I haven't shaved completely in years, because my naked face frightens people. It makes grown men scream like little girls. My shaving is apparently one of the signs of the apocalypse around here.
I mention this, purely for informational purposes. After all, the more signs and portents you know, the more you can prepare. You can check your almanac, your A to Z against the lie of the land, plan the route.
Provided of course, that you're holding the map the right way up, and it's the right map, you shouldn't have any real problems, right?
But what happens when you've got the map upside down, or back to front? We've all been in a situation where things don't make sense to us; maybe you've arrived in the middle of something, picked up a conversation half way through. Everything is full of unintelligible nonsense and you're damned if you can work out what's going on, because you have no clue what kind of frame of reference people are using.
You're in medias res. Stuck in the middle of things. Your beginning isn't the same as theirs. They started before you got there, damn their early-bird ways.
So now you have to stuggle to catch up - to throw yourself into the river and hope there'll be some familiar things to grab, like driftwood, or rocks; politics, religion, sports scores; something and anything you can latch onto, to pull yourself onto the boat and join the voyage properly as one one of the crew.
I wasn't around when FoolishPeople began, or when Enochian; Language Of Angels was being performed in the early nineties. I was busy doing other things. I wasn't around in 2011 when Strange Factories was being filmed.
Here's the thing, for as sure as angels are angels, it doesn't matter whether they have wings or not. It doesn't matter that it's 2013 and I wasn't around ab ovo ('from the egg'). Like you, I'm in the middle of things, here and now.
Because all we're always in the middle, always where the action is, struggling to make sense of things.
And as sure as eggs are eggs and the angelic choir of seraphim have wings of fire to cover themselves, something has happened, something called life. Somehow, that's where the magic happens - that's where the feathers fly.
Life doesn't give you a nice neat introduction, a significant pause to indicate that something is occuring. The house lights do not dim in a genteel way to attract your attention. That's a ritual of theatre, of Art.
That's taking the raw stuff of life, of that rushing river - the same one that you cannot cross twice, by the way - and carefully, deliberately crafting something.
We mutter something around here: "Art on the Inside. Blood on the outside."
Because when Art meets Life, the theatre might as well be consumed by a conflagration, obscured by a cloud of flame and feathers. And those angels, those watchers - that audience up in the Gods?
The first in a ten part series sharing 101 things I learnt whilst writing, directing and producing my first feature.
Not all ideas are born equal. I completed three screenplays in total before the story of 'Strange Factories' even existed. None of them were right. 'GraveLand' was even set in the same location as 'Strange Factories'. I re-wrote many, many drafts to make 'GraveLand' the one, but it just wasn't. It was tough for me to accept, but I'm glad I suffered the process as the lessons I learnt over those re-drafts are immensely valuable. Don't willingly accept the first idea for a screenplay that comes to mind. You may need to clear some distance to reach the place in your imagination that holds the key to the right story.
It's easier to write a script for an incredible location than it is to find an incredible location for a script that already exists. 'Strange Factories' was written with full knowledge of the environment and location that we would be using. This location inspired and shaped the story.
You never have enough time to rewrite and you can never do enough drafts of your script. Leave time for another draft after your rehearsal period.
Fundraising and crowd funding require more focus, work and attention than any other element of pre-production. They're easily one of the most brutal elements of the filmmaking process. Be willing to get your hands dirty. You'll learn why having a pair of human eyes on your funding page means people are more willing to give money to your campaign, and this will feel like a small victory. If you take it seriously, you'll learn a whole set of skills that will aid you in the future, not only in filmmaking. I recommend picking up a copy of the 'Influential Fundraiser.'
Rehearsals are not only for actors. The more time you spend with your team working out how you'll shoot together, the better.
Your mind and body is as much a resource as your camera and your location. Making a feature film is a marathon. You need to be healthy and fit enough to not only direct, but to carry equipment and props (sometimes for miles and miles up very large hills if you can't afford transport). The entire process of making a feature on a tiny budget will push you to your limits and beyond. Don't underestimate how much you need to prepare and get fit before you start. Not only physically, but mentally too. A daily meditation routine is the reason I'm still here.
