glenjplayer

Sunday afternoon, kicking back in a rehearsal for Colder, updating my blog. We are four weeks out from tech and I’m not panicking. Maybe I’m holding all of that in store for later. But then again, perhaps I have every reason to feel confident. The actors are bringing it. A real pleasure to watch as they grow into these roles. Michelle (our fearless director) is just so damn smart (no pressure) with a really clear vision for the work. The design is simple and visually grabbing.

A fair bit has happened since last time. Got a lighting sponsorship from the awesome Heath at FireFly Lighting. Our lighting designer Dan Anderson is licking his lips in anticipation, and I’m really interested to see who this comes together with the set. Poster art has come back from the printer and will go up around town in the next few days. Working on doing a little production preview video … production meetings blah blah … there’s a lot to do and strangely the last thing I think to do is sit in on a rehearsal. Check in on the art. See what demands they are facing. See what help they need.

Mostly being a producer is doing and communicating the doing. But before the doing (and the communicating the doing) comes the thinking and after comes the reflecting…. and perhaps it’s this thinking and reflecting which is the real task in the rehearsal room. Not thinking and reflecting on product, that is after all the director’s job, but thinking and reflecting on process. The point is to be helpful, to keep the challenge in focus, manageable, and resourced.

That, and laugh at all the funny bits.

Related Posts:

• Colder Rehearsal Video
• … Colder 2011 #2
• … Colder 2011 #1
• Review: I Love You, Bro – La Boite
• Review: The Chairs – La Boite Theatre

… and have a read of Colder’s amazing director as she blogs here experiences …

http://michellemiall.tumblr.com/

 

 

Related Posts:

• Colder Rehearsal Video
• … Colder 2011 #1
• … Colder 2011 #3
• Review: I Love You, Bro – La Boite
• Review: The Chairs – La Boite Theatre

This is the first of a few reflections I’ll write  about my experience co-producing Colder (by Lachlan Philpott) directed by the awesome Michelle Miall, which will be playing as part of the Indie season  at La Boite Theatre.

As I write this we are a smidgen over six weeks from opening. I have just been to a rehearsal and had the joy of watching this beautiful cast work through some of the demands and complexities of the script.

There’s something special about getting to eavesdrop in on the creative process of theatre artists. Some might argue that this can detract from the experience of the finished work, but for me being able to share in the discoveries that artists are making as they are making them only serves to deepen my connection. That this “eavesdropping” is necessarily part of the role of a producer doesn’t by any extent diminish the feeling of joy I had tonight on my way home.

Continue reading

Related Posts:

• Colder Rehearsal Video
• … Colder 2011 #2
• … Colder 2011 #3
• Review: I Love You, Bro – La Boite
• Review: The Chairs – La Boite Theatre

like dating…

• You get a little too eager, start to show off¹, and end up spilling it on your pants².

¹ Sometimes you put too much water in, sometimes too much milk. Tomorrow, you wont be able to get the right bowl, instead you’ve got a pasta bowl and the damn thing is sloshing all over the place. Then, just when you think you’ve managed to get through a breakfast pants intacto, you turn the tap on to wash it and the water comes shooting out, using the curvature of the bowl, up and over the edge of the sink and onto your pants. In some cultures the willingness of a man to be seen in public with a strange but funny looking blob shaped stain on his pants is seen as a sign of not “giving-a-shit” any more.

² Accurate, albeit unfortunate. It has been calculated that the amount of water wasted in the re-washing of otherwise “okay” pants is equivalent to 50 Olympic swimming pools every week. Second only to pants washed because of that little bit of wee that shoots down the side of your leg when you were absolutely convinced there was no more damn wee up there.

unlike dating…

• You can’t invite it in for a “bowl of porridge”³.

³ We can be quite sure that if some poor fellow was to suggest such a thing to a delightful young lass (each upon the veritable threshold to their sexual maturing), that she wouldn’t be into that kind of thing. In fact, and somewhat annoyingly, she’ll have probably been up for it had he said licorice or salmon or something equally abhorrent. But that’s just the Gods⁶ getting a cheap laugh at our expense. Continue reading

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Dear Sean,

Thanks for making me an omelette the other day. It was tops.

I decided I’d make you one too.

 

Now don’t say I never give you nothing…

Sincerely

Glen

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This is theatre of ideas, forcing us into a world scarily similar to our everyday. A world where humans can be reanimated. A world of the uncanny-valley, the creature himself – a collage of flesh and meat – abhorrent less because of how it’s come about and more because of how startlingly human he his, but not so accurate to be an actual man.

