An extract from 'In an Unspoken Voice' by Peter A. Levine:
'Mythology teaches us about courageously meeting challenges. Myths are archetypal stories that simply and directly touch the core of our being. They remind us about our deepest longings, and reveal to us our hidden strengths and resources. They are also maps of our essential nature, pathways that connect us to each other, to nature and to the cosmos. The Greek myth of Medusa captures the very essence of trauma and describes its pathway to transformation. In the Greek myth, those who looked directly into Medusa's eyes were promptly turned to stone...frozen in time. Before setting out to vanquish this snake-haired demon, Perseus sought counsel from Athena the goddess of knowledge and strategy . Her advice to him was simple: under no circumstances should be look directly at the Gorgon. Taking Athena's advice to heart, Perseus used the reflective shield fastened on his arm to reflect the image of Medusa. This way he was able to cut off her head without looking directly at her, and thus avoided being turned into stone.'

So that's how she dies in the story, and what about how she became a 'snake-haired demon' in the first place? Before she was a Gorgon, Medusa was beautiful, and she knew it too! So irresistible that she is raped by Poseidon in Athena's temple. Rather than showing any sympathy for Medusa, Athena is furious at the sacrilege that has taken place and transforms her into a hideous snake woman. In feminist readings of the myth. Medusa is the embodiment of femininity from the point of view of the Ancient Greek patriarchal society - something wily and deceptive, and to be controlled. And the turning to stone is symbolic of impotence or castration of the male....

When I listened to the Tom Waits song 'Such a Scream' recently, it made me think of the Medusa myth, and my latest piece of writing is based on it;

I'm checking my rear view mirror, Medusa
I see you every time I turn my back
Don't lose your head over me, Medusa
I'll never kiss you again
 
Just last night I dreamed I was dreaming of you
The moon was gold and your hair like wind
Take a swig of this poison, Medusa
I won't ever mention the rain
 
Men once fought each other for you, Medusa
Now your skin is blotched and scaled
Remember when you burned for them
Now you burn with the shame
 
Your red lips were a flag to me, Medusa
I can never look you in the face
Time is just memory mixed with desire
A scream is all that remains
 
I'm frozen with the fear, Medusa
I watch myself turn to stone
Now you must lose your head, Medusa
Stretch your wings, ignore the pain

Real Gone

I don't play favourites with Tom Waits albums, but this is probably one of them. Waits has constantly reinvented his sound over the decades he's been making music, and I remember buying this album when it first came out and thinking how different it sounded to everything else I'd heard.
I read that he'd taped lots of different vocal percussion tracks as starting points for many of the songs; ravaging his voice in the process as he refused to simply loop the sounds. In one of my recent rehearsals I set myself the challenge of recreating the percussive tracks in this album using rhythm tap. This is a style of tap dance that I've been learning for a year under the tutelage of my friend Lexi Bradburn of Sole Rebel Tap - it's more of an acoustic than aesthetic style, whereby the shoes are used as percussive instruments. I came up with some very simple combinations as shown below - I'm not sure how or even if I will use any of these in the final show, but they were fun to make!

I've now written 12 stories/poems for 'Frontal Lobotomy', there is a rough order or structure I'm working in, and I have plans to write 4 or 5 more short pieces. I'm currently on my 4th draft, though there is much editing and refining to do. I have a show image, I have copy, I have a venue for the Edinburgh Fringe, and 3 London previews booked in for late May and July. And now I'm going to Berlin to study Integral Movement and Performance Practise at LISPA for 5 weeks.

