What, where, how, why?

Hello and welcome,

For anyone who has found their way here via the lovely Western Mail article -

http://www.walesonline.co.uk/showbiz-and-lifestyle/arts-in-wales/2011/05/13/interview-deep-cut-playwright-phillip-ralph-on-his-daring-new-experimental-project-91466-28685045/

You may be wondering how you can get tickets to see this cockamamie (there's a word too little used ...) scheme and where the experiments will be held, etc -

So, here's everything you need to know -

Swansea - tickets available via Taliesin
www.taliesinartscentre.co.uk - box office - 01792602060
18th - 20th May - Upstairs at Noah's Yard, Uplands
1st - 3rd June - Civic Centre Foyer, Oystermouth Road
15th - 17th June - Junction Cafe, Blackpill

All tickets £3 - experiments begin at 7pm and 8.30pm - running time 75mins

Cardiff - tickets available via Sherman Cymru
www.shermancymru.co.uk - box office - 02920646900
25th - 27th May - The Plan Cafe, Morgan Arcade
8th - 10th June - Old Library, The Hayes
22nd - 24th June - tbc (Fancy a showing in your house? Contact Sherman Cymru!)

All tickets £3 - experiments begin at 7pm and 8.30pm - running time 75mins

There you go - other things you might want to know -
Twitter - @manoneeye - follow me for updates and pre and post interactions #oneeyedman
Facebook - The One Eyed Man Project

There'll be regular updates here and I'll try and post videos of experiments as fast as my little laptop can edit them. Only a few days to go now and the experiments begin in earnest.

I'm genuinely looking forward to it - I know that might be hard to believe but it's true.

Mind you, if you come along on Wednesday at 7pm you may well see a man explode due to an overdose of adrenalin and fear ...

Have a splendid weekend.

Phil

One week to go ...

As I write this today, Thursday 12^th May 2011, I have less than seven days before the first One Eyed Man experiment takes place at Noah’s Yard in Uplands, Swansea on Wednesday 18^th at 7pm.

Yesterday I did my first press interview about the project with the Western Mail. It felt particularly strange and complex to be discussing the project with the press since it’s not exactly the kind of thing that one can ‘sell’ as a finished product. The reporter was genuinely interested and engaged by what I’m doing but at the heart of our conversation he asked me a key question that has been bothering me for the last week or so:

“So, are you sort of waking up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat, worrying about drying up and running out of things to say?”

The short answer to that is ... not really ...

Ask me again in six days time and my answer may well be very different but at the moment I feel less and less scared as the offerings get nearer. Now, why should this be? Anyone who has read my blog about doing John Dawson’s public speaking course (Taking My Place In The World) will know that I fear standing in front of a room full of people as much as any sane person. Yes, I get very nervous, yes, I get a massive adrenalin dose, yes, it makes me feel sick. But for some reason, the closer I get to the OEM, the calmer I feel.

The reason for this lies in one of my answers to the interviewer yesterday – he asked about if I was worried about ‘getting it wrong’ and, after all the thinking I’ve been doing and remembering the TED talk by Kathryn Schulz, I said – “Well, I can’t possibly get it wrong because there is no ‘right’ to be wrong about.” These offerings will simply be what they are – sometimes they may feel ‘comfortable’ and smooth – meaning that subjects flow and ideas blossom and flourish – and sometimes they may be ‘uncomfortable’ and bumpy – meaning that we (myself and Gareth and the audience) get stuck on an issue or an idea or a quandary and simply have to sit with it and work through it. But there is no way for it to be wrong.

I’ve also been thinking a lot about my energy level and the need I obviously feel as a seasoned performer and actor to want to deliver a ‘show’ for the audience. After all, they have each paid £3 and given up a couple of hours of their life. Surely, in return for that commitment, I should ensure that I return that in kind. And I firmly intend to – but the manner in which I do it will not be the way I ordinarily would choose. This is being thrown into sharp relief by my ongoing illness.

