E9: Luke Davies

TRANSCRIPT:

[Evy:] Oh we're rolling

[Webster:] Oh shit, oh okay, alright.

[Luke:] are we rolling?

[Evy:] we are rolling, there is no beeping, I'm kinda concerned about that..

[intro music]

[Evy:] hello and welcome to Word Up podcast, I'm Evy

[Webster:] and I'm Webster
[Evy:] And today we're with famous, infamous, the man of the hour, the man of the camera, behind the camera, at stage. I don't know.
[Webster:] the man of many skills.
[Luke:] I like "the hour", the man of THIS hour.

[Evy:] just this hour
[Luke:] or slightly less than an hour, whatever it is
[Evy:] So, Luke Davies, welcome to our podcast
[Luke:] Yes, thank you, I'm delighted to be asked to be on your podcast, yeah
[Evy:] how are you today?
[Luke:] I'm great, thank you very much. Surviving winter, it's always nice to have people turn up unexpectedly and sit around my table, and here you are.
[Evy:] It's great to be here.
[Webster:] yes yes yes.
[Evy:] So, let's dive into your story.

[Luke:] you sure you want to do this?
[Evy:] well... We take our chances.
[Webster:] too late to back down now, right?
[Luke:] yeah..

[Webster:] So for our audience who don't know who you are, would you mind explaining your artwork and what you do?
[Luke:] Aright, that is... feels like a lot, doesn't it? To be put on the spot like that. Okay so let's see. I have a video production business, I make videos and films. I also teach performance workshops, I have a little theatre company that teaches improv to high school students and I also write some poetry, which I have been performing for the last couple of years. So that's kinda a bunch of the things at the moment.

