Tag: performance

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Pen at Work

Two weeks ago, I spoke about seeing a one-woman monologue at the Edinburgh Fringe. It particularly appealed to me because I’d previously written my own play with a similar theme and presentation.

With the festivals now over for another year, my attention has turned to giving my own work its first major rewrite for some time, including a new snappier title.

In particular, the main character has always been an English literature student who keeps a video diary I changed the subject to a music and video production course, giving her more reason to use a camcorder. I’ve also restructured the narrative to include self-interruptions where she looks back at her student days from 15 years in the future.

If I really give the piece my attention, it should be roughly redrafted by next week, and then I need to start reshaping it neatly into its new form.

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Embracing New Beginnings, or Something Like That

Regular readers will know I run an open-mic event called Hotchpotch. This is primarily for writers rather than musicians, and it’s been happening since 2010. Since I took over in 2015, the one constant has been the need to change venues from time to time. We are now in such a transition period again.

This time, we had several weeks’ notice from the venue. The owner intended to sell the place, but it unexpectedly closed before the sale went through rather than afterwards. The new place has not responded to our email asking whether they would honour the bookings for the remainder of 2023.

As a stop-gap, we held the July event in an open-air amphitheatre. It was a lot of fun, but the Scottish climate means this is not a feasible long-term solution, so it won’t be repeated any time soon.

On Friday, someone did reach out to us to offer assistance, and I hope it leads to a fruitful outcome, especially as a couple of other venues in the area have also closed suddenly.

For 13 years, we’ve been able to secure venues free of charge in return for members buying drinks and snacks from the bar. I’ve come to accept these days are probably at an end, and I’m actively considering how we might implement a new model involving donations.

That said, a fallow period of a month or two might give Hotchpotch a chance to reinvent and reinvigorate itself, just as we’ve done for the last 13 years.

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Lights, Camera, Industrial Action

Last week, the Writers Guild of America (WGA) trade union began industrial action, shutting down production on many high-profile TV shows.

The union leaders’ demands are complex, but they revolve around issues such as contract lengths, payments from streaming media, and the use of artificial intelligence software. Here’s a background of what’s happened so far.

This strike is particularly disruptive to talk show hosts like as Jimmy Kimmel, yet it also affects some scripted dramas like Stranger Things, where rewrites are commonly made on the fly.

Of course, this doesn’t imply that writers are the most important members of a film set. Rather, they’re part of the well-oiled machine of production. Take one part out and it begins to fail.

By comparison, a strike by the actors’ union Equity could inflict just as much chaos as the WGA has done. In UK terms, the Bectu trade union represents non-performance roles in broadcasting, so a member walkout could cripple the BBC.

At the time of writing, we don’t know how long this strike might endure. The action taken in 2007 lasted for 14 weeks. This time around, with 97.8% of its 11,500 members voting in favour, we might not be seeing much Saturday Night Live for many weeks to come.

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Rubbish + Time = Cult Classic

Yesterday afternoon, I decided it was time to watch Spice World. It tells a fictional tale of the events leading up to a concert at the Royal Albert Hall, comprising many surreal moments and fantasy sequences, not to mention self-parody by the band members.

Let’s be clear, this is not a great picture if you like a plot. The disjointed story interweaves a crew trying to make a fictional movie about the band, an entirely separate crew trying to make a fly-on-the-wall documentary, and a newspaper mogul trying to usurp their success. It instead helps to think of the film as a series of loosely-related sketches.

That’s before we arrive at the dozen or so celebrity cameos, some slotted clumsily into a screenplay written by Kim Fuller, brother of the band manager Simon Fuller. As such, there is a lot of self-indulgence here.

Despite this, the film has become, according to one source, the highest-grossing musical film of all time. The initial negative reactions from its 1997 release tend now to be coloured by nostalgia. The Odeon even held limited screenings to mark its 20th anniversary.

It’s even been suggested that some studios make intentionally bad films in a go-for-broke fashion. Sometimes it’s to keep the rights to an idea – or sometimes they reckon the gamble can pay off. The 2003 Tommy Wisaeu film The Room is a case study all of its own.

If there’s any sort of lesson to be taken from this, I think it’s that writers sometimes need to worry less about the quality of work and focus on simply producing it. If you want it to exist in the world, sometimes you need to make it yourself. In Spice World, someone took arguably the most famous singers of the era, wrote them into a rather silly script, and we’re still talking about it more than 25 years later.

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Being a Judge

On Saturday, my open-mic night Hotchpotch jointly hosted a poetry slam with the Edinburgh-based I Am Loud.

A slam is a form of performance poetry that heavily emphasises performance and audience reaction as well as the actual writing. It’s also competitive, with a panel of judges awarding points based on pre-agreed criteria.

In all my years of attending slams, I’d never been asked to act as a judge before. By all accounts, it was the least-envied job in the room. We would be marking each of the performers on a scale of 1 to 10.

I didn’t see the other judges’ papers, but I found the standard of performance was so high that it generally came down to how much I enjoyed the poem. There were some tough calls, but I don’t think I’d make any amendments in hindsight.

It really did help to have been to so many slams and other poetry events, so as to build up a frame of reference about what I enjoy and dislike. It was also useful to pay attention to the reactions from the audience. I’d be happy to do this again in the future.

It’s safe to say it now, but I was privately rather worried about whether our members would attend a ticketed slam in place of their usual free-of-charce open-mic. However, I’d failed to take into account that the I Am Loud name has some clout with local poets, and they sold out all 12 performer slots – even if two of them withdrew.

