Author Blog On Burn my Heart--The Play!

August 2010

There are more than twenty characters in Burn My Heart. So how would you turn it into a stage play for just five actors? This challenge is being undertaken as I write, by Trestle director Oliver Jones with translator and playwright Rina Vergano. While I’ve previously adapted some of my own work (The Other Side of Truth for radio and The Playground for stage – see www.beverleynaidoo.com ), this feels rather like handing over a child for adoption! Yet some paths, I believe, are meant to cross...

A month before Burn My Heart was published in Britain in 2007, Oliver Jones and I spoke for the first time. He told me about his passion to form a company, Blindeye (www.blindeye.org.uk), that would make theatre about human rights. When he spoke of his interest in the Mau Mau, I suggested he read the novel. “I’ve so many images about how I’d stage it!” he said afterward, “but one thing is difficult--the number of characters.” I wondered if he would be deterred.

Yet Oliver's ideas brewed on. Making a play is a collaborative process and quite different from brewing a novel in your head. In addition to the director’s resolve, a lot depends on “things coming together.” Now, three years on, with Oliver now working at Trestle, he has set up Blindeye. I was delighted when he got in touch again. I not only knew of Trestle as one of Britain’s leading touring companies but I’d seen productions on tour and admired the physical storytelling.

In May, when I made my first visit to Trestle’s Art Base in St Albans - during development workshops on Burn My Heart - I wasn’t expecting this hundred-year-old chapel full of gothic shadows and ghosts of a huge Victorian asylum. When I stepped inside the large wooden doors, it felt like the right place to dig into Burn My Heart’s secrets.

It’s now only a few weeks until the play’s autumn première, at Trestle Arts Base, St Albans before its eight-week UK tour. And how are Oliver and Rina tackling the challenge of twenty-plus characters? Well, with a good script, good actors, and imagination you can do almost anything. The list below reveals who will morph into whom, plus some other creative surprises in the casting! Of course specifics can change because that’s the challenge of physical theatre – discovering what works. But women will play the boys and the same actors will play both black and white characters. Am I nervous about seeing the story that still lives in my head take a completely new form on stage? You bet. But what a grand journey for my characters as they stride out beyond the page.

CHARACTERS (5 actors – 3 female, 2 male)

Mugo (Female)

Lance (Female)
Mrs Grayson
Dreadlock
Auntie
Gitau


Mathew (Female)
Mami
Mrs Smithers

Kamau (Male)
Old Josiah
Insp. Smithers
Child at club
Waiter at club
Schoolboy

Mr Grayson (Male)
Longcoat
Schoolboy
Child at club

Red Hats/Guards random members of cast


By Beverley Naidoo

Trestle's Summer School Blog

At the start of a week of Trestle Summer School, 2nd August 2010, twelve children aged 5 to 10 meet an artistic team of director (Emily Gray), performer (Georgina Roberts) and musician (Philippa Herrick) and take inspiration from Lewis Caroll’s Wonderlands of both Alice and Through the Looking Glass.

A question: can Trestle fully immerse the group in a world in which the artists share theatre techniques and the children make sense of them to create a thoroughly enjoyable week long theatrical experience?

Another question: can Trestle achieve the challenge of researching our next show for this age group without distracting from the major theme and ambition?

Day 1 – We begin with: a theatre building set up to be explored, a group of expectant children, most of whom do not know each other and the dramatic arrival of our performer, falling down the tower of the refurbished chapel, Trestle Arts Base. This character asks ‘Who am I’. ‘Where am I?’ ‘What am I’ and as we move around the building, following the clues and sounds of the White Rabbit, the children embrace the mission to discover who this intruder is by showing us who and what they are.

We end up in the theatre, which has become an installation of Wonderland and the children readily enter the otherness of this world; the contrariness of Wonderland is soon shared between us as each child is measured in vegetables “you are a runner bean”, “you are three beetroot's and a spring onion” and umbrellas become banqueting dishes, apples become powder puffs and recorders become hat stands. The intruder is named Ah-Um by the children and some secretly suspect she might be Alice.

