Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Big Tent. Live events.
We hope you've enjoyed the summer.
Insofar as there's been a summer and we hope and we are delighted to continue our live event online series brought to you by Torch,
the Oxford Research Centre for the Humanities as part of the humanities cultural programme itself, one of the founding stones for the future.
Stephen Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities, a centre here in Oxford which will have public engagement with research and with performance.
Dance. Music, theatre. Cinema. At its core.
My name is Wes Williams and I'm a professor of French literature at the University of Oxford Fellows and Edmund Hall.
And I'm also officially, as of next week, the director of Torch.
This term's big tent live event series will bring together each week researchers and students,
performers and practitioners from across the different humanities disciplines. Our aim here, as regular viewers will know,
is to explore together important subjects and to ask challenging questions about areas such as the environment,
medical, humanities, ethics and A.I., the public and the private and the common good.
And we'll celebrate storytelling and music, performance and poetry, identity and community.
If you would like to put any questions to our speakers during the event tonight, please pop them in the comments box on YouTube.
We encourage you to submit these as early as possible, and I can then ensure that they inform and enrich the Q&A part of our discussion.
In about half an hour or so. Now onto our excellent speakers tonight.
I can't tell you how excited and honoured I am to host and welcome.
Joining us for the first event of this term's online series, Katie Mitchell and Ben Whishaw.
I'm going to embarrass them both by saying a few words of introduction before we start our conversation.
I'll start with Katie Mitchell. Whose unique style, rigorous.
And some say uncompromising methods have established her powerful reputation as both a maker and a thinker,
as someone engaged in an ongoing, innovative exploration of the possibilities of life performance.
Her work is well-known to audiences across the globe.
In a career spanning 30 years, she has directed over 100 productions, including text based theatre, opera installations and multimedia work.
From her early days as an assistant director with Paines, Plough and the RISC to her recent success with Land Melody,
Lamar created that the day he moved Jinno in Paris and Orlando.
At Belen's, shall you know, Mitchell has become renown for bold and innovative productions which make rich use of multimedia in life.
And, as we should say now, locked down performance as well, working with ancient classical texts as well as achingly contemporary writers and themes.
Katy has collaborated with the Royal Opera House, the National Theatre, the RNC, the Royal Court,
as well as theatres across Europe and indeed the US to produce work which provokes and inspires in equal measure.
Many awards include the evening fan of Best Director Award, the British Academy's Presidents Medal.
In 2009, she was presented with the Order of the British Empire OBE for her services to theatre.
She read English at Maudlin College, and we might reflect on whether that was that was not good training for her life and work in the theatre.
She's also enjoyed a fruitful relationship with the university over the years, including a stint as a visiting chair and opera studies in 2016 17.
And I'm thrilled to say that today's conversation marks the beginning of her time here
as the first ever visiting fellow in theatre in our humanities cultural programme.
Welcome, Katie again. I'd also like to welcome Ben Wish all this evening, a multi award winning actor in film, television and theatre.
Ben trained at Rada and his work quickly brought acclaim, including a much lauded Hamlet at the Old Vic with Frevert.
None way back, it seems to me in 2004. He has worked with or been directed by.
And we might come back to that Katie Mitchell multiple times, including The Seagull at the National Theatre in 2006.
And recently, Norma Jean Baker of Troy at the shed in New York.
I think just last year in television, his work ranges from BAFTA winning performances in Richard,
the second as part of the amazing hollow crown for the BBC in 2012 to his extraordinary and multi-way award
winning portrayal of Norman Scott in a very English scandal in 2018 amongst many film roles from Bright Star,
where he gave an exquisite account of Keats. By way of aerial, both there and not there in Julie Taymor as Tempest and Paddington,
delighting audiences young and old as the voice of the refugee bear in the hit movies
2014 and 17 all the way then from Hamlet to cue it all their Bond films since 2012.
Skyfall. Welcome back and thank you for taking time out from what I know is a hectic schedule today.
My pleasure. Lovely to be here. Katie and Ben, you've generously agreed to discuss your work across and between different media,
and I think we agreed it might be useful to have as a focus for our collective thinking.
This question, that's sort of a blessing all of us at the moment,
which is life performance in many ways in which liveness can take many forms lovingness can take on film, on stage, on Zoome and so on.
But before we get into kind of nitty gritty stuff, I thought it might be useful just to have.
No offence from the horse's mouth, if you like, how you got to be working in the ways that you are now.
How did you come to theatre? How did you come to directing Katie?
How did you come to acting, in a sense? How does one get to be Katie Mitchell?
How does one get to be beneficial in terms of performance life that you've led?
Take your drama. Take it off. Yeah. Well, when I was a young person, I really want to be a visual artist.
So my dream was to be a painter. And I don't think I had a very good teacher.
And so I was made to feel that because I couldn't represent a tree beautifully or do a sort of line drawing of a nude beautifully,
that I didn't have the right to be an inside the visual arts field.
So I sort of move sideways into theatre as a sort of second best and then found that very sort of addictive and yeah, very, very interesting form.
And then the big influences on me after the move from visual arts to theatre were always work from abroad.
So I didn't really feel any connexion with any of the work that was happening in the U.K. as a young woman in the 80s, 1980s.
So most of my influences came from a very big trip I made to Eastern Europe, to Russia, Georgia, Lithuania and Poland,
where I researched directors training and saw amazing practitioners and learnt a lot
about Stanislavski and also seeing work that was coming into the UK from abroad.
