First day as a full time freelancer

It's been a very scary thought in the build up, and may well get scary again in the future as at the moment I'm feeling slightly in holiday mode with trips to the Edinburgh Fringe and to France (the latter the genuine holiday) lined up. It might feel more real in September. Today, though, I've felt very able to cope with the idea that from now on I'm employing myself.

It's perhaps because I've had all the nice sides of it today. I started at ten thirty after leisurely eating my breakfast and making real coffee. I had the back door open with the sun shining outside and at one point went for a stroll to pick blackberries. I cooked myself pasta with artichoke hearts and basil and a big glug of olive oil for lunch. I felt motivated, productive, and so able to finish at four o'clock to go for a bike ride and an icecream, knowing I'd got as much done as is sometimes possible in an 8 hour day.

I know from having done it two days a week for the last ten months that it's not always like this. Sometimes it's hard to get into gear when you're at home on your own, and I was lucky that I had people I could email when I had questions I wanted to ask someone. When I'm not earning enough and working away at things that might never get funding and never happen, that's going to be hard. Worrying about paying the rent will be even harder.

For now, I'm not going to stress, but I might do a little planning. I'm going to think about ways I might support myself better and keep myself motivated. I'm going to do some talking to some wise people and appreciate my avenues for advice. I'm going to try and keep getting up in good time, having leisurely breakfasts, and making sure I get out of the house and having exercise on a regular basis. I'm going to try and schedule work time and personal time and not blur the boundaries too much. Most of all, though, I'm going to enjoy it while it feels good, and cross other bridges when I get to them.

A question of perspective?

I went to the Hayward Gallery on Monday after finishing work. It's not going to make it into my 100 things to love because it's a bit too obvious a choice, but on the other hand I've never been there before. It feels a little too inaccessible and concrete, somehow, though I've admired all the artworks outside for years. Do they have to do that because other people don't walk in either?

The irony is that when I got there, I discovered that the exhibition currently on display is Invisible. It's a bit like the "What's the password" joke or the one about "The storage is in Ware" "Where?" "Ware" that came up at work recently. The subtitle is Art about the Unseen. All very modern and when I walked in to practically empty walls and pieces about thoughts and gazes it was all a bit too much like nonsense. Some of it funny nonsense, like the man who'd forgotten to bring a piece of artwork to an exhibition so put in a police report for his invisible art which had been stolen. Other nonsense verging too close to the pretentious.

Once I'd wandered around a bit though, there was also some fantastic stuff. Or stuff I really liked, anyway, and that makes it fantastic in my book. Some of it was there, some was mementos from stuff which had been fantastic before.

I started to warm up with the piece of a platform which had been an installation by Chris Burden called White Light/White Heat where the artist lay unseen above the gallery for every day of the exhibition. I quite liked Bethan Huws's "...from New York to San Francisco to..." - that sometimes there would be an actor in the gallery, behaving like a member of the general public, so you'd never know they weren't just another visitor.

I found "The Ghost of James Lee Byars" quite scary - you enter a room through a curtain, thinking it'll be one of those shadowy exhibition rooms with a film in or something and actually it's seriously dark, so dark you can't see where the wall is, and only, eventually, a faint chink of light where the opposite exit is. You have to walk through it to get to the rest of the exhibition (though you can get help) and I, like I suspect many other people, crashed through pretty quickly. I swear I could hear someone breathing, though when I lifted the curtain and let the light fall through there was no one else there. James Lee Byars was the artist and was originally alive when this was first exhibited, but no longer.

Then back to the funny again - I loved Carsten Höller's "The Invisible" - one of a series of fantastical cars invented as competitors for the "New World Race". This one, on spot four (which they had laid out on the floor) was so advanced it was invisible. I also found the realisation I was in a drawing quite lovely - Lai Chih Sheng's "Life-Size Drawing" where every edge and line in the room (though presumably not the oher exhibits) had been drawn over in pencil. Less successful, I thought, was Tom Friedman's Untitled (A Curse) which was meant to be a spherical patch of air over a pedestal which had been cursed by a witch.

The one I found the most disturbing, even more than "The Ghost...", was Teresa Margolles's "Air". I almost wish I hadn't read the display outside first, to see if unknowing it'd have had the same affect, though I guess they have to warn people. Earlier in the exhibition there'd been a room with aircon making a point about atmosphere but this one was cooling systems using water, and the water had been used to wash bodies in a mortuary. I was fine about reading this, but went in and suddenly went crawly all over. Not because it was distasteful particularly (though it does feel a bit icky) but with the sensation of desperately sad souls. Why this felt meaningful when Tom Friedman's didn't... I guess is half the point.

Ceal Floyer's plumb line, marking the centre of the gallery space (randomly on the edge of a staircase) is worth a mention if only because she's a distant cousin but then I finished with an invisible maze - I didn't find out who this was by. You pick up kinesthetic headphones (I've made that term up. They vibrate rather than making noise) from a rather beautiful display, and sit them just above your ears. There is a map of the day's maze which you have to walk through, with the headphones vibrating every time you hit a "wall". I kept finding dead ends where there shouldn't have been dead ends and gave up.

