With the exception of my own ironic trashing of Bob Dylan’s efforts, most musicians appreciate the craft and determination required by anyone to train the self and produce a sound. Even if the music itself is not entirely to one’s own taste, being a musician makes you recognise the effort that has gone into producing it. The Labsters now do this. They wait patiently and listen intently to what the others are working on and recognise success when it arrives. Its gratifying to see it happen.

The appreciation of Dr Speyer’s soprano was, however, tinged with alarm from the more medically aware members of the choir… But he sang up, outdid the Australian magpies warbling on the green outside, and maybe even produced three notes simultaneously!!!

After a short conversation with Steve, in which he kept  his foot pressed very forcefully on my windpipe, I suddenly and inexplicably found myself agreeing to play the role of Lindy in Sue’s presentation this arvo. So with my broken arm released from his intense grip, I went off to prepare. Sue coped brilliantly with me as her ersatz partner, and delivered a clear and lucid account of her aspirations as a film maker. Well done Sue.

And well done everyone today.

I know it will disappoint many of the Labsters who pestered me on this,  but I need to reiterate my refusal to wear a dress and stand in for Bec at tomorrow’s farewell. There’s just  no way on this I’m afraid. My female side’s agent is holding out for the role of Julia Gillard!

Can i warn you all that tomorrow will be Sonya’s birthday and if at some bizarre moment i go over to the keyboard and hammer out an intropductory chord it will be for us to sing Happy Birthday to her. You have been warned.

And so tomorrow will be the last day of FilmLab II.

What a mixture of feelings that will bring…

The panel were impressed – we heard them say so. The teams delivered!

In the UK there is nothing like FilmLab, and filmmakers there would be envious to learn about it – and about the funding made available to the participants. The Labsters are priviledged to be able to acceess a scheme like this. Today they showed that they were prepared to earn it too.

Well done to you all.

I was really sorry that Fiona and Jason weren’t well enough to be with us today. I thought we missed them, and the group was incomplete without them. Hopefully we’ll have them back tomorrow.

Enjoyed doing the musical structure lecture on Arvo Part, er.. this arvo….

Now look, I’m taking the fact that you fell asleep during the full play through as a compliment to Arvo’s skill – rather than a comment on my boring droning on about structure and numbers….

The choir were superb with this today. They learned it extremely quickly – which means that after two weeks of singing together everybody’s musical ear is tuning up nicely. The men and the altos picked up the harmony lines in an instant. They listened to each other singing their respective parts, and achieved a lovely blended sound. This is a high level skill and requires much more musicality than singing along to the radio, so the musical development is there for all to hear. The sopranos likewise delivered the tune with style – perhaps shrieking at Major Tom also had an impact…

In many respects the Russian National Anthem has been a turning point in the sound we’re making. We’re risking more and finding that our real capabilities lie well beyond the imagined ones. The limitations are those of fear, and when fear is overcome – through play or just recklessness – we achieve a much better sound than we ever thought possible. If only there were another couple of weeks, with this kind of bravery and commitment we’d be hammering out something extremely complex in 4 part harmony.

I hope the parallels between these musical achievements and the potential success of your stories don’t need spelling out here.

Da Sweedanya!

I enjoyed working with my groups today. They are working hard to sythesise a style and find the story, based on the work of the past two weeks and their own continuing hunger to tell a particular, as yet unformed, tale. Its a slow process, but just as with the singing, there’s a strong commitment here too.

Didn’t get to do The Daily Rant today. That fell at the hurdle of last minute timetable readjustment. But with luck I’ll get the soapbox out again and sound off about another topic tomorrow. I have something up my sleeve.

Lots of the Labsters have asked about the quotes I read out in my first Daily Rant. Here are the 36 points in full, from the man himself. As usual, for ‘theatre’ or ‘play’ read Lo Budget film…

Good luck for tomorrow!

Paddy

JOSE RIVERA’S 36 ASSUMPTIONS ABOUT PLAYWRITING.

Over the years, I’ve had the good fortune to teach writing in a number of schools from second-grade to graduate school. I usually just wing it. But lately, I’ve decided to think about the assumptions I’ve been working under and to write them down. The following is an unscientific, gut-level survey of the assumptions I have about writing plays, in no particular order of importance.

1. Good playwriting is a collaboration between your many selves. The more multiple your personalities, the further, wider, deeper you will be able to go.

2. Theatre is closer to poetry and music than it is to the novel.

3. There’s no time limit to writing plays. Think of playwriting as a life-long apprenticeship. Imagine you may have your best ideas on your deathbed.

