All thanks to Bob Blunden, Hannah Rothman, Richard Shannon, Jack Gamble at the Arcola for helping to make this trailer for Il Letto. Let's see how it goes down the Arcola next Monday and Tuesday.
All thanks to Bob Blunden, Hannah Rothman, Richard Shannon, Jack Gamble at the Arcola for helping to make this trailer for Il Letto. Let's see how it goes down the Arcola next Monday and Tuesday.
Through I series of picture I will show you how this week unfolded.
First there was the procrastination.
Then there was more procrastination.
Then I realised that I really did have to get down to work and really prepare for the TEDx talk I had been invited to give at Central St Martins.
The subject of the Talk was Momentum. I called the talk, 6cm of Separation. Here is small extract...
"Do you know how long information remains alive within your social media timeline? Have a guess? It is about 18 minutes. If Facebook deem your post the kind of thing that people like sharing, then it will try and stretch that experience and share that information to more people. You see Facebook wants Facebook to be the most interesting experience possible, so people keep coming back. A post will generally go to around 4-5% of your followers. On Twitter it is much more like a waterfall. I believe that the momentum of our digital lives is exposing divides in our society. One of those divides is between those millions who feel comfortable with sharing their lives online and the millions who wonder why on earth anyone would care? There are people who experience connection as poverty and privacy as wealth. From Wikileaks, to Pornography to Over-sharing on social media. There is a blending of public and private. There is a contraction of private space. A social Gravity. The world is getting smaller. You hear that all the time, but this time we feel it. I felt that we had moved from 6 degrees of separation, where we realise that we are all interconnected, to an era of 6cms of separation where we realise we have all moved into the same flat. 6cms is the size of our screens, it is the actual distance between a friends’ feed on the left, and the trending news feed on the right.
The Talk was also about the Rathband Play, and how it was possible to create an entire play from the social media vapour trail we all leave.
Eventually all nerves turned to excitement and I only fluffed up one bit. And apparently they will cut that out! Yay! Here's a thing about the TedX talks. You have to learn them off by heart! That's why they are so good!
Anyway, I thought my bit was a tad heavy for a TED talk, but I hope it will find it's tribe and nuzzle next Amanda Palmer's amazing TED talk here. Interestingly it is about Crowdfunding, and the best example of building social capital I have come accross.
This week, the final audio files will be in, and next week I will be finishing off the storytelling hub and how it gets on to Itunes. Then it will to get your rewards out. I can't wait.
Hope you all have a good week.
Speak Soon.
We have moved from the age of six degrees of separation to the age of six inches of separation. The distance between our Facebook trending feed and your Facebook private message feed has contracted. The collapse in public and private is also collapse of internet real estate. We used to roam far and wide, and now it we stay in our internet bedroom. Why leave when we can conjure the whole world to a screen in front of us.
The same friend that shares Syrian gas attacks in one fragment shows children's birthday parties in the next. The collapse of news and friendship. It is truly horrible. Like teenagers, who lack empathy because their brains are pruning connections made in childhood, so we prune our friends, the friends that we were so happy to make in the naughties. Now they must go because these days a problem shared is a problem multiplied. This is Social Gravity. Social Media is barely a teenager in age. Maybe we will may grow up with our media. Maybe not. Either way, the collapse in public and private creates mini black holes of narcissism online.
So, Gerald Lidstone at Goldsmiths was instrumental in helping me secure some funds that enabled the writing I did over the summer to happen. It also means that now and again, he will ask me a favour and I will do it. With pleasure. He asked me to help PAN Intercultural Arts. They are a charity of 30 years experience of working with refugees, trafficked people, kids to near to guns. They are having an event at King's Place on 30th of November - a fund raiser with Barry Cryer and Colin Sell. You can book tickets here: https://goo.gl/23D3vb
Last Saturday, I had the joy, nay honour of going to Barry's House in Hatch End. As we were filming a video, we went mob handed but Barry welcomed us all, and then in the next 40 minutes we came up with this.
Barry is 81. His trousers are up to his waist. He is smart, smokes fags, has a great wife. Has lots of light coming through his living room windows, but above all he is funny. He has a certainty about him. A command of every word that he says. It was inspirational.
The amazing Wooden Overcoats team, of which I was a small part, has been nominated for a Prix Europa, which is a pretty much the Oscars for Audio. I have never been nominated for any prize. It is pleasing!
So, £648.00 - that's what it costs to hire a 60 seat theatre in London from 10am - 10am. That is what it costs to take some control back over your career. Yes. That's what I am trying to do. My experience of sending out work is that it is oh so slow! And you can only build so many meaningful relationships. All writers feel like the runt of the litter, trying to suckle at the theatrical teat!
