Production Week Blues

I was going to title this ‘An In Between Day’ or something along those lines, but I see that I did this for the last blog post, so I’ll be a little more honest and a little less abstract in my title today.

It is Saturday morning, coming up on lunchtime, and I’ve got the Production Week Blues.

It feels very ungrateful to write that, at the end of my first proper production week back, but seeing as integrity and honesty are my SuperPowers, then telling the truth is a non-negotiable for me. Always has been.

Having the blues is nothing to do with the work. I’ve spent the week working with an excellent director and creative team, and the work we have made together is beautiful and slick and all of the good stuff. Masks, and other bits of Covid-safety (including remote rehearsal attendance) mean that I feel a little more distant from the cast than I normally do, but the positivity is there, even if a little muted.

So it isn’t that.

Partly it is the hours. We’ve talked again and again in lockdown, in all those Theatre Zooms about how unsustainable the ‘six eleven-hour working days in a row’ model of production is, and I’ve proved that again to myself this week. I think we’ve all proved that to ourselves. I’ve heard other members of the team articulating it in different ways, and so I think that the working revolution will come, even though it has appeared instantly as we come out of lockdown. Although I understand that the theatre did their streamed panto on a 9am-6pm production schedule, so it seems sad to me that they’ve gone back on that with this show.

That said, we’re working better than the bad old days on this one, for sure. We teched with the company for two sessions a day, rather than three, and the creatives worked together in the evenings. This is a wildly better method than back-to-back tech, and the show benefitted from it, definitely. As lighting is less complex on this show than sound (which does a fair bit more) and than video (which definitely does the heavy lifting on this show) I’ve had couple of evenings of leaving at 8.30pm or 9pm, and then because of set and production needing time in the mornings, I’ve had a 12 noon start on Thursday, and and 11am start on Friday. And then today, we are in such good shape that I’m not in until 4pm. So the hours are significantly shorter than they could have been, and yet my body is still tired and my mind and soul pretty heavy.

So if it is not only the hours (because it is important to acknowledge that even with time shaved off the days, they are still essentially a double-week, and that is something that theatre people, particularly lighting/sound/video designers and production staff are expected to do as a matter of course, in sequential weeks, again and again, and that that approach is simply unsustainable, so part of the crisis in theatre is definitely the hours, coupled with the low pay), then what else is it?

Chris Goode’s death is definitely part of it. He died last week. Last week was pretty unbearable. This week, my processing of his death has happened around being in production. I made nine shows with Chris, over thirteen years, the last being in 2016. I’ve known him longer than that: he ran CPT when the theatre company I co-founded, Mapping4D, did our first show. It was about identity and belonging in London. I had no idea then, but those themes would be key to all the work that I did with Chris over the years. I stepped back from working with Chris in 2016, because I had realised some things about process and content of his work that meant it wasn’t possible for us to continue working together. I wasn’t there for the last few years. The events of those years, and the revelations and events of the past few months are… grim. Grim is a word that has come up often these past two weeks.

This week, in production, I’ve had a waterfall of memories from the work that we made together. There are tiny red LED lights that blink in this show. They remind me of another show, and of the few, isolated red lights that blinked on an off and on and off, in a sea of other red lights that sat there, manageably unblinking. Those isolated red LEDs continued to blink, to transmit their signal, searching for others that understood their pain.

So Chris’ death is part of it.

And yet there is more.

How difficult I’ve found this venue’s approach to Covid safety and Covid safety management is a huge part of it, and whilst I won’t write about that here, the act of getting that down in words shows me how much of a big deal it is.

I’m missing A and KaylaDog. That’s a part of it, too. This is the longest I’ve gone without touching someone since March 2020. It’s nine days and counting. I acknowledge how hard it is, but in doing so it gives me a new humility about how easy lockdown was for me, really. And a deeper compassion for those who did lockdown on their own.

And I guess that the last part of it, is that production week knocks out my ability to write. I mean, it doesn’t. That is a ridiculous thing to say. Shonda Rimes talks about how you can always, always find ten minutes to write. And she’s right. But what this schedule has done is that I haven’t been able to do the 7am-9am daily pomodoros session with the other writers that has been the backbone of my artistic process since February. I did it today on the terrible connection from my hotel wifi and it was a bit of a major joy to see their faces.

So not having that time to be in flow each day affects me. Production week knocks out my meditation and my yoga, too. I ate cleanly/positively/well (whatever word you use for that) for the first fours days of production, and then Friday afternoon it all went out the window and noticed the effects on my body then.

I was in flow, proper creative flow, for seven sessions of this fifteen session week so far. So that is part of the issue, I think: the time spent doing the good stuff, the art bit is approx half the time (would have been proportionally more if this was a bigger/more complex show) but the hours mean that it become exhausting and knocks out not only your whole daily creative practise, but also the daily self care, wellness and exercise practices you have in place.

So there it is. That is why the blues. All those reasons, bundled up together.

Yesterday, I meditated before work and I managed to write.

Today, I’ve written and I’ve mediated and I’ll get both yoga and some actual proper exercise in before heading to the theatre. So today is a good day. And I can enjoy that.