I Told You This Would Happen - On Tour

Hello.

I'm going to put some thoughts about touring I Told You This Would Happen here because this show is really hard, and also really brilliant to perform.

I can't promise there won't be spoilers. So if you haven't seen the show and plan to, read on at your own risk. If you like knowing what's going to happen before they do, maybe join a group or something, because life happens man.

Thursday 28 May

We opened in Hull last night. Part of the story I'm telling happened in Hull. I realised as the Humber Bridge loomed from behind the bend of the M62 that I hadn't been back since. Good, I decided. I'm back on my own terms. Frankie's Tavern, the docks, the station. Still, good. 

The tech didn't finish until 19:40, I was on at 20:00. Less good. (Nobody's fault, brilliant and patient technicians getting to grips with a technically nuanced show). Lounged at the desk, sharpening my pencils, feeling more in the room than I remember feeling during the previews. Back then, I was deafened by my heart gulping in my ears, tonight I'm enjoying the pre-show music.

Clearance, first move, start talking: to the people in the room Kathryn. There are people here to hear you. I don't want to be here, I don't want to do this (I'm talking though, the words are coming out, in the right order). I feel this to a certain extent with every show, it's a hard story to tell, I have to get to a dark place by the end, and at the beginning that feels like a crazy thing to be volunteering myself for. But it's written in such a way that the play just happens to me, and the more I let it, the better it is. There was a catharsis when I wrote it, and there is in the playing too. 

I make eye contact with a couple in the front row, there's an interesting woman on the end, another older couple further stage right, a man I come to silently refer to as 'the reviewer' for reasons unknown to me, and a sporty looking man in the middle, on his own, possibly straight from the gym, what made him book this? I wonder. He's precisely who I want to have this conversation with tonight. Come on then, you're on.

Off to Halifax this morning. Raging thirst. 

Me: There's a retail park behind this roundabout, I'm just going to pop in there, want anything?

Tech: You really do know Hull then.

Me: Yeah.

In Boots: all Boots shops look the same except when you're a time traveller and it's 2007 and that's not the pharmacist you remember. 

Bought some vocal zones, because I'm here for a show. Still good.

Tech: So was it just coincidence then, that the tour started in Hull?

Me: Yeah. 

I slip Dr John into the cd player. Nicked my boyfriend's car cd case before I left. Feels good to be blasting some good blues as we zip up the flyover, past the Humber churning mud. 
Feels good to be playing music I listen to with someone brilliant. Feels good to be doing this on my own terms, and not on my own.

Halifax is lovely.

Friday 29 May

The get-in in Halifax made me want to take up smoking. The anticipation of performing filled my stomach with acid, at twenty to curtain up I'm having that kind of full body flush usually reserved for being sick. 

The show was fun though. Endless technical hitches gave my relationship with the space a live quality that allowed me to play, and we got some nice laughs.

I learnt I don't need feedback. I asked my producers to send out a feedback form with the programme sheet. What was I thinking?! People can have whatever reaction they want to this show, and frankly it's none of my business. 

Toying with the idea of collating any feedback I get and posting it to Douglas McPherson in a glass box with a big TICK painted on the side of it. 

Dear #tigerdouglas, 
Here is some testimony of what subsidised art means to people in rural communities and anywhere else that isn't ONE POSTCODE IN LONDON (who wouldn't see work like this or anything else without subsidy). 
A bientôt,
Beaumont x

PS. Turns out Capitalism isn't an entirely fair system and money has a funny way of making its way back to the same people. Measuring success on ticket revenue is a bit like the star rating system some of you critic types still go in for - pretty fucking arbitrary and entirely based on the bias of the critic or system.

And just one measure of many.

And I'm getting off topic.

Saturday 30 May

Cleaner show on the tech side of things meant it was easier for last night's audience to join the dots, and they were wonderfully with me through the whole thing. Chipping in with 'yeah's and 'oh no's. Looking forward to tonight, and a whole day in sunny Hexham with no get-in.

Tuesday 2 June

There's a thing that happens about two thirds of the way through the show, after we've had a few laughs, and around about the time of the 'fucking' slide, when people stop looking at me. Maybe it's counter transference on my part, but it feels a bit like I've betrayed them with what our relationship is about. I'm really pleased with this as a dynamic. It enacts the subject matter. 

To the woman who cried. I am sorry, but I hope it helped.

Doncaster tomorrow.

And now through the medium of interpretive dance...

I'm more used to considering 'the medium of interpretive dance' as a punchline than something I might actually do.

