Summing up the first 6 months of 2012

Here’s what the 7 of us have each been doing the first 6 months of 2012:

Donna

When not wrangling the script for my adaptation of Monkey, Journey to the West for Kim Carpenter's Theatre of Image, I've been either working on a new play Jump For Jordan, or on my doctoral thesis. And you know how some projects end up being way more ambitious than you had anticipated? Well, it's been a time-gobbling brain-stretching summit-climb on all three. But I did what you do in such cases: dug deep, bought time, ate chocolate, and managed the crumpling effects of the sitting marathons with lots of yoga. Happily, the agony-ecstasy development threshold of pinning down the first draft is more or less complete in each case. We've assembled an outrageously talented cast to workshop Monkey in August, and I'm so looking forward to putting this mad epic tale on the floor. 

The strands of the thesis exist in broad form, giving me another year to pull it towards intelligibility and completion. And Jump For Jordan is ready to workshop, thanks to two astute dramaturgical butt kicks delivered by Lee Lewis and Cath McKinnon which rightly shifted it from domestic tragedy to black comedy. The importance of timely peer feedback, and not identifying too closely with your characters, is duly noted. Other than that? Being swept up by 7-ON's super power for self-organisation as we saw our book, No Nudity, Weapons or Naked Flames, through to publication in March. Liaising with the indefatigable Gus Supple on the development of Platonic, 7-ON's next production. Developing a mini musical for children with Sally Sussman called Caylee's Ukulele. And rejoining the board of Powerhouse Youth Theatre which this year turns 25 years young. 

Verity

After two productions opening within two weeks of each other at the tail end of 2010, 2011 was a year of lots of teaching and mentoring for me, which was both delightful and frustrating. Delightful for bringing me in contact with the people I got to meet and work with, inspiring for the loveliness of this upcoming generation of writers (I’m a big fan of Gen-Y, you smart, savvy, amusing lot!), and, since I was also working with a particularly engaging group of older writers, let’s hear it for the older chaps, too. Frustrating in that I’d rather be writing and earning my crust that way. I guess it has ever been thus, and perhaps, in this time of intense competition for such a narrow range of opportunities, inevitable. Public forays of my work were occasional—short pieces as parts of group shows. This is valuable experience both when those shows work, and when they don’t. Even the tough experiences will teach you something, and every time you engage you extend the number of peers whom you get to know. 

In an overview like this, I can’t not mention the publication (by Federation Press) of 7-ON’s book of monologues, No Nudity, Weapons or Naked Flames. I did the editing for this and it was a great experience to be working so closely with the texts of my fellow writers. We are all very proud of the subsequent book.

Nailing runner–up in the Blake Prize for 2011 provoked a furious burst of poetry writing. Lord knows where that is leading, but it’s intensely satisfying. I have a reading at Parnassus Den (to be directed by the wonderful Sarah Goodes) on 5 August this year of a play I’ve been working on for yonks, The Ice Season. After winning the Open Section of the Inscription Prize, this play has done the rounds a bit and I am having to exercise faith that it has the potential for a memorable theatre experience that I think it does. I hope a few of you out there may come along to the reading and give me some feedback on it. I have other pieces in development but mum’s the word there in case I hex them!

Hilary

One of the peculiarities of this profession is that you can spend many years toiling away with nothing to show for it, and then all at once it all bears fruit. In February, Black Swan/Perth International Arts Festival produced The White Divers of Broome, a play I’d been working on for four years. Even so, I must have written twelve more drafts over the rehearsal period (poor actors!). It was a big cast, very high production values, in the largest theatre I’ve ever played (the Heath Ledger), so it was a steep learning curve—thus the many rewrites. Kate Cherry’s production was beautiful, meeting such demands as underwater diving, Japanese lantern processions, and a ball.

In March I had two one-acts to write, commissioned by Kambala School. These were Ugly Beauty and Connectivity, produced in June. Congrats to a cast that is also juggling debating, netball, soccer, violin, homework …

Last month I was in London, where Victim, Sidekick, Boyfriend, Me played at the National’s Cottesloe Theatre. It was commissioned as part of their Connections Programme, along with nine other plays (see my earlier post). Angela’s Kitchen, Paul Capsis’ one-man play co-created with Julian Meyrick and myself as associate writer, has just been published and is on the road for a six-month national tour.

