The emotional impact of the compilation tape has become a subject of increasing cultural significance of late. Especially, it seems, since technology looks like rendering the C-90 obsolete. Once the perfect means of expressing through an all too personal selection of songs what words couldn’t, the compilation tape looks set to become one more archaic totem left behind in the fall-out of the relationship game.
This potency of cheap music has already been explored in several ways. Sonic Youth guitarist Thurston Moore has edited a not quite coffee table book called Mix Tape, in which he and his musical peers lay bare their direct experiences of compilation tapes via a series of deeply personal testimonies. Similarly, comedian Daniel Kitson’s solo play, C-90, fictionalised a depositary where all the compilation tapes that were missing presumed dumped were archived.
Sonic Youth, alongside Nirvana and Girls Aloud, appear on the soundtrack of Static, Suspect Culture’s new collaboration with the London based Graeae company, in which such magic moments rewind and fast forward themselves into dramatic life. According to writer Dan Rebellato, Static’s origins may be typical of Suspect Culture’s line of intellectual inquiry concerning how people do or don’t communicate, but the play’s driving force was far closer to home.
“Jenny Sealey from Graeae is directing it with Suspect Culture’s Graham Eatough,” Rebellato points out, “and when they were developing ideas she said that her partner made her compilation tapes. Because she’s deaf we all found that very moving, and what emerged out of that personal experience was something about how people manage to communicate despite the obvious barriers. This story of a widow who believes her dead husband is communicating with her through this compilation tape came directly out of that. We then got very interested in the idea of how listening to music at a very personal level begins to look like prayer. The way in which you listen becomes about trying to pick up clues or wanting so much to feel some kind of sign or presence. It’s this desperate desire for some kind of contact.”
Rebellato’s last statement pretty much sums up the transcendent power of a pop song and music’s often wordless power to encapsulate heartbreak and loss. But he also makes Static sound like a direct descendent of beyond-the-grave celluloid romance Truly, Madly, Deeply, it’s predecessor, Ghost, and, if you want to put subtitles on it, Krzyztof Krieslowski’s Three Colours: Blue.
Rebellato admits that Static “occupies similar territory, but it’s not surprising that it’s so central to the culture, because death is still a mystery. Not about where you go or anything, but it’s very hard when someone dies that yesterday they were there and now they’re not. It sounds like we’re getting into religious territory, but at a very basic level that’s how you comprehend it.”
With an adaptation of Douglas Coupland’s Girlfriend In A Coma, an “apocalyptic” radio play and a follow up to his Edinburgh Festival Fringe hit-ette, Mile End, about suicide on the go, death is very much on Reballato’s mind just now. So, however, is form.
Suspect Culture’s back catalogue has long concerned itself with how people struggle to make connections, physical, mental and emotional. Eatough and the company’s collaborators have also attempted to move their work beyond words, introducing recurring physical tics as trademark signifiers of a character’s personality. A collaboration with Graeae, then, is especially interesting.
Graeae were probably the first theatre company in the UK to pioneer work performed by professional disabled actors. Since Sealey took over as artistic director, she has introduced a form of work whereby signing plays for the deaf is more than a tokenistic add-on, but is actually integrated into a play’s action. This paid serious dividends in a production of Sarah Kane’s Blasted, in which every actor onstage signed their lines as they said them. Static, though, is as much about feeling as it is about hearing.
“Sign language,” Rebellato says, “is absolutely its own language, with its own syntax and sets of rules. So you have to approach it in exactly the same way as I would with any other language, in that I occasionally tune in as things come in and out of focus. So I’ve written the script entirely in English, and there are certain ways you need to write with other things in mind. But I’ve quite deliberately made some speeches difficult, like all this stuff that’s in there that are pastiches of rock music journalism. Then there’s how you go about interpreting a song.”
Static’s subsequent concentration on interpretative gestures ties in with a recent exhibition, which showed a performance by 1980s German post punks, Die Todliche Doris at the 1998 Deaf Music Festival, held in Berlin some years after the band’s demise. Rather than reform, the German trio drafted in two black-clad interpreters. Their attempts to express the music’s basic primitive rhythms as well as the words resulted in a form of expressive contemporary dance founded on gestures that don’t sound a million miles away from Static.
“There’s an entirely different kind of physicality in a Smiths song,” Rebellato says with the confidence of a dance-floor observer, “to something by a girl group. But with both there’s an affirmation of some kind of communication between people. There’s that intensity of feeling you get through music when trying to express grief. So on one level Static is a play about music and the role it plays in ordinary lives, and the power it has as a vehicle to express certain things.”
The power of love?
“I guess we could go down that Jennifer Rush route,” says Rebellato, possibly considering his own mix tape choice. “If we have to.”