[Webster:] How do the three interact? How did you come to be doing those three things?
[Luke:] Okay, that's quite interesting I think. That's a long story, it goes back a long way, but I think what it does is like... Identifying when I was younger that I would like to work in a creative field. And that for me was going to be television. And sure enough, I worked really hard and I got into television, and then found myself in a not particularly creative part of television. That's not true actually, I was in post-production for fifteen years, and actually... Collaboratively, it was a very creative... working with producers and it was in that sense quite rewarding, but of course, what you're doing is, you're working within a very narrow brief: to satisfy particular requirements of a show or a channel or a particular project. And so, there was still this sort of creative... I still needed to find a different creative expression. I had been in youth theatres when I was a kid and stuff, and that was always satisfying. So I knew there was a performance aspect that I wanted to explore as well, so... That became theatre and improv and uhm... And then, the writing has been, again, it's one of those things where you sort of think, has always been in the back of my mind, quite idly, thinking like "oh yeah I'll probably write something one day or..." maybe you don't or maybe it's just a delusion, I don't know.. But a couple of years ago, I went to see some spoken word for the first time, and having some experience... years of experience performing in a different way, with improv and theatre, seeing spoken word performers made me think: "Ah, now this is really interesting, this could be a new challenge." What I do is I think I can bring something to this performatively, all I would need now is the words to speak.
[Webster:] Right
[Luke:] So that was the point in which I thought "Oh yeah, so I will set myself this challenge of writing" yeah. So that's where that has come in.
[Evy:] So it feels like you have traveled also, a lot. You're not from around here, are you?
[Luke:] Oh gosh, yeah, I don't know. Have I traveled a lot? I've been around the world, but..
[Evy:] you lived in Australia.
[Luke:] Yeah, so I'm really from Wales, and then my...
[Evy:] So from the UK
[Luke:] yeah in the UK. I felt that I had already traveled quite a lot, by living in Wales and England by the time that I was, eventually as an adult, I moved to London to work for the first time and then... I thought that was already quite a lot of traveling, I always moved around as a kid. But then I married an Australian woman and ended up living in Sydney, having children there... And then, because we were both sort of restless and traveling types, we thought we'd take a great adventure and go around the world and uh we made our first stop was Amsterdam. And actually, it sort of went a bit wrong at that point because we ended up staying in Amsterdam forever. So it's been twelve or thirteen years now, but this was only supposed to be the first stop on a great world tour. And uhm in fact we came to the place went: oh this is nice, let's just stay here. So that's what happened there.
[Evy:] What attracted you to Amsterdam?
[Luke:] Amsterdam was actually somewhere I had never been before.. It sounded interesting, it sounded like "Oh this would be a fun place to be for a little while", with small children and there was an opportunity for my ex-wife to work here, and it was like, "Oh, we'll try that, do that for a year" as it turned out, it just became this sort of like "Oh, this was a really nice place to be, it's a little city, there's lots of things, there's lots of creative things happening, culturally there's lots of interesting things happening, but it's not overwhelming like a big city like London where we'd lived previously, or Sydney where it's so enormous it always takes two hours to get everywhere and things like that" Suddenly you're in this place where you can just ride around on your bikes, and it's family friendly and there's lots of cute things happening.. So it just felt like a good place to bring up kids and that's what we did, yeah. So now the children are almost all grown up and uh yeah...
[Evy:] So you are drawing some of your inspiration for your poetry from traveling? Or what other things that inspire you?
[Luke:] So what inspires me? No I think... I'm possibly... What's inspiring me right now.. One of the most .... Things that I'm really enjoying about writing, has not been so much... I felt when I started.. Sorry, I mentioned already, once I started it, it was something about the challenge of just writing something... How do I actually do that? Having improvised for so long or worked with other people in the film making setting for so long, working with a script. So then it was like "Okay, how am I actually going to write something down?" And that became... That was the initial challenge. What I found after doing that repeatedly, was actually that the idea of having particular things that I wanted to explore was not first and foremost in my mind. What I found by repeated writing was that certain things would come off the page, and I recognised that there were themes that I was exploring, and I wasn't doing that deliberately. So that actually became... that is still ongoing and that's still a really interesting process. So some of the themes that I'm noticing that come out, there's things around mortality, I think that's because I'm getting older and my kids are getting older and the kids are a great mirror, by which you realise that time is passing, you know? My kids are now... umm one's an adult, and one is very nearly an adult. And so you go like: Alright, yes I've physically been along, alive a long time. And now my children are adults. And so then, so things around ageing and mortality. But there's also things around... And this is related to traveling, and that's things around memory and landscape. The ideas of home and nostalgia for home and a sense of belonging and things like that. Those things are also coming up. Another thing that I've noticed, because I like to question myself and the work that I'm producing, after I've done it. For example, recently I noticed that I was exploring a theme around a particular place in Wales, that I associate strongly with my childhood. It's not where I lived but it's where my extended family are from. And it's... I explored this through several pieces, so what I noticed after a few poems was that the poems themselves were rather... we're quite down beat, they were quite uhm... They were meandering and they were slow, you know... And I thought: "Oh, this is quite nice, but there's also not a lot of humour here" So now what I want to do for my next poem, no matter what it is going to be about, I would like it to start from a place of being funny, okay. So then it became a challenge just to say "right, whatever it is I write now, and I've no clue what it is, this will be a funny poem" And again, just to set myself up in opposition contrast of what has come before. And I find that's, for me, that's quite useful, technique for stepping into the next piece, next work. It's like: "Let's explore this more 'cause I'm interested" or "Let's just put pause on that one and explore something completely different, in a totally different style".

