Karen Corbett SCRIPT (for performance)

Premise: “In the pressure of a technologically mediated world, writing for performance can connect us with our shared humanity”

Dominant Action: Connecting Setting: Creative Writing Symposium in a young university, Key Note Address

Character: The Performance Writer Goal: To inspire an appreciation of the unique properties of writing for

performance through performance.

Obstacles: Thwarting the expectations of a Key Note Address in an academic environment. Lack of time. One hour time limit. Self imposed strictures of experiential learning. Grappling with the basic concepts of performance writing in an entertaining way that opens vistas for the audience.

Intentional Actions:

Entertain, Connect, Enthuse, Share, Perform, Play/Toy, Enjoy

Stakes: Communication, connection, humanity.

ACT ONE Scene One

PERFORMANCE WRITER:

(Voice Off, Singing)

Michelle Pena Herrera, Nalvia Rosa Mena Alvarado, Cecilia Castro Salvadores, Ida Amelia Almarza

(Enters room)

Hay una mujher desaparecida Hay una mujher desaparecida En Chile, en Chile, en Chile,

(Comes centre stage, connects with audience)

Clare Elena Cantero Elisa Del Carmen Escobar Eliana Maria Espinosa 1 Rosa Elena Morales . . .

PERFORMANCE WRITER:

As Cixous said, we must have a dead woman in order to begin. With this song I have conjured up several dead women so that we can start. These are the names of women who were disappeared in Chile. Theatre is very good at conjuring up the dead and also conjuring up those who have never lived and, who perhaps should have.

Scripts are maps of energy. Just like the weather map on telly, the written words on the page are not the experience, they are not the real thing. No more than a weather map can convey the feeling of Melbourne on a 24 degree, sunny, summer’s day can a script convey the experience of being in an audience watching a play.

The words are the tip of the iceburg., while the bulk of the ice- burg, the bit that sinks the Titanic, is below the surface, unseen, until you run into it in a performance and you experience it’s might and its impact.

As I was writing up this script last night, or rather in the wee hours of this morning, and after going through all the notes of my course in Writing for Performance

1 Written by Holly Near

I realised that I was reinventing the wheel and came to the same conclusion I came to more than a decade ago, namely that I should talk to you about what is unique about performance writing. Once again I decided to focus on the smallest unit of craft that can be used in a myriad of ways to create scripts from theatre to television to film and that distinguishes performance writing from other genres.

That smallest unit is ‘Intentional Action’. Intentional Action creates energy between actors and between actors and their audience. The quality of energy and mood in the theatre or on the screen will fluctuate depending on the Intentional Action chosen by the writer, the actor and director, and in film, the editor. And while the writer needs to understand this concept, performance writing is always a collaborative affair and writing a script means writing a map of energy, a blue print for the circulation of energy that will be realised by a host of other professionals who will all contribute and fill out your blue print.

A great précis of intentional action, also known as Stanislavsky’s ‘method of physical actions’ is in Mammet: “True and False”, the section on Stanislavsky.

You are writing for bodies I space, you are writing for actors, they are called actors because they act, they take action . They are not, as many young actors imagine, be-ors. They do not be, they do. People can Be angry, Be depressed, Be sad or Be happy. But what are the ACTIONS of anger, happiness, sadness, depression? It is the actor’s job to execute the actions of these states of being. If you ask an actor to ‘be angry’ as the character, you will most likely get a lot of huffing and puffing and shouting that is quite painful to watch. Similarly if you tell them their character ‘is depressed’ you are likely to get an actor who mopes continually on stage. But if you write that actions of, for example anger, then you will be swept away by the character as they ‘belittle’ the other character, or as they ‘threaten’, ‘mock’, ‘tease’, ‘wound’, ‘humiliate’ or ‘intimidate’ him or her.

Here is a formula to work out if an action is intentional or not when writing for performance:

Ask yourself what action the character is doing as though you were the character. Use the formula below to test it out and see if it is an intentional action/verb.

