Hi, Thanks for coming.
I thought I’d start with some background to this series. So you’re lucky you’re at the first one because subsequent audiences will miss out.
I have always been talkative. My parents and teachers that I could talk to anyone about anything. I claim I was born middle-age. I was certainly precocious. I still have a heavy tome called The Manual for Sedimentary Structures that I bought when I was 8. I was into rocks and animals from an early age. Every holiday we would drive to Castlemaine where my grandparents lived, from wherever far flung construction town we were living in at the time. And the special treat was to go to Stoneman’s book shop in Castlemaine. It’s still there.
As well as books on Natural History, I read all the Enid Blyton’s I could get my hands on. I still get a charge if I think there might be a secret island or a cave somewhere. I guess that fed into my passion for doing new climbs, for exploring. As I got older I read Science Fiction. Those 1950s to 1970s SF books were amazing. The imagination of those writers is rarely surpassed. That period culminated in 1974 when I read Harlan Ellison’s A Boy and his Dog which was in some anthology of 70s Science Fiction, the ones with the yellow covers. His speculative fiction was incredible. As was his anger with the way the environment was being treated. His introduction to Approaching Oblivion, called Reaping the Whirlwind, remains with me as a classic of dissent. Similarly, his story Silent in Gehenna, where the protagonist continues to protest despite knowing his cause is futile, I think summed up my life before I’d even lived it.
But I had no wish to be a writer, or an artist. At the age of 14 I got into rockclimbing and that would be a major passion for the rest of my life, still. I was never very good at it, and got scared too easily, but I have to do it. It embodies me. It is how I know I am in the world.
I have a friend Jack, who features in a few of these monologues. We met in primary school and because our parents worked on similar projects we ended up living together in three separate towns and going to the same schools. My technique for coping with new schools was to be funny. To tell jokes. I worked on the theory that if people are laughing with me they weren’t laughing at me. This did not always walk.
Did I mention the background is most of this monologue? No, sorry.
On TV at the time was the English TV show, The Dave Allen Show, as well as other English comedies. I hated Benny Hill. But Dave Allen was the consummate joke teller. He understood the ebb and flow of the tide that is joke telling, he had exceptional comic timing, and he did a mean Irish drunk/catholic accent. I still remember many Dave Allen jokes, such as the Wide Mouthed Frog joke. I think my brain was in a formative state at the time, and his Irish brogue rewired the synapses into some kind of joke-telling pattern.
In my last years of school I was a focused science student, though perhaps not too focused. In 6th form I spent more time telling jokes, drinking and thinking about girls than studying. I had an arrangement with my English teacher that I did not come to class, and others got work done. I approached my pure math’s teacher with same arrangement and he said yes. Sadly my Applied Math’s teacher, who was also my Chemistry teacher, and my Physics teacher, did not go for the deal. I’d worked out that to get into a New South Wales University all I had to do in Victoria was pass. So I was slack, but I almost blew it. A pass was 50. I got 50, 51, 53, 56, and 63. The 56 was for English, not an auspicious start for a career in Literature.
Jack introduced me to rock-climbing, on the cliffs around Nowra where we were living. He and I had arranged to go New England University because of its reputation with Natural Sciences and because it was surrounded with bush, and as it turned out, had an active climbing scene.
Needless to say that the climbing scene was so good that it severely impacted on our university studies. Ironically Geology was a subject both Jack and I failed. I think we have a science degree between us.
Several important things happened at Armidale however. I met Mark Colyvan and Dr Brian Birchall. Mark was my age and though he didn’t look it, knew more about punk music than I did. Brian was older. He lectured in philosophy at the Uni and was a Hegelian. In our campfire society, I learnt that I was a natural born raconteur. I also learnt that I needed to understand what Brian, another natural born raconteur and bon vivant, was talking about. Mark obviously felt the same need. He is now the Chair of Philosophy at Sydney University and an awesome intelligence. Although, I have never understood his obsession with the Beatles.
The other thing that happened was I started a small photocopied climbing magazine, what today has the fashionable term Zine. The first one was described by a friend’s feminist girl friend scathingly as 1st Year Boarding School humour. And in hindsight, how right she was. It was called the Monthly Rag, and was described as a periodical for the C.U.N.Ts, the climbing union of the North Tableland. Well may you groan. It is nothing I am proud of. And I promise that is the most sexist thing, and possibly the most offensive joke that will come up in the course of these monologues.
Surprisingly, for a young male, I was quiet piqued by the comments, particularly as the feminist girlfriend’s boyfriend was a major contributor to the conversation that had given rise to the Zine, and clearly had not admitted this.
I then produced another Zine with title Screamer, which is a climbing colloquialism for a very large fall. It had poetry in it. Admittedly drunken pub poetry, but some of it stands the test of time. Some photos, quotable quotes, and I think I wrote my first adult short story.
So just to refresh, in dot points, which I learnt much later in life. In fact I set down with some textas and butchers paper early and wrote them down. Clearly too long in the world of Arts Administration.
- My brain is hard wired in some way that remembers jokes and the art of telling them.
- My brain does the same to anecdotes and stories. I love to tell stories to people.
- I was interested in natural science, the environment and philosophy.
- I had embarked on an embryonic writing and publishing career.
- I was passionate about rockclimbing.
There’s a SWOT analysis on the other side if you want to see?
There are two dot points that aren’t on the list but that were evident to me from this period, but I can’t track them back to an amusing anecdote.