[Evy:] Right, interesting. And how do you experience all of that on a stage? How is your performing part... Because writing is one part, right? And then performing.. Do you find that easy, to connect to your audiences?
[Luke:] Yeah, I think it's... I think that performing of the poetry has been a really... Again, it's been a really interesting experience, a really interesting discovery for me, because I feel that I have years of experience as a performer and hosting for example. And lots of tried and tested techniques that I have in order to connect with the audience. And that's one thing, finding the ways... Let's say that's myself, as an individual, whether I put on a stage persona or I put myself out there which is a slightly more vulnerable thing to do. But there's also then discovering through the work, when I'm writing, what connects with an audience. That's been a new thing, what language can really connect with an audience? What's the pacing that I need? The order of the pieces that I might read, if I'm given a slot where I can read two, three or four pieces. It's like, the order that I present it to the audience is really important as well. These are all things that I'm finding out, and these are all really exciting. I think, because previously, in other arenas I've tended to be on stage with other people, at the same time, this is probably the first time that I've consistently been on stage, in a solo way, presenting solo work, and that has brought up a certain vulnerability for me as well and a certain anxiety and a certain set of discoveries associated with that as well. So, the feedback is very important, if there are certain people in the audience, I'll go and talk to afterwards, or people will come up to you and offer their feedback. That's always really wonderful if you've touched somebody in a particular way and they want to express that to you, I think that's a very humbling thing to do. Humbling thing to receive from a person, it's very generous of them. So all of that feeds into this... It is an exploration, it is a learning process, constantly. I think it's worth.... For me, it's really important to keep refining it, or keep trying things, keep experimenting with things. I don't feel like.... I'll give you the example, like a stand up comedian I think that stand up comedy doesn't always appeal to me, because I feel like there's a trap that a lot of performers fall into of repeating the same material each time, knowing their set of by heart, goes down pretty well, they repeat it. I think that it lacks spontaneity, it lacks an organic spark of... I think you recognise that it's not quite authentic, that it's very slick or well rehearsed. And I think that often that performance can miss another way of connecting to the audience, which is that the person is really just putting themselves out there and I think that the audience responds to that sense of human connection with somebody who they might see as vulnerable and nervous or whatever you know, so in that sense I think: Well I'm not afraid to step out and just say like "okay well this is what's on my mind this week, and these are the pieces I'd like to read" and keep it exciting.
[Webster:] Ja, it sounds like you're in a constant state of developing your process and learning. What are some of the must-earns that you think were instrumental in helping you get where you are today? For people who are thinking about getting started in poetry or performance, spoken word and the such?
[Luke:] Yeah I think that there's an old adage around.. Uhmm.. I suppose you can apply it to a lot of the creative fields but I think I first heard it in the... I think I heard it first for writing and then for acting. I heard somebody say "Oh if you want to be a writer". And the other said: "then just write" and then somebody else says like "Oh I want to be an actor" and then they say: "Well, just act". Right, okay? There's no... Yeah I think that the, uh... I have a sense that that with.. Again, we're talking about creative expression, I think eventually, if something needs to come out, it will come out. It will find it's channel, and it will emerge. I think that I know a lot of people who are afraid to explore the thing that they most want to do, because they're afraid to fail. This is kinda well... We talk about this a lot, right? You hear about it every day. With inspirational memes on instagram. But yeah, so we have this... There's this fear that we won't be good enough. No what's quite interesting is like, lately one of the experiences that I have is I have children now, who are growing up, and.. So when children are small, they're this tremendous creative and imaginative force, but they don't have necessarily physical cognitive skills and refinement to achieve really high-end work, okay? So what happens is they have a vision of perhaps a painting they'd like to do, or something that they'd like to write, and they have the tremendous energy to start it, and then eventually, they might be able to get it to a certain point and then they might leave it. Or they might get frustrated, and the frustration comes in when they think like "Oh it's not as good as the thing that I wanted to do" okay? So, now the fact is that they have the energy to start it, and that's really exciting. So I think, but when adults have these creative pursuits they think "Oh, it's not gonna be good enough.." They have an idea of what they would like to produce, of being somehow good enough. Measured against an arbitrary standard of their own imagination: "Okay, this is what it should be like" alright? And they think "Well, I can't possibly achieve that, so I won't do it" okay? So now, one, for me, one of the challenges is to imagine "Why would.." I I've had this when I've taught... I've taught adults improv in workshops and over courses and what I've find is that people say like "Okay, there's a standard that I would like to reach, I'm not there yet. So I'm gonna be very angry and frustrated with myself" And I think "well, if you don't do the work, right? Ultimately, if you don't do the work and expose yourself to the practice of doing it, then you won't make any discoveries." And it might well be, it's not a very popular thing to say, but it might well be that you're just not really good at it, right? You're never going to be very good at it, okay? Not everybody is gonna be a tremendous... Not everybody is going to be a good actor, not everybody is going to be a great brain surgeon, not everybody is gonna be a wonderful singer, okay? So it might be, completely your aim might be completely unrealistic, right? But I don't think that it's not worth exploring. Because you'll find out the limitations, we can't all be astronauts, okay? So that's evident, I've given up any hope I might have had of becoming the next James Bond. Purely on age grounds, okay? So...
[Webster:] Because you have the looks.
[Luke:] So, well, I think it was David Niven played James Bond when he was in his sixties, so.. But, fact is that there really is a thing for like... Okay, let's talk about the writing poetry, which I've come to fairly recently, is thinking like: okay, the only criteria is like... If I don't criticise it when it's going onto the page, I'll write it, and then I'll edit it, and then I'll perform it, okay? But if I just let it be, then the next stage is to put it in front of the audience to see if it lands, see if it connects. And what happens then is really really wonderful. Because you're just putting it out there. And I really would encourage people to just think like "it doesn't matter how afraid you are of doing it" If you just make something and put it out there, you'll be amazed how generously people will receive it. And that's worth trying, 'cause that's, yeah, that's a wonderfully humbling experience.
[Evy:] For sure
[Webster:] As a guy I follow on instagram, I can't remember his name now, but he's all about positivity and he's all about putting out your content and you know, just not being afraid of what people are gonna think about it, because for most of us, you know, if you're living in a creative field, or you work in a creative field, you have this artwork, that you think is good, but you're afraid of what other people are gonna think about it. So you limit the amount of output you have, based on other peoples imaginary beliefs of how good your work is. And one of his things is, his quote is "No one cares, just work harder, just put it out there.” And I think that's just some really good advice on how to move forward.
[Luke:] Yeah, that's really nice.
[Evy:] So, with that bravery, note, I think you have something prepared for us, for today? So let's hear it?
[Luke:] Alrighty.




