#anybody else cant help but be a little autobiographic every time?

[pinkyoyogurt]

and if i ever fade away, you can search for me in the characters i created.

i've left at least a little bit of me in each and every one of them, maybe accidentally, maybe in a foolish attempt of trying to leave a little piece of me here after i part ways with this earth.

it doesnt matter how different the characters may be from me, but i always seem to bleed a little bit over them.

[dannychristiepopularperform-blog]

Developing My Script

Having spent a lot of time working on everybody else’s ensemble pieces i was unsure how to go about mine. All the other pieces in our show were performed by one person with the help of the rest, using our bodies to create shapes, or our voices to build up tension etc. I felt I needed to do the same.

 I wanted to do something self expressive with my rap skills, but I knew it was not enough to just rap. Tori in the other group had built a skit for her variety show where she got to act out a scene of trying to get a job in a strip club, so she got to show off her belly dancing. I thought I could maybe do something similar but take a real piece of my life, something autobiographical. Not only did I want to preserve a moment of my life and capitalise it, i wanted to honour my Grandma who raised me. I had re-watched a video I uploaded to youtube of her singing, and I felt it would be nice to make something out of that. However, my idea never felt Cabaret enough considering what the group and I saw at the Proud Cabaret.The acts were very self expressive, there was more jokes than narrative from the compare. It was not like watching a play like i’m used to or watching a variety show on the BBC. It was a series of dances, with nudity, skill and novelty. I definitely had skill but the rest did not appeal to what wanted to achieve.

Pressing on, I decided to create a performance which had Divine playing my grandmother stuck in a hospital bed, interrupting me while I tried to record music in my room, then had the others in my group popping in to play nurses during the performance of my final song, then have a moment where that before mentioned video would play and end the section. I was nervous about this however, as I thought the movements and the changes looked a little messy in rehearsal and my group played along but I could tell they weren't so serious about it. We tried it a few times and had something we were OK with but I really wanted to see how the rest of the class would receive it in a feedback session.

 I performed this in front of the class and was surprised with the feedback I received. Ad’s and the rest of the class agreed my performance would be better stripped back to just having me performing on stage. At first I found it hard to visualise as I felt like I needed a visual representation of my Grandma. but as I did impressions of my Grandma it seemed people warmed to that more than having Divine there. I was massively inspired by Conrad Murray’s performance (There are clips on this feed). It would be a kind of stand up, but with a heart. I was relieved, and more inspired when I begun to put a script together.

This is what I came up with:  

Dan & Nan

 -1st light

 I was raised by my Grandmother in Coventry who went blind when I was around 11 years old. That’s when I became a young carer.

 Funny thing is even when she went blind she was stubbornly independent. She would cook, do housework, even go shopping and walk faster than anybody who dared to accompany her.

 Grandma was the strongest woman I knew, she raised 8 children with my grandfather, then took my brother, sister, and I in when we were young and raised us too.

 Grandma was a real old-school Jamaican Christian woman. Our Sundays were ruled by church and women in hats bursting out in the Holy spirit (impression). I was a good kid too, I was the top of Sunday school. Then I became a teenager.

 -1st Soundtrack (low volume)

 8 mile came out and we went mad. Every lunch and break time at school we would rap battle each other and if you lost at break you had better write something in 3rd period. Then, I was probably 13 when my friend james introduced me to Channel U (which is now called AKA) and I was exposed to Wiley, Crazy Titich, and a whole roster of grime pioneers. Grime had swept the UK and suddenly there were gangs of boys in every school huddled around a Sony Eriksson phone bluetoothing instrumentals and showing each other their new lyrics.

 -1st Soundtrack stops

 When I got my first job I spent most of my money on recording equipment for my bedroom and some turntables. I started being known in my area for my music and I wanted to do more. In the meanwhile however Grandma became sicker and sicker until she was bedbound. She had lost the independence she was famous for and proud of and totally reliant on my siblings and I, and the district nurses. Of course, I didn’t mind, but it could be annoying at times, especially when I was trying to record.

 -1st song till it stops

 -2nd light 2nd soundtrack

 Grandma; Daniel!

 Me; Yes Nan!?

 Grandma; Daniel!

 Me; Yes Nan!?

 Grandma; Daniel!

 Me; (Under breath) Fuck sake.

 Me; What’s up Nan?

 Grandma; Fix this pillow fi mi.

 Me; Again? I just fixed a second a go I told you I’m trying to work upstairs you can’t keep doing this.

 Grandma; You nuh understand. Its such a terrible thing when you cant move.

 -1st light soundtrack off

 So I fix the pillow and its like trying to get the right picture on an old broken television or find the right frequency on an old fm radio but eventually I get it and I’m free again. So I run back upstairs.

