A Bitter Pill - Creative process for Natural Theatres
Revisiting A Bitter Pill for this livestream project was a new kind of process for me, as I first started thinking about the piece over a year ago in preparation for my MA thesis. Having done in depth research last year, which ended up having a huge effect on my life, I felt like I knew what I was coming into and was keen to dive in.
It was actually much more difficult than I expected to pick up where I left off. It’s hard to wrestle with the conflict of wanting to do something creative and artistic justice, and having to work in a way that is practical and realistic. With a quick 3-day residency all the time we had to work with, I knew I would have to go in with a plan, and that it definitely wouldn’t be possible to develop the piece to its full extent. Therefore, we decided to focus on just the middle section; starting from a place of derealisation and Brain Fog, building through a Sylvia Plath poem and spiralling into an intense, chaotic climax of movement.
In this part of the piece I feel like several different ideas are layered one above the other, with each train of thought running in parallel. I am aiming to provoke an emotional response in the viewer, to create a connection between them and the performer, which allows for a shared empathetic understanding of an extremely complex emotional situation. I didn’t want to lay out a clear narrative, or decide too strongly on exactly what this part of the piece was ‘about’; rather, I wanted the combination of movement, sound, and emotion to speak for itself, and create an enigmatic sense of this feeling that is so hard to describe.
Even writing this blog entry, I’m struggling to find the words for exactly what this feeling is. It’s something about spiralling, questioning, realising what you thought you knew was wrong, realising who you thought you were may not be who you were meant to be, questioning if you agree that that’s even possible, scrambling for an explanation, anger at yourself, anger at the world, panic, doubt; an internal chaos and an external numbness that collide and implode all at once.
This tumult was what I hoped to share with Ellie in rehearsals; both to give her an understanding of my experience and where the piece came from, and also to see if she had any connection to this feeling. It took a whole day of moving, talking, reading, and googling various synonyms to finally come to some sort of realisation. I could tell I had broken through and finally made some sense, (and unfortunately probably caused some of this tumult to happen in her mind) but, this was an essential step in opening and extending the reach of the work beyond my own brain.
From this point of epiphany, it all came together very quickly. It was so satisfying to build on something that already had such a rich foundation; there was no need to try to justify or force reasoning, because everything had already come out of such extensive research and felt so clearly connected to the concept. If anything, we found that the more we thought about the movement the more reasons and interpretations seemed to appear. It’s a great feeling to know that what you’ve created is authentic and genuine, and to have a clear explanation for every tiny detail of movement.
Before we knew it, we had a 9 minute piece, borne from discussion and reflection, rooted in research, and ready to be taken even further when we have the chance. This is very much just an excerpt of the full work, which is sitting patiently within our minds and memories, as well as in the film, and hopefully one day will reach full fruition with a whole team of dancers and a spectacular location. Until then, I am so pleased we were able to share this short section with an audience, through Meta4 Dance Company’s Natural Theatres project.
- Pagan