So this my last blog post for a little while, I expect there will be a bumper edition in May! Xxx

'First Kiss' Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan - Orphans

She drove a big ol' Lincoln with suicide doors
And a sewing machine in the back
And a light bulb that looked like an alligator egg
Was mounted up front on the hood

And she had an Easter bonnet that had been signed by Tennessee Ernie Ford
And she always had saw dust in her hair
And she cut two holes in the back of her dress
and she had these scapular wings
That were covered with feathers and electrical tape
And when she got good and drunk
She would sing about Elkheart, Indiana
Where the wind is strong and folks mind their own business

And she had at least a hundred old baseballs that she'd taken from kids
And she collected bones of all kinds
And she lived in a trailer under a bridge
And she made her own whiskey and gave cigarettes to kids
And she'd been struck by lightning seven or eight times
And she hated the mention of rain

And she made up her own language
And she wore rubber boots
And she could fix anything with string
And her lips were like cherries
And she was stronger than any man
And she smelled like gasoline and Rootbeer Fizz
And she put mud on a bee sting I got at the creek
And she gave me my very first kiss
And she gave me my very first kiss

Talking 'bout my little Kathleen
She's just a fine young thing
Someday she'll wear my ring
My little Kathleen

A friend and someone who is becoming kind of a mentor set me several writing tasks a couple of weeks ago, and one was to sift through the music of Tom Waits for references to women. And I did. I listened to his entire back catalogue, save the live albums and wrote down every reference to women, and every reference to love. This took me a long time! My mentor-friend had expressed that some of Wait's attitudes towards women had made her slightly uncomfortable, being at odds with her feminism, but that she'd explained them away because of her love of his talent.

With International Women's Day also happening in the meantime, the Kardashian nude selfie, and the subsequent backlash, these topics have been playing on my mind. I read a great article on the presentation of women in art and the media, which pointed out why perhaps the Kardashian selfie riled so many people - here.

Having listened carefully to the lyrics; Tom Waits is someone who paints vivid pictures of female characters, and often writes from the point of view of a woman, though there are a couple of moments in his writing that don't sit well with me, particularly when younger women are heavily sexualised, or presented as lonely individuals, waiting for their man to return. There are some fantastic bad-ass women as well, funny women, and women who appear to operate on their own terms. Waits is also beautifully tender and sentimental....Here are a few examples....

As he dreams of a waitress with maxwell house eyes, marmalade thighs, and scrambled yellow hair

You know the ladies I been seeing off and on, well they spend you're lovin and they're gone. You can't be loving someone who's savage and cruel, take your love and then leave on out of town.
 
You know your perfume, well it won't let me be.
 
Your eyes are enough to blind me, you're like looking at the sun.
 
She was sharp as a razor, soft as a prayer
 
She's up against the registrar with an apron and a spatula
 
She's a moving violation, from her conk down to her shoes
 
The whores hike up their skirts and search for drugstore prophylactics, mouths cut just like razor blades and their eyes just like stilettos.
 
And the radiators steaming and her teeth are in a wreck
 
When she came she honked the horn
 
You see a redhead in a uniform will always get you horny.
 
She dropped her draws and stuck her face ass out the window, shouting get a loada this, and gave the finger to the moon
 
Besides I never talk to strangers anyway
 
Who asked you to annoy me
 
I see you on a Saturday night, in a penny arcade with your hair tied back
 
Stuffed a thousand dollars in her blouse and cast a cruel and unusual punishment.
 
She said I'm a sucker for a fella in a cowboy hat
 
And with a knees upon the glove compartment she took out her Barrett's, and her spilled out like root beer, and she popped her gum and arched her back.
 
Some nights my heart pounds like thunder, don't know why it don't explode
 
And when they pulled her from the wreck, she still had on her shades
 
The ghost of your memory is a sizzle and a kiss
 
She wore red shoes, red dress, sad night, a compact with a cracked mirror, a bottle of evening and paris perfume. Bring a raincoat, bring a suitcase, bring your dark eyes, and wear those red shoes
 
Little girls with nothing in their jeans, pretty blue wishes, sweet little things
 
I know a good hotel in west Hollywood be just right for you
 
Put on a little perfume, red ribbon in your hair
 
Dive down here beside me, let me hold you in the dirt. Sink your teeth into my shoulder, dig your nails into my back. Tell that little girl to let go of my sleeve, you'll be all women when I get you. Come baby fall in love with me.
 
