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drinks Monday 1 September 08 Edinburgh Reunion in London
Topping And Butch Hit Leicester Square 26-27 September 08
All About Napua
New York-based international jazz musician and theatre performer, composer, writer Napua Davoy explains how she creates her work. She remembers Edinburgh, and writing about her mother's Alzheimer's. And the three words she used when she dislocated her arm.
by Napua Davoy
Four years ago I finally put down my hopes and wishes and declared yet another primary relationship dead in the water. After repeatedly banging my head against the wall, I gave up, finding myself in need of refuge and strength. I dived deep into myself with the intent of connecting to that Supreme Bliss of Being that happens in the direst of moments, when one feels to be simultaneously both centre and circumference. I began to feel less dreary and confused, and soon enough a group of words came to me and I typed them down.
'As our mom loses more and more words, her memory no longer holds their associations, and therein lies a beautiful opportunity. Because after 75 years, our mother has regained her innocence and now possesses an enthusiasm and a curiosity generally seen only in a child. The passage of time is utterly of no importance. So where there used to be schedules, chores and agendas, now there are wide open spaces of mornings, afternoons, evenings, bedtime - moments in time - suspended in air, no restraints or restrictions. Time to enjoy sharing the moment, that's what our life has become. Time to enjoy sharing the moment.'
These words opened my first play The Brighter Side - an American Family Odyssey. Having been a musician all my life - firstly a singer, then a jazz pianist and songwriter - it was not a great leap to begin writing stories. I'd been amazed at the progress my family had made in the ten years since my father's death and had reflected much on these transformations of relationship and behaviour. In my developing ability to go inward and plumb that sacred well of intuition and imagination, awakening within me was an observer I had never before known.
Nights at my computer became my most favourite time. Years grooving at the piano like having a heroin needle dangling from your vein, drunk on the groove, I found myself now engrossed with the play of words and ideas that reflected my musical experience and knowledge. Feeling the weight of the rhythm, constructing and balancing ideas where before there had been harmony and melody, the phrasing of the sentences poured out onto the page. Restricted as I had been to four-bar phrases and 32-bar song forms, it was as if I'd been let out of a small room into a large field. I roamed and roamed. I connected first within, making that a daily habit from the moment I came to consciousness, and when coming to my writing only wrote what occurred to me. Never forcing, only writing when I was moved, but writing every night.
You may think that writing a play about your life is a good way to learn to write a play. You know the material so well. But your life is not a play. And I was going strictly from intuition. So in my rather backassward, autodidactic way, I cut my play out of my inspired writings. There's a ton of it on the editing floor that finds its resonance and meaning within the sentences that remain. It's such a beautiful process of reduction: taking from an outpouring of emotional response, to seeing the mythology of your own life, and expressing it through the arts you've been honing for a lifetime.
I presented the first eight minutes of The Brighter Side at a showcase held by the dance studio where I'd started classes in jazz. The audience could not have been more moved. I continued to combine theatre and music in these small segments, bit by bit, finally creating the whole play. Two friends gave me ProTools for Christmas and suddenly I had the ability to multi-track record in the comfort of my own home 24 hours a day. For a lifetime I had wanted this. Once, in the mid 80s, I’d tried to put together a small recording studio. I swear you have to be a rocket scientist to be a recording engineer. I lived near the Empire State Building and the radio interference was maddening. Someone suggested I wrap all the wires with aluminium foil. Do you have any idea how many wires it takes to connect a small four-track recording studio? My bedroom looked like a B-movie monster with aluminium tentacles.
32-track recording on my nine-inch laptop through an analogue/digital converter the size of a small novel. Heaven!
While writing the play I’d written lyrics for a few songs that reflected its themes. I had no idea these lyrics would form part of the play. In fact when writing lyrics to music, phrases often pop out of the middle of the tune before I even know what I'm writing about. But there they were: songs of remorse, the lessons of life, the loss of and quest for love.
In the wreckage of what I jokingly call my bank account and unable to pay my bills I’d been staying in a friend's spare room. When I returned to my apartment in Spring 2004 I hooked up the ProTools and intuitively went to work. The soundtrack of The Brighter Side was completed in my first three weeks back. I didn't read the manual and got into trouble with the huge gaps in my know-how. My task was clear: I needed great, enduring music with fresh and honest arrangements. I played everything myself with a Roland XP-30 synthesizer. Someday it will be beautifully recorded live with strings, classical guitars, piano, accordion and percussion. Maybe flute and oboe too. It will be fabulous.
Right after I finished the score Grethe Holby (who later became the director of Brighter) invited me to perform the piece at her loft in Soho, New York. It was at this performance in April 2004 that a lawyer friend said I clearly had a hit, and after he requested to manage me and develop Brighter, I could focus on another project that had been begging my attention.
