A talk I gave at the Institute for Arts and Therapy in Education

IATE talk 12^th November

Personal pain and process – transforming life through theatre works

It’s exciting to be talking to you at this event today. I have found great value in various forms of therapeutic practice at different points over the years. And in equal and possibly even greater measure, I have found my theatre practice to be a powerful and rewarding way to both embrace and transform issues.

A bit of context about me: I am a performer and theatre maker.

I also work as a director and I teach: drama, physical theatre skills, clowning and comedy both in Drama Schools and on open courses.

Although I began acting in the 1970’s in my country of birth, Australia. England however, is my home and I have been making theatre works here since 1980, firstly as a founding member of a small-scale fringe touring company and since 1983 as a solo artist. I have also collaborated with other artists and companies but most people who know me probably know me for either my teaching or my solo work.

Physical theatre was my field originally – some the early pieces were wordless or almost wordless. But I’d say, more often, I write and use text and meld it with movement and song into a whole.

I have always mined my own life to some degree for my theatre creations. Either directly or indirectly.

I have been asked to focus today on work that relates to childhood issues, but firstly I’d like to give a bit of context on my larger and more current approach to making work by referring to my most recent series of solo shows, which were autobiographical, based on real life issues. 3 shows created between 1999 and 2010. Right now I am working on a fourth, a piece largely composed of performed poetry.

The style they all roughly share is a kind of confessional story-telling mixed with swiftly sketched scenes plus some philosophical musings in direct address to the audience and including some music and some song. As a flavour, most people describe the work as a mixture of moving, thought provoking and funny.

These recent works have had for me a definite transformatory power. Getting my problem, my issue, getting the painful history into a format that contains emotion, finds new meaning and is also is redeemed by comedy has proved very effective for me.

Humour provides and requires a shift in perspective  – and used well, that has a tremendously healing function.

My 1999 show TOPLESS, (got to have a good title… Topless was a ‘baring of the breast’, a ‘getting things off my chest’), it spoke about a series of painful events that happened over a 2 year period – divorce, heartbreak, a bout with breast cancer, illness and death of a parent and more. With all that as content, I felt the show had to be funny, so any ‘poor-me-ness’ had to be self-deprecating, any drama-queenishness owned up to. The grief was not sentimentalised but allowed to sit with its own human quality in the midst of it all, while the absurd details of the medical procedures and a painful romance were cartoonified.

So much so, that when I look back at those events now, it is the vivid, colourful version complete with a soundtrack of lounge songs that I recall. And I call that a result.

The most gratifying thing about not just TOPLESS, but MIDRIFF and INVOCATION is that my audiences, male and female alike always surprise me by seeing themselves in them. I’ll come out to the bar after the show to find people talking to one another and then to me about issues in their own lives….

Despite which, each time I make an autobiographical work, I wake in the middle of the night worrying

a/  do I really want to tell people these things about myself?

and

b/ will this be of interest to anyone?

Time and again I re-establish my belief that the specific leads into the universal…

And that telling one’s own story does have a value for others,

And that saying the truth as you see it, never turns out to being quite as scary as you think.

In these 3 autobiographical shows, naturally, some other people’s lives and stories intersect with my own. I’ve made a point of contacting people to make sure that they feel comfortable with what I put in my scripts about them.

In MIDRIFF I was not able to consult a friend because she had died. Tragically and disturbingly. Here is an excerpt from my 2002 show MIDRIFF:

‘Whenever I tell this story

I feel like the ancient mariner –

But it’s the kind of story my friend would have told herself

Am I immoral to put in the show…?

O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I

- to vampirise other people’s lives like this

I am indifferent honest, but yet I could accuse me of such things that it were better my mother had not borne me. I am very proud, revengeful, ambitious, with more offences at my beck that I have thoughts to put them in, imagination to give them shape, or time to act them in. What should such fellows as I do crawling between heaven and earth?’

It’s always a relief to say bad things about yourself before someone else does.

As I was preparing for this talk today I realised that I will be talking about my family. In my earlier pieces I didn’t automatically ask their permission as I assumed my parents, still living in Australia, wouldn’t be seeing the work. As it turns out they eventually did see a couple of the pieces. My father came and saw Topless and he said : ‘You didn’t mention me.’

Just going back to that little extract from Midriff – you’ll see that I leaned on the story of Hamlet.

Which brings me to a brief talk about Process…in case that’s of interest to you…

The starting point for my pieces are usually something that I can’t understand or something that disturbs me.

Anything can provoke or trigger a piece: a recurrent dream, a newspaper article, a world event (CND protests Hiroshima Mon Amour 1984, Chernobyl – Frightened of Nothing 1986), some glitch in my current life, like a bout with breast cancer…

The starting impulse feels like a push, like a compulsion it’s like I have no choice about it

Then there’s gathering of material

Mining internally, keeping an eye out for synchronicities, what Arnold Mindell calls ‘flirts’ in the environment, researching…

Often I write a poem as a first capturing of the impulse, the lump ‘subject’ or seeming subject matter

Often there’s a song that I become fixated with listening to …

which usually never makes it into the realised production

Then there’s just continuing to write, read, research and improvising in the rehearsal room

Occasionally there may be drawing involved

There is collaboration with designers, if I can afford them and directors, who bring their own richness and judgement to the mix

Then there’s finding the myth

In other words

A piece has got to have a good ending, the audience has to go out happy or satisfied….or at least with in an interesting question.

There’s no getting round beginning middle and end

In that way dramaturgy assists the cathartic process: unless the piece feels complete, there will no be closure.

I have always been a ‘structure emerging out of content’ person….

So at a certain point in the process, looking for a model existing story or myth can be useful

With TOPLESS I thought, I know I want to say this stuff, but how is it going to end? What can I lean on here – is this the Book of Job, can I comically refer to Dante’s 7 layers of Hell? I just kept writing, allowing it to unfold. I eventually found out in the end that it was a struggle with identity.

What I thought was a recurring joke was in fact the nub of the piece.

My conscious or logical mind would never have found that.

So, childhood issues takes me to my early work.

My first solo piece was a physical theatre piece was called Red Heart, after the hot desert centre of Australia. An attempt to come to terms with growing up in suburban Australia – the claustrophobic, apathetic, sanitised mundaneity of it all in stark contrast to the wild interior.

In Australia, the huge proportion of the population cluster along its paved over, bill boarded, well-watered rim. Whereas the original population, the aborigines, had sung and danced and worshipped and cared for and communed with every single inch of the land including the desert with its, to many eyes invisible, rich plant and animal life.

I played the landscape and the wildlife. I also portrayed my child and adolescent self and my parents. I think at the time I was just intending to paint a portrait, to point up this absurd contrast, to show these quirky things…

but in the context of this talk, in a way the piece kind of hints at a family life that was a bit of a desert – sunny enough but arid and desolate and isolated, with this no-go land at the centre of it.

One of the issues at the ‘heart’ of our family dynamic was my father’s nervous illness which my mother only ever mentioned to me in private and which was never given a name other than ‘nerves’ or ‘nervous anxiety’, and which was never to be mentioned in front of my Father. So, though I felt it wasn’t a secret because it had been told to me, there was a constraint, a message there to stick to the safe territory, the allowable, the acceptable, the reduced options zone.

And of course I spent many years obeying this and then rebelling against it.

It strikes me now that the safe inhabited extremity and the mysterious interior is also a rather good metaphor for both the therapeutic and the artistic.

For me, emotional well-being consists of acceptance and understanding of all the shadow selves – all the aspects of the self. As an artist one has to be prepared to engage with and honour whatever arises. If you are playing a dark character you cannot judge them. It you are looking at a subject you have to uncover the unexpected aspects, not just show the obvious.

