17 / ranunculus, bouvardia, grevillea
Disquiet, joy, and FLORET | FEATURETTE, vol. 3. 🌷🍊💞
Hello.
Coming soon:
Short Films, out on October 27 💘🎞
Launching on:
October 27 (the day of release!) at 6pm, SOAP Dance Hall, 12 Beresford Square, Tāmaki Makaurau
November 1 at 6pm, Enjoy Contemporary Art Space, 211 Left Bank, Te Whanganui-a-Tara
I hope you’re having a good Labour Weekend, if applicable. I hope you’re well either way. I hope you’re having luck in small exchanges with strangers and that something on the street or in the garden strikes you as nostalgic, if only because the air meets you in the same way it did when you were a child, when everything felt large and endless.
I think it’s because we are hurtling ever closer to the inevitability that is the release of Short Films, but I’ve been feeling a distinct disquiet this past week and a half. It’s nothing to do with the book itself. I don’t even think it’s had one cause—except perhaps that kind of self-awareness that bubbles into self-examination that the imagined voices of family members and middle school friends tease further into self-centeredness. Which is probably just what happens when the brain turns focus on itself, anyway. Something cannibalistic in it, but imagining other people’s teeth.1
For the most part it’s just been sitting at my desk at work, for example—where, for context, I work in arts marketing, with a focus on digital—and feeling potently ill about my own relationship with social media. I’ve always said I want to delete all of my accounts as soon as I reach the point that my ability to get work isn’t hinging on them, but last Friday I found myself staring at my Instagram account and just thinking, This is clutter. I am clutter. I am cluttering. And none of this is new, of course—none of it is even original—but! It’s become particularly noticeable during this book period. Because my full-time job is in many ways to do the thing I ostensibly should be doing for myself right now, and it doesn’t feel disingenuous when it’s for the artists I spend most of my time doing it for, but it feels completely antithetical to how I want to approach my own work.
Every time I go to write an Instagram caption it’s like I’m dancing around in a little jester outfit going, I’m confident in my work but I am also fun and approachable and I don’t take myself too seriously and I am earnest but not in a way that should cringe you out and also I don’t care about any of this none of this charade has an effect on me social media is a fake landscape and don’t we all know it I promise I’m not desperate for you to buy my thing honestly how capitalist is this relationship with art and how gross but also this is my work and the arts are underfunded and undervalued and should I not want to devote time to the craft I do care about and in this society there are limited paths to that so this is my lot unless we wrench the whole thing wide open aren’t I goofy here are some emojis I’m not even thinking about this also teehee lol bye bye! And—you don’t need that. I don’t need that. It doesn’t help any of us. Plus, the thing is: I’m a writer. If I have something to say, you get it here, or you get it in my work, or we can talk about it if we encounter each other in person. But it’s this absurd adjacent performance that hit me in a huge wave last Friday, and it’s just like—no thanks. I don’t think I want to do it. And no one is forcing me to. Nobody even minds.
I’d also like to bring back photo albums, probably. I want to document my loved ones but I’d also like to keep them mine. No need to share them, or to curate them; no need to prove happiness is happening. I’d like to say Bring back elusiveness! but I also know people know this. And I’m very aware that these spiralling clutter-thoughts came bubbling to the surface at the same time my own interaction with Instagram has significantly increased—three guesses as to why. So I don’t want to be setting myself up a marketing scheme. I don’t want to gamify my relationship to the world, thanks. There’s a lot to be said about how social media has merged the personal, public, and professional, and how we’re in the midst of exponential digital growth ahead of a pendulum swinging back to level—perhaps. Anyway, we won’t get into it. Cavernous stuff.
The little Friday rupture was followed by a Saturday on which I walked through every retail establishment in Auckland CBD in an effort to purchase clothing and really just wound up psychoanalysing whether I felt inherently unworthy of occupying public space by 11:46am. Which was an exaggeration, I think—and tied up in a few other things. I made a couple of rare purchases, though.2 It ended up a win.
This is going to be a good week. The disquiet has ebbed, I assure you. Instead of enabling my tendency to balance all potential outcomes in my mind at once, three scripts per conversation and all their alts, like some resource-poor half-hearted Doctor Strange, I’m going to try just floating through it. Enjoy things until there’s concrete evidence as to why doing so will be scuppered, and then work through that without the fear that whatever has happened is indicative of some great character flaw or unsalvageable betrayal—because the reality is: it’s not. Things don’t have to be frantic. They don’t have to be cluttered, or desperate, or cloying. These are exciting times. These are exciting times, and they are good ones, and the days are getting longer with each one that arrives. And perhaps my extensive, well-documented clinging to joy is derived from a propensity to plan for the worst, but that’s why it’s important. Because there is so much joy, and such abundance.
