I had a long conversation recently with Michelle Penn, author of Paper Crusade, and Mick Wood, Artistic Director of Théâtre Volière. His company is producing a festival called Poetry Plays in collaboration with The Pomegranate Magazine over three days at the Cockpit Theatre in London: nine performances of completely new work, putting poetry back at the centre of performance, with everything from audience participation improvisation based on The Pomegranate’s publications (First Thought, Best Thought), via three competition winners, to a piece by well-known poet, Martin Figura called Shed.
The piece we at Arachne are most excited by is Storm Child — an adaptation of Michelle Penn’s poetry collection, Paper Crusade, a re-imagining of The Tempest — which Mick Wood describes as ‘the most meta-theatre piece of theatre you’ve ever seen.’ Which it really is, taking a story that’s been theatre and dance to poetry, and now, through Poetry Plays, back to theatre and dance.
Paper Crusade
I asked Michelle how the work had got from the page to dancers on stage.
Michelle: As you know, Paper Crusade had this inspiration in Crystal Pite’s choreography (in The Tempest Replica), and it was always a dream of mine to somehow write this book and then have it created by dancers on stage. And when I met Mick about a year and a half ago, I think it was a very quick meeting of the minds, not only because he really, really likes Shakespeare and he’s a huge fan of The Tempest, but he also knows a lot about dance and his son is a professional dancer. So very quickly, there was some sense between us that we were interested in using dance as part of what the new piece was going to be. So, we have two dancers, Mick’s son Jan, and a French dancer named Eloïse Frey, and they have been a really big part of the workshopping we’ve been doing for a little over a year.
We’ve looked at some of the poems, at what we want to do as a story because one of the things that I think became important was that we weren’t just going to put the book on stage and have everything acted out. There’s already the audio book, which was a fantastic thing because I got to see how professional actors (Nigel Pilkington, Saul Reichlin and Sophie Aldred) read my words, and it was a really incredible experience to have that. I think it’s important that we were doing something different again.
And what we’ve ended up doing is using elements of the poems. We’ve taken a lot of the characters out, so that the focus is really on the Daughter, the Father and the Boy. There’s a lot of dance in it and it explores themes of control and one-upmanship and revenge, themes that are there in the book. But again, we’ve created something new, and that why we’ve given it a different name, Storm Child. The Daughter is this Storm Child character. Obviously, The Tempest storm, but also interior storms and emotional storms.
It’s been a really exciting process because my theatre background ended when I was about 18, doing little plays with people at school, but never anything where I’ve worked with professionals on stage. For me, it’s been this really fascinating experience where we’ve had workshops where we’re just trying things. We’re playing around with what the poem might be saying or a part of the poem, Jan and Eloïse will suddenly do a movement or try something that expresses some aspect of what the words are saying.
Mick: We’re really lucky, actually, because Michelle is a really good dancer. She does adult ballet, which I didn’t know, at all. And so she’s actually dancing a bit in the show.
We’ve been working with La Soupe, a French puppet company, so they’re making a magic pop-up book for this show, which a lot of impetus for the things that happen in the show come from. We talked a lot about what does a show based on Paper Crusade add to the book itself and vice versa. The idea is that the show is almost like footnotes to the book — a way into the book for people to understand the themes and get a sense of atmosphere from it. So, it’s not a replacement for the book. The metaphor that we’ve come up with in the show is that there are three theatre technicians on stage as the audience comes in and one of them is spark out on the floor, possibly drunk, or possibly electrocuted, we haven’t decided.
Michelle: Or maybe just fell off a ladder.
Mick: And that’s Michelle. There is no set to speak of on the stage at first, except for the bits of an uncompleted projection screen and a few other things scattered about, wires and stuff, because these techs are in the middle of setting up a show, and they’re classic techs, heavy metal T-shirts, bunches of keys … The conceit is that Michelle is a technician who is unconscious. And she wakes up to find herself in the world of poetry, she’s been washed up on the shore (as the Daughter) and the book that was being used by the techies as a set model has become one of her father’s magic books. And as she goes through the pages, the things she finds in the book influence the things that happen on the stage, and then gradually throughout the show, the techies play the parts of the other characters in the book.
Cherry: This is standard book size pop-up, is it? Or is it bigger?
Mick: Fifty centimetres. The emphasis isn’t really on the pop-up book, it is a way of moving the action forward, it punctuates the show. But the main thing is that it’s playful, you’ve got to take a risk and that’s what you should do in the theatre, take some risks, try things out and above all, have fun with it. And then the audience will have fun, as well. My attitude towards this was always that you show the audience visually, as little as possible really, so that they participate; that’s why I’ve always loved The Tempest. That whole speech from Prospero at the end, when he says, ‘You have lent us your imagination. Now your imagination has to set us free.’ And that’s what I love about Shakespeare. Somebody comes on and says we’re in a field. There’s a massive army over there and there’s a massive army over there — and you make the world yourself with poetry, I’ve always thought of poetry as little plays that are set into your head.
Cherry: Exactly, and particularly with Michelle’s book, because it is little contained explorations.
Mick: It’s so vivid. That’s why I like it, the imagery is really vivid and immediate.
Cherry: Michelle, what has surprised you most about the process of turning your words on a page into something on the stage?
Michelle Penn in character for Storm Child. photo by Eloïse Frey
Michelle: I think part of it has been the way that Jan and Eloïse have created these dances and we’ll read a little bit or talk a little bit about, OK, well, this poem is doing this, and this is what it does in the book, and this is what it could do here in our piece. And then they choreograph a dance. I do have to keep my jaw from falling on the floor because they, in a very short period of time, are able to come up with something that I think is incredibly emotionally engaging and also does feel like it’s of a piece with the words. It’s not acting the words out, but it’s somehow exactly right. Even though it was in the back of my mind as a fantasy that someday, somebody’s going to dance to these poems, to see it actually happen is astounding, really.
Cherry: There is a lot of space in those poems for people to interpret. You are not pedantic at all, and just the things that we had to play with about using different fonts and the way we laid out each character, each voice differently. So, it almost dances on the page.
Mick: Michelle’s been so generous with her poems and her work and allowing us to sometimes do quite funny, frivolous things in the show. And that’s real generosity of spirit. There is some really serious subject matter, so it’s great that she’s allowed us to do that.
Michelle: Since I don’t have a lot of experience in theatre, it’s just been this very new adventurous thing for me. It’s a little scary. I would be lying if I said I wasn’t quite nervous about being on stage and not reading poems, but actually performing them, having to perform them in a way that would be very different from when I’ve read them at a launch or online reading, and I have my trusty book with me and I read with the line breaks — it’s going to be a different way of approaching the same material. And interacting with props and things is completely new to me.
It’s exciting in a lot of ways, because I feel as though there’s been this amazing creative meeting of the minds, and I love the way that one person will have an idea that somebody else will say something in response, and we build and build and build. And then all of a sudden, we’ve come up with something that I certainly wouldn’t have come up with on my own. So that is really exciting, and it’s given me ideas for other things, or even new ways to approach things that I’m writing now. It’s an entirely new process.