While my childhood was less than blissful (and I know that is the same for many), my father’s childhood, as much as I know about it, was pretty tough. In his adult life he remained hampered by unresolved feelings, as far as my untrained eye can see…..Dad was like many people of his generation – fearful of his inner workings. He preferred, as much as he liked anything, the material world. And he preferred, as we all can do at times, to point feelings outward to blame, intimidation and anger - rather than face the uncharted territory on the inside.

In performance, Red Heart provided for me a mix of feelings, a touch of transgressive guilt but also some satisfaction – as if I were able to ask the audience: ‘Look, what do you make if this, is it normal?’ I had always been gratified when things were admitted to in novels or diaries, the true hidden, the un-conventional story revealed. So perhaps what I said might be of use to someone else? Also I felt a subtle power in showing my own version of events, becoming the describer not the described.

I started to look back over my body of work with this talk in mind, I realised I had pretty much forgotten a piece called ‘Dogs I Have Been’ from about 1990.

This short piece – 16 short poems performed with a slide show with pictures of the family pets - was performed in the Lyric Studio in London as well as touring the UK. ‘Dogs I Have Been’ directly uses my childhood memories.

I think I was in therapy at this time, and examining my early life.

The first family dog I knew was my father’s fox terrier, already one of two dogs with the same name. He was grief stricken when this second dog died. My mother used to joke that my father loved in a strict hierarchy his ‘guns (no time to tell you about the guns here, another time)…guns, car, dog, kids and wife, in that order’. Perhaps you can see why I write about my folks, they were quite entertaining. Now I would have put myself at the bottom of that list. ….brother , sister.

Perhaps that was Dad’s special knack, making everyone feel equally undervalued.

My father would declaim loudly and often ‘The more I see of humans, the more I like dogs.’ He would also say: ‘The name’s Ted – short for bars-ted.’

My father was in fact illegitimate, back in the day when that really wasn’t much fun.

It was only towards the very end of his life that dad told me once that his birth father - I don’t really think of him as my grandfather as I never met him - had had a fox terrier and so Dad got himself one. No wonder he loved that dog so much.

Now I know there is no normal. But at some point in life I began to notice a dissonance between how popular culture presented family life, and how my actual family life was….

Also – due to a number of events in childhood that I won’t bore you with here – I had a bundle of issues that I heartily wished to be rid of. I sensed a dissonance between how I wanted to be and how I was.

I was disturbed at the time at the way I often presented myself as over-compensatory, over-eager. I had a ‘good girl’ demeanour, a ‘like-me’ ‘like-me’ puppyish way of operating, that also cut out in moments of stress to raw feelings that I felt guilty for having.

Read DOGS

I, II, IV, VIII, XI

When I found them and read them through, I was surprised how uncomfortable it was to revisit those feelings. These little poems I still find quite sharp and raw – more of a pouring-out rather than the alchemised healing that I have come to appreciate from my more recent work.

And I remember now that I always felt uncomfortable reading them.

I made a piece called Wendy Darling for which I won a Fringe First in 1988 – a conscious childhood issue was not the seed impulse for the show. But later I could see how informed it was by my childhood and family themes.

Wendy Darling was born from recurrent dreams of flying. My early collaborator, director Rex Doyle said, you should use Peter Pan.

I had recently returned from Australia and had brought with me this old vinyl record which was a recording from an old stage show. I have a memory of I think, the one time the whole family grouped round the record player listening together – quite poignant in itself.

My brother had told me at an early age: ‘Girls can’t do anything.’ And of course I simultaneously believed and reacted against it.

In young adult life I was always banging against the glass ceiling of my imagination trying to invent inspiring female characters. Which was hard because I was had been brought up timid, to obey and keep myself safe. And of course that had not always worked out.

I originally wanted to update the story. Empower the character of Wendy. I imagined a piece where Wendy grew up and become an intrepid woman traveller in the 1930’s. I wanted her to hike to Tibet and learn the art of levitation. I imagined her having a daughter who was living now and a fan of yoga and meditation and there could be these flashbacks… but as you can hear this was going nowhere – sloppy split narrative and no plot. Drama requires conflict and adversity.

And anyway once I began re-reading J M Barrie’s story and reading about his life, and listening to the record, I realised how much I loved the darkness of the Never Land, the savagery of the Lost Boys who shoot Wendy on sight, the grudge-ridden Captain Hook and Wendy’s unrequited love for Peter. I couldn’t better J M Barrie.

(‘Mr Darling’ had a dark fascination in childhood, before I could consciously see that he had the same kind of melodramatic panics that my father had. And also I suddenly see the loveable Nana the dog nurse, having an office that put her in charge, one level above the children. )

Wendy Darling starts with a grown up Wendy come back to revisit the abandoned childhood nursery…we imagined, as for the real-life boys that Michael and John were based on, that they were killed in the Great War.

So Wendy arrives alone. As she prepares to spend the night there she unpacks a pine chest and the whole Never Land comes spilling out. She plays Peter and re-enacts her unsatisfactory relationship with him. At one moment, he says ‘to die will be an awfully big adventure’.

My big brother died in 1984. The grief process was difficult because although I adored my older brother, throughout my childhood he pretty much seemed to hold me in contempt and there wasn’t much happy togetherness. He was much wilder than me, we had very little in common.

It took me years to realise I was grieving both for a brother and for a relationship that had never been.

And that I had been left like Wendy at the end of my piece looking out the window, vainly wishing for an impossible past and for one more glimpse of the boy for whom she had been too boring.

Here’s another excerpt from MIDRIFF with its Hamlet theme:

‘I’ve always felt for Ophelia at the beginning of the play –

Hamlet Act one, Scene three, her brother Laertes:

My necessaries are embarked. Fullstop. Farewell.

Oh! so Ophelia’s brother was buggering off all the time as well!

Age of 15 I wrote a poem about the back of my brother’s head

End of the hippy era, he and his long hair were always headed off

To Indonesia, Darwin, somewhere

Maybe my love of Hamlet is an act of revenge against a brother who never paid me enough attention

I adored him but we had absolutely nothing in common

My brother was the bad boy and I was the good girl

He escaped sooner but I escaped further.’

Adaptations have been rewarding for me. I made a piece called The Wooden Boy based on Pinocchio for a company called Gambolling Guizers, two male performers. Although at moments leaning on the Disney version, I concentrated on the darker Collodi original where Pinocchio is an unruly wood sprite, and had the performers appear onstage as wood sprites who then unfold the tale. In response to another of my father’s maxim’s ‘children should be seen and not heard’ – by which he meant they should be not just silent but preferably inactive, I had Pinocchio drowned at the end, with one sprite as the grief-stricken Gepetto cradling the boy turned back into a stiff lifeless puppet while the other woodsprite says slyly from the side: ‘Am I real boy now, daddy?’

These acts of revenge worry me slightly…..

It’s been hard writing this – I’ve come up against something that troubled me for so many years – really there’s not so much that I have suffered. A bit of me is afraid you’ll think poorly of me for making so much of nothing. Where I stand now - I thank my mother and father for the life and the privileges they gave me.

And I certainly thank my father for the wealth of material he has given me.

I thought at this point of writing a list of all my childhood issues,

but

I don’t want to overly expose myself

and I don’t wish to sound complaining either.

Suffice to say that at moments in my childhood I was disappointed in the amount of support and respect I received.

Inside the grown up me there were questions about abuse of power and then of course there were and are in the world very real issues of equality and double standards regarding women that were quite live for me.

The Porter’s Daughter – a play I wrote, was initiated by my wanting to deal with the problem of ambition. Why wasn’t I further long in my career? Why were women more likely to subsume themselves to men’s careers than vice versa. Why didn’t I have enough ambition?

Rex recommended I look at Lady Macbeth. Another adaptation, another re-writing of an old story.

For Lady Mac – I showed the moment that happens off stage in Shakespeare’s play. How and exactly when does she go mad?

‘I longed to be a soldier, but no one humoured me.

They threw the dress over my head like a sack and trussed me up inside it.

‘You are to meet your husband,’ they said, ‘He is a great man of action, a great soldier.’

