Transcription of post-show discussion at Leeds Met Studio.
Q. I wanted to know if this is a work in progress. If it’s a work in progress then something else needs to be done but that in itself was a piece of theatre. Because the whole idea is to make people ask, what is this, what is the drama, what is the story. I don’t know what else you need to do.
A. There’s a certain pressure on us in the industry to create something that’s an hour long. I think this is really about establishing what the rules were, what the codes were. It’s a couple of weeks writing and then about 5 days working on it in the studio.
Q. Are you taking it somewhere else?
A. At the moment it’s very site-specific. What happened is because we’ve been making it here the space has had an influence on what we’ve made. It’s dead easy to rig lights here. Ourselves. And sound and the curtains were open the day we arrived. Often in dark places, like casinos are notoriously dark and have no clocks, you lose track of time. We are very conscious of the outside world here. There was one rule we gave ourselves which was if you hear an aeroplane overhead then you stop. There’s one overhead now.
Q. Do you want to say something about why it’s called the Pilots?
A. The project is part of a whole series of works which are loosely tied to an idea of acts of terror, or terrorism. And obviously that’s a starting point that’s it’s moved away from massively. I think the idea for us was pretending to be pilots and I took the idea of pretending to be George Michael and Andrew Ridgely in the Club Tropicana video pretending to be pilots. Which is why you got a little bit of George and Andrew at the end.
Q. There’s quite a minimal aspect to it are you keeping that or is that part of your rehearsals?
A. I’d like to keep this. It’s not normal. I mean it is normal when you’re in a theatre when it’s not operational, exposed and open. I like the idea of being aware of the space. I trained as a theatre designer, trained in the idea of toothpaste design, a bit of red here a bit of green there. I’m quite into using the space but often had arguments at art school about what a theatre space was, you know, it’s a big space we share with an audience and that was never recognised. It was always flat, fourth wall. I’m always interested in how we can use the space. I love the fact that working here for a few days has made us think about how to make a piece of work. Bring the lights down and just have two lanterns. It’s so simple and really nice to tour with.
We were thinking about starting off like this and ending the show with it being complete so the ending is sort of a beginning so it’s all set up for a performance. There’s a lot on the blog about this but it’s about pilots and points of departure and arrival and what they mean.
Q. Did you just have one idea like The Pilots? Did you just take the word pilot?
A. It came from this idea of acts of terror and September 11 and airline pilots and not airline pilots then and it’s gone on an huge journey since then and it does on tangents. It’s more about trying to find out where we are, who we are and why we are. There’s another narrative we need to find, a sub-narrative. We started about a year ago on letters that I’d written but never sent, we called them angry texts, like when you get pissed off by British Rail and you never send it but it’s really about cleansing. So we used those letters and then threw them away. And the idea of the time it takes before sending and receiving, it’s very old fashioned. We spent a couple of weeks in France writing and now a couple of weeks here with a critical eye which can augment what we do. I’m also making three other shows at the same time and these ideas all come together and fuse somehow.
Q. There was a moment of fear for me at the start when I saw that you were doing a play within a play, you know a performance within a performance. I’ve seen things before that have just been self-referential talking about drama and it’s just been pants. But that speech that you had about ‘I’m going to tell you things that are on your mind’. Is that part of the idea of the performance to take away the normal consciousness of what theatre is? I don’t know what the question is I just wanted to say thank you very much for not being what I expected.
A. It’s all about identity and communication and throughout it we use different tenses so half the time we don’t know who we’re talking to. Am I talking to him or to you? Are you my audience or is he? That was the whole idea. It does become self-referential.
We’re conscious of that which is why we’ve inserted the idea of it being wider than us. It’s very much about me and Tim and our relationship of 10 years of making work together.
Q. It was really involving I felt completely involved as an audience it was almost as if I wanted to say something while you were doing it I felt that much a part of it.
A. That’s nice.
Q. I was wondering how you come across the process of it all. You know do you have a script one minute and then improvise? How does it work? What do you do in the space.
A. We have to challenge ourselves every time to not become familiar with how we’re working. It\s something we’ve talked about that’s familiar territory that’s the way we’ve done something in the past let’s try and divorce ourselves from that way of working. This is the first piece that’s gone through quite a traditional conventional form i.e. writing. That’s new for us which is quite liberating to have some text. I think we work on our feet most of the time. I think it suits the project. I’m working on another project for children and we have a huge amount of earth and that’s a very sculptural process. It’s important to ask these questions about how we make work and how we communicate that work.
This one has been different in that the finished script was brought here and we videoed what we were doing and the mistakes that we made we started to put into the script. Like ‘Where are we?’ That came out of a thing on the bus there was a piece of news in the newspaper and I said ‘Oh my god a student’s been tasar-ed’ and Mole said ‘Where?’ and I said ‘Page 11’ and he said ‘No whereabouts in the world?’ It becomes about where you are. And you know. ‘Where are you?’ ‘Page 11’. ‘No where in the world.’ And it comes out as what are you talking about. Where? What does that mean? So mistakes come out of reading text sometimes.
We play and video and go ‘I like that bit.’ Normally the first thing that we make is the most interesting and we try to get back to that first experience of making this thing alive on a piece of a paper or onstage or an idea. That’s the big process. And this that we showed you was very different it had a completely different energy which we’ll have to look at. I was nervous. I’ve been doing this for so long and it’s still scary. It’s weird.
Q. I was reading that article on the bus too. A student was tasar-ed for asking questions.
Q. Whereabouts in the world was that?
A. America.
Q. Is there anything specific that you want to have answered by us?
A. I think all our questions have been answered. That’s a good question. I think when I go out of the space I don’t know what’s going on. I don’t know what’s happening. The main question is that beginning and whether it works.
Q, I was interested in the scripts. I really liked the quality of reading the script. I imagined that when you do it you might not have them. I wondered what you thought.
A. We were talking about that today. Whether we have scripts or not.
Q. I like moments when you lose your place in the script. Getting lost in it then finding the way out. It seems to me that that is what the piece is about. Stuck in the future of the script.
TAPE ENDS
