All posts by : ramblerwest

guest blog post by Professor Esther Dermott, University of Bristol

@estherdermott

When Tina and Kristina emailed me, saying that they had come across my sociological work on fatherhood, and was I interested in collaborating on a new theatre piece, I was excited. There was an element of feeling flattered (for sure) but mainly interest in the prospect of doing something new; this was a very different prospect to writing a journal article or designing a research project.

I was also nervous, mainly because I wondered what DadMan was going to say about fathers and fatherhood. My work argues that contemporary fatherhood has changed. Specifically, that the idea of intimacy captures the essence of what men are looking for in a relationship with their children and is central to parenting practices now being adopted by men. So initially I worried that the play might pander to tired clichés about male incompetence that I have tried to challenge. Once I spoke to Kristina and Tina that concern went away: they had a feminist sensibility and wanted to capture the tensions between different kinds of work and care in a nuanced way that made sense to me.

My other thought was about how my academic work could possibly inform the piece. In an early version of the show, one scene had text from my book on fatherhood read aloud from a lectern, intercut with a father crawling round the floor engaged in childcare and expressing his worries about being a dad. I could see what the scene was trying to do, for me, it highlighted the tension between the detail of the everyday and more general claims about male parenting. But it also highlighted the limits of academic writing as ‘drama’ – my words just sounded really boring. In revising that element, Tina and Kristina were able to be informed by my research without being bounded by it, and to use sociological terms in a way that is also entertaining.

‘Impact’ is the term used in academia for taking your research outside of the university. Basically, it means that someone who is not an academic is interested in your ideas. Having that happen, and being involved in helping to make a piece of theatre, has been great. It has made me think again about what sociology can and can’t communicate about families, how we as academics talk to publics and the role that the arts can play in that.

guest blog post by Daniel Bye

I don’t know if anybody has ever mentioned it before, but becoming a parent really eats into your productive time.

My wife works full-time and I am a freelancer so in order that our one-year-old daughter is not with a childminder all the time (which in any case we couldn’t afford), I look after her on Mondays and Tuesdays. The theory was that it would be just about possible to do in four days (Wed-Sat) the work I used to get done in five (Mon-Fri). Especially when you factor in nap time on Mondays and Tuesdays.

This theory has proven hilariously inaccurate.

For a start, I already worked plenty of Saturdays, so it’s not a 20% reduction in work time, it’s a 33% reduction. Also, unless I’m away from home, the working day is now at least an hour shorter, often as many as three. And as every parent knows, nap time isn’t work time, it’s when you get the laundry done.

(The one thing no-one told me about becoming a parent was that it would lead to a fivefold increase in the amount of time I spend dealing with laundry.)

But the key loss of productive time is actually the time it didn’t look like I was being productive. When you’re a writer, the time spent running errands in town, idly reading a book on a fascinating subject, or just having a Sunday, that’s all work time. This work is invisible to the casual observer. But under the surface, characters are having conversations, a dramaturgical problem is being teased out, or a fascination is becoming an idea.

I think about 75% of my writing used to be done in this way. By the time I finally got to my desk to write something down, or into the rehearsal room to rough it out, it came relatively quickly.

The amount of time I now have to follow an idle train of thought has been decimated. A child’s needs are so immediate that it’s rarely possible to stay in your head for more than a minute or two before you have to change a nappy or read Hairy Maclary for the fourth time this morning.

It would be conventional at this point to say that it’s totally worth it in terms of the sheer pleasure brought by our child. I’m not sure this process is susceptible to that sort of cost-benefit analysis. Like, I don’t regret for one second the fact that we chose to bring this tiny person into the world. She’s wonderful. The process of watching a person becoming more fully herself every day is an enormous thrill. I feel immeasurably enriched by her existence and I miss her every hour we’re apart.

I miss her every hour we’re apart, but after two days of being together, I really look forward to some time on my own.

For most of her first year, I was desperately racing to keep up with everything I was supposed to be doing. I didn’t succeed. It wasn’t all down to the baby that I got a bit behind: for four months of that first year when my wife started her new job, I ended up having Dot three days a week. We also moved house to a new city. We went through the full gamut of major life changes within the space of about seven months.

Still, it is becoming more manageable. I’m now almost at a point where I’ve caught up with everything I’m supposed to have done. With one notable exception, I’m at most a week or two behind schedule with any given project. By Christmas, I’ll probably have caught up entirely. Except perhaps for that one notable exception. Well, maybe two. But it is becoming more manageable. Honest.