Static, Tron Theatre, Glasgow, February 14-23, then touring
www.tron.co.uk
www.suspectculture.com
www.graeae.org
The Herald, February 12th 2008
ends
This potency of cheap music has already been explored in several ways. Sonic Youth guitarist Thurston Moore has edited a not quite coffee table book called Mix Tape, in which he and his musical peers lay bare their direct experiences of compilation tapes via a series of deeply personal testimonies. Similarly, comedian Daniel Kitson’s solo play, C-90, fictionalised a depositary where all the compilation tapes that were missing presumed dumped were archived.
Sonic Youth, alongside Nirvana and Girls Aloud, appear on the soundtrack of Static, Suspect Culture’s new collaboration with the London based Graeae company, in which such magic moments rewind and fast forward themselves into dramatic life. According to writer Dan Rebellato, Static’s origins may be typical of Suspect Culture’s line of intellectual inquiry concerning how people do or don’t communicate, but the play’s driving force was far closer to home.
“Jenny Sealey from Graeae is directing it with Suspect Culture’s Graham Eatough,” Rebellato points out, “and when they were developing ideas she said that her partner made her compilation tapes. Because she’s deaf we all found that very moving, and what emerged out of that personal experience was something about how people manage to communicate despite the obvious barriers. This story of a widow who believes her dead husband is communicating with her through this compilation tape came directly out of that. We then got very interested in the idea of how listening to music at a very personal level begins to look like prayer. The way in which you listen becomes about trying to pick up clues or wanting so much to feel some kind of sign or presence. It’s this desperate desire for some kind of contact.”
Rebellato’s last statement pretty much sums up the transcendent power of a pop song and music’s often wordless power to encapsulate heartbreak and loss. But he also makes Static sound like a direct descendent of beyond-the-grave celluloid romance Truly, Madly, Deeply, it’s predecessor, Ghost, and, if you want to put subtitles on it, Krzyztof Krieslowski’s Three Colours: Blue.
Rebellato admits that Static “occupies similar territory, but it’s not surprising that it’s so central to the culture, because death is still a mystery. Not about where you go or anything, but it’s very hard when someone dies that yesterday they were there and now they’re not. It sounds like we’re getting into religious territory, but at a very basic level that’s how you comprehend it.”
With an adaptation of Douglas Coupland’s Girlfriend In A Coma, an “apocalyptic” radio play and a follow up to his Edinburgh Festival Fringe hit-ette, Mile End, about suicide on the go, death is very much on Reballato’s mind just now. So, however, is form.
Suspect Culture’s back catalogue has long concerned itself with how people struggle to make connections, physical, mental and emotional. Eatough and the company’s collaborators have also attempted to move their work beyond words, introducing recurring physical tics as trademark signifiers of a character’s personality. A collaboration with Graeae, then, is especially interesting.
Graeae were probably the first theatre company in the UK to pioneer work performed by professional disabled actors. Since Sealey took over as artistic director, she has introduced a form of work whereby signing plays for the deaf is more than a tokenistic add-on, but is actually integrated into a play’s action. This paid serious dividends in a production of Sarah Kane’s Blasted, in which every actor onstage signed their lines as they said them. Static, though, is as much about feeling as it is about hearing.
“Sign language,” Rebellato says, “is absolutely its own language, with its own syntax and sets of rules. So you have to approach it in exactly the same way as I would with any other language, in that I occasionally tune in as things come in and out of focus. So I’ve written the script entirely in English, and there are certain ways you need to write with other things in mind. But I’ve quite deliberately made some speeches difficult, like all this stuff that’s in there that are pastiches of rock music journalism. Then there’s how you go about interpreting a song.”
Static’s subsequent concentration on interpretative gestures ties in with a recent exhibition, which showed a performance by 1980s German post punks, Die Todliche Doris at the 1998 Deaf Music Festival, held in Berlin some years after the band’s demise. Rather than reform, the German trio drafted in two black-clad interpreters. Their attempts to express the music’s basic primitive rhythms as well as the words resulted in a form of expressive contemporary dance founded on gestures that don’t sound a million miles away from Static.
“There’s an entirely different kind of physicality in a Smiths song,” Rebellato says with the confidence of a dance-floor observer, “to something by a girl group. But with both there’s an affirmation of some kind of communication between people. There’s that intensity of feeling you get through music when trying to express grief. So on one level Static is a play about music and the role it plays in ordinary lives, and the power it has as a vehicle to express certain things.”
The power of love?
“I guess we could go down that Jennifer Rush route,” says Rebellato, possibly considering his own mix tape choice. “If we have to.”
Static, Tron Theatre, Glasgow, February 14-23, then touring
www.tron.co.uk
www.suspectculture.com
www.graeae.org
The Herald, February 12th 2008
ends
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