A week's break... and such a lot happens

I'm back after a week's half-term break in Dorset, during which time I mulled over the current script in the light of the work Alison and I had done the previous week, when we erected a (very) temporary stage and looked at the setting for the production. It's always far easier for me to picture how a script will work once a staging layout has been clarified.

As a result a number of significant changes have been made - clarifying the filmed and animated sections; adding a large horse puppet at two important parts of the story; changing a 'story within a story' section in order to help the narrative; and adding some new visual twists and turns. I discussed this new version with Alison this morning and I've now sent off copies to our main collaborators. 

Alison has tonsillitis and went home early, preparing to think about the Rashin Coatie story we're incorporating into the show. She clearly had been doing some research because within a few hours she sent me a link to another blog - http://grasspuppet.blogspot.com/ (which unfortunately seems to have dried up in 2008). The blog was written by Jumaadi, an Indonesian living in Australia whose father taught him how to make puppets from grass when he was 6:

During this period Esther travelled north, meeting Joyce Laing once more at the Art Extraordinary Gallery in Pittenweem, Fife, and further discussing how we can use Joyce's knowledge of Angus and her collection of his work; as well as the possibility of using her voice as a 'narrator' within the show. Esther also saw the National Theatre of Scotland's 'The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart' which she raved about, and visited The Maltings in Berwick-Upon-Tweed. All this in the course of developing contacts and links for a potential tour of the Angus show.

Progress

This is the (very) rough set Alison and I have created in our workshop. We've done this in order  to work out the heights and levels we'll need as playing areas, and from that in turn we've worked out what size of puppets we'll need to make. In the course of doing this we were also able to decide on a number of other things - so the upper level (above the bar) will be a crawl floor which will enable us to operate marionettes from that level; equally we liked this unbleached, stained, fabric quality (Anselm Kiefer again). Each of the cloths can act as a screens for projections, film and lights, so much of the eventual colour we use in the production will achieved through the use of light and projection.

The whole exercise was an excuse, too, to go through the script and look at, in a very broad brush-stroke way, how the story would unfold on a stage. Doing this, a number of things were - as ever - changed, or added to. 

As a result of this work we have been able to prioritise the jobs we'll start on (next week). Alison on a puppet of Angus as a boy and a similar 'sister' puppet. I'll start making three masks representing Angus - one as a handsome young man, one in middle-age, and one as an old man. I'll also be able to send the dimensions of the set to Chris Spears on Berneray so he can create the wood frames that will enable us to reproduce this rough, full-size, 'model' set in the Community Hall on the island. The other piece of news was hearing, last night, that the hall committee have agreed to hire us their hall for a week in May.

Work begins..

Images from Deep Time Cabaret 2008

Work on Angus started last week; though slowly. Alison and I found two half-days to talk about the script, and Esther is in Scotland, starting to talk about a tour of the show. Next week we'll clear out our workshop and start for real - making a space for a stage area, and beginning perhaps to make puppets and masks.

We spent a lot of the time talking about the set; about how it might work; its feel and its look. I brought in a book about the work of Anselm Kiefer, the German painter whose work I admire. I hope that the set will have the feel of some of his work - the worn, tired but not exhausted look of it. In particular it'll be about how the films will work projected onto the stage cloths. Not using pristine and taut sheets, but slightly tainted and knocked around fabric, combined with rich black and white film. It emerged from our discussions that the design should use colour carefully, placing occasional rich textures against a general muted monochrome, and using straw or grasses among muds and dust as a playing floor.

One of our starting points is the set for 'Deep Time Cabaret', a show that we developed for touring in 2008. The subject and approach will be very different, but there is something about the organic way the DTC set (above) developed - the mixture of simple forms, rough fabric drapes, and projections, that will be similar to the Angus work. We will also use suspended lamps, hand-held cameras and levels within the stage that can be easily transformed by the cast. 

Angus at Craig Dunain

From 'The Voice of the Bard' by Timothy Neat 1999. pub. Canongate (with the authors permission):

"Angus McPhee was an unusual artist. What happened is this, at Craig Dunain, Angus was set to work on the asylum farm but he was always wandering off into the woods, and he was allowed to do this. And there in the wood he made rope and clothes and boots and shoes and harness and reins for horses, out of grass! He made them out of hay, wool, twigs and leaves, anything he could find. And this kept him quiet. He was so strong he could be dangerous. He was schizophrenic but, working at his ropes, he became as meek as a lamb and the staff let him get on with it. He used to hang what he made up on trees and in hedges and stack them under the rhododendron bushes. Over the months and years they rotted away into compost.

"He had this compulsion to be useful, to earn his keep. He had a dedicated sense of service. He must have remembered how his father had made ropes of grass and heather, how he'd helped his sisters carding wool, how they'd made horse-bridals and collars out of marram - so, in his madness, he made length after length of string and rope. Then he would weave these ropes into hats and cloaks and leggings, knapsacks, holdalls, and strange things that look like giant horns. He made needles out of wire and knitted vests from the wool he collected from the thorn hedges. He made trousers out of beech leaves and tobacco pouches out of birch and great sea-boots out of hay. He lived in a world of his own but it was also a world like the past, like the old days Mairi Mhor wrote about in her song:

When Martinmas came

And the livestock and crops were all put away,

The men would be making their ropes of heather

And the rush-bags stacked in a heap

By the clamp built high for potatoes,

And the barrel would be full of salt-meat:

That's how things were for us,

Growing up in the Island of the Mist."

As told by the bard John MacAskill of Blackpoint, Grimsay, North Uist. The photographs by Tim Neat are of sculptured weavings by Angus McPhee from the undergrowth of Craig Dunain Hospital, Inverness.

