Tuesday 23 December 2008

Dissertation

I've finally found the time to put my MA Dissertation on the internet. To view it please go to http://laurabean123.wordpress.com/

As always I'm looking for input...

Wednesday 10 December 2008

Some Baby Seeds

... are being planted in my bored little brain. Ideas are there that are so new, so fragile, that everytime I try to discuss them with someone they shatter in my hands and become banal and nothing worth uttering. Yet the desire to start working again keeps on niggling.

Living with Stevie obviously has an affect on me because I have started to research fairy stories again... no I take that back... maybe it is a combination of Stevie and this time of year - I have just realised that this is also what I was working on this exact time last year, with Stevie, for the group show at college. Ah how the past comes around and around and around.

Stevie and I started a project for the group show where I re-appropriated newspaper stories into allegorical tales using the language of fairy tales. It was for an audience of one at a time and also had an accompanying shadow play that Stevie designed... some of these ideas are obviously still floating in freeplay with me.

I recently went to the Press night of Cinderella at the Lyric! Wow! I was really in love with the show - possibly just my sick little brain, but I found this version, with the direction and the Grimm's writing far more enchanting and christmasy than the 'traditional' version with a fairy godmother. It was dark and magical all in one go - if it wasn't advertised as a kids show I would have been demanding that the dark nature be pushed even further... after all fairy tales were originally meant for adults. Funnily enough I met Liz, who played Cinderella, a couple of months ago at a Devoted and Disgruntled night at Shunt. That was an added bonus.

So - that is some stuff that is at the root of my shattering ideas... here are a few more:

"I had to produce a discourse that would be readable only for those who would make their own translation from the point of view of their own adventure." (The Emancipated Spectator: Ranciere, 2007)

"I wanted to write a story that would feel, to the reader, like something he or she had always know. Something familiar, even if the elements were as original as I could make them." (Neil Gaiman in this artical)

Reacently, walking home from work I heard someone shouting my name .. turned around and saw an almighty chunk of my past standing at London Bridge station. One of those people who you fall out with under awful, hurtful, hateful circumstances, eight years ago, but still think about them all the time; never expecting or wanting to see them again. One of those people that you imagine, if you ever saw them again you would probably just blank them and say, "I'm sorry do I know you!?" before sharply turning around and running away... wishing that you had just said "Sorry".

In one swift, totally unexpected movement, I was hugging her and was so happy that our paths had crossed on a day when she hadn't even entered my head. All the anger that I think we both thought would be felt just wasn't there and an agreement was made that enough water had been passed under that bridge for it to be built again... so we are going for a drink tomorrow... and I remembered a fairy story that has been lost, that we wrote together as teenagers.

As We Speak...

I am sat behind a reception desk... earning money. Unable to get a full time job I have resigned myself to sporadic temp work, to pay the rent, only to realise I never wanted a full time job in the first place - no wonder I didn't get one. But my bills are mounting, christmas is coming and my placement is ending. I am obsessed with all the wrong things. No new work on this horizon.

As we speak... the sentence "It is the power that each of us possesses in equal measure to make our own way in the world... She participates in the performance if she is able to make her own story from the story in front of her" (The Emancipated Spectator, Ranciere: 2007) goes round and round my head... I'm doing what now in the world?

Realising that choices are hard work and I'm not putting enough of it in; the new year approaches and I will be a little clieched and resign myslef to a new beginning... maybe I will start that early.