I don’t just mean that for me. I know this newsletter has a lens that is almost myopic, and so much of what I’ve spoken of lately is this book—which is important to me—but I mean this for so much beyond that. Books come out, and that’s exciting. But other things are exciting, too. The moment you spot your friend on the street, walking toward each other. Recognising a song you love when it plays in a store. Going to sleep and knowing, when you wake up, you have the ingredients to make yourself a cup of something you’re going to enjoy. Finding the puzzle piece you needed. Clean socks. The shifting sky.
I’m going to market to you now, sorry. Fraught, maybe—but I did promise one more. I like to honour my word when I give it. I like to see things through. For what it’s worth, I put it together before I wrote any of the above. The beat may be a bit repetitive now. Regardless, here we are.
FLORET | FEATURETTE, vol. 3
The third and final FLORET | FEATURETTE. Lucky last. Graceful wave from departing vehicle. Goofy footpath goodbye. Fade to black—or else roll credits over a single unbroken take, all our characters fulfilled, and together, and in the world, which we see with increasing openness, dollying out, away, until what we’ve been so anchored in is revealed as a tiny piece of something larger, but no less important, never, never, never; and we know them and we love them; and we return to our own lives, small, too, and the greatest ever. Lights up.
i.
ii.
iii.
iv.
Two acting exercises I encountered in rehearsal rooms in 2019:
a question and answer exercise in which the director read out a series of questions, ranging from favourite foods to core motivations, to a group of actors who were not expected to give a response aloud, but simply to lie on their backs on the floor of the darkened room, to take the questions in, and to think on them3
the heat and weight analogy (what are the stakes in the setting? in the relationship between these characters? in the space that exists there?)4
v.
See you Thursday. Promising that.
T
The reality is, of course, that no one is ever thinking about you as much as you fear that they might be. And not everybody spends so much time with the minutiae of you, or of themselves; not everybody is as concerned with being observant, not everybody is scripting, not everybody is mining for that perfect Dickensian revelatory detail, not everybody is Nick Carrawaying—or being Nick Carr-ied-away.
Not everybody is searching for the bad faith reading, either. It’s exhausting constantly trying to preempt that; to get to it first, so no one can accuse you of not being aware of it. Of your shortcomings, of self-indulgence, of whatever else. Equally, this insecurity requires you—us, me—to act with bad faith against, let’s be honest, our loved ones. To assume they’re predisposed to think the worst of us, or that they wouldn’t offer us grace, or kindness, or understanding. Mostly, the people close to us want to love us, and want us to love them. And vice versa, of course, of course.
Perhaps due to the fact I am a pop-culture-invested woman in her 20s, Instagram (here she is again!!! Notorious!!!) has recently been serving me up reels of Austin Butler. And, look: Tom Eerebout and Sandra Amador, his stylists for this recent Elvis press tour—absolutely incredible. Love it, thanks, that’s what we’re channelling from this point on.
I wasn’t acting in this particular production, but that same year I was performing somewhere else, and the director had us lie on our backs on the stage as part of a warm-down, and I was genuinely struck by how relaxing I found it. I’m sure the fact it was an open air theatre helped; there was something very grounding about the sense of place. But these exercises do make me think about how much of acting is associated with embodiment, not unlike the way sports are, and really perhaps the soothed feeling I get from this concerted bodily presence is just basic mindfulness, which I am (with the exception of sporadic three-hour-long walks) chronically terrible at engaging in. I’m sure there’s some marketing slogan about mindful vs. mind full. Anyway, the lying-flat-on-my-back-undisturbed-in-a-public-place thing crops up in another poem. Not so frequently in my day-to-day life.
Two more small notes about this rehearsal room:
Distance is everything. Everything. The closer those two characters ought to be emotionally, the farther apart they should be on the stage. Even and especially if they are alone. Let theatre do what film and television cannot. Let the expanse exist between them. It isn’t empty. It isn’t empty. Hold it as long as you can. There’s more in that distance, dramatically, than anything you’ll find from careening over the edge.
I’m conflating rehearsal room and production here, but there’s a nod to one of the directors in one of the Short Films poems. I’ve only been texted from the audience—by a director—once in the years I’ve stage managed. That’s not to pass judgement at all (it was in-keeping, all up, with the experience we’d had putting the show together). She’s one of my favourite directors, by the by. We’ll be working together again soon.