And presently, The Splinter is in rehearsals at the Sydney Theatre Company, opening on August 15. I describe it as a Gothic horror puppet show, though that really doesn’t do it justice …

Noëlle

When I look back at the first 6 months of 2012 I’m surprised to discover how much time I spent in libraries and archives (bricks and mortar as well as digital). My partner was a Visiting Fellow at Yale, and I piggy-baked on her trip to spend March and April in the US and England. My brother lives in New Jersey, so I met my lovely niece and nephew for the first time (in person), and visited New York, also for the fist time (loved it). In Hew Haven I took advantage of Yale’s fabulous Sterling Library to research nineteenth century travel narratives of South America for a non-fiction piece Darwin’s Thistles—a Cautionary Tale (published in Mapping South, out soon). I also fretted about the huge disparity between the Haves and Have-nots in America. I just don’t understand why ‘blue-collar’ and low-paid workers vote against affordable health care and taxing billionaires. But that’s another story—maybe even a play?

My poem Once Upon a Tiger won a poetry competition in the UK. Seeking Mr Freud, a one-act black comedy, was broadcast on 89.7 Eastside FM Radio. I did a week-long environmental history workshop at the ANU; kept working on The Book of Thistles; kept writing and developing performance essays. Good With Maps had a Parnassus Den reading directed by Kate Gaul and performed by Heather Mitchell. (Not all my performance essays lend themselves to this kind of double life with an actor, but GWM really does.) I just presented the latest performance essay, Loose Gravel—a poetics in Sydney, and will be doing it in Brisbane late August. Am going to be spending a bit of time in Queensland over the coming year or 2, thanks to an Arts Queensland/University of Queensland Creative Fellowship.

Ned

2012 has been a pretty crazy year, and that’s saying something given the past few years. It began with the publishing of my book, Playground Duty. I spent 2011 writing it. Full time. For the first time for fifteen years I wasn’t trying to juggle writing (and acting) with a full time teaching job. It was bliss. So, in early 2012, I was sitting at home wrestling with a new play when there was a knock at the door. A kindly face from Australia Post was standing there with a satchel. I knew what was inside. I didn’t know what to do. I took it inside and put it on the table and looked at it.

“What will I do now?” I asked myself.

“Better open it”, came the reply.

So I did. And there it was. My brand spanking new book. I took it in my hands and it felt … well, good. The house was empty. I didn’t feel like talking to myself anymore so I just stared at it and wondered what to do next. It was a very weird feeling for someone who writes plays. I was used to seeing my work come alive in the company of others. It was the beginning of a very different type of journey. And it’s still ebbing and flowing.

The play I was wrestling with is now almost fully formed, except for that most elusive of things, an ending. I am loving being able to give it my full attention rather than making it fit in where I could grab a spare minute. I’ve also finished an adaptation of Women of Troy for ABC Radio National. It’s being recorded in a few weeks. And the icing on the cake has been the publication of 7-ON’s No Nudity, Weapons or Naked Flames. I wonder what the rest of the year will bring?

Cath

The last 6 months have flown fast and it’s a matter of keeping up now. I’m off away for a long weekend to live, breathe and intricately plot my new piece for ABC Radio. After an excellent reading with a large (luxury!), insightful cast and director it became clear that the script either has to go longer to 90 mins or needs to be cut significantly. I know where it’s headed and the ideas are flowing and hope I can bring it together. It’s exciting but there is very little time to get it up to speed so the need for a total retreat is urgent.

I’m also very much looking forward to a reading of my new play gifted early next month. Augusta Supple read an earlier draft and kindly offered to organise a closed reading at the Arts Platform. Very grateful as I think I’ve made it clear in my earlier blog how much I value the process. Producers—wake the fuck up! There’s a virtuoso role for a brilliant actress in her fifties! (That’s my new self-promotion voice talking—Is it working?) Oh and then just the other day another Platonic play-let fell out of my head and onto the page and into the mix for the production at the end of the year.

But amongst all this I am creating paintings, sculptures and mixed media works for an exhibition called Resolution: Sublimate. For me all the art forms cross-sect, fertilize and, and, I thought I’m not going to follow that analogy but let’s face it … it could either turn into a tree or some monster from the black lagoon—both reasonable responses to this wild inexplicable experience of consciousness.

Vanessa

January—Eat chocolate. Think about stuff.

February—I took my play ‘Every Second’ to the PlayWriting Australia National New Play Festival in Melbourne. Two weeks of rewriting, working alongside actors, director and dramaturge to refine the work and eventually stage it as a moved reading for … well other playwrights, directors, actors and dramaturges plus theatre practitioners from around the world. 

March—rewrite. Eat chocolate.

April—Eat Chocolate. Write new stuff. Think. Rewrite.

May—My play The Magic Hour (directed by Chris Bendall) premiered at Fremantle’s Deckchair Theatre—a beautiful production starring Ursula Yovich, a caravan and a glow in the dark beanstalk. I was able to spend time in March working with Chris and Ursula on the script and then have that final time of rehearsal to hone the piece still more and the whole experience was great.

