Field Report: 02
Weekly updates exploring transformation across writing, filmmaking, performance, visual art, and design. Unravelling process, navigating systems, charting signals and building worlds.
This week finds me mostly offline and deeply immersed in a re-draft of a play, something I began to write during the two-week wait for my blessing of a son during the first wave of the pandemic lockdown, back in 2020. Five years of rebirthing these pages, and here I am, deep into a concentrated writing sprint, mirroring my own lockdown, closer to what feels like the finish line (at least until the next wave of RnD). It all takes the time it needs, but let's be real: many factors slow down the ‘getting the work made’ phase and finance and funding are major. And everything shifts when that support lands.
Diving in deep again left little space for digital connection this week. It’s been beautiful and exactly what the process needs.
DAWN PATROL
Morning sessions have shifted from exploratory to targeted. I’m thinking about home whilst pacing for a route in an attempt to clarify what feels like a very British play. The discipline of early rising remains, but it’s less of a documentation ritual and more of a wrestling of patterns, dialogue drill, and scene re-structure. Shapes have emerged, images catapulting me back to what sparked the story in the first place, and a new scaffold has risen and reminded me of the joy in the discovery - the architecture of the telling will always tell you what the play needs to be.
SIGNAL DETECTED
Deep work creates its own vortex. I’m alone but always in the company of the characters and relationships I build. Frequencies emerge through the sculpting of the whole, the atmospheres, character voices become clearer as the world builds; I weirdly have no recollection of writing some of it in the first place. Then come the structural problems, like a sucker punch, painful for a while, but they seem to solve themselves during sleep and packing lunches, and then waves of personal experience through the action of the writing, the making and the doing of the work. Then triggers of homesickness, huge pangs of it, which this week unlocked a transformation signal, an eruption which made space for the shape of the play, a blueprint to finally root and form into something I am really proud of.
A significant structural shift emerged during this tuning in period, what began with an interval has transformed into a 90-minute straight-through experience. This continuous form better serves the material, creating an uninterrupted psychological journey that mirrors the relentless nature of the systems being explored. Imagine what could happen with all the creatives in the room making the play live and breathe in real time. SOON!
The play has a strong central image of a wearable item that doesn’t fit certain bodies, the shape of it holds place in both structured and explosive environments. Throwing me mixed messages, but this week, these images, along with a canceled character who had actual wings, have crystallized and created the play and its new form. This visual and thematic resonance between protection, freedom, and perspective, between military systems and our living, breathing, messy heart of the family, is the mechanism for the way in which the story propels itself and shares an experience for an audience, eventually I hope. I am so excited to hear it out loud and bring her home, there’s so much more to dive into, but it’s certainly nudging closer.
I've neither posted on Substack nor read anything online during this period, with a few dips over to Instagram but a step towards a complete digital fast. The work has demanded this approach, and it certainly feels better for it.
This creative immersion has led to a necessary counterbalance and need: booking a trip to the UK. There’s this dance in me between distance and proximity, between imagined/ remembered Britain and experienced Britain, which creates a new productive rhythm for my work. It’s disturbing to navigate sometimes, tricksy how it creeps up on you but I’m blessed to be able to access travel and the choice to make the return happen when so many people are disconnected from their homelands and unable to go back.
MAKING SENSE OF IT
Intense focus radiates the deliberate silencing of external systems to amplify internal ones. By temporarily suspending digital connection, I've created space for the play's internal logic to assert itself, maybe. Or it might be just the perfect time to understand what the play has been telling me all along...
Removing two expected theatrical conventions, narration, and an interval, has created what feels like a more intentional theatrical experience, the one I am excited to pursue, experience and watch. Sometimes transformation requires not merely an adaptation of the work but removing its interruptions entirely.
In a culture that equates visibility with existence, temporary invisibility becomes a radical creative act. I want to listen to this instinct more and to your thoughts in response…
RECOVERED SIGNALS
This wedge of decorated rock from Mount Alice in the Falkland Islands was a gift from another member of service personnel in 2001. He wanted to commemorate a challenging period for me and transform the experience by demonstrating that it is possible to consistently opt out of group behaviors. His quiet, deliberate choice to step outside the forceful conventional patterns and create something beautiful in the face of adversity has been on my mind. We both operated on principles outside collective understanding and I value this moment so much, it keeps cropping up on the pages.
What interests me isn't the romantic notion of the outsider, but the genuine survival strategies developed by those who move alongside systems without being captured by them, he deserves a character, something to be explored across my morning pages in the coming weeks.
CURRENTLY RESONATING
The symbolic weight of Ravens across cultures, as goddesses, messengers, tricksters, prophets, and protectors, provides a blueprint for navigating between military precision and human vulnerability. She haunts me.
Catch the Engage 101 exhibition if you can, I was delighted to attend the opening last weekend. It’s only on until tomorrow but catch it if you can…
Villa 72, Al Fanna St., Umm Suqeim 3, Dubai
Negative S P A C E is a group exhibition curated by Nadine Khoury and Gaith Abdulla that examines the resilience and resourcefulness of artists working outside the confines of institutional representation. The exhibition brings together a diverse group of artists navigating the scarcity of creative spaces and questioning the structures that shape access, inclusion, and artistic agency. Negative S P A C E is the outcome of Engage101’s third Peer Review Program, an artist development initiative seen as a collaborative effort between Engage101 and the participating artists centered around discussion and critique between peers.
The participating artists: Ahed Al Kathiri, Ahed Alameri, Alina El Assadi, Amna Ilyas, Fizza Shabbir, Layla Doueidi and architect collective Salma Hani Ali & Omar AlAhmadani, reflect on how space is claimed, contested, and reimagined.
At the heart of Negative S P A C E lies a series of critical inquiries:
How do we want our spaces to exist?
How can we reshape the space we occupy?
How do we claim our space?
How are we unknowingly conforming to societal spaces?
In what ways can we draw inspiration from past generations to create alternative spaces?
Who speaks for us?
Who are ‘we’?
Negative S P A C E draws audiences into the possibilities that emerge when boundaries are stretched or broken entirely. It is an exhibition about agency, resistance, and redefining creative autonomy in the face of limitations.
And I am so excited to be part of curating Cycles of Change. If you’re reading this then I’m on my way to Bayt AlMamzar for my first ‘Tech Rehearsal’ in the UAE. Excited to meet all the selected artists and for our opening tomorrow. Follow our updates on instagram . Dalia Yassine has made space for something truly special.
Looking Ahead
Next week: I need to have delivered the thing, the beast the P L A Y and then navigate my way back to an action thriller, I think I’ll need a lot of paint for this transition and coffee. The screenplay is sagging in the middle, I need to be nimble, pumped and ready for action - any tips anyone? It’s fascinating to me how we as artists often navigate multiple roles, projects, and visions at once. How do we move between deep work and connection without losing the signals detected in either mode? Is consistency across digital platforms necessary, or can creative practice follow more organic rhythms of engagement and retreat? One thing’s for sure. We are never alone.
With deep gratitude for your engagement, readership and support. I hope your weekend unravels in curious ways.
RC