Instincts are rarely wrong when it comes to what you feel you need to shoot. There are scenes in 'Strange Factories' that exist only because of mad moments of inspiration. I couldn't always explain why I needed them, but I just knew and some of these scenes have proven crucial to the story I wanted to tell.
You make your film more than once, some say it's three times: when you write the script, during the shoot and in the edit. I'd say it's more than three times. I'd count the rehearsal process and also how you choose to eventually share your story when you exhibit or unveil the work. You could also include the creation of any transmedia elements if they have depth and truly exist within the story world. The 'Strange Factories' live cinema event will be another chance to create and tell the story that first came to me four years ago.
I've never had much patience, but as a filmmaker I've learnt that patience is a prerequisite on many, many levels. Sometimes there's nothing you can do but wait.
Have faith, because if you don't have faith in your film, who will?.
That's it for part one, part two will be posted in late April.
Someone once told me there were no answers, just things that allow you to ask more precise questions. Back then, I was studying Philosophy, so it sort of made sense.
Actually, I say that it sort of made sense, what I actually really mean is that it made total and utter sense. Bolt from the blue kind of sense. The kind of ephiphany usually reserved for soon to be prophets and/or religious zealots of any particular stripe.
I went so far as to grow the long hair and beard, of the kind associated with with Old Testament patriarchs. Sadly, at that point I lacked the requisite gravitas, and instead looked like a man who lived in a bush.
However, my lack of Old Testament chops withstanding, I soon realised that I was in somewhat of a minority. Most people, I am informed, like as little ambiguity as possible. It helps to plan your day, to determine right from wrong and that sort of thing.
And I'm not against planning things out, far from it. But, as they say, the best laid plans of mice and men...something, something. But here you see what we're up against, because we automatically revert to tried and trusted ways.
Humans are fundamentally conservative. Even the most neophillic of you has a certain way they like to view the world, or some sort of framework for whatever it is they do.
So when a work raises more questions than answers, what then? When things get weird, and unpredictable, do you try and seek out a way to discover the sense of them? Do you build, try, test and model? Try to connect what you're experiencing with what you know, with what you understand?
Or do you let it wash over you, and experience it as-is?
You might think the first is more useful, and perhaps it is, but the fact is, the world is far vaster than your experience. There are always going to be things which raise more questions, for perfect modelling is not possible with our human hardware, and not even with our most advanced technology.
As it is, we're still limited to estimating, to shortcuts and best-fit lines. Which means there's always going to be a place beyond the edge of the map, a crazy, uneasy place where you're not sure what's going to happen.
FoolishPeople live there, in that place. In coming to experience our works, there's every possibility you'll go beyond your map, into an experience which won't conform to the standard question and answer set.
In this, perhaps magick and phantasy are more real than what you think of as reality. More quixotic, chaotic, unpredictable and open to undreamt possibilities.
It was a wonderful piece of immersive theatre, that was a pleasure to experience, performed with innocence and wonder by a very talented collective. I throughly enjoyed myself and I encourage you to try and see it before it closes.
Showcasing their wordsmith, wizardry and immersive magic StampCollective reveal their latest “real life
imaginary playground”: Moragorithm HiC (Human Interest Company) .
This interactive performance-game mixes theatre and live art. You find yourself as the newest recruit in a
Lynchian corporate world - where the mundane meets the highly unusual. StampCollective are working
with the three p’s - Play, Puns and Portmanteau to provoke your mind, jiggle your body and ignite your
(non)senses. Past shows have been described as being like “...Twin Peaks meets the Crystal Maze. I
approve!”.
This subversive, surreal and silly experience challenges your perceptions about authority, consumerism
and what you really hold valuable. During a time when digital interaction reigns, this type of live art game
offers you something different, a bespoke human experience. No two shows are ever the same; each
performance emerges as unique as the group of audience inside it. You are in the driving seat, step
inside the strategy and influence the world of Moralgorithm HiC. Your response has power over the
performance. Providing equal opportunity for you to observe or play. The ball is truly in your court.
StampCollective, associate artists of Theatre Delicatessen, are proud to host the final production at
Marylebone Gardens before the resident artists move out and move on, and the venue is redeveloped for
new purposes. Book tickets and receive your Moralgorithm HiC induction pack. The game has already
started, follow the action #MoralgorithmHiC. Places are limited, book now to avoid disappointment.
