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Madeline McNamara

From the Shaky Isles

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Posted on August 22, 2013 by Marian Evans

ISLANDS

O for God’s sake
they are connected
underneath

They look at each other
across the glittering sea
some keep a low profile

Some are cliffs
The bathers think
islands are separate like them

I feel so fortunate. I’ve heard gifted readers read the second draft of the Throat of These Hours radio play. And I know what I’d like to do and what I have to do, to ensure it’s ready to submit to Radio New Zealand at the beginning of October. This week, I’ll write the third draft. And up the coast composer Christine White will soon start work on her next composition, for Islands.

The readers kindly came to my place, one weekend afternoon. Lorae Parry and Madeline McNamara – both familiar with the stage play –  read ‘their’ parts again and Laura Daly joined them to read the ‘grand-daughter’ part. Christine listened from one end of the sofa and I listened from the big table, my back to them all, following the text, pencil in hand. Beside me, to check the length, the timer I use on mornings when I feel half-hearted. (When I set it to count down from forty minutes I always manage to go for it, however daunting the task.)

The reading took sixty-three minutes. Even if I allow for our brief discussions during the reading I have to shorten the script, to leave plenty of space for Christine to work in and to stay within the fifty-five minutes that Radio New Zealand assigns for radio dramas.

But there’s more than shortening to be done. Thanks to the reading and the discussion afterwards, I have insights I’d never reach on my own. I read lines to myself as I draft, but sometimes that isn’t enough and the continuity of Lorae and Madeline’s voices and responses now provides me with an invaluable baseline of shared experience. For instance, some lines from the stage play are also in the radio play. When I heard Madeline re-read them in this new context I identified where the lines sound awkward in both plays; I must re-write them.  And during the discussion after the reading, Madeline and Lorae  re-read one scene with a fresh interpretation – how I love what actors can do! – and one possible problem disappeared, so long as I signpost the tone required.

Laura used to manage the radio station where I learned to make radio programmes and Lorae writes for radio, so they also told me where the play required more or fewer or different sound cues. Exactly what I needed to know. And Laura asked whether there’s an archive of Muriel Rukeyser reading her own poems. She felt that the poet’s own voice could add a powerful layer of sound. As I wrote in the last post, I’ve been enriched by listening to the Muriel Rukeyser recordings on her Penn Sound page. But I hadn’t considered including her voice in the radio play or the stage play. So that’s a possibility I will explore.

Christine’s responses were inspiring too, and very useful, as always. She had ideas about the soundscape of course, but she also identified two places where her attention fell away because she had to think through what was happening. I love it when readers or listeners can identify where they lose their engagement.

I hope all these women come to a reading of this next draft, in mid-September. But in the meantime, I’m on my own.

Starting a re-write is always exciting and scary. As Jane Campion said recently, “A lot of time in writing is spent wondering if you’re hopeless.” And today an additional anxiety joins the writing fears and my ever-present funding anxieties. In the recent New Zealand International Film Festival I saw a magnificent film about backing singers, Twenty Feet From Stardom. Another film about women and voice, Lake Bell’s In A World, is screening in the United States. Then, by chance, because I don’t have a television, I saw an episode of a New Zealand comedy called Supercity. And there were two women meeting in a recording studio after years apart, and sniping at each other.  I love synchronicity, but by the time Throat of These Hours is finished, will feisty women in recording studios be a cliché?

On the plus side, in the last month we’ve had two severe earthquakes within 100km of Wellington. After the second, last Friday, there have been hundreds of aftershocks a day, now down from over 400 to about 100. We’ve been told to prepare for another severe earthquake and to remember that The Big One can occur anytime. On advice from Christchurch friends, whose city is still recovering from disastrous earthquakes, I keep my phone charged and take it everywhere, with a windup torch/radio and water. I wear my heavy boots and keep them by my bed, have a bag nearby with hard drives and essentials like passports. A thermette out, and refreshed earthquake food and water.

The physical experience of the earthquakes does something to our nervous systems I think. There’s the fear of course. And the joy of being alive after something dangerous has passed. But I’ve felt that the constant quakes stimulate some instinctive, subliminal and surprising responses within that are more than an adrenalin rush, maybe because the quakes cause subtle disturbances in our spinal fluid, on its journeys to and from our brain stems.