Anyway, I then did about 15 years of working on naturalism in mainstream tax based theatre,
but I always wanted to go back to a more sort of visual arts influence,
making work that was to do with the crossover between theatre and other mediums.
And so I then have my a breakthrough show going into live cinema, which then off what I would consider my real career.
That's me. I was EUBAM. I got taken to an audition for a youth theatre when I was 13 by my dad,
and it was a youth theatre in a town just down the road from the village I grew up in.
And I was quite a shy. Thirteen year old and I think my dad must've thought it would do me good.
And I liked acting. I done acting at school, but I. Had never explored it further than that anyway.
So I went to this audition and I got into this youth theatre and it changed my life in a way.
And we did extraordinary things there. We did Greek plays and we did adaptations of books and we did devised pieces.
And anyway, I guess it became the thing I loved most and.
Then I decided is why I wanted to do and then I went to Rawda when I was 19.
And then I guess I was just extremely lucky and.
And I go, I got some I got some nice work.
And one thing led to another, and then you meet wonderful people and I've and wonderful people like Katie who you.
I've been fortunate enough to sort of build them, you know, you keep working with over time, so.
Well, that's what's happened for me, really. Thank you both.
I'm I'm really interested in your saying that you theatre was a way into this for you and you and that list of things that you mentioned.
So kind of ancient text, but adaptations of things divide things, stuff things to me that there's so well,
you don't always get a chance to do that as a professional actor because you're
too busy working with ready made scripts or working on readymade stuff.
Is that is that a shame for you? Do you think that you would like to do that kind of devising, making, adapting work again?
Or once one's become an actor, does one just do the one thing?
No, I would like to and I feel like I have had experiences that have felt close to
what I experienced as a teenager at the Youth Theatre with Katie actually,
and some other people. No, I.
I've enjoyed. I've enjoyed. Sometimes having experiences where a text is just the beginning of a of a process and a launch pad.
And then it's something that's made kinds of collectively. Not as much as I would like, but it does.
But I've tasted it and I appreciate it very much.
Yeah. Because in case you come back to you and you have what you say, your your, as it were, real career post live in a moment.
That's about adaptation, remaking, reworking as much as it is about just staging a ready made plex isn't it.
Or my oger in jeopardy. Yes I think it is because of course the first live cinema show I did was Virginia Woolf, The Waves.
And in fact my wish to do that stemmed back to my time at Oxford where I did a special paper on Virginia Woolf.
So I would say there's something gorgeous about being free, a little bit of the of a play text and having the problem, if you like, of a novel.
And in that case, the problem of a novel with no dialogue and no narrative, really,
and then collaborating in a different way with performers and one's creative team to push the boundaries of what the form of light performance can be.
I mean, that doesn't mean I didn't really relish many of the journeys I took with various play texts.
You know, our journey on The Seagull band was really, you know, fantastic.
I just think it sort of just going through the threshold into different types of material
creates different types of working processes and relationships and different form outcomes,
which I find more exciting probably than the well-made play text.
But maybe that also is just a natural weariness. Having done something for 15 years or sort of a curiosity about new forms and departures.
Yeah. Do you have to get into a different sort of head and Harton body space to work on a text like The Seagull?
In other words, that that sort of already exists.
That's been around for a long time, that a lot of people have their own versions of and so on, then say something that's never been made before.
Does it matter to either of you, really, that this is something that has kind of a performance history or a collective history about it?
Do you feel responsible for that performance history or like collective history or do you think.
No, this is an encounter between me or us and the group of people and putting on this this story here and now.
So it was a bit of a long question, but we'll just question Ben. Ben, you go.
I, I, I would try not to.
From an actor's perspective, I would try not to think about the performance history.
Of course, you can't be completely ignorant of it, but I wouldn't go and watch.
Not that that would be necessarily possible into it.
I wouldn't want to have my, you know, go back and watch other actors interpretations or read about them or anything.
I wouldn't find that helpful. And you want to sort of come to it.
In yourself at this point in time, bringing yourself to it.
So now I try. I try not to think too much.
We try and treat it like people say like it's a brand new thing. But but also, I'm always aware,
particularly with plays that are older texts and that the director is probably going to be bringing in choices and will hopefully.
And so you open to that as well. Yeah. And.
But Katie, Katie, I suspect for you.
You might be more aware and that might it might direct you more strongly about where you want to take the production.
Having been aware of the history of the plague. Yes, I think I think it's a director compared to the actor.
I think you have to be mindful of the production history and particularly when you're dealing with Chekhov,
because the with that particular writer and those particular plays, the production history has sort of got tangled up with the original material.
So that production history, which really was of late 60s, early 70s Royal Shakespeare Company way of staging it was very slow,
contemplative pieces of drama that has been mistaken for the actual original Russian radical material.
So when you sort of trying to work out how to conceive and stage a play like The Seagull,
you're already been forced into a conversation with the production history and the material you've got somehow cut your way through both.
And I think that that was I remember in the preparing of The Seagull,
that was quite a challenge to work out how to present it in a way that tried to cut away the barnacles,
if you like, of the production history and just get back to that sharp, very avant garde shock of a symbolist play.
And I think we we really tried, didn't we, Ben?
When when I brought that idea to rehearsals, we really tried to work with that and we were thoroughly told off.