I had booked a concert with a big band in Germany in mid-July. I always prefer doing original music, but had no charts for such a large ensemble and decided to try to do them myself. I had eight weeks to do the work for which a professional would normally need sixteen, and I didn't know where to start. As if that were not enough, I had to learn the Sibelius software program to print the work. As soon as the lawyer laid out his plan, believing that Brighter was on its way - oh naive one, how have you even gotten by all these years? - I immediately began studying arranging. I spent eighteen hours a day at it and almost from the start began to feel something was coming, either in my psyche, my bloodstream or my soul.
Sure enough, on the fortieth day of study, nine sentences came to me and I quickly jotted them down. These nine sentences informed me of the story of Miami
, my jazz musical about a man who fell in love with two women. One he loved as an angel, the other as a woman. I started writing all the scenes I knew and as I wrote, I would find out more and more details. I’d already booked the summer with jazz performances in Europe so I continued to develop Miami wherever I was. By my return to New York in September, I'd finished the script and then wrote the last nine songs of the fourteen. The piece was finished by November, in five months.
My director Grethe Holby and I agreed to work together soon after this and in February 2005 began to rehearse. In mid-March I produced and performed the first three nights of The Brighter Side in a gorgeous theatre on the Upper West Side a stone's throw away from my home. The production was so simple we even made a little money.
It's amazing how fast the word flew. People would come up to me, not knowing my involvement, and tell me what a good show it was. It's certainly gratifying, but gratifying enough is the ability to do this when I think of what people are suffering in the world. I remember standing on a street in Agra, India, after four hours gazing through teary eyes at the beauty of the Taj Mahal. Feeling something scratching my hip, I looked down to see a large bundle of dirty rags. Further examination revealed a pair of green eyes peering out, and a child begging. How lucky are we spending our days and nights producing art? Even if you fall flat on your face, at least you got to do it.
So dedicated am I to my yogic study I rarely get sick. But after that first production, I came down with a bad case of the 'flu. I was exhausted, and during this time Grethe suggested we go to Edinburgh. In my weakened and feverish state I dragged myself to the computer and the Edinburgh Fringe website. The idea of producing a play via the internet seemed absolutely impossible. The fever made my every muscle ache. I couldn't concentrate, I only wanted to lie down, and decided not to go to Edinburgh. Grethe was disappointed, but understanding.
But as the weeks passed, I began to feel I'd made a mistake as my research revealed that waiting in line for competitions, for getting into not-for-profit theatres, for getting to know producers (oh, banish the thought!) was the lay of the land and I better get used to marking time. I returned to the Fringe website to find I'd just missed the deadline. I immediately contacted Jane at the EdFringe office and begged to be let in. She was most helpful and within a day I’d booked the first week at Purple Venues and the following two at the Roxy. (My publicist Guy Chapman told me I should do the festival, meaning the entire three-week period.) It was lucky the Roxy had an opening during the first week too, as Purple Venues folded ten days before first night. Purple Venues has yet to refund the $1,300 rent I paid them. I hope they'll be good to their word. It's not looking that good right now after they said they'd mail a cheque.
I had not a farthing to spend on fringe festivals. Luckily I’d incurred a lot of credit card debt so at the very least I had frequent flyer miles to the UK. My little sister agreed to come to work lights and sound. I researched the cheapest digs and couldn't get a response from anyone through the apartment listings and as a failsafe booked bunk beds at the Castle Rock Hostel. My director also set out to get a flat and ended up finding us a most beautiful 2,000 square foot palace in Newtown where I stayed by myself when she and her cousins left after the first week. Ironically Guy Chapman was renting a flat five houses down this tiny, tiny street that only had twenty houses on it. I figured I was in the right place!
Edinburgh - I have never seen such an outpouring of so much creativity in all my life - what a simply outrageous festival! The Roxy is right in the heart of it, south of the Royal Mile near the University. The university students were ever so sweet and over-worked. I'll never forget the care they showed me. Truly a wonderful group of folks. We'd had advance press in The Guardian due to the subject matter, making me feel we were really going to do well. Not so many groups got advance press that was picked up by Reuters and appeared all over the world.
On our first day, a young man from The Scotsman came along. He fidgeted throughout, giving me that sinking feeling. His three line review claimed to disbelieve one of the main premises of the play: that my relationship with my mother vastly improved after she developed Alzheimer's because everything about her that was difficult disappeared. That is actually what happened and furthermore he had the nerve to say the play was mired in cliché. He even used the cliché to make the accusation. I think he failed to see the classic nature of the piece. Most people look as if their DNA has been all shaken up, the catharsis is so complete. I still wonder how he missed it.
We let it roll off our backs and on the third day went out to take some publicity shots up Calton Hill. It was one of those glorious Edinburgh evenings when the clouds come tumbling down the sky from the North East, propelled by Hawk the howling wind. It was sunny - warm for Edinburgh and with beautiful light. I’d made this ridiculously large yellow banner with the name of the play beautifully sewn in blue felt. I'd be running around the city with this thing streaming from a bamboo pole I'd been given by one of the sweet staff at the Roxy. We wanted to get a picture of me as an Olympic athlete wielding my banner against this beautiful sky.
