gardner, Guardian) of dirty butterfly.  The wiki on debbie tucker green.   

You know the playwright is making a confident statement straight up by her use of lower case, where one might expect upper case letters. There's an immediate sense of rhythm and an ear for language, out of the ordinary.

From the review: " Debbie Tucker Green's debut play will not suit everybody, especially when the playwright has a distinct way of saying things. In particular this play will not suit those who are weary of tales of urban fragmentation, think that dramas using monologue and giving voice to the internal should be restricted to radio, and get irritated when characters stand around discussing their relationship rather than dialling 999 for the ambulance that is so clearly and urgently required.

For the rest of us, this play, set in an all-too-familiar world, in which lives interlock but never connect, will do just fine. I cannot say that I enjoyed it very much, but I liked it a great deal. And now I cannot get it out of my head."

Brexit. Pina Bausch. Cafe Müller.

Brexit struggles reminded me of Pina Bausch's Cafe Müller. I saw Cafe Müller when her company came to London in 2008. It echoes in my memory today.

Three men and three women. Two men in suits. Third wears a loose white shirt tucked into trousers and is barefoot. Two of the women, (one Bausch herself, while alive and dancing) wear white dresses, barefeet; the third wears a dress, overcoat, and heels. 

At various moments, one or more dance with eyes closed, rushing across the stage strewn with chairs while the other dancers rush about them moving furniture out of the way. The dancers rely on each other to clear their paths as they dance with their eyes shut.

The movement is often frantic and repetitive, halting with a feeling of exhaustion. There are themes of manipulation and dependence throughout the dance, which are realized through intense repetition as well as trust between dancers that they will keep each other safe on stage in varying states of awareness.

“The Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch...has stood for wildness, wisdom, creative exploration and dedication combined with passion. Never tired of questioning, and continually demanding more freedom, I associate its tradition with unwavering curiosity and courage.”

— Adolphe Binder, Intendant and Artistic Director

Link to full piece on youtube here.  Link to her Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch

Pina Bausch, in my mind, is with Caryl Churchill as one of our greatest theatre creators. Perhaps, Bausch is more internationally known.  She could be credited of starting out a whole movement of "Dance-Theatre" (at least in parallel with the dance language coming from the US via Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham) and certainly, I do not think her work was well understood at its beginning.

Still, her work is awkward and difficult to convey with words.  I wrote in 2008: "  the story seems to be on the edge of your mind. You can’t complete the narrative in any straightforward way, some of the dance, physicality and atmosphere has to complete it for you. And so, the pieces becomes highly personal as the work only makes sense in your head...but yet somehow quite deep and universal as everyone grasps the themes: alienation, love, patterns of history, stress, confinement, rushing through life half-blind, hoping trusting that some persons you can't see will make your journey OK..." and that feels still somewhat glancing at it.

"If you have been exhilarated, stirred and moved by what her dancers do, then you too are an expert. You get it. And it's this ability to speak directly to an audience, to pierce right through whatever critical apparatus they arm themselves with, that is at the heart of her unique genius. She offers big, complicated truths without footnotes; it's high art without homework. And she has changed for ever my sense of what can be achieved inside a theatre. " wrote Helen Hawkins, Culture Editor, Sunday Times in 2008 and perhaps she has it right.