“I - - - - you & you (plural)” “I - - - - them, it, him, her” “I - - - - myself, us”

(PERFORMANCE WRITER sequentially focuses on various audience members to make her point as she enacts her examples)

“I sooth you” “I chastise them” “I berate myself “

“I deride you” “I praise him” “I bolster myself”

“I baffle you” “I study her” “I judge us”

“I crave you” “I frustrate it” “I blame myself”

“I niggle you” “I flaunt it” “I humour him”

“I nurture you” “I derail it” “I scrutinise myself”

These are the actions that drive drama, they provide the subtext for your dialogue. They give the actors something to do. When you know what one character is doing to either themselves or the audience or another character then the dialogue is much easier.

The stronger your verbs the more vibrant the world of your play. The more vibrant the world and its energy the deeper the exchange with the audience.

(Here PREFORMANCE WRITER turns to her notes, mutters to herself. She appears lost, to have ‘lost it’. She begins by quietly muttering then builds )

Where is it? Oh dear. Don’t tell me . . . Oh this is embarrassing, I can’t have . . . Damn! Shit! – Oh sorry, It’s just –

(Pause)

How was the energy? Feel it change?

(She gets audience’s feed back)

Yes, you can really feel when energy changes. We feel it viscerally when we are ‘in sync’ with someone else because our mirror neurons are switched on and we internally mimic what that person is doing and feeling. Some people experience this acutely and more deeply than others, but, basically we all do it.

When writing for performance we are writing to switch on the audience’s mirror neurons through activating the actor’s energies.

It is alchemical writing for a transient experience.

Intentional action is the smallest unit of energy that drives through a play. It is activated by the character’s desire to attain a goal and to overcome the obstacles that prevent the attainment of that goal. Whether we, the audience, care usually depends on what is at stake for the character and whether we are interested in the character.

So let’s look at Goals & Obstacles, Stakes and Characters.

How many of you found the first series of ABC’s Bed of Roses, unsatisfying?

(PERFORMANCE WRITER solicits response)

That first series provides a good example of characters striving for goals and being presented with obstacles, but the tension and connection with the show leaked away when the obstacles magically dissipated and were overcome with no effort, no mistakes. Hence the audience felt no sense of achievement, no sense of overcoming trials and hence little satisfaction when watching the series. The great acting and direction made it watch-able, and there are sometimes in life when we don’t mind watching easy achievements, but the lack of struggle to overcome obstacles in this show led to many viewers feeling unfulfilled.

Characters always WANT something.

We find out who they are, what sort of person they are by the way they pursue their goals and how they overcome the obstacles that get in their way.

CHARACTERS are their actions, they are what they do.

Writers have various ways of discovering their characters, and often for script writers we listen for our character’s voices in our heads. Sometimes we get up and pace and ‘try on’ their walk,

their body. Or we will do as Edward Albee does and not write a word until you know which Laundromat your character would use and who they would meet there, what time of day they would go, what they would read while there, what sort of donuts they would eat.

Actors often make great writers because they feel a character in their body, they hear the character’s voice and speak their dialogue while they pace or prance around the room in their character’s ‘shoes’ so to speak. In this way their characters not only come to them but also develop.

As Alan Ayckbourn once said “The characters have to be allowed to control their own

destinies. I sometimes say to one of them, “I wish you’d leave the stage, because that would give me a nice neat ending”. And he refuses to go, and the ending is bungled. But then you are left with something much more interesting” (New York Times, 1979).