Now, you were thoroughly trained as critical. Yeah, yeah.
Yeah. For that attempt, it was very interesting. We were made it, didn't we, at the National Theatre in London.
I then went a couple of years later to Copenhagen and repeated exactly the same production.
And it was seen in a completely different way as a sort of necessary relief that, you know,
some part of the radicalism of the original material had been repositioned culturally.
But such is this difference of making different plays in different countries.
I come off the point so that in response to answer, yes,
the production history in the case of such a major writer is quite significant in terms of how the director approaches in,
conceives the material, but hopefully not in a way that burdens the actor.
That's more just the director alone cutting through the jungle of it.
Yeah. And Ben, presumably that's true for the Shakespeare work that you've done, say I mean,
presumably I didn't you don't go and look at other people's versions of Hamlet before you do your Hamlet or other people's versions of area.
Before you do you are you, in a sense, leave that job to the director in a way so that you can work your own particular craft?
Is that is that right? I would choose to.
I know other actors who like to know how it's been done before.
So that you could do something different with it or say that.
Yeah, well, I just think I don't know. I would rather just kind of.
Yes. As I said, to come to it as much as myself and how it speaks to me.
At that moment in time, didn't you think that there's a different way that how the director looks at a play and how the act looks at a play?
Quite different. I was reflecting on this recently with my students and I was saying it's like if you imagine as the director looking at a play text,
it's like looking at a house with lots of entry points or doorways.
One's marked Hamlet, the others marked Ophelia. Then it's Polonia.
And as a director, you've got to walk through all of the doors of all of the characters and then work and they all fit together.
And that's quite a burdensome and complex task. Whereas the actor has it has a burdensome concept, tough, complex task, but different.
They just go through one door rigidly, just state hamlet, door, corridor.
And they say in that one, I wonder whether one symbol for in a way.
I mean, I do I do think you are responsible for the whole plane. But.
Or at least I dunno. I think you have to be aware of the production you're in, and I think this is something I've enjoyed working with you.
Katie, is that it's rare that an actor in your production in one of your productions knows the kind of production he's in and the load he's in and.
It's not going to be a production where every single act is slightly in another in another production, which I've seen.
I think everybody has seen a lot of when there's this jarring. Thing going on when no one's quite on the same page.
And I love that. So that and that is to do with being aware of.
Having an overview of the whole thing.
But you're right in that basically you have to be completely immersed and absorbed in the way your character is seeing things.
But a little bit how we build character using the Stanislavski technique means that we construct characters for all biographies,
for all of the characters, and all of those biographies have woven together.
So you couldn't play Hamlet without knowing when you first met Ophelia and the actress
playing Ophelia couldn't be playing it without knowing when she had first met you.
And all of those sort of biographies and woven together. And I think that creates a real sense of sort of shared past.
And from that comes a sense of shared focus, doesn't it? Which is really useful.
Good old Stanislavski. OK. You've got ahead of me. I was going to ask you about Stanislavsky.
But I was gonna get that through the Russians. But we can get that through Hamlet. Well, if you like.
No, I think you should. I think as we've talked about The Seagull, I am a little bird told me, Ben, that you're very interested in WFTDA, the Idiot.
And in ways in which one might sort of transform that into something like a performance piece.
Here's a kind of test for you both. How would you start doing that from a kind of Stanislavski perspective?
What would you.
Because doesn't does the novel tell you everything you need to know in terms of all the relationship you've just been talking about getting?
You know, who who meets who went on to win, or do you have to sort of write out even further from the novel?
Basically, how do you transform the area into a show with the help of Benin's Lafsky?
Well, a big thing that would. This is another thing I really love.
And I don't mean to sound like I'm just sort of praising Katie endlessly, but that is unusual for an actor to have this kind of experience.
So what was brilliant about Katie's process is that. It's very clear.
You begin the same. It wouldn't matter what the source material was, you begin everything the same.
It would begin with questions, really, Casey, wouldn't it? Like you established the facts.
You'd go through the thing.
And right then you'd to through the text and you'd write down the things that you can certainly know about the characters and the world.
And so that's where it sort of all begins. You you get you collate as much information as possible and then.
And then you see where the gaps are rund. And what happens is a sort of filling out of a backstory, isn't it, Katie?
Which becomes a really. Completely addictive sort of process for me and for most actors, I'd say, what with you?
You're married to Katie.
Some of you admitted yourself, because my lovely daughter just came in and I didn't want the sound of her use in the background.
Forgive me. Forgive me.
Yes, it's it's it's a classic she Stanislavski technique where you just go through text and you look for all the facts about the past,
not the present. You're not doing the present analysis. You're looking for the past and then anything that you you can't really understand.
You ask a question. So if we take the Sego, I don't really know the idiot well enough to know the idiot well enough to talk about that.
We take the seagull or maybe Hamlet. We take Hamlet, you know.
When did Ophelia first meet Hamlet and where and what happened?
That may be a question that you ask.
And then you you try to answer it as simply as you possibly can cross referencing the text and looking for the simplest impression.
The text gives you the answer. And then you answer it. Then masses of questions like that and then masses of facts.
And then at the end of that, you've got a list of facts and all your answered questions,
all about the past, and then you just assiduously put them in chronological order.
And the all the time you're building the past in order to play the present, it's not.
It just helps you play all the present action. The building of the past biography.
