Well, it's been hectic lately. Genuinely. We have a work-in-progress session coming up on the 5th of April, we're currently dipping in to rehearsals with Imitating the Dog Theatre Company, and we've been lucky enough to be given a great opportunity for next year.

The piece we're working on is coming along nicely. We've finally settled on the world that the performance takes place in - the rules, the ideas and its inhabitants. It seems simple really, but we're trying to be as accurate as possible with it. From an early stage in the process, we decided that we didn't want to create an event on stage if we're not totally sure of the rules of the world it takes place in. So with that done, we moved on to the content. The working title of the show has changed quite a few times since its inception, but currently, it's going by the name of My Canary's Name is Daniel. Seeing as we've been working on it for a while, we feel fairly comfortable in giving out some basic information as to what the piece is based upon fairly soon, and some early promotional press will appear quite soon. (A few early photographs can be found at our facebook group).

The show revolves around a man living in an abandoned, scorched town, who is coping with his survival whilst the normal world carries on miles away from him. Though he's been here for a while, the piece starts as he's about to throw himself a party to cope with the boredom; even though he knows no-one will come, he still sends out his invites. The only entertainment which he seems to have being what he makes for himself - and his canary. Daniel.

Once we've cobbled together some official press and copy for the show and the Process at Play festival at the end of September, which we're thinking will include the piece's first showing, we'll be able to give a much more detailed description.

On the 5th April, we'll be inviting a small audience in to view the work in progress, with a discussion afterwards focusing on feedback and analysis. We've been working out how to work well as a company with all three members on the stage working without an outside eye to keep tabs on the composition and general aesthetic. The first go-to solution is to, as we've done before, film our work and watch it back together giving it a bit of a critique, but it will be nice to have an up-to-date, on the spot and fresh pair of eyes seeing the work.

In other news, we're currently spending a lot of time with Imitating the Dog Theatre company, dipping in to their rehearsals, helping out as extra sets of hands and just generally observing how they work. It's been useful to say the least so far, and we've got another couple of weeks to go. We fully accept that we're just starting out in the grand scheme of things, so to work with an established company who've just got back from their tour of the middle east (genuinely) is endlessly helpful. We'll be learning everything we can from them.

On a very similar note, Sticky-Tape are immensely happy to announce that we've been selected to work underneath Proto-Type Theater for a year, starting in September, in their company mentorship scheme. After form filling and an interview stage, and what was described as a exceptionally difficult descision for them, they've accepted us as a graduate company they'd like to work with - providing us with rehearsal space, office space and a lot of useful guidance in the world of theatre. On top of this, it means there's a possibility that Sticky-Tape will be relocating to Manchester from our base at The Lancaster Institute of Contemporary Arts. It's an exciting opportunity that we're more than happy to accept.

No Excuses

Well, it's February now, so there aren't many excuses that we can make for not having gotten back in to the swing of things after new year. The good news is - we don't need them, as a month seems to be a good amount of time in which to shake off the hangovers, get some fresh ones, and power through them in turn.

Last week, we got our narrative caps on and tried to decide what our research had led us to. We have, for a while, been fairly agreed on the idea that as a company we're not trying to teach anyone anything in particular. Who are we to say that what our shows consist of is right or wrong? What matters is that it is. And the audience can take something away from that. During a piece, we want to say many things and at the same time nothing. Our work isn't didactic, but our views, opinions and personalities naturally affect it. As long as there is an experience or reaction, varying from person to person, we provided it and did our job. As Barker said - 'There is no message'.

SO...

Without giving too much away, we're focusing on a man. A man, his life and his experiences - or more his lack of them. We have realised that at some point in our lives, all of us have just snapped awake for a split second and thought 'What have I done with these past few weeks?'. That sort of feeling of life skimming you by without actually realising what's going on in it. We've decided to have a look at this feeling, the self justification that comes with it and the personality(ies) he creates to cope when his only access to the outside world is his tv. A man who refuses to move on in his life and just sticks with the simple, the known, and the easiest routine. Based upon the exploration we did late last year on film and relationships, I'm quite excited.  It's bound to evolve, but we've got some solid ideas on how to stage it and how to create the right world.

We just started by creating our world - a man's house. He's stuck here, this is his world. We added his connections to the 'real' world. His possessions. His communications with others. His past. We've tried to add detail to make it vivid. But not real. There's nothing easier to make boring (in my oh so humble opinion) than naturalism. The stage has so much more to offer than a window in to someone's home. Now, we're planning out his events. And what can happen to and for him. Strangely, I don't want to say too much, but there are details which I'm dying to talk of....

Anyway, on top of this, on Friday Me, Jon and Leo are getting a visit from our other [Sticky-Tape] member, Jon Armstrong, who acted as director for our last two shows. He's had about as much contact with the piece as anyone else who skims this blog, so it'll be nice to see what an outside eye can give us. Between him and Andrew Quick, who is talking everything through with us tomorrow, we should avoid becoming too stagnant. Here's to hoping. We're assembling our props and jotting down our ideas. It should all start to form now. We've been playing and experimenting for a good few months now, and we're ready to start creating.

