I've been meaning to write some words, by special request, about my experience of working on 'Brainsong'. Our sole performance is coming up this very Saturday 28th May at 6:30pm at the Quarterhouse Theatre as part of 'Normal? - Festival of the Brain' in Folkestone. We've had ten days of funded time to develop a 'work in progress' 35 minute performance which is, as anyone in the arts knows, a luxurious situation definitely to be savoured and exclaimed at. The ten days have been sprinkled across the past couple of months in chunks of two or three together, creating little oases of Kentish coastal sojourns for me, filled with unique and memorable creative experiments. Oh I do like to be beside the seaside.
The last of our rehearsals has now taken place and this is my slightly disorganised retrospective of the highlights so far.
I have worked on four events previously with Anna Braithwaite, a talented composer and creative and strategic force without whom the whole thing would not have been possible. She also has superhuman levels of patience and good humour and is therefore perfect in every way.
I've also worked before with musician and vocalist Gemma Storr, here playing trombone, which is just one of the many instruments she can dust off to great effect specially for us. The rest of the team are Katy Rowe, an awesome fiddler and general good sport, Aidan Shepherd, impressively flexible on accordion and bass, David Insua-cao now known to us as 'Davide' for no logical reason, on percussion (he can turn almost anything into an instrument) as well as Zoe Aldrich doing a fine bit of running away and Claire our stage manager and sound engineer.
Our director is Emma Bernard (also full of energy and good humour) and she has shared with us her favourite warm-up sequence, Chairman Mao's daily exercises, to give us the strength to resist inevitable capitalist invasions of the rehearsal room.
And this has not been the only new experience. I have also had opportunity to get to know Stratford Westfield shopping centre extremely well. Eventually I worked out how to escape Forever 21 and Primark and find the International station for (usually late) high speed trains to Folkestone - FYI it is buried down an oblique corridor ('it's behind you') between various sourdough bread outlets and and world food stalls. Without this knowledge you will never get out of the Waitrose foodhall. There I would wait for my reliably late train in the pale grey, deserted, polished concrete chasms in which the train platforms are buried, like archaeological discoveries on an alien planet. (I often think with immense pity of the poor Olympic crowds from all over the world a few years ago who had to find their way around Stratford. They must have bought a lot of stuff in Waitrose).
Usually I would meet up with Gemma and Emma who had boarded the train at St Pancras and then we zoomed through the exposed landscapes of Kent towards a variety of rehearsal rooms and naturally we talked all the way there about The Work and The Process, nodding sagely and stroking our imaginary beards. Ahem. Well, we told each other dirty stories and laughed like drains.
Our rehearsal rooms have ranged from a beautiful old pub (regenerated!) that has had its insides scooped out to form a clean workspace to a low-ceilinged 50's dance hall with DJ booth, plastic flowers and the mild smell of sweat (not yet regenerated!).
At one rehearsal we got to pick the brains of an Experimental Psychologist and that's provided me with a few months' worth of dinner party conversation. (Invite me to dinner, anyone?)
In the meantime - Folkestone - well, interesting. What a quirky place. Things are changing there before our eyes as the town steadily rebuilds itself to its former glory. The shadow of the past is there in both the glorious old seafront hotels and monolithic residential mansions set back from the road, plus the modern reality revealed through the shiny big cars parked in the west end of town as well as shabby artisans' terraces and run-down townhouses used as hostels in the east. Anna is not the only person I know who has moved from London to the Kent coast, trading their modest flats for proper family homes and a seaside life. There's a wonderful noodle bar, some fantastic coffee, massive pieces of home made cake, eccentric artists you'll trip up over, cobbled streets and massive seagulls.
Well you are probably desperate to know about the piece and hear less of this contextual nonsense. Well in a nutshell, it is a tour-ette of the world of a Tourettes sufferer via insights into the feelings and processes of addiction via explorations of OCD. Using voices, clarinet, trombone, accordion, percussion, violin and six bass guitars.The music is all by Anna and is unique and, er, Fairly Challenging to play and sing, in fact so much so that I'd say not one minute of those ten days of development was wasted, even when having prolonged tea breaks in the sunshine because even the biscuits were deeply relevant, as you will discover when you see the show.
So if you fancy a day out in Folkestone and feel like coming to see the show and will pledge to spend at least half an hour afterwards telling us all how bloody clever and talented we are, book a ticket now !!!