Day 2 - No time to dwell on identity today; time has indeed fled and we are in the kingdom of the Red Queen. The terrifying and absurd monarch arrives and we discover it is her birthday, so games are to be played, rules to be made and unmade, winners and losers to become muddled and heads to be chopped off. The children adapt games to suit the Queen, for example, “What’s the time, Mr Wolf?” becomes “How many jam tarts have you Red Queen?” to which she replies, “A crumb, a puff of flour, a smear of jam”. She commands us to learn Spanish rhythms and flamenco poses, so a bull fight can be played out before her. A Jabberwocky made out of a parachute with bins for eyes is made; it dies and there is much galumphing.

Day 3 - The White Queen celebrates her non birthday and we enter her wood, full of tissue paper petals, ethereal sounds and strange creatures. Imaginations run wild as we create hand creatures inspired by Indian mudras (hand gestures) and body monsters made by four hand creatures evolving into a shape made by 4 bodies. Junk puppets are made and brought to life through breath and sound led interactions. Instruments are also given breath and move as if they were creatures, making sounds and conversations. The creative brilliance of the children is evident in their ideas; one suggests an auction in the wood of the White Queen and the group invent objects which were then bid for, not by monetary value, but by crowns, jewels, sneezes and cosmic entities.

Day 4 - With the presence of the White Rabbit comes a chorus of rabbits, caught frozen in the headlights of the imagined Red Queen’s stare. Masks are worn and worked with as the group prepares entertainments for the imminent tea party of the Sad Patter, no, the Glad Matter, no, the Rabbit just can’t get his words out right so nonsense is spoken and understood by all. We borrow ideas for entertainments from Oscar Wilde’s short story, The Birthday of the Infanta, which conjures a world not too far from the strictures and absurdities of the Wonderland gardens and courts.

Day 5 - At last the most frequently requested character of the week arrives, the Mad Hatter himself; he is eccentric and Scottish, unnerving and charismatic. He helps the children to create the experience that they want their parents to have in the afternoon; he is demanding and kind and then he falls asleep, leaving them to set up for their performance.

There is no script and there is no rehearsal. The week’s work has been grounded in Trestle’s approach to physical theatre, creative learning and storytelling. We invited the children in as individuals and demanded from them the depth of creativity and bravery we would expect from an adult professional. If we as professional artists have engaged and guided the young people in skilled way, then this culmination of the process will genuinely show the audience what the week has been like and draw them too into experiencing Trestle’s work.

The Sharing
In come parents, grandparents, carers and aunties for an hour of the utterly unexpected; experiential live art meets physical theatre performance in an installation setting. Trestle have lost the children in Wonderland and the audience have to coax them to appear – in dappled light, poems of defeating great beasts are told, the children lecture their parents on the exotic puppet creatures of the White Queen’s wood, the adults dance to the demands of the Red Queen and suffer elimination, the Mad Hatter invites us all to a virtual tea party. Only once the entertainments have entertained, culminating in the futterwaken fashion show, can the real tea, cake and jam tarts arrive and be shared by all.

Parents comment on their children coming home each day with questions the adults cannot answer, the performance opens some parents’ eyes to new types of theatre; the children also appear to have grown each day. There has been great enjoyment and in terms of creative learning many valuable life skills have been developed, we hope with a lasing effect. The performer has delivered brilliant performances in role, becoming a different character each day, all of which the group has engaged and improvised with. The musician has used exemplary facilitation skills; encouraging instrument playing and rhythmic performance which are story based and musically open. As director, I have shared the physical theatre skills that Trestle uses and supported the children in their play with them.