4. Write plays in order to organize despair and chaos. To live vicariously. To play God. To project an idealized version of the world. To destroy things you hate in the world and in yourself. To remember and to forget. To lie to yourself. To play. To dance with language. To beautify the landscape. To fight loneliness. To inspire others. To imitate your heroes. To bring back the past and raise the dead. To achieve transcendence of yourself. To fight the powers that be. To sound alarms. To provoke conversation. To engage in the conversation started by great writers in the past. To further evolve the artform. To lose yourself in your fictive world. To make money.

5. Write because you want to show something. To show that the world is shit. To show how fleeting love and happiness are. To show the inner workings of your ego. To show that democracy is in danger. To show how interconnected we are. (Each “to show” is active and must be personal, deeply held, true to you.)

6. Each line of dialogue is like a piece of DNA; potentially containing the entire play and its thesis; potentially telling us the beginning, middle, and end of the play.

7. Be prepared to risk your entire reputation every time you write, otherse it’s not worth your audience’s time.

8. Embrace your writer’s block. It’s nature’s way of saving trees and your reputation. Listen to it and try to understand its source. Often,  writer’s block happens to you because somewhere in your work you’ve lied to yourself and your subconscious won’t let you go any further until you’ve gone back, erased the lie, stated the truth and started over.

9. Language is a form of entertainment. Beautiful language can be like beautiful music: it can amuse, inspire, mystify, enlighten.

10. Rhythm is key. Use as many sounds and cadences as possible. Think of dialogue as a form of percussive music. You can vary the speed of the language, the number of beats per line, volume, density. You can use silences, fragments, elongated sentences, interruptions, overlapping conversation, physical activity, monologues, nonsense, non-sequiturs, foreign languages.

11. Vary your tone as much as possible. Juxtapose high seriousness with raunchy language with lyrical beauty with violence with dark comedy with awe with eroticism.

12. Action doesn’t have to be overt. It can be the steady deepening of the dramatic situation or your character’s steady emotional movements from one emotional/psychological condition to another: ignorance to enlightenment, weakness to strength, illness to wholeness.

13. Invest something truly personal in each of your characters, even if it’s something of your worst self.

14. If realism is as artificial as any genre, strive to create your own realism. If theatre is a handicraft in which you make one of a kind, then you’re in complete control of your fictive universe. What are its physical laws? What’s gravity like? What does time do? What are the rules of cause and effect? How do your characters behave in this altered universe?

15. Write from your organs. Write from your eyes, your heart, your liver, your ass — write from your brain last of all.

16. Write from all of your senses. Be prepared to design on the page: tell yourself exactly what you see, feel, hear, touch and taste in this world. Never leave design to chance, that includes the design of the cast.

17. Find your tribe. Educate your collaborators. Stick to your people and be faithful to them. Seek aesthetic and emotional compatability with those your work with. Understand your director’s world view because it will color his/her approach to your work.

18. Strive to be your own genre. Great plays represent the genres created around the author’s voice. A Checkhov genre. A Caryl Churchill genre.

19. Strive to create roles that actors you respect will kill to perform.

20. Form follows function. Strive to reflect the content of the play in the form of the play.

21. Use the literalization of metaphor to discuss the inner emotional state of your characters.

22. Don’t be afraid to attempt great themes: death, war, sexuality, identity, fate, God, existence, politics, love.

23. Theatre is the explanation of life to the living. Try to tease apart the conflicting noises of living, and make some kind of pattern and order. It’s not so much and explanation of life as much as it is a recipe for understanding, a blueprint for navigation, a confidante with some answers, enough to guide you and encourage you, but not to dictate to you.

24. Push emotional extremes. Don’t be a puritan. Be sexy. Be violent. Be irrational. Be sloppy. Be frightening. Be loud. Be stupid. Be colorful.

25. Ideas may be deeply embedded in the interactions and reactions of your character; they may be in the music and poetry of your form. You have thoughts and you generate ideas constantly. A play ought to embody those thoughts and those thoughts can serve as a unifying energy in your play.

26. A play must be organized. This is another word for structure. You organize a meal, your closet, your time — why not your play?

27. Strive to be mysterious, not confusing.

28. Think of information in a play like an IV drip — dispense just enough to keep the body alive, but not too much too soon.