I'm looking forward to see what this young collective do next.
In 2001 FoolishPeople was re-emerging from the chrysalis, after an extended break of six years (when I attempted to ignore the scream of my own personal truth.) My first son, Finn had just been born and I had a powerful realisation in that I knew I didn't want him to have a father that I didn't even recognise, a man who had become bitter and twisted because he wasn't brave enough to confront the creative fire that was burning him alive internally.
In this year zero I completed 'The Singularity'- FP performed this successfully at 'The Barn Theatre' in Welwyn Garden City and I was attempting to find a venue for FoolishPeople to show this work in London. I sent out a proposal for the project to a number of London Fringe Theatres, and had received an invitation to meet with the Artistic Director of a very well known fringe theatre.
When I was shown into the office of the Artistic Director, I noticed his office looked like a hoarder's flat. He moved a mass of papers, offered me a seat and started leafing through the script to 'The Singularity' which I had sent him. Not saying a word, but just sneering as he reminded himself of the work.
He turned around, got himself a drink, and gulped it down, (offering me a drink wasn't even a consideration), he probably received hundreds of scripts a week, from playwrights all attempting to get him to stage their work at his theatre. I was, to put it bluntly, the shit on the shoe of his day.
He broke the silence by telling me he'd read 'The Singularity' and it had some things he liked and others that he really didn't like. He didn't at all understand the concept of the immersive nature of the theatre I wanted to create- why did I need to use the stairs as well as the black box theatre at his venue? He laid it out in meticulous detail and defined what was expected of my work and my protagonist and why the immersive theatrical nature of 'The Singularity' wouldn't work. He told me that if I would change the work to a traditional play and could pay for the hire of the theatre, there could potentially be a way I could stage 'The Singularity' there.
In that moment I could feel the fear rising and his negativity threatening to extinguish what was a new beginning. It felt like a dangerous moment, where my life and work could turn and travel a path that would take me right back into the heart of despair. I sought out one single reason why he wasn't right, that I shouldn't listen to him and let him banish my ideas and dreams and in turn define the parameters of my art and ritual himself.
In that moment I remembered Les Tucker, who had taught me writing and devising at North Herts College. He'd introduced me to Artaud and encouraged me in the creation of my first written work, when the musical theatre material we were pushed to perform wasn't what he or I were really interested in. Les loved the horses, he always carried a copy of the racing times and he always defined his own path. I can never thank Les Tucker enough for the impact he had on me and the creation of FoolishPeople.
With this in mind, I explained why punk values were so important in FoolishPeople's work and demonstrated by showing him my middle finger.
There was a moment of shock between us both. This wasn't within the parameters of how a meeting between an unknown playwright and a well known fringe Artistic Director should go.
Polite English theatre is a myth, there's nothing polite in English theatre, it's still as bawdy and rude as it ever was. The essence of theatre just got better at hiding its truth, for fear of banishment.
Without permission I had ushered us both onto a new, strange path by my rude gesturing. A new story unfolded where anything could happen.
We got CPT the next week and The Singularity was shepherded into London under the stewardship of Chris Goode, who was the best mentor I could have asked for. Chris as an artist also defined his own parameters and I recognised Chris as another outsider. He completely supported the immersive theatrical ritual that was 'The Singularity' at a time when there was little to no other immersive theatre taking place in London. He recognised the power of these new parameters that were being offered to the audience from their immersion within a story.
Out of all of the auditions I've run for FP, the one I most remember is a lady who took a large knife out of her bag with her right hand and stared at us across the audition room like she was going to kill us all. She then retrieved a lettuce with her left hand from the same bag and hacked it to pieces. That was her audition. She took back the power from the audition process and from me as director. She redefined what was possible and because of that I'll never forget the experience until the day I die. It was truly amazing.
I'm not suggesting that in every exchange you should set out to redefine what is possible or expected but I think it's vital for art to exist within new parameters, outside the confines of what is safe and acceptable and this is one of the reasons why I think FoolishPeople's work still after twenty years remains outside of larger recognition. Society has mechanisms in place to reject that which is both very new and very old, whilst reinforcing the terrible nature of now, always now and never tomorrow or yesterday.