[Music]


Angry man encounters cat and bird


Emerging onto the balcony
One morning
The man, phone in one hand
Cigarette in the other
Discovers a large ginger cat
Defecating in an ornamental pot
Where his fine desert grasses grow


Outraged, he cries
“Get out of it”
And lunges forward
Aiming a kick squarely at the cat’s behind
But the cat evades, nimbly
And flees along the railing


Hearing a cry from a neighbours tree
The man turns to see
A gull, watching him
Narrowing his eyes,
The man sees as if for the first time
The bird’s ridiculous thin red legs
webbed feet
And lack of arms


“And you,” he yells, “can fuck off an’ all!”
The man throws his cigarette lighter
At the bird
It misses,
Falling hopelessly into the gardens below
Beyond sight,
Landing softly so that no sound is heard
The bird flies away.


Some minutes later
The bird spots the cat
Sitting in the centre
Of a decorative circle of paving stones
It comes in to land
And for a moment the bird and the cat
Regard each other.
Moss grows through the cracks
There is a distant sound of running water
The sun shines
The cat turns its head


Back to the sun
Sniffs the breeze
And closes its eyes
Wondering, for a moment,
what it must be like
to be able to fly.


The bird looks towards the sun too
But it does not occur to the bird
For a moment
What it might be like
To close one’s eyes