I am 43. And I sometimes wonder what a new-writing theatre sees when it sees me. Well I think that they see someone who doesn't need that much help. Someone who could very likely work out how to push their career forward on their own. And you know what. They are right. I can't do this every week, but I can do it myself this time.
I am going to be putting on two shows in the same day. Rathband at 3pm and FVZii in the evening. Here are the flyers. Get in contact if you want to come along.
We finally managed to get into the studio and record the music to the song we put together for the Russian Tea Salon at the NPG. That sounds as if I do this kind of thing on a daily basis but I don't. I have never been into the studio, I have never recorded music that has had anything to do with me!
Lewis Murphy as composer, Ricardo Panela as Baritone, Noah Mosley on Piano. Each of them virtuoso in their own way. That is what I have noticed when it comes to Opera. The level of musical detail is of a level that I simply can't hear. Each session is like a masterclass. It isn't the same in the pop/musical world. There it is all melodies and catchyness. Here is absolutely getting the note and word into pleasing combinations. Mistakes are simply not tolerated. Not in a neggy way, but in a way that slowly over a few hours leads to something quite beautiful.
So in as much as I can invite you to the event at the NPG, I can bring you the Soundcloud. Look at the portrait of Mussorgsky. Imaginge him coming back to life for a week. Enjoy the music.
Click on the photo below to hear it.
Today, I'd like to write about what happens when your script gets apprehended by a completely new culture.
First of all, here is a pitcure of White with the script that she translated. That was my first shock today, seeing my ideas in a completely incomprehensible characters. It is like the English words are submerged beneath the tide of a completely new culture. Your ideas are still there, but they are wearing different clothes. White reckons that she only changed around 3% of the script. This is the closest the scripts will remain. After the next draft we have made a decision, that we will let the scripts drift apart.
The entire Korean cast were sat round a table by 10.30am. Each of us introduced ourselves and after each intro, a round of applause. We have two interpreters working with us. White and Joseph. They are great. But It is just classic, when they are translating back to you. And you know the Koreans have said something long and important. and it gets truncated by the interpreters into about three words. I think if we paid them more, we might get a bit more.
From a comedy and dramaturgical point of view, I wanted to know what transfered and what didn't. But as the reading began more basic questions surface. What are they thinking about this? Is this just nonsense? Do they understand anything? For the first 15 minutes it felt cold, but then it warmed up. A sense of recognition took over. Seoul dominates South Korea like London Dominates the UK. S.Korea has politicians just like Boris Johnson, and so they channel their own politicians at that moment, and we see the similarity.
When I first began putting the characters together, I was convinced that I needed to base them on Comedia D'ell Arte architypes. Characters who were recogniseable to any city. So Schatzie is the biggest idiot Gianni, followed by Leo is Arlechino etc. etc. For me London itself has always been 'The Magnifico'. A character so powerful it can never die. It it does it gets replaced immeditately.
One of the big issues is of Koreans playing all the European nationalities. Having based the characters on Commedia then it could easily be Mongolians, and Chinese, and Phillipinos or maybe even Japanese. All of these nationalities live in London and so Ji Eun could move in with them and the whole London part of the scipt remain.
Sometimes a moustache will get you somewhere. About 3 years ago, I was asked because of my moustache if I wanted to audition for a new film, set in 19th century Paris. It was about two rival watchmakers, whose magical mechanisms become entwined when their children fall in love. It was a great script, but it missed some twists and turns and links and a bit of logic. I failed the audition, but without being asked I gave them a dramaturgical report, and now guess what. I have a film credit. Flippers. I am a script consultant.
DEEELIIIIGHT!
GROOVE IS IN THE HEART!
HERE IS THE TRAILER.
The music arrived today for the National Portrait Gallery Operetta on the 24th of June. It was truly a moment for me. I won't post it here until after the show, but to me it was entirely beautiful. Lewis Murphy is indeed a prodigious composing talent. He has bags of common sense. The cuts to the words he suggested each time were right every time.
Here is the latest version of the libretto. We are thiking of calling it 'The Piano has been Thinking' in honour of booze and piano players. Like the one here.
THE PIANO HAS BEEN THINKING
We all die in flight,
Flap-fall silent as bats,
Slap into the great swelling hill
Of moonlit sea.
Called back to the great
Not to be.
Mussorgsky.
I heard the name,
A woman was calling
And like a bullet leaving a brain,
Sucked back into the barrel of a gun,
Into a game of roulette not yet begun,
I jolted back to life.
I remembered my name,
Mussorgsky.
I sat up in fury,
Mussorgsky.