I’m on big doses of steroids and on a day to day basis my energy levels fluctuate wildly – from manic to nothing. In order to ensure that I continue to get well and have time and energy for my body to cope with the illness I simply have to ensure that each performance is ‘real’; i.e. I’m not pretending to be anything other than I am. If I’m tired, I have to be tired. If I’m manic, I have to be manic.

As I keep saying to Gareth, there are no smoke and mirrors in this work. What you see is what you get. No attempt to hide behind anything. Whether that makes for theatre or ‘art’, who knows? But I’m really interested to find out.

Yesterday, Gareth and I spent some time in the second Swansea venue – the foyer of the Civic Centre on Oystermouth Road. It’s a big, municipal building – huge foyer area made of concrete.

It’s a place where people come to wait – for their opportunity to interact with bureaucracy. It’s not usually or ever been a place for a performer and an audience to meet. But it will be in a few weeks ...

I’ll blog regularly over the coming few days leading up to the work and will do a daily blog about the shows afterwards. As ever, please let me have any thoughts or comments either here or on the facebook page. This work really is about a conversation.

Cheers,

Phil

Just what exactly do I think I'm doing?!

So, that was a taster of the first ‘proper’ day of work and rehearsal on the project. But what exactly does that mean – ‘proper’? In this context: a series of experimental performances – surely there’s no such thing as proper? Surely there’s no right way of going about things and any methods that I might have used in the past to work on projects are null and void?

I’ve been grappling with this question a lot over the last week or so. The day of the Royal Wedding was the first day back at work after I’d been discharged from hospital after a five day stay. I was finally diagnosed with a condition called acute sarcoidosis. In a nutshell what this amounts to is that my body, for no apparent reason (or certainly not anything I could have prevented) has decided that it needs to seriously ramp up its immune response – so strongly in fact that it has begun to attack itself. It’s an incredibly rare condition that affects about one person in every 10,000 which explains why it took five days for it to be diagnosed. In fact, my time in hospital was rather like being the subject at the centre of an episode of ‘House’ – perplexed consultants and medical students looking at me and scratching their heads and developing theories and sending me for chest x-rays etc. When it was finally diagnosed there was much jubilation and I was regularly visited by med students who had been told to come and have a look at me since the condition is so rare that it would be worthwhile them checking it out!

The prognosis is very good, I’m delighted to say. In most cases, acute sarcoidosis simply ‘burns itself out’ over a period that could last from a few weeks up to 18 months and, once it has gone, the likelihood of relapse is small. There is a tiny chance that it could become chronic but, hey, let’s cross that bridge only if we have to.

Throughout my time in hospital however, there was a constant thought in my mind wondering whether I should postpone or cancel the OEM experiments. After all, if I really was seriously ill, it wouldn’t necessarily be wise to undergo a series of gruelling performance experiments over 6 weeks with two offerings a night. But, in typical bloody minded fashion, I was determined to continue ... and I still really had no idea of how major the illness was ...

So, Gareth and I continued to meet and ‘rehearse’, doing practical, tangible things to prepare for these totally unprepared experiments. We met up at Volcano’s new space in Swansea and spent a day improvising wildly about things – the deaths of Osama Bin Laden and Henry Cooper; my feelings and irritations and loves. We met for a day in Cardiff and took to the streets, armed with clipboards, asking people simply how their day was going. We chugged a chugger – demanding to know if her job brought her happiness and made her feel like her life is worthwhile. We stood outside the Job Centre and got into conversation with total strangers about whatever they needed to talk about. All of this was, and is, extremely useful work in relation to the experiments themselves – especially in regard to helping me get over my fear of talking to people. But for every day we worked, my body repaid me with two days of pain and swelling and agony. So much so that, last Friday, I had to go back into hospital as I’d had an attack overnight that was so severe that I could again no longer walk.

These two things – the illness and the desperate need to feel properly prepared – have forced me to face up to a fascinating issue with regard to these experiments. If my theory is correct – that it is possible to make a piece of theatre simply by dint of being human, alive and in a room with other humans who have lived through the same day as me – then how can I possibly prepare for that in any traditional way that I recognise? And, more importantly with regard to the issue of my health, should I even try?