But, no matter what approach you take to creating your characters in scripts your audience will know them and relate to them through their actions. How they behave in the shared time and space of the performance, be it on film or on stage. We know them through their intentional actions. We know them through the choices you make as a writer, the choices you make as to how they will deal with a situation, which choices they make in order to deal with whatever obstacle you have put in their path. Let’s say I have a divorced, middle aged, female painter who hasn’t had an exhibition for a 5 years due to the chronic illness of her 22 year old daughter. The bills are mounting, she hasn’t paid the mortgage because she had to give up her part time teaching job to care for her daughter and she is at risk of losing the house. (The Stakes) She decides to hold an exhibition of the paintings she’s been doing in the early hours of the morning to wind down before bed. (Immediate Goal) (Her long term goal, Super Objective is to cure her daughter) A gallery is interested but it will cost her money she doesn’t have to rent the space and frame the paintings. (Obstacle) Now you the writer decide WHO SHE IS by how you chose she will handle it. Maybe she paints day and night in a frenzy, (between caring for her daughter) deciding to sell the paintings unframed and take the risk that she’ll sell enough to cover the rent. She’s painted heaps, enough, if she sells them to cover gallery rent and the mortgage. She has a meeting with the gallery owner who says she won’t accept unframed paintings. What sort of character do you have? We will know by her actions. Maybe she gets angry (after all she’s not sleeping) and BLAMES the gallery owner for not supporting her, for being rigid, for being too conservative. Maybe she RIDICULES the gallery owner for being so conservative and behind the times. Maybe she CITES examples of other gallery owners who accept this practice etc.

OR maybe she CAVES IN, maybe she she’s been pushed too far and without sleep (GIVEN CIRCUMSTANCES) she quietly says OK , she GIVES UP and either jumps off a bridge or goes back to the Ashram and meditates.

I don’t know, she’s your character, you decide. th And characters don’t have to be in a ‘story’ hiding behind the 4

wall, with the actors pretending the audience isn’t there. Maybe they can see the audience and talk to them? What are their goals, obstacles and intentional actions then?

In my play Orphanage of the Animals, the characters have no story, that’s the point. They see the audience and vie for the audience’s attention, (GOAL) it’s the nearest thing to love they can hope for. Their OBSTACLE is that their parents don’t want them or can’t love them or their parent’s love is utterly inadequate. So they spend a lot of time on stage PLEASING, THREATENING, CAJOLING and WOOING the audience into listening to them, getting their attention (INTENTIONAL ACTION).

Next we come to what holds it all together. Every dramatist knows the search for a Dramatic Spine. This is where the notion of a Premise is your friend. This is what unites a transient, temporal experience, giving it cohesion. This concept works for every style of play.

A story is essentially, what happened. It is a series of: this happened, then this happened, then this happened. Some people call this episodic. Some writers hope that a theme will hold their writing together and give it cohesion. Maybe in print this works. In print the reader can go back, put down and return to the writing. If they don’t understand something, if they realise they missed a detail or a foundation concept they can flick the pages and retrieve the information, the idea, the feeling. In scripts the movement is ever onwards, even in a meditative dream play the audience don’t stop the production if they’ve missed something. And that’s the beauty of the medium too. Writing for ephemeral, transient experience. Writing for an exchange of energies that can never be repeated, ever.

Lajos Egri in The Art of Dramatic writing in 1946 wrote cogently about Premise. Read the whole chapter, it’s great! I don’t have time to go into it here but He’s said it all. There are two understandings of the concept of premise, however, and yo need to be aware of the different meanings. In film, ‘premise’ is usually understood as the situation that the film is building on, what went before. In theatre we call this the given circumstances of the play but in film writing circles, premise is usually the term they use for this.

Even in theatre, very few people understand the term, the concept of a dramatic spine has far more currency. In this

writer’s opinion, premise serves you admirably for any form of performance writing and puts you ahead of the pack. I suspect that the concept can even work for the post modern writer however, in this case it is not the script that articulates the premise but rather it is the writer’s own premise, maybe about their relationship to a particular script or to writing in general. Think about it as a possibility and play with it.

Here are some examples of Premise as it operates in different plays. King Lear: Blind trust leads to destruction Hamlet: The person who delays taking action in the present by scrutinising the actions of the past has no future.

Godot: Life is a process of filling time and trying to endow this filling with meaning whilst waiting for the real meaning of life to be revealed. Romeo and Juliet 1. Great love defies even death. (Hollywood premise)

Romeo and Juliet 2. Love cannot survive in an atmosphere where it is not valued. (Baz Lurhmann’s premise)

As a writer you need to know your premise by the time you start editing and before you show it to anyone other your best buddy who “gets” you and your work regardless. Premise is your most important editing tool, it provides the criteria for editing, for knowing what is extraneous and what is vital to your play.