It's not a diversion it or it's not a sop to the actor.
So it's to help them play the present. So it's a very it's a very particular rigorous technique, which is one of many steps that stand house.
And then after you built the past, you build the place and then you build the immediate circumstances,
which was what just happened 24 hours before the scene.
And then you analyse the present action using tools called events and intentions,
which are very familiar to lots and lots of people, very plastic Russian tools.
Where were the main changes in the scene? And in between the changes, what were all characters playing to each other?
So it's very, very simple and gorgeous system, but it's very detailed.
And the thing about working with Ben, I mean, he's just incredible. He's very, very, very detailed as a performer,
which means that he's not only works very closely on a very detailed analysis of where all the changes, both micro and macro, are in the text.
But he can also calibrate all of the psychological logical shifts of those
intentions around those changes in a way that's just so refined and nuanced.
And he likes doing it. So a lot of people get a bit tired and contemplate.
I've got a play, takes about 400 events and, you know, 400 intention's.
That's really that's really dull. I won't play something simpler. But Ben is the opposite.
He goes, I think he missed an event. Katie, can we have a 401.
And then every single inch of what he's doing on stage in terms of playing, he needs to be precise about.
And that that leads to a sort of density and complexity in terms of the psychology,
which is sort quite is breath a breathtaking level of skill, which very few performers can achieve with breathtaking.
I am sorry. Know, I agree. I think we can't just. This is the Ben Loves.
I think there's an element in which it goes in the other direction, too. And I think I can see why.
And I just I kind of more seriously, I wonder, Ben, you carry that sort of stuff over into film and TV work.
So I'm thinking of the Norman, you know, the the the very British.
I've forgotten the title now. But, you know,
that was a character where it struck me that you were doing incredibly detailed work as part of that character rather than just sort of being.
Oh, I do. I do. I do apply it. It's impossible to apply it in the same way and to the same degree because.
Well, one in the case of a very English scandal, it was made fertility,
there's not the time to do that kind of detailed work either beforehand or during the process.
But. But I do apply it and I always think I always make a biography now.
And I always work out the facts of the past and I will always fill in and I'll always work out.
I always work out my intentions and events, even if on the day.
You know, the whole thing turns out to be nothing like what you'd imagined, and you can't really use it.
You've got it there as you got there in your back pocket kind of thing.
Yeah. OK. We've been a sense already answered the question. Can you teach this stuff insofar as you.
You both said, well, Stanislavski's. Method is one way of learning this stuff, at least.
Neither of you have claimed that it's the only way. But you clearly both find it really, really useful as a way of kind of.
In a sense, measuring and understanding the craft to use your title to the craft of it all,
just to kind of put they put they put them put this little bit of the conversation,
it seems to me that both of you seem to think of your work as craft, as made things,
you know, like, I don't know, a goldsmith or a filled with my thought.
You know, you're making stuff in an extraordinary detail that is beautiful.
Is that fair? Well, I think that that's one thing I really love.
Sorry again about this process of working then, because it does so to demystify things.
Could you eat? And there is a lovely feeling of light, will you?
Because otherwise there are a million ways you could try to approach a text or anything.
And if you've got if you've got these, it's a toolkit.
And it is sort of like you can make it. You can apply it every time.
And sometimes you don't need to. And sometimes other things will happen. And there's room space for the space, for other things to blow in.
But you're not going to have that crisis of light fast. I don't know who I am, what I'm doing.
What would you say this same Katie for?
Yeah, I think it I think is is enormously important and useful to have a sense of.
I think there's something about it. Maybe the most useful thing is sort of for the time that we're all together making a show,
everyone agrees to one way of working, because, as you say, well, there are so many different ways.
And as you say, we don't claim that this is absolute. I think this is very tried and tested, let's say,
because if you think that I learnt it from someone called Lev Dadin who studied with someone called Toff's to knock off.
Who studied with Stanislavski?
It's close to transmission and then so many people have used these tools so that all of the weaknesses of the tools have been sort of eject over time.
So they're really well-made tools and they're enormously useful for directors and actors.
And I think the demystifying is really important.
Just just going into the director's other tasks that they have to do, not just working with performers in in my mission,
would definitely to nail the skills both hard and soft skills so that the process of directing is demystified in order that anyone can do it.
Because there still a little bit of salt resolution mystery around your directing, which can put a lot of people off.
And there is a field dominated by one diversity group who don't understand themselves as a diversity group.
And so I think it's the more you can demystify the processes and nail the skills, the better for access to the field, basically.
And bringing a lot of people even like, you know, Ben describes himself to that youth centre.
You know, there he is, given the tools and off he goes. I mean, that's that's so important, you know.
Can we talk about a different set of tools for a moment? And that's the tools that have to be developed.
Well, you were already doing that. You've already worked with them, both of you.
So great in terms of love, cinema and bone, in terms of cinema, TV and so on.
But obviously, in the last six months to a year, the tools of that we're working with now, the tools of the screen,
of the camera of live, of something called life performance, that is also not actually where people are present.
Do you have thoughts on the difficulties of live performance now and the kind of digital performance offered exciting possibility?
Or is it always gonna be a kind of second grade version of the thought of what you might call the holy grail of being there in the room with somebody?
I mean, of course, this is different, but we can't make anything live at the moment.
And that is going to be for a long period of time. And as we will know, more pandemics will come in the future.
