Force Majeure's Not In A Million Years

Week One: Caroline Baum in the Rehearsal Room with Force Majeure

I’ve always wondered how you make a work from scratch.

Now I get a chance to see close-up. Too often as a journalist you are let in at the end, for just a few minutes, when everyone is on their best behaviour - it’s a micro-managed PR exercise that offers little insight into the process. This time I’ve got total access. It feels exciting to be walking along Pier Four, spotting Philip Seymour Hoffman in a break from rehearsing Sam Shepherd’s True West for the STC. Rachel Perkins is next door, working on a film. There’s a sense of a real hub here, of a community of artists engaged in exploration, all looking for new ways to tell stories.

The rehearsal studio at Bangarra on Pier 4 is a big black space with a mirror down one wall. It’s supposed to get to 27 degrees outside but it’s chilly in here unless you are moving. Temperature is an element in some of the stories KC has gathered under the heading Not in a Million Years to explore extreme experiences some would call miracles, others would call luck or fate. There’s the female glider who nearly froze to death in the stratosphere caught up in a storm. The airless warm fug of the Beaconsfield miners trapped and immobilised underground. And other stories of beating the odds: the unhappy lottery winner, the athlete who breaks a world record, the flight steward who survives a terrorist plane crash.

I have no idea how KC plans to pull these themes together and translate them into movement. It’s an experiment that carries its own risks. For now she looks  remarkably serene, given the responsibility and time pressures of premiering a new work in six weeks.  

Scrolling through her plan for the day on her new iPad, KC sets a series of familiarisation exercises to her cast of four: Sarah Jane Howard, Elizabeth Ryan, Vince Crowley and Josh Tyler.

Some of  them sound like games:
‘Roll across the room any way you like’, ‘Imagine that you are trying to blow your partner across the room’, ‘Pretend you are trying to escape from whatever embrace your partner tries to hold you in’, and ‘Now do the same thing but imagine you can only move along lines of a grid’. 

Sitting together with artistic associate Roz Hervey, KC issues brief instructions: ‘Swap partners’ ‘Change the rhythm’ ‘Don’t try to be interesting, just be true’, ‘Try the same thing but using a table and chairs’. KC does not hesitate, she projects confidence, laughing often, smiling at a move she likes. The atmosphere is relaxed, easy, as if there was all the time in the world to play and explore. Everything feels open to discussion, fluid. It’s an energising, intense mood. I wonder if it will ever get strained. Stage manager Erin Daly keeps an eye on the clock, reminding KC when the team needs a tea break (and, in Vince’s case biscuits, which threaten to break the budget) and videos material for reference when KC gives her the nod.

As sound designer Max Lyandvert DJs a sampled sound track for movement, (‘give me something less industrial, more loopy Fellini’ says KC) each task becomes more elaborate, with more layers of instruction, more physical challenges, more room for improvisation. Organic patterns and shapes occur, fragments of potential stories suddenly materialise in snatches of gesture, like phrases of an overheard conversation. There is a tantalising sense of too many options.

After an hour of physical exploration, the group gathers around the table to watch  TV footage as part of  the research process: a documentary from the ABC’s recent Miracle series about the female glider caught in a storm; an episode of ER in which Sex and the City’s Cynthia Nixon plays a stroke victim and we experience it  from her point of view. We listen to a radio program about athletes’ memories of the intense focus of  elite competition. The dancers write down key phrases that strike them: ‘I am the  starting gun… I am the only bullet in the chamber .… ’ These phrases resonate with their personal experiences of concentration, relief, pain,  time slowing under stress. They wonder, as we all did, how Cathy Freeman coped with the pressure of expectation on that day in 2000, how the glider focussed  all her attention and will on staying alive for her parents, how Cynthia Nixon’s character thinks she can communicate with doctors and nurses but is locked in by the paralysis of her condition.

The conversation ranges loose and wide: the human spirit in all its complexity, contradiction and improbability, the role of chance, luck, probability… and how to express all of this through textures of sound, what words to use, what bits of testimony to quote from, what stories to invent… all of it is up for grabs in this early stage, every door  is open to ideas. KC guides the conversation back, so that it does not go off on too many tangents. I don’t think I expected the dancers to have notebooks, to be writing dialogue.

*****

Today part of the set arrives: much excitement! Packets of polysterene foam pellets become an irresistible patch of snow to play and dance in.  Sarah Jane works up a solo, hurling  herself into the white, spinning, twisting and  burrowing through its softness until  she realises she’s also inhaling it. Erin makes a note to organise face masks. KC shifts the snow with a fan, piling it up in drifts,  creating waves, looking like the foam that collects on surf. It crunches, like  the best powder, but when you are buried underneath it, it deadens sound, making it hard to hear anything, including KC. ‘That will make tech rehearsals tricky’ the performers predict over lunch in the sun at the end of the wharf.

Based on the real life accounts, Vince and Josh improvise a scene as the Beaconsfield miners in which one teaches the other the words to the only song he can remember. Unfortunately it’s The Gambler, by Kenny Rogers. ‘You gotta know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold’ em, know when to walk away…’By the end of the week, it is lodged in my brain.

Caroline Baum

Have you booked your tickets yet? Not in A Million Years is at CarriageWorks 17 - 27 November.  Click here to book online.