Scallywag Radio Presents - Like That, Another Micro Audio Play

Zdravstvuyte Scallywagska,

Despite underwhelming popular demand, Scallywag Radio is proud to present the second eagerly unanticipated Micro Audio Play - "Like That". That's right, we're not fucking around here, believe you me. You me. You me. Odd that. Or perhaps that's just the massive dose of mescalin I had for breakfast this morning?

In any case, "Like That" is an entirely different kettle-of-marine-life than Fast And Spurious, altogether. What's that, dear imaginary reader? You want me to explain and expound on the origin of the text, the ideas that drive it, plus the mode, means and manner of it's transformation from words on a page to Micro Audio Play? Well. Just 'cause it's you, let's see how far we get with that. But I'm not promising anything.

Way back in 2014 I was deeply immersed in the development of a new technique for making small-scale puppets. Inspired by my new creations, I wrote a monologue ostensibly but not exclusively for this little old lady.

As a matter of historical fact, I did actually have the profound pleasure and privilege to perform the monologue with her at an extraordinary little event that is certainly worth a short digression. It was January 2015, and I was staying down in Barcelona working as Studio Slave for sculptor and social hub/svengali Frank Plant (if you like large scale drawings in steel, buy one of his pieces and it will improve your life immeasurably). A friend of his (and now mine) Josephine Grundy organizes a "Salon" in her apartment every couple of months, in which her living room turns into a performance space and auditorium for about a dozen people. People bring food and drink to share, and over the course of an evening a vividly mixed-bag of artists - professional and amateur - present everything from text-based theatre to contemporary dance, from live music to storytelling, from experimental video projects to puppetry, and any and everything else in between. Wonderfully, with a resounding "fuck you" to main-stream culture, nothing is monetized. No one pays or is paid. Everyone is there purely for the love of sharing all forms of time-based art. I would encourage all of you to switch off your computer and get involved in something like this. Right after you finish reading my blog, obviously.

At the time of writing "Like That" I was also inspired by a new-found fascination and study of The Theatre Of The Absurd - in particular the works of Beckett and Ionesco. Through the playful liberty of deconstructing language and stripping away its meaning, I was especially drawn to exploring what was not said in a text. It is into these cracks that an audience must create their own meaning. The previous year I had written two scenes - a monologue and a dialogue - for a production I directed in Tallinn, that was entirely made up from unfinished sentences. (I plan to transform the monologue into another Micro Audio Play.) By furnishing the empty spaces in the text with their own ideas and experiences, an audience creates order from disorder, making the content of the scene intimate and personal to themselves, and perhaps even uncovering their own meaning for the ethical, psychological and emotional issues that have been raised.

Perhaps in my next BlogSpotPost I will delve deeper into the notion of how time-based-art as heterotopias are places of opportunity, sites of interactive disorder generating new orders and of order transforming into regenerative disorder. But probably not. Even imaginary readers have a limit to how much shamelessly verbose pseudo-academic theatre-theory wank-fest they can stomach.

Interestingly (for me, at least) the musicality and dynamics of "Like That" are in some way an exact mirror image - or perhaps better, a negative image - of "Fast And Spurious". In "Spurious", the delivery of the text was absolutely and intentionally monotone, the dynamic range and musicality came from the environmental soundscape. In "Like That" the environmental soundscape is monotone, and the voice has as much dynamic range as the microphone could handle and my performance could muster. The music - 2nd Movement of Dvorak's New World Symphony, mangled to make it sound like it's being played from an old gramophone - is strangely both a character and a background sound, because on a purely rhythmic level it is having a "dialogue" with the voice.

Ok. Even my imaginary reader hasn't made it this far, so I will finish up with a quick dialect note. For the non-native English among my imaginary listeners, the word "nowt" in the last line of the play means "nothing" in Northern English vernacular. (Yorkshire, Lancashire, possibly.)

Right then. Nowt more to say. I've stuck "Fast And Spurious" in below here, for those of you that missed the last post. As always, neglect to leave your comments in the "Comments" section below.