Here We Go.

Time to go. And I'm glad of it.

We've spent the past few months exploring ideas, testing practices and cutting out shapes in our arts and crafts sessions - and here we are. Ready to start forming the story which we want to tell. Themes and ideas are all well and good but eventually you need to start forming a cohesive piece - maybe not for the audience but at the very least for yourself. And that's where we're at.

We've loved our study of film and romance, it's yielded some great stuff and it's time to genuinely start creating our own. Currently, we've created a 30 minute or so piece of theatre filled with dialogues and animation following various themes and thoughts. As a company we 'get it'. But it's not theatre yet. If we performed it now, all we'd receive is a lot of curious grunts and confused faces. It's our work, and now we need to take our ideas and make them accessible, challenging and entertaining (So far, all we've got down is the challenging bit - and that's far from formed).

Tomorrow, Me, Leo and Jon C are locking ourselves away in the Sticky-Tape office and getting all of this down.

One of the toughest points when creating any new piece of theatre has to be asked where we are now. 'Do we give it a narrative?'. In the past, we've generally focused on theatre which focuses around a loose coalition of scenes - tied together by a faint background story but a strong theme. So, for the first time, we're going to give it a go. And I don't know how it's going to turn out. We're hoping that our 3 months of research will pay off in not letting a horribly weak plot-line come through.

This has been the second of two relatively short posts here, but I'm hoping the next one will have a lot to say.

Intermission 2011

I'd like to think that as 'artists' never stop making art in our own little way, but it's hard to spin this in any way other than we have had a brief break towards the end of 2010 from our Sticky-Tape pursuits. We slowed down greatly a few weeks ago when faced with piles of G4A Arts Council England forms which needed filling in. Budgets needed planning, proposals needed writing and ideas needed forming - on paper anyway. Genuinely, it's a hypothetical exercise. We're planning out how to best create these applications for later in the year, when we will be scouring the country for grants, bursarys and other ways of affording a way to make the dream that is Sticky-Tape flourish without us having to commint 95% of our time to Bar jobs and 'flipping burgers'... In a way.

Then, before we knew it, Christmas was here, the country shuts down to give presents and everyone eats too much, drinks too much and generally sits around doing as little as possible. But that's all behind us now, it's a new year and we'll be back to the rehearsal spaces very soon with new ideas. I can't wait. Frankly, the last three weeks of doing very little in the way of our work has killed me and I'm glad to know that we'll all be in the same city in no time. Ready to get back to it.

Thanks to everyone who has stuck with us so far - we couldn't have done anything without the help of others. It's 2011 and there's plenty of time left to go.

Making sense of the Moon

If we could do this in my kitchen, my nice warm kitchen, I'd be much happier. Braving this cold weather is not good for me in the slightest. Trudging through the cold to get to the studio is putting me in a right grump.But that's enough meaningless complaining for this weeks post. And on that topic, I do apologise (to myself and anyone who reads this) for not making an entry last week - a time tabling change by Drew Hemnet threw me a bit off course.

So, what have we been up to in the past fortnight, I hear you ask with humouring apathy?


We carried on with our creation of filmic moments, playing them off each other; mixing them up and slotting them between each other as we saw fit, and playing with the OHP creating some really nice little visuals and stories. The idea was that the visuals became more and more realistic as the stories we told did the same. The first story was a fantastical love story inspired by 'Le Voyage dans la Lune', an old French film (well known by most for the scene where Mr. Moon gets shot in the eye), was told with very crude shapes and a fairly 'unreal' method of portraying it. But it did create a rather innocent view of love - a naive sort of depiction that you get on the silver screen. We moved through to more realistic stories which we have found through film, such as a tale inspired by everyone's favourite Krakozhian, Tom Hanks in 'The Terminal', which was 'based' on true events. (Though we are aware of how even 'true' events in Hollywood movies range between 'liberal' at best to 'lies' for most of the time). At this point we got a bit surgical with the OHP shadows, cutting out some nice detail with a scalpel to create some nice, life-like shapes. It's a simple idea, but it created some nice moments which had an innocence about them, and kept making us realise how much our views of love in our lives is preconcieved based on what we've been shown on a screen. Love is far duller than what we're shown - I'll never scoop a bullet out of my true love's chest and then massage her heart back in to cardiac rhythm with my bear hands (Christ, I hope not...) - and that's the way I like it, to be honest...

By stumbling about like this we made some beautiful moments, but that's all we had - moments (a concept which our last work was based on.) but no structure. The first time we put all this together and ran it all back to back we could see that we needed a frame to hold it all together. It barely made sense to us, so to make it a bit more cohesive we really did need to add some framing - not only that, but something physical. We were left with interesting texts which seemed to repeat on and on. The words did differ, but the performance remained the same and the pace just hasn't been thought of at all. The plan is to kill two birds with one stone, so to say.

