It took a while to click into gear but there were some moments and the story was more coherent than the first time for sure. I want to be less English about things. Less polite at times, less gung-ho at others. As I remember flashes of last night, I'm smiling more often than I'm cringing, which is a change from the last one. We might be onto something here. It's hard to tell from the inside, but there were occasions where I was able to stand at the edge and watch people do things and I often understood it and enjoyed it. It really became apparent that we are telling hundreds of little stories crammed into one big one, and they change and switch so often.

***

My strongest impression is of how unbelievably heroic you all are. I know of no other company, anywhere in the world, who are putting themselves on the line like you lot. Unbelievable, enviable courage.

It was generally far more buoyant, after you got past the first three books. Before that it seemed like you were frightened of being ****, and we all know what a serial killer that is.

Language. I know we’re trying to avoid tritely ‘epic’ diction – but studiously avoiding certain words because they might seem slightly elevated is its own kind of triteness. I suppose we shy away from words like ‘Mother’ and ‘Father’, not because they’re trite in themselves, but because we’re worried we haven’t earned the right to use them. We feel we have to be worthy of their resonance. Your challenge is the same as every writer’s, in this sense.

Having TC come on at the end of each book and ‘fill-in’ amusingly is like a gigantic pair of pink armbands. I look forward to the day when fedora turns amphora.

But you're all blindingly heroic, as I say. In the words of Mark Anthony: "You have shown yourselves all Hectors."

Reuben

***

It feels as if the singing is up and running now, and we can make some beneficial adjustments to the way we deploy the songs. For example, we could pick up "Dreaming YASA" verses as we go along, depending on the action. Odysseus could strike up with his verse in Book 6, for example, when he is indeed shivering under a pile of leaves and likewise the others who have a verse. That would mean a verse and chorus every so often, which would be a nice way of binding the show together musically. There is also the possibility that we might start up "What are your Dreams?" as Odysseus approaches Scylla, and Scylla's heads would be able to deploy their verses in the action, rather than as a separate number.

There was a lot more courage to hand, I thought. Ian sang the Telemachus verse having never heard how the whole thing goes; LizzieP led off the sung book - six, it was - with real singing, which set, in a real sense, the tone; Maddy gave us two tone colours for her verse of Dreaming YASA; Katy harmonised the "Andra moi" piece with the minimum of explanation; Scotty started his Eumaeus verse with real quality; others stepped up, too, but perhaps the most pleasing achievement was that we learned and performed the Andra moi tune in the same day whilst twirling sticks. That takes both skill and guts.

We still have work to do on "watch my lips". "Dreaming YASA" was still rather woozy and we could be a lot more active during each note; and it really is alright to look at each other when we sing.

What else? We will have more bits of tune to drop in throughout the show; let's explore singing while moving and making the pictures; each actor can be braver about taking the initiative to sing: you start and the rest will pick it up.

In the meantime, keep the personal practice going: in the end, the quality of the group sound is dependent on incremental improvement from everyone. Music ideas are welcome. If you have an idea, or think of a scene which needs a song, let's work on it.

J'Ox

***

Steff.

***

Fed says:

I waited for the blind panic that had been described so colourfully to kick in, and it didn’t. Disappointment #1.

Something I learned: The better we know all this, I learned, the better we can forget it.

Something I thought: It will be fabulous when we can begin and end the books without Daddio taking charge for us.

I was infuriated by our inability to do some of the simplest things such as handing around the scarf (which indicated who was Odysseus) and reassembling into the Croissant of Power (which we had practised an ddiscussed just that very day). Those are two things which are very straightforward and which form a glue we can all use. These elements can be our seatbelts, not the panic which we allow to rule us. So it was good to be infuriated, that made me feel like I was doing something very useful indeed.

Here is a harsh observation and it is true of every Factory show I have been involved in. While our strength is that there is no carapace of illusion around what we do, what you see is what you get, we are all chassis, the work itself is the entire mechanism of the illusion, and so on… we are boring and vain when we share with the audience how difficult it all is and how heroic we are. They are not interested in our panic or our nerves or our heroism. The hero is scared but does it anyway. That is courage. They will definitely like us for being slightly out of control. They will feel sorry for us. But we are not there to be liked and pitied. We are selling them and ourselves and the work so desperately, groin-strainingly short when we are more interested in our fear than in the work. We should dare ourselves and each other to feel and look and behave like we are ready. That should pervade all our work, our rehearsal sessions, our pre-show wanderings, the show itself, the bar after.