Here a few words about structure seem appropriate. Luce Irigaray talks about the idea of morphology, that writing can trace either a masculine or feminine libidinal economy. In general, action films trace a masculine libidinal economy, otherwise recognised as ‘The Hero’s Journey’. (See Chris Vogler on The Hero’s Journey. The Australian Writer’s Guild has several copies.) This structure usually consists of with Induction, Complication, Reversal, Climax and Denouement. Writers who use this structure often work out their ending first and write to it. The other libidinal economy is feminine. A great example of this structure is Helene Cixous’ ‘Portrait of Dora’, about Freud’s famous analysand, ‘Dora’. Originally written as a radio play, it has no linear storyline and consists of a series of mini climaxes, little exploding moments that rumble through the script and really take advantage of the ephemeral and transient nature of live performance. When we consider more recent postmodern plays, structure is really up for grabs. A wonderful of example of a brilliant postmodern play is Caryl Churchill’s “Far Away”. Heavily influenced by Brecht, Churchill creates three discreet episodes that inform each other through their juxtaposition. It scrutinises the way war corrodes character, morals, relationships while brilliantly revealing the madness inherent in war and the paranoia it induces. Deftly she illustrates this by coopting different species into the war, with cats on one side and crocodiles on another, where even light, coffee and gravity take sides and can kill you. In the final scene one of the characters explains that “It wasn’t the birds I was frightened of, it was the weather, the weather

here’s on the side of the Japanese. . . And the Bolivians are working with gravity . . .” 2

It’s almost time to go but I can’t leave without a word about language. (PERFORMANCE WRITER performs a reading of a brief extract of Lady Mac

Beth, Act 1 Scene 5 )

Whoever wrote Shakespeare, be it the Bard himself, his company, another bloke or his wife, was a very clever bod indeed. I don’t know if you noticed but the language actually directs the actor. The vowels provide the emotion while the consonants provide energy and direction. In those opening couple of lines the vowels perform what is called, in acting circles, a ‘vowel scale’.

(PERFORMANCE WRITER demonstrates again and shows how the vowels start at a high pitch and gradually descend during the lines and how the consonants guide them and together they create the image of the descent of the “raven that croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan under my battlements”, with the raven landing under her sex. PERFORMANCE WRITER reads a section from Beckett’s ‘Waiting For Godot’, pages 62 and 63 to demonstrate a similar use of language from a more recent play.)

Thank you for your time and I may the energy force be with you!

Epilogue: (Which has become Program Notes)

COMMON MISTAKES :-

Exposition: Need hardly any, if at all. Give the audience some credit and above all give them a job!!!!! Give them the clues and let them work out what has gone on before. They come to the theatre to work, otherwise they would have gone to the movies.

Dialogue Illustrating action.

In the early nineties, I was performing in the first play written by an award winning novelist. The stage directions told me to pick up a cardboard cylinder and as I held it up my dialogue was something like: Blah blah blah (picks up cylinder) “and gave me one like this cylinder here”. The novelist didn’t trust that as an actor I would be seen holding the cylinder, either that or he didn’t trust that I would follow the stage directions and pick up the cylinder. If he had the dialogue would have read ““and gave me one like this”.

Lockstep dialogue: Not leaving any gaps or allowing for jumps in dialogue. If you listen carefully to two people speaking you will notice that they often don’t actually answer each other or logically extend the topic of conversation. Often people will have a conversation as though they are each speaking their own

2 Pg 36

monologue, in their own little world, and only “vibrating” off each other. This can make for great tension, quirky and captivating dialogue and the lack of predicability draws the audience in and makes them work. But how could the audience make sense of such a conversation? Do they have to? Or, will they see the actors bodies as they hear the dialogue? What effect could that have? If Mr 87 and his wife Mrs 84 are voicing their own monologues maybe it is her hand, reaching out and touching his at a particular disjuncture that makes us realise that they know each other inside out and don’t need, after 60 years together, to talk “about” anything much anymore.

