Future Conditional Notes for Tomorrow An anthology of women in theatre Publications Theatre-Women-Notes for Tomorrow First Edition © 2017 The Open Page Publications / Odin Teatrets Forlag and the authors ISBN EAN 978-87-87292-17-7 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known and hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or any information storage or retrieval system without written permission from the copyright holder. Cover Design: Marco Donati Future Conditional Cover Painting: Notes for Tomorrow Dorthe Kærgaard Lay-out: Rina Skeel Editorial Board: Gilly Adams Edited by Geddy Aniksdal Gilly Adams Maggie Gale Julia Varley Geddy Aniksdal Maggie B. Gale Production Co-ordinator: Julia Varley Luciana Bazzo Translations: Gilly Adams, Ana Imširović Dordević, Julia Varley and the authors Thanks: Sarah Duthie, Lars Vik For further information concerning The Magdalena Project and other events mentioned in this book please consult www.themagdalenaproject.org Published by The Open Page Publications with the support of Odin Teatrets Forlag, Grenland Friteater and The Magdalena Project Preface Whilst the last book of The Open Page Publications, The Magdalena Project@25 - Legacy and Challenge, gave us an opportunity to look back at the early beginnings, as well as the later years of our theatre network’s existence, this new book is an attempt to take a step in a different direction, into the future, asking where we are going and what we will do when we get there. The Editorial Board of The Open Page Publications has always been driven by the need to encourage theatre women to record their experiences of making work, whether within the context of a group or working alone. The thirteen volumes of The Open Page journals and three books, the latest of which is this Future Conditional - Notes for Tomorrow, have given us much more than we asked for: personal stories, notes on significant influences, practice, pedagogy and, frequently, reflections on the perplexing question of how to pass knowledge and experience on to another group or generation of women. The Open Page has woven together the threads of different women’s lives through and across time and different conti- nents. In particular we have enjoyed celebrating the work of women who have survived whilst always seeming to be swimming against the current. There is a coherent development from the early Magdalena Project Newsletters, which consisted of short articles and announcements of upcoming events, to The Open Page, in which we explored subjects more deeply and stimulated first-time writers to publish alongside more experienced practi- tioners. The shift from the Newsletter to The Open Page came about naturally in the same way as going from journals to books, from articles to longer essays has done. Twenty-five years of work with the Editorial Board has given us the opportunity to develop our own writing and to keep an ongoing critical and constructive dialogue amongst ourselves and with the other contributors. In the last few years, for different reasons and in different ways, we have found ourselves deeply affected by thoughts of tomorrow and the place of the future in our current work. In the process of making this book we discovered that we had chosen a difficult theme - something many of the authors reflect upon. Future Conditional - Notes for Tomorrow is an anthology of essays, poetry and articles, short and long. The common aim, expressed in individual ways, is to articulate hopes and fears, demands and aspirations for a future that we share with each other, while also remembering the women who have walked before us. Gilly Adams, Geddy Aniksdal, Maggie B. Gale and Julia Varley Holstebro, July 2017 CONTENTS 81 Gilly Adams (UK) Walking Westwards 5 Preface 99 Patricia Ariza (Colombia) 9 Maggie B. Gale (UK) Knowledge Future Thinking 107 Madeline McNamara (Aotearoa New Zealand) 17 Anna Andrea Vik Aniksdal (Norway) Divine Doubt Thoughts from the Future 120 Luciana Martuchelli (Brazil) 19 Brigitte Cirla (France) Mare Serenitatis Utopian Dreams 126 Meg Brookes (UK) 22 Marisa Naspolini (Brazil) Get Sh*t Done 100 Years and a Few Stones 129 Julia Varley (UK/Denmark) 25 Jill Greenhalgh (UK) The Swing Facing Up 159 Lis Hughes Jones (UK) 39 Margaret Cameron (Australia) Lis - Sian - Ann: Moments of Retrieving, Remembering, Recreating Lay Me Out 170 Raquel Carrió (Cuba) 52 Kordula Lobeck (Germany) Building a Structure Present Futures 172 Dawn Albinger (Australia) 57 Jo Randerson (Aotearoa New Zealand) Reflection on Hope Amazing Babes 186 Pilar Restrepo (Colombia) 60 Parvathy Baul (India) Living