Sunday, December 14, 2014
The Good Fairy And The Voice Of The Future
I have a facebook friend who has a part in a pantomime. He’s posted before and after pictures of himself: dressed in his street clothes, and in make-up and costume.
The make up makes him look both more than his usual self - brighter, handsomer, more engaging - and also, strangely more like his real self. More like the inner self he maybe feels himself to be, somewhere, as we all do, yet which in normal life he never quite manages to manifest.
Looking at him made me remember my first panto - Bristol Hippodrome 1962 - which was also my first experience of professional theatre.
And how that was what I most loved: the fact that the people on stage were recognisably people and yet also so much more. Funnier, more full of love and pathos, brighter. More vivid. Bigger. More alive.
And maybe that's how I still want my characters to be...
He’s playing Buttons from the look of him. Buttons who I used to love and feel so very sorry for. And -absurdly - I found myself feeling a pang of envy. Sadness, too: that I’ll never get to play Buttons. Not ever…
Another facebook friend, also in pant, is playing the Good Fairy. She shared a lovely story of how she was holding a little girl’s hand on stage just after the song sheet and the girl looked at her and asked:
“Are you real?”
And she thought about it a moment and then said
“Yes”.
And then felt guilty about it, but didn’t need to.
Because of course she was. Absolutely real.
And I realised I also wanted to play the Good Fairy…
I seem to have spent a lot of energy this past week reading pant reviews and struggling with the same regretful pang.
And the same anger, too:
That an incompetent and malicious music teacher made me ashamed of my singing voice; and that a viciously prejudiced culture made me ashamed of my whole self.
But I won’t feel sad.
I’m sitting down on the plane to study Nova’s amazing, beautiful and visionary speech from Peter Handke’s “The Long Way Round” which Chris Goode wants me to perform in a reading.
A reading that forms part of his project to form a permanent Company.
It’s not quite the Good Fairy: but it is the voice of New Age, and it really excites and inspires me.
Though I doubt Chris’ll give me a big frock….
Labels: Chris Goode, panto, transgender
Tuesday, April 01, 2014
Feeling happy in The Albemarle Sketchbook
This is me onstage in the Courtyard Theatre of The West Yorkshire Playhouse last Sunday.
I’m with the rest of the cast of Chris Goode’s “The Albemarle Sketchbook” and we’ve just done our first run on stage. I’m feeling happy, I think we all are, because the run has gone well and we’re going to perform the show in a couple of hours and we know it’s going to be something special.
And it was.
I’m wearing a print frock of a kind I wouldn’t normally wear because I’m playing Chris’s mother. And it’s good we’re all feeling happy because this is a show about happiness. It’s inspired by a happy dream Chris once had and it’s a lovely, tender, thoughtful piece of work that in its own very special and quiet kind of way is profoundly revolutionary.
I feel especially happy because, without being rude to all the lovely studio theatres I’ve performed in, this is a real grown up theatre and this is the first time I’ve performed on a grown-up stage.
And that makes me happy because so many years ago I discovered theatre by acting in plays, and playing women’s parts, and I loved it. I felt I completely belonged and I didn’t feel shy and frightened any more.
And that was when I finally understood about all the feelings of strangeness and not belonging to my own body and wanting to play with girl’s toys and wanting to wear girl’s clothes and knew I wanted to be a girl.
And knew that was utterly impossible, because we’re talking fifty years ago and all I knew about men in women’s clothes were the dames in the pantomime, and how ridiculous they were, and the young man in “Psycho” and how sick and evil he was, and I felt I must be sick and evil and ridiculous all at once and knew I couldn’t tell anybody and the only thing I could do was try my very best to be normal.
And that didn’t work out very well, it never does, and I did want to keep on acting but when I went for boy’s parts I was stiff and shy and embarrassed and completely hopeless and that is why I have spent most of my adult life absolutely convinced that acting and performing were things I absolutely could not do and they were completely not for me.
But theatre obviously was. There was something absolutely compelling about it; because even though theatre had become a place of terror and shame I was totally drawn to it, in spite of myself, and it became the subject of my Phd and eventually, 15 years later, by a serious of outrageous accidents, writing for it became my profession.
And even though looking back on it it seems clear that becoming a playwright was probably not my true path, in a way, but a response to blockage, I am so proud I did it and so proud of what I achieved.