That night I dreamt

I was the warrior standing beneath the banners on the battlefield.

I had his spirit, his strength, his body and his aim.

My voice rang out above the beating of the flags and I saw horses, men and cannon follow my intent.’

I re-read the play – the first Shakespeare play I had studied, and on re-reading was very taken with the imagery of the shifting wheel, everyone moving up a level….

Still looking for the antidote to weak or victimised female protagonists. I wanted to take someone who was abused but have her functioning and undamaged. I focused on the lowliest character in the castle and gave him someone lower than him. I invented a daughter for the Porter.

I also wanted to explore an uneventful life, and un-driven life - as I was quite a passive person. Also wanted to illuminate if I could, the theme of a woman’s worth.

In TPD, the woman gets to move away from the incestuous and violent relationship with her father (I hasten to add this was not directly modelled on me and my father) and moves up through the ranks to become the queen’s hand maiden and finally the lover of the king.

When the word is out that the English are arriving, the Porter come to the upper part of the castle to find her, ‘You belong with me,’ he says, ‘can you not understand, there’ll be a siege! You’ll never survive.’

And she replies: ‘How do you know? I have stood the whole of my life in siege.’

In my play the witches are a cross between Mother Courage and the Three Stooges. They have come north to take advantage of this moment in time and now they are headed south again, with quite a lot of booty from the castle.

I made the Porter both a bully and a weak man…and in this scene he tries unsuccessfully to pull upon the witches pity.

But he’s been violent and abusive to one of them previously and that is not forgotten. They force him to push their cart out of the bog.

He accidentally discovers that they are leaving with the gold.

They and they insult and mock him.

He is afraid – ‘what kind of grandmothers are you?’

They do a mock beheading and impaling and a mock knighting and just when he thinks he’s free, they kill him anyway.

The woman remains alone in the castle with the dead queen’s body and she gives a speech challenging the coming men to see value not in money or in glory but in the richness of feminine nature. The way her father had been blind to it.

So as I look back one could identify in my work a common theme or re-writing the past.

I copied Wendy Darling from VHS to DVD last night and noticed – I play almost single character in the Barrie’s book and play. Escaping my childhood role of useless girl and good girl to become the whole story: from the heartless Pan and the jealous Tinkerbell to Pirate Smee the unassuming, indispensible second-in-command, the loving yet elusive Mother and the disturbed and brooding Hook.

In translating my real life issues into theatre works I guess I have time and time and again been attempting to form a new story, if not the optimal one, then I have attempted a different one.

The work

is never done…..

keep making work

Of course, the best resolution is to move forward. The new show, CHASTITY BELT is coming along nicely.

talk about disappearing

I was invited to talk at IATE, an arts therapy organisation I gave a talk called Personal Pain and Process – Transforming Life through Theatre Works yesterday. 

The event organiser asked if I would like to show a video of my work. I have been very busy teaching and writing a new show and it was just the day before that I got into the cupboard and pulled out a copy of my 1988 piece Wendy Darling. The last time I'd gone to the bother of swapping over the plugs round the back of my TV to watch it, it was sometime ago.
back then the image had the colour and textures of the original show - cool blues and rosy amber tones....I pushed the boxy old VHS into the machine and horror, now there is just a moving image in grainy dark grey tones. I was so pleased I had done it.
It's hideously expensive to transfer - most places charge £25 for up to 2 hours.
I have never really enjoyed watching myself back on tape and I started this blog with the theme of disappearance, but I was in a more resigned place then, than where I am now. 
This blog began as an impulse to leave some kind of mark  - and not so much in my own name, but in a tiny stupid way, in order to counteract the under-represented achievements of women in general over the centuries.

A colleague told me that you can now buy VHS to DVD machines relatively cheaply.

I was teaching the other day and, once again my students have searched for me online and found on youtube not my groundbreaking, genre blasting physical theatre work but something someone I don't even know has posted up (a song that was produced in a way that nullifies the intention I had when writing its lyrics - something I was too young, stupid and too unassertive at the time to avoid). 

Hm so the thought now flashes up - am I now intent on posting up the transferred work (the stuff that isn't completely degraded to shadowy invisibility already). My skin shivers. Staying hidden seems preferable still...but the idea of it disappearing altogether is kinda chilling....
if only VHS technology had been designed to last.

three women in edinburgh

Three Women went to Edinburgh, thanks to Tessa's planning and resourcefulness. We drove up there in her green Volkswagen which we had pasted over with our show posters. We bought, dyed and wore (constantly) pink boilersuits (over the now sewn-to-the-skin uni-tards), and performed at the WildCat venue - at the now the original Pleasance site - now a plethora of venues in itself, then just one big dusty hall. We shared the stage with National Theatre of Brent's show Zulu (with the feverish comic genius of the sadly late Julian Hough), and on another year their show about the Bible with the exquisite Jim Broadbent as a touchingly innocent Virgin Mary.

Quite a venerable wooden floor it was, with no dance lino. Claudia had a bit of floor work and we spent minutes after each show helping her pull the splinter out of her leotard. 
Food was mainly curious Scottish bread rolls that seemed to have a high cellulose content and mostly filled with ham or corned meat. For our vegetarian Claudia, a simple cheese filling was a rare find. On Sundays nothing was open, except for the high streets. The little corner shops were closed. 
Thank God for Hendersons and the pizza restaurants.
We would sign on for the cabaret spots at the Fringe Club. Does this still happen?
Performers performing to other performers to advertise their shows.
We'd drag ourselves and our props to a huge hall near the university. I loved watching the other acts and would go up and introduce myself to the people or groups I liked. I first met my future husband doing his set in the Fringe Club, though we weren't to properly meet till a year later.
We did two Edinburghs. One with High Heels and another with a show called Follies Berserk. I remember that show we used our funding to create a portable set and used it to upgrade the visuals in our show in terms of props and costumes.
We were still mining the seam of things relevant to women. I had seen the Follies Bergere in Paris and that was what the show was based on.

a bunch of accidents

Randomly, my boyfriend's parents suggested we join them in a trip to Europe. We felt a holiday was out of the question, but if we gave up our rented flat and sold our cars and loaned out our fridge...we could go for a year to get experience in the form of courses or performing experience.

We hatched a plan to travel Europe (the second time, for me), then go to Italy to do a course in Italian in Perugia, then settle in London and see what might happen.

Before getting to Italy, we made an appointment with an agent that my boyfriend's family had put us in touch with. He recommended that if we wanted to work in theatre, then we better get started straight away.

Perugia never happened.

I remember being counseled by this same man to dye my eyebrows and to learn how to speak RP. I remember being affronted at the first part of the advice and never really getting how to choose a good headshot. I made a number of terrible mistakes with my Spotlight shots. The idea of one photo being a single descriptor somehow horrified me. 

I did take lessons in RP with a woman somewhere in Chelsea. She had me working on a speech that had this sentence in it - 'We shall have champagne, buckets and buckets of it.' I was annoyed that it had to be buckits. This is England. It's spelt 'buck-ets'. She taught me to say pockits as well and of course dahnce, not dance with a short a. I worked at it and spoke it. One day I asked someone 'is that a plahstic hahnd bahg?' 
There was an Australian guy in London who had been in 'Precious Moments' in Brisbane, who had had a job in the tv series Tenko. He spoke very poshly. It mentioned Ayckbourne to me and I kept saying pardon. I thought he was saying 'egg warmers'. 'I'm probably a bit too plummy now. ' he said, in a voice that sounded made out of sherry.

One day on the Kings Road, I ran in to a woman called Pauline Walsh who had been in the cast of Captain Midnight and who had been touring with Hull Truck for a number of years. She said somehow a lot of loud singing had been required and it had ruined her voice. She said, 'You're interested in Mime, aren't you?' and I said 'Am I?'

I guess she'd seen Act Without Words or heard about me being in it.