I've gotten stitches since I was a kid. Not sure when they started, but the most memorable was during sport's day when I was 8. One of the kids in the year below drew a picture of me lying on the track as his assignment on 'Sports Day'. My adorably sensitive neighbour came to tell me, lest I spot it on the noticeboard outside their classroom and be upset. 'A girl fell over'.

Curious thing is I was quite a good sprinter, I did a fair bit of dance in my extra curricular activities and had strong legs. The year before Mam had videoed me in the relay: we pasted the competition: 'you were so far out front I couldn't keep the other kids in the frame'. 

It got to the point last year when I was getting stitches while driving. A car. It was because I'd stopped breathing, I do that sometimes. It's a way I let myself know I'm stressed, or more to the point, it's a way my body let's the me in charge, the me that lives in my head, that firmly believes in mind over matter, that can make my body-self feel things by thinking them into being, it's how my body let's that me know she's maybe a little bit stressed.

And breathing, well you're not supposed to think about that are you? It just happens automatically. If I were to hyperventilate due to my stitch and pass out, my body would regulate my breathing while I was out for the count. Try not thinking about something you know you're not supposed to think about because it might have terrible, embarrassing consequences. Don't think about cocks. Now don't picture the last cock you saw in curious detail, I'm being serious here, whatever you do put the image of that great big chicken down. Sometimes, if I catch it early enough, I can talk my diaphragm down from the precipice. Breathe in 2, 3, out 2, 3. You're ok, you're, you're ok. (I was recently given the brilliantly sensible advice of concentrating on the out breath, because as we've already covered, your body is all tooled up to deal with the in-breath thing on it's own).

Anyway, long story short a few too many instances of 'I can't breathe, I can't breathe', the familiar stabbing pain in my ribs, tightening of the windpipe, rising panic, soon abbreviates itself to 'I can't breathe, I can't b-. I can't-. I can't.' And so I don't do as much exercise as I would like, for fear that I can't.

It's no coincidence that my psychotherapy course has recently taken a swerve toward neuroscientific study of the brain in the body: how the body thinks and the brain feels. So this year's resolution, late and only half made for fear that I can't, is to start a revolution in my body politics: no more shall mind rule over matter. I've promised myself a reconciliation between the limbs and organs that exist beneath my head and the 'me' that floats above. 

So my first audition of the year came right on cue: as things do once you open yourself up to an idea. The Mayers Ensemble is a cross discipline experiment run by dancer, choreographer and theatre maker Pauline Mayers to find a common language between 'dancers' and 'actors', so that maybe we could drop the labels and all move and talk and make some work together. 

Perfect.

The audition was tough. It was a room full of dancers, before I knew it we were lunging rhythmically to music that was fartoofasttobelungingtoo. I got a stitch within the first ten minutes. 'This is not for me' I thought. I pushed on. 'I'll never get this job' I thought. I pushed on. 'This is what you wanted' I thought'. 'Fuck off' I thought.

I got the job.

The escape route out of that tightened fist round my oesophagus has always been dancing. I enjoy dancing, and so I kid myself it isn't 'exercise' like running or step aerobics, but something nearer fun. Last week the Mayers Ensemble came together to do some dancing.  Last week dancing was exercise.

When it comes to contemporary dance I don't know my arse from my elbow, but it turns out  either are as good as the other as a starting point; and for someone who isn't always comfortable being up and personal with my own body being in touch with everyone else's from the word go has brought with it some interesting challenges to how I think about bodies and how I feel about thinking.

Amanda is a beautiful, physically strong dancer. Because her body is really strong. It bulges and flattens according to what it needs to be able to do. It is a doing body, poetic and expressive. There's something knowable about her body that I don't always feel towards my own. She starts from the body and lets it think for her. 

By day five, my mood was low. I was spending a lot of time thinking about pain thresholds (and the efficacy of deep heat creams). There is no getting round physical pain. Even if you know it's making you fitter, stronger, more bendy. The relentless physical challenge of each day forced me to feel, and not only my body, but the feelings I carry that I don't want to feel. The shame, the anger, the sadness that I am so adept at bottling, dissociating from, thinking away. 

'This is what my body does' I kept thinking. This is part of how it expresses itself. My solo pieces were frenetic, distressing to watch, tiring to perform. But they were also a release, of who knows what.

At the end of the first week I got home and cried and I didn't know why. Well, I didn't know in the way I was used to 'knowing'. A girl fell over.

I'm glad to be starting from the other side of the spectrum: to start with the body. Usually my head does all the work and the body comes along for the ride. As with the show I wrote, which was my way to think myself better after a traumatic relationship.

My lovely new partner summed it up the other night when he said 'you told your past like a story and it's only starting to hit me that this really happened, to you.' And frankly, it's only just started dawning on me.