Working in theatre has been so important to my learning to accept and value myself as a transwoman and all along the way re-discovering myself as a performer has been incredibly important to my transition.
It’s no coincidence that the first show that really made me visible as a performer, THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO JESUS QUEEN OF HEAVEN was the first show that happened after my surgery.
And then the whole process went a stage further last October when Chris Goode asked me to take part in the development process for his “Albemarle” and I remember being quite nervous about it, because although I’ve taken part in quite a few development processes as a writer I’d never done so as a performer and had no idea, really, as to whether or not I could.
But I could, and ever since then seem to have been performing more and more. And it still amazes me, somehow, that I can do it.
A month ago I was playing the lead in a film, “High Heels Aren’t Compulsory”, by Lock Up Your Daughters productions, and I remember the last morning I had to walk down a corridor towards a door with my name on it, Caroline. I was playing a post transition transwoman academic turning up for work and this was me seeing my female name on my office door for the very first time.
I remember waiting for them to say “Action!” and not knowing quite what I would do, but knowing when the moment came I would find my spot and be absolutely in it and do it. Whatever it was.
And I did, and was amazed I could, and felt a bit of a fraud when the lovely director told me it was so good for them to be working with someone as experienced as me. Because really I’ve hardly any experience at all.
I feel a bit absurd saying it, but it’s as if finding my spot, finding the place I need to stand for the camera, is about finding my place in life also.
And I’m glad it’s happened so strongly in Chris Goode’s “Albemarle” because this is all about healing. Healing from a deep wound; and his beautiful work, among so many other things, is about healing also.
And there I am on stage and feeling completely at home there.
Because I am at home.
Labels: acting, Chris Goode, happiness, healing, recovery, revolutionary theatre
Tuesday, October 29, 2013
Working in 'Albemarle'.
When I was still a boy my mum and i would often make the sad journey to Cheltenham.
Sad because it was there that I would be put on a train to make the fear-filled journe to the boarding school in Swanage.
I don’t remember much about my mum. When she died, it was as if a lead curtain fell down to block my memories.
But I do remember us driving past a huge gasometer where it smelt of gas all around.
There were houses there, and I remember saying how awful I thought it must be to live there in the smell of gas.
“The thing is”, my mum said sadly, “You get used to it”.
And then you don’t notice the smell.
I’ve been in and out of rehearsal rooms for the past thirty years; and the one smell I’ve got used to is the smell of fear.
Mine mostly. It’s a lonely business being a playwright in some ways, and you carry a load of responsibility. Because if the play is crap the production too will be crap. However much directors and actors try to gild it. And in that sense what happens there is in the end down to you.
So there’s my fear of failure, and the director’s fear of failure and the actor’s fear of failure.
Bullying is pretty endemic in the profession, in one form or other, and I have sometimes been in rehearsals where it has been very obvious. And very ugly.
But always everywhere everyone tries to be professional and responsible and strong.
Everyone does their best to get on with the job and create the very best production that can be created in the very difficult circumstances that always apply.
But still to a degree fear taints everything.
I mention all this because I’ve just been in a rehearsal room for two weeks where the smell wasn’t there. And so I noticed its absence.
Maybe it was because for the first time in those thirty years and all those rehearsal rooms I wasn’t writing the play. And so I had the pleasure and joy of creating material with none of the responsibility of trying to figure out what to do with it. Or where to put it. Or how it might fit, or not fit, into the overall structure.
I loved that. It’s a bit like being a grandma.
But then if I come to think about it I’m really not that frightened of writing plays anymore. I do know what I’m doing. And while there are also going to be people who dislike what I’m doing really very intensely (a “disaster of a play”: Sunday Herald on “The Tree of Knowledge”) I’m not that frightened of them.
So it might make more sense to be afraid of doing something I really have very little experience of - working as a performer/deviser - and that actually there’s not a lot of evidence that I can actually do.
Especially since I was working with such brilliant people:
Chris Goode http://chrisgoodeandcompany.co.uk/
Jeni Draper (of The Fingersmiths http://www.kaiteoreilly.com/otherprojects/fingersmiths/index.htm
Tom Ross-Williams of Populace http://populacetheatre.wordpress.com/
Heather Uprichard of Shunt http://www.shunt.co.uk/
Jamie Wood http://www.jamiewood.org.uk/
And all under the incredibly well informed critical eyes of Maddy Costa (of The Guardian and http://statesofdeliquescence.blogspot.co.uk/2012/02/how-you-do-this-is-up-to-you.html) and Theron Schmidt (of Kings College, London http://performancephilosophy.ning.com/profile/TheronSchmidt.