Responses from parents about their children:

He showed increasing enthusiasm as the week went on. He was desperate to come from about 8am every day.
Absolutely loved it and had lots of fun.
So lovely to see them looking so comfortable in the space

From a practitioner:

What the children brought to it was genuinely integrated into the work; it was far more than a workshop!

by Emily

http://infinitesouls-carp.blogspot.com/

Howling at the Moon Fool

I started working for Trestle as Marketing Manager just before Christmas, and in these few short months I have already been bombarded by giraffes, fairies and arctic weather conditions, seen two key members of the team off and away on maternity leave and their wonderful replacements hit the ground running straight into 2010 and the spring season. I can’t help feeling that this is the beginning of a new phase for us here at Trestle. The Glass Mountain marked the end of our three international collaborations and our current production Moon Fool; ill met by moonlight heralds the beginning of a series of co-productions with emerging companies.

My journey to Trestle began bizarrely, a long time ago when I was studying at what was then Melton Mowbray Performing Arts College. I was fortunate to be taught my acting lessons by, among others, one Sally Cook – now Melton was a serious Performing Arts College, it was a place that at the time was a little controversial – I studied a Btec course which was still considered a sure fire way of not being able to get into University (a point I later proved wrong). Sally, unbeknown to me, had been a founding member of a theatre company that was known as....Trestle. Well, I took her mask and physical theatre module and it has formed a major part of my practice and my life ever since.

Melton and Sally lead me to Dartington College of Arts, a place which at this very moment is disintegrating in the same way as (children of the 80s, please stand up) Never Ending Story’s Fantasia. The tiny grains of sand that remain have settled in Falmouth – hopefully into a place where people are still allowed to dream of things that amount to more than money. The course at Melton was created by two ex Dartington students who experienced the place at its time of true shining during the 1960s and the reality of their vision helped form my view of live arts.

Dartington is not a place to be mentioned lightly, especially at this time of mourning and rebirth; I refuse to admit that the heart of the place will die, but I can't convey how much I hope the essence of why we all went there remains in spirit. My college, our college, our community, spans and crosses graduation dates and years of study and exploration- Foxhole and Higher Close, of reminiscing via Google maps and hitching up the hill, (well remembering when hitching was just something you did), of all the things you should have figured out when you were there before life came stampeding towards you and put it into context... finally, the lectures slept through, but the twelve hour durational performance that was the reason you slept in, of yoga in the gardens and gin outside the SU. Any time spent in the company of such an auspicious place (and I do think that Dartington is that), is a privilege and it stays with you throughout the rest of your life.

After Dartington the world seemed vast and tiny simultaneously and like any contemporary arts graduate I stumbled through individual projects, taught, worked and wondered. Within a few years I was fortunate enough to find steady employment in a Theatre as a Marketing and Press Officer. The Alban Arena in St Albans is hailed as Hertfordshire’s premier entertainment venue and hosts everything from Jools Holland to the Tweenies (not quite where I saw myself when I was at University), but for two and a half years I was nurtured and allowed to focus my skills and began to understand the engineering of commercial theatre. Without this experience, I could not have made the journey back to the Theatre in my heart.

I am feeling now as if my feet are under the desk and all the elements that are encompassed within Trestle are coming more into focus every day. I am facing a period of great learning and improvisation at time when it seems harder than ever to produce work that invokes feeling and reaction; Moon Fool; ill met by moonlight is out on the road and has been met by some rave reviews reflecting both the passion and drive behind the shows conception and the power and love of all of those involved.

Work has already begun on our next co-production with new company Blindeye. Burn My Heart is based on the novel by award-winning writer Beverley Naidoo. The show will use African and European music and movement styles through a powerful mix of text, compelling storytelling and physical theatre to tell this fast-paced, devastating and highly relevant story. Blindeye’s Director Oliver Jones will be visiting Kenya, where the novel is set, to collaborate with artists during April.

Blindeye is an exciting new theatre company, dedicated to the production of and participation in work on national and international human rights issues. Both Trestle and Blindeye share a passion for collaboration with artists from an early stage in the process; Blindeye experiment with traditional tools of theatre-making to create work that is visceral, provocative and relevant to the world we live in today.

I feel now as if I am in the right place, as Marketing Manager for Trestle and as an individual. I am certain that whatever is thrown at us as a Company we can face head on and overcome.

by Rhian