In August I spoke to Lindsay Price from Theatrefolk, a Canadian-based website which is absolutely packed with resources for drama teachers. (If you’ve never had a look, go there now.)

Lindsay not only managed to ask some great questions that helped me transport myself to many years ago, when I used to teach physical theatre, but she’s also included a transcript of the interview in the blog post, which means, if you want to find out what we talked about right now but you’re not in a place where you can switch on your audio, you can have a read.

I loved that Lindsay picked up on my obsession with allowing people to take risks and make mistakes – her introduction is great, reminding us that we should celebrate failure during the devising process, hopefully it’s just taking us a little bit closer to what we want to create.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying we should celebrate people making mistakes because they’re careless, or because they just don’t care. I’m talking about congratulating those that take risks, those that try something new, those that say, “You know what, I’m going to try this and if I feel clumsy, or I feel stupid or if I just think, oops, that was the wrong choice,I’ll just stop, think about why it didn’t work and get on with the next option.”

Lindsay mentions that she uses the term “collective creation” which I find much more interesting than “Devising”. Can we call it this in the British curriculum, please?

We talk about how the experience of devising goes way beyond creating a piece of theatre. The pride that comes with completing a piece, the responsibility we need to take to create it. The importance of “gathering” before we start to create, to allow things outside of our minds to influence our work .

Of course, in talking to someone else, we often discover things about ourselves, so I even got some insight into myself.

I learnt what my practice was about when I started teaching others.

So, if you have half an hour during which you can listen to the podcast, do go over to the Theatrefolk website. And while you’re listening, have a look at the range of resources that Lindsay and friends have to offer.

And also, notice how she pronounces my name, she gets it absolutely right!

Many years ago (we’re talking pre-Facebook), I led the creation process of a piece called Goddess. It was a movement-based piece with very little text and so I felt like we needed to underscore most of the play. The only person I knew who could cope with the chaotic devising process and create something appropriate was my friend who goes by the name of HW Tamplin, who was based in Madrid. There was no Dropbox then, and I still had dial-up, so downloading the music was a long process. Still, we did it. HW also wrote some thoughts down about the process, back in 2006 and I have dug them out. Here they are. (You can find the link to the music at the end of this post.)

Composing the music for Goddess has been a great personal challenge: to convey the character of the myths’ protagonists, as I understood them, surrounded by the aura of an epoch, a different time, a world of mortals and Gods, of Goddesses; to find the balance between the physical work on stage and the sounds. Furthermore, with actors devising the play in another land – I was mortal, they were Gods.

Even before I read the first draft of the script I received an e-mail from Pilar saying “I hear lots of wind in this play”. Now that was a start of sorts, it led me to compose the track suitable-named Goddess1 without even knowing whether it would fit anywhere in the final play. This track is based on floaty synth-pad sounds, some string-based, some wind-based, with an improvised harmonic structure. The result was quite abstract and so I added a layer of a tuned percussive sound (similar to a vibraphone) that hinted towards a melody of some kind, but kept the track’s sort-of-abstract nature and feel. The track was then shelved for possible future use.

Having read the first draft of the play, I understood that each character in each myth would have to “carry” their own distinctive sound with them, their trademark, their instrument, their melody. For certain scenes, I could also hear choirs in my head, the voices of the Gods, Hera enraged, Hades ruling the Underworld, Narcissus’ fate. And now, the scenes, and their characters:

Eros, the God of love, playful, is seen practicing with his bow and arrow, decided, self-assured, a definite, clear-cut melody in mind for him. Psyche, a mortal, sacrificed on top of a mountain for her beauty, emotional, at a loss to understand her fate, adrift…wind, abstract…that was it! Finally Goddess1 had a meaning! – it would become the music for the “flying” scene: Eros, now vulnerable, in love with Psyche, flying her away to their home. And so, I had hints of a melody for Eros, and a definite melancholy sound for Psyche. Three further tracks were required for this scene, the introductory Eros track (the moment to show-off his “melody”), the mountain track, and the final track, where Eros discovers Psyche trying to see his face. First to come to reality was the mountain track. It had to be a piece in crescendo to go with the voices of Eros and Psyche mounting to a climax (Eros hitting himself with an arrow), and so it starts with Psyche’s flute-like sound in a slow melody that is more distinct than its abstract form in the flying scene, and then Eros’ melody appears backed with a solo cello, different woodwind, brass and string instruments appear in turn, growing to a sudden dramatic end, with the sound of an arrow, “wooshing” through the air, a thump and the crying voice of the Gods (or are they seagulls!!). The final track to this scene was to become an exercise in sound editing and production, with no further composition (as Pilar put it, Goddess Revamped), only changing some of the content in Goddess1 into a short angry-sounding piece to go along with Eros’ anger, disillusion, a God in pain due his love’s betrayal. The starting track, Eros’ bravado so clear-cut in my mind, his melody already in existence, and yet such a pain to come up with the accompaniment; it took what seemed like years to become what it eventually became. Having arrived at a dead-end with what I had come up with, it wasn’t until after I scrapped the work completely, that it rapidly flourished in the jazzy form it now has, cool, self-assured, arrows flying all over the place, the perfect start for the play, the fun to counterbalance the underlying drama in the play.

