February 20, 2007
Our last night following an intensive week’s work on the project.
The post-show discussion was lively and interesting – comments on the video projections, the jazz-formed writing, the three Chet Bakers as well as, of course, a lot of comments about Chet’s life.
The video clip is from the end of the show.
February 18, 2007
Our first performance followed by a ‘critical creative forum’ – a live discussion with the audience about their responses to the work.
Lots of interesting feedback – about the video projections, the integration of jazz and dramatic performance and the extension of the music to add a bass player.
The video clip is Andy and Glenn – the ‘Eleven O’Clock Number’ scene.
January 17, 2006
Saturday 15th October, 2005
13:00-18:00
Nicholai La Barrie and Steven Beckenham.
Initial research meeting.
Feedback from reading Deep in a Dream biography.
Watched Let’s Get Lost.
Talked about the nature of the project – using found text.
Everyone very excited about that.
Talked about where the show might start, at what point in Chet’s life.
Talked about the need to make two lists:
- one of songs
- one of lines we think are important from people, including Chet.
Steve took Ronnie Scotts DVD to watch.
Nicholai took Live in Japan to watch.
Rehearsed My Funny Valentine with trumpet and piano – very good fun!
Saturday 12th November, 2005
Played through There’s a Small Hotel, My Funny Valentine with the piano.
Made a shortlist of must have songs:
Read through the text samples and talked through the implication of each.
Initiated idea of starting piece with Chet in chair asleep, as cigarette burns out he wakes up with a start, segue into saying lyrics to Deep in a Dream.
Nicholai came up with the reverse chronology idea which we all loved – Chet as old man at the beginning ending with Chet as young man, perhaps the Charlie Parker famed ‘audition’.
Talked through the main themes:
Piece should explore what lies beneath the icon of Chet Baker?
An internal monologue of his memories – a unreliable narrator.
Actions:
Mark will email opening text to everyone at least a week before next rehearsal.
Nicholai will work on budget/funding plans.
Steve will contact Union Theatre with a view to going there in June 2006.
Mark will talk to Karena about Contact in Manchester.
Mark & Nicholai will talk to Toby and Jorge about their Edinburgh plans.
Next rehearsal:
19th December – Oval House Theatre (Nicholai will book space).
Tuesday 19thDecember, 2005
Discussed the artistic vision of the piece in much more detail.
Union Theatre – no reply from email.
Contact – not
We are much clearer about what we are trying to achieve and how we can go about it. The application of translation theory and its implication for adaptation of the Chet Baker texts now seems to make much more sense: we are in the process of foreignising the new performative work by looking at the textual structures of the original and reflecting those in the final work. Hence there will be a degree of improvisation in the textual form – a playing around from a central theme (jazz structure), a feeling of the iconic (we talked about video projection), and narrative/memory (from the Chet Baker memoir).
The idea of Speedball also provides us with a kind of freeform structure that should hold these elements together.
We read through the beginnings of the script (5 pages) and started to talk about how each scene relates to the other. The suggestion to move some scenes around will be written into the next draft of the script for the next rehearsal after Christmas.
Again, we talked about the songs and made a new list.
MY FUNNY VALENTINE
THERE’S A SMALL HOTEL
THE THRILL ISGONE
I SHOULD CARE
I’M THROUGH WITH LOVE?
ALMOST BLUE
I’VE NEVER BEEN IN LOVE
LINE FOR LYONS
TIME AFTER TIME
Actions:
Mark will complete mac application.
Nicholai will complete AC R&D application.
Steve will make a compilation CD of all the new songs.
Date of next rehearsal: 11th January.
Saturday 11th January 2006.
All actions points from last meeting have been completed.
Today, we welcomed Andrea Vicari to the project. She is going to develop the jazz composition aspect and act generally as a musical director for the piece.
We read through the latest version of the script. Tried a lot of SLOWING DOWN the reading, making it not predict what the coming lines were. This worked well. This was also the first full filmed rehearsal so the results will be interesting.
We reached a stumbling point with the sequence from the memoir – the woman in the boat. The text needs to be changed in order to work. Again, the fundamental questions of who is Chet talking to came up. In the adaptation, we need to be aware that the audience will not have been on the same research journey as us. In the showing and telling we need to strike a balance and it all comes back to two central questions: what is the story we are telling and why are we telling it?
Andrea thinks we need to rehearse the development phase with a quartet as that’s what Chet Baker used to play with. We looked at the funding implications of that and will present the budget to the Arts Council on Wednesday.
All in all, while not a particularly satisfactory rehearsal, we actually seemed to have achieved a lot.
Next meeting: two weeks’ time.
January 8, 2006
Our first video rehearsal is up for everyone to see. We are still in the very early stages of the process and what you see here are conversations about the text and way to approach the playing of the character.The one thing that we know is that this piece is going to be filled with muisc ,so there is lots of that as well. Steve play’s “My Funny Valentine” and he and Andrea jam on “Theres a Small Hotel” at the end enjoy.
January 3, 2006
Steven Beckingham: Actor
Originally from England, Steve started his acting career in Portland, Oregon, U.S.A. After earning a BA in Music from Pacific University and appearing in many professional productions in Portland, he moved back to England and completed the One-Year Post-Grad Classical Acting Course at LAMDA. While there, Steve enjoyed roles such as Vanya in Uncle Vanya and Marc Antony in Julius Caesar. In a LAMDA production of Hamlet, he not only played the role of Polonius, but had the pleasure of composing and arranging the music.
