SO FAR, WE HAVE –
- Questioned different opportunities, ways of thinking and making as a collaborative
- Looked at the attitudes of fanSHEN, and how their styles could inspire us
- Explored music and how that could dictate a score to construct a narrative
We have adopted an idea to use music to produce scenes of a nature which inflict moods of anger, frustration, loss and dreams. We came to a point during the middle of our process towards our performance in how to contextualise these moods, so one of the participants in the collaboration posed the idea of using our current compositional strategies and adapting them to an existing text which fits the criteria of these particular moods. this lead us to begin to explore Arthur Miller’s play ‘The Death of a Salesman’ and particularly its central character, Willy Loman. Arthur Miller was a popular American playwright and a profound figure for his American plays during the 20th century. Written in 1949, ‘The Death of a Salesman’ is a play which follows the fall of salesman Willy Loman. Willy Loman is a husband and father of two sons in the play and is absorbed in being the best he can be and wanting the same for his sons. Willy strives for his sons to be a success because his life hasn’t plotted the way he envisaged.
“Willy Loman is a man who wishes his reality to come into line with his hopes, a man desperate to leave his mark on the world through his own endeavours and through those of his children. Though he seems to seek death, what he fears above all is that he will go before he has justified himself in his own eyes and there are few, from New York to Beijing, who do not understand the urgency of that need.” Bigsby (2005;101).
Throughout the play Willy Loman projected onto his wife and sons (son Biff in particular) his past experiences of failure and the insufficiency to achieve what he once strove for, the American dream. The dream to be the best at what he does and to live comfortably and happily, allowing the highest hopes and aspirations to bring him huge success. Unfortunately, Willy’s life plays out to lead to the tragic downfall of him taking his life as a product of giving his life to pursue the American dream which ended in failure. Willy doesn’t want his children to fail where he did so he projects his dreams onto son Biff, who doesn’t want the same life his father has, as he has seen the deluded and defeated man his father had become.
The play is structured in two acts and a final act ‘Requiem’, requiem meaning a token of remembrance in which the play concludes in Willy’s family he has left behind reflecting on his constant struggle to achieve material and personal success as a salesman, which is the totality of the American dream, being the best, you can be and having the best as a product of tireless work. This play was a perfect platform to deliver the moods we found from our soundtracks we discovered early on in our collaborative process.
As a group we read ‘The Death of a Salesman’ and decided which moments and themes in the play best suit our soundtracks, then we also bared the question of how as three artists we could reinvent Arthur Miller’s original text into short sized-down sequences to speak about times we are living in or how the American dream is just as much a struggle now as it was when Arthur Miller wrote ‘The Death of a Salesman’ in 1949…
LIFE LESSONS AND THE THINKING BEHIND HIS WORK…
PART I – The first comings together of our music choices and elements taken from Millers ‘Death of a Salesman’:
(SCATTERED EXTRACTS FROM SCRIPT) PART I:
(James on the chair. Ash reading opening stage directions. Josh introduces Show. LIGHTS ARE DIM AND BEGIN TO SLOWLY FADE UP DURING THIS FIRST MONOLOGUE)
ASH – A melody is heard, played upon a flute. It is small and fine, telling of grass and trees and the horizon. The curtain rises.
JOSH – Hello everybody, welcome to life lessons. A response to his work.
(BEGIN FIRST TRACK – James on chair in centre movement (Pink Floyd) – halfway through track Ash & Josh stand on chairs and deliver text)
Life lessons were titles for fragments in our performance in which we created sequences to play out Willy Loman’s downfall. We began to explore key moments from the play, then moved through scenes which involved our original songs from early on in our process. We used different compositional strategies to gradually reveal we were responding to Millers work in a contemporary style. In the first fragment we created repetitive actions and layered them with lines from the play to bring to light Willy’s frustration and also how his family felt about losing him. During our process of creating scenes we combined discussion improvisation and repetition as means to question Willy Loman’s personal struggle: We furthermore became interested with the way theatre company Forced Entertainment construct their works. Forced Entertainment are composed of six Sheffield based artists that tour their work worldwide. Famous for their work that doesn’t follow a non-linear narrative, as a collective, we were inspired by their practice and how wanted to adapt our performance to have a postdramatic framework where we played and improvised with ideas until they stuck. Furthermore, we developed moments, debated ideas and strived to stick to our original idea of letting the music set the mood for the scenes. We had our music, had moments from the play we felt were important and adapted them into game like scenarios, movement pieces, but also included areas of the original text, attempting to tell brief versions of why Willy Loman eventually came to his fundamental downfall.
“My process is messy and non-linear, full of false starts, fidgets, and errands that I suddenly need to run now; it is a battle to get something – anything – down on paper. I doodle in sketchbooks: bits of ideas, fragments of sentences, character names, single lines of dialogue with no context.” (Klages, n.d).
Moreover, we told versions of events from key characters in the play and their feelings towards losing Willy Loman. Using our compositional strategies, our thinking, our music and Arthur Miller’s text, we strived to bring to light the essence of the play, which was a story of a man’s dreams shattering before him which we found that his story is still as relevant to this day.
Throughout the second half of the process we questioned whether this was not only a collaboration between ourselves but collaborating with Arthur Miller. We considered throughout the whole of our collaboration different approaches than what we’ve done before. We originally approached our work by engaging in music to be a platform to start considering what kind of themes we want to work with, but in adding an existing body of text, we had the freedom to debate and experiment within to create something we hadn’t originally intended.
We drew the performance to a close by writing a letter to Arthur Miller:
Dear Arthur Miller, thank you for being here, in whatever form, for our performance. Your collaboration and insight has guided us. The issues and struggles you were writing about is still present in this day. From the migrant workers told to go home to families struggling on zero-hour contracts. This is your work, today.
Using music supported moments within our piece to evoke certain feelings, however using an existing body of text enabled the potential to form a story which not only articulates moments from ‘Death of a Salesman’, to articulate that 70 years later, people are striving for more and are struggling to find a place in society based on their socio, economic backgrounds…