introduction:
Playwright, poet, director and designer, I have 25 years experience in professional theatre. My last three successfully staged productions were The Orange God (2001), Ping (2002) and Antimony (2003). I wrote, directed and designed all three.
I designed, built and managed Café Brazil, K’Rd., Auckland, from 1995 to 2007 with my brother Dominic. Brazil was an institution. It served as venue for readings, experimental theatre and performance, the majority of which featured my writing.
Brazil closed to give Dominic and I the freedom to pursue our artistic careers, his in digital media, mine in theatre. Together, we made 4 videos for local musician SJD, in 2004 and 2005, one of which, “southern lights,” Grant Smithies called the “best music video ever made in New Zealand.” I continue to write pieces for and publish works previously seen only in performance online at Square White World.
the project:
– a radical exploration of the body on stage and in love
– for production in 2009
– four parts in four different venues:
an art gallery
a theatre
a strip club
a karaoke bar
– interweaving four stories and four styles:
physical theatre
image theatre
psychological theatre
absurd theatre
– innovative and conceptual theatre:
to take as long as possible
to have one to fifty performers
to include dancers and musicians
– bringing the arts together:
visual art
performance art
music
Love Project 9 is art. It is about broadening the theatre audience to include gallery goers, fans of live music, those hungry to find beauty and thirsty for fresh experience. It is about driving theatre writing over the limit and arriving at a new sense of what it can do. It is about sensation and excitement. It is about wanting MORE.
Love Project 9 aims at the local market and national and international festivals in the future.
About:
the stories interweave through the four performances:
1.Semele and Zeus (or Jupiter): a classical myth with modern relevance – sex, sexual jealousy, surrogacy and cloning. A universal story.
Semele is so beautiful that the God falls in love with her. He visits her in human form and at the sound of his voice she in turn falls in love with him. The God’s wife grows jealous when she sees that Semele is pregnant. She convinces Semele to trick the God. She argues that Semele hasn’t loved him until she’s had him as a god, not as a man. The God has no choice. He comes to her in his immortal form and it burns Semele to death. The child, Dionysus, bursts from her womb. The God slits open his own body to bring it to full term there. When grown, Dionysus will rescue his mother from death and she will preside over those mysteries we call Dionysian and which include theatre.
2.A summer party at a house in the country. Chekhov-style. What little action there is being character- and not plot-driven. The NZ landscape, in all its emptiness, is a character here. What is left unsaid motivates what happens. We learn of the undercurrents linking all four stories: destructive, passionate love, and belonging – the want of it, the lack of it.
3.A drift-work. Made from the residue of words, like a high-tide mark left by the preceding wash of language.
The action proceeds as if the characters from the NZ Chekhovian summer story have arrived on the shores of the story of Semele. They ask if they belong.
Like beach-combers, they pick through the washed up flotsam and jetsam. Their poetry lies in an attempt to make something of what’s left. Of what they find. As much as of what they bring.
4.A carcrash. Darkness presses against my face. Physical events. Through a succession of specific images a logic becomes apparent: it is the story of an ordinary life relived through a series of involuntary memories. A life literally flashes before our eyes. Dramatic images, political speeches, songs, shocks, pink rain. Memory and experience sit side by side. This is a poetry of sensations. We are neither at the end, nor at the beginning. Of a life. Perhaps we are in the middle.
Love Project 9 pushes the boundaries of conventional theatre. It can because it knows where those boundaries are. It involves the participation, in advisory and dramaturgical capacities, of some of the best and most experienced theatre practitioners in New Zealand.
Through workshops with familiar and up-and-coming performers and through the input of an extensive network of artists from the visual arts, music and film, the project will be challenged to innovate in every aspect of its realisation.
Inputs from informal consultation are essential to this project, both in the sense of building a community of interest and of satisfying that community and the wider community with work that is engaged, relevant and of high artistic merit.
Love Project 9 will harness theatre’s potential to galvanise the arts and bring together the interests of artists from spheres other than theatre. It will raise its profile as one art form among many, but one with the capacity of inclusion that brings to those it touches the excitement of immediacy.
The potential outreach into the general population of this bringing-together, this immediacy, this depth of experience and this will to innovate is immense. To capitalise on it fully, the project requires adequate investment to achieve a sustainable momentum.
I, and those whose names appear in this application, believe this project is asking for enough to bring it to the next level in theatre writing – a potential classic.
Funding is sought to support the writing process, including:
– four months full-time – see budget
– a draft ready to read by February 2009
– script advice over the writing period
– workshops to test-drive the project – see budget
– script finalised by mid 2009
Script advice during the writing process:
– Geraldine Brophy has indicated she would be willing to advise during the writing process and act as dramaturg for workshops
– Alison Quigan to be confirmed
– Stuart Devine has indicated he would be willing to read and comment on the script during the writing process
Workshop participants:
– Marek Sumich – actor
– Anja Packham – dancer/actress
– Erikka Lindsay – singer/composer/musician
– Kelson Henderson – actor
– Morgana O’Reilly – actress
– Barnie Duncan – actor/musician
(Finished script will be submitted to Playmarket.)
for assessment
Project Budget
EXPENDITURE
Fees/wages
writer/director………………………………………..$12 000
script advisor/dramaturg…………………………..$ 5 000
actors/performers…………………………………….$ 2 160
Material costs
rehearsal space hire………………………………… $ 300
equipment hire………………………………………..$ 150
video recording costs……………………………….$ 150
photocopying of workshop scripts……………..$ 300
Administration
and overhead costs
telephone………………………………………………..$ 200
stationery………………………………………………..$ 200
TOTAL EXPENDITURE…………………………………..$20 460
EARNED INCOME
Support from
other sources
applicant’s contribution…………………………….$ 500
in-kind support………………………………………..$ 300
TOTAL INCOME
……………………………………………………………..$ 800
Shortfall
……………………………………………………………..$19 660
Budget Notes
(all figures include GST)
1.writer/director’s fee is calculated @ $3 000 per month;
2.script advisors’ and dramaturg’s fees are calculated @ $5 000 capped;
3.actors/performers’ fees are calculated as follows:
1.first month: 5 actors/performers @ $18:00 per hour for 8 hours (over two days);
2.second month: 5 actors/performers @ $18:00 per hour for 8 hours (over two days);
3.third month: 5 actors/performers @ $18:00 per hour for 8 hours (over two days);
4.rehearsal space hire is calculated @ $100 for each of the 3 workshops of 8 hours (split over two days);
5.equipment hire has been kept as a contingency for additional costs associated with the 3 workshops, stage properties and refreshments;
6.video recording costs are calculated @ $50 per day for the second day of each of the 3 workshops (covers cost of tapes and/or a token fee to an interested student);
7.photocopying of workshop scripts is calculated for the complete script of @ 200 pages x 12 actors/performers (in total) x $0.125 per sheet copied;
8.both telephone and stationery costs have been retained as contingencies: stationery covers extra ink for computer printer, reams of paper and notebooks; telephone covers incidental phone charges on cell or landlines (it is expected that most communication will take place via email);
9.applicant’s contribution will cover the costs of telephone, video recording costs and part of equipment hire;
10.in-kind support will cover the costs of stationery and the remainder of equipment hire (i.e., coffee and comestibles for the workshops).