Back again amongst the lumpen multitude
Mussorgsky.
A black-haired woman
held out a cup of coffee,
As if death were a hangover
From which you sober up.
Life is the hangover,
But I gladly took the cup.
Oh how I drank
She took my cold grey-skin hands
Put them gently on the keys.
I looked up in fear
The last time I was here
I could not play a single note
Remember anything I ever wrote.
For that is the fate of the composer who drinks:
A piano that forever shrinks.
Emotions that no longer exist,
Hands turned into fists.
The woman placed her lips to my ear,
Breathed courage to my rage and fear.
Lifted me up, help me to see
I used to be me, magnificent.
I am Mussorgsky.
All of us die flying,
Fall silent into the sea.
So, now is time to leave you
Called back to the great
Not to be.
So Cassie and Corey is very near to going in front of Radio 4 Commissioners. I have been there before!
However this time, I am more hopeful. It is in house. They won't put up ideas that they don't have at least a little bit of confidence in. They asked me to write some background to the project. A little provenance.
'Cassie and Corey' was developed between Jan-April 2016 as part of a quartet of plays by emerging writers at Theatre 503 in South London. The brief was simple. Each writer had 30 minutes to explore the borough and to find out what was going on NOW. What were the questions running through Wandsworth's mind in 2016? One writer was assigned to the local police service, one to the local disability centre, another to a centre fighting poverty and helping immigrants. These explorations came back together in the form of a two-hour show that was aimed at the giving stories back to the community.
Cassie and Corey came from a series of conversations held with Deborah Bowman the Head of Ethics at St Georges' Hospital (She has been involved with numerous Radio 4 projects). We tried to triangulate the things that kept her awake at night and combine those with the things that kept me awake at night. She was interested in the ethical limits of care, and the moral judgements people make when they feel that someone is 'undeserving' of treatment. I was interested medicine around identity, so eating disorders and also plastic surgery. It soon transpired that St Georges is one of the only places in the world where they perform bariatric surgery on minors. In short, gastric bands for kids. This led to interviews with the doctors in charge of the eating disorder clinics at St Georges. The story you have read comes from real life examples of the struggles young people have with food. We fixed the story an obese boy preparing for surgery, who is too scared to go through with his operation.
Food is the major theme of the play, a subject so close to us yet so difficult to see clearly because of that, like a book held too close to our eyes. We all have a relationship with food it is a hidden frontline between ourselves and society. It is a subject we have no choice but to engage with. It really is about NOW. 1/3 of all UK citizens people are now obese. Yet we still mock people who are fat.
The story is a picaresque one, where slightly low characters go on a journey and have a series of adventures; where a satiric eye is placed back onto our society. It uses comedy as a tool to dissect a difficult subject because sometimes comedy has a sharper scalpel than anything else. This is especially true if the characters are based in truth. Jason Ekotie Eboh, the most obviously comic character, was based on conversations held with Wandsworth food bank. Places of real shame for the people who go; places where it has not been unknown for the Daily Mail to send reporters to harangue people leaving for lighting up a cigarettes on their way home with their shopping.
So whilst Cassie and Corey is strongly about society's relationship with its nourishments, it is told through experiences of real people. My own permission for telling the story comes from my own relationship with food, which sometimes has been a struggle. The play is based on sound medical facts and indeed, the play went down so well it was mooted as a potential teaching tool at St George's. It certainly formed part of the ongoing CPD of the chief consultant of bariatric surgery, Simon Chapman - the emminent Doctor S referred to by both Cassie and Corey.
I don't have much more to say, than I miss last month, and I miss this bunch. I haven't told them that I am in talks with a producer at Radio 4, to have it as an afternoon play. I would like them so much to take part, but who knows who will make those decisions. We worked so hard on casting, and these guys did a week's work for £100.00. Fingers crossed. #iloveactors
So, I spent my evenings in South Africa, really writing about a Russian composer brought back to life. I would sit in a sports bar, drinking beer and eating burgers. Below are the lyrics that I have written and sent to Lewis Murphy the composer. He is composer in residence at Glyndbourne, and I feel privileged to work with him. We saw eye to eye immediately, and he is Scottish, down to earth and someone who I would gladly collaborative with again if given the chance.
I used to write a lot of poetry, I stopped. I don't know why. I think the world changed. It seems like the world isn't interested in poetry anymore. I think poetry is really the language of our dreams and if we don't write poems, experience them, then how can we bring our dreams to life?
The lyrics I wrote are about sudden death, and sudden being brought back to life. They are about Musorgsky, alive again realising that he has been brought back to life for a purpose, to be asked about Russia by the living. He answers them, and dies suddenly.