We've been looking at love and the stories which it inspires so we thought we'd make up our own. For a while, we're going to tell our own filmic stories (which may or may not be about love). We'll write them out and then physicalise them - blend them with our own language which we've made up, and create a frame  which our moments can survive in. Whether or not the ones we have already survive, is pretty hard to judge - I hope they do - but if not, we've made our language which we can create work with. Now it's just time to write a story with it.

... And a Carling Martini for the lady.

This is just an amazing cup of tea. I mean, I'm still tired, so it's not as if my exuses aren't 'valid', but, god, I'm enjoying this. As the only Northern member of Sticky-Tape currently working on this project (Jon Armstrong isn't involved in this piece as of yet) I feel the need to keep it real and moan about working down the mines, my bath of coal and the importance of tea. They just don't seem to get it.

This week in our studio, tucked in the corner of a flat-pack building shipped from Scandinavia, we've been exceptionally busy - on our piece, our research and our voyage in to the world of film. I've noticed before that people seem to comment on how beautiful the movie stars of years gone by are compared to those of today. The women have an extinct natural beauty and the men have an aura of sophistication that just doesn't exist any more. Vermouth has been replaced by Fosters. And, in a way, I think it's all true. But I also think it's the medium which creates this feeling. Everything looks classier in monochrome. Just like in photography, everything looks more interesting in Sepia ink. There's something about out-dated mediums that almost seems exotic and 'out-of-reach' - probabaly because the mainstream doesn't use them any more. So, in true 'done-before' style, we have been looking at techs like this. This week has been the world of shadow, silhouette, and the high-school science favourite, the OHP. It's really interesting to play with actually, and even though it's possibly the most low-tech form of live media around, it feels exciting to revisit it. There's been no sign of any acetate yet, but we have been at it with a pair of scissors making some custom shapes to tell our story. The most intruiging part about it is how easy it is to see through what is happening. You can see our hands moving the shapes, you can see what we're doing to create our images as we go along, and you can see the shapes themselves sitting on the light casting their shadow. Not only that, I love the grain on the image. The specks of dirt and the contours of the lens just grubby up theimage like an old cinema reel projected far larger than it should be. Since my science teachers in secondary school all those years ago, I don't think I've seen an OHP used outside of a theatre and I can see why. Early days, but the images we created really made that 'youthful' feeling of being amazed by something really simple come flooding back.

With absolutely no inspiration taken from the recent buddy comedy starring Will Ferrell and Marky Mark, we've also been looking at the B-Characters from movies or The Other Guys (Trust me, as far as I know, none of us have even seen that film. Honest). It ties in a bit with an idea we discussed on our last show, 'What happens to the characters off stage', but we decided to think of the story as seen by the minor characters and their perspective. The whole story is there, just from a different view point, including the things we don't see. We wrote some text on this individually and decided not to share with each other what films they were inspired by to see how obvious their origins were. A couple stuck out because of the facts, but one which we've sort of stuck with for now just told a great story without giving too much away - something where its quite easy to make what you will of it without being force fed what's going on. This seems to be the direction we're taking this though, we want our film based work happening on stage making allusions and hints at whats going on from a far off perspective, whilst the true narrative occurs way underneath the rest, probably through totally different mediums. I hope anyone who sees it can tweak a few details of what we're creating out for themselves, and that the blanks they don't find get filled in anyway.

Good Will in Black & Fidelity Hall

I apologise, I haven't even had a cup of tea yet, so this may ramble more than usual.

To tell the truth, we haven't really looked at translations too much since I last updated this. But that's half the reason I do it - to try and follow these tangents which three months down the line seem to make no sense. The good news is that we have actually made tangible progress. We can jump up there and perform a good amount of extremely unpolished work. But it's there, and we're moving along.

We started by following (I know, I'm repeating myself) the idea of how disconnected we all are from the media which we live through, and use to cope with our own situations. The way I see it, half of what we say in this way doesn't make any sense whatsoever. It's a reference to a reference; an in-joke. We played about with how much we can make from references like this, but then stumbled on the notion of what the other two (Leo & Jon) like to call the Frankenscene. Funnily enough, if you take half of a conversation from one film and merge it with half from another, the result is about as cohesive as day to day conversation usually is. Maybe not always on paper, but when spoken, it generally works.

We're attempting to tell a story, but not the story which is on stage. What's on stage is the cover-up. We're weaving the story underneath what you see on the surface. It'll be lurking behind the rest of the action in media, shadow and lights. As everything is, right?

We'll be working away, as usual, and hopefully we'll have 30-45 minutes of crashbangwallop within the next two or three weeks. The plan is to then sit back, relax, and rip it to shreds. If 10% of it survives I'll be a happy man.