The Decision

'Then playwriting itself became a nettle, became several in fact; the shallowness, the wasted time, the messiness of other minds, the hopelessness of pretending - in the garden of the arts, it was a weed and had to die.' - Ian McEwan, Atonement

There is an inevitability that this blog will unwrite itself as the project develops and my original intention rights itself. This was the third workshop with students from Nottingham Trent University. The second workshop with a full compliment of performers. I created a text to the compositional structure - featuring fragments of the material I have already listed here. Political. Personal. Wedding protocol. We read it through and enacted certain scenes. Do Re Mi. My Favourite Things. The problem is - I can't find the tone of voice I'm looking for and my focus is becoming more involved in researching and writing for the amateur dramatic Act. The initial binary opposite (AM Dram / MA Dram) I was investigating is no longer the aim - populism and elitism as an area of investigation is too slippery to pinpoint - especially in a year. The students I am working with though able and enthusiastic are not the polar opposite of the cast of the Church on Rise Park Drama Group. Two of them are Fine Art Students with no professional experience of performance. In this sense - they are as much amateur as the amateur group. Perhaps I needed to work with professional experimental theatre practitioners. So what is left of Act One. The fact that it can be more abstract, more thought provoking, more able to shock. This is not necessarily the right justification for creating a new piece of work. I have set out to realise two performances and a film of these performances. I have foreseen the product, the 'end point', the 'exit velocity' before entering the process. I must now reevaluate where I am going and what I need to do to get there. I experienced the academic circuit whilst touring with MBD and have no need or desire to explore that performance context now. The dualities between the two arenas that I intended to explore are present in just the one act. Does the fact that members of the drama group take time off work during a show make it their job? Are they both professional and amateur? Can the piece they perform not have elements of experimental theatre? I have become too immersed in their world to create another world whose only aim is to be different. There is a rich dynamic in their words - from interviews, from rehearsals - that will inform the process. I will focus solely on creating a new piece of work for the Church on Rise Park. The edge of the map is the blueprint.