When the last severe quake hit, I’d just finished folding the washing.  I was about to mop the kitchen floor. The house torqued more than it ever has. As usual I didn’t drop, cover, hold, but I nearly did.

After a burst of Twitter activity I returned to my mop and bucket. And found that I cleaned the floor with an obsessiveness that reminded me of similar cleaning marathons just before I gave birth. Then I gathered my mobile quake equipment to walk around the waterfront to the library. Every road I saw was gridlocked,  the waterfront was crowded and the waterfront bars were full. And for the first time in years I wanted to get drunk and fuck a stranger. (I’ve experimented with euphemisms for this, but they’re gutless; I don’t dare wimp my language in Muriel Rukesyer’s presence.) These urges felt quite different from my parallel joy-to-be-alive delight in the beautiful early evening and the oystercatchers on the beach. And now, my dreams are unlike any dream I’ve ever had; they tremble on into the late morning.

So why are the quakes and my responses to them a plus? What have they got to do with Muriel Rukeyser and my rewrite? First, they make me treasure poets all over again. And treasure Muriel Rukeyser in particular. Fine poets like Muriel Rukeyser (as you know!) give us language to enhance our experience and help us to understand it.  Lots of fine poets here in Wellington; and the very first poem to refer to the quakes – ESTUARY – has already arrived, written by Hinemoana Baker and Christine (click on it for a larger image).

Regardless of those other recording studio works, my quake-inspired re-appreciation of poets affirms my decision to explore and to celebrate Muriel Rukeyser’s work as best I can.

Second, it’s possible that the subliminal quake effects I’m experiencing will fuel useful new directions for the play, where an earthquake kit’s been almost-a-character from the beginning.

The almost-spring-time is also a plus, not only because the days are longer and warmer. It’s brought camellias and a photograph. The white camellia (mine is in full flower) is a symbol of women’s suffrage in New Zealand, which has its 120th anniversary on 19 September. To celebrate this, there’s a National Library exhibition, Tirohia Mai| Look At Us Now. And it includes this photograph from The Women’s Gallery Opening Week (1980). It reminds me of small histories embedded in the subtext to Throat of These Hours. That’s very useful.

(l.-r.) Marian Evans, Allie Eagle, Nancy Peterson, Juliet Batten, Anna Keir, Heather McPherson, Bridie Lonie, Keri Hulme (in front) Brigid Eyley, Claudia Pond Eyley photographer Fiona Clark 

I look at this group and remember collective members who weren’t there that evening: the late Joanna Paul, poet/filmmaker/artist , filmmaker Carole Stewart, printmaker Tiffany Thornley. Think again about the difficult futures in store for most of these women artists and writers and activists and how much women’s history is forgotten and how quickly that happens. Even the National Library, which holds the negative of the photograph and all relevant details, left one woman’s name off the label and described the photographer as only ‘probably’ Fiona Clark.  Back in 1980, these women were searching for cultural grandmothers like Muriel Rukeyser. It helps to acknowledge, with gratitude, that Throat of These Hours is part of a long conversation with them, in person and in spirit.

(They look at each other

across the glittering sea
some keep a low profile

Some are cliffs)

And I remember that just before the photograph was taken, J C (Jacquie) Sturm (1927-2009) reached under her bed for her short story collection, left there for many years because she was unable to find a publisher for it.  In the gallery, during that Opening Week, alongside other women writers – some of whom also wanted an audience for work that didn’t interest their publishers, or any publisher – Jacquie read two stories. Later, as publishers of last resort, a little group of us published her first collection, The House of The Talking Cat and Keri Hulme’s the bone people, which won the Booker Prize. This memory reminds me that there are always solutions. Keeping on keeping on works in the end. Reassuring.