MUSORGSKY
We all die in flight,
Flap-fall silent as bats,
Slap into the great swelling hill,
Of moonlit sea.
Called back to the great,
Not to be.
Deep Time passed.
MUSS-org-ski.
I heard the name,
A woman was calling
And like a bullet leaving a brain,
sucked back into the barrel of a gun,
Into a game of roulette not yet begun,
I came back to life
I remembered it was my name
MUSS-org-ski.
I sat up in fury,
MUSS-org-ski.
Back again amongst the lumpen multitude
MUSORGSKI!
A black haired woman, held out a hot cup of coffee
As if death were a hangover
From which you sober up
Life is the hangover,
But I gladly took the cup
Like all dead,
I would have licked the sacrifice from the floor
For a minute more
Of human life.
You honoured me with the cup.
MUS-org-Ski at your service.
I will now go ahead
I already know my task
Why the living call the dead.
It is to ask the questions
About how man should live
I see Russia is the question
This answer I can give.
The world is but a bed in space
On which the nations sleep
At night we fight for the blanket
None has the right to keep
If Russia vast and measureless
Pulls the covers to her head
Her fate is always certain,
Her feet will freeze instead.
Listen to MUSS-org-ski.
My pulse has long-time gone
The ladies loved MUSS-org-ski.
They listened to his song
Love Russia just a little
See what you might get,
Her woman will dance you a ballet
Her men will walk into lead,
So kiss each toe gently
And sew each tear with thread
There is no need of a celestial blanket
We we have each other instead.
All of us die flying,
fall silent into the sea.
So, now is time to leave you
Called back to the great,
Not to be.
This is one of those rare times, when having a parent who was an alcoholic has actually been useful. I have been commissioned to write a operatic song for a Russian Salon at the National Portrait Gallery on 24th of June. I have to bring Modest Mussorgsky back to life for 3 minutes and tell of his experience of living in Modern London. I am convinced that coming back from the dead, would give you a massive head-ache. Post your reactions to this of Ilya Repin Portrait. It was painted 10 days or so before his death.
Another full house. It is so astounding the difference that a day makes, in a performance. The first week a play is like a musical instrument that tunes itself with the help of the audience. There was a post-show discussion last night, and I asked through a show of hands, how many people had heard the ultra-high frequency emitted as the teenagers go past the Mosquito anti-loitering device. About a third did. It works! The audience is split in two by their age and experience. Some go one way and some go the other.
The performances were great again. But I still can't concentrate when the actors are waiving about the scalpel. It is so sharp, it has to be locked in the weapons cupboard at the Theatre. Tonight it will be remade in less deadly style. Hopefully it will help the audience concentrate on the words. It does add a dash of danger though...audiences love a bit of danger.
That was a lot of fun. The cast were amazing. Gabriel, was an amazing presence on stage, Hariet provided the power and emotions, that made it more than a comedy, and Stanton, well the crowd fell in love with him a bit.
The audience lauged at all the right bits and so good on to them too. And good mates turned up to support. One from China, though he was coming to the UK anyway.
You can tell you have a great director when you are utterly surprised by what you wrote. Cassie Webb is a marvel, and is a surgeon on the written script. We open up the patient together, she points to the bits that need removing, and I sew the patient back up again.
Back again tonight for the Q+A.
Oh and yesterday, I published a story on Wattpadd. It is called the FishFinger Mystery.
A new story - The FishFinger Mystery - Cod #wattpad https://t.co/348d5dlFZ8
— christopher Hogg (@goldenanorak) April 13, 2016
Tonight is the first night of 'Cassie and Corey' at Theatre 503. It runs for 5 nights. For me that's a record. 'Cassie and Corey' is a comedy about eating disorders. I started writing in January, and followed my intuitions all the way. From Deborah the Head of Medical Ethics at St Georges, to the workers at the Wandsworth Foodbank. It has been an education. I am left with the feeling that there is an invisible net of people, good people coming to the aid of those in distress, doing their good and leaving again secretly. I was most impressed by the volunteer bakers who come together to bake birthday cakes for poor families. This becomes an idea in the play tonight.
I am told that there will be reviewers. The BBC have said someone might come too. Who knows who I will meet over the next week. Am I nervous? Well if my grumpiness with those around me is a barometer, then yes. Actually, I am waiting by the door for some T-shirts to arrive. They are 5xxxl T-shirts, for Corey. I paid a stupidly high postal supplement, but no sign yet....
Just spent 20 mins trying to get some joy from Ebay. Oh Well. Corey, will just have to act BMI 60.
I will write tomorrow about what happened on the first night......