This is the creature’s story. A story of longing and loneliness, of bigotry and monsterism.

What if – a man is born fully made, though horrible to look at he is a sympathetic as any new born, what will become of such a man if they are abandoned and left to fend for themselves? Who will they turn too? What will they seek out?

This is the question behind Frankenstein. It is heart breaking in its answers.

Continue reading

Related Posts:

• Reflections: Apollo 13 Mission Control @ Brisbane Powerhouse
• Review: I Love You, Bro – La Boite
• Review: Tender – Metro Arts & …and moor theatre
• Review: The Clean House – QTC w Black Swan
• Review: The Chairs – La Boite Theatre

Written in 1956 The World Jones Made shows some startling insight into a post apocalyptic 1950s America.

It asks a bold question. If a man can see his personal future as if it was his present, then when he acts is it because he decides to do so or because he was fated. What then is man? At the whim of an unrelenting universal nothing, or a driving force against that.

In dramatic terms, agency – that is the action of the characters, their goals, desires, wants – is what drives a story. What keeps it for falling down on itself.

How then does Dick write a character seemingly at the whim of fate so they still have agency?

Jones talks about himself, not as if he knows the future but as if he lives in the future with a foot in the past. Reliving over again stuff he’s already live. As if he soul or life force is displace one year forward, and his body stuck in the present.

This is problematic. When Jones acts in the present, he acts with full knowledge of the future, or at least the next year, in fact he acts only to fulfil what in his mind has already happened. Technically this is not a dramatic action. There is no character agency here, in the sense that a character decides they want something and then chases it.

Strangely through Jones doesn’t feels like he lives in the present, instead he feels like he lives a year in the future on that edge where the unknown becomes known. As if Jones is a third party voyeur on his own life.

Continue reading

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It’s been some days since I attended Richard Walter’s Public Lecture on Screenwriting held in conjunction with Aftrs, Griffith Film School and Inscription and herein lies some reflections on the experience.

Comprising of 2 two hour lectures one in the morning and one in the afternoon, it’s a both an entertaining and informative day on thinking about the craft of writing.

In the morning Richard took us through some introductory remarks on screenwriting that really serve to frame how he thinks both about the craft and and what constitutes a good screenplay.

He’s got his own cute ways of saying things which you can read about in his books, and this is what I took away from it:

• write a personal story
• write a integrated screen so that  EVERY sight and every sound – MOVES the story forward
• Reach as many people as you can, because that is the nature of the art.
• Get as much conflict in your story as you can
• Tell the best lie you can to find Emotional Truth
• Stories have begins, middles and ends
• and perhaps most importantly, for a story to mean anything it needs to come from a Source, via a Message, and to a Receiver.
• And that in fact one of the most important things a writer can do is think about their Receiver/Reader/Audience every single step of the way, every word, every mark on the page.

Appropriately all of this can be found in books, and I would recommend you read them before you listen to him speak.

In the second two hours the final point above gets a real work over, where he breaks down in brief a few screenplays to see how they could be improved. Yes, every word, every mark on the page. It’s a bit of an eye-opener.

Right.

So, what do we have? Some useful information, but if that’s all you need than it is significantly cheaper to read his book.

But more importantly you get an entertainment.

What are we saying here? Richard even in his public lecture takes his own advice to heart. Every anecdote, every little screenwriting gem – told and re-told through countless hours of teaching – each now refined and is delivered just so to both entertain and inform.

It’s like the man doesn’t know how not to entertain. A good place to be if you want to get into a craft whose primary purpose is to do just that.

Lecture attended: Richard Walters Screenwriting Public Lecture.

More info http://richardwalter.com/

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• Colder Rehearsal Video
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• Reflections: Apollo 13 Mission Control @ Brisbane Powerhouse
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Made less so by posting online

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Some thoughts.

I’ve never really been a big fan of specific word count writing goals such as those that drive people through NaNoWriMo.

Primarily because I’ve never had too much trouble sitting down and writing a bunch of words and being satisfied with that. But also because I never really needed to know when something would be done – exactly. I was happy enough relying on my internal writing clock measuring progress with a rough estimate of a finish month – well finish quarter.

Then I got older. Then I realised there were only so many writing days left and still so much more I wanted to put down. Not that I’m an old man or anything, but still.

So instead? Well, drafts need to be done by a fixed date. Which means weekly writing goals, which really means daily word count targets.

Blurgh!
Continue reading

Related Posts:

• Reflections: Agency in The World Jones Made (Philip K. Dick)
• Overdropping
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