Matariki Mural (detail) 1981

And sometimes the ‘solution’, or resolution, is unexpected. The Matariki Mural down one side of The Women’s Gallery is another element of the subtext. I made it – with lots of good help from other women – after state funders refused to contribute to a national tour by women poets, the Matariki Tour. Kohine Ponika, the elder poet in the group, named the tour after the Maori word for the Pleiades. The mural included six women’s poems (by Sappho and Eileen Duggan 1894-1972 – who both refer to the Pleiades – and by Heather McPherson, Keri Hulme and Merana Pitman, who were all in the Matariki group). The beginning of the dedication reads ‘A gift of love to the mother of Matariki’ (Kohine Ponika). The end plays with the word ‘tangi’ which can mean ‘bird song’ or ‘to weep’. When ‘all women poets/all women’ flew up against a patriarchal wall and were ‘bruised or broken, and sang or wept,  we were all part of that. Greetings’.

The Women’s Gallery building and the wall down its side are long gone – earthquake risks – but the mural was a satisfying end to that Matariki story. There’ll be a satisfying end to the Throat of These Hours story too.  For now, to end this post, Christine and Hinemoana’s tribute to Jacquie Sturm: Beautiful Thing.

Hinemoana Baker is a writer, musician, occasional broadcaster and teacher of creative writing. She traces her mixed ancestry from several North and South Island Mãori tribes, as well as from England and Bavaria. Her first poetry book, mãtuhi | needle (VUP/Perceval Press, 2004), was co-published in New Zealand and in the US. Her second collection is kõiwi kõiwi | bone bone (VUP 2010). Hinemoana’s recent awards and residencies include three months at the University of Iowa’s International Writing Programme in 2010. She was one of 60 writers who represented New Zealand at the 2012 Frankfurt Bookfair.

Christine and Hinemoana’s Taniwha album is available here.

Throat Of These Hours: Muriel Rukeyser, Verifiable & Unverifiable

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Posted on July 19, 2013 by Marian Evans

THEN

When I am dead, even then,
I will still love you, I will wait in these poems,
When I am dead, even then
I am still listening to you.
I will be still making poems for you
out of silence;
silence will be falling into that silence,
it is building music.

‘Why aren’t you talking with people who knew Muriel Rukeyser?’ a poet friend asks me. I explain. As a history graduate, an oral historian, a librarian, a lawyer and documentary maker of course I’m tempted to interview all of you who have stories to tell and to get myself to those Muriel Rukeyser files in the Library of Congress. Essays and poems about and for her, like those collected in How Shall We Tell Each Other of the Poet?, inform and enrich my understanding. But I’m convinced that to place her in Throat of These Hours (for stage and for radio) it is crucial that I focus on Muriel Rukeyser’s own words. Fifteen months ago, a nourishing conversation with her generous son Bill Rukeyser encouraged me to risk this approach. Later, I found THEN. Its promises and its reference to building across silence gave me further confidence.

It’s always rewarding to go from Muriel Rukeyser’s poems to her prose (The Life of Poetry, The Orgy, Savage Coast, some essays). And to go back again, and see something that I hadn’t noticed earlier or better understand something I’ve read before. But it’s complicated. And I get nervous.  What if I miss something fundamental about Muriel Rukeyser? What if I place her life and work in a context she’d hate?  So from time to time I go back to what other people have written about her. And when I do, I find Muriel Rukeyser ‘waiting’ somewhere unexpected, exactly when I need her,  providing some of the surprises and pleasures I mentioned in the last post.

Today, as I reflect on my research, it’s a section from her essay The Education of a Poet. Describing two kinds of poems, it reaches me for a second time in Catherine Gander’s new book Muriel Rukeyser and Documentary; The Poetics of Connection:

…the poems of unverifiable facts, based in dreams, in sex, in everything that can be given to other people only through the skill and strength by which it is given; and the other kind being the document, the poem that rests on material evidence. (“The Education of a Poet” (1976), in Sternberg, The Writer on Her Work, p. 226)

I laughed with delight when I read this. Yes! This explains how it works. It’s obvious really. To build Muriel Rukeyser’s presence in Throat of These Hours I use the unverifiable, which I gather from the skill and strength of her writing; and the verifiable that comes from elsewhere. And do the best I can with each of them.