First thing I did was a weekend workshop with this man Desmond Jones. I learned how to articulate my body. You can make a movement head chest or chest head. I had a small but profound epiphany when I remembered a moment in the La Boite production of Tales From The Vienna Woods. If I turned to the other character 'in a certain kind of way' it felt right, and if I missed that, then I felt disappointed, that I had lacked creating something in that scene. I realized that turning to him chest, head carried the more special, more emotional sensation I preferred. This, I felt, was useful and important information. This was the the first whisper of how body and movement and meaning might intersect in a way that interested and excited me.

We learned to walk on the spot in two different ways, we learned how to pick up a suitcase, a glass, a heavy glass, how to throw a glass away. Desmond would say fascinating things like 'Time replaces space and weight'. And cheesy thing like 'out to lunge, back in ten minutes' We learned how to appear to be riding a bicycle. Agony. I could hardly walk. I was working harder physically than I had ever done before in my life. My boyfriend booked for us to go the the famous Ronnie Scotts. As is usual in Jazz world, the main act (Georgie Fame) started incredibly late. Delighted though I was to be at such a landmark venue, my eyes were closing. And my legs, even seated, were very, very sore.

Desmond championed a small booklet called The Canadian Airforce Exercises. I took this up with gusto. Every day I followed the programme. I started working myself to medium, then maximum fitness for my age, then over the years, I started to increase to the peak for younger and younger ages. Lisa Lyons the female body builder had been photographed by Robert Mapplethorpe. I longed for gender-stereotype-defying biceps like hers.

I joined the regular evening classes. I loved the camaraderie of the after course drinks at The World's End Pub as much as I lamented the impossibility of getting a nice cold glass of white wine, or nice cold gin and tonic, or nice cold anything. I met a woman, New Zealand by birth, called Tessa Schneideman and a lovely young man called Robert Clayton.

Concurrent with these new studies, I auditioned for and got a job with a company called Mouth And Trousers. The show was The Death of Harlequin, and that was my first performance at Jacksons Lane. I also played Madame for the same company in The Maids in the York and Albany Pub Theatre at the top of Parkway in Camden. One performance I accidentally laughed too soon resulting in the other actresses having to rush the plot to the interval. Humiliation and shame. 

Desmond decided to start a school. Tessa, Rob, Zena Dilke, William Dashwood, Claudia Prietzel, Denise Stoklos, Linda Coggin, Franki Anderson,  Rachel someone, a punky Australian girl, a Dutch boy called Elijah and a chap called Jon something and I were among the first class of the 3 month school. I was living in Marylebone and would walk there everyday along past Baker street and Madame Tussauds to the then BTA British Theatre Association in Fitzroy Square. there was a theatre space. We the class would stand on the stage area, if I remember rightly looking down at Desmond on the auditorium bit. I would do my Edgeware Road walk doing my finger isolations for the finger ripple exercise and practicing doing the Decroux-ian hand shapes - palette, trident, coquille, salamander, margueritte. Then learning how to do the sequence in canon, each hand doing a different shape on each beat.

A boy at school one day said to me, 'I feel sorry for you. You seem to be very ambitious and it will be hard for you as a girl to get anywhere.' This was not really news. My brother had already told me that 'Girls can't do anything' but there was a women's movement going on somewhere and perhaps that would change the rules at some point. Or at least I thought I might have a bit of a go at making a slight fuss about the state of things. The main thing I felt was slightly pleased that this chap felt I was ambitious. I have largely held the impression that I am a lazy, ignorant coward without anything resembling a plan.

Desmond held a 'graduation' showing. I did a solo 'A la Carte' a woman dining in a restaurant, moving from nervy constraint to voracious indulgent to cannibalism of her waiter ( well, a biting of his arm in the typical mime sketch finish 'freeze blackout'). There was to be a printed programme and and I felt, well, if this is the start of public performances in this country , I better start as I intend to carry on and I changed my name from my unpronounceable, unspell-able surname to a name from my mother's side of the family.

I was invited at some point to join Desmond's troup. Desmond had his own performing troupe called Silents. Silents included Tim Dry, Mollie Guilfoyle, Barbie Wilde, Ian Cameron, Robert (?) and another chap called Dennis. And now me. I was incorporated into the group piece and I think I even got to perform my solo piece. We performed at the London International Mime Festival at the Battersa Arts Centre (now BAC).

Tessa asked me and Denise of we'd like to keep on working at Mime. I said yes and we would meet in my basement flat in Marylebone. One day I said (rather grandly) that I didn't want to carry on just doing this unless we were working toward something, like a show. Tessa took the ball immediately and booked the York and Albany. We graduated to rehearsing in her home in Brixton. Tessa had been a fine artist and we rehearsed in the top room, once her studio. She was a very good painter. She exhibited at exhibitions in the RA and the ICA. She said she gave it up for mime because it was less lonely. She was 10 years older than me. Denise Stoklos was a Brazilian girl who went on to make many solo shows and star in a Brazilian soap opera for many years.

As a group, Three Women, we decided we didn't want to do 'mimey mime'. Why is it interesting to open a window or pick up a suitcase that's not there. And I suddenly realised that there was this irritating phrase 'everyman', which your classic mime, Marcel Marceau was meant to represent. 

We thought 'what would everywoman be like?' and did a piece about putting on makeup and clothes and feeling disappointed and then trapped by the result - the silent scream was a classic mime cliche and I am ashamed that we used it here. We did sketches on rape, on feeding a difficult child and on eating disorder. 

In Mouthpiece, we stood and sucked each other's thumbs, we made a fat lady with two of us hidden under a black lycra dress and Tessa constructed a giant cherry topped bun that swallowed one of us. Yes, we were wild renegade mimes, with props, sound effects, sometimes words and music! And we work hideous black uni-tards. All the time.

Tessa was highly imaginative and suggested we create a piece that showed just our feet. We worked from instinct as much as anything else. I realised that I had learned a lot from years of watching Warner Brothers and Disney cartoons. Efforts and dynamics and beats and visible emotions. Causality - action and reaction. Footnote showed a host of fleeting encounters or passages of different characters: barefeet trying to strike up some kind of intimacy, air kissing fancy shoe wearing women, a mother with a train of shoes dragging behind her like a ball and chain (*Claudia's puppetry training inspired this prop idea), a flasher and a skipping little girl who foils him with a kick.

We made an abstract work inspired by Theatre du Mouvement after we had studied with them. 
Brabarella was not a take on Barbarella but the story of Cinderella told in lingerie. Separate from their made-for function, bras are incredibly interesting and versatile obects. Cindy's ball gown was cascading tiers of B cups and if you've never seen a strapless bra be first a mouse's ears and then a moment later horse's blinkers then you have not lived.

The closing piece was called Circus. Housewives (aprons over yes, black uni-tards) perform an entire circus using household implements. an eggbeater became a unicycle. A dustpan brush for the bearded lady, brooms for a stilt walking act, saucepan lids as cymbals for a hoover-hose snake charmer. tea-strainer goggles, oven 'riding' gloves and a shower cap for daredevil motorcyclist with a jaffle iron as the handle bar of the bike. An old hair dryer hood and hose for the elephant. A magic sword act with panda teddy, colander and skewers. And a disappearing  act that used a sheet, a peg and an audience member (once it was the then very famous musician Joe Jackson). It was clowning before we learned how to clown.

...to think I wonder what happened to my serious acting career.

Later Desmond created an advanced School in Shepherds Bush where we shared the hall with a dog training class (not at the same time, luckily). Our leg warmers (yes, the 70's, the first time round) would get rather furry. 

Theatre du Movement came to the UK and we studied with them in a beautiful church hall in Belsize Park one glorious spring. Their work was amazingly expressive, dynamic and heir anatomical knowledge was brilliant. Desmond was great at inspiring us and getting us creating right from the go-get (there were advanced students of Theatre du Mouvement with superior technique to us who were contemplating  years more training before setting foot on stage).

