The UK Premiere of That Night Follows Day is this Friday and Saturday (18th and 19th May), in Birmingham as part of the Fierce Festival. I'm really looking forward to that. The piece is a collaboration between myself and the Flemish theatre company Victoria, and has a cast of seventeen children, between the ages of eight and fourteen. The set is by Richard Lowdon (Forced Entertainment) and the lights are designed by Nigel Edwards who has worked with my colleagues and I at Forced Ents for a very long time. The pictures here are by Phile Deprez.

Someone wrote a very nice blog entry following the first performances in Brussels the week before last. You can read it here. 

You tell jokes to us.
You grade us. You tell us that we’ve worked hard, or that we have to work harder.
You save our drawings.
You say that Rome was not built in a day.
You say that silence is golden, that silence is important.
You sit by the bed.

You stand in the doorway.
You wait in the car.
You wait outside.
You teach us to swim.
You read to us about things that happened in a very far off, very distant galaxy.

You watch us when you think we aren’t looking.
You look at us with expressions that we can’t exactly read or properly recognise.  

The whole tour list for 2007 is down below, where it says 'Read more...'. There are already more dates planned for 2008, and I'll try to add these here soon.

For more information about Victoria check out their website.

Read more...

I’ve done a few very short stories now for this project by artist Barbara Campbell. It's an on-going work in which she’s web-casting short text-based performances each night for 1001 consecutive nights. She’s reached number 693 at this point – nearly two years work.

Each nights performance is relayed as a live webcast to anyone who is logged on to her website at  the appointed time - sunset where she happens to be. 100’s of different writers and artists have contributed to her project – each writing a story (or stories) for her to perform.

The seed for each story in the project is a prompt word or phrase selected by Barbara from journalists’ reports covering events in the Middle East. She renders these prompts in watercolour and posts them on her website. Participants then write a story using that day’s prompt as inspiration. This is the one I did yesterday - a rather bleak tale, from the already bleak prompt line 'generally unsmiling' and these are the ones I did before, here, here and here. These other stories are also pretty bleak so you can see that I'm consistent. 

There’s something quite exhilarating about the process of writing for the project – depending on how your time-zone synchs with the one Barbara happens to be in you get more or less time to write, and you get the prompt at different times of day/night. The previous one I did (from the prompt 'wanted to get a good look') I was in the UK while Barbara was in Australia. So I think I got the prompt at about 9pm and had to complete the writing before I went to bed. The other contributions I did were when I was in New York and Barbara (I think) was in Europe, so I was getting the prompt mid-afternoon and having to turn the writing around by midnight or so. For someone that travels so much it seems I get quickly confused by timezones.

I really like working against the clock as a writer and also on 1001 Nights Cast really enjoyed the fact of having to deal with some random stimulus. Barbara always lets you know where the quotes she chooses have come from but I never look at the larger news stories that she’s drawn on until after I’ve finished the writing. There’s something about the prompt – always a super-brief fragment - that’s very inspiring to work with, a level of incompletion that’s highly generative.

There are also some really great stories at 1001 Nights Cast from other people I know – from the writer/academic Adrian Heathfield, the director Peter Petralia, performer Cathy Naden (Forced Entertainment) and from the science fiction writer M. John Harrison - as well as loads more by people that I don't know. My friend Sara Bailles just did a story there too. You can search for these other stories, and check out how to contribute to the project at http://1001.net.au

They're showing That Night Follows Day in Rotterdam as part of De (Internationale) Keuze van de Rotterdamse Schouwburg in September and are busy working on a publication to go with the season. For the publication there are interviews but they've also set up a complicated email thing whereby different artists in the prgoramme get to propose questions to each other. So, yesterday, this in email:

"The question that Pavol Liska and Kelly Cooper of the Nature Theater of Oklahoma ask you is: 'How specifically do you subvert your habits?  How do you trick yourself, on the most practical level, so your own work keeps changing and surprising you? How do you cultivate your creative longevity?'"

And my answer:

"I don't have a strategy for this. I get tricked by accident - by being too tired, too busy, by being distracted, by getting fascinated with something that is happening, by becoming delirious (in a banal way, not thinking of hallucinogens), by making mistakes, generating accidents or by following a flow. I guess a 'strategy' could be putting yourself in a position where all that is more likely, however one would do that wether over a period of hours, days, weeks, months or years. As if creativity were a matter of making mistakes that you quite like and then trying (with all your best 'craft') to live and deal well with the consequences."

I also proposed a question to Pavol and to Kelly, and to Lina Saneh and Rabih Mroué from Lebanon, and the other artists in the season including René Pollesch and Romeo Castellucci. Do they consider themslves to be optimists? I'll post here if there are any responses.