(clapping)
[Evy:] Thank you so much for sharing this. Was it inspired by actual events?
[Webster:] I thought it was a true story.
[Luke:] I think you should write what you know, yeah.
[Luke:] It's true, I do have a cat that comes onto the balcony, yeah. But I can't be on it at the same time as the cat. Because the cat doesn't trust me, so we share the balcony, it's an informal arrangement with the neighbours cat.
[Webster:] It's working out.
[Evy:] That's Amsterdam for you, right?
[Luke:] Yeah
[Evy:] Birds and cats, informally.
[Webster:] Your poem was very visual, you know? You're very detailed with the visuals, how it looked, what was happening, you know, frame by frame. Do you think that's influenced by your filmmaking? 'Cause I was following the story in my mind I was like... You were describing the light falling and then lands softly on such and such. Do you think that comes from you being a filmmaker?
[Luke:] I think it probably does, I don't think it's a deliberate choice in the sense that, yeah, I don't set out to write a particular way. But again, this is part of the thing of having like receiving comments from the audience or receiving comments from other writers and performers. This is... There is something about that, that resonates, that I've heard before. So I'm thinking, okay, yeah probably I am a visual thinker and again it was this... I think that there's also a legacy of poetry that I've read, and again, what... And perhaps that I'm a visual thinker of seeing the way that language creates these images in your head and being aware of this phenomenon. And so, yeah, I can see that that's something that perhaps feeds back into the way I'm doing things as well. Sometimes, like, again, in this one there are certain details and I don't know quite... After I've written, because I write quite quickly, as well... Actually, I would say I write very quickly. I don't like to think about it too much at all. But then often, when I read it back and have the replay process, the images occurring in my own head, it's like, that's quite... In this poem there's an image of moss growing through cracks, and again, that evokes for me, you know... It implies that time is slow, and time is passing slowly. But it also does feel, in a clumsy way, it evokes sort of time-lapse imagery of like a nature program or somethings like this. So I think that there is an element of... Yeah I think it's probably an inevitable legacy of working in film for so long.
[Evy:] And you say you're writing fast, but when do you write? Do you have like your process, are you a morning person? Do you write in the evenings, mornings?
[Luke:] No, I'm certainly not a morning person. I've been trying to challenge that lately, and it's not going very well. But yeah, no... So the process for me is usually just before the deadline. It's quite a good thing. Actually the deadline has been a super useful thing for me, so actually to go out and proactively seek... Yeah maybe this is something for other people, too. But to proactively seek an audience, to find a place to perform, and have that deadline in place. And then recognising that it would be very easy at that point to say "Okay, I have a performance, so I have this work already, that exists, so I can go and perform" To actually say: "Okay, on this date at this time I would like to present one new piece, or two new pieces" for example and maybe read an older piece. I'm finding that really helpful for just generating more stuff. Sorry, excuse me madam, getting a bit caught on my wine.
[Webster:] You mean water?
[Luke:] Water, okay, we'll take that one out.
[Luke:] So yeah I'm finding that the deadline to me are really useful tool for getting me to generate new work. And so, and then, yeah, without any sense of shame or embarrassment to say that literally the hour before I head to a gig would be a good time for me to write something or... I had a performance recently, where I hadn't written anything new, and I was gonna perform an older piece, and then when I got there, I thought: Actually, no, there was something new I wanted to say this week, so I wrote it in the bar before I went up, so.. That was quite nice.
[Evy:] So, shout out for procrastinators everywhere.
[Luke:] Yeah, absolutely, yeah... But again, I'm just thinking like, okay, there has to be the... But the challenge comes from me. In the sense of saying: No I will generate something new. Because I can always rely on something old. Because I've always got that on hand, in my pocket. So that's why "No, let's do something new this time" It's almost... It's sort of knocking up against the improv thing which I have years of experience of. And yet, there's something about this medium, the spoken word, where I'm not.. I don't feel... I don't even know if it's ready, but I don't feel that I want it to be a complete improvisation on the stage. There is something that I wanna write down before I get up there. It's a different... It's a slightly different process for me. I'm not saying that that might not come in the future or that I might want to explore that, but it's not there yet. Right now, it is about wanting to write something down. To know that what is that narrative path, before I step up there.
[Webster:] Everyone's got a different process, so I think you kinda have to just trust that, right? 'Cause you've been doing it so long, and it's working for you, so far. So there is something to be said for... Even if it is maybe last minute, and a bit improv-y, that's how you do it. And the end result for the audience, is just as good, so... Who cares if you wake up at twelve in the afternoon and write a poem and then perform it, you know, four hours later in the evening? If it works, it works, right?
[Luke:] Yeah absolutely, I think... And I think that's one of the things that we can be thankful to the audience for. Is that, the audience doesn't ask the question "well, how long did you work on this?" Attaching some notion to the fact that like "Oh, something took you... Like if it's a book that took you twenty years to write, therefore it has more value than this thing.." you know? We're just.... Yeah, the audience goes in good faith to see these events, and their expectations are high, you know. They wanna be entertained or moved or whatever that is, and you know, that's a generous thing for them to do. And they want you to succeed, they want to be entertained or moved or whatever it is. That's why they're there. So I think that that's a really nice contract that we have with them is that it's only when... I mean, what's the worst performance you've ever seen? I don't know, somebody on stage forgets their lines, or is totally inappropriate, or... If the audience becomes self-conscious or embarrassed by the performance they're seeing, then that's probably the only way it can go really badly wrong.