One example of the unverifiable comes from The Speed of Darkness when Muriel Rukeyser speaks across a generation directly to me (yes, me!) and to every reader who is a poet (and from The Life of Poetry we know how inclusive her ideas about ‘poet’ are):

…thinking of the poet
yet unborn in this dark
who will be the throat of these hours.
No. Of those hours.
Who will speak these days,
if not I,
if not you?

If I trust the unverifiable fact that Muriel Rukeyser is speaking to me, the skill and strength of Muriel Rukeyser’s lines compel me to risk entering an intimate yet public conversation, and to risk making errors of interpretation. Throat of These Hours is a tiny participation, a longer version of a tweet or a Facebook post that may or may not reach others. But because Muriel Rukeyser asks me  “Who will speak these days/if not I, if not you?” I’m doing everything I can to speak these twenty-first century days as they affect some women artists’ lives and work; and the pollution of water and breast milk. And – with Christine White –  to transmit her question directly to theatre and radio audiences.

Other unverifiable facts come from THEN, amplified for me by Chris’ composition (she performs her work-in-progress in the clip below). When I re-read, or hear sung, the promises in THEN: “I will still love you, I will wait in these poems… I am still listening to you… I will still be making poems for you/out of silence”, the unverifiable facts that reach me are (again) that when Muriel Rukeyser wrote ‘you’ she spoke to every reader; and that she would support what I’m doing, even if my New Zealand eyes and ears and heart sometimes misunderstand hers. Her promises reassure me and strengthen my resolve.

I need this reassurance, as a woman writer and cultural activist who has spent many years searching among fragments and silences for a personal and cultural matrilineage. When I was born, my mother told me, she turned her face to the wall. She didn’t want another child. She was an ‘absent’ mother throughout my early childhood; and we found each other ‘difficult’ until the last ten days of her life, when I accompanied her to her death. (My own mother-lack meant that I in turn was often an absent mother for my three young sons; remedying this later on has been challenging for us all.) And within the wider culture where I work, default reference to the predominant global literary and artistic patrilineage endures, even though New Zealand women writers now achieve equally with men (thanks in part to consistent advocacy from influential writers who are men, especially poet Bill Manhire, director until recently of the International Institute of Modern Letters). But since I found THEN, about a year ago, its handful of words gives me, at last, exactly what I need – a reliable connection to a matrilineage that is strong and complex and ‘normal’. If I falter as I write Throat of These Hours, I re-read THEN or listen to Chris singing it. Renew the connection. And, encouraged, start again.

I’ve also found that I sometimes need confirmation when a single verifiable fact seems significant for me or for my characters. That’s when I most want to investigate among those who knew Muriel Rukeyser, or among her unpublished documents. I’ve wondered for example about the parameters of Muriel Rukeyser’s support for other women writers, because the need for women writers to support one another is a theme in Throat of These Hours. I read (in “On Muriel Rukeyser” in How Shall We tell Each Other of The Poet? p. 293) that Denise Levertov learned of her election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters from her friend Muriel, in their final telephone call. She later realised that Muriel had worked on her behalf for this election and for Grace Paley’s election. Aha, I thought, she advocated for other women writers. But did she advocate only for friends? How far did she go?

In her beautiful essay “And Everything a Witness of The Buried Life” (How Shall We Tell Each Other of the Poet? pp. 6-7) Jane Cooper refers to another (rethought?) version of Muriel Rukeyser’s statement about the two kinds of poetry, from the Preface to The Collected Poems (1978):

Here are…two kinds of reaching in poetry, one based on the document, the evidence itself; the other kind informed by the unverifiable fact, as in sex, dream, the parts of life in which we dive deep and sometimes–with strength of expression and skill and luck–reach that place where things are shared and we all recognise the secrets.

When I re-read this halfway through writing this post (it’s taken a few weeks on and off) I had no memory of having read it before. And again I laughed with delight and recognition. Yes! For sure there’s an element of luck involved in research when we dive deep and sometimes… reach that place where things are shared. And sometimes that luck involves documentary evidence. And through luck I learned more about Muriel Rukesyer’s support of other women writers.