The limitations of my illness have suggested that what I need to do to prepare is not do any of the things I would normally rely on. The very nature of theatrical performance is based on rehearsal and preparation. A clearly defined end goal – a script, a set, a lighting design, a character, a narrative. All of these elements are missing from the One Eyed Man Project. All I have is myself, my life and experiences, the day I have just lived through and the group of people who have decided, for whatever reason, to come along and see what I’m up to. There is an argument to say that the only way to prepare for such an event is simply to be alive.

So, I have been forced to acknowledge that the illness is actually offering me a great gift as it is forcing me NOT to do all the things I would normally do in order to feel secure enough to perform in front of an audience. It is demanding that I simply arrive on the night and see what happens.

Of course, that’s not strictly true since old habits and fears die hard and some preparation will inevitably take place. But the form and content of that preparation will be totally alien to every process I’ve ever known. And what that means is that for each performance/offering/experiment I will have to be totally present and ‘in the moment’ (a state of being that is the Holy Grail for actors and performers) since there is literally nothing else I can rely upon.

And that also means that I have to let go completely of any notion that there is a ‘right’ way or a ‘wrong’ way to go about what I’m doing. Some people will love it, some will hate it – some will consider it to be valuable, others may think it is worthless – but neither group will be correct. It will not be ‘wrong’ or ‘right’ – it will simply be what it is.

I am indebted to my friend Stephen Donnelly of Swansea’s Shellshock Theatre who saw the first video diary and the section where I talked about ‘not knowing’. In response he sent me a fantastically interesting Ted Talk by Kathryn Schulz who dubs herself a ‘wrongologist’. She is fascinated by the creative potential that can be found when we let go of the desperate need to be ‘right’ all the time and acknowledge that being human is about getting things wrong. See video below.

So, the illness, whether I like it or not, is part of this process and is obviously going to prove vital in whatever happens at the 36 experimental offerings. I hope you’ll let me know your thoughts on any and all of this and come along to the offerings themselves.

One thing’s for certain – they’ll be unique ...

Cheers,

Phil

A call to arms!

Or at least to, you know, interact with me a bit.

If you like, obviously ...

No pressure ...

Just be nice to talk to you, that's all.

See how you feel.

I'll leave it with you ...

Phil

Hospital Reading

So, I spent five days in Singleton Hospital in Swansea and was finally diagnosed with acute viral sarcoidosis (inflammation of the lymph glands around the lungs) which lead to severe reactive arthritis in all my joints meaning I was unable to walk or stand and was in serious pain. On the mend now though and my enforced rest gave me a final chance to do some more research reading (and learn how to (badly) edit video).

I read the posthumous autobiography of the American counter-cultural stand-up legend George Carlin, Last Words. He was a contemporary of Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor and had his own battles with drugs throughout his life. But his authentic voice and ability to speak to people in a way they’d never heard before (or since) made him a legend. Below are a few thoughts and quotes garnered from his book:

Doing my job – using my mind to produce the external evidence of my inner state.

Insist on being yourself, talk about the changes in you, stop working from the surface of the brain and get into the middle of your gut; talk about who you are and how you feel.

Authenticate self by hearing what you think you said out loud.

Social critic/philosopher/evangelist

Be the person on the outside that you’ve been on the inside your whole life.

Authenticate what you think and feel by talking directly to the audience.

You can’t run out of ideas so long as you keep getting new information and processing it.

Taking my life and putting it out to the world.

Lily Tomlin – “I worry about being a success in a mediocre world.”

Taking a new leap into the dark.

Abraham Maslow – “The fully realised person transcends his local group and identifies with the species.”

Creative process = tension between the internal me and the external political environment.

A liberal orthodoxy is as repugnant as a conservative orthodoxy.

Speak to audience one on one; confide in them the internal me; share insights; be their friend; take them step by step by the hand and lead them to the place I want them to be; lead them logically to conclude that my version is correct.

The noisier the culture becomes, the stronger your voice has to be to be heard over the din. (My note – Stronger NOT louder.

Engage the audiences mind.

Laughter is not the only proof of success.

Audience shapes the material: I write, they edit.

