Autumn, it seems, is upon us. There's a nip in the air and the leaves are crisping up nicely. And to celebrate this change in the seasons, we are changing things up on this 'ere blog with a GUEST POST! Yes! I know, we're good to you....
Beware Dramaturg Armed with Sharpies
Starting any new relationship with another creative being can be tricky.
I married my wife after meeting her on an internet dating site, and despite sharing plenty of communication before we first met – emails, photos, music, hand-written ramblings – that first time we faced each other over a (pub) table was at once exciting, nerve-wracking, and full of the possibility of great success or stalling failure.
Beginning a dramaturgical relationship with a new playwright or company carries some of these familiar hallmarks – you sense it’ll kind of work, the noises made by both parties are all good, you’ve found out what you can about one another, you’re trusting in a shared commitment to some common goals, but when you meet in the flesh… how… exactly… does it all happen? Where are we going? Do we know? Does that matter? What’s the process meant to be? Should it be that – or something else?
Enter Sharpies (and exit metaphor: I didn’t use Sharpies to plan my relationship or my marriage, though there was a drunken diagram of potential in-laws on the back of a beermat).
As both dramaturg and playwright I have always tried to write everything down in the early stages – part of my own process of recording and later sifting out the important bits of conversations – but increasingly the Sharpie has become the tool with which I’ll be trying to shape and map out a process for my own or somebody else’s creativity.
The Sharpie is awesome. It lists, it reflects, it organises, it colour codes (if you have more than one) and with a big flipchart you can see thoughts and questions all in one place and track how it has journeyed, developed and how it now all inter-relates. Plus it has a nice thick line that feels all definite and productive.
Okay, so it’s not the Sharpie doing that – the right tools often need to be available to you to make a job feel easier. The benefit, I hope, for the company in question is that I can act as a filter and focusing tool for their creativity: that when the talking is done, there is a map left behind that points the way forward, shaping and guiding the next steps.
This collaboration with Theatre Rush and Beaford Arts is completely new to all three parties. We are crashing together three known processes – devising, producing rurally and dramaturgy – to make one that is unknown to us. We bring different things to the table, but by our second session have shown ourselves open to challenging one another, and all want our skills to work better together (whilst sounding less like a political campaign strapline).
What’s been refreshing with Theatre Rush and Beaford Arts is their willingness to be hands-off about what they’re bringing with them: respectively an existing show and process, and an idea of what a rural residency within communities might look like for a company. They offer them up for comment and scrutiny. Their benevolence has made my job much easier. The Sharpies have been whirring.
The next practical stage now approaches – two days of dramaturgy looking at the core stories that create The Lost Tales of Devon – and if the spirit of collaboration continues in this vein (open to challenge, fluid process, reflective and driven in equal measure) we’re in for a rich and rewarding time. The right tools are already available in the room: we just have to find the ones we need most.