Planning our work

Now that I'm able to plan things in a little more detail, I've had another discussion with Chris Spears about the use of Berneray Community Hall in May. We're trying to arrive at a fee for hiring the space for a week. The hall committee meet in a few weeks time, and I hope that we can come to some agreement at that time.

Berneray map: Wikitravel Image Repository Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 1.0.

The hall is at Borve (Borgh) to the NNE of Loch Bhuirgh, numbered 3 on the map above (if you can read it), and Chris lives on the edge of the Loch. Everything is very close by, a short walk away, and it may well be that when we get to having visitors they will stay at the hostel at East Beach (no.6).

The plan is that I travel up and work with Chris to create a rough version of the set, accompanied by Loz Kaye, the Musical Director on the production, who will work with musicians from Lews Castle College Learning Centre on Benbecula. By the end of the week we will be joined by other artists and performers working on the show - Alison Duddle, my colleague and co-director at Horse + Bamboo Theatre; Mark Whitaker, a puppeteer who we hope will be in the final show; and Joanne B Kaar, who will be making the woven costumes and other performing objects for the production. We'll have some of the masks and puppets to work with; possibly even some film material, so we should be able to achieve a lot in a few days of workshopping. 

View across to Berneray harbour; with seals. 

We could easily do this work at our base in Lancashire but it makes real sense to do it on the islands. First it will introduce some our cast to the Outer Hebrides; it will also be far easier for Chris, who lives on Berneray and Joanne, who lives way north on the mainland (near Dunnet by Thurso in Caithness), and the musicians, to meet up with the rest of us here. 

Most importantly we're able to cross the various causeways and visit the place on North Uist where Angus was born and lived until he went away to fight in the Second World War (and, of course, to where he returned after 50 years away). 

Finally I want the set to have a strongly organic feel - not to be a rigid structure of painted theatre flats and screens, but to use local materials to help create a framework where wires or ropes tensioned by heavy rocks can support cloth screens. This will take experiment and probably some  beach-combing, but it's certainly something best done in this island environment. 

The bard John MacAskill

It crossed my mind to find something more about the photographer who had taken the evocative photographs of Angus during his last years back in Uist (see recent blogs). In doing this I came across not only the photographs but the writing of Timothy Neat and, in particular, a very special book 'The Voice of the Bard': Living Poets and Ancient Tradition in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland'.

It's a lovely book, larger than I expected, and takes the form of interviews or biographical portraits, written in the first person, with a dozen or so bards - poets and singers who continue a rich and ancient tradition but are rarely heard outside of their own communities. It also has a short essay on the history of the bardic tradition by Dr John MacInnes. It's available at the moment (via Amazon) at the amazing bargain price of £9.99.

One of the bards portrayed in the book is John MacAskill, of Grimsay, North Uist, and he talks about Angus MacPhee "many men went away with the Lovat Scouts in both world wars. One of them came back to South Uist last year after more than 50 years away. His name is Angus MacPhee and he was from Iochdar. It's beautiful story. We saw a man talking about him on the television." He goes on to tell this story in his own way, making powerful points through his use of language "...he was brought back by aeroplane, all those years after he set out on his horse."

John MacAskill ends his piece with this.

"When I heard the story of Angus MacPhee, it's a very strange thing, but a lullaby came into my mind. Its called 'Blue Donald's Lullaby' and it used to be sung by Mrs Archie MacDonald, up in South Uist. She's dead these many years. It's a lovely song, and it's very old."

The sun rising

And it without a spot on it,

Nor on the stars

When the son of my King

Comes fully armed,

The strength of the universe with you,

The strength of the sun

And the strength of the bull

That leaps highest.

That woman asked

Another woman,

What ship is that

Close to the shoreline?

It's Donald's ship,

Three masts of willow on it,

A rudder of gold on it,

A well of wine in it,

A well of pure water in it. 

(Trad. trans. HH)

The current plan

Angus McPhee drinking coffee at Uist House, the care home on South Uist where he lived after returning to the island after his long, long stay at Craig Dunain psychiatric hospital near Inverness. From Joyce Laing's book 'Weaver of Grass' (photo: Tim Neat).

The plan: Once our current shows are up and running, Alison and I will start working on 'Angus'. Between now and May we'll each find at least a months work to spend on the show - probably masks and puppets will be the first things we make. Some of the puppets required are complex - in particular a set of marionettes for the scene when the young Angus sets off to join the Lovat Scouts at the outset of the war. These I imagine will be carved in wood, and possibly by Alison who has got into wood-carving in a big way over the past year and more... Meanwhile, I'll probably start by creating a series of masks of Angus McPhee himself; masks that represent Angus at different stages of his life.

The plan is to then for us to take these to the Outer Hebrides early this summer, along with our musical director, Loz Kaye, and using Berneray Community Hall as a base for a short time, to start developing the staging for the show and beginning to look at how the different formal elements - the masks and puppets, song, music, film, woven pieces - might all come and work together. At this point we'll meet up with some of the other artists working on the development of the piece - Chris Spears and Joanne B Kaar. I'll also continue with this work throughout the summer months.

Helen and Esther will meantime be working on raising the funding to enable us to continue the work. By April 2012 we'll put together a more formal presentation at Taigh Chearsabhagh of our work in progress as a public exhibition. At this point the Foyle Foundation grant runs out and we'll  

Then the final making period will start at our base in Rossendale in preparation for a tour from July to September 2012. This happening will depend on how successful Helen has been in raising funding support to allow us to finish the making and then to undertake rehearsals. The final part of the funding jigsaw is in the organising and selling of the tour itself, and this is where Esther's work is crucial, and will need to start before we're too long into 2011.