Wanting to sit with Muriel’s voice for a while, in effect to visit her as a friend and witness, I spent a day listening to recordings on her page at Penn University’s Penn Sound site. It was a day of pleasure, with an extended Lee Anderson interview and Muriel’s readings of her poems, including one mislabelled The Speed of Darkness – another magnificent poem, one I’ve never read or heard before, about DNA. A joy to hear her speak, laugh, joke a little about ‘Tantrum Buddhism’.

In the Lee Anderson interview, Muriel Rukeyser twice insists on having her say about women poets. In the first statement she speaks about the difficulty for women associated with the Beat Group. Muriel Rukeyser was familiar with how the group treated these women and the effect of this on the women. And she was determined to record what she knew.

There’s one thing that struck me very much in San Francisco that I haven’t heard talked about and that is the difficulty in the Beat Group, the difficulty for women, the difficulty in their attitude toward women too and toward anything that women might mean to them. It seems to me that in what they are doing now there is very little possibility of commitment of any kind including commitment to women, possible commitment for women and that this has been very painful, an agony for the women connected to the group.

So I learned that Muriel Rukeyser was staunch in her support of women writers. She would seize an opportunity within a general conversation to speak out about their (our) experience within a well-known group of predominantly male writers. She would use strong language as she did so.

In another segment, Lee Anderson asks:

…Aside from Rexroth, who has disowned his own followers, the Beat Generation, besides Robert Duncan, Ferlinghetti and Levertov, which of the poets do you think show most promise in the San Francisco area?

Muriel Rukeyser responds:

I think two people you haven’t named are Josephine Miles [the interviewer laughs and says “She’s not…” and Muriel speaks firmly over his – repeated – objection] and Mary Woods and these are not in that group at all, these are people who were in San Francisco and Berkeley before the Beat Generation came up or came in because a lot of them are of course refugees from New York…

I’ve often seen the little smiles and heard the little laughs that some influential men give when thoughtful women present their views of what matters in the literary and arts worlds. I’ve heard the interruptions and interjections that accompany those little smiles and laughs. These behaviours have been a constant in my life over many years. To hear Muriel Rukeyser speak in similar circumstances touched me deeply. Yay. As her assertive voice moves across Lee Anderson’s interjection, it further verifies that Muriel Rukeyser extended her personal support for Grace Paley and Denise Levertov to other women writers. And that when she did this she met, at least once, with the same kind of opposition that exists in the twenty-first century. These recorded statements also – somehow – support the unverifiable fact that she speaks to me and to others like me in her poems and would understand and care about my characters’ dilemmas. She shared aspects of their (our) experience.

Another example refers to the domestic, so often a complex issue for women artists. And certainly so for my characters. And for me. I don’t iron much. But Thursday afternoons I walk up the hill behind my place, to visit a friend born in the same decade as Muriel Rukeyser, a selection of reading in my back pack for any downtime when my friend naps and there are no domestic tasks waiting for me. The other week, as I iron my friend’s bed sheets – very soothing after my morning’s work on the Throat of These Hours radio script – I wonder, as I do from time to time, about Muriel Rukeyser’s domestic life. How did she manage all that she did and was? I imagine that she enjoyed eating. But did she like to cook? Did she like to create an orderly household? Did she iron? Could I ask Bill Rukesyer about this? Do I need to? Then, when I finish the ironing, I open my bag and take out Kate Daniels’ “Searching/Not Searching: Writing the Biography of Muriel Rukeyser” (Poetry East 16-17, Spring/Summer 1985, pp. 70-93).

The essay engages me deeply, on a winter afternoon high above Wellington Harbour. So much to think about. And there (on pp. 74-75) waits an immediate partial answer to my questions.

I know I like, in addition to her stoicism, her inconsistency, the way neatness in all things evaded her. I like the corroboration of my intuitive guesses about this when I find an old friend saying that Muriel did not know how to fold her clothes, that the neat and unwrinkled folding of clothes mystified her. I love this: that she did not reject the importance of unwrinkled clothing but approached it as a mystery.

Another wonderful surprise. And I smile at ‘intuitive guesses’, ‘corroboration’. I like these terms that relate to the unverifiable. And then, on the next page, Kate Daniels writes:

[Muriel Rukeyser chose] to protect her ability to work, to protect the circumstances in which it flourished… she would not choose between motherhood and writing poems.