It’s astonishing to me now how much time I used to waste. I say this as someone who’s always thought of himself as a pretty good manager of time. I was not notably unproductive. But now, if I get a few hours at my desk, I note that almost none of that time will be spent checking twitter and facebook. I am barely aware of what’s going on in the world of professional football, and that’s not just because Middlesbrough got relegated last season. Almost none of my working time will be spent dithering – I used to agonise over certain tasks until they were unavoidable. Now I write a first draft of that email or that document and it’s surprising how often that’s the email or document I’d have ended up with after agonising until the deadline. I usually have time to redraft it and because I’ve not wasted any time dithering and agonising, I’ve still spent less time on it than I would have before.

I’ll be honest and say that, as you’ve probably noticed, I haven’t done that redraft on this blogpost. Generally, though, I’m getting to a point where I’m doing better work in less time than before I became a parent. So now, if I get a few hours at my desk, it astonishes me how much it’s possible to do.  (Anyone planning to have children on this basis should know that the first year is murder whatever you do, and it only takes one night of (more) interrupted sleep for it all to come tumbling down.)

I’m not writing a new show at the moment, so I’ve no idea how this will all translate to the sharper end of that process. But I have spent a fair amount of time writing new material that may or may not develop into anything finished. One of these pieces of new material has formed a lot of my trains of thought over the past month and I’m excited to note that I’m now able to follow those trains of thought for more than a couple of minutes. Hairy Maclary still stops them in their tracks, but somehow I’ve adjusted to the new rhythms of life and these days they wait for me in the sidings.

Someone once said to me, if you want to get someone to do something for you, ask a busy person. A not-busy person will have so much time that they won’t schedule your thing, they can do it whenever, and it will slip and slide and never get done. Meanwhile, a busy person will do it next Thursday at 10.35am.

Now I think that if you want something done, ask a parent.

Don’t, though. It’s just a figure of speech. They’ve got enough on their plate.

by Tom Moseley, stage manager on “Wonderwoman: The Naked Truth”

For the past 10 years I have been involved with theatre and performances for children, so the idea of having accommodation for children or people with additional assistance requirements was not anything new to me. However, being involved with a show for adults who will have babies and toddlers with them was a totally new experience.

The addition of babies and toddlers in the audience impacted nearly every aspect of the performance, There were several things that I had to be aware of in the set up of the performance and during the operation of the show.

• The Audience lights have to be kept on throughout the duration of the show so at no point during the show do the parents have a moment when they cannot see their child, and the child cannot see the parent to try and keep the child as calm as possible. Parents may have to leave the space to change their child’s nappy or if it is in too much distress.
• The stage lighting has to be kept bright enough to make it possible to see any crawling children without impacting too heavily the more intimate scenes, so the actors don’t accidentally trample babies during scene changes.
• The audio has to be loud and clear enough to be heard, but not loud enough to startle and upset the children, which ends up being one of the toughest thing to get right when operating a show in a space for the first time.
• Toddlers will move around the performance space, there is no way of avoiding it, so the cast has to be aware of their surroundings at all times and for all moves, so do I. Being flexible with timings for the scenes, sometimes they will run longer because of baby intervention, making music run out before the end of a scene, being able to loop it as seamlessly as possible is a consideration that has to be at the back of my mind. Exactly the same issue with scene changes themselves, they may take longer with babies moving around the space. I find there are a few parallels with performing promenade shows, having audience members in your way that you have to be aware of at all times.
• At the end of the show the audience will stay in the space for upwards of 35 minutes to speak to each other and the cast, so having enough audience music is a must, I was totally unprepared for the amount that parents do not want to return back to the house, causing the length of time that they stay in the auditorium to be quite large for a show this length.

Overall the atmosphere of our baby friendly matinee shows is very different than our purely adult evening shows, the baby friendly matinee shows have a far more relaxed atmosphere, this developed over the duration of the run, I am sure this is to actually put the parents themselves at ease and to make them feel as comfortable as possible that it is ok that their baby makes a noise (or lots of noise), one thing to note is that when one baby starts making noise it spreads to the rests of the babies like a wave across the entire auditorium, being somewhat reminiscent of being trapped inside a playgroup. To put it in noise perspective, babies have been measured crying between 115-130 decibels, which is as loud as a siren, or the legal limit for a concert. So 20 babies crying at once during a particularly emotional scene will never not be absolutely hilarious and mortifying in equal measure.