29. Think of writing as a constant battle against the natural inertia of language.

30. Write in layers. Have as many things happening in a play in any one moment as possible.

31. Faulkner said the greatest drama is the heart in conflict with itself.

32. Keep your chops up with constant questioning of your own work. React against your work. Be hypercritical. Do in the next work what you aimed for but failed to do in the last one.

33. Listen only to those people who have a vested interest in your future.

34. Character is the embodiment of obsession. A character must be stupendously hungry. There is no rest for those characters until they’ve satisfied their needs.

35. In all your plays be sure to write at least one impossible thing. And don’t let your director talk you out of it.

36. A writer cannot live without an authentic voice — the place where you are the most honest, most lyrical, most complete, most creative and new. That’s what you’re striving to find. But the authentic voice doesn’t know how to write, any more than gasoline knows how to drive. But driving is impossible without fuel and writing is impossible without the heat and strength of your authentic voice. Learning to write well is the stuff of workshops. Learning good habits and practicing hard. But finding your authentic voice as a writer is your business, your journey — a private, lonely, inexact, painful, slow and frustrating voyage. Teachers and mentors can only bring you closer to that voice. With luck and time, you’ll get there on your own.

Very exciting to see all this, and despite being press ganged by the ferociously efficient Kerri into double glazing and blackening out the lecture room, I’m rather envious of it all and would like to be in there making something too.

But I’ve just had an idea for that….

However I fought off the indolent tendencies, got back on this morning and after breezing in I feel… tired.

I’m sure the Labsters do too. In fact it was there in the singing work this morning. Although the sound is getting better, and the group are able to learn new harmonies ever more fluently, the “recovery time” has gone up. With choirs this is a failure of self discipline among the group, and often a sign of tiredness. It puts noise in the system and exhausts everyone else who are similarly battling with the work whilst trying to manage their own energies. The only answer is a resolute focus. It’s true that we get tired as the work progresses, and worse still, just as it is coming to culmination we are reaching the point where we’ve spent most of our best energy. What’s needed now is what Arsene Wenger calls “Mental toughness”.  That ability to discipline oneself ever more meticulously so that the task stays on track. It effectively makes the work easier to do because you don’t allow a slip in your own energy to distract yourself.

Everyone has come up with a theory about how their film might be. This week that theory has been put to the test, in the heat of continuous workshop development. That’s where the success will be. In the assiduous pursuit of letting the audience have a good insight into the possible film.

Keep fighting the tiredness guys, and stay focused!

Very impressed today with the level of work going on. It seems dwelling on the impossibility of the tasks has been brushed aside and everyone is going for it.

My own afternoon was divided between two projects, both of which took big, and brave, steps in responses to the work we did together. That is enormously gratifying in itself, but  it’s even more rewarding to see the groups at the end of the day buzzing with ideas and questions in response to work they’ve done under their own steam.

I know this intrepid approach extends across all the other projects teams too. So keep going Labsters it won’t be long before the outside world will pressure you all for more conventional “value for money results now!!” Everyone is grabbing the opportunity  – provided by FilmLab’s more rarified creative environment – to stretch themselves, go the extra mile, and find those imaginative insights that add depth to the work, but can only be achieved by putting oneself through the mill.

I’m thinking we might attack the Russian National Anthem soon. Pa Rooskiye, Kanyeshna! (In Russian, of course!) I don’t think there’s a challenge I could put before the Labsters that they couldn’t meet just at the moment.

Da Skorova!

Anyway the working week started here and the Labsters trundled in slightly glazed and suffering from Lost Weekend Syndrome.

So it was rather uplifting to be met by Andrada in full Romanian national costume, practising authentic dance steps for Dumbala Dumba. Apparently she nipped over to Timisoara on her two days off and went to the festival of “Arm Dancing, Ethnic Leaping And Intenational Dumba Enunciation”, and put some real graft in. Consequently the Labsters have a  much more genuine swagger to the movement, and the Rickmanesque lack of consonants has likewise been eradicated.

Incidentally, the team from FilmLab I, are coming on sunday and have Bated us, literally, to indulge in a Bowie-Off. They’ll sing their Bowie song and the current Labsters will do their own. I think there’s a telephone poll on national tv to decide the winners, or something, but anyway, I think we should go for this…

The plotting and scheming of the Stephen and The Clearyettes seemed to have paid off handsomely. The Teams have been set bespoke projects which focus on aspects of their proposed films in a practical way. Already we’ve had acting impros being filmed, documentaries made on the arcane science of omlette making, three page short stories commissioned and executed in an afternoon. The level of industry is as exciting as the cooperation is impressive! There’s much more to come through the week, and this is a week that we will wish had more than seven days to it – which would finish off our disoriented body-clocks for once and for all.