With each day that passes new parameters are emerging for artists. The tools exist today for you to develop, produce, shoot and distribute your own feature film yourself. Artists no longer need to rely on galleries to exhibit their work, there are empty spaces everywhere, offered up by the failure of the parameters of Capitalism. There's no one way, no simple solution on how to develop your ideas. Only you know the parameters and it's up to you to communicate and act as an advocate for your work and your own personal truth. You just need the will and tenacity to complete each stage of the process and do all the work necessary to manifest your art.
This is of course the very essence of the Fool archetype.
Like the Fool, there has never been a more dangerous, exciting or rewarding time to define your own parameters.
Most of the time we don't really think about moving. We just do it, and the motor functions and muscles do the rest for us out of habit. It's automatism at its finest, muscle memory that works faster than thought.
But we've all been there when you're thrown into an unfamiliar situation; that moment when your frame of reference has shifted so mightily that everything seems unpredictable.
If we feel negative towards it, often the experience will seem threatening - we'll want to do everything we can to turn back to what we perceive as the status quo. But then again, there's a creative angle to such things - an inescapable newness that may inspire a sense of vast possibility.
Because there's now the chance that the simplest, most ordinary of things can and will assume a new meaning for you. Because the unfamilliar, the unusual, the strange, and the uncanny forces you to re-evaluate, to fire up those faculties that you used to make sense of things.
Those same engines that were idling, merely ticking over before now, as awareness starts becoming important, because anything can and will happen. Because you're in a new situation, a new world where things work differently.
Your most ordinary of motions become infused with strangeness, and that's precisely what John was talking about in his last post on the Power of Nostalgia - the sense that you hang upon a precipice, or that the barriers, boundaries and screens which lend definition to your world are actually paper thin.
The fact that those very things you count on to make sense are fragile and subject to change is the reason behind the conservative urge, in the apolitical sense.
The Great British - or English if you prefer - Strangeness with which Foolish People work is, in a sense, precisely about nostalgia in the melancholic Homeric sense. A kind of unease which permeates our work, illustrating the rhythms which exist in spite of human society.
An urge to return to an imaginal home where ritual and shape may once again connect us to what it means to be human. To violate strictures of linear perception and immerse oneself in the deeply weird.
In that sense, it's unsurprising that the seventies and eighties in Britain were profoundly haunted; the spectre and the apparition may appear from nowhere. Antedilluvian spaceships may be unearthed amidst the concrete and modernist architecture. Ancient pagan rites emerge, fused with the insatiable curiosity of modern science. Atom bombs and athames, astrology and particle physics, nuclear power and telepathic children.
And this is the heart of Strange Factories - a story told in a pagan landscape. A landscape and place that is uncivilised, as the Romans named the countryfolk outside, in the provinces. There is a heretic heathenism to it - a journey down strange roads, with natives that do not obey the mores you know.
Perhaps calling Strange Factories cult cinema is far more accurate than it appears. Like the cult that surrounds Lord Summerisle in The Wicker Man, FoolishPeople perform rites and acts which may at first seem bizarre and occult in nature to outsiders.
But these rites and performances are at the heart of cultic practice, a shared excperience that bonds people and their environment together. The relationship one has with experience, with environment and culture, and with other people, is subtly altered.
That experience can break and reforge bonds in new ways, so that you may never see things quite the same again. In that sense, it is the nostalgic ache for the long-forgotten, dimly half remembered, that we seek to give you. For though you may not be able to ever go home, to go back, the very ache, the very strangeness provides you with a new awareness of youself and your origin.
The strange crooked roads are lonely and haunted, yet you will find many companions along the way, odd though they may be, and weird their ways. The Hum of Strange Factories is all around you, but its origin, and how you relate to it, is yours and yours alone.
Before I started work on the Strange Factories script, I knew I wanted to explore nostalgia and the stories that affected me so profoundly as a child. Their themes and the content of the dreams they instigated were so wondrous and deeply creepy.
Children's television for those of us born in the seventies in Britain, who grew of age in the eighties was deeply strange. For lots of reasons. It seems the layers between the truth of the fairytale and the power of the myths that haunt these isles were still close to the surface, calling to us from stone tapes and faces hidden in the wall.
The strongest current within children's television programming of this period for me as a young boy was the infusion of disquiet and unease amplified by the loss of my father, grandad and nan in quick succession.
