Unrecorded: this is the next step.

Thursday – I wake up about 9. During the night I hastily wrote down all I could remember in the session with Sylvia in the last pages of my book. In the morning Emma, my cousin makes me eggs on toast. We talk about art. She is a great drawer, some small apple drawings stopped me dead. Then there was one of her daughter’s head Maddie, while asleep. I tell her she should draw a series of these moments. Later we walk along the cut, a river sized man made canal to the Arnolfini. We see the work in the first gallery, and I briefly show her Vitamin D before making for Bristol Temple Mews.

The train journey is simpler this time: one train to London Waterloo. It takes 3 hours and I fall asleep, almost as drained as my phone battery. Before the end of the journey it stops playing music. I have an hour and get a travelcard but take a but to Oxford Circus. I am going to audition for the LCF MA costume design show.

I find the campus no probs, but spend a while finding reasonably priced food along the way. I get there before 5 easy but spend an hour waiting knowing that I have to go home and go out to work at the cinema for 8pm. At 6 we finally go in, talk about a play in which the protagonist has a ‘light’ but wastes it and is returned to button material – I ask, ‘does he have a choice?’ then witness a couple of physical theatre actors improv while I embarrass myself trying to imitate the action of eating this lit UV tube in mesh.

Catching the train just after 7 I get back home towards 8pm. Luckily, my mother gave me some extra money and I use it to get a taxi back to my house where I change, then go out to work. I make it in time.

Friday – First of my days off. I think about music for Sunday’s workshop. I also watch some harmonica vids, but I don’t feel like I am improving. I ask anyone if they want to watch On The Road, but go down by myself. I watch the film, it was pretty good. There was a lot of sex. Sex and writing. The music was good, too. After however I end up working for an hour and get home at 10.

Saturday – starting to panic about tomorrow, I have to learn ‘abokado wa ichiban chikakute doki ni arimasu ka?’ Where is the nearest Avocado? in three languages, I have them but I cannot work the accents yet. I go cheesy music hunting and pick up a copy of Now That’s What I Call Music 46. It makes me laugh. I trade in my old phone for a tenner, thought it won’t pay for my phone bill. I leave a voicemail message on my studio manager’s phone asking for part of the deposit I was promised at the end of last month and answer a few emails including an invoice for the amount requested for the No Strings Attached grant. I also ring Bean, who very kindly offers to pick up my stuff from Hatch at the end of the month.

I received the funding! This project is now more real to me than ever before. I have had the busiest week so far for this project. I have decided to breakdown my past week on a day to day basis to give an idea of the work over the course of the week:

Monday – I spend the day working on the budget for the No Strings Attached scheme and the presentation on Tues. I also go looking in vain for a book on playing the harmonica. I time myself on my phone to keep the presentation under 10 minutes. I plan on doing this before work in the evening but I find they are overstaffed so I offer not to work which gives me more time. I end up having to strip a lot of my information back after presenting the project to my mother.

Tuesday – I wake up at 7, scrape getting the right train and head to Farnham with my presentation on my laptop for 10:10. I arrive early and share a table with an equally nervous speaker for a talk held at the venue. We wish each other luck. I present to the panel and it goes pretty smoothly. I am pleased to see Fiona who I talked over the project with months ago. I am told I will find the result by the end of the day.

Farnham is beautiful on a sunny day. I smile as I head to Sainsbury’s to get a photograph for an interview on Thursday. Then I wait for a train up to London to meet about The Other Art Fair.

In London I have several hours to wait but do not spend money on travel and walk in a big loop. I visit Tate Modern first: zone out in the Tank containing Lis Rhodes’ Light Music, then watch some of Sung Hwan Kim‘s movie. There are 3 school groups in the Tanks and Turbine hall. As I leave I almost collide with several of Tino Sehgal‘s dancers.