So we have to have other systems. And so we have to sort of put my money to just to relinquish the holy grail of the live experience
and accept and welcome in different versions like this experience now of us communicating by Zoome.
We have to welcome in those versions because we still have the existential needs that live performance was fulfilling.
It was dealing with all the complex parts of what it is to be human, you know.
And we still have those needs and we still need the narratives and we still
need this reflections back on on our behaviour and experience and perceptions.
And so we are going to have to find other ways of creating which are not us all being together in the same life space,
but through different digital platforms. And I was already investigating that actually before the pandemic hit.
And part of sort of an interest that I have in trying to reduce our carbon footprint,
particularly when we're making big international touring products.
And so I was working with a choreographer called Jerome Bell at a Swiss theatre in Lisanne called Videos.
And we were working up a way of making a show where there was no travel,
which would mean there would be Jerome in Paris and me in London rehearsing via Zoome local performers in Lausanne.
And then when it Tore's, no one moved.
Basically, new local performers in the next city would work with either me and Jerome by Zoome or a new local director with a performance score.
And I've been linked to literally zero movement and travel of either people or elements.
So already I was beginning to think, you know,
as time passes and the environmental catastrophe sort of crashes onto us, we need new systems for working.
So for me, I think it's a really is an awful time full stop for everyone.
But there are some advantages in it in terms of our sector.
You know, I think make us come up with new forms of working and communicating and just have to relinquish the holy grail of the life thing.
I mean, as you know, I would have so much life cinema that I'm not so mean.
Do it like this is a moot question in your recent work anyway. And where, you know, what am I watching?
Is this life? Is this in the same Plummers that more has been explored?
Anyway, what you do. So I can see why you this does.
You know, acknowledging the horrible mess of it nonetheless represent a kind of artistic challenge and opportunity.
I wonder for Ben. Again, do you. Do you grasp this is as a kind of possible utopian even future?
Or do you think, dammit, I want to be on in the room with people?
I won't be in the room where it happened that Hamiltonians I to be completely honest, I have felt so sort of.
Knocked for six by oh. And then I haven't. I'm still getting my head around everything.
I mean, I'm really inspired to hear what you're saying, Katie, actually, but I mean,
I haven't even really felt like doing any I mean, it's fortunate because there is no work to do.
But I haven't felt like doing any work. I've been really feels guilty to admit that because so many people are.
Having to work so hard. But I have enjoyed I have to confess.
Sort of like. Having a fallow period.
Mm hmm. So I feel I'm still in that time.
I feel like I can't really answer it. I'm very curious to know because I think Kate Kate is absolutely right.
This isn't going to obviously change any time very soon.
So we're going to have to adapt. And I think maybe I could put a question to you that's come from the audience.
I mean, we've already started actually thinking about some of the audience questions,
but if so, if a project came to you, Ben, which was working on a livestream to play.
Would that interest you or would you think. No, I need to be again.
I need to have the audience directly there with me? No, I would interest me if the people.
If the project was good and the people were interesting. Yeah. So if gauging comes along, is that right?
We need to do something that's digital now. Yeah. Well, we've just been having that conversation.
Plus just in our greenroom before, we were already opening up.
But the thing is, it's not about having a challenge and an opportunity. It's a necessity.
And I think that this really was struck to me, struck home to me when very early on during lockdown,
a friend of mine had been part of a conversation going on apparently in Manchester about a new building, a new performance building that was opening.
And the architect had been sent back to the drawing board to make the building work socially distance.
And I think that was in must be March. Someone mentioned this to me and I thought, oh, my God, I'm so serious for me.
So it was a real turning point, I thought. It's long time.
We're looking at the long term, not the short term. And then, of course, ones I've always got formal intellectual curiosity.
How is it possible to make this experience that we have normally together when we're separate?
What can that you know, what can that be? Mm hmm. And that is intellectually interesting.
OK, so again, you've answered one of the questions, which did have you used quarantine time to progress as an artist?
In what way? Oh, my God. Well, I use coincidence time.
I thought, what should I do with my time? A show after show went down.
I've had a lot of fantastic use of my time, actually. I've spent most of my time teaching young people.
Actually in many, many different countries. Teaching, mainly directing, but sometimes acting in the U.K., Germany, France, Italy.
I'm going to be teaching people in Norway. Copenhagen, Milan.
Lots and lots of different groups. So it's given me access to the younger generation in a way that I've not had for a long time.
And I really, really relished that. And I've taken a huge amount from that, including my M.A. students.
Holloway. So I've done that, but also been able to build up projects which are looking at a different blend of digital and
fair to say we're doing a show for the Shah Buna working with the British writer Chris Bush,
where we produce 10 short films digitally.
And where we introduce all of these characters and they go out in the spring of next year.
And then in the autumn, you see all of those characters five years before meeting and having a dinner party.
So it just so exciting to blend those. And then obviously, working on the Zero Travel Project,
I've spent a lot a lot of time with scientists talking about the environment and also with the wonderful British scientists.
Actually,
Chris Rapley just drilling down again into what's happening and how we can make piece of theatre about that subject without emptying the theatres,
because it's not a very happy subject. So I've been busier than normal.
Yeah, I know you've been busy. Yeah. Not very exciting.
I mean, again, we've talked a bit about this,
but some of those projects we will probably help develop will be maybe in the next little while whilst your visiting fellow.
