Exploring Parallel Worlds

FRANK MCCONNELL tells NORTHINGS about the latest developments in the work of his Black Isle-based plan B company, including a run at the Edinburgh Fringe for their new show, Parallel / Parallels

IT HAS BEEN over six years since the last major plan B production, Double Helix, which was in large part down to the terms of the NESTA Fellowship I had. They changed the rules in a way that meant that the holder was not actually allowed to produce work. They saw it as being about developing your creativity. I could understand it, but it was very frustrating for people who work in the arts rather than sciences.

More recently, though, plan B received flexible funding from the Scottish Arts Council in 2007 for a two year period to take us to April 2009, and recently they have awarded us a further two years to take us to 2011. The SAC money is to allow us to develop the company and develop projects in the Highlands.

Our new show, Parallel / Parallels, is concerned with the idea of parallel worlds. Quantum physicists are fairly certain now that there are parallel universes, and that there could be many different versions of ourselves existing in many different universes all at the same time, although we are only ever conscious of being in one at any given moment.

The show is not really an attempt to understand the physics or the maths, but what struck me was if that really is a fact, then how does it affect us as human beings, and how does it affect the human condition?

It’s really a dance theatre piece in my mind, and there is as much music and text as there is dance

The seeds of the show were actually planted after we did Double Helix. Maureen McMillan, who was an MSP then, came to see it. We had a silver reflective surface as a floor, so you could see the dance and also the reflection on the floor, and Maureen said to me afterwards that it was as if there was a whole parallel world under the floor. Her remark kept nagging away at me.

It’s about possibilities, really. According to an American physicist called Hugh Everett, anything that could possibly happen is happening, it’s just that we decide at specific moments to follow that one possibility. When you examine the physics of it at a quantum level, particles vibrate at such speed that you can’t really see anything, but once you do physically observe it, it becomes fixed.

It has led physics into the area of having to deal with consciousness as a real factor, although they haven’t really come up with a proper definition of consciousness yet.
We open the show with a quotation from Hamlet, “What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties …”, and finish with the line “And yet for me, what is this quintessence of dust?”, and in some respects we are trying to answer that question in a moment.

There is a recurring moment in the show of two people about to meet, and we are trying to look at lots of possibilities coming out of that potential meet.

The notion of being in two places at one time isn’t easy to get to grips with – it’s not only abstract, it’s absurd in some ways. But we are made up of particles, so we have to allow that possibility. We have probably all had the experience of, say, driving up the A9 and suddenly snapping back and thinking where have I been for the last 20 miles?

You have no recollection of it, and moments like that are maybe actually timeless, where you have been in a parallel world somewhere. Not consciously so, because you have still been driving. It works with memories as well, associations with smells or images or whatever that can draw you into another world.

I found all of this a bit scary when I first started, I think. Or unearthly, maybe. I suspect that moments where you really trust your instinct or intuition might be related to this as well.

We have been creating and rehearsing the show at the same time in the studio at Eden Court. It’s really a dance theatre piece in my mind, and there is as much music and text as there is dance. The music is all by Michael Marra, and is new for the show. John Harvey is working with us as writer. There are six performers, including Michael.

Part of it is improvised, so it is not entirely completely set even in the final version. We did a few workshops, and we talked a long, long time abut it, and eventually it came down to trying to fix a moment. It’s a bit like the film Sliding Doors with Gwyneth Paltrow and John Hannah, where there are two parallel stories based on her catching or missing an underground train.

We are presenting the show on a black reflecting surface, with two banks of seats along each long side. We made a decision early on to allow the audience to make a choice of which side they choose to sit on, and that decision will influence how they see the show, because we use moveable louvres as the set, and at times you won’t see through them at all.

We will preview the show at Eden Court, then we go to Dancebase in Edinburgh for ten shows during the Fringe. I would imagine we might tweak things a wee bit when we go to Edinburgh, and then we are touring in September for one week, including a show at Strathpeffer Pavilion, and again in February.
It has been difficult to get bookings, partly because of the subject matter, and partly because of finding spaces that can accommodate having the audience on either side of the performance space. There isn’t an option to do it a different way, so the venue has to be able to accommodate the physical layout.

I’ve done a few pieces now that have focussed on some kind of scientific theme, and I feel this is getting to the end of a chapter. We’re looking at some different things around new ideas of identity in the Highlands, inducing some community and school projects.

Being based in the Highlands seems significant to me. It has something to do with remoteness, not even so much geographical remoteness. Inverness isn’t remote these days, although the very first project we did was in Applecross. It’s more being at a distance from the central belt.

We are also doing a show with Michael Marra next year that we first did 20-odd years ago, called ‘A Wee Home From Home”, which is a kind of semi-autobiographical thing about being brought up in Glasgow, and the good reasons for leaving.

© Kenny Mathieson, 2008

Links

• plan B
• Parallel / Parallels at Dancebase
• Eden Court Theatre