We Out Here (they’ll Be In My Store Soon, Too)

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jaws theme starts playing

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headсanon that max lost his teddy bear mr. Honeynuts. and on one of his birthdays neil and nikki give him the same tattered bear which was found in the commission

Music Spotlight: FLETCHER

FLETCHER (@findingxfletcher) might just be one of the hardest working musical artists we’ve seen in a while. This New Jersey native has earned every single one of her 100 million streams on Spotify, worked for every spot on stage at major festivals like Lollapalooza and Bonnaroo, and kept releasing new music while she was at it. The kicker? She did it all while finding the time to graduate from NYU’s Clive Davis Institue for Recorded Music. How she managed to find time for our little interview, we’ll never know.

Who influences your music the most? 

I grew up listening to pretty much just Bob Marley and Celine Dion because it’s the only music my parents had in the house; a bit of Bruce Springsteen since my mom grew up in Asbury Park, NJ. That was it honestly. But I’m really happy about this, they still remain major influences for me.

What’s the most important piece of advice you’ve received so far? 

Paul McCartney told me to “be great,” and I really want to tattoo that on my face. But in all seriousness, I think the best advice I’ve received is “if it’s not fun, don’t do it.” I’m just having a lot of fun right now traveling the world and meeting those who’ve been there since day one and the new people just now hearing my music for the first time.

When it comes to celebrating women, how do you think artists can continue to support women from all backgrounds? 

We must celebrate inclusivity, diversity, and intersectionality. I hope to empower and uplift other women in the industry through various creative partnerships and collaborations and through my music, and I hope others will do the same.

Dream collaboration and why?

 I love the honest, simple storytelling of Ed Sheeran, Shawn Mendes, Kacey Musgraves, and Lorde. I would love to work with any of them.

Lighting round! Describe each of the following in one word: Who you are, what you value the most, and what you’d be if you were a food item.

Empath, Connection, Nacho.

If you were to star in a TV show, what would it be about and what kind of character would you play? 

I’d definitely want to be a superhero, maybe like Wonder Woman. I have my black belt in Karate, so I feel like I’m qualified for the job.

Want to hear more from FLETCHER? Yeah, we know you do. Follow her at @findingxfletcher , check out her official video for Undrunk here and then swing on over here to listen to her music.

(This interview has been edited for clarity.)

‘This little hand’: Gesturing Lady Macbeth.

Catriona Bolt is one of this year’s students studying the Shakespeare Studies MA that we run jointly with King’s College London. In this blog, inspired by her MA research, she reflects on the use of gesture in performances of Lady Macbeth. 

Shakespeare’s company of actors – including the man himself – understood acting through a classical prism. The three tenets of the Roman lawyer Cicero’s handbook for orators were docere, delectare, movere: to teach, to delight, and to persuade. Even if you don’t know any Latin, you might be able to guess another meaning for movere: move. You can yourself move physically, or you can move someone else emotionally, which is closer to what Cicero meant. Early modern actors moved their audiences through accent and action, again key reference points for Roman orators. Accent described speaking the verse, while action meant the accompanying gestures. While we’ve developed many more techniques and theories about acting since the Globe was shut down in 1642, students at drama school today still have movement and voice classes daily, and most productions at the new Globe will have a Movement Director and a Vocal Coach in their company.

Gesture is a specific part of movement that normally uses the hands and arms. Our hands are one of our primary communication tools – for those who use sign language they are sometimes the primary communicator. In Titus Andronicus, Lavinia is doubly robbed of the means to communicate her brutal assault as both her tongue and her hands are removed. Good actors will use their hands expressively to convey how their character is feeling, sometimes using gesture to speak what is unspoken in the text. Perhaps the most famous example of this in Shakespeare comes towards the end of Macbeth, when Lady Macbeth signifies her breakdown by repeatedly rubbing and wringing – ‘washing’ – her hands, which have come to symbolise her guilty conscience. In interpreting Lady Macbeth at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse (2018), Michelle Terry employed brilliant gestural work to build a character with the terrifying, ultimately self-destructive ability to disconnect from her own actions.

As we first saw her, Terry’s Lady Macbeth was hunched upstage, alone, over a letter from her husband (I.v). However, as she reached the “unsex me here” soliloquy, Terry moved forward to command the space, holding a taper to light her face. This speech is more usually accompanied by expansive gesture that reflects its physical content. For example, Judy Dench’s celebrated interpretation for the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1979 saw her act out a fearful physical sequence in evoking ‘you spirits that tend on mortal thoughts.’ Terry hardly moved except to address the upper galleries, bringing a chilling determination to her performance. In gesturing little, a large part of her communicative power went untapped during this opening scene – in fact this became Lady Macbeth’s most potent weapon, because it meant she could use gesture to deceive other characters in the play-world; even when alone, her gestures were unnatural, divorced from her feelings and intentions. For us as audience members, it established a convention. While Lady Macbeth was alone, she gestured and moved little. But in the following scene, Macbeth (played by Paul Ready) arrived and Terry played much more physically, hence more expressively; when Joseph Marcell’s Duncan arrived, her gestures were stylised and courtly. So we saw that her original restraint was a deliberate choice, and that Lady Macbeth was a frighteningly good actor, even for her husband.

This pattern continued throughout the play, until a climactic scene between her and Macbeth after the banquet (III.iv). Terry’s gestures towards Ready throughout were responsive, not assertive, as her character manipulated his. But as Macbeth became more unhinged, Lady Macbeth became less able to control him. During the banquet she restrained him, holding her arms out to get rid of the rest of the court; by the end of this scene, he was throwing her around the stage, mastering her physically as he was unable to rhetorically. Terry closed the act alone with a scream.

Lady Macbeth appears only once more, in the sleepwalking scene (V.i), and as she does we are given a detailed description of her gestures that, particularly in this particular production, signposts her loss of control. These gestures are focused on her hands, which she rubs repeatedly to wash away the blood she sees there; her final gesture is to reach for her husband’s hand: “Come, come, come, come, give me your hand. What’s done cannot be undone.” Terry, hunched and tiny in an oversized nightgown, sobbed piteously as she seemed to physically wrestle with herself. Sleepwalking, her gestures had finally caught up with her conscience. Her hands were in tune with her thoughts, and she could no longer distance herself from her actions.

Macbeth production photography by Johan Persson 

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