Class: Week Two

We got through a great of material today, pursuing the subject of home and being away from home. We began by recapping on the piece of simple choreography produced by your own personal migration patterns. We repeated this at different speeds and in differently-sized spaces. Then - anticipating the structure of Timeless - we continued counting through the years to project an imaginary set of further migrations taking you up to your seventies. It was interesting to see the patterns in your imaginary migrations: there was a large exodus to America in your twenties; there was another large mid-life migration in your forties; many of you - perhaps obviously - saw your future home as tied up with family commitments. It was striking how little movement there was in the years 50 to 70. Perhaps you imagine you'll be settled by that time?

I had asked you to bring in items from your room that made it homely. You produced a terrific collection of objects, hard and soft, big and small, old and new. As we toured round, I was struck by some resonant, sometimes cryptic statements about these objects. I note only a very small selection of the pages of notes I took down:

• I have a problem that I don't feel at home at home.
• It's nice knowing they're somewhere on your wall, boxes ticked, it makes it home. It feels like it's been around for a very long time.
• Everywhere I go in the world I have to buy a pair of ear-rings. This place I went and every village I just had to get some.
• Elephants are majestic and strong and family-oriented and beautiful.
• Before I left I went round knocking on everyone's door to take a picture of them. They think I'm mad.
• It almost attracts people to my room cos they come in and hold it. I have quite got a pillow thing.
• Coming back from Turkey it's like 'ooh my coat'.
• My room is like a museum of frames. I don't go looking for them; it's an of the moment type thing.
• Toothpaste and floss and stuff he gets supplies and we just take that out of the bag but the toothbrushes he brings me personally.
• We made a flask of tea and took some biscuits to this deer park he had at the end of his road. He wants to be a driving instructor.

I only offer these to show that already there are some lovely little glimpses of story, experience, memory and language. Some of these fragments - when taken out of context - have a very attractive almost poetic quality. You'll see that I've sometimes cut two phrases from the conversation together to try out the strange effect that the juxtaposition creates. We'll be producing more of this kind of material as the course goes on.

We then discussed homeliness, thinking about place, time, smell, atmosphere, all the things that create a cosy sense of home.

You began looking at developing simple physical movements that you might associate with your object and by extension your room. I then asked you to swap 'rooms' and we started building up a performance sequence of (a) performing the 'homely' physical/gestural movement associated with your home object (b) giving some expression to a sense of not being at home, exploring the new/unfamiliar object, and (c) randomly cut in, I asked you occasionally to try to create, just with your eyes, a link back to your old room: I hoped we would begin to start visualising homesickness on stage.

There was some nice work here. The first two things - (a) and (b) - were promising, though they need a stronger sense of composition before they'll start working on the larger scale needed for performance. The 'looks homeward' were very interesting; I expected rather dramatic expressions of longing, but far more effective was what you all did. Everyone more or less just turned and focused their eyes back home. It was the minimalism of the gesture, combined with everyone doing the same thing, that made it work for me.

I asked you to introduce language into the moment, saying 'I want to go home' in the group's variety of languages. The vocalization didn't add very much to me, in fact distracted from the clarity of the glance. We will, however, look further at using the different languages in the group (we had some basic level of competence in 17 languages, from Afrikaans to Welsh!) over the next couple of weeks.

After the break, I asked you to 'brainstorm' jobs that might involve people resettling across the world. We got a long and imaginative list. I'm interested in this because I want us to be thinking about possible stories and - though I didn't say this in the class - it might make for some interesting characters if you looked at what the experience might be of being an international footballer's daughter, or the child of an ambassador, or the family of a group of economic migrants, and so on. I may pursue this next week.

We then discussed Timeless. You offered some very clear comments on the structure and tone of the text:

• You discussed the wit and humour of the interrelations between the characters.
• The complexity of the time structure.
• The gaps that the audience had to fill in to understand the development of their relationships.
• The thematic evocation of 'perfection' in the challenging third scene.

Watching the first quarter of an hour of the final act, the aims of the scene became clearer. The 'future' being depicted (as the first scene is the present, and the second the past) is the imaginary, wished-for, ideal future of each of the characters. It became clearer that each character is imagining how the future might go and the other characters at various points are projections of their imagination. So throughout the scene we see all four characters represented in the imaginations of all four characters; although it would never strike you like this, we effectively see sixteen different characters on stage. Their isolation from each other is emphasised in the lighting, enclosing each actor in their own pool of light.

You made some very comments on the way that Nick Powell's score worked with the performance; each instrument in the quartet became attached, at times, to a particular character. During moments of obsessive gestural repetition on stage, the music would underscore that, the sombre strings adding to the feeling of melancholy in these moments where the characters long to shed their physical inhibitions and be 'remarkably casual' with one another. This awkwardness is represented in a series of gestural movements: Ian putting his hand out only to withdraw it and rub the back of his neck; Veronica putting her hand to her throat; Stella holding her hands to her cheeks. The string quartet, however, also offers us a vision of the reconciliation of these characters; even though they are isolated from one another by their awkwardness and theatrically by the lighting, they reach a kind of harmony in the music, where the four instruments do wor harmonically together. The gestures too pass from person to person, finding resolution in the repeated motif about 'the beach we went to that one time'...

At the end of the class I gave out the text of Airport. Please note that this will be a difficult read for some of you (except the person who speaks some Spanish) and you'll need to spend some time working on it before the class. In the class we'll look at some video of the original production.

Finally, we gave out research tasks. I allocated to you, in pairs, one of the following themes:

• bilingualism*
• nomadic peoples
• migration*
• tourism*
• interior design*
• homesickness
• non-spaces

(The asterisked topics are the ones I'd like you to report back on next week (week 3). Note: this is a change from what I said in class.)

I'd like you to post reports on your research to the blog, but over the next two weeks, we need brief reports on what you've discovered. While I'd like you to be fairly rigorous in your research, this is of course a creative project and I am in interested in things you may discover that trigger a creative response.

Dan Rebellato