Forest Fringe — Paper Stages Paper 2012 — Paper Stages i Introduction IT BEGINS AS IT ALWAYS DOES AT FOREST FRINGE with an invitation. Come and spend some time with us. We have done all this for you and we hope that you like it. It will not cost you anything, unless you want it to. We take what we’re doing seriously but that doesn’t mean you can’t laugh. We don’t expect you to understand everything. We don’t understand everything. We don’t promise not to upset you. We don’t promise to keep you entertained. But we promise we care and we ask you to trust us. To give something of yourself and see what happens. Stages Paper And this being the Edinburgh Festival, normally by now if you were convinced or even just a little curious you would find yourself queuing on a wide stone staircase leading to a tall-ceilinged church hall. You would have in your hand a crumpled raffle ticket to get you into the show and perhaps a bottle of organic beer, or the remains of an old coffee, or a rain-spattered copy of the fringe brochure used briefly as an umbrella on the run to get here in time. You may know what you are about to see or you may not. It’s not all that important. You may have been here before or you may not. That is also not important. You are probably expectant, and a little cold, listening almost accidentally to the conversations that ripple around you. Hopefully you are glad you found us and wondering already when you will next be back. This was how Forest Fringe worked. A wood-lined hall above a vegan cafe that became a home in Edinburgh to a community of artists and audiences who believed ii 1 in the importance of risk, and the need to have a bit of courage, and perhaps most importantly of all the idea How to Use This Book that by gathering together in this way we might ever so slightly change the world. However, as you may know, we BY GREG MCLAREN are no longer able to use that old hall to make a home for ourselves in Edinburgh. It now belongs to Assembly and we hope only that they can use it with as much imagination 1. This book is a seed. Do not read. 5. We are not the world, there is not as the hundreds of artists that have been a part of Forest Plant. one love and we are not all the same, Fringe over the last five years. Give it to someone not at this festival, no matter how deep down the deep not really a reader, unfamiliar with you go. That is a fairy tale. We differ. theatre. Prove it. This does not mean the end of Forest Fringe. It does not Sow with care. even mean the end of Forest Fringe in Edinburgh. Forest 6. Accept that art is mere curiostiy, and Fringe is just the best name we have for all the things we 2. The authors of this book are indulge. choose to do together, in Edinburgh, across the UK and outsiders, difficult, ask too many beyond. We as artists. You as audiences. questions, don’t like flags, think 7. Shame that the works here are not strangely, probably want you to go anonymous but authority thrives somewhere dangerous and ask a sex in the chemical soil. Our farmers This year in Edinburgh Forest Fringe is the whole festival criminal for directions to the nearest rejoice that the desire to control still Stages Paper of performances squeezed precariously into the pages of art brothel. flushes through these revolutionar- the book you are now reading. This is almost the last time ies. The need to own our curiosity in this book that you will be asked just to read. This book 3. Lazy reports indicate this is will defeat us in the end. something of a mental colouring-in- is meant to be performed. In its pages you will find maps, book, a delightful memento of time 8. The stupefaction of vast slabs of so- Introduction scores, sound pieces, bank accounts, plays, invitations, spent lodged under a carapace, a ciety is complete. As it gazes numbly words, phone numbers, diagrams, recipes, instructions, guide to the tetrads and canabalistic on, the forest thins, is cleared, is poems, promises, advice, pictures, sun dials, directions and nematodes that feed the roots of grazed, raised, tested, founded, social experiments. It is entirely up to you how you choose taller trees, but no. These pages shilled, land filled. Follow the crumbs contain instructions, maps, systems, out, but they’ve been eaten. As has to use them. cracks. Follow them, accelerate the your sweet home. Then follow not. collapse of society as we know it, tip Choose your own path; select your Thanks to the Jerwood Charitable Foundation for making our carefully balanced world into a own eventuality from the list. this project possible. Thank you to the brilliant artists who chaos of undergrowth, unanswered have made such startling contributions to it. And thank questions, unpredictable behaviour 9. Consider, if you dare, the following and self