These are choices that Tina my protagonist has to consider, too. I’m relieved to have this confirmation that Muriel Rukeyser would understand how hard it can be for women artists to make these choices and deeply grateful to have this information from Kate Daniels, who’s researched the documents.

Through this kind of luck, I continue to build Muriel Rukeyser’s presence in Throat of These Hours and hope that in small ways I will reach “that place where things are shared and we all recognise the secrets”. And tomorrow Chris White, Lorae Parry and Madeline McNamara come to read the second draft of Throat of These Hours as a radio play.

Throat of These Hours blog and Facebook.

Throat of These Hours

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Posted on June 6, 2013 by Marian Evans

 

from The Speed of Darkness

13
My night awake
staring at the broad rough jewel
the copper roof across the way
thinking of the poet
yet unborn in this dark
who will be the throat of these hours.
No.    Of those hours.
Who will speak these days,
if not I,
if not you?

Throat of These Hours is two plays, one for stage and one for radio. Both now in second draft, they have long-ago beginnings, when a lover gave me a photocopy of The Speed of Darkness. I don’t remember why she gave me the poem, but it stayed in my file box of precious documents when I moved to France with my youngest son, to Texas on my own, back to New Zealand and between its two main islands. I don’t keep stuff; I own only a dozen books and when I accumulate more I give them away. So now and then I took my copy of The Speed of Darkness out of its box and asked Do I Need This? Read it again. Got its thump to my heart again. Put it back in the box.

Then, last year, a friend suggested that I write a play. I’d written only one, ever, a short exercise during my scriptwriting MA studies, at Victoria University’s International Institute of Modern Letters. My apprenticeship was in screenplays and my Creative Writing PhD (for which I wrote three feature-length screenplays) was about screenplay development for women writers and gender inequities in the state funding system. But I decided to try a full-length play, partly because I’m interested in media convergence. What elements are necessary in and unique to a literary form and what aren’t? Why write a play rather than a film or a game or a book of essays or a comic or a collection of poems? And I thought of my tattered photocopy of The Speed of Darkness with its rusty staple. I’ll investigate why it means so much to me, I decided. I couldn’t have made a better choice. The Speed of Darkness, other writing by and about Muriel Rukeyser and the writing itself challenge, nurture and transform me.

Throat of These Hours is set in a present-day radio station in Wellington New Zealand. Tina-the-techie, in her late fifties, used to be a backing singer and – when she could – a composer. A single mother, a lesbian, whose grand-daughter Kate has recently come to live with her. One of those women artists whose interrupted creativity is the subject of Tillie Olsen’s Silences (1978). Looking for cultural mothers to learn from, she rediscovers Muriel Rukeyser’s poetry and sets some of it to music. Early in the play she says:

I sat down with Muriel, ‘beautiful Muriel, mother of everyone’ as fellow poet Anne Sexton called her.  Here I am Muriel, I said. Another single mother.  A single grandmother now.  And I want to become a throat of these hours–  I want to learn from you. From your poems.  From your fiction.  From your other prose.  From what people write about you.  I want to latch onto your breast.  Absorb courage from you.  Here I am.  Help me.

The stage play is influenced by a New Zealand classic, actor and writer Cathy Downes’ solo show The Case of Katherine Mansfield (1978) a portrayal of Katherine Mansfield that draws on her journal, letters and stories. In Throat of These Hours, Tina struggles to understand Muriel Rukeyser’s life and work and to develop a show about them, while she makes a living, cares for her grand-daughter and deals with anxiety about her health. The reappearance of her former nemesis, radio host Meredith, after twenty-five years’ absence, adds more complications. Once an activist and a well-regarded poet, childless Meredith stopped writing and focused on a broadcasting career and is recovering from breast cancer.

Muriel Rukeyser is not a character in the play, but she is ever-present, in the poems and in excerpts from prose – The Life of Poetry and various essays. Tina shares these with Meredith, with her grand-daughter Kate and with Grace, the much younger entrepreneurial host of the Mother’s Milk programme, who makes and sells breast milk yoghurt and has a concern for toxicity in breast milk that matches Meredith’s concern with abuse of water.