I then walk into the Jerwood Space, stare in wonder at Kerstin Kartscher’s lamp. Leaving the show, I walk down The Cut, have tea at The Young Vic and decide to head down to the National Theatre. I arrive at the Hayward Cafe early and wait. The waitress there is overworked. Near 4 I see a curly haired girl at the till, I think this is Chantelle. She sits at a small table across from me and makes a phone call. Minutes later I get a missed call. I ring back and this girl picks up the phone. She is Chantelle.

We talk about Studio Chess last year and developing it for The Other Art Fair. I want to involve more people and the audience on the night. I show her cards I made for a workshop. She likes them and thinks that they will be good to sell at FAD‘s stall at TOAF too.

After the meeting I leave loiter in London till 7. After 5 I get a missed call from Farnham Maltings: the results of my application! I ring back and leave a voicemail. I then get the news while in the Poetry Library – Success! I make a hurried call to my mum, she doesn’t pick up the phone.

Wednesday – The first project talk with Sylvia Rimat in Bristol! I make the journey from 11am changing at Woking, then Salisbury and take a 1 carriage train to Bristol. I arrive near 3 in a city I have never been to and head straight for The Milk Bar. I meet Sylvia and we talk alone in a darkened room with an electric heater. Book of Essays is about a book of essays but the Self keeps coming up. Sylvia mentions Brecht‘s idea in German: verfremdungseffekt, estrangement roughly. After 3 hours heavy talking I leave to stay with my cousin. Getting there near 7 I meet her at a quiet house outside the city past and Aldi. She has 2 daughters. They get slightly excited by me arriving, especially Maddie, who is 8.

It is a Wednesday. Next Tuesday I will be pitching the project to a panel of judges to gain the award of a grant which will pay for the majority of Unrecorded Project’s development. I have run out of money. What can I do?

I continue as best I can. I have been revising and revising the budget for the project while balancing the creative, idea made part of Unrecorded. Both are important and I need to concentrate on them equally to make sure the proposal is strong enough.

I worked through the budget yesterday, then asked my mathematically inclined brother to check through the figures with me. What I did not know before drafting the budget is that support-in-kind is so important to the production of a piece of performance. So I have been spending time working out a figure for the stuff I’ll be getting for free out of support and good will. It is always important to remember the help of those that give to your career as an artist. I recall this now, as spoken by a tutor during a workshop at Artsadmin. You are successful because others have faith in your ability.

So onto the figures. The first budget was complex and detailed, with two tables: one to state the overall project cost and another to show how the budget is divided between the R C Sherriff Trust and the No Strings Attached scheme. The new budget, for the second pitch, states everything in one table. It is divided into two parts: INCOME and EXPENDITURE. For a budget to work the figure for INCOME and EXPENDITURE should match up. Or if you are looking to make money from ticket sales, say, your projected targets should be put into INCOME and must be greater than the EXPENDITURE figure. If the opposite is true, then that means there is a DEFICIT and your project will make a loss.

I have listed both grants as a source of INCOME and their different uses in EXPENDITURE. Pretty standard really. However, for support-in-kind recources, I have placed them in both parts of the table so that they cancel each other out and come to a value of zero. I have also put in contingency at 5% of the budget. However I added this to the total before support-in-kind is added, as 5% of the overall total would push me over the £1000 limit of NAS*.

Thankfully my budget matches up, but I still need it to check and re-check again to make sure. The largest part of the budget is taken up by the rehearsal stage; this accounts for using ]Performance Space[ and my fee for the time spent in the studio. All of this bar £200 is unpaid. The £200 that comes from the R C Sherriff Trust grant amounts to two days paid work.

The £1400 unpaid is based on me spending two days per week in the spae rehearsing and developing the work. And I have not included the travel cost.

The reason I have managed to get access to ]Performance Space[ is I have decided to move studios there. Aside from access to a large space free of a stage for rehearsal, I am also looking forward to meeting the other artists and be part of a studio dedicated to Performance. I went down last week to check out the space and meet Bean, who was enthusiastic about Unrecorded Project. The great thing about undertaking this research and development process is the people that I meet along the way.

*No Strings Attached scheme