defining groups unmeasurable instruction: you for making the effort to find this book. Thank you for by previous empiricism. Breathe. Do not stop. trusting us. We hope you enjoy it. And we hope you come Now you are indebted to these words. back soon, wherever we may be. 4. The calm of our supermarkets, This imperative will haunt you and the vent of Saturday night street as you lie near the dreaded end, tired, violence, the simple binary of right old, wracked with memories, only and wrong, the very concept of then as your heart fails and your Andy Field entertainment; all are at risk from the fingers curl tightly around the remote Co-Director, Forest Fringe activities described herein. can you finally exercise your free will. 2 3 Score to Recall 1 x Hard White Card 22cm x 66cm 1 x Permanent Marker 1 x Arrivals Gate Stages Paper With your non-dextrous hand write large on the card a name Stand at the Arrivals Gate Hold the card aloft Anon 4 5 Paper Stages Paper Deborah Pearson 6 7 Sun Dial: Dial Plate A Point of View of Time Place this North What you need: 10 11 12 1 2 Your book One pencil White tac A watch A compass N Some weights (stones) Sunshine! W E 9 S 3 Paper Stages Paper Instructions: Making the Sun Dial How to use your Sun Dial 8 4 1. Using white tac stick a pencil onto The Sun Dial is now your only source Abigail Conway the centre of your dial plate where to monitor ‘time’. You will spend the indicated. Ensure that the pencil is day reliant only on the sun dial to track straight and does not lean. the movement of time. Your sun dial 2. Go outside to a sunny spot. Find is your personal, portable, time piece 7 5 North with your compass. linking you to the sun and our earth’s 3. Weigh your book down upon a flat movements around the sun. surface Then make sure that the 12 6 6 o’clock is pointing North. Will time pass slower than you expect? 4. The shadow from your pencil should now tell you the time. You may wish Enjoy! Place pencil here to double check the first time with your watch or any other time piece www.youtu.be/zboRwKQMsJQ and, if necessary, make adjustments. Do not check the time with a watch, After the sun has set please mark the end of the day by visiting the above link to or by any other standard method, Sun Dial: A Point of View of Time witness another point of time shifting. One where in the dusk and darkness, new life from this point onwards. www.abigailconway.org.uk begins again ready to bloom bright in the first flush of a new dawn. 8 9 Paper Stages Paper Action Hero Action www.actionhero.org.uk @actionherolive www.actionhero.org.uk @actionherolive 10 11 Paper Stages Paper 12 13 Dream Sequence Once they can run no more both collapse in exhaustion The Incidental Plays In the midst of a protest that is fast Barely two metres from each other descending into a riot A series of plays to be performed in a city by an indeterminate They hold each other number of people for an audience that does not quite realise it is an Hands slipping inside layers of Oh, baby do you know what that’s audience. clothing worth? Oh, Heaven is a place on Earth. Cold fingers running across warm skin In a department store Flares Dressed in unbought clothes Fireworks Lying on beds “I would like to talk to the capitalists The silent suffocation of Frank Uwe Water cannons erupting like Nestling in armchairs about money, but they only want to Laysiepen by his most famous former fountains Curled in a ball in front of banks of tell love stories” lover A chorus of police officers televisions Rhythmically banging their batons Trying on hats and headphones and A figure stands half illuminated by A man stands uncomfortably still in against their shields crash helmets the middle of a busy public square streetlight Moving through a corridor of light In paint People continue to move around him fittings Eventually it starts to rain or chalk The Physical Impossibility of Death in Switching them slowly on and off Stages Paper or marker pen the Mind of Someone Famous Off and on they write on the wall Sister Lovers “I would like to talk to the capitalists The remains of a half eaten fish about money, but they only want to supper A number of figures in identical Realism Andy Field Andy tell love stories” Scattered on the ground in front of a outfits move casually through an park bench overcrowded room In the middle of the night A can of Tennents lager Occasionally In high visibility jackets Coffee (for Nora Ephron) Unopened Almost imperceptibly Crisp packets A half-chewed polystyrene cup They catch each other’s eyes Chocolate bar wrappers A conversation over coffee Containing a number of small Coke cans Or what appears at least to be coffee denomination coins Crumpled flyers Body language mirrored HTTP 404 – File Not Found Cigarette butts