Since graduating, some of Steve’s credits include – STAGE: Death of a Salseman (No 1 tour of Germany), The Settling Dust (Union Theatre) and Serenading Louie (GBS Theatre-RADA). TV/FILM: The Tiger and the Snow (dir. by Roberto Benigni), The Road to Guantanamo (dir. by Michael Winterbottom), Dr. Who: Dalek, ep. 6 (with Christopher Eccleston), Ian Fleming: Bondmaker and Alive: Baja.
As well as playing the trumpet, Steve is an avid composer, arranger and singer/songwriter.
Nicholai La Barrie: Director
Nicholai is originally from Trinidad and Tobago, he started his acting career at the age of ten, with the Lilliput Children’s Theatre. He has performed with many of the major theatre companies in Trinidad and Tobago.
He has been seen in Ti-Jean and his brothers 1998 for Trinidad Theatre Workshop, Clear Water -Clear Water Productions & Oval House. Since moving to London he has appeared in Passports to the Promised Land –Nitro, The Adventures of Snow Black Rose Red- Queene Productions, Macbeth –Fifth Column Theatre, 147 -Dende Collective, The Seer –West Yorkshire Playhouse and most recently in High Heel Parrot Fish –Theatre Royal Stratford .
He has directed It Had To Be you for Ragoo Productions, co-directed Pieces of Mine for Standing Room Only, and Passport to Posterity for Tiata Fahodizi.
Nicholai is currently Head of Youth Arts and resident youth theatre director at the Oval House Theatre. He recently directed the Festival of London Youth Arts award winning production of Chatroom for the National Theatre Shell Connections Youth Festival and a site-specific production of Peter Pan, staged in the flower garden of Kennington Park.
Mark O’Thomas: Writer
One of the few playwrights working in the devised theatre domain, O’Thomas’s Time Out Critics’ Choice Piranha Lounge (with Dende Collective) best demonstrates his use of the interplay between text and physical performance. His theatre credits include Almost Nothing Royal Court and OneFourSeven Bristol Old Vic and UK tour. He is script advisor/translator for the Royal Court and his adaptation of Jorge Amado’s Dona Flor and her Two Husbands opens at the Lyric Hammersmith Studio in March 2006.
Andrea Vicari: Composer
Pianist and composer Andrea Vicari was born in Miami (Florida) and grew up in Birmingham (England). Educated at Cardiff University she won a scholarship to study at The Guildhall School of Music in London. Andrea was soon in demand as a ’side-man” working with bass guitar legend, Dill Katz in a band that included the then unknown guitarist Phil Robson. Soon after she formed her first important group with Julian Argüelles on saxophone & Stuart Hall, then of Django Bates’ “Human Chain”, on bass. Other employers included GRP recording artist, Phil Bent; jazz warrior David-Jean Baptiste with whom she recorded her first commercially released CD; and the all-women band “Birds” led by Kathy Stobart. She played a successful season at London’s sadly defunct jazz club “The Bass Clef” with the late great American saxophone innovator, Eddie Harris, broadcasting live on JazzFM radio; and gigged with the US trumpet legend Art Farmer.
In 1994 Andrea was commissioned by The Arts Council and the Peter Whittingham Trust to write music for a new eleven piece jazz orchestra which became the Suburban Gorillas project. A CD and Jazz Services tour followed including a triumphant appearance at the Brecon Jazz Festival and a live BBC broadcast from the Newcastle Playhouse
January 3, 2006
Chet Baker: Speedball can be performed in a traditional theatre space but this is not our location of choice. We are interested in finding other spaces to perform the work such as jazz clubs, hotel rooms or dressing rooms. We are interested in a proactive relationship with an audience that both challenges and influences them, taking them into new dimensions and spaces with a unique experience that only live art can bring. Live streaming provides another audience for the work and adds to a sense of otherness for the live audience who are both part of a shared world in the here-and-now of the performance and that of cyberspace
January 3, 2006
Our work is a process and we present the piece as a work-in-progess because for us it is never finished. During 2006 we are rehearsing on a regular basis where we exchange ideas, formulate script and rehearse music in order to develop a piece that offers a narrative truth of Baker’s life. We are interested in how a product is influenced by the form – how jazz, for example, can interrelate with theatre – and how in making performance new structures can be found that have a resonance with the original textual form. All rehearsals are filmed and made available as podcasts while each performance will be streamed online live. This ability to be open about our development and performative processes through technology is critical to our role as artist practitioners in the vanguard of researching the very notion of adaptation and the responsibilities that such a function entails.
January 3, 2006
Chet Baker, jazz singer and trumpeter, died in mysterious circumstances in an Amsterdam hotel in 1988. This project represents an investigation into Baker’s life through existing texts which include an unfinished memoir, interviews, documentary film, song lyrics, photographs and music scores. Through an examination of these ‘texts’ we – a writer, director, jazz composer and actor/musician – are seeking to create a speedball of Baker’s life: a ‘foreignised’ adaptation of these texts that reflects the endemic structures of the original in terms of memory (narrative, memoir), jazz (improvisation) and the iconic (photography). Our work, which is ongoing and documented through podcasts, represents not a simple adaptation of source material or a translation of form but a transfiguration into a performative art form.
December 23, 2005
This is the first step into Chet Baker : Speedball ,a piece about the life and mysterious death of the jazz icon Chet Baker.
