Stillpoint Theatre

February18th

We showed 40 minutes of the emerging work last week, to a small, but attentive audience.

A very strange beast the ‘work in progress showing’. For both the audience and the performer. The rules of engagement are not always clear and the functionality of the thing often subsumes the possibility of transcendance (or even satisfaction!) emerging for either party. There is perhaps a kind of gladiatorial fascination with the guts of a thing being exposed and for the maker, a surrender to unknowing and nakedness; a kind of consensual sado-masochism if you will. It always sets up very useful questions and investigations though, so a good thing definitely.

Back in the beloved Nightingale space again this week working with Lucinka Eisler.

Investigating more deeply some of the information that emerged from the showing on the 8th February. A discovery that it is the mother’s story after all and a decision to interview more 15 year olds.

We’ve been discussing the phenomenon of being a teenager in an era where all these online social networks require you to present a public face 24 hours a day and how different that must be from the era we grew up in. What it must be to be projecting a self to some unknown & unquantifiable public, well before you have any sophisticated independent notion of who you are. We talked about this in terms of female sexuality: Girls enjoying the feeling of power they receive from arresting the male gaze, but having no real sense of how volatile the elements are that they are invoking. We discussed the phenomenon of grooming; men harvesting underage girls using these networks.

We are interested in our character, Carla treading a very dangerous line in relation to this material, so that in entering her world, the audience is not presented with any easy moral get out clause.

hmm good times.

The showing was ultimately super informative, affirming and provocative in equal measure and exactly the kick in the pants we needed at exactly the right time. We are very grateful.

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