The winner in the end was Tom Bird, who goes on to compete in the final competition later this year.

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A Little Poetry

Every year, I take time to visit StAnza, the poetry event in St Andrews. The festival is typically spread over the course of around a week, so I normally book a few events on the same day. This year took a significantly different form but it was no less literary.

I booked just two events: the breakfast poetry in the morning plus the slam competition on Saturday evening. I’d planned to use the middle of the day to visit a pal I haven’t seen for around three years.

He introduced me to a game called Bananagrams. It’s easier to demonstrate than explain, but fans of Scrabble will likely enjoy it. We played four games and discussed a few of the books on his shelf.

By the end of the afternoon, I’d decided to skip the slam. It goes on late into the evening and I was too tired to stay up. Instead, I used the time to compose an overdue card to a pal in Dublin, complete with a handwritten letter that ended up being four A5 pages long.

If I were one of these people who posted these vapid inspirational quotes, I’d end with something like ‘The serves as a reminder that even when plans change, there are always opportunities to connect and create meaningful moments.’ And yet that very much expresses how I feel. Just this once, let’s lean into this sentiment.

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Cataloguing the Uncatalogued

For the last eight years or so, I’ve run my monthly open-mic singlehandedly. However, our collaborations during 2022 showed me the group was becoming unwieldy to manage alone.

So at the next event tomorrow, we’ll introduce our first co-host. Having already briefed her about the help we need, such as welcoming readers while I set up the equipment, I started to compose a short document to explain the role in more detail.

This short document quickly expanded to a long one, becoming a chronological checklist of the entire evening from start to finish. Much of the content is based upon years of personal experience and best practice. But almost none of it had been formally recorded before because there was never a pressing need.

I’ll give the document to my co-host tonight or tomorrow, although it’s still the first version and could do with some refining. Once it’s more robust, it’ll serve as a template in case she or anyone else needs to cover for me in the future.

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Marching into March

Around a week ago, tickets for the StAnza poetry festival went on sale. For around a week, there are poetry events all over St Andrews, particularly in the Byre Theatre and Parliament Hall, but also taking advantage of smaller rooms and venues across town.

I’d normally be at the front of the queue for events, but I’ve held off booking them this year. I have other commitments that potentially clash, plus I was waiting to receive this month’s wages.

It’s likely I’ll go to the breakfast event on Saturday, with a pie or a pastry served before it. I’m then going to visit a pal I haven’t seen for two years who lives in the area. At night, I need to decide whether to enter the slam competition, as the late finish means staying overnight or catching one of the last buses home. I’m then playing Dungeons & Dragons the next day.

So as soon as I publish this, I’ll be looking through the festival programme and working out a plan. I can already see some of the staple events, like poetry in translation, round table discussions and music recitals; I just need to work out how to fit them into my schedule.

I have

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The Best Bad Poetry

A few days ago, I received an email from a blog I didn’t know I was following.

The author had just updated with a poem about the Ship Canal Bridge in Seattle that was heavily influenced by the William McGonagall verse The Tay Bridge Disaster. For the avoidance of doubt, only the style is lampooned; the Seattle bridge is in no danger of collapse.

I’m from Dundee, right next to the Tay, and McGonagall is closely associated with the city. As I read the Ship Canal Bridge poem, I found I had more and more I wanted to say about the poet and his output.

A major hallmark of his distinctive verse came from forcing clumsy descriptions into rhyming lines. It amused me to see the critically-panned film director Tommy Wiseau under the See Also section in his Wikipedia entry.

However, I’ve also heard McGonagall’s technique described as ‘journalistic’, as his words often give a factual insight into the subject. This is showcased neatly in The Tay Bridge Disaster.

To our eyes, such a poem might seem insensitive to its victims and their relatives. However, there appeared to be no public outcry 143 years ago; even in modern times, performances are often played for laughs.

I must credit Dundee Rep Theatre with making an exception in 2019. As part of a local history show called The A to Z of Dundee, one of the actors read an excerpt from the piece. Despite the overall show being comedic in nature, he gave it a poignant tone that I think was better suited to the subject matter.

One of my university tutors believed McGonagall was the only poet whose entire body of work had been published. Better still, his output has been in the public domain for decades, so it’s easy to find countless other examples of his style.

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Adapting a Sitcom For the Stage

Last week, I visited London with a pal. Among other attractions, we stopped at a West End show, namely a musical version of the sitcom Only Fools and Horses.

Both of us enjoyed the performance, yet it started me wondering about the pressures of adapting a much-loved show without disappointing the audience. A good start is to find writers with a track record of hits, and this show had two of them.

One of these is Jim Sullivan, who penned the spin-off show The Green Green Grass and is the son of the original Only Fools and Horses writer John Sullivan. Completing the duo is Paul Whitehouse, bringing his extensive background in character-led sketch comedy.

The resulting show is one that borrows major plot points from the TV series without ever feeling like a rip-off. The mix of music was interesting as well. It included many original songs, but the writers also chose to sprinkle in pre-existing tracks from other artists like Chas & Dave and Bill Withers. The opening and closing themes also featured prominently.

While it’s nothing to do with the writing, the accents of the actors were spot-on, helping to draw the audience into this world immediately.

In short, these two writers have pulled off an incredible feat of taking a TV sitcom and presenting it on a stage without losing any of its charm. I can’t find any other Whitehouse & Sullivan collaborations, but I look forward to seeing what they produce in the future.