Entanglings: July

monthly missive from an artist's lyfe

I am working with a lot of writers. My role is called mentor or dramaturg. I am reader, responder, sounding board, cheerleader, questioner, suggester. We meet online, square heads on a screen, me in my crowded study with the messy bookshelf, recently slightly reorganised but still not organised, books and journals lined up and stacked whatever way they can fit, a small fat alarm clock I don’t know why I keep, an old board game of my partner’s called SOCCER GAME. Or we meet in person, at a small, bright café in Footscray where there are equal parts tradies and laptop tapping solo humans and friends cooing and chatting. Or we meet in person, at theatres where the writers are being supported via programs, as part of cohorts with other writers. Sometimes I am with more than just ‘my writers’ as part of running a workshop or having conversations. We talk about their projects, about craft, about ways to pull an idea through and transform it from thought into performance. Many of them talk about keeping their cast sizes small so the work has a realistic chance of going on. I do this too. I am writing a new play which I thought had three actors but perhaps it works better with two. In fact, it would work best with about forty but that is another version of it. We talk about how the economics of making theatre are shaping the imaginative scales we permit ourselves to work at. I talk to one writer about whether it is okay to write a character into a play that will only appear in one scene. What does this mean for the story, for the actor, for the budget? I see a staged reading of a new work and am thrilled, almost shocked, when actors keep appearing. I lose count. Are there 8 of them on stage? 9?! The bodies fill the space with bodiliness and voice and this is not shrinking to fit, it is exploding. Sometimes I get dizzy plunging deep into so many other imaginative worlds. I read and talk and read and talk. I try to find threads in the work and ask the writers if these threads are the same ones they are trying to weave. I try to offer possibility. I try not to interfere. I am amazed at how these worlds, these plays, transform as the writers return to them again and again. Over a week. Over a month. Over years. This is the hard yards. I am impressed again and again at the tenacity and the passion that drives these writers. With no guarantee of an outcome, a production, of funding. A work is full of thoughts and ideas and concepts and hopes but submerged within them and then, suddenly (it is not sudden, it is after weeks or months or years of hard yards) it appears. There it is! It is a breathing text, alive in the world, hungry for actors and an audience. I am proud. Ridiculous. The writer and this moment do not belong to me. Maybe it is not pride, this feeling of fullness and admiration and warmth that floods me. All I can do is use a lot of exclamation marks to express this un-nameable feeling and draw on its fire. My role is called mentor or dramaturg or many other things but one thing it is always is this sudden, strange sensation. Something like learning or inspired or hope or bloody hell they bloody did it. Despite. In spite. In crowded studies and among lives with work and children and griefs and washing dishes and fitting it in and doubts and terrors they did it. They do it. My own new work is so deeply submerged right now it is bathypelagic. The writers I work with act as guides, shining a light towards the surface.

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Hello and thank you for reading Entanglings 2026! In 2024 I wrote Unfurl, a weekly poetic response to a performance work. In 2025 I took a hiatus. This year I am writing a monthly missive with the aim of capturing a poetic/prose snapshot of the ordinary/mundane life of an artist. It will not capture everything, of course. It will be idiosyncratic and inconsistent in what it notices and reports on. It is inspired by thinkers such as Lauren Berlant, Ann Cvetkovich, Sara Ahmed and Kathleen Stewart who are interested in how the everyday affective quality and experience of our lives are worthy of attention and may enlighten something about how we live and how we might want to live.

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