BECAUSE OF THE WAR (script)
Because of the war, things were changing.
Very few toys or games were left, and music was almost over.
Tap water was tasting female and television only came in nasty spasms.
Popular foods were found to be unstable-
additives that had been put in there some time ago,
to keep the flavours and shapes strong, had started telling; weeping, crying out.
This was disturbing people, ruining their appetite.
Everyone was getting really thin.
The thinkers acted, and strategies of self- help were disseminated,
through the radio, leaflets, and public science demonstrations.
People found that there were other ways to get the things they needed.
Men and women from all walks of life made experimental diggings.
New planting and fertilisation exercises began.
A whole new philosophy of farming was emerging.
In this way, some people began to transform the war slowly, from the inside.
They buried and burned many kinds of things, and grew the things they really needed with the New Philosophy.
Lovely music started happening spontaniously in the most unexpected places-
so no one needed to pay for it anymore.
( the woman in the car park sings;)
never mind the world is bad
never mind you killed our dad
all the pain is flowing from my head
never mind it's all wrong
never mind they broke this song
all the pain is flowing from my head
oh oh oh oh
god is made from love
oh oh oh oh
war is made from love
yellow love, bile love, yellow love, vile love
yellow love vomit love
god is made from love
(Yellow man continues;)
But for some, it was hard to clean out all the old connections.
They said they were too full of memories to make the change.
For these people things could only get worse- the complexities started to build up in their guts and mixed with their longings to form addictive, bittersweet enzymes.
This chemistry switched connections in their heads - they found that the difference between the anticipated and the actual was becoming incresingly unclear.
For them the war will never end; it is visible even in small places- in the movements of dying insects, in the way children hold their bodies in the night.
Some people think that there is no war at all.
For most it is similar to the experience of falling in Love
For a few, it is so alien, it is like the beginning of Hell....
CREDITS
Yellow Man:
Robert Allwood
The couple who bury the trophies:
Alan Thomas and Pat Thomas
The woman in the car park who sings:
Sara Byers
The family who burn the Sainsbury's bag:
Simon Haydon, Helen Manson
Their Children:
Rufus and Theo
The yellow man IS yellow in reality, but to our eyes, and due to some technical issues, he may look Orange.
A Guardian reviewer called him 'a man the colour of Agent Orange', and I realised that's probably okay.
When I first stated making BECAUSE OF THE WAR I was going to be the presenter. I bought a good quality, realistic moustache, and did many many takes of myself delivering the monologue, sitting in a 'storytime-style' comfy chair. I tried wearing glasses too, to give my self a greater air of authority, but I just could not use the footage, partly because I was over critical at my own appearance, but also because somehow there was not enough distance - maybe in a Brechtian sense?- between the performance and the viewer, it needed some kind of a shift, kick or kink that I could not seem to provide.
I thought that maybe I needed to develop my performance skills. I started going to Gary Stevens performance workshops in Whitechapel. There I found what I didn't know I was looking for fellow workshop participant Robert Allwood.(check out his details or contact him at www.ukscreen.com/cast/dhyandeva)
At the workshops we found ourselves doing some pretty strange group improvisation exercise- in one we were dogs and cats waiting to be spayed in a vet's waiting room. Something about Robert's distinctive and engaging body language doing this, the way he shook his legs around?- made me get into a conversation with him about what else he got up to. He told me that sometimes he was the YELLOW MAN and did unsettling things in public places - was he one of those 'living statues' that stood very still and were usually silver? Some pennies started dropping in my head...
Yellow seemed to be the right colour for the Presenter. It's nicely contradictory-¬Ý a colour that signifies both madness and joy, it's the colour of wholesome things- Bananas, sunlight- and things you want to avoid- Vomit and Urine. After meeting Robert I started adding to the text of BECAUSE OF THE WAR- the YELLOW LOVE SONG appeared, and some of the bits to do with the sense of taste and things in the stomach - the tap water tasting female, the addictive bittersweet enzymes.
I was really happy with Robert's performance. I didn't let him have much space to do 'warm ups' before shooting, (there isn't much space in the room in our house where we do blue screen filming) but I kept the camera running as he was¬Ý swinging his arms around. He made some quite funny and alarming 'warm up' noises too, but somehow it was going too far, breaking the decorum of the character of the presenter, to include those.
Someone said that his persona is a little like Johnny Ball's - presenter of 'Crackerjack'- the children's 'variety style' TV show of the 1970's. It has a kind of gentleness, directness and naivety combined with an odd anxiety.
WHERE DOES THE COLOURING IDEA COME FROM?
This is the first time I have used the idea of performers being coloured.
It's kind of annoying that the BLUE MAN THEATRE GROUP is around in London now, but there is no connection, for me anyway.
When I first used to tinker around in a studio and make sculptures, I made a series of work using combinations of found objects- often odd clusterings of things like soft toys, food, and DIY tools bound together in some unsettling collision. Many of these clusters were baptised as 'ART' by being drenched in quantities of bright gloss household paint- I think this is partly where the colourisation of the Presenter idea is really coming from.
It also comes from the experience of seeing the CAMBERWELL ANGEL.
When I lived in the Camberwell area in the 80's and 90's I frequently caught sight of the 'Camberwell Angel'; a big black lady in her 30's who made herself entirely white. Bleached dreadlocks, eyelashes, white skin paint, nail varnish, every item of her clothing; white. She was an outpatient at the Maudsley Psychiatric Hospital and the local understanding of her was that she was convinced she was an angel, and therefore modifying her appearance to express this appropriately. I spoke to her on several occasions, usually on the bus or in the pub and she was charming, lucid, easygoing. I never plucked up the courage to ask her about the Angel business.
In our dialogue, also on this site, Paul asked me "Are there different colour figures at different levels?" Well, that was a good question, as I'm starting to realise that yes, there are.
Different coloured characters have started appearing in my writing and filming for my next works.
There is a PURPLE PREACHER in a feature length film script I've almost finished writing. He can only speak the words in a Jehovah's witness tract called ' All suffering soon to end'- they are the only words permitted in the entire film. To me Purple is a confused, difficult colour- stuck between Red and Blue, it' doesn't know if it's hot or cold, blood or sky. I intend to do a website; www.allsufferingsoontoend.com for that project so watch out for that.
There is also a PINK LADY figure I'm working on. She's in a piece I'm making called THE TRUTH AND THE PLEASURE. She's a kind of mental fitness trainer/infotainment officer in bubble gum pink skin and lycra, with a grinning Prince William mask for a head. She performs a relentless rhyme - a mind control song - to make you happy and successful. I think this pink is a much more dangerous colour than the yellow.
I hope this piece of writing has given some insight, however sketchy, into how things tend to come about. Thanks for reading.
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