We are ready.

The great thing about this show is that Odysseus is the King Bluffer. The gasp-making-spinner. The liar. The quick-thinking fabricator. That is us. Let’s do it. Let’s shock each other with our artfulness and rule-breaking.

I came away very inspired and with a hugely amplified understanding of what sort of a show this could be (and paradoxically, a greater understanding of the fact that it can never be understood and described in the way our Hamlet or Seagull can – it is such a huge, sticky, story-making-web we are spinning.)

I now want still more familiarity with the books on many levels. For instance, I am shaky on the Iliad and I need to get down to it, it will be so useful. I want better knowledge of tangential stories: Odysseus lie about being Cretan, Demodocus’ song, more family tree, Theoclymenus’ story, the details of all those bird-signs… the better to forget it all.

I want to know the Cinderella books like 2 and 20 truly inside out and find them fascinating.

While I have a sound knowledge of bare bones I dare not forget ****.

I want more random poems, songs, and bits of our writers’ writing to pull out of our arses when we want.

I like Steff’s note about noticing casting. We have to just know and remember the essential cast members. It’s so simple. There were a number of times a character's name would be called and no-one responded, this happened to me about twenty-three times, but shame on me for not knowing who was supposed to respond. I read Steff’s note above about moving around the “radio play” and my first response was “…but we were told to stand still!” But shame on me for not really being sure if that was part of the instruction. Was it? It occurred to me at the time that we should move but I didn’t want to be wrong and I had enough to deal with… being boring and vain. These are simple things and they are solved by listening.

**** will happen in the rush of performance. We have to understand that is the bastard spinner* Odysseus at work. And choose to run with him.

*Australian term meaning: clever charismatic bloke who tells wonderfully implausible yarns.



Amanda H says:

I haven't been to an Odyssey session since last Spring, so I was really impressed by how far things have moved on. I thought the company showed confidence and calm, which allows us as an audience to relax and be drawn in.

I really liked the way that prepared elements such as dance, music and text are being used. When written passages emerged (Tiresias springs to mind), it was very exciting, and I honestly couldn't see the joins.

There is a question about the balance of narration and storytelling through action (Steff has touched on this, I had a brief chat with Paul about it too). It seems to me that people are now very good at narrating a book concisely, but it was lovely to be offered a little scene where we could just contemplate the characters and back story of, say, Helen and Menelaus. I agree that the scene that involved Jethro was also very effecting. So there's something to think about here about the relationship between getting the bare bones of the story across and allowing moments of drama to develop and expand.

There's a larger musing (I wouldn't even say 'question') that arises, then, about the need to have TC as MC. Following the showing I asked myself:
1) What would happen if the company just administered the tasks themselves?
2) Would I be able to fully understand what was going on if I hadn't read the Odyssey myself?
I conclude that if this showing had not benefitted from TC's interjections/explanations it might well have been hard to interpret as a telling of the Odyssey, but it would still have been a fascinating piece of theatre, cut free from the sense that we're watching actors rehearsing. Just a thought.

I loved the way that the sense of ensemble was so strong (I don't mean in the RSC sense, I mean in the sense that I understand from experimental theatre, where everyone is onstage creating something together). This is a real achievement for the Factory, given the fluid conditions under which the company operates, and a new mode.

By the way, as always with the Factory, the time flew by. Bloody well done. x

.......