It was all a bit like being in some 70's Supergroup with some unbelievably acute music critics watching every move. And it could very easily have been terrifying.
But it wasn’t. There were tears, to be sure; but good tears. Tears shed in an atmosphere of creativity and trust.
And consequently I kept on finding myself doing things I had no idea I could actually do.
All this was mainly due to being able to work with people who were not only incredibly skilled, but also worked with huge courage and generosity of spirit.
There is a fundamental belief at the core of the society we are forced to inhabit that fear is somehow good for people. That it brings out the best in us.
It’s crap of course. Like so much else.
Fear inhibits creativity and stultifies thought. And a major aim of education and artistic activity should be to help people overcome it.
Most artistic and educational events do the absolute opposite: and in that sense the artistic place we’ve been in for the past fortnight has more than a whiff of revolution about it.
A much better smell than fear....
Labels: Chris Goode, devising, revolutionary activity
Friday, October 11, 2013
Healing the division between body and mind
So here I am trying to do a Pilates exercise when all of a sudden I overwhelmingly want to burst into tears.
I don't know why.
In the loo afterwards, trying to recover myself, I find myself thinking " It's so dreadful the way Susie died".
(Susie being my late partner, the mother of our children, who died of a brain tumour in 2005. After 33 years together)
My dear teacher suggested I do the exercise at home. So there's me at the bus stop, pressing my bag between my knees, doing the exercise, tears running down my face.
And when I get home its the same.
That night I dream of a huge old fashioned reel to reel tape recorder, one that records feelings instead of sounds, and I know I've pushed the playback button and don’t know how to find the one marked STOP.
That’s the question, I think: how we stop ourselves endlessly reliving emotions of the past. And re-learn to live the feelings of the present.
But the problem seems to be there's a whole load of trauma stored up in my body somewhere, and I keep walking in such a way as not to to feel it.
And now my legs are twisted and arthritic...because the pain goes right back into the past, long before the death of Susie, maybe even before the death of my mother, and seems somehow connected with the terror and the shame of being forced to live as a boy when deep down I knew I wasn’t a boy at all.
To avoid the shame I forced myself to walk “like a man”: and so my body, like my identity, got twisted out of its proper shape.
It amazes me, when I think about, how we in the West could ever have fallen for the collective delusion that the mind, or the soul, is somehow different and separate from the body.
And yet in my deep fear and distress that is somehow how I had to live.
I used to love performing in plays; and the rehearsal room was one place where I felt accepted and at home. And wasn’t shy any more.
But that was where I also learnt I would be so much happier living as a girl; and the shame and the terror of that tainted the theatre and completely blocked my capacity to perform.
It all became like an underground stream, dark and hidden and incredibly powerful, that somehow, years later, carried me back to the theatre as a writer.
And so saved my life...
I had to learn to write fast in my early days as John Clifford the writer; and bit by bit I became aware that I was performing all my plays in my head. That as well as becoming the character, I was becoming the actor or actress playing them.
That my performer’s instinct was still at work, deep underground, and telling me what lines worked and what lines did not.
My creative work, the love of my partner, the love of my children: all these helped me recover from the trauma. And as I became slowly more and more able to reveal myself as transgendered, so, too, did this underground stream rise to the surface more and more.
And now.... For years I’ve had an agent as a writer (Lisa Foster at http://www.alanbrodie.com/) and now I have an agent as a performer (Triona Adams at http://www.cdm-ltd.com/) and an entry in SPOTLIGHT, even. As a transgender actress.
And I celebrate all this today because I am packing my bags to spend a fortnight in London to work at devising a new work with the extraordinary gifted and courageous Chris Goode (http://chrisgoodeandcompany.co.uk/).
To work on the creation of ALBEMARLE.... not as a writer, but as a company member: a performer and deviser.
So here’s me: with my bandy legs, my arthritic knees and my bus pass. About to start a new chapter. Stepping into the gorgeous unknown.
How wonderful...
Labels: Chris Goode, Descartes, Pilates, transgender
Subscribe to Posts [Atom]