Theatre du Movement mixed Yves Marc's sporting training with Claire Heggen's dance training. They incorporated african dance, animality, isolation work, impulses that travelled through space and intersected with martial arts (kicks, falls, pushes and presses) and exquisite articulation through isolation (at last that Martha Graham contraction with an emotional or narrative possibility!) and shifting flow. We studied undulation. We worked with voice and breath. Desmond's class instructions were, in my memory, based around 'yes', 'no', 'that's it so-and-so (usually a male student)', and more tension! Desmond was keen that mime not show up to be 'effete'. There was a lot of debate on what mime was or wasn't allowed to be. Mime is an amazing skill but in the wrong hands it can be mannered and tedious.

One day in search of 'clay man', I ignored Desmond's cry for 'more tension' (I had knee problems that tension was not helping) and I used a Theatre du Mouvement undulation. 'That's it Peta!' Des exclaimed. I feel disloyal writing this as teachers should always be honoured. But when the student finds more knowledge and freedom elsewhere, they have to go.

Although my Australian accent was for the most part modified, it seemed to me that most of the acting jobs were for people with wonderful regional accents. And the plays I saw were so soaked in class. Would I ever know how to convincingly play a gritty girl from Birmingham, I asked myself. (I can see now how timidity, laziness and unconscious arrogance have held me back). It seemed to me that British theatre was still largely about location location location and concurrently social station, social station, social station. I had no context here. So mime was a gift for me.  I would never have got started in theatre making in this country if not for the opportunity that Desmond and Tessa (and the random meeting with Pauline Walsh) gave me - the ability to create work from nothing. Work that could also tour to Europe without translation.

* The three women who originally rehearsed in Tessa's top room were Tessa, me and Denise. Denise is a fabulously talented woman. There was a difference of opinion around how much rehearsal we felt we should do. Denise preferred a more improvisatory approach to things. Tessa had taken advice with someone in the business and was told that it might be best to get a clear coherence in the company before we did our very first run. It was a hard choice for us and not pleasant for Denise. Tessa suggested asking Claudia Prietzel to become our third woman. Together we had a better work rhythm. Robert Clayton became our technician. We were to work and tour together for three amazing years.

I had arrived in England to maybe take a year out and get some extra experience in Theatre. Once Three women was touring I was able to give up my waitressing job. I was earning a living doing what I loved. What a privilege.

hair and rocky horror

You couldn't see the musical Hair in Queensland. The nudity was disallowed. 

I saw Hair at the age of fifteen with my parents. We travelled to Sydney to see it. Very exciting to go the theatre in the red light district of Kings Cross (think a sleazier Soho). It was disorienting to be there with my father. After seeing the film Easy Rider (where the freedom loving protagonists end getting their heads blown off by rednecks), his verdict was 'They deserved it.'

It was thrilling to see the songs I had memorised from the album. And wonderful to see the characters of Berger and Woof brought to life. Reg Livermoore had been on children's television and here he was playing Berger 'get-your-pants-off-Berger'. I heard my mother laugh beside me the way she had at the Theatre Royal. 

Then the Be-in scene where the case disappears under a huge parachute silk and then appear with the cloth rolled back all naked. I remember it as a shock. Ok, that's part of being one of the beautiful people, that's the freedom I'm on the side on if I like the music and the jeans and all. if I'd been aware of the concept of dramaturgy, I may have had more of an opinion. The film version cleverly created a plot for the musical. And character arcs. This was just a 'happening', whatever that was. We went to the stage door and I got the boy who played Woof to sign his picture, sigh. He was talking about how he wanted to build a replica of Thor Heyerdahl's Kontiki and take to the oceans. Why? I screamed inside...isn't being on stage in this dazzling city in this unique cultural event with all it's frisson not enough excitement? Well I didn't really think all this - my brain just kind of froze with incomprehension. And fear. And disappointment. 'I'm so timid, I will never be part of the really exciting parts of life.'

It was years later, when I was around 20 - how ridiculous is that that 20 is just 5 years older than 15. We went down to Sydney again to see Rocky Horror Picture Show. It may not have been  banned, it may have been a question of marketing, demographics and economics. I was with Sue Parker (at that time she was considering attending NIDA - we were accompanying her for her audition in fact). I guiltily now register not really acknowledging the enormity of this or supporting her adequately. It was like it was all on the side. I don't remember her speaking about it. I'd like to say more lack of appreciation of the stakes than callousness. Or my usual fear. I would never have had the courage to imagine myself living in another city, studying at a Drama school. And I was sure that Sue could have and do whatever she wanted. My vague memory is that she decided it wasn't for her - and with her multi-talentedness I was not surprised.



 

live by night

It's not that I didn't like working in advertising. As proper jobs go, copy writing was creative and fun. Luckily I escaped most of the excesses and chicanery as shown in Mad Men. But you can't compare writing radio ads to playing Shakespeare, or Beckett or Brecht.

I can't remember who alerted me to the La Boite castings. Pre-twitter, facebook and mobiles, Brisbane had a good 'bush telegraph'. You heard about events by ear. At the moment of writing, even the order of the shows is foggy and making a record of this involves an act of deduction and approximation.

I did another show or possibly work in progress with the very daring and creative Sue Parker. It was based on Lenny and George from Of Mice and Men and I was asked to play a grotesque platinum-wigged character with cartoon hips the size of a 18th Century French courtesan's dress. It was set in a boxing ring. I have no memory of any performances of this.

Next must have been Grease. This was a huge adventure back into the culture of the 60's. We learned American accents, we learned to dance together -jive. The boys had their hair cut in DA's and as mine was not ponytail length again yet, mine was cut short for a hopefully gamine look. I played the annoying and unlikeable cheerleader Patty Simcox. I remember the rehearsal to get Greased Lightning set up in a short music intro with the guys bringing the car in four sections on from the four corner exits. There was a big fantasy jukebox that came on and off, too I remember. This was a joyful time - there was an ensemble theatre feeling as for Captain Midnight, but all the more joyful. Being Australia we would meet at people's houses for after-show parties and dance jive and end up in the pool.

Some how, someways I had the happy fortune to be given the part of Juliette. Jennifer Blocksidge directing. Thrust stage use, with a series of levels on the back wall. A chess board for the stage design and Indian fabric details on cheese-cloth shifts and renaissance shirts for the men. I still had short spiky hair, I think we thought we were being very bold with that. The actor playing the Friar was a Czech, I think. He had a delightful accent and once told me not to 'burn my candle at both ends....Cut it in half and burn it at all four ends.' Incandescent advice.

I remember learning the lines in the living room of my flat on Latrobe Terrace. And rehearsing 'Gallop apace' with Jennifer asking me questions and answering mine. The puzzle of playing the thoughts in Shakespeare, allowing the quick succession of images to play inside one's head and body. Shakespeare is like ballet - so much to manage all at once. You can immerse in it, a joyful rigour - that's me putting into words what I never could have imagined saying then. I was learning dumbly and blindly. But learning nonetheless. I'd had none of the emotional stretching and research they prepare students with in Drama Schools. I remember with compassion and annoyance, my resistance to expressing some of the things Juliette says in this speech. And how hard it is to play fresh and innocent and sexually alight all at the same time. The balcony scene was easier. A lovely warm-hearted young man was my boyfriend at this time and he was my Romeo (Doody in Greece). And the morning scene ('it was the lark') even better.

For the first time in my life I developed hayfever which manifested itself with the worst of all symptoms - an irrepressible cough. In the tunnels under the seating I had places stashed with throat sweets and tissues. The scene where Juliet's father thunders at her, I spent bent double on the floor suppressing the urge to cough and basically, choking. An allergically-produced teardrop splashed on the stage and remained after my exit. The woman playing my nurse said she found it very poignant to focus her speech on.

 Sean Mee, now the director of the relocated La Boite Theatre played Mercutio. He gave me my first mimetic tip. 'Stab, then react', he showed me the difference and he was right and I wondered why I didn't know that.

