Way back in October we announced our new project in development: a retelling of the story of Orestes and Pylades through a queer lens. Since then, we’ve been working hard behind the scenes to get the project on its feet, from narrowing down themes and concepts, through beginning to generate text, to seeing the shape of the final production begin to form. In mid-April, we held two days of research and development where we brought together everything that we had worked on so far, and came away with something that is beginning to look decidedly like the embryo of a show!
Members of By Jove and collaborators sharing writing.
We were especially lucky in these sessions to be able to be joined not only by our UK-based collaborators Sue Blundell and Vivienne Youel, but also the US-based inspiration behind the project, Professor Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz, who flew over from New York to join us in Wembley sharing thoughts and ideas. This meant we had nearly the full complement of contributors to the show present in the room!
We devoted the first day to writing. In March, we had held a writing workshop, at which one of our lead writers Wendy Haines set us tasks to write pieces that were outside of our comfort zones: for example, dialogue for those used to writing descriptive passages or character work for those who tended towards more thematic writing. This meant that we brought new and really exciting pieces of work to this session – though I think we were all a bit more nervous to read them than usual! Needless to say everyone received each other’s contributions with warmth and generosity, and we generated some really lovely pieces of text.
The plot ‘skeleton’.
At the end of the first day, we completed an exercise of laying out the various narrative strands of the myth of Orestes, including the permutations offered by the different ancient Greek tragedians. We then mapped against this the writing we had done so far, marked the prominent story points that we knew would appear in our version, and saw where gaps remained for us to do some more writing. This resulted in the ‘skeleton’ pictured, offering us a map of where we are and where we might go.
Vivienne Youel leading a music exercise.
The second day was devoted to music and movement, as this project is going to combine these elements with texts in an integral way. Vivienne Youel led us through some fascinating sound exercises, including working with group vocals in a way that we all immediately felt had important resonances with ideas of ritual. We played with ideas of the Furies as a sonic presence, as we’d all been drawn to the concept of Orestes’ ‘catatonic state’ when he is under the influence of the Furies in the previous day’s session. This resulted in us subjecting Marcus Bell to some rather tortuous attacks as we each took on the role of Furies – sorry Marcus!
Playing with staging.
Turning to movement, Marcus and David Bullen led us through some fascinating physical exercises, working with concepts of trust, freedom and control, and active and passive roles in movement. For me, taking part in these exercises was helpful in opening up ideas about characters who I had previously found it difficult to access: sometimes it’s necessary to step into someone’s shoes in a more physical way in order to get inside their head. As a non-performer who finds movement exercises rather intimidating, I was surprised by how much I enjoyed taking part and the inspiration I took away from it!
Now we’re ramping up for our major research and development week in July. We’ll have more information here in the coming months as we hold further smaller sessions, so watch this space for updates. What we can say for now is that, as things start to take shape, we’re getting more and more excited to bring this project to you. I think it’s going to be some of our best work yet, and the real epitome of the collective way that By Jove works. Sothis is definitely one to keep an eye on, whether you’re a long-time supporter or a new fan just discovering us – if you want to know what By Jove is about, this is it!