No Dramatic Spine (Premise): just telling a story –this happened then this happened then this happened, episodic.

Narrators: Never use Narrators instead of intentional action Not grasping Given Circumstances and how they change with style.

Number of characters (in theatre): Only have the number you absolutely need, use actors to double up. Each actor costs your production $1,000 per week, you don’t need an actor to walk on as a waiter to establish a restaurant setting, instead use a black stage with one pin spot on a couple at a table, the audience aren’t as thick as we often think.

Silence: Even writing for performance genres, many writers’ imagine that the words have to do all the work. In performance writing we have to leave space for the performers bodies to carry the bulk of the meaning. This means that the lack of words, or silence, is not a void, a bottomless pit, but rather a space of potential like no other. This is where the actor’s body can speak more eloquently than our words. Try writing various scenes using only the same one short line of dialogue. Allow the action and the actors’ bodies to create the different subtexts for that one line of dialogue and then see them perform it in you mind until you can get real actors to do it for you. Harold Pinter has stage directions such as ‘a silence long enough to make a cup of tea’. This isn’t because he got tired! So much happens during Pinter Pauses, the balance of power usually shifts between characters during these pauses.

Stage directions for the heck of it:

Stage directions are different to the director’s task of ‘blocking’ a scene and moving actors about a stage. New performance writers often writes stage directions because they feel the need to see movement on the stage, movement anywhere, for the sake of movement, regardless of what is driving the scene.

Stage directions either move the action on, precipitate a change in the direction of the dialogue, or reveal something about the characters (as above). Another use for stage directions is metaphoric. I had a student once who wrote a gorgeous short play about deaf girl and her mother. The stage directions had the mother crossing behind the couch on which the deaf girl spent all her time. The mother only crossed the stage from stage right to

stage left in the morning and then stage left to stage right in the evening. The mother was tracing the path of the sun rising and setting around the daughter, an eloquent way to convey the central role the child played in her life, even though the dialogue was angry and they did little but quarrel.

The deadly “I remember . . .” monologue: The action of “remembering” or “recalling” is very difficult for an actor to make interesting for very long on stage. Often actors love “remembering” as an action but if it goes on for more than a few seconds the energy on stage and between the audience drops, it loses momentum and directors tend to fill up the dying energy with ‘pretty pictures’, the sort that take the focus off the actor and the script. When the focus goes off the actor who is speaking, that actor is likely to start ‘manufacturing’ emotion as they feel that they are losing their audience. This results in corny acting or antics never intended by the writer, or do as an actor friend of mine did every time there was a lull, cry! Whether the script called for it or not. Actors HATE to feel their audience slipping away and will do anything in their power to get them back, regardless of what it may do to the play.

To Remember is a weak verb, novels ‘remember’ much better than plays.

World of the play, The Rules that govern the world of the play need to be consistent. In realism the world is governed by the same laws that we experience, in Magic Realism (such as Angels in America or my own play Viva La Vida Frida Kahlo) angels can appear and change the effect of a cause. Example: in the real world and in Realism, if you step in front of a bus you will get hit and most likely die or suffer terrible injuries, but in Magic Realism an angel may step in between you and the bus and stop the bus in its tracks. Or in Frida, there were two Fridas, Mexican and European Frida. While European Frida was in bed convalescing from a bus accident Mexican Frida stuck a brush in her hand and forced her to paint on the easel on her bed, meanwhile, downstage the image they painted was being assembled in 3 D by unseen puppeteers. In this production giant snails, foetus’s and pelvic bones floated from European Frida’s stomach by red ribbons.

In Realism if a character doesn’t have the rent money they are evicted, money is one of the governing powers in the world of Realism. In Shakespearean tragedy the king is the highest power and life or death are determined by the king’s pleasure. In a naturalistic play such as 12 Angry Men it is the judicial system that wields the power, hence the importance of deliberating the case so carefully.

Voice Over. Never use Voice Over instead of intentional action