In She stoops to Conquer, I played Kate Hardcastle, my boyfriend the prankster Tony Lumpkin and our friend Paul, recently Kenickie in Grease and Benvolio in R&J played the tongue-tied Charles Marlow. My memories are of an empire line dress, a bonnet in one scene - had to be clever to point it so each four sections of the audience got to glimpse my face. I vaguely remember a bit of RP happening in rehearsal and possibly learning how to use a fan - folded and opened and fluttered and snapped shut.

One evening, during Kate and Charles big scene, I could hear the audience laughing. Great, I thought, they are really finding it witty. What was actually happening was a large (Queensland size) cockroach was stealing the focus by climbing my dress. The audience could see what I could not. Once it reached my peripheral vision and almost my decolletage, I snatched it up and flung it away. I feel ashamed not to be speaking of a lengthy and deep rehearsal process - but the community of the production gave us all a sense of play. Increasing I am hearing of people writing PhD's about the importance of play in performance. We had it as a given - friends working and socialising together brought so much trust and bounce to the shows and directors who had to work quickly in the evening calls employed good humour and intuition as well as craft to achieve well-reviewed productions. Not just because I was in a few shows there, I felt La Boite was producing the best and liveliest theatre in the city.

 

I also had the huge great fortune to play The Good Person of Szechuan - Shen Teh -Shui Tah. Paul as the Pilot and Graeme as the water carrier. I imagine it was something like being in a repertory company. In my uninformed state I found it hard to understand the air of reverence that people always had in their voice when they spoke Brecht's name. I didn't understand the mystique. Something in me felt the rightness of it. The short episodic scenes, the songs. The humanity and humour.
I'm just reading a book called Durov's Pig by, about Clowning and politics (sadly out of print), which tells how Brecht loved cabaret and had a famous clown as his friend and mentor-of -sorts.

I am not sure how well I played Shen Teh, probably without sufficient bite. In the love affair with the airman, I felt more at home with the emotions of hope and disappointment. The moment of her determination seemed a foreign beast to me, good to imagine living like that. Shui Tah had  a half mask made out of felt, a hat and a big white suit. The final courtroom scene was a gift to play. It's making me wish I could go back and do these roles over again, with full awareness of the privilege and opportunity.

All this time I had been watching the career of Peter Kowitz in production after production at the QTC. He was also in two plays at La Boite also. 'Da', an Irish play and a gritty and disturbing Australian play about police violence by David Williamson, The Removalist. This last had so much stage fighting in it, Peter's leg was a mass of bruises and swelling. I had first seen him in QTC's Toad of Toad Hall. He played Toad and I loved his physicality and elan while at the same time being slightly ashamed that it was a children's or family show I was enjoying and not proper drama (these were pre-physical theatre days, remember) - but I can see now I was seeing something I liked. Toad's motorcar was two chairs and I was hugely impressed by the way he 'crashed ' the car. Lifting the chairs seemingly out from under himself and throwing them as if the vehicle had exploded. He was also extremely charismatic onstage.

At some point Graeme and I were in a site-specific ( we never called it that)  production of The Ancient Mariner at a Cathedral in London. G was a sailor, climbing with the other young men on rope rigging set up on the back wall. I made a processional entrance/appearance as Life-in-Death coming up the aisle in the centre of pieces representing the bow and stern of her ghastly boat. I remember trying to fulfill the brief by imagining what Life in Death could possibly mean. My mother exclaimed to me afterward 'Your eyes!' she was quite chilled by me, which seemed strange to me . But such is the power of suspension of disbelief. Combined with white makeup and staring eyes heavily ringed with black.

I got given the part of Marianne in Tales from the Vienna Woods. Rod Whistler directing. It felt like a more mature and complex production. I was not surrounded by my usual 'team'. I think by now G had a job in La Boite's TIE company, under Sean Mee's direction. A tall man with a huge hand used to slap my jaw every night. I could feel it swing and resettle. I guess we couldn't fake it in the round.

The production was a tour de force with a tiny stream running through it to represent the Danube. Other areas of the space were a bedroom and a row of shop fronts (must have been thrust). The river had a tiny bridge and a small tree. I had a scene in a living room, where I sang 'Da draussen in der Wachau' but even the living room was somehow part of the mini countryside.

The actor playing Alfred took me for a drive one night before rehearsals, so we could get to know one another. That strange thing of intimacy on stage. He used to actually tongue kiss me, until another woman in the dressing room gave the simple advice: 'Keep your teeth shut'. The piece was dispiriting as well as rewarding to play.

When I went to Europe again with Graeme, I visited to St Stephens Dom where Marianne knelt and prayed in the play. I guess I was hoping it would feel amazing for some reason. It felt if anything slightly less real to me than the shaft of light in that corner of the stage had felt. And I found and bought the play text in German...which I never read. I must have been missing performing...

act without words

Pre advertising, I had come back from Europe and Sue Parker, the talented and fearless performer director I had met on 'Captain Midnight,' asked me to be in Samuel Beckett's Act Without Words. I read the opening stage direction. Something like 'he is thrown onstage backwards.'

I had done yoga at high school. After several terms I was discovered bunking off from dreaded sports and amazingly was asked what I would really like to do. Dance, I said, or Yoga. In the Yellow Pages my mother helped me find a woman who taught us the ancient vedic art of physical and spiritual harmony and health in black fishnet tights and leopard print leotard. But I hadn't done Yoga for a few years now, nor dance.


Standing on the rush grass matting tiles in my flat on Latrobe Terrace Brisbane, I bent over, tried to touch my toes and didn't get very far. I started to piece together some kind of routine from any dance and yoga exercises I could remember and that seemed relevant. I had no thought that I was 'warming up' or 'training'. We had no concept of 'improvising' or 'devising' or even 'playing'. We improvised in the most old-fashioned sense of the word as in we made do.


La Boite was in the round. That was never going to work for this piece. Nor thrust. We decided to play in one corner of the square. La Boite had no flies. Sue got an aluminium A-frame ladder and we had the wonderfully exuberant Sheldri Weston (art school) sitting at the top of it with the props that were delivered down to me by a fishing rod fitted with a butchers hook.


We had an all-female team. Our stage manager was Jo Hardy. One evening, rehearsing late in the theatre, we had a near mishap trying to strike the ladder. 'Hold it! ' said Sue. 'I've got it!' said Jo. 'Get a man!' shrieked Sheldri while I said with my trademark anxious conservatism: 'Put it back the way it was!'

We decided for whatever reason that I would be best dressed in black tights, a striped top (genuine sailor's matelot top - part of the spoils from the French boyfriend who rejected me) and fingerless white gloves. I had my first encounter with white face makeup. And my first struggle to control my lank hair on stage.


I have zero memory of the performances. The number of shows (one, three?), the quality, my sense of satisfaction, any accomplishment of anything like an emotional journey, post-show comments. Potentially more people were watching Sheldri than they were me.

at la boite/proper job

The last two chapters jump around in time a bit but there you go, such is memory.

I still had no idea what to do with my life when I returned from Europe. My friends from the 'Captain Midnight' production were at film school or art school. My proper jobs to date had been: a Saturday morning job during high school in a high street lingerie shop - before Victoria's Secret, don't get excited, I was selling comfy cotton sleeping shifts. Later my boyfriend got me a job working for a photography business, cleaning slides with toxic fluids. Back from Europe, my actor friends mentioned a casting agent. I got a commercial for a used car commercial. Yup. The director of the commercial was nice, an articulate man and not a mysogynist. Sorry to be so blunt about it but in Old Brisbane there was a lot of it about. Old Brisbane was a pretty scary place for females and people who didn't like football and beer. Even a decade later I saw a man in a florist shop - ah Brisbane has changed, I sighed to myself only to watch him ask , in hushed tones and a gesture for the bouquet to be fully encased in brown paper, as if it were a leg of ham. 
Bill, the commercials director spoke to me over a sandwich lunch on seating inside the used car dealership. We sat and spoke about Europe. He'd hated it but at least spoke about it . A rare thing. Normally just mentioning the continent would dry the conversation up. People perhaps felt defensive or felt you (I) were being arrogant. Or both.