A genuine momentary communion: they wouldn’t have experienced it without me and I wouldn’t have experienced it without them.

Few things dramatise the face-off between loner and group more starkly than artist before an audience and, the irony is, if the loner/artist can’t get an audience to act like a group, he’s fucked.

The whole thing is probably about connecting in order to make kinships.

I no longer indentify with my species; I don’t feel comfortable or safe on this planet.

If I identify with individuals, I feel pain. If I indentify with groups, I see people who repel me.

Mantra: Be. Do. Get.

It was a fantastic book and he was a terrific comic – brief snippet of his final HBO special below.

I also read another autobiography by controversial artist/musician Bill Drummond late of the KLF and K Foundation who notoriously burnt a million quid. Fantastic book, amazing man – and he endears himself to me more and more by his innate ability to piss people off. Anyone who can irritate that many people by making art of any stripe gets my vote by default. Couple of quotes from him below –

“The drive to make sense of the chaos that’s in our head and fills our universe. The drive to hold it down so we can proclaim: “Look, this is it, this is what I see, I hear, I feel. Don’t you feel it too?”

“We are born with an instinct to take sides.”

“We are all seduced by power, each and every one of us. Don’t let anyone ever tell you that they are going to corrupt/change/destroy the system. They will be the ones who will be corrupted, changed, destroyed long before the system knows they are even inside it.”

“The contemporary arts should never have anything to do with the establishment. If they fulfil any positive function it is to provide an indefinable cultural opposition; to keep alive the dreams, research and development of utopia.”

Fantastic, inspirational stuff. Gareth has also been reading Drummond’s most recent book, 17, about his latest musical project. I’ll get him to blog on it next week.

I’m sure that’s more than enough to keep you occupied and away from the telly tomorrow while two grossly over-privileged individuals get married for the entertainment of the masses.

I won’t be watching. I’ll be slowly beating my head against a brick wall for the duration of the ceremony and celebrations until my face is a bruised and bloody pulp ...

I love a royal wedding, me.

Cheers all.

Phil

PS - If you haven't seen my first min-doc on the process of making the One Eyed Man, please check it out below. There's more where this came from ...

A Smorgasbord of Delights

Since last I blogged it’s been something of a rollercoaster ride for me – incredible highs and devastating lows. I’ve always sort of preferred life to be like that but I have to say that this last couple of weeks has been pretty white-knuckly, even for me.

To begin with the highs – first off, I attended the IETM spring plenary conference in Stockholm from 14^th to April. IETM (Informal European Theatre Meeting) is an organisation that has been going for over 30 years and pretty much does what it says on the tin. It brings together theatre makers and producers from all over Europe to foster collaborations, co-productions and sharing of ideas. This was not only my first time of attending but also in some senses my ‘coming out’ as a solo artist. I’ve never been particularly good at networking and ‘selling myself’ so I was especially nervous. I arrived the night before conference was due to start and began my stay with a run around one of Stockholm’s many islands – always a great way to orient yourself and arrive somewhere.

Then I was into the maelstrom. And ... I loved it. It was very tiring and a bit full on – not being usually the most excessively of sociable people I probably met more people in those four days than I normally do in six months. The great thing for me was that each conversation was not about ‘Sell! Sell! Sell’ but simply about conversation and connection. The theory being that true collaboration and sharing comes out of genuinely open conversation and not hard sell.

Amongst the highlights were one of the most bonkers pieces of theatre I’ve seen in a long time by a company called Institutet – Comte D’Amour. Inspired by the horrific Josef Fritzl case, this was four blokes in their pants and nappies going absolute shitstorm bonkers for three hours – with cover versions of ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ and ‘Wicked Game’ thrown in for good measure. It was mostly over-the-top, pretentious and silly shite but there was a forty minute section in the middle of it where one of the cast in particular was basically fucking himself up – physically, emotionally, in every possible – which was bordering on genius. The trailer below does it no justice whatsoever ...