I spent a great deal of time alone with only my imagination and gravestones for company. This overlapping nature of this architectural uncanniness helped open doorways that have never shut.
The loss permeated the stories I watched, it was already there waiting for me.
As a child I was scared of everything, my mother was deeply religious and after losing my father she retreated to the safety of various forms of religion. The children's television of my childhood offered no safety. The characters never told me things would be ok or alright in the end, they showed me that only the weirdest had the skills to survive the onslaught of apparitions and shifting realities, that bathed a generation in the odd irradiance, creating tomorrow's people.
These threads showed us the day after, awful futures we didn't want to live in, fictional narratives that threatened to obliterate the real.
These stories sent my friends and I to bed with true horror in hearts, many a playtime was spent dissecting the apparent doom that grew closer every day, reaching out to us from the television screens. Nuclear Armageddon was such a real and profound fear, its poison seeped deep into the reservoirs of dreams our imaginations held, causing tides of toxic dreams.
Saphire and Steel is a programme that fills me full of dreadful wonder even today. It relentlessly refused to open its world completely to its audience, it treated us as equals, expecting you to interpret and investigate the cases just as its two agents.
No easy answers, no simple solutions. This journey must be endured, for it is in the experience of the geography of these narratives that we learn the shape of our own imaginations, reflected deep in the landscapes of their characters and worlds.
Televison of the 70's and 80's arrived wrapped in nostalgia, even as you watched it for the first time you felt a deep longing, that turned young eyes into old and vice versa.
Bagpuss, probably one of the most fondly remembered British children's television programmes was about forgotten and lost toys, left to experience fleeting moments of what once was.
Strange Factories, is born of a type of nostalgia. A longing that you can't verbalise, that connects the marrow in your bones to worlds that only exist when you dream of them.
Sinking into the bath, feeling the water rise around you. Diving into the pool, breaking the surface and passing into another world. One that's all around us, a kind of noticeable density that you can feel against the skin.
Light is different – more diffuse. Sound is warped, becoming strange. You can feel ripples, movements through the medium, feeling other people without touching them though they're some distance away.
It's a whole different world – and you're no fish, are you? You can feel the difference, because you know somewhere else, somewhere unusual, with a different set of rules. When the rules are different, new possibilities occur, just because things operate in a different way than you are used to.
You can rise and fall, supported by this new environment, by its very density you can accomplish movements you would never be able to perform in the world from which you came.
Fully immersed, you affect the world. Your every movement changes things.
You are like Archimedes, displacing his bath-water, just before he has he has his Eureka! moment.
Immersive theatre provides you with that other world – a whole different place to interact with. A narrative that keeps you close, that you can feel, touch and hear without the artificial distinction of audience and player.
A writer, possessed by a terrifying fiction hunts for the heart of his story in a pagan landscape, haunted by the infamous hum emitted by a Strange Factory.
Strange Factories is the first feature film produced by FoolishPeople.
1957- Seascale, the North of England. Cirxus; an old English circus lost in the shadows of the smoke stacks of Calder Hall, the world's first commercial nuclear power station.
Athalia the ballerina waits in the ring for Loudon the clown to return with directions to the Black Pool, the mythic site of the Home Sweet Home, the final show of the season. Join her as she begins a bizarre and wondrous search for Loudon through the irradiated secrets of Cirxus, where she must face the macabre atomic menagerie, haunted by circus animals and navigate her way through the maze of strange, hallucinogenic sideshows to the other side of time.
Cirxus defies genre and form and offers a literary experience like no other. A combination of hallucinogenic novel and blueprint to a physical experience.
A rowdy gang of Tracey Emins wrestle half a dozen dazed Andy Warhols to the ground. IT IS THE FUTURE AND ALL FORMS OF ART ARE FREE. Perfect replicas exist of every masterpiece ever created, artworks and ideas are stolen from the mind before they’re even created.
Copyright or ownership is meaningless. FLESH-WORTH is all that matters. Arm yourself with weaponised art and explore the notions of open-source myth. What are intellectual rights worth in a decomposing culture?
Featuring full archival material from FoolishPeople’s performance run of Dead Language at the Institute of Contemporary Arts.
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