 -2nd song till it stops.

 -2nd light

 Grandma; Daniel!

 Me; (to self) rassclart. (Out loud) Yes Nan!?

 Grandma; Daniel!

 -1st light

 Back down stairs I go. This time she needs a cup of tea. So I make her a cup of tea in her beaker but it’s a long ting because she can’t hold it herself her fingers and arms are rusted up by arthritis so you have to feed it to her. Of course its too hot. So I put it aside to cool.

 I try another song but I get interrupted again to go give her the cool tea, which is now cold so it has to be done again. This time I wait until its just right and just before she takes a sip she says;

 -2nd light 3rd soundtrack

 Grandma; Thank you Jesus.

 Me; Did Jesus make your tea?

 Grandma; What you mean?

 Me; I mean what about us? We do all this stuff for you do we get a thank you? No, but Jesus gets all the thanks and all he does is hang on the wall looking like Noel Edmonds.

 1st light soundtrack stops

 I’ve done it again. Tripped the Jesus wire with my insolence. I get an earful about how nothing is possible without God and Jesus. But to be honest since Grandma has got like this I just refuse to believe in it all. Not to mention I’m a grown rudeboy now, I haven’t been church in years I blaze weed, link gyal and keep a butterfly knife in my sock in case Jesus doesn’t save me when it kicks off in a house party.

 I’m also quite annoyed with Jesus. If he has any power at all she shouldn’t be in this condition. Shes been repping Jesus since she was born, she knows the Bible like the back of her hand and she has never let him down. But time and time again he lets her down. He lets my whole family down. I can’t stand to hear his name to be honest.

 She’s such a soldier such a trooper. All I can see is her strength and her resilience, and I am living in her accomplishments. The house Grandfather and her worked years to buy and raise 8 children in. Jesus didn’t pay for that, or help raise none of them. Only 2 of them still do church. Everyone else is fucked up like me.

 I shoot Jesus down every time she mentions him. It’s brainwash from slavery. Turn the other cheek and all that stuff slave masters would tell their slaves so they would work day in and day out and not fight back or fear the hell of a whip across their back for disobeying the master. I’m learning that once upon a time black people weren’t slaves, we weren’t Christians we were pharaoh and kings of empires. I try to tell her, and its interesting but not quite registering.

 I love you Grandma but I wish you believed in yourself as much as you believed in Jesus.

 -3rd light

 -Final song

 -video

 end

-My script makes use of the Self Expressive mode, mixed in with the Representational mode. It is essentially a one man show where I act out all 3 of the characters which include:

-Myself in the Here and Now (Narrating)

-My younger self as a teenage rapper (Grime artist) Performed

-My Grandmother

My piece is definitely a Storytelling performance which could use techniques from book: Popular Theatre A sourcebook (p114 paragraph 4 Storytelling the languages of Topeng) where it speaks of storyteller character Penasar Kelihan from a play called Badbad it says:

 “The first storyteller to enter is Penesar Kalihan. His entrance, accompanied by the usual shaking of the curtain and flourishes of the cymbals and drums, reveals him to be proud, flamboyant and commanding. He has age heart laugh of an enthusiast and dances n an exaggeratedly macho fashion that pushes the dance to the edge of parody.”

 My narration and character while playing a younger me would require me to have a certain amount of charisma, and a certain amount of youthful bashfulness especially as a young grime MC. Most Grime MCs and rappers are stereotyped to perform with a level of aggression depending on what their style is. Grime was for the most part an aggressive genre when I was growing up and reflected the lives or experiences of young boys involved in gangs or street culture in the city. 

 On the other hand as a narrator and schizophrenic actor (portraying myself and my grandmother) I would exaggerate things, exaggerate my teenage machismo, and also exaggerate my Grandmothers’ behaviour somewhat. Mainly to make the performance comedic, and show the contrast between the two sides of myself i am portraying. On one hand I am a young teenager being aggressive and ‘cool’. On the other hand I am portraying the struggles of a young carer, and the struggles of an elderly woman. I would not be wearing any costumes (apart from the essential hoody) so my quick transformations would have to be fluid and easy for the audience to follow.

I indicated lighting in my script but that was abandoned. I wanted to do as Conrad Murray did in Denmarked, I had planned to use lighting show the changes, but feedback from the group changed that. I was advised to try using my position on the stage to illustrate the different characters and move in a triangular way in the boundaries of the one stage light.

-I would be slightly stage left as the narrator

-I would slide centre and slightly further back in the parts between my grandma and I

- I would use most of the front stage to perform my rap parts