There were work groups and seminars and talking/talking/talking. The personal highlight for me was that I’d applied to present the One Eyed Man Project in a Brainstorm session and had been successfully chosen. 20 minutes to share the idea and get people’s feedback on it. I decided to treat the presentation exactly like a show and not prepare for it in any way. After all, I have been thinking and talking about the project now for well over 18 months. If I can’t talk about it off the cuff for 20 minutes then the prospect of me performing in like fashion for 75 minutes twice a night is a slim one. It went really well. My questions were related to presentational style, some content (which at this stage I’ll keep from you), and mainly how to interact with audiences before, during and after the presentations. I think the time is ripe to look again at how we share performance work with audiences and how we – performers and audiences – interact throughout the process. For example, is it possible for people to book tickets for a show without knowing where the venue is until the day? Rather like an illegal rave? Leave your mobile number and we’ll send you a text an hour before the show. Similarly, is it possible for a show to be announced on the day – for example if a huge global or national event makes it ripe for a show that day – and people to still want to come? My ultimate dream is to have a large enough network of people who have seen the shows in the past and engaged with the community aspects of being an audience that they could even ask me to do a show at the drop of a hat! Is all this simply pipe dreams? At this stage probably yes – but in the future, who knows? Anyway, the brainstorm was great, I met lots of people who loved the ideas behind what I’m up to and were really encouraging about it.

So, after lots of drinking and talking, and a bit of sightseeing, I left Stockholm on Sunday 17^th to fly home and begin ‘rehearsals’. The only fly in the ointment was that my legs and feet had started to really ache whilst I was in Sweden. I put it down to having bought a new pair of boots which I’d worn every day and too much standing around drinking and talking ...

How wrong could I be ...

The plan was to meet up with my collaborator on the project, Gareth Clark, down in West Wales for an initial week of discussions and sharing before getting into ‘rehearsals proper the following week.

Best laid plans ...

Below is the first of hopefully many mini docu-drama-mentaries on the process. Hope you enjoy it.

I bloody didn’t ...

Cheers,

Phil

Fail better.

So, the preparations are now well underway. Venues are booked, tickets are onsale, audience numbers have been decided upon. I need to look into getting some public liability insurance apparently so that if one of my audience unexpectedly keels over and dies, then I’m not to blame and can’t be sued into oblivion. I’ve even had some little business cards made which have the OEM project and this very blog written on them. It’s all going really well.

Apart from one tiny fact that I keep forgetting ...

This is supposed to be an experiment. It’s not supposed to be a show.

Oh shit ... I keep thinking I'm actually producing a show. I'm not. I'm performing a series of very public performance experiments.

So, the question I need to keep asking myself is what exactly am I setting out to do here and why – oh God, why? – am I doing it before a paying public?

The answer to the first half of that one has been covered quite a bit in previous blogs but I will address it here since I’ve only gone and raised it again. I want to move forwards from the kind of performance work that I’ve been doing over the last few years, both alone and with Volcano. The interaction with the audience that somehow transcends traditional boundaries without simply turning into a free-for-all discussion. The subject matter being decided amongst us on the evening and during the show – without somehow setting myself up to be Ross Noble. The idea that I can be totally open, vulnerable and present in front of an audience and that is rare enough and strange enough to provide the basis for an experience. I’m looking to see if I can create a new working methodology that allows me to make theatre at the drop of a hat about and for the people I’m presenting it to.

It’s an experiment. I have – genuinely – no idea if it will work. I actually have no idea what ‘working’ means in this context? If it’s funny, does that mean it’s ‘worked’? If it’s moving/boring/profound/silly, does that mean it’s worked? If people feel that somehow they’ve had value for money for their £3 ticket price, is that a sign of success?

Or has it 'worked' if people have had an experience of whatever kind that has interested them and been unexpected and out of the ordinary and challenging without being pretentious? But does that mean it’s failed if it is pretentious?

There it is. The key word.

Failure.

By acknowledging, both to myself and to an audience, that it could very likely be a failure I’m speaking about the elephant in the corner. Experiments have perceived and hoped for outcomes but often they don’t achieve them. The Bunsen burner farts and gurgles and the test tube explodes. Or nothing happens at all. And the scientist takes his findings back to the drawing board and starts again. But an experiment is not seen as having failed if there are things to be learnt from it. You change the key ingredients and conditions and you try again.