Through my art school friends I drifted into artists modeling. A privilege to sit immobile and be with your thoughts for half-hours at a time. One student had been to my high school - a year or two below me. I'd spot him in the playground. He was beautiful and charismatic. Now he behaved with anarchy - painting in bold slathers over the sketches he was abandoning. He became a painter of witty, intriguing, colourful and distinctive works that fetched high prices. I don't think he ever liked me specially but I have him to thank for me getting my first proper job.

There have been a few key moments in my life that seemed quite accidental but which had huge impact:  English teacher David Sutton handing me a brochure. Gary Carsley pointing me to a job I didn't even know existed. Pauline Walsh meeting me by chance on the Kings Road and leading me to a whole career path. More about that later.


Gary said: there's a job going with that commercials director you did the advert with. I hadn't remembered even mentioning that to him. For a copywriter. I had no idea at all what that was. I went for an interview and was lucky enough to be taken on. I had a tiny offfice. I pored over the advertising awards books and was amazed by the screenings of British cinema and television commercials. The wit, the photography. For two and a half years I wrote commercials and I also provided free recording talent from time to time. And I got to direct a few commercials. Mostly starring inanimate objects such as shoes. But a couple with real people in them. I also got to experience Christmas parties with the receptionist being required to sit on the leading partner's knee. A board room with a pool table complete with a decoration of a woman's breast mounted on a small wooden plaque like an antelope's head. It has a bell in it and they would ring it when they won a round or pot the black or whatever marks a triumph on a game of billiards. Parties where the main voice talent of the day would fill a pint glass with ashtray contents and drink it for possibly money but I think just for the hell of it. Endless sexist racist and homophobic jokes in the office. My direct boss was an island of civilisation and calm. It was his partner to whom all these behaviours were I guess seen as essential to good Client relationships or simply droit de siegneur.  He used to call his secretary, a welsh woman named Susan, 'Chop'. Sue, Suey, Chop Suey. Chop. My name is Susan she would say to no avail.

But in the evenings the antidote. I cultivated my bohemian life. Vintage clothing, mattress on the floor. La Boite. 







 

what are you doing for the rest of your life

The best of the times with French boyfriend Eric were the long drives home from glamorous Indooroopilly to my slack suburb of Mount Gravatt in his Peugeot 505. There was a Jazz programme on the radio and a guy with a mellow voice would incant the names of the instrumentalists and that was of course Theolonious Monk....the  unmistakable sound of Stan getz on clarinet...... The slot was called Round Midnight. They had a sting of Bill Evans playing  'What are You doing for the Rest of Your Life' on a blurry, chime-y electric keyboard. So romantic and sophisticated. So NOT the world of my father lying on the floor in front of the TV watching the Black and White Minstrels - wrong in so many ways.

Well after the three years of the BA, what was I going to for for the rest of my life?

I didn't want to do the Honours year of my BA - there was no more Drama option. I would have to read Milton. Milton. Paradise Lost. What was that going to do for me? (sorry fans of Milton, no one had inspired me with all the reasons why that might be meaningful. Perhaps the meaningfulness actually unnerved me).

I never thought in terms of what I wanted to do - but what I didn't want to do. I was afraid of science, maths, the world of real work. I couldn't think of a single job I wanted to do. I didn't want to dance because I was told it was impossibly hard and lonely to be a prima ballerina and being in a chorus didn't seem to me to offer much chance of self-expression. I wanted to be the one doing that contraction, but doing it so that people were moved and amazed as I had been in that one fleeting moment when I was watching modern dance aged eight.

My mother proposed a European tour - really? God she was amazing. The phrase 'gap year' didn't exist in 1972 Australia. I went with my dear friend who was a professional actor. We sat in the front row and watched Ralph Richardson and Michael Gielgud in something - I remember Geilgud's character was given socks and sandals to wear. I was astonished that my friend fell asleep - these guys are Gods and you're the actor! I could see the quality of these wonderful performers but I didn't have the cultural context to really get the play. In the grand West End building, it's naturalistic staging seemed jarring in the wrong way and just old-fashioned.

By now I had had a taste of epic and ensemble theatre though I didn't know it was called that. The intimacy of La Boite's in-the-round or sometimes thrust space with it's necessarily non-naturalistic settings or skeletally naturalistic settings had woken up my taste for visual and imaginative work. Although I would not have been able to put that in a sentence for you at the time.

I went to the RSC and was shocked. Witty Elizabethan characters behaving like tidy middle class folk. Leafy gobos for the forest - but no atmosphere of a wooded space - and sincerely I could not hear the text. I could have understood the lack of vital physicality if the text were spellbinding in its excellence. Maybe I was unfortunate to see just one poor production.
I saw Terence Stamp - my first movie star onstage. The Lady from the Sea, I think - the hallmark Ibsen formula, after ten years the mysterious character spoken about so much in the first half appears! I was so ready to be astonished by his entrance. My mother had loved Stamp - his blue eyes! she would gasp. He was stunning on the huge cinema screen, but entering into the huge expanse of the old Round house in Chalk Farm, he was poor on his feet and had zero presence. 

My friend  and I diverged as planned, he went up to Scotland and I traveled on to Europe alone. I reveled in the paintings and sculpture I was seeing. I saw little theatre, though, usually too timid to go our at night. I did see an amazing Servant of Two Masters in Berlin. An unforgettable harlequin dressed in a suit like a broken down Frank Sinatra. 

I could weep now to think that I might have been at Le Coq school in those days. But I was an ignorant little Australian girl from a dumb suburb and a very nervy one at that. Signing up at a foreign school with a bunch of hungry strangers would have unhinged me, I think. Instead I stomped the streets of Paris every day. I haunted Pere Lachaise and looked at the graves of the dead greats. I took photographs trying to borrow some artistry from my ex-boyfriend Eric and thinking of Henri Cartier Bresson. With my 2 and a quarter square format Ricohmatic I took photographs capturing the quirky and the bleak and the kitsch, knowing that I would never really become any good with the camera.

After nine months I came back because my mother said that a friend was opening a musical he had written at La Boite.

I don't know what I am doing

I didn't know then and I don't know now. I remember doing a quiz in a women's magazine in my teens.

It was a career-finding tool. You answered all the questions such as do you want to work with people, do you like travel, do you like using your mind, your hands, whole body?The quiz results worked in a table form and in the box corresponding to using both imagination and body there was an empty space. There was no option for this choice of mine.
Mum had sent me to Ballet classes and Piano classes and Jazz dance classes and Art classes - all the things she had never had herself. I could weep now when I think of it. The battles she must have fought with my father to make it all happen. I'd like to go back in time and throttle my nine year old self who gave up the classes. To make more time to play Barbies with a girl called Susan something. For heaven's sake. My mother must have been in despair. I didn't know what privilege was, but perhaps I was also lonely.

Mum had taken me to the old stucco studded theatres of Brisbane a lot. I remember the pleasure and privilege of sitting on the edge of the seat ( the old fashioned flip-down seats. Mum told me to leave mine up and sit on that so I could see over he  heads of the grown ups.

A play about Elizabeth Browning with a live dog onstage. 

Modern Dance. Ah that - I remember a female dancer making a contraction and I was spellbound....oh the emotion to seemed to contain, ah what was the title of the piece, I suddenly wanted to know....what is the story, what is this woman going through, how wonderful a piece of dance that is telling me something emotional...and what a wonderful emotion - at the core of her body, it was compelling. All that ran through my small brain in a bare moment, trammeled up in a flash by disappointment. Because the gesture was fleeting. Just a dynamic to spin her into the next group of steps in a new tangent. Years later when I saw photographs of Martha Graham, there it was, that curve of the backbone - and that hollow space in front of the abdomen, the shape of absence. The grief of something lost or perhaps never found. But I never saw that promise of shape and emotion combined onstage until many years later.