Ben, you talk about being follow. I find that a really interesting kind of Metropol, because, of course, it's also an environmental.
You know, land has to be fallow for a while, but for the ground to be then fertile.
But some of the boys suddenly you need to. I'm not your therapist, but I think you need to feel bad about.
We'll follow. My lead therapist told me it was all right. But it's also true.
You've been filming and I wonder if I think you've been filming it is filming different now to what it's normally like.
Nonetheless, you have to do a lot to be in bubbles and you have to work separately.
Or I did one day off something that I had not quite finished in March, OK?
I couldn't really say, but it was weird because you meet a whole bunch of people and nobody can see.
Is this. Yeah. And. But, you know, well, it will get used to that and it will find creative ways around it.
I know you don't. They bend when they happen. I'm having a zoom cool with a lack of lean in Paris and then zoom call their only mask.
That's been e decked out that you have to wear masks in the office.
And that was just really weird. Yeah. It's just to just see people's eyes is going to be a.
Anyway, a. Here's a technical question then, which somebody is just sent him, which I think is really interesting to both of you.
Or rather, did you think the difference between the technical skills required for stage and screen
action will become blurred in this kind of zoom world precisely because of face,
you know, TV skills involved as much as anything else?
And you've been working with that when the live cinema stuff.
Will this this new domain in which we're operating mean that the skills about your technical skills for actors will become blurred?
All right, if you don't think you're doing something different anyway than when you're acting on stage or on film.
I think Ben may not agree with that. Ben, do you think it's different on stage?
Adam? Yes. It's hugely different, isn't it? Yeah, I do.
OK. So this livestream show that you're gonna do. Are you gonna be a screen actor or a stage actor while you're doing it?
It's a really but it's a really good question because I do see what you mean of it.
It is life. There's one go at it.
You can't go back. Concrete cut. Yeah. Sorry.
Series saying hello to me. I live Tecktonik thing about our private lives and our public lives.
Is that like crunched together, don't they. Because it your situation at home.
Thing. Yes. So it is it would be it was going to be a really interesting sort of mash up of the two.
And something else because acting. I would.
I can imagine like this on a zun call. It isn't like acting for a camera either.
So it's it's not really it's a completely new thing. I think it's a neat I think new thing is the way of looking at it.
And I think it's we've probably got a train for and think about it and reflect on how to do it really well.
I think is probably quite complicated to do. Acting as you my students have to do a.
My last year students, their final project because of the pandemic, had to go on to zoom and you can see them investigating.
All of the challenges of it is really hard and some magic. See the actors crunching their way through it.
You know, it's it's difficult, I think.
I'm trickily, want to ask whether Stanislavski's gonna help you with that and I can see actually it probably will.
Of course, because it's the same word. It's about how to be present in the moment as you feel.
Well, the thing I think that's really exciting about it.
If we think that there's about 200 muscles on the face and the muscles are the things that articulate a lot of the inner feeling or emotions.
So there is a sense in which everyone is going to get the director's view of the acting,
e.g., very close to the privilege of being a director as you sit super close to the acting.
Yeah, you rarely see the detail of it. Yeah, that's part of my original wish to bring cameras into theatre is so that everyone sees that detail,
A and B, the actor doesn't have to amplify it a bit for the people who are sitting 10 seats back.
So I think there's something really gorgeous about the detail of Zoom.
Do you think I mean, what could really I mean, this is a prelude to our project, isn't it?
Then whatever it is, then you can really, really work on that detail.
But also, there's something about the zoom is always putting people in their private spaces.
I think there's something really interesting about this point. Yeah.
Really, really interesting. I've been teaching all this time. I got a 14 year old teenager behind me always aware of that.
And it's lovely to have her so close. But it's sort of it definitely modulates my behaviour in a completely different way.
Yeah. I wonder also, again, in response to one of the questions that comes through,
going back to the diversity point that you made earlier about directors being largely from, you know, white and male.
You didn't say that, but that's what you meant.
I think there is this new mode going to democratise representation in a way to bring more people into the space of performance because,
you know, we've all got this kid or haven't we all got this kid?
I mean, we all have this kid. I think I think it I hope it does.
But I hope also that that happens in the live performance. When we come back to it before we go away from it again.
So I think yes, definitely.
I think it could be a lovely interim platform for sort of people to be free to take charge of theatre for artists at a time this past,
you know, and and and reimagine it. Yes, I think yes, I think so.
That's Ben. Do you have thoughts on that? I just completely agree.
And I think, you know. It's the thing of that you hear people talking about of wanting things to go back to how they were.
Yeah, but I don't. I don't know, maybe that.
And I and I think a lot of people don't. So it is a time.
To really think about where we want it to go and what new work we might make and
the kinds of stories and how we tell those stories and who is telling the stories,
you know, it's all very exciting, really. Could all.
It's all up for grabs. I hope I. I've got no interest in going back.
Less must go forward. I completely agree with you.
And then lots of really exciting new ideas, like localism, for example, which I find really, really interesting.
So I see. What's that? What's that mean?
Well, it is, as I understand it.
I mean, just coming to it is the idea that basically you you start to function locally within your immediate community.
So I was reflecting as as I was cycling through my local park and I just there was a young group of people doing Shakespeare in the park.
I thought maybe that's what I would end up doing. I'll just be directing shows in my local park.
And it's actually quite a nice thought, actually. Yeah.