Echo and Narcissus, what an unlikely pair!…Of course, Echo cannot have a melody of her own, her own voice cruelly taken away by Hera in the first part of this scene, but she has the ability to repeat what has just been said, perfectly, beautifully…musically inspiring. But let’s start with Hera, Goddess of Goddesses, enraged at Echo’s treachery, persecutes her with great might, pushes, shoves her, steals her voice, point blank deprivation…the thud of tuned timpani, a majestic organ, chaotic percussion, a choir of voices, the voice of the Goddess, precede the upbeat minimalist piano phrase that is Echo fleeing, the squeals as her voice is torn away. Hera, triumphant, fades away leaving Echo in silence. Then, in true transnational collaboration, my own little piece of stage devising – Echo and Narcissus MUST dance a waltz, a sweet piece of music to show Echo’s ability at repetition – an unforeseen circumstance for the playwrights, who had to re-envisage this part of the play. Narcissus’ deep low-pitch voice, a playful bassoon, mimicked by Echo’s high-pitched voice, initially thought for a clarinet, finally a flute, waltz away backed by the ever-dear sound of plucked and bow strings, how beautiful, how dreamy, how untrue, it was all in Echo’s imagination!!!…Then the crude reality of which Echo is mere spectator: Narcissus, in a tour de force with his own existence mirrored in the pool, the sound of water now echoing his now eerie melody, beckoning, a hint of voices, the sounds of fate, ‘twas written in the stars, Echo cries, Narcissus gives in…

And now Persephone and the Underworld scene…tricky, especially as this part of the play was changed up to and including the performance; however, most of my initial musical ideas could be used as originally planned…Hades, lord of the Underworld, what a shady character, and Persephone, so easily drawn into his power play…a kidnap…the original idea with two high-pitched melodies, intertwined, fighting, screeching was scrapped because the results were too disturbing, and the strength of the physical piece it accompanied would have been lost, so we kept only the voice of Hades, dominating the scene with a single, slow, disturbing melody which worked perfectly…then, in comes death, destruction, Armageddon, the kidnap, distorted guitars, Hades’ melody double-speed, the luring voices, the lost souls, the Lord of the Underworld forces his love down with him, the sister’s nightmare, she falls, the lights red, flashing, the crash…they are in the Underworld, distortion, wind, water, dark sounds, confusion, an end or a beginning?…a brother, a sister, reunited, a waltz-like piece recapturing the melodies of all the characters in the previous dreams, Eros, Psyche, Narcissus and his Echo, washed away by synth-pads that lead to a happy ending…

The music for the curtain call at the end of the show was developed from the Eros piece at the beginning of the play using the same jazzy bass line at half the speed, and was originally envisaged as the music for the brother-sister scene. However, its circus-like nature, with its fast melody carried away by an accordion accompanied by variations on the melodies throughout the play, made it the perfect piece for a final piece, the curtain call, to remind us of Calderon de la Barca’s famous words, “For all life is a dream, and dreams themselves are only dreams.”

The music was composed using a stand-alone hardware sequencer, then the MIDI data was transferred to the computer in Gladiator Camp Studios, and the sounds arranged there for best results using sampled instruments and virtual synthesizers.

To listen to the music from Goddess, have a look at HW Tamplin’s Soundcloud profile https://soundcloud.com/hwtamplin/sets/goddess

I’m in the middle of reading Kate Atkinson’s gripping novel Life After Life. The  novel is fascinating: it’s the story of a girl who keeps dying.

The book begins with short chapters and these keep getting longer and longer as the story develops. Each time the character dies, the author rewinds and we see a different chain of events which lead to her not dying – or rather, just dying later.

I was thinking that this would be a really interesting book to use as a stimulus. The novel is set in the early 20th century and tells the story of Ursula, a middle class girl living in London who’s still in the city when the Germans attack. I’m not going to continue with the plot because as a plot, it’s not that interesting (yet). However, the way the story is told, going backwards and forwards in time and from the main character’s mind to reality plus the variety of well-drawn characters that populate the novel make it a must-read.

The structure would make it an interesting book to adapt or take inspiration from. Having to re-tell a story where the events change ever so slightly but where the setting and characters are the same, is a creative exercise.

You would need to decide how much to change the dialogue, how much to change the details of the stories and whether the characters changed or not, depending on the event you were telling. Which mannerisms will you highlight for each character? Which actions? Will you highlight the pivotting moment in each scene, the moment where the character’s fate changes? How will you depict a character’s death? In the book, the author repeats “darkness fell” or at least mentions darkness as a way of telling us the character has died. How would you do it? How could you repeat again and again a moment, while keeping it fresh?

Once again, I hope this short post gives you a bit of inspiration when devising a play. And do read Kate Atkinson’s book, it’s quite unique.