Composer Christine White and I presented a session on the stage play as a work-in-progress at the Rukeyser Symposium. It included a filmed reading of three scenes from the first half of the play to show the arc of the relationship between Tina and Meredith, and film of Chris performing two of her compositions-in-progress.  The first of these was for the stanza from The Speed of Darkness placed at the top of this post. Responding to the viscerality of Muriel Rukeyser’s poems from Tina’s own musical starting point – singers like Janis Joplin, Marianne Faithfull, Patti Smith – it begins the play. Clips of the scene where Tina and Meredith meet again and Chris’ performance of The Speed of Darkness are below.

Chris has written about her work on the poems here (re influences) and here, where she says:

The play explores two women who, for various reasons have struggled with their art-making…Meredith has long since given up on writing poetry, and Tina is trying to discover her own voice through following the writings of Muriel and setting them to music.

 

The throat – the sounds of the throat can be many and varied…and can communicate a variety of emotions – the feeling of constriction, of not being able to speak/communicate – throat clearing, trying to make a way through obstacles.

 

Even the act of sighing and iterations of the breath can give signals as to the state of mind of the communicator – the body in the act of communicating, or trying to…

 

As this is a central theme in the play, and seemed to be a theme in Muriel’s own writings, I thought it is an obvious instrument. Its use in the presentation recording isn’t as subtle as it could be in the context of the whole play.

 

I think now of the film The Sixth Sense, and a documentary about the film. In terms of sound design, the breath was used in layers – many many layers…human breath, animal breath – sometimes pitch shifted and slowed down – always running almost as if in the subconscious of the film – creating an undercurrent signal of the afterlife.

Chris’ second composition so far, for Then, is musically very different and will appear in a later post, with the other two scenes from the filmed reading. Then ends the play and shows how Muriel Rukeyser’s influence and the events of the play have transformed Tina’s life and work. On days when I fear that This Project Is Beyond Me, I listen to Chris’ version of Then and it helps renew my resolve.

Although the discussion with Rukeyser Symposium participants was brief, it was very helpful to me as I moved (I thought) into the third draft of the stage play. But throughout the research and writing processes so far, there have been surprises. And after that brief discussion and conversations with others, including those involved in the filming process, I decided to write Throat of These Hours as a radio play before I engaged with the stage play’s next draft. To make something very sound-oriented, simple and spacious, fifty-five minutes long, before moving back to the longer multi-sensory and complex stage play. My next post in a month’s time will be about this and other Muriel Rukeyser surprises. And some of the deep pleasures.

Selected Symposium clips

Reading from the stage play-in-progress: Tina and Meredith meet again

From The Speed of Darkness, composition/performance by Christine White

The Actors

Lorae Parry MNZM is one of New Zealand’s best-known playwrights, with five full-length published plays. One of them, Eugenia, has been performed in New Zealand, London, Sydney, and at the State University of New York (2012). She has co-written several other plays, including Sex Drive with Pinky Agnew. An award-winning actress and director, she has worked in theatre, television and radio and is legendary for her comedy performances as Prime Minister Helen Clark. Lorae recently returned from five years in London where she worked as a director and filmmaker and wrote and directed her most recent plays, Kate and Mrs Jones and Bloomsbury Women and the Wild Colonial Girl. She has an MA in Scriptwriting from the International Institute of Modern Letters.

 

Madeline McNamara has a Masters in Theatre Arts (Directing) from Toi Whakaari/ The New Zealand Drama School and Victoria University and is a performer, director, teacher and producer of original theatre work by women. She co-founded Magdalena Aotearoa, a network of women in contemporary theatre with Sally Rodwell in 1997 and was co-artistic director of the Magdalena Aotearoa International Festival of Women’s Performance (1999). Recent directing credits include At Circle’s End – A Drama about Death and Diversity (2011). She is co-artistic director of Acting Up Charitable Trust, an organisation that provides training and performance opportunities in the fields of theatre, film and music for people with learning disabilities. Currently, Madeline is an actor with Jo Randerson’s Barbarian Productions, developing Jo’s latest work White Elephant.

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