See that little jersey girl in a see-through top, with the pedal pushers sucking on a soda pop, well I bet she's still a virgin, but it's only 25 to 9
 
When the bitch is wound up, and her parents are gone, man you wanna hear her with the sirens on
 
I paid 15 dollars for a prostitute, with too much make up and broken shoe
 
He hung his wild years on a nail he drove through his wife's forehead
 
His wife was a spent piece of used jet trash, made good bloody Mary's, kept her mouth shut most of the time.
 
Well things are pretty lousy from a calendar girl, the boys just dive right off their cars and splash into the street, and when they're on a roll, she pulls a razor from her boot, and a thousand pigeons fall around her feet
 
Aunts may has gone insane, she lives in the doorway of an old hotel, and the radio is playing opera, all she ever says in go to hell
 
He has a mistress, she's Puerto Rican, and I heard she has a wooden leg
 
All the doughnuts have names that sound like prostitutes
 
And the girl behind the counter has a tattooed tear, one for every year he's away. Such a crumbling beauty, there's nothing wrong with her 100 dollars won't fix.
 
She has that razor sadness that only gets worse with the clang and thunder
 
I'll never kiss a gun street girl again
 
I just know that she's made of smoke but I lost my way, she knows that I don't look but I must pay.

She's such a scream. Nails in cement. The flowers red, the well is full inside her skull. Her lips are red she the Queen, she's such a scream
 
I fell in love with your sailors mouth and your wounded eyes
 
She was 15 years old and she'd never seen the ocean, she climbed into a van with a vagabond. And the last thing she said was I love you mom, and a little rain never hurt no one
 
Where the blue eyed girls and red guitars, and the naked river flows
 
The prettiest girl in all the world, lives in a little Spanish town. I left her for a bony lass, and I told her I'd see her around. Well that bony lass has a heart of glass.
 
She lives in a house that way back off the road, she drove a camel through a needle, she's diamond that wants to stay coal. There's amnesia in her kiss, she's a swan and I pistol, and she will follow you like this. She's whiskey in a teacup, she gives blonde a lousy name, she's a bonsai Aphrodite.
 
With charcoal eyes and marrowed hips.
The moon was gold and her hair like wind
 
You don't meet nice girls in coffee shops
 
I miss your broken china voice
 
By a 99 cent store, she closed her eyes and started swaying, but it's so hard to dance that way when it's cold and there's no music
 
A good man is hard to find, only strangers sleep in my bed,
And my favourite words are goodbye, and my favourite colour is red
 
Marie, you are the wild blue sky, men do foolish things,
You turn kings into beggars and beggars into kings
 
She's a rose, she's a pearl, she the spin on my world, all the stars make their wishes on her eyes
 
She's a princess in a red dress, she's the moon in the mist to me
 
And from a window across the lawn I watched you undress, wearing a sunset of purple that rose and strangled ebony curls. You wear two lavender orchids, one in your hair and one on your hip
 
I hear your champagne laugh
 
Her bright red cheeks are painted on and she's laughing her head off in the Reeperbahn
 
Topping the bill was horse-faced Ethel, one-eyed Myra queen of the galley. Yodelling Elaine, queen of the air. She had a tiny bubble of spittle around her left nostril and a rusty tear. She had a Tattoo gun made out of an old cassette motor and a guitar string.
 
My baby's so fine, even the car looks good from behind
 
She was in over her head, she thought she could stand up in the deep end.
She thought she had the moon in her pocket.
He wore on his arm just like jewellery.
Don't let a fool kiss ya, never marry for love

What's more romantic than dying in the moonlight?
 
I'm burning with all this pain, put out the fire, make it rain
 
I close my eyes every night and dream that I can hold you.
 
She sunk like a hammer in the lake
 
If you've found someone new put me back in the crowd.
Take back these wings, put the sun behind a cloud
 
I want you to kiss me like a stranger. I wanna believe our loves a mystery.
 
She stole the blush from the rose.

They told me you were no good, but I know you take care of all my needs.
 