—-

The groups walked, like powdered French aristocratic dandies, to the music of Handel. Producers took the lead in introducing the directors and writers. It was a status bloodbath out there on the floor, some strutting around like storks, others windmilling the air and some even tumbling around on the floor. It was like Barry Lyndon on acid.

Choir is starting to make a really strong sound. The harmony work was tough, but everyone got the hang of listening first, singing second and then the sound improved enormously. There are people in there who I can hear are not used to singing, at least perhaps not outside of their own bathrooms, but they are working and hanging in – I hope they can hear how much they have improved.

—-

Decided I’d leave the building and go for a walk today before the presentations. So after a quick chat about the excellent Pavlova with Sonya, I meandered around the perimeter of SAFC in the bright sunshine. Soon the air was filled with the unmistakable aroma of bacon cooking, and as this clearly wasn’t Sonya’s doing I came to the conclusion that it was my own pale Northern European skin grilling in the light.

So, before I fried to death, I sat down in the shade of a tree outside SAFC.

It was delightful. The trees were practising their own version of Tai-chi in the wind. I sat and listened to the squeaky gate  conversations of a group of Australian Magpies. I mulled on what was about to come. All day it seems, the Labsters have been plotting, scheming and working in  determined cadres throughout the building. Everyone appears a little apprehensive, but hungry for the benefit of the outcome.

I was full of admiration for the way they all planned to take risks and try things out publicly for the sake of their projects.

—-

What a way to spend three and a half hours! I’d pay to see that in a theatre. A stream of ideas, narratively worked out to varying degrees, but all revealing the passion of the film maker. All in different styles and done with conviction. I was proud of how everyone stepped up and put themselves on the line for their work.

Congratulations to absolutely everyone.

—-

One of the great things about FilmLab is the way this enriched environment emerges. The SAFC is currently populated with aspirational, and therefore inspirational, film makers. As a group they hold wide variety of insights and points of view on a range of stories. They similarly have a wide range of approaches. And all share a resolute determination to do whatever it takes to get the thing done.

This produces the kind of environment that makes even the casual observer (or the even more casual tutor) want to run out and make a film. The ethos of the SAFC is comparable to that of a university in the age of enlightenment; the key issues being ruthlessly hunted down and understood, questions asked and the answers re-interrogated. More to the point its the Labsters themselves who generate this environment through their generosity and mutual support – the hallmarks of the highest artistic sensibility. These Labsters want the best. Not just for themselves, but for anyone who pursues the best. Nobody is a rival, they are happy to see anything succeed if it aspires to quality.

Can’t wait to do more next week.

Ok Day Four…

kicked off with Kerri bringing in a huge bag of home grown lemons – following a discussion we had about the juggling balls. So I took one of the lemons and have just had it in my tea. Superb!

While all that was going on the Labsters were beavering away in nooks and crannies throughout the SAFC. Plans were being drafted and redrafted, and there is a sense of something big hanging in the air. And indeed there is. Tomorrow the teams will make presentations about films which don’t yet exist, without necessarily having developed the stories in them or without fully understanding how they’ll shoot them yet.

What they are trying to communicate is an aesthetic – the impulses and sensibilities that the film will contain. The emotions it will provoke in audiences, the rationales they will work from. All of this is scary stuff at this stage of a project’s development. So my over-riding feeling today was of looking at a group of people who were brave – in addition to all their other gifts and qualities. Or at least they were preparing to be brave….

It’s by no means certain, of course, that bravery will be enough to guarantee success, but it is a sine qua non for all endeavour in general, and artistic endeavour in particular. Good luck Labsters, and bear in mind the benefits you’ll gain from this – no matter how the presentation itself turns out.

Now then.

Something else happened today in the group singing. Suddenly the spirit of the Red Army Choir visited the tenors and basses. Chests were thrust out, air was sucked in and a great vocal booming carried the harmony line in SOtR. Phones rang in the Kremlin, and apparently airplanes were scrambled as far away as Vladivostock. The girls were so impressed they applauded spontaneously. At last they have a fitting counterpart to some of the sound they’ve been making this week.

So. In the same spirit I’ve dug out the Russian National Anthem, and we’ll sing it – in Russian – next week.

Oh come on, the Romanian song was a doddle!!!

Good luck for tomorrow Labsters!

Da Sweedanya…