QUESTION
Is £37.99 too much money to spend on one shit gag?
Today I've been holed up in the Studio Theatre at The Riverfront, surrounded by kid's toys and empty alcohol containers, holding a burst balloon in one hand and a crocodile puppet in the other. "This is it" I say to myself, with a mild feverish sweat forming on my brow "This. Is. It"... And then I just stand there not quite knowing what to do.
Later, I spent an hour or so flicking through eBay listings, looking for a plush adult elephant costume, and asking myself "Is £37.99 too much money to spend on one shit gag?"... And it was then that it dawned on me. With a lightbulbesque epiphany I learned my first lesson from this process; Facilitation Is Fundamental.
If I didn't get buckled down I'd float away, and with no money to pay folk, I'd have to facilitate myself! And from there on out, I was wholly productive.
I decide to spend my first day planning the coming weeks, and try to detail each and every idea I've ever had about TigerFace. As I do it feels like I've been working on the show forever. Some of the material I have in my notebooks dates back to 2012, and as I look over my old handwritten notes and drawings, I feel like I'm time travelling back to when the idea felt very uncertain, but very exciting, and by the afternoon it occurred to me that it still is very uncertain, and still is very exciting, just in a wholly new way.
Back then TigerFace was about me experimenting with form. I wanted to pull myself out of my comfort zone and find new (and potentially better) ways of making work and connecting with an audience. Back in the days of Scratch Nights and Cabarets, 9/10 times I'd walk out on stage with only a few ideas of what to do, forcibly plunging myself into the gaps in between 'bits'. It was in those gaps, nervous and blind, frantic and over-energised, where I found my breath, and where the work started to make sense.
Because that's how I sometimes feel as an adult... In way over my head, sweat forming on my brow, into something I haven't planned for, expecting an opera and showing up at a rodeo, panicking whilst trying to remain calm and whispering to myself "they never said it would be like this".
6 years on, TigerFace, has found a way to make sense, me but also (I hope) the world around it. Beginning to form as a semi autobiographical piece, I begin to find ways to articulate my experiences of the world through him. He started off as a character I invented to tell jokes with; a miserable tiger man, recently fired by the BBC, stuck performing his children's show for cynical adults, and now I see so much of myself in him as a 30-year-old millennial experiencing something other than the bright and beautiful world promised me as a child.
And how does that feel?
Well, I'll keep you posted.
If you want to join my mailing list and get TigerUpDates please drop me an email to: mejustincliffe@hotmail.co.uk
Mucho,
JTC