If there is a meaning in that then it's worrying, but the exhibition is definitely worth something which may not be a look.

camping with a vengeance

Since I've started freelancing I've been trying to create my own luck by being open to opportunity, as I'm sure Oliver Burkeman once suggested. Nearly two months ago now, at the beginning of June, I helped out Field Trip with the first outing of The Campsite, a new venue which is "dedicated to supporting unfeasible ideas and impractical performance work". Commissioned for its first outing and supported brilliantly by the folk at the New Wolsey Theatre, Ipswich, as part of the Pulse Fringe Festival 2012,  The Campsite transformed a scrubby, gravelled piece of disused land into a space full of innovative theatre, performance poetry, music, film, and participatory experiences, mostly for audiences of 1 to 6 people.

My involvement with the project came about like tripping over someone's guy rope, getting your knees muddy, but discovering that this tent has wonderful things and people inside, and being welcomed in for a beer. (I imagine, because this has never actually happened to me while camping. Yet). To continue the metaphor, while you're there you do end up having to help pump up the airbed, but there is pizza, coffee and a never ending supply of pastries and you have a wonderful if knackering time - and actually, a lot of that isn't a metaphor.


The guy rope, in real life, was a plea from Laura and Tom, the directors of Field Trip, on Twitter, for someone to help them pick up a caravan. They're friends of a friend (Nick White-White, who plays Frolly like a grown up and is also a theatre maker); I have a car with a tow bar, wasn't doing anything that weekend and offered to help. Several weeks later Field Trip had ended up buying my uncle and aunt's caravan (who have been enthusiastic in theory but somewhat bemused and possibly sceptical about how theatre in a caravan actually works) and I was sat in an office in Southwark with Tom. On one side was a splendid view of the London Eye, on the other, a completely bewildering wall full of names, times, and vans. 

 Most of what I did at that point was sit there and make reassuring noises. Tom seemed to find it vaguely comforting. And two weeks later there was a real live venue with an awful lot of artists, over 500 theatrical experiences, and nearly 14 hours of theatre, all over just a day and a half.


The Campsite had a mix of timed performances, most inside vans but some across the whole site. Then we also had durational performances which were very short so audience members could queue. It was sometimes difficult to know how to pace the issuing of tickets and to predict who might turn up when. I mention this because I found it really interesting just afterwards to read Hide & Seek's blog about Sandpit, which has a similar way of working but was trialling a drop in only version of Sandpit in June because:

'...there’s a problem with this system, which is: not everyone can turn up at 6:30. Not everyone knows which games they want to play, based on a 20-word description in a programme. Some people come at 8 and the games they’re interested in are all booked out; some people don’t even know what’s going on, they just wander past and have a look and want to get involved.' - Holly, Hide & Seek

The best bits were when people weren't that worried about seeing a particular artist or even knowing what they were signing up for, but found themselves surprised, shocked, amused and charmed in quick succession by a series of small scale personal encounters and then settled down with a drink, hot or cold, in a comfy campchair and watched Charlie Carroll's Campfire Sessions or the unforgettable special version of Ghostbusters. More detail and snippets of everything that happened can be found on The Campsite's Tumblr site here.

 The moral of this story for me is that it's definitely a good idea not to be so careful you don't have happy accidents. The caravan, now christened Margaret (aka the Princess, of course) is back in its new home at the Albany Theatre, Deptford, in a tiny nettled corner between a container and the wall, full of camping chairs, signage, and other bits and pieces. The vans have gone off to their respective parts of the UK. And recently I was back staring at that wall, as we planned what might come next.

Playing at the Playhouse

Motivational Bananas from Best in the World

There has been so much to write about, and yet so little time for blogging recently. I need to limber up those muscles so this is a tribute to Oxford Playhouse for the excellence of its current programming.

I had a week off from my main job last week and although I did of course spend quite a lot of time catching up on freelance work, I also felt the need to get out of London for a bit. Quite a while ago I saw that Hugh Hughes was planning to tell some stories in a pub in Oxford on Wednesday evening and, as he's one of my very favourite theatre performers, this seemed an excellent excuse to visit and do some work with my friend and current collaborator who lives not too far off. I then spotted that the very lovely Annie Rigby who was one of the nicest, most approachable people I'd met at Devoted and Disgruntled, had her latest production with Unfolding Theatre on the next night. Then, I realised that Northern Stage's resurrection of Close the Coalhouse Door was also on, for which I'd seen great reviews and which interested me for its accessible community values and political message, and that I could fit that in as well. It seemed way to good to be true.

And that, in a nutshell, was potentially the problem. Normally at this point I get into a fit of excitement and anticipation, then I go and see the work and am sometimes just a bit, sometimes desperately disappointed. I'm generally a harsh critic and as much as I love theatre, I often don't enjoy individual shows that much. I find it too easy to pick holes, hard to just go with the flow but disappointed when it leaves me cold.  I find more traditional plays dull, or that innovative formats get in the way of the real heart of a piece. I'm probably a bit too driven by "buzz" in what I choose, which should help to pick some of the best things but also makes it that much more dangerous that the actuality won't live up to the hype. So... here I was, two days, three plays, three different venues, and a whole heap too much expectation...