Can you see how this might apply to what I’m attempting to do?

I will be doing two offerings per night – at 7pm and 8.30pm. The reason for this is simple. If the first experiment fails then I don’t have to endure the agony of waiting 24 hours to try it again. I have to get right back in there with a different group of people and see what happens when the essential ingredients change. But I can’t guarantee that the second offering of the evening will ‘work’ any more than I can the first. I’m trying to bottle lightning here. And let me be clear, this isn’t being done out of any bravado or bloody mindedness. I love theatre. Always have. And because I love it I want to push at the boundaries of what it can do and play around the edges. But I do it with a due sense of respect and fear. Theatre as we now know it has taken millennia to evolve. Maybe it’s reached its apotheosis. Maybe it has peaked.

Or maybe not ...

The second part of the above question should be easy to answer now also. Why do this in public? Because a performer without an audience isn’t a performer at all. I’m trying to have a conversation – as all performers are – and the experiment is reliant upon the raw materials of performer and audience meeting together in a space. I need an audience in order to conduct the experiment. The ticket price of £3 was arrived at since I feel that offering something for free (my first instinct) automatically suggests to people that what will be offered is worthless. So, £3 seems like enough to ask for people to make a commitment and be bothered to come. It's certainly not to make a profit. And, of course, I do worry about offering value for that commitment. But for all that I’m going out on a limb, I have been doing this job for 20 years. I can always fall back on a knob gag or a Shakespeare speech ...

The upshot of all of this is that I am utterly terrified of what I’m about to embark upon. I could fall flat on my arse 36 times and be embarrassed to my dying day whenever anyone mentions this project. I could be utterly dull and boring and people could be furious with me. I could simply be ignored.

In short, I could fail. But isn’t that risk what makes it so exciting? And what is failure anyway?

This week, as part of my ongoing preparations I have been reading a terrific book by the comedian, Stewart Lee, called ‘How I Escaped My Certain Fate: The Life and Deaths of a Stand-Up Comedian’. Lee went through something of an epiphany with his work several years ago, falling out of love with it and quietly giving up performing around the time he became involved in ‘Jerry Springer – The Opera’. After the furore surrounding that show – all of it unnecessary and overblown in my opinion – he returned to stand-up and quickly became a must see. And why? Because – love him or hate him – and many people do both – he was risking failure with the work that he presented. He risks audience alienation (and often succeeds in achieving it); he risks boredom, irritation, repetition; he breaks from the stage and roams the auditorium; he allows himself to fail. And his work is thrilling and strange – and yes, irritating and boring – as a result. I saw his show, 90s Comedian, when it was recorded at Chapter in Cardiff – below are a couple of sections of that act. If you’ve never seen him live, I really recommend it. The sensation of being in a room with him and his audience as he dances on the edge of utter failure is quite something to see.

So, here’s the point really – David Cameron and his ilk would have us believe that all art must be successful in order to justify its existence. And how do they quantify 'success'? If it is not universally liked and accepted by all then it is valueless and should simply not exist. But this view doesn’t work. The greatest artists the world has ever known were often failures in their lifetimes. They pushed the boundaries of their artform and challenged the conventions of their day. In my own small way, this project is my attempt to do just that. Pretentious? Quite possibly. But as an artist, the right to fail is all I have.

I hope you’ll come along and watch me walk the wire. I may fall flat on my arse.

Or ... who knows?

‘Ever tried? Ever Failed? No matter.

Try again. Fail again.

Fail better.’

Samuel Beckett

Keep well.

Phil

PS - Tickets onsale via Taliesin Swansea and soon Sherman Cymru Cardiff.

http://www.taliesinartscentre.co.uk/performances.php?id=309

http://www.shermancymru.co.uk/performance/drama/oneeyedman/

Follow me on Twitter @manoneeye

and Facebook: The One Eyed Man Project

And please leave me any comments or thoughts you may have on the project. I’d love to know what you think.