Update on me

People love to talk about movements. Groups of inspiring people all inspiring each other being generally inspirational. I never found it that inspiring. I was secretly achingly jealous of the entire idea. I've never being particularly great at being part of a movement - mainly because of impatience - my impatience with the group and the group's impatience with me.

I've also (as my pocket-sized string quartet hastily tune up and slip into a self-pitying dirge) never been the kind of person that people particularly want in their group. Not in a bolting-the-door-and-throw-boiling-oil-over-the-parapet kind of a way just in the way that what I like to think of as a the nice parts of me don't ever make a particularly forceful impression and the not so nice parts frequently rear the ugly head when I get nervous and say fucking stupid things that leave me shaking my head furiously as I repeat them to myself on the long walk home.

This may only be my grass-is-greener imagination but things always seem to be happening in an unseen room on the other side of a closed door. And its not that the door is locked its merely that I feel it would be rather awkward of me just to invite myself in unless I can justify my doing so. And I very rarely can.

Maybe I should stop griping and let the things I enjoy doing speak for themselves. Am at the moment beginning work in earnest on an as yet untitled Shoreham Village Project with a friend of mine. We started with the idea of a day trip - and the nice idea that theatrically you could do a piece of theatre about a day trip while physically taking people on a day trip. Since then it has morphed into something rather larger involving nostalgia, the imagined countryside, nostalgia for the imagined countryside and Alfred Hitchcock. Still, one of the main points in doing it is the the interest in having a piece of theatre (in a Platonic sense often seen as an artificial simulation of reality) that necessitates the realisation of its subject in the real world. Or, in other words, we are creating a story about the escape from the city to a nostalgically constructed rural idyll that requires the audience to physically escape from the city to a countryside that we have, in part at least, constructed. If all this sounds slightly like its vanishing up its own site-specific arse, never fear, It will also have disappearing ladies and sports cars.

Meanwhile in another part of the world looks like I might still have a lovely job at the loveliest of venues at the Edinburgh Fringe. More on that later. I am still however considering a move to Canada to do a PHD on the history and theatrical/theoretical connotations of the rise and rise of Site Specific/sympathetic theatre. Any advice from those in the know (hint, hint Mr Craig Walker) about how and where I might do this would be much appreciated. Have been thinking recently that, for a lot of reasons, seems like a good time to get out of dodge and I've been longing to go back to Canada for years and at this fairly infantile stage in my theatrical life I have as many friends in Toronto as I do in London - though having them (and Canadian immigration) invite me in is another thing entirely.