I started at 6pm on Wednesday evening at the Angel and Greyhound, Oxford, on my own in the end though I'm not necessarily so bothered about that when seeing theatre. The thing I particularly like about the work of Hoi Polloi is the way they create magic without really (sort of but not in any obtrusive way) asking you to pretend. If you're in a theatre then you're really in a theatre, and we were really in a pub. The person talking has come to tell a story, not act one out - or if so, only for demonstration purposes. I'm sure there is a technical term for this, which I don't know, but I like it. In this case Hugh said hello, told us what was going to happen, used our pint glasses and his mobile phone as props, and in 15 minutes took the 5 of us sat round a pub table on a journey back into his childhood in Anglesea. I'm not allowed to say what happened in the story (we took an oath of secrecy) but it wasn't romanticised or indulgent, yet it was beautiful. I loved it.

Next, I trekked back across town (I'd not planned very well and ended up crossing Oxford several times that day) to the Playhouse for Close the Coalhouse Door. This piece is a collaboration between Northern Stage and Live Theatre, oganisations I don't know well but whose commitment both to excellence but also local relevance I really respect. Close... is about mining history in the North East, the hideous conditions, rich industrialist control and gradual improvement of conditions for pitmen and their families. Originally staged in 1968 when there was a lot more hope than there is now, the collapse of the industry since should have made it all the more bleak, but in fact it's funny and entertaining, though unashamedly left wing. Probably my only criticism is quite how firmly they rammed home the sarcastic message at the end ("of course none of this happens now"). Again, as with Hoi Polloi, there is an openness about the form, with the audience being told from the beginning that we are watching a play. Within this, we have a family in 1978, acting out the history (the bedtime stories of the grandfather) whilst the present day drama of the choices of the sons of the families also unfolds: to stay and work in the pit or escape to university. Actually, that's my other criticism - whilst the female characters in this piece are strong, there are only two of them out of nine. Limited by the original play, of course, but I hope modern political theatre somehow manages to revisit the past without always insisting that the male perspective is the only interesting one. In any case, much music on imaginative instruments (guitars, ukeleles, knitting needles on scaffolding), bad jokes and serious history made the more than two and half hours duration fly by (especially with two intervals included for our refreshment). It felt incongruous in Oxford, and I'd have rather have seen it in a more intimate venue up North, but fantastic stuff all the same. I hope we take notice, though I worry we don't... that's a whole different discussion on the efficacy of political theatre.

All that put me in good shape for a working day with Tailormade Productions the next day, especially when coffee and buttered toast for breakfast was followed by homemade houmous, jacket potatoes and pickles for lunch, and my desk had a view of the garden and the sounds of birdsong.

On Thursday evening we headed back in to town for Best in the World in the Burton Taylor Studio, a tiny and sympathetic space just around the corner from the theatre. This piece comes from director Annie Rigby's genuine love of darts but observation that the greatest dart players are still really very ordinary if not sometimes highly flawed men. Here there was even less of what you might call traditional "acting". The play, performed by a solo actor, ultimately tells us all that we can all be "the best in the world", demonstrating this through information about darts players and other sportsmen and women, including an absolutely jaw dropping demonstration with a tape measure of how far Jonathan Edwards, not an obvious triple jumper because of his shorter stature, actually managed to hop step and jump. We were invited to celebrate our own achievements and to support other audience members, and it was funny, engaging and as energising as the motivational bananas given to us on the way in.

So there you go. Three fantastic pieces of theatre in a row, though very different, and if that wasn't enough, the amazing Coelocanth by Ben Moor on tonight and tomorrow - a piece I saw years ago at the Edinburgh Fringe which I also absolutely loved. I hope I get to see something else by Ben Moor soon; but I'll definitely be keeping an eye on Oxford Playhouse.

100 things: randomly loving London

My pursuit of lesser known London delights has been sadly neglected of late. In fact I'm starting to feel it: I'm getting out a lot but mainly of course to go and sit in a darkened room and watch (or occasionally participate in) people doing things which aren't quite real. Or which are real but symbolise not quite real things. This isn't supposed to be a post about the nature of theatre but it's a bit of a cover up itself. This isn't one of 100 things to love about London, but it is a bunch of slightly random images from the last month or two, surprisingly few of which have been taken on the way to and from arts related events, and which are really just to remind myself that I'm still here, and how much else is.

Hot chuzzos and chocolate from the food market behind Royal Festival Hall, at a rare sunny moment.

The boat on the roof...

...and the skate park underneath.

 The pickled coelacanth at the Natural History Museum.

Ducks by Kew Bridge Station (you can just see them if you look closely, up the top of the bank. Ducks are really bad at responding to direction I can tell you.)

Cranes on a building site in front of the Gherkin - also slightly hard to make out.

Street sign.

View of the river in East London, with Canary Wharf and what I insist on still calling the Dome...

...and back to West London, with boats sailing on the river at low tide near Kew Bridge.

I'll try and do more soon. Promise.