MJ Deans’ Starter for 10
MJ Deans is a Gaelic-speaking actor and performance facilitator. She recently began work on a new piece of Gaelic language theatre adapted from a short story by acclaimed Scottish novelist Kirsty Logan as part of her Starter for 10 residency.
Starter for 10, offers aspiring theatre-makers a funded residency of £2,500 to help them develop their skills, networks, or explore a new idea for a piece of theatre.
We caught up with MJ towards the end of her residency at Rockvilla, the National Theatre of Scotland’s new creation centre.
“I'd been thinking about adapting a short story of Kirsty Logan's for a while. I'd loved Una and Coll Are Not Friends from The Rental Heart and Other Fairytales since I first read it in 2014. The story is set on the Isle of Skye and has a great, modern, fairytale quality. I thought it could make an exciting piece of contemporary physical Gaelic theatre. I'm also really interested in making theatre accessible, so before translating the story entirely, I had to think how it would work for English-speaking audiences. I came up with the idea of having one character always speaking in Gàidhlig and the other always speaking in English. I had no idea before my Starter for 10 residency if or how it would work!
I had so much fun during my four day residency. I had an amazing team in the room; director Caitlin Skinner, actors Beth Friedan and Michael Abubakar and movement director Natasha Gilmore. Caitlin kept the environment in the room really safe and playful, so the actors were free to improvise and challenge each other. Beth and Michael were incredibly generous with their ideas and performances and kept probing me with questions and new ideas.
We spent two days improvising around the scenes I'd written and then I'd go home and redraft in the evening.
The last two days saw Natasha coming in to work specifically on the movement, which was amazing and brought out new sides to the characters I hadn't thought of.
Being based at Rockvilla during the residency was an invaluable experience. Having everyone under one roof makes such a nice change from the old National Theatre of Scotland HQ at Civic House. I was able to nip into the technical or costume stores to borrow things or ask for some help and advice. It's such a buzzing, supportive atmosphere at Rockvilla. Staff I'd been chatting to over the week popped into our end-of-residency sharing to see how we were getting on. Rockvilla feels like a big, sexy, water-cooler hub for Scottish theatre. I think some great new connections and ideas will definitely be made in Rockvilla soon.
My main focus for the Starter for 10 residency was to ask the question, ‘does this form work for the story I'm telling?’. The feedback from our sharing was ‘yes it does’ so I'm now in a great position where I can go and keep writing. Once I've got a first draft finished, I'll see where I'm at and where I think Kirsty Logan’s story would be suited to as a piece of theatre. I hadn't dared to dream too big before the residency in case the idea didn't work, but now I'm really excited for the future!”
Photography by Beth Chalmers.