As opposed to travelling across the world with them are awful carbon footprint or they am not flying.
I'm on the wretched trains, but yeah. Look, it's basically as I understand it was, you know, more about it.
It's a movement for for putting our energies into making environmental change.
Your artistic contributions locally. Yeah. I just think working globally, that's really exciting.
I mean, in a way, it goes back to the youth at the moment that you start with then.
In other words, you know,
the shows happening in your community with your community locally and being made in some sense for the community or with you with the community.
I mean, of course, we have other kinds of theatre still going to go on and carry on as well.
Other kinds of TV and filmmaking. But and local is interesting because I've just had a little note saying here,
the countries represented in the audience at the moment Japan, Belgium, UK, China, Philippines, US, Singapore, Spain, Italy, Hong Kong.
So local will mean lots of different things in all the various different places in terms of the people who were online watching us now.
And I suppose that that's, again, another question that's come through here, which is as well as sort of potentially democratising things.
What's clear? You touched on this earlier, Katie, is that this sort of new digital space.
It's kind of both somewhere and everywhere at the same time.
And I wonder if we can just reflect on that for a few minutes, the sort of the local but also the global,
the relation to either in terms of the project that you took. My ideas are kind of a transferable project from one place to another.
Or, you know, you've done a lot of work in Germany. I hope you don't mind my saying your German is not amazing.
In other words, you've nonetheless managed to transfer and you've worked in Russia and, you know,
so you've transferred a kind of a way of being into something that is not rooted in a particular language or in a particular culture.
So does that mean that the global is there or is each time?
And do we need to be local wherever we are? I really don't know.
But what I do know is that we have to stop flying and we have to stop consuming carpet like this.
And therefore, that means we cannot have this international cultural travel and the products can't travel like that travelling and the productions
can't be made like they've been made with the with the highest cost for an international production is transport and accommodation,
particularly transport.
So I think it's just a great moment as fantastic to hear the number of country people from in and say this is like positive globalisation where,
you know, we we all can meet across a lot of countries on Zoome and talk about different things.
I think we can do locally and we can share ideas across this in a digital platform,
but not necessarily have to travel anymore because the environmental catastrophe,
which the pandemic is a sign of, it's not separate from the real elephant in the room.
Yeah. Yeah. That's all. All those models are redundant.
They've got to be changed. We've got to have new systems.
And I think it's very exciting, the idea that I could be directing a show, an entirely different country and not go that.
And vice versa. I think it's a very exciting possibilities.
It was back then. Yes. To be honest, I've been such a hermit for the last six months.
This is the first time I mean, I've done some Zoome calls with my family and things,
but this is the first time these these are questions that I'm just starting to think about.
Mm hmm. And I feel actually very inspired just by hearing you talk about them.
So I'm open to that.
I'm imagining it's much, much harder for a performer to embrace this than for director.
Because, yo, I don't know. But your kind of stock in trade, what you work with is a kind of presence is being there in some way.
So I can't see how you would say it would get quite as excited as Katie about not being somewhere.
Well, I agree with Katie that we have to get used to not being somewhere. We think we know we're going to have to really change our behaviour.
So I think I'm all up for embracing. What what what the change needs to be.
Yes. But I think that's something they will learn about because.
Yeah, you do think how can I act with somebody on a over my computer and how how do you have.
What about physicality and presence? And, yes, everything else that's so important to them?
Let's do a thought experiment then on this one just to finish off, because we're coming up to five two.
So we've got about five more minutes. Sort of one of the questions that somebody is asked.
Well, there's two more questions left. Let's take then a bit of thought experiment.
So the ideas that we've just been discussing the last five, ten minutes. How would they have made the show that you did at the shed last year?
Different. So if you could if some one of you could just say a sentence or two about what the show was.
And I mean, I can introduce it if.
It was Ben Carson's doing a Greek tragedy based on Helen's you ripped D and modernising it by imagining that Helen was Marilyn Monroe.
Yeah. Crudely speaking, deformed by me, an actor.
And I'm Renee Fleming. So it was a very peculiar set of ingredients.
I think it's fair to say. Katie, would it? I think is such an interesting question because it would have worked brilliantly, I think.
Yeah. In a way it could. It could have been really good on a digital platform.
And I do have to say that I didn't even go to the US. True.
I don't fly on principle. So, you know, we ready inside and you and we we rehearsed it therefore locally in the UK.
So it was very there already had some some US elements of this, didn't it.
I think it would work really well on a digital platform. Would you say. Definitely. And also because it was not.
It had no. It wasn't a play.
It wasn't an opera. It wasn't a poetry reading.
It was not. You couldn't define it. So it was already in its own.
Strange space, wasn't it? So it was already booked.
So he got what it was already both ancient Euripides and very modern, and Culliton was already male and female.
I mean, there was all sorts of binaries that were being, if you like, deconstructed through live on stage.
Now you guys are saying, yeah, and we could do that on on Zumar, at least in a digital on a digital platform.
That right. Yeah, I think, yeah. It would have worked.
I mean, we'd have to rethink a few things. But you could totally perform the text.
And Rene could perform the score and it would work with on on a Zune to be completely possible wouldn't it, Katie?
Yeah, it would be quite exciting. Yeah. Quite exciting man.
Yeah. OK, maybe we've hatched an idea. But but.
But lovely. But you did that in the shed. Yep. In this new space in New York.