My French boyfriend was widening my horizons - he had me reading Genet and Vian. Seriously, Genet - I was 17 years old. He (Eric, not Genet) had a curmudgeonly critical side which I thought only belonged to the old school Aussie men. We went and saw a Pinter play. I am always ready to be moved and excited when I go to the Theatre. Sometimes my aesthetic tastes go out the window, so strong is my impulse to be excited and swept up in the watching of a show.

Eric thought the Pinter play was pretentious although he didn't use that word. He found the pauses empty. I loved the mystery of it all. The blank emptiness of the space, the sofa and the characters sitting on it.

I saw Kopit's Indians at  La Boite - a wonderful dream-like play with a curious mix of humour and pathos, somewhere. Possibly in a wonderful little architect-designed theatre our English teacher had taken us to . Often architects get theatre design wrong or the building budget ruins their concept with compromise, but this was a little jewell.  La Boite, meaning The Box, was 'theatre in the round', in well, a square. The actors were able to enter from each of the four corners and sometimes via a ladder and a trap door, on a level with the back row and then enter through the aisle steps, or even use the aisles as playing spaces. My mother knew of the  Opera La Boheme but had never been permitted to study languages or even history ( her father said she had to do home economics) and she used to pronounce it La Boh-eet.

I've  just remembered that one May or August break ( August is a short break in Australia and not summertime), I signed up to do a Jazz dance class. I've done classes before, I said to myself, so I'm not a beginner, therefore I must be Intermediate. I had no one to tell me otherwise. A week of pain and humiliation. Actually not a full week. I dropped out. I was staying at Eric's sister's house and working my way through their record collection - Charles Aznavour! Like Piaf, his songs were vivid little movies, and the orchestration so emotional.

While still with Eric I signed on for some workshops at La Boite. We made sculptures with our bodies by running into the circle and striking a pose. One person would start and when the second person entered, their gesture had to be in relationship to that pose, then the first person would change. Each new person that entered, we all would notice the new feeling and possibility in the choice they had made and CHANGE! so the entire picture changed. We were urged to be interesting from every angle - the essential discipline of working in the round.

I've just remembered an exercise the other female teacher at the workshop when I was 17 taught. Standing in a circle, someone had to jump in and become something that would give the opportunity to build an entire picture, hopefully with everyone in the group ending up in the centre. I remember the two women teachers and Salvatore demonstrating. 'Fire!' one yelled and jumped into the circle writhing like flame. 'A hose!' (that was a gently mind blowing moment - ah, not the fireman, the hose), 'Water!' now, 'A fireman!'. Someone became a dog pissing on the fire 'Is this allowed? I probably jumped in as a pointing 'passerby...' with classic adolescent timidity and lack of chutzpah.

There was an audition at La Boite and I got the part - nothing much, nothing much at all. A Yukio Mishima play - a husband and his lover, I think, and much talk of drowned hydrangeas. I played the hysterical, nervy wife, but didn't actually have to play any of that as she was in bed throughout the play. 'In bed' under a sheet on two wooden cubes (classic bare stage design staple). My main acting challenge was to stay awake for my cue and my show stopping ( not that it was great  but I think it was at the end of the show, or before a blackout at least) moment to sit-up-and-scream. I think I wore a calico shift and my long lank blonde hair made me correctly wan.

At some point my french boyfriend ditched me. After much weeping and much wearing of his favourite shirt (out of some kind of rage of appropriation rather than sentiment), opportunity opened in a new way. Another audition at La Boite.
One day (years later) Eric told me this: he has been employed/volunteered into taking photographs of the UniQue (University of Queensland Theatre Company) 'Precious Moments' show. Where are those photographs now? He said that he watched me as I played (among other small roles) a bikini clad lion tamer (the way I recall it, my main focus in this segment was not to be too embarrassed) and that as he watched, he said to himself that he was never going to be able to put that look on my face. It astonished me that a/ he had been observing me so closely b/ that I had anything worth watching about me c/ that he couldn't see that I was just pushing out the performance so as not to fail d/ that he would expect to be able to get that reaction from me (he's a person, not an endeavour) or e/ that he would want it or need it. And I suppose I got a message that, buried under all that was, f/ something that I was enjoyed doing might well make me unviable as a love object.

Going back to a/ and b/. Most things in Brisbane happened with a stoic resignation. As a child disappointment was an old friend. My father's main aim for us children was for us to be invisible, silent and obedient. Timidity was pretty much my middle name. Yelling, railing, anxiety, bitterness and rancour were the unnamed principle actions and emotions for my dad. And my brother and I were encouraged to feel that we were the cause of all unhappiness or at least the salt in life's wound, which helped to prepare my jumpy disposition and an unhealthy self-consciousness in me.

Eric opened my world and also sometimes limited it. I'd say, 'let's go to that art exhibition', he would say 'yes', but not make a plan was given to understand that I would be somehow disloyal if I went on my own.

Somehow or other (My mum looking in the paper for a way to cheer up her rejected daughter?), I found out there was an audition at La Boite. 

The foyer. Normally a place where people in nice clothes stood to drink coffee and eat the amazing La Boite fruit cake slices. Now people are sitting on the hairy carpet tiles, leaning up against the walls. An intriguing girl and a stunning boy. Wow, this is a brave new world. Drama School but an new level. We were to work with a director from Sydney or was it melbourne..he had worked at The Pram Factory, which was in Melbourne. Exciting name. Pram Factory. New possibilities started to be created in my head.

I have zero recall of the audition process. What did he ask me to do? Lindzee Smith. Long black hair. Strong but very present and with you. I'd never met anyone like him. The word sincere seems limp.http://lindzeesmith.blogspot.com/ The next time the chosen cast came together, we sat (what privilege) scattered around in the seats of the La Boite auditiorium. Lindzee looked at each of using turn and called us by our names. Without reference to notes. He called us by our names. It was the first facilitation skill I learned. We were seen, we were present, we were going to do this thing together and he was our leader. So maybe the first good leader role model I'd ever seen, I now note.

Jack Hibberd's ensemble theatre style play, Captain Midnight, with music. We had two aboriginals who agreed to be in the cast. One of the two girls in the crochet blanket from the Drama School played one of the three aboriginal girls...they all work black leotards. Sounds naff, but it was done with as much care as possible. I remember a segment of the play she danced wildly in a spotlight, with her long bushy dark hair making trajectories in the space.

I had a solo song. A woman called Barbara - forgive me! time has erased her last name from my memory - was the MD. She taught me to sing 'Ah' instead of my first hard syllable 'I'. She and Lindzee told me 'hold your head up' and like a petulant moron I said, 'I am'. My posture was almost as poor as my confidence. That terrible way in which a 19 year old thinks they are a piece of shit and god's gift at exactly the same time. And that it's the director's job to get the performance out of them, not their own responsibility. Maybe not all 19 year olds, but certainly me.

I could probably sing you all the songs from the show. The ones I was in. I played the Premier's (?) wife the chauvinist white guy's wife. Again my long hair and ability to wear a long white cotton shift standing me in good stead. 

'I mope around this house all day, 

in search of something to do,

I feel just like a statue in clay, 

or a wingless cockatoo. 

I lounge all afternoon in bed, 

and bathe until my body melts, 

sometimes I wish, I wish I were dead...

there's one consolation though...the wealth!!'. 

I played one of a pack of french prostitutes in one scene - rainbow wig, heightened, cartoonish, camp - and other group roles with quick costume changes. Sue, the intruiging girl, had a larger role and she was playing a guy. I was amazed my her confidence and 'differentness'. I later found out that she had already directed Endgame. Fearless and focused, I found her. Not surrounded by a bunch of limits like me.

I do remember thinking that if I hadn't lost my boyfriend, I would not be able to do this. This. Theatre. It was something.