[Evy:] Have you had moments where you... Like what's the strangest thing that happened to you on the stage?
[Luke:] I think that improv comedy is the place where it was most likely to be... Where you could push the envelope of what's appropriate, or you could test the audience in a way of being provocative and seeing what makes the audience grin. Because if you're doing comedy, then you have this constant feedback from the audience, of "Oh this..." Even to the point where you can sort of detect what part of the room it's working in. So you can go like: "That group over there likes risqué humour, this little group over here likes intellectual humour" So you can sort of play the room. But if you want to... And then you can use bad language or be deliberately provocative or offensive and just see like "okay, well how far can I push this audience?" and then trying that. And some of those, occasionally I think, once or twice I've sort of said something spontaneously and thought "OH, that didn't land well" and then you go like "well, we don't need to do that again. We're not on a script, but we can, yeah, we can change it" And of course some performers actually then pursue that further and that makes them a different sort of person to watch.
[Webster:] It's an interesting relationship, because they want you to be good for their benefit. And you want them to be good for your benefit as well, so there's like a push and pull, you know. But if you're not good, they're gonna tear you apart and they're not gonna enjoy your poetry and that's gonna affect your performance as well... So how do you handle that, you know? Knowing that "Man, I really need to deliver for these people, who've turned up, and maybe paid money to come and see what I have to say", how do you deal with that in your head?
[Luke:] I think it's... For me, arriving with integrity, so that means, and that's just a set of my own... having a certain set of my own rules.. certain... or values. So... One thing that's important to me is like "okay, well, am I stepping on stage with what I wanna present?" If I set myself the challenge of a new piece "Did I write it?" Or am I just... If I did that, and I turn up and I've only got three older pieces that are... I feel lazy, and I think "Okay, well I'm not at my best." But fortunately, that doesn't happen so much. Usually if I've set myself the challenge, then that's... And I say: "I'm gonna write/read something new" then I'll deliver on that promise that I made to... initially to myself, okay? And then the next thing is to go on stage with... probably with no alcohol, right? Not be drunk, okay? And then again, that might work for some performers, and not for others, but for me, it's like "so okay, having had..." I can have my social... If this is a social evening, and I want to watch, too, then I can have my glass of wine after the set, okay? But until I've performed, I'll be on, I want to be completely aware. And once or twice I've thought "Ow, it won't hurt, just have a couple of beers before I go on" And actually I've noticed the difference in myself, so it's like... Okay, so that's not something for me. So I won't do that either. So again, I think that as long as it's a bit like... You know the football fan who has his lucky pants and things like this... It's like: Well if I get all the variables right, my team will win, okay? So and to a certain extend, I think it's a little bit like that, it's like "Let's... Nobody is giving us these performance rules, we just have to set a criteria where I think I've done the best job. To get on and treat the audience with respect and believe that there's in the work that I'll do that I've got the mix right, that will connect with them. And then also, when I feel like it, to explain that. I can always take the extra step of saying “Well, today I feel this." Right, okay? "This is what's been going on for me today" And revealing something about the... My personality, something that I'm really feeling. For a long time, hosting comedy, it wasn't so much me on stage, as a persona, that I had, a slightly more... A more confident, more comedic, more outgoing version of myself would go on stage. This is a character that I created. And I still draw on that person, sometimes. But now becoming more interested in presenting myself. Like, private me on stage and seeing what happens there as well. Because I think, by being authentic, when you present your work again, you're giving the audience a further way of connecting. And not just... It doesn't just work in terms of the connection they have with the performer on stage, it will... You know, you will see people connecting, with the people that they've come with in a different way, because you'll have affected them in some way that they'll want to talk about it. And that's really interesting, too.
[Evy:] Yeah, for sure. And it's the vulnerability that connects people, right? Because then you also become in a way "responsible" for that person, because they shared something with you, and you're responsible for that feeling, in a way. To hold space for that person to share, right? It's really beautiful, I think.
[Webster:] Well, I look forward to seeing your next performance on stage, Luke.
[Luke:] Oh, thank you very much.
[Webster:] And for our audience listening, where can they find you, online?
[Luke:] Right, well I have my instagram: @luke_davies. With an E
[Evy:] we will spell it out.
[Luke:] yeah, spell it out. Yeah you're social, find me there, yeah, it's fine. Thank you very much, it was super fun.
[Webster:] Thank you
[Evy:] Thank you so much!
[Webster:] And for our audience listening: as usual you can find us on www.worduppodcast.com, where you'll find our social media, past and present guests and you can also make suggestions on guests that you think we should speak to. See you next time.
[Evy:] Doei!


[outro music]


[Evy’s laughing]
[Webster:] Should I say "See you next week"?
[Evy:] Next time.
[Webster:] "next episode"?
[Luke:] See you next time
[Webster:] See you next time.


Transcript by Audrey van Houten