Yeah. And I guess that comes to a kind of a final point, which is.
So somebody said, how can you grow new talent and new spaces for this new performance mode?
And in a way, the shed was already invented for that. So the shed. You know, I've not been that good.
Yeah. Not great in principle. Don't fly, but because I've been in state for a while yet.
But you've made the show or the show was made for that space.
I think at least partly, wasn't it. Yes, it was. Yeah. So can you talk us a bit through a bit about how you make a show for a particular space?
What the process of commissioning is? How does a show get made like that? The problem is I'd really like to answer that question.
But the space was being built, so we didn't actually know the space.
And that's when when Ben and the team and my associate him represent me over there.
Lily McNeish went over. It was a building site, literally, and they had a on the task to rehearse.
So in a way, it was such a strange,
exceptional experience in relationship to building actually coming up around you as you're trying to tack it on the ground.
Ben is it's hard to take it as a model, but how is it?
It's hilarious because we all got sent home one day because it was the space was unsafe to be in their building.
So it was just it was being built around us while we were rehearsing the final rehearsal.
But that was very exciting. It was exciting. It was it was fun and funny and exciting and a bit scary.
The projects come together in a whole variety of different ways, don't they?
I mean, sometimes an organisation will say, do you want to direct this or do you want to act this?
And sometimes you go to an organisation, you. So I would like to direct this or maybe go to someone, say, I'd like to act this year.
But in this case, it had the weirdest evolution, didn't it?
Because Ben rang me. You see, you explain it, Ben. The evolution of this project.
You were in New York with Rene and Anne business.
This is very odd. Yes. Yes. I was in New York with Rene and and Alex Poots, who is the artistic director of the shed,
and and had written this text and asked if I would like to do for me I really love.
And and she we'd worked on something else together.
Alex Puzzo decided it needed another element other than just an actor and said he knew Renee Fleming.
Maybe there was some kind of chorus because it was a Greek. Built from a Greek text and said you could have a singer.
So Rene came on board. But then we had nothing else. We had no no way of transforming this text into a performance.
And no one in the room had a clue how to do it.
And that's when, you know, Katie Mitchell. She does opera and she does Greek and Greek plays.
I'll ring her. And I did. And then that's. Yeah. And that's how it happened.
So that's a very weird, very, very, very unusual procedure.
Well, that's a shame, because it seems to me a perfect procedure.
In that, you know, performer loves attacks, loves a writer's work, needs to then go and find some way of operating,
making that happen, remembers having worked with somebody else who's kind of got the tools.
Off we go. I mean, I suppose what lucky about that is that you also had the producer onboard or the.
Yeah, I would say in retrospect it was a little bit the wrong or the wrong way round.
It felt that way anyway. Maybe I shouldn't. We're running out of time and maybe it's too much.
I'm just interested. I'll tell you why I'm interested,
partly because precisely this is partly me thinking from our perspective in torture and in relation to the new humanity centre and so on.
How do we bring together academic work, research into performance and the history of performance in the Greek into,
you know, the history theatre with artists?
And how do you generate that work in what will be a new space, you know, is gonna be a built space as well as a digital space?
How does that work happen? And clearly, there are lots of different ways.
But whether it leads with the power, whether it leads with the director,
whether it leads with the performer and so on, what's what's the thing that makes that actually feasible?
It is an idea. Connexion, isn't it, between either a group of artists or artists and academics.
And it's a very fragile, tiny thing. So if someone has a hunch that some idea would be possible in the same way that Ben had this hunch and this hunch
that you could with a fantastic opera singer like Renee Fleming that has to act like himself and Carson's taxed,
if you could just get that fourth person there, then we'll those ingredients would coalesce.
Yeah. But I think I think the seeds of things are quite fragile and you can often miss them as the seed of an idea.
I mean, they just just you just don't notice it.
So providing a sort of environment like you are with us and providing context like this for these sorts of conversations can often breed things.
Yeah. We're back to fallow.
You need some fallow ground to plant the seed and then you need the water, the resources and all the rest of it to make the seed grow, I guess.
But yeah. Okay. We're running out of time. Have we forgotten anything?
Is there anything you really want to think about that we haven't said?
I don't think so. I think we've a really, really, really enjoyed this.
And I think we know Snuffly really, actually. Thank you so much.
Well, thank you. I think that yeah, we've sort of just about run out of time.
Thank you to both of you are brilliant speakers for a wonderful and really actually, I think enriching conversation.
I have to say thank you also to the viewers at home who sent in their questions. Are they home?
There's all sorts of homes represented here in array and a whole range of different places.
And also, thank you to the backstage crew, the people at Tortue who've made all this possible.
But, of course, the biggest thanks. Go to our two speakers.
Thank you again, Ben. And thank you all so, Katy. Thank you.
Bye bye. Our next big tent live event will take place in two weeks time.
On Thursday, the 8th of October at five p.m., we will be live from an Oxford venue with a world premiere performance from the Villiers Quartette.
We'll also be speaking with Professor Dan Grimley from the music faculty, who will introduce and explain the significance of the performance.
And Dr Joanna Bullivant, also from the music faculty who'll be chairing the evening.
We hope you'll be able to join us again then.
And if you want to catch up on any of the other previous events on Big Tent, they're all on the torch website.
Thank you so much again for joining us one and all. And hope to see you in a couple of weeks time.
Goodbye.