Dublin Fringe Festival opens tomorrow and among the visiting companies will be the innovative North American ensemble SaBooge. Writer Jodi Essery tells Belinda McKeon about bringing the troubled spirit of Billy the Kid to the stage.
He lived his life outside of the law, seared his path through borders and boundaries. He was thought to have killed a man for each year of his life: 21 bullets, 21 corpses, 21 stories never fully told. In 1970, almost a century after his death, he came back to life in the pages of Michael Ondaatje's book, The Collected Works of Billy the Kid. It was an extraordinary book for an extraordinary life; a collage of prose and poetry, a mishmash of clippings and diary entries, a fictional flashlight that made for a light more stark and more vivid than the narratives of history, of reality, could ever provide. This text was fragmentary, but not flimsy. It was innovative, but rooted in the image and its importance. It was urbane, but saturated with unembarrassed emotion. So, unsurprisingly, when it found its way into the hands of one of North America's most interesting theatre collectives, the Montreal- and Brooklyn-based company, SaBooge, strange sparks began to fly.
"It's odd, really, because we didn't want to make a cowboy show," laughs Jodi Essery, who adapted Ondaatje's text into the script of SaBooge's new show, Every Day Above Ground, which will tour to the Project Theatre later this month as part of the Dublin Fringe Festival.
The company has been to Dublin twice before, with two memorable, unusual pieces of work: Hatched, the story of a woman with wings, in 2003, and Fathom, a tragedy set in colonial Tasmania, which won Best Production at the 2004 Dublin Fringe Festival. Every Day Above Ground, an early draft of which was presented in Brooklyn earlier this year, and which has just played in Philadelphia, is another strikingly original work, both visually and textually. Directed by Adrienne Kapstein, with sound design by Jeff Lorenz, it presents the outlaw in death, reckoning with the deaths of those he has killed. The effect, as actors move through a dusky dreamworld of hidden entrances, unseen faces and sudden surfacings, was, in the Brooklyn performance, at once deeply moving and brilliantly chilling.
Naturally, however, this piece is original in a different way from the previous two, with Ondaatje's text running through it as a seam. The company arrived at that text in a strange, intuitive way, says Essery: every time they met to discuss possibilities for a new show, Ondaatje's ghostly words, the flotsam and jetsam of Billy's imagined inner world, kept returning. In fact, it became so persistent a presence in their conversations, Essery recounts, that the company began to work with it even before the pragmatics of using it - the legal pragmatics, that is - had been fully sorted out. Its draw was just too strong.
"We thought, at first, that we would write and see if the rights were available to the book, and that if they were, we would use it as a source text," she says. "And while we were waiting - it proved a much longer process than we had anticipated - the book came more and more into our consciousness. We had started to work with it and read it together, and it became clear that we really wanted it to be our next piece. So we knew that unless we got the rights, we would do something else entirely."
Luckily, the response from the author was a positive one. Not only did he grant the rights, but he met Essery and her collaborators on a couple of occasions as the piece began to take shape. He offered the company his encouragement, but crucially, he also granted them the distance and freedom to make of his text what they would, "which was the permission that we needed to use it as a jumping-off point rather than a kind of bible that we were bound to", according to Essery.
"He read the draft for the Brooklyn workshop production and was very positive about it, and felt that we were on to the right track with it. He wanted to see where our voice would go with the piece, said that he trusted us and would like to see what happened with it. So he's going to check in on the piece again in a couple of months [ it tours to Montreal and Manhattan after the Dublin run]."
Ondaatje's endorsement is all the more impressive when the full extent of what the company is doing with his text is considered.
ESSERY ISN'T JUST talking in catchphrases when she says that The Collected Works has served as a departure point rather than a bible. The piece is a variation on, rather than a version of, the book, with actor improvisations mixed in with lines from the book, and language slipping and sliding between voices in a deviation from Ondaatje's ringfencing of characters in Billy's life. Though Every Day Above Ground is billed as an adaptation, it's as different from straightforward adaptation as a piece of theatre can be; rather, it comes across like an incredible dream. The dream, that is, of a troubled, guilt-plagued consciousness which has fallen into a fitful sleep while reading Ondaatje's text and which, for some reason, has found itself locked into the reawakening of a complex soul that was not ready, all those years ago in New Mexico, to die.
"I guess because SaBooge is so character-based in the way that we create work, finding the right voices for each character is really important to us," says Essery. "So if there's an image from the book that works, we give it to whichever character's mouth it seems to fit in. Because, otherwise, we found as we started to adapt it that a lot of the characters just sounded the same. Because they were all Michael Ondaatje's poetic voice, which works beautifully in the book, but when you put it on stage, with actual people, there is a sameness that descends over it."
So one of the first things Essery and the other company members did with the text was to work with Ondaatje's characters and find individual voices for them.
"That way, working with the text, the actors weren't just reciting it verbatim," she says. "They were trying, instead, to filter it through the character and see how it would come out the other end."
Why does Essery think that the life of Billy the Kid pushed itself on the company so doggedly as it was working to come up with a new show? She feels it has something to do with a floating, not fully articulated sense of culpability, of remorse and responsibility, that had found its way into their collective consciousness.
"We had been talking a lot about guilt, and about confession, and about feelings that you might have, unrequited feelings of not having had an opportunity to really have any perspective on your own life while you were living it," Essery explains. "He was so young and he went out believing . . . we just wanted to give him a sense of self-reflection, and see what kind of a journey he would have to go on with the characters in the book, with the poetic images, in order to reach a state of self-reflection.
"The book seemed to speak to us about his inner life, the strangenesses of that inner life, the complexities of it. And we saw an opportunity to kind of put the lens of death over the top of a figure that's quite well-known from history and see what would happen if we travelled beyond his death. Not in the living world, but in his own world. Because it's clear what happened to his myth in the world after he died, but we wanted to take him as a character and see what would have happened to that character in his own mind, in the moment after he realised that he was dead."
THE PIECE REFLECTS the fascinations that emerged for the company while working together on it: the vast expanses of the desert, the reappearance of things long buried, and the grotesque results of taxidermy and of the work of the early frontier photographers, who captured something much more than lost moments and unsure faces in their muddy ferrotypes, their phony backdrops, their eerie flashbulbs blazing like guns. The attraction, says Essery, was to "something less linear" than was created with the previous shows - though Hatched and Fathom could hardly be described, by any stretch of the imagination, as straight plays.
"We wanted to explore the idea that people can be many things in many moments, and that this doesn't lead to a conflict, but that the accumulation of those things comes to a complex whole," Essery says. "We don't want to simplify the collage, but to let people feel it on some emotional level, which is, maybe, more subconscious than it is narrative."
Every Day Above Ground has, as a show, already been many things in many moments, and the company intends to keep reworking the piece until its final performance at PS122 in New York next February. It's not that its run in Dublin, and its other appearances, are mere test runs for that performance, however; rather, that the ethic of reimagining is central to the way the company creates theatre. That a piece should be unfinished is not, for SaBooge, a cause for panic. Rather, it is a space for spontaneity and originality.
"We always try to make a production out of wherever we are at a given time," says Essery. "Every time we put something up, it's part of the thrill to re-map it, to take another look at it, crack it open. Devised work changes every time you put it in a room. Depending on where you're at and where the group consciousness is at. So I think that this piece is going to continue to evolve."
- SaBooge's Every Day Above Ground will run at Project Upstairs from Mon, Sep 18 to Sat, Sep 23.
