dustseeing

Seamus Finnigan meets the Derry Girls.

a little unpleasant, being a citizen of russia to see posts by famous ppl on instagram about the amazon. when we had a burned half of the country (all of siberia and the cities close to it) and the fires dont cease to this day, none of the popular people spoke about it. the tragedy in the amazon is the same terrible situation as in russia but my country as usual is simply not on the map and it is not worth paying attention to

i remind u: three million hectares of forest were in fire

by the end of july, the burning forest area exceeded 3 million hectares and many cities were shrouded in smog, which made it difficult for local residents to breathe.

sespite the scale of the fires, for a long time the ministry of emergency situations and regional authorities did not carry out active actions to extinguish the forest. they explained this decision by the fact that it is "economically unprofitable" to fight such fires, since there is no threat to people and infrastructure on these lands. later, the governor of krasnoyarsk region alexander uss called the idea to extinguish the forest "meaningless and even harmful"

the words of my relatives, "it is impossible to live normally. headache, sore throat. four-year-old daughter coughs directly until vomiting. hands and feet itch at all. that's just the same kind of let – last week the smoke in the same krasnoyarsk covered, so gone at last. and again on a new! Is it desperation to just cry. u will not believe it: i got up at night to check the baby's breath, afraid that she was not breathing."

our president p*tin is an asshole. i wish him death and the same torment that the people of our country have endured for 20 years. the country is almost a revolution, people are put and beaten, the authorities consider my life "economically unprofitable" (i am not even close to these fires bc i live in the capital of the country, but my friends and relatives suffered for almost a month and a half). i can be fined for my opinion, because we do not have freedom of speech, in november, our country is likely to be disconnected from the world Internet. in order to destroy any arguments that the people themselves choose the president: we have no fair and open elections, it's all a mirage. if the municipal election is happening in the nightmare, something about presidential elections, i am silent. everything goes to absolute hell, almost totalitarianism behind "democracy". this man sits on the throne for 20 years, we don't have a replaceable power. endless hypocrisy, corruption, devastation, poverty and misery.

Face: And a lot of love.

But what about the verses in Genesis? Leviticus? Romans? How do you explain….? What about…? Then someone else counters with Galatians and David and Jonathan and Jesus and the Centurion’s servant. And the wheel spins on.

I know how badly you want a simple, clear, 100% unquestioned answer. 

It doesn’t exist. 

There are a million reasons it doesn’t exist (language, translation, culture, etc.) but the root of it all is that it doesn’t exist because the Bible isn’t a singular text of rules. It’s not a history book or a science book. Hell, it’s not even A BOOK. 

It’s a library of books all written by different people in different time periods. Different Scriptures argue with other Scriptures. They contradict each other. They are in dialogue with each other. 

And if all of THAT weren’t confusing enough add in the countless scholars throughout centuries that have disagreed and fought and punched each other (for real) and called each other names. They ALL had different interpretations of what texts meant. 

“SO what? Do we throw it out? You must not take the Bible seriously!”

I actually take the Bible very seriously. I’ve devoted my life to the study of it. And it’s BECAUSE I take it so seriously that I refuse to let it be reduced to a simplified rulebook. I refuse to let it be used to condemn people it doesn’t condemn. I refuse to let it be mistreated and used as a weapon.

Just because there are no simple answers doesn’t mean the text is worthless. Instead it’s a collection of poetry, stories, songs, and more that are written by real people in real places at real points in history. They are struggling to make sense of their place in the world and their relationship with the Divine. It’s gritty and messy and filled with mistakes because that’s what it means to be human.

But it’s also filled with immense beauty, with passion, with struggle. It tells the story of a people struggling with who’s in and who’s out (and a God who is always calling them toward more inclusion). It’s the story of a people who struggle with what it means to do justice (especially in the face of Exile and Empire). It’s the story of a people who struggle to make the presence of God known through how they behave. 

The Bible still has immense relevance today but only if you read it the way it was meant to be read, not as a rulebook full of easy to understand facts but as a testament to the human struggle to connect with God and do right by each other. 

And let me tell you, if you can get off of the “BUT WHAT ABOUT AHHHHHHHH….” hamster wheel you will uncover such beauty and depth and the Bible will be so much richer. 

Shakespeare’s Globe produces new plays?

Jessica Lusk is our Literary Manager. She is responsible for the research and development of all our new writing. Lucky her! If you came to see Emilia in 2018 you can thank Jessica in part for that.

In this blog she explains why and how we commission new plays at Shakespeare’s Globe. If you’re a budding playwright this is essential reading. 

The Globe has always been a new writing venue. It’s hard to believe now but Shakespeare was a new writer once, and The Globe I write from now, (the third Globe) is still a new writing venue today.

Our first brand new play was seen by enthusiastic audiences back in 2002, it was called The Golden Ass by Peter Oswald – an adaptation of a Roman Classic – with a cast of 30 actors playing almost 200 different characters, with puppetry, opera and mini-scooters… it was certainly not a case of starting small!