June—Shannon Murphy’s hilarious production (at the Griffin theatre) of Porn.Cake. I remember sitting on a couch in rehearsals with producer Michael Sieders and we both gasped at the same moment, laughed, and covered our faces at the same moment. This told me that we were on the same wavelength. (Porn.Cake has been recently nominated for a 2012 AWGIE.)

July—short play I wrote, about love and sacrifice and gnomes: Small Hard Things went on at Tamarama Rock Surfer’s Bondi Feast directed by Scarlet McGlynn.

This year I am PWA Writer in Residence with Griffin Theatre in Sydney. I have been working with three emerging playwrights (but actually they are all quite accomplished and established in their own ways), attending Griffin meetings and learning about the nuts and bolts of this much loved theatre. As well, we worked (and wrote) with the Griffin Studio gang to make a one night only site-specific work in Kings Cross entitled Lovely/Ugly.

Publishing wise there has been the thrill of our 7-ON monologues produced in No Nudity, Weapons Or Naked Flames and another monologue of mine First Light was published as part of the atyp anthology The Voices Project (Currency). Plus assorted teaching gigs with writing students at NIDA, atyp, NSW State Drama Camp and Newcastle Uni. So, busy first half of year … big move to Newcastle with partner and child, acquisition of vegie garden (small) and dog (largish). Life balance juggling agogo. And of course … more writing and rewriting, more dreams, more discussions, more plans for more projects and lots, lots more chocolate.

Are You Sitting Comfortably? Well, Don't.

HILARY SAYS: 

I decided I would like to provoke a comment or two this week, so that I’d better write something controversial, such as my belief that within a hundred years the notion of eating animals will be repulsive, akin to eating human beings.

This led me down a path of exhorting you readers to turn off your heater, put on another jumper, and sacrifice a degree of comfort in order to save our planet. I ran this nothing-to-do-with-playwriting draft by my fellow 7s, and what arose were two interesting strands of discussion. Firstly, that of the Individual Voice vs the Collective Voice, and this isn’t Hilary’s Blog after all, but 7-On’s (not all of them share, necessarily, my feeling that warmth is overrated).

The other strand, and the one I’ll pursue, is the theme of being uncomfortable as it pertains to writing for the theatre. The other 7s responded severally, with their notions of what this meant. To one person, it’s the feeling that “rehearsals are like walking on bits of broken glass with a smile frozen on your face, yet it’s the moment we live for... Maybe playwrights are the ‘unevolved’ of the human race: we don’t actually want to get too comfortable.” To another, it is “the fear some companies have about programming work that makes an audience 'uncomfortable' – unfortunately they use that very word, bland as it is. I find difficult work that upsets me actually strangely comforting in that it reminds me that I'm not alone in the world. I'm not talking about easy shock tactics but work that seeks to understand, even if it doesn't fully succeed.” And a third: “The work that makes me uncomfortable is safe and boring and reminds me of what I thought was theatre when I was a kid. Often the distressing bit is that it’s bloody predictable and cliché-ridden and doesn't challenge anyone.” This 7 went on to give the example of politically correct theatre, which no one dares question or criticise.

It’s interesting to see, at the various points along the way, the role discomfort plays in creating a piece of theatre. There’s the initial spark, the question that comes into your head that you can find no easy answer to. The persistent thought, irritating as a grain of sand in an oyster, that refuses to go away but demands investigation. Or the arresting image you come across, or the confronting phrase, or the person you meet who gets under your skin, and won’t be dismissed. As far as I know, no writer is inspired by a blissful moment, because this is complete in itself: it doesn’t require understanding. It’s the incomplete, the niggling, the confusing that provides fodder for a writer.

And then there’s the research. Making yourself go and talk to strangers, or read stacks of disturbing material. And the writing itself, which requires you to enter the world of the play, the mind and body of your characters. This kind of work invades your dreams. How many of us have sworn that “after this, I’m going to write a comedy”?

Not to mention the kind of self-criticism that dogs the working playwright. “Is that actually truthful?” “I’m ripping off the film I saw last night.” “What makes me think anyone’s going to care about this?” You’re in a constant tussle with your superego, just trying to get words down on paper.

I was talking to a friend last week about my fear of being judged. She looked at me amazed and said, “Then why on earth are you a playwright?” Good question – and I suppose the answer is that the rewards outweigh the fear. The pleasure of that irritating spark; the excitement of seeing something unspooling from your fingers on the keyboard; the joy of solving a problem; the satisfaction of building a beautiful structure; the gratitude towards being taken seriously by a bunch of artists on the rehearsal room floor. And beyond the rewards there’s the drive to do it, the utter discomfort, physical and mental, that I feel when I’m not engaged in making something.

Without discomfort, we wouldn’t do it. Discomfort is the writer’s friend. So if you’re having trouble getting any work done, turn off the heater and see if it helps.