Apologies for late blog, but I flew out of the country the night of the showing, and just returned. So the showing was scary and I did panic in places, but not as much as I thought I would. Perhaps after I confessed to knowing nothing I felt less responsibility. I was surprised by how much of the books I did actually know. It felt slightly surreal before we started (as all the factory shows have felt) when you can't get your head around how any of it is going to work. This being my first showing and in fact, first session since the summer. So it is possible to just to jump in, as Maz had proved. Although knowing the books is probably wiser! A few books in to the evening, it became clearer how it works. I was aware afterwards of not listening enough. Sorry Fed, stole your part (example of not seeing or listening) if it's any consolation I got myself into a situation where I was stuck telling a story I had no idea of the outcome.
But at times it was fun. I felt seriously tired towards the end, as you are continually concentrating, with no let up. The slow response at the beginning of each book, which Tim noted us on, was on my behave trying to calculate if I knew what happened in the book. I certainly came away with a sense of how exciting and brilliant the show could be. Having more material, dance/pictures at our disposal would help. Or maybe there are enough, I just don’t know them, as I’ve not been around. But maybe knowing how to use them is the trick. I wasn't sure what to do with my stick and hoop. I let it drop on the floor at times, which felt messy. I wonder what meaning I could give my hoop, so it doesn't become litter. If it were a weapon I wouldn't leave it on the floor. I want to invest my hoop with a bit more reverence. I felt like I did too much at times, simples best. I was so impressed with the singing from everyone. It was wonderful to see how much work everyone has done on the singing and movement. At one point preshow everyone improvised Scylla’s song so beautifully, I couldn’t believe it was spontaneous. I really enjoyed stepping into a room, where such wonderful hard work has been done. And I was thinking that when all this work is applied fully, the show is going to be really something!

xLeila

***

I'd heard the war stories and was also terrified. But it was interesting how almost as soon as it started the fear evaporated - something about standing in the croissant, looking round into your teammates' eyes, seeing the excitement (and the fear reflected back at you..) and knowing that, well, people have got your back. I felt that one of the things we did well was to try and keep this supportive and responsive way of playing throughout - not always successfully, but we tried and it seemed like a step in the right direction.

The prompting from TC before to favour showing rather than telling really helped and I was surprised at how little we used narration to move the story on, good lessons learnt and experience from the first showing I suppose. I really enjoyed the way we commited to populating the world and making the scenes come alive - as we go on and the fear decreases and listening skills and ability to see and respond to offers increase, hopefully we can start to do this really sensitively and skilfully (I was certainly guilty of not always doing that..) and create some amazing worlds, while remembering who and what the book is about.

I was thinking after about the session we had with Adam Meggido in the summer on improvisation. In the Improvathons (impro marathons) he runs he talks about the 'hive mind', when the whole company joins in a scene to support and help the main players in it (the idea is to make them look good!) and works almost as one to move the story on in a delightful way. It helps of course if none of you have had any sleep for 24 hours, but I felt moments where we beginning to do that which was really exciting. And I'm sure the no sleep for 24 hours can be arranged. Perhaps an idea to see if he'd be able to come back to build on the work we did then, and have been doing since?

Fed and others have said this above but I realised more than ever that you've got to know it bloody well, and I don't. The more we know it, the more relaxed we'll be and able to do cool improvised stuff while never losing our fixed point of the books, and the more we'll be able to incorporate the writing, something I felt I didn't even come close to doing in this.

And I should say it was really, really enjoyable to do.

Ian

***

I'm sorry that I've been so lax at posting my thoughts here. But we were talking about the second Odyssey sharing in the pub after yesterday's session, and I made a point which I was encouraged to share. And so am.

First of all, though, I wanted to say that as someone who was in the audience of both sharings, the improvement in the second sharing was startlingly exponential. It was brilliant and gripping, and well done to all.

Ok, the thoughts from the pub: We were talking about the (perhaps primary?) importance, in Factory work of obeying the instruction, of performing the task without deviating from the instruction. And how the weight of that seems, in the Odyssey, to fall on the shoulders of the person who is telling the book. And how performing the task as instructed requires a certain amount of control-taking and decision making by the person telling the book, which may when appropriate mean that not all offers from other actors ought to be accepted.

We talked about the importance of not feeling that all offers had to be automatically accepted 'in the spirit of improv' (and obviously improv isn't exactly what this work is, anyway). We talked about ways of rejecting offers which, despite being rejections, advanced the storytelling in an interesting way. The specific point that we were discussing was whether Johno, in book 17, should have responded to the 'audience interview' question 'can the dog speak?' by saying no, leaving Maddy to pipe up 'actually I can speak'. Johno was playing Odysseus, and clearly the motivation for Odysseus was to maintain his disguise by concealing the information held by the dog. But perhaps, in this situation, it might have been possible, instead of simply saying no, to say something such as 'He can speak but he's a well known liar, nothing that dog tells you will be true.'

Also, yesterday's session (8 Feb 2012) was incredibly exciting, particularly the striking pictures that were being made and (to me, of course, personally exciting) the new writing that was being brought on in new ways.

And bring on Oxford!

Jay