I suffer from melancholia. What has been professionally diagnosed as dysthymia, permanent low grade depression. However, I refuse to validate the Depression – Beyond Blue, by using that that word to describe myself.
Hand in hand with this is a feeling of not belonging in the world. Of seeing everything as if refracted.
Wow, that brought the room down. It’s OK. I’m not going to dwell on those aspects of my psychology, or at least not in this monologue.
Shall I tell the Wide Mouthed Frog joke to break the mood?
Now we track forwards thirty something years. I have a PhD in literature, and environmental ethics, a field called Ecocriticism. But I also have a Masters in Visual Art in Shadows and Performance. And I begin to think about how this came about? Most of my peers came straight out of schools and got into theatre, and it has been their passion. They are younger, more skilled and more experienced than me. They also have a better professional reputation.
So the question were why did I want to perform? What form was that going to take? Was there a place for me in the contemporary theatre industry? And that demon question all performers face, would anyone come and see me? And enjoy it?
There’ll be an evaluation sheet available on the way out. Or you can log on and do the Survey Monkey.
I looked back at my life. As I said, I was always a bullshit artist. A friend once said that I could tell the story of an easy climb and have everyone’s palms sweating. I was accused of embellishing the truth, hell I was accused of lying. I will admit to the former charge. Campfire conversation is one of the oldest art forms in the world, and still occurs in many cultures. Joe Strummer discovered it late in his life.
I spent ten years rock-climbing and living in camps. At night, there was not much to do. There were little to no women and most of us were heterosexuals. While there was daylight and often after we invented bizarre games, that often hurt people. But after we calmed down, we would drink and the conversation would move fast. Rockclimbing was an oral culture, and a lot of probably still is. We had all read the books from early in the century, of the 50s and the exploits in the Mountains. Some of those at the campfire would go onto to equal such exploits. Some never returned to the fire. Rock-climbing was still a new sport in the early 80s and its mythopoesis was still being created. Myself and a few others were the story-tellers, those that kept the fire side group entertained into the night.
I started working as a Climbing Guide and learnt a lot about teaching in that situation. The first rule is gain their attention and their respect and then work from there. This has stood me well in university classrooms and with my work with youth with poor literacy and numeracy skills.
Another monologue, is about another performative aspect of my life, hitchhiking. I have claimed that I was Australia’s Greatest Hitchhiker, but on reflecting on my performing it occurs to me that this was also my greatest performance, 10 years of intimate conversations, of putting people at ease so they would let me stay in the car, keeping them entertained to either keep them awake or so they would let me stay in the car.
The third aspect of my life that has been performative is my teaching. I say that my teaching is a cross between teaching and stand-up comedy. Not-surprisingly, some of actor training I have done has helped my teaching and presentation skills.
In 2006 I crossed the line. I asked my friend Anna if she would do a performance with me inside a visual art piece I had made, the Sistine Fieldbin – or Greg Chapel. I had turned a large 5m bin for keeping wheat into a church. Every artist wants to make a church don’t they?
I figured we could perform inside, and project the performance outside in real time. This way I would be confident enough to do it. I did a number of performances with Anna, behind puppets, inside cubes, always hiding. I learnt a lot about theatre from Anna who was one of those people who had matured in theatre. She had worked all around the world and done all sorts of training. Not only did we do that, but she encouraged me to do other workshops. I did a Stomp with Zen Zen Zo in Melbourne and Viewpoints there. I have done more since.
In 2012 I did a solo performance on a remote salt lake. There was nothing separating me from the audience.
Since then we have been trying to put together a show that neither of us will perform in. It is an audaciously technological with another friend Dave, one of Australia’s greatest geek. Unfortunately, despite some successes that have allowed us to advance the idea and the technology we have not been able to bring this show to it’s completion. If anyone out there has a spare 100k meet me after the show.
Which brings me back to the questions I asked. Why did I want to perform? What form was that going to take? Was there a place for me in the contemporary theatre industry? And that demon question.
I discovered in conversation once that Anna and I both have the same, what she calls a ‘ghost hobby’, more of a terrifying dream, to be a stand-up comic. I have had a taste of that and it feels good but I’m not sure I’m cut out for that gig. Despite my encyclopedic memory for jokes, and an allright delivery, I’ve got lazy, that is not what people go to see for comedians for anymore. I would have been better in the days of Tommy Cooper and Morecombe and Wise.
Eric Morecombe. “Every Sunday my dog and I go for a tramp in the woods. The dog really enjoys it, but the tramp is beginning to get a bit annoyed.”
Sorry, that just slipped out.
Which brings me to the Monologues. One of my favourite performers was Spalding Grey. I didn’t realize until recently when I did a Richard Schechner Masterclass in Brisbane what an amazing actor he was in his youth. Dionysis 69. Awesome. Spalding killed himself by jumping into the East River in 2004 at the age of 63.
I came to him though his writing, and his monologues. He wrote one about having an eye operation which a friend gave me after a similar event. I laughed, I cried, I lived through my pain again through his pain.
So I have long thought that the Monologue might be the form that suited me, if (and it is a big if) if I could remember the lines. Anyone in the audience who is an actor knows that learning a long monologue is one of the hardest script memorization tasks in theatre, you can not get cues from the other actors. And you are entirely responsible for it’s presentation.
And the other big if, and this is another one of those demon questions, did I have anything interesting to say?
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