Worm-Hole (The Radio Interview)
ARCHIVE EDITOR'S NOTE --- On the afternoon of Wednesday 25 September 2002, Niki was a guest on The Beat - hosted by Dave Beck - on KUOW-FM (Puget Sound Public Radio) in Seattle, Washington, USA in connection with her performances of Worm-Hole at the Seattle Fringe Festival. Her fellow guests for the half-hour appearance were then-Festival Executive Director Kibby MacKinnon and Fringe performers Jennifer Haley and Timothy Mooney. During her five-minute-plus interview segment, Niki spoke about the genesis of Worm-Hole, provided some insight into the mind and raison d'etre of the novice-nun character, discussed the reaction of audiences to the piece, and offered up a bit of her own background in dance and physical theatre.
At last check, the program was still archived at the KUOW Website in its Archive Section. Click Here for the specific webpage. Under "Seattle Fringe Festival", click "Listen To Real Audio". The clip is in Real Audio so you will need Real Player in order to load it. If you don't have Real Player on your system, you can download it from the Real.Com Website. Niki's segment begins at approximately the 15:20 mark. For those who, for whatever reason, are unable to load the audio stream (or if the program has been removed from their Archives), Niki's interview has been transcribed below. In the very few cases where the audio quality made it difficult to make out individual words, or where voices trailed off or overlapped thereby obscuring words, we have either put in what we thought the word was with a question mark or we have left a blank space. However, we are satisfied that the transcript is 99.9 percent accurate.
Transcript of Interview of Niki McCretton by Dave Beck, Host of "The Beat" on KUOW-FM in Seattle, Washington, USA on 25 September 2002:
DAVE --- We're turning next to Niki McCretton who's presenting a show called Worm-Hole at Theater Schmeater. Who's the woman at the centre of your piece, Niki?
NIKI --- Well, she's nameless, sadly, but that's because the piece is told through movement, so you don't really get to find out who she is in that way. She's a novice nun. You see her on-stage in the room for the first time. She's very excited to be there because she's trained for a long time to have this great role in servitude and she's very excited to wait for people to evangelize, who never actually come.
DAVE --- So she has what kind of a life?
NIKI --- It's a very frugal existence. She is provided for in terms of food and water. Unfortunately, she's only ever given Cup Noodles to eat and she's not given very much time to eat them, so she doesn't manage to eat the first couple of days because she hasn't really worked out how you operate a Cup Noodle in 30 seconds. But she gets the hang of it in the end and gives herself some very bad intestinal problems.
DAVE --- Does this come out of a, I mean, this sort of incongruous idea about a nun and physical movement which is your background as a dancer and a movement artist?
NIKI --- Yes, it is, yes.
DAVE --- How did you want to wed these worlds or what kind of dreams (?) gave you that idea?
NIKI --- That's a really difficult question. The piece is really layered so there's lots of reasons why I made it. E-e-e-e-e-e!!! The first reason I made it was actually the educational system in Britain which seemed to put people in little boxes - my nun character has a lot of little boxes that she reveals to the audience - and just sort of the faithfulness you have to have to be a teacher in the education system and just accept the way things are, even though it might not be the way you would want to teach them or operate. So it really came from that, and the notion of having a faith, and whether you have a faith because it's rewarding, or whether you have it because it's a true faith. The reason it's told physically is because it explores the idea of somebody taking a vow of silence as well, so it seemed to fit or at least flow with the idea of doing a piece of physical theatre.
DAVE --- As we meet this novice nun, is she experiencing, or does she experience during the course of the performance, some sort of spiritual insight or awakening or crisis, or what kind of goes on with her?
NIKI --- Well, I can't tell you what happens at the end because that would spoil it for everybody, but she does certainly go through a range of emotions and, like I said, to begin with, she's very naive and very keen to please, and when her (_____) aren't fulfilled, she automatically assumes the Catholic guilt, that it must be her fault, she's not doing things well enough. So she strives very, very hard and there comes a point where she can't remain bound by it anymore, and it gets a little crazy. It's a very funny piece and she becomes fairly blasphemous, I guess, in some of her actions because she doesn't do them quite as wholeheartedly as she should. In fact, a demonstration of one is that she mixes up her section where she is meant to pray with the section where she is eating her Cup Noodles, so she's praying with this Cup Noodle to God. That's pretty crazy right there.
DAVE --- You're kinda playing with the idea of rituals and how we kind of get in, in where they lose their original meaning, and in the way we (_____).
NIKI --- Yeah, and in a way, it's a real mirror for just daily life, I think, because we get, we do get caught up in that, and time, and doing things to the best of our ability, and actually, I think all of us lose ourselves a little bit with that kind of nine-to-five-ness, so it's about that, too.
DAVE --- Are the, what are the movements, the physical gestures, dance traditions or styles that you incorporate or create for this particular performance piece?
NIKI --- I think I'm drawing on all my training. I trained most recently as a dancer. I trained when I was 30, I went in and did my dance degree. I never had the chance to do it before and I thought, I'd better do this before I'm too old. And I'm mixing up the training I did originally as a performer which was in clown and physical theatre, and acrobatics, so I'm trying to sort of marry all the things together.
DAVE --- What reaction do you get from people who are re-examining their spiritual life as they come and see you portray this nun (_____)?
NIKI --- Yeah, that's amazing! People come to see the show three times, if they're going through that in their life, they come back and back. I think because it's layered, you get the meaning from it one time, and when you come back again, you see the detail in it that you might not have seen before. Some of it's quite subtle. Yeah, I think it makes people talk to each other. A lot of people have got on my website, and on the Fringe Festival's, where they've had an opportunity to sort of vox each other and there's a big discussion about the show and its meaning, and what it throws out for people.
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Webpage Last Updated 15 May 2007