Old boyfriends, like burnt out light bulbs on Ferris wheels
 
There's a blue-eyed girl, with a red bow tie, a string of pearls, with one good eye
 
And a crow turns into a girl
And she tastes like the sea
 
And there's a rose upon her breast, where I long to lay my head.
And her hair was so yellow, and the wine was so red.
 
So close your eyes, open your heart to the one whose dreaming of you
 
If she ever loves another I'm gonna take morphine and die
 
Her hair was as blue black as a bucket of tar, skin as white as a cuttlefish bone
 
She left in the fall, that's her picture on the wall.
She always had a little drop of poison.
 
He loved the woman but she wouldn't stop screaming.
He stripped his woman, stripped her bare
 
I'll lose everything but I won't let go of your hand
 
She's a cheap motel with a burned out sign
 
Love is when opportunity meets with preparation
 
All you left me was a feather on an unmade bed

When I'd completed the Waits on Women research I wrote a poem about a frightening encounter I had in London last summer. There's lots more I want to write about women for this show, but for now here's something that I hope gives some insight into how scary it is to be female sometimes.

The One Who Got Away

It was down Seven Sisters road, on a balmy summer night
She'd walked that way a hundred times, and always been alright
Except this time the predators had all come out to play
The lights were bright, it was fight or flight
She's the one who got away
 
Passing by the bus stop, the first man blocked her path
He cornered her into the park, holding something sharp
She should've screamed then, come what may
Dodge that man, run as fast as you can
You'll be the one who got away
 
The next two were more passive, they simply chose to leer
They made sucking noises as she passed, still shaking with the fear
Here she comes, hey sexy what's your name
Choose to ignore, keep your eyes on the floor
You might be the one who got away
 
The last encounter was a group of three, shouting in her face
She'd given them a wide berth, expected something less
In any case by now there was nothing she could say
She was nearly home, her wits were blown
She had almost got away
 
Not that it should matter how she happened to be dressed
The clothes were super baggy, the hair a big old mess
It makes no difference how you look, or if it's night or day
You're still just meat, lone on the street
But this time, she's the one who got away
 
She swapped her high heels for boots some time ago
The alarm she wears not just for show
She'll make certain that she's not the one to blame
Maybe tonight's the night, she'll have to run for her life
I hope, she'll be the one that gets away

The first Robert Wilson production I saw was 'Woyzeck' at the Barbican, London in 2005. I probably would've overlooked it had the music not been composed by Tom Waits, and I've been hooked on his work ever since. He's known in theatre and opera for his architectural designs, musical collaborations and the abstract movement and stillness from the performers - so much so that seeing one of his productions is like viewing a series of moving images, and it's always a surreal experience.

:For about the last decade, Wilson has been creating a video series of Voom Portraits, or Living Pictures, where the actor is framed as if in a photo, but filmed so that the picture is 'living'. There is good documentary on youtube that explains it better than I can here.

There are hundreds of examples, and this one of my favourites:

As part of my final project at LISPA, I decided to conduct an experiment into Intoxication and how costume provokes the actor. The end result was a montage of Living Portraits featuring the other students on my course, which was projected during a movement sequence towards the end of the performance piece. Each participant was invited to my filming booth, set up in the corner of our rehearsal studio, given a shot of bourbon to smell or drink, and made-over as a Tom Waits character or theme. I didn't plan how I was going to transform each person, I relied on my instinct, after having a good look at the subject before me, and the costumes, props and make up I had available. After they had been appropriately costumed, I asked them to allow the way they now appeared to provoke them for 30 seconds in front of the camera. I cannot forget how willing and generous they all were, especially as most of them ended up looking quite deranged! I asked their permission to include the video here - if you listen with the sound on you'll be able to hear rehearsals going on the background, but for the authentic experience it's best to play 'In Shades' from the Tom Waits album Heartattack and Vine alongside the video.

Since the last blog post I've amounted 6 pieces of writing and 8 visual segments for the solo piece, and I have starting points for 3 more pieces of writing. I have no idea how they will fit together or come across yet, and there's still time...