Hilary Bell's play 'The Splinter', at the Sydney Theatre Company, previews from August 10.

The 7-On Push for Female Playwrights post by Catherine Zimdahl

There is so much to be done when one is a working artist. Firstly the need to carve out the solitude to research and create.  I don’t get much time so every moment counts. Happily I have a number of projects I am in the midst of creating both as a playwright and visual artist and I can go from one to the other when I need my unconscious to do some problem solving. Tomorrow I’m in at the ABC with a new 50-minute radio-play (Producer: Anna Messariti) it’s a reading to get it up to speed for production. I enjoy this process, because the work starts to come to life and questions are raised and creative solutions are often found. And with this particular progeny it will be adapted both as a stage play and film script but sadly will not be turned into the greatest art form of them all – a tweet!

There is also one of the more difficult aspects to be done - the act of self-promotion, something I’m trying to be more focussed about. My own website is coming, my agent RGM and Associates are updating their website with my new plays and there is also the much beloved Australian Script Centre which is constantly finding new pathways for Australian plays.

And finally there is the political world of the arts that needs to be attended to even if you are not much of political animal yourself. Last year was a big year for addressing the woeful situation of Women Playwrights in this country. Women across the country spoke out furiously, persuasively and continue now to speak out (see Ned’s great blog). In early 2011 Verity Laughton and myself representing 7-ON met with Lyn Wallis of the Theatre Board of the Australia Council. Verity asked for hard stats, a serious research paper and a Town Hall type meeting just as the women directors had had the previous year. Lyn Wallis took it to the Major Performing Arts Board and attracted the funding for all of these things. The town hall meeting became a Roundtable organised with much goodwill from so many people and organisations. The day itself was complex and we all hankered for immediate results however we did get to hear some difficult but honest responses from Artistic Directors, Associates and Literary Managers to the injustice of our situation. Recently came the excellent and thoroughly damning research paper undertaken by Elaine Lally and Sarah Miller for the Australia Council that was part of this process. It is out now and directives to the Companies are underway, the results of which won’t be known until late 2013. So we shall wait and see if it is a quick fix or a sea change.

On Tuesday night I had the honour of hosting an event co-produced by the Australian Writers Guild and the Victorian Writers Centre. It was titled "Sticky Floors and Glass Ceilings" and was billed as a panel discussion with four female playwrights. The participants were Patricia Cornelius, Hannie Rayson, Lally Katz and Michele Lee. I was slightly apprehensive about this as I wondered what it said that a man was hosting such a discussion. Was this another glass ceiling not cracked or a sticky floor?Why didn't the organisers get a woman to host the panel? Fortunately none of the panellists seemed worried about this ( I was going to say "batted an eyelid" but...) and nor did the audience. Maybe being the only male member of 7ON has given me some cross gender credibility?
My other major concern was whether we would draw a crowd but this was also unfounded as we drew a full house to the Wheeler Centre. Thankfully people are interested in playwrighting and playwrights.
Apart from my hopelessly confusing "Next Wave" with "New Wave"(nerves/age?) and mis-reading the title of one of Michele's plays (inexcusable), it all seemed to go very well.
The discussion focussed on a range of issues. We began with a bit of an overview of the history of women playwrights in this country and the interesting observation that they were flourishing in the middle of the twentieth century. One might ask what has happened in the early part of C21st?
While it became clear that there was a certain level of frustration amongst some of the panel at the state of play in Australian theatre, the over-riding impression was that writing plays has always been an occupation that ebbed and flowed. For whatever reason, it was clear that everyone on the panel had experienced peaks and troughs in terms of their playwrighting careers. It was also agreed that sometimes playwrights are at the whim of forces beyond their control. Subjective forces that might determine whether a play sees the light of day or remains locked away in a computer.
This is not to suggest that there wasn't a feeling that gender issues were at play in Australian theatre. More that this panel discussion focussed on each writers personal journey as playwrights and their craft.
All four panelists began their writing careers when they were students. It points to the importance of an education system that encourages the arts. They each expressed a passion for writing plays with the caveat that at times it can be incredibly frustrating. The desire to see work spring to life off the page is a universal one amongst playwrights. So is the collaborative nature of the art form.
Interestingly being a woman didn't seem to influence either how any of the panelists wrote or what they wrote about. Nor did it affect the types of characters they created. It's not as if being a female playwright means you are going write lots of roles for women and none for men. Of more concern was cross cultural casting and the frustrations associated with writing characters from non English speaking backgrounds and then being told they were impossible to cast.
Even though each panelist brought a distinctive and particular perspective to the discussion of their craft there was a unity of purpose expressed that provided inspiration for the appreciative audience.
The Australian Writers Guild recorded the discussion and it is available on their website.
                                                                                                      Ned Manning