and Dying as a Dream Practising Ancient Wisdom 190 Zoe Gudović (Serbia) 64 Katarzyna Kułakowska (Poland) One Part of Me Somebody’s Daughter 197 Geddy Aniksdal (Norway) 68 Carolina Pizarro (Chile/Denmark) Notes for Tomorrow Changing the Present 218 Dorthe Kærgaard (Denmark) 76 Jess Brookes (UK) Paintings Magdalenas 221 Notes on Contributors 78 Roxana Pineda (Cuba) 227 Photo Credits Crucial Moments Future Conditional - Notes for Tomorrow Maggie B. Gale Future Thinking Like others whose work is in this volume, the task of writing down thoughts about the future has been remarkably difficult: I have resisted writing my contribution for some time. The future feels bleak in many respects and the world feels like a place in a great deal of trouble! I am a historian. We write about the past. We construct ‘versions’ of the past in our writing. We bring imagination to fact. We work on a balance between ideas, hunches, nostalgia, memory and data. If I am being honest, I don’t want to have to write about the ‘future’: the ‘future’ feels insecure. However you look at it, things are not great in terms of ecology, escalations of armed conflict, psychotic or mega- lomaniacal presidents, social and economic inequality. And in the area where I work, things are not looking good in terms of educational provision. There is an overwhelming feeling of ‘the end of things’ in the air: the end of good times, the end of plenty, the end of the ‘known quantity’, of the familiarity of things around us; the end of political sanity, and not just because of the situa- tion in the middle east, or the recent Brexit vote in the UK and the US elections. Future time I am in my early fifties. My hair is going white and my bones creak in new and strange ways, many of which are none too welcome. If I feel like this now - how will I feel in five years, ten years, twenty years or maybe even thirty years? Or maybe five is more than I will get. When I was young I spent a lot of time thinking about the future, in quite concrete terms - I will do this, then I will do that, then maybe I could do the other. Now, I often fantasise about a future where I do only my favourite things, but all of the time - reading, poking about in the garden pretending that I know what I am doing, making things - knitting, sewing, writing - lying around watching old films in my pajamas, travelling, visiting friends, the sea, museums and art galleries, going to the theatre - but only ever seeing performances that will move me and stay with me forever - cooking food for friends, playing with grandchildren, having dogs again, swimming… In this future I will have had enough of ‘work’ - no more meetings, no more difficult colleagues, no more problems to solve, no more sinking feeling when I sit down to a computer screen - maybe no computer screen at all? Here simply speaking, life will be my work and I can bring my ‘work skills’ to use where needed or where I see fit. 8 9 Maggie B. Gale Future Conditional - Notes for Tomorrow This is a future imagined in the here and now though, as a response to my own being funded. Our Arts Council, the UK’s main subsidy body, until recently paid sense of feeling unsettled in the present. I am in a well-paid job where I have some reviewers to review shows that they had already funded - to make sure the work is status, I have a lovely, clever, and funny partner, I have two great kids - young men good - and that they were right to fund it in the first place. If it is not good then… who are tall and strong - one son who has just gone off to do a seven-year course at well it may not be funded again, or, in fact, it may be. It depends on who looks university and another who is sixteen, funny, thoughtful and a bit at odds with the at the funding form. I recently was told confidentially, by an arts officer for the world - like his mum. I have a deadline on a book that I don’t really want to write Arts Council, that if an application for funding ticked certain boxes then it didn’t - the research is sometimes exciting, mind-boggling, surprising, thought-provoking really matter about the projected content of the work - it would get funding. I - but how to put all of this into a book? And a book that I suspect, in reality, very would be giving it away to say here what the tick-box categories might be, suffice few people will read? But now I have a contract and a submission date with a to say they are generated by the most bizarre criteria which place theatre as one of publisher and so… I have to write it and maybe you will be one of the few who many tools in the toolbox of social engineering.