Only two weeks earlier I'd injured my hip flexor in a ballet class, and as I was climbing up the Parthenon, it faltered and I went tumbling down, only maybe five feet, but landed on my right hand and dislocated my forearm from the elbow. Never have I experienced such pain. I yelled out to Grethe as I watched my forearm dangling off the elbow at an impossible angle. In the next moment I gathered my yoga wits about me, said three words that basically mean ordinary consciousness, getting to higher consciousness, becoming such refined energy of consciousness that one can reflect the Cosmic Being of the Universe. As I finished the three words - Chittam, Sattyam, Purusha - I watched my arm pop right back into its socket. Bingo!
The ambulance came in a flash as I lay there on the ground writhing in pain. On the way to hospital they gave me Scottish History and laughing gas. I waited two hours in the emergency room until the doctor came and asked why I'd waited so long to come to the hospital. 'Excuse me, but I've been waiting for you,' I responded. 'But this has already healed 36 hours', she claimed. The yoga. And thank God I was in Scotland when this happened. Had it occurred in the US my lack of health insurance would never have seen me reach the emergency room.
So now with my arm the size of a balloon, my hip flexor utterly unreliable, I set out to do my very emotionally draining, physically demanding play. Without my physicality, I was forced to become a better actress. Where I might have shaken a clenched fist before, I now had to accomplish this with my eyes, with my being.
And this before audiences the size of a small family. With 1,800 theatre groups in three weeks what do you expect? One must dive deep into oneself to deliver as good a performance as possible. I saw colleagues wilting around me with the staggering amount of seemingly futile flyering and tiny audiences. But I make a point to utilise every single waking moment and happily settled into a groove of flyering, seeing wonderful performances of all types and sketching all day long. Some day I will have a set of paintings from my sketches of the people and places in Edinburgh. I performed my play almost every day at 10:45 in the morning. Singing arias first thing every day requires utter discipline to get to bed early. Utterly un-Fringe-like behaviour was needed to deliver The Brighter Side properly every morning. I’d walk the mile or so from Newtown uphill to my venue, thoroughly energised, heart pumping upon my arrival, raring to go.
I believe the Edinburgh Fringe is designed to make you fearless and strong. Theatre boot camp, that's what the Fringe was for me.
I have now written the music for a new play by Frank Bramwell who I met in Edinburgh. Macbeth Killing Time, a drama portraying Macbeth 300 years hence being visited in Purgatory by a prosecutor and a defence counsel, is simply brilliant. The new piece is entitled Tempest Fugit. I'm thrilled to have been involved and count this as one of the many gifts of the Fringe.
Back in New York City, I’ve written a narrative script for Miami so I can perform the jazz operetta - for a cast of seven and a dancing chorus of twenty - by myself while I begin to gather a cast, arrange to record the CD of the music and work with my new and brilliant director who just fell out of the sky.
I’m also experimenting with the interface between dialogue and music, and discovering the right balance of singing what you're saying can be a tricky business. There is a sensibility born of jazz and opera which resonates with a 21st century audience. 18th and 19th Century frameworks do not necessarily work for us; the pop idiom born of magical personalities of self-contained singer-songwriters does not give us the strongest song form from which to grow. We're in need of a renaissance – and I feel we’re in sight of a renaissance. The miraculous fabric of live theatre that makes that ineffable blending of honed technique and chance come together to change an audience forever provides a perfect place in which to develop a rich and compelling and beautiful music that will inspire and live on in the hearts of those lucky enough to experience it.
I hear the droll spinning of the bagpipes pouring out of that souvenir store across from the square where there are always street acts. Walking down the cobbled streets filled with people dressed in every type of attire. Theatre people will clearly do anything. Jazzers are a far more predictable lot; in fact damned conservative by comparison.
One late afternoon walking down Cowgate three gypsies came up to me. I call them my Yogic Gypsies. Eva approached me with her remarkably beautiful green eyes and greeted me with an openness and a blissful contentment that immediately seduced me into returning to The Forest with these three young vagabonds who'd been sleeping in the park prior to getting the room-and-board-in-exchange-for-café-duty gig at The Forest. I met there all manner of people: mostly young, penniless world travellers in search of themselves and adventure. People from everywhere, then suddenly in that large room, a play began. A one-act, a conversation between two young men, a collision of reason and paranoia. Right there in The Forest. Now that's theatre. And that's Edinburgh.
END
(c) Napua Davoy 18 May 2006
Details of The Brighter Side - an American Family Odyssey, and Miami, and other work by Napua Davoy are at www.bravecoolworld.com. Tempus Fugit is at Greenwich Playhouse, London, 9 May to 4 June 06.
Sub-editor - Al Black
Fringe Report (c) Fringe Report 2002-2008
