Is anyone interested in cowboys?

Convener(s): Heather Taylor

Participants: Jamie Rocha Allan, Catherine Paskell, Kirche Zeile, Jonathan Grieve, Lara Kriefman, Garry Robson, Alex Scott.

Summary of discussion, conclusions and/or recommendations:

Tombstone tales – arcola : Used fingers as guns, told small stories.

How do you capture the expanse of westerns on the stage?

Maybe it’s the small stories – the rancher, the settlers, the dark and cramp of the small sod houses.

Often guns went off by accident and there were horrible festering wounds

Compare cowboys- Canada vs US vs South America, etc

England the term cowboy means bad – someone dodgy, not very good at what they do, frauds

Interest in learning about ranching and the fight between them and the farmers

Musical Quilters is example of settlers tales told on stage

Westerns mark the socio-economic changes of the times

Not just romantic – its someone who does something to make change (good or bad) and leave

Italian directors brought in Italian ideas into the wide open spaces

About being free and taking risks

Westerns are constantly changing and every generation looks at it differently – they are mythical landscapes

Cowboy play being developed at BAC recreating western films

Puccini opera : Golden Girl of the West

Lonliness and emptiness

The cowboy myth hopped across through films around the world

Filled with icons, multicultural aspect of cowboys

They have one foot in the modern and one foot in the past – train vs cowboys

Treading between cultures but using things you recognize

Stealing iconography but not embracing the ideas internally

Hero who’s dead

Country Western – community values and there’s the Grand Ol Oprey in Paisley

Play: “Stag and the black black oil”

Who is the English cowboys : maybe celtic figures (riders of Rohan) – people attached to the earth.

They are like