Another thing to watch out for with baby friendly matinee shows is that toddlers really add to the show in a way that only toddlers can, the freedom to roam about the stage has left some particularly hilarious moments, making it a real struggle to not laugh so loud that the audience notices my existence, my particular favourite was seeing a child decide that the floor was her mortal enemy and so headbutt it with enough force to sound like a bass drum, get back up and keep waddling around the stage like it never happened.

This show is the single most positive show that I have ever been involved in, the audience are always itching to leave their positive comments and go out of their way to speak to the cast. It resonates with parents in a way that is unlike anything I have ever worked on, and the baby friendly matinee is the one that makes it obvious that the show has a purpose, seeing new mothers having the ability to relate to a show and to other mothers, to know that their struggles are completely normal is absolutely magical, and any inconvenience from children making noise is shared by the entire audience who all relate and understand the embarrassment and that it is not anything to worry about because everyone’s baby will be doing it.

In conclusion the baby friendly matinees as a technical stage manager can be hilarious, complicated, noisy and go on much longer than you expect them to, but no matter how they go they are always different and unique.

guest blog post by Oliver O’Shea, theatre director

We are sat at a table, reading a new section of the script. Written in the very early hours of the morning, this text is based on the previous day’s work, in which we were devising a new scene for the updated version of Wonderwoman. We are trying to concentrate, and both Kristina and Tina are closely considering the words as they read their parts aloud.

Today, we are not in a windowless basement, but instead in a rather spacious room which overlooks a calm lake of Cannon Hill Park in Birmingham. In fact, it is sunny today and the light pouring in through the windows is bright and pleasant. But we are squinting at the papers and tablet screens in front of us. Not gazing out of the window.

And yet…out of the corner of my eye, I spot something concerning which is happening in the corner of the room: one of the aforementioned large windows is slightly ajar, and poised between the frame and the ledge is one of our props. Not just any prop, but a purple toy rabbit, which we have recently decided will now play a rather prominent role in the performance. Gripping the leg of the rabbit, and determining its fate is a grinning two-year-old; Kristina’s son to be precise.

I hasten to reassure you that we had already established at the start of the day that the windows of this first storey room were (as expected) childproof, and could only be opened about an inch or so. The only danger was to the rabbit. And perhaps any unlucky jogger or pram-pusher who might be strolling below…

Before it could be dropped to its demise, the rabbit was reclaimed from his grip, and our renegade Assistant Director set new ‘tasks’ with other toys instead. Perhaps we should have foreseen that using children’s toys within our performance about motherhood would only make rehearsing with young children in the same room more challenging. But then again, we probably would not have decided to use these toys in performance, if we had not been inspired by their presence in the rehearsal room in the first place.

Kristina, Tom (stage manager), Oliver (director) and Tina

As a young, single, male theatre director without any caring responsibilities, joining the Notnow Collective for this project was a revelatory, inspiring, at times challenging – and, yes, occasionally frustrating – experience. Typically when early-career directors receive training, a more experienced director passes on their ‘process’ and ‘practice’ from a predominantly aesthetic perspective. Now, having had time to reflect on my two weeks with Notnow Collective as their rehearsal director and dramaturg, I wanted to consider in what ways the conditions in which they find themselves working, are influencing their artistic practice. And more broadly, whether we should be as bold and imaginative in our working practices, as we attempt to be in our productions.

Even in the most formal and conservative of rehearsal processes, invisible and unspoken influences affect the atmosphere, and thus shape the work which is being created in ineffable ways. Working with a toddler in the rehearsal room, changes the rhythm and the manner in which a scene is rehearsed, for instance; it changes how we approach the scene and shifts the priorities of attention. So, the performance itself diverges from its existing form – when working in a rehearsal room, everyone in the room contributes indirectly to what is created, whether actively or not.

In addition to evening performances, Wonderwoman will be presented with baby-friendly matinees on-tour. I was delighted and enthralled watching the first performance of Wonderwoman at mac, Birmingham, observing how the dynamics of the performance are transformed by having over twenty babies and infants in the auditorium. And on reflection, I wonder whether would Kristina and Tina be so resolutely focused and unflappable during these performances, had they not rehearsed with distractions and interruptions from their own children?

And as for my own work as a freelance director, I contemplate how my own rehearsal style might shift and adapt as I work on other upcoming projects. Perhaps I will welcome the interruption, the disruption, the tangent more readily than before; and perhaps the greatest discovery is that the real moment of drama is to be found in the dangling of a prop from a window on a sunny day, rather than from the words on a page.

If you want to know more about Oliver’s work check his website https://olioshea.wordpress.com/