Since then we have produced almost 40 new plays, for both the Globe and the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, including Jessica Swale’s Nell Gwynn, Howard Brenton’s Anne Boleyn, Che Walker’s The Frontline, Claire van Kampen’s Farinelli and the King, and most recently Morgan Lloyd Malcolm’s Emilia. They’ve played here, in the West End and on Broadway, as well as on tour around the UK.

Now, as we enter our 22nd year, the process of commissioning and developing new work is getting a shake-up. Shakespeare wrote his plays specifically for the Lord Chamberlain’s Men and for the playhouses they performed in, and once they had passed the censor then it was left to the audience to decide their worth.

We want to take this as our guide: to work with writers and produce exciting new plays written bespoke to the architecture they will be performed in. We will give writers the space and time to work with our academics and research team, spend time with our actors, see plays in our theatres, experiment with and learn from the architectural playing conditions of our two theatres, the practitioners who work in them, and ultimately write a play bespoke to those theatres.

We’re calling this idea ‘The Scriptorium’, hearkening back to the medieval idea of a space devoted to writing, but more on that another time…!

Our cause is to celebrate and interrogate Shakespeare’s transformative impact on the world - and where can that impact be more felt than in the writers of today…. Artistic descendants of this extraordinary shaman.

Our aim is to programme and produce new work within a season of Shakespeare’s plays that support and complement each other. For example, we programmed Emilia in a season of Shakespeare’s plays in which the character of Emilia threads her way through several stories – Othello, The Winter’s Tale and The Two Noble Kinsmen. These plays provided an opportunity and framework to reflect on the myriad influences this ‘Dark Lady’ may have had on Shakespeare’s imagination, but crucially in Emilia, Morgan Lloyd Malcolm placed this revolutionary poet right where she is meant to be – at the centre of her own story.

At the beginning of 2019 we hosted our first ever new writing festival: responses to our winter production of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. The central Faustian bargain has traditionally been associated with the male ‘soul’, and so, we commissioned six female writers to give a feminine response to the central provocation at the heart of Doctor Faustus that asks 'what would you sell your soul for?’ The responses were surprising, revealing, funny and truly moving, and the reaction from the audiences were similar. To have an opportunity to see how  classic plays sit in conversation with brand new ones is so exciting, and this festival of writing is something we want to do again and again, bigger and even better.

During the festival we experimented with different performance spaces and found that there’s so much more to play with than just a traditional stage. The Globe’s ‘Tiring House’ (where you would put on your ‘attire’ before a performance) makes a beautifully intimate and immediate playing space that created a ‘pop-up’ element to our first new writing festival. So, watch this space, and lots of other spaces around the building. 

If you’re a writer, here are a few things to bear in mind:

One of the exciting things that writers find here is that the Globe theatre demands writing that is truly active, epic and democratic. The audience can be your biggest supporter or your harshest critic: roughly half of a Globe audience is standing, and they’ve only paid five pounds, so if they don’t like something, they can – and do – leave!

The Globe invites live and direct communication with its audience. It also responds brilliantly to declarations of huge shifts in space and time – think of Antony and Cleopatra where we move between Egypt and Rome again and again so swiftly, with nothing more than a different set of characters coming on to tell us that we have changed continent.

And as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name.

-  A Midsummer Night’s Dream

The space is the concept. The dramaturgy and structure of the play can be inspired by the necessity and parameters of the stage as much as the narrative that drives it forward. There are no sets, no amplified sound, no black outs – it’s a space that is completely shared with play, player and audience. And above us all is the sky. It’s a vertical as well as horizontal space. It’s mythic and domestic. It’s a tabula rasa that allows for an experiment in form as much as content, and that is a challenge our writers say they love to rise to.

Although Shakespeare himself has popped up in one or two of our new plays over the years, he’s not in himself the most interesting subject matter. Shakespeare wrote about Kings and Queens, faeries and myths, fools and twins, but what he really wrote about was the human condition. We want to find our new Shakespeares. Writers with big ideas that speak to a contemporary audience. 

How to develop a play for Shakespeare’s Globe

We don’t accept unsolicited scripts, mainly because we’re not looking for finished, polished plays. Instead we want to support writers as you develop your plays bespoke to our playhouses.

If you’re a writer with an idea for the Globe please don’t spend your precious free time writing something without being paid for it! 

Instead send us the pitch, invite us to your shows, or rehearsed readings, or send us scripts you’ve written in the past, but please do not send us your new plays written for the Globe. Our space is full of ‘airy nothing’ that invites you to speak to it and to fill it with your imagination; all we need is you, your poet’s pen and your big idea.

If you would like to invite us to see your work performed please email us on [email protected]. The subject line should read: Invitation/Pitch (New Writing).

all roots, including potatoes, are goblin food

mushrooms are goblin food too

meat, especially dried meat or offal

all junk food is goblin food

macaroni cheese is goblin food even if you used fancy ass ingredients to make it. in fact all large helpings of pasta are goblin

anything eaten at 3am is goblin food

anything thrown out/slated to be thrown out becomes goblin food

anything made from leftovers is DEFINITELY goblin food

We must not buy their fruits: 

Who knows upon what soil they fed