To interrupt our scheduled broadcast of festival highlights, we bring you a final (for now) review of the live literature project. From the artist’s own mouth. I introduce, Cath Nichols –
Sarah asked me to write the final blog for the exploring live literature project.
On day five we tried some improvisation. This was to address the problem we had identified with the way in which an audience for a literature event might be confused by a live art/ dance approach to the material. There was always some tension for Andy and Sarah, I think, about whether we were doing ‘live literature’ or something else. Was it becoming too much a theatre piece? Where were the boundaries? I was less concerned, as I tend to think definitions may be what the artist involved wants them to be. This strange business with the plastic and the sequins could be live literature because I was the writer and I thought it was (there’s arrogance for you!). But even I saw that our use of the recorded voice in a theatre space might lessen the audience’s response to the actual words. When a thing is heard as well as seen, people tend to prioritise the visual, as humans are very visual creatures. So, we needed to find ways to reassert the primacy of the words/ the text.
The improvised introduction, spoken directly to the audience, would stress the story and the texts involved. It also gave me permission to come in and out of the story at other times to address the audience. For example, the mermaid must ‘walk on knives and suffer such pain/ as she cannot imagine now, beneath the waves/ beneath the blue’, and we are reminded of this when she reaches the palace: after sweeping my plastic ‘skirt’ over a trail of sequins I say, ‘Each night she sees their sharp hard blades/ their glittering faces staring up beneath her skirts’; but now I come off poem and say to the audience, ‘Can you see them? The knives?’ Which not only involves the audience but also clarifies what the sequins have become. Previously the sequins (blue, and about the size of a two pence coin) were the mermaid’s attempts at speaking, like communion wafers, or foam, that sprayed from her mouth onto the floor …
Cath and Plastic
I was dubious about the introduction first: would it be needless repetition or a plot-spoiler? But in the end I found it useful. The introduction highlighted not only what the weird props were doing/ becoming (‘mermaids are different from us, they have a tail’ – wrap plastic round my legs in tail-like fashion) but allowing me to underline parts of the text I felt were important. For example, in the original story the mermaid is fifteen, which is a vulnerable yet headstrong age. The poem itself only mentions ‘she has the hope of adolescence’. I like the specificity of her age and could use it in the introduction. I also introduced her sisters, who try to save her life near the end of the story, and are represented by the plastic whirling in vertical circles like diving/ soaring tails. I ended by saying that in order to leave the sea the mermaid agrees to be without her voice and to be in constant pain, without her tail. We decided to rip the plastic sheeting to illustrate the severance of her tail. Both Andy and Sarah found this very graphic – and it made us aware that some of the other movements we had developed over the project did not perhaps have quite such a strong effect, though I maintain that the mermaid was a stoical person in the face of her pain and wouldn‘t show her suffering. But perhaps the pace of some of my movements needed changing?… After stepping forward from the ripped plastic, my final words of introduction were, ‘This is my story, The Price of legs’, which produces a nice double meaning: the mermaid’s story or the myth, and my take on it as a writer.
The questions Sarah and Andy have asked me during the process have been hard. In the face of , ‘what do you want the audience to get from this?’ I have to admit I am a bit clueless. I feel this way about the writing itself. ‘What do you want the reader to get from this?’ Umm… er…? All my energy for words has gone into the creative endeavour and I struggle to articulate what the text/ performance is for. Is it for anything, or is it just there? Eventually I did find some words, which apply to both performance and to the making of poetry. I want the audience (or readers) to experience something familiar become unfamiliar; and at the same time seem beautiful and strange. Then there is a return to the familiar, or to the real world, with a slightly changed perspective.
I can see this principle at work in my other writing, especially my previous sea epic Tales of Boy Nancy. It is part of a desire to have people want to return to a story, or a poem, and to read it/ see it/ hear it over again. It is satisfying to realise that this has been part of the structure of The Price of Legs from the beginning, because that is precisely what I have been doing with Hans Christian Anderson’s text: returning, taking issue, re-writing, challenging him; considering the story’s oral roots. With poetry this ‘return’ requirement is a necessary quality that I want to create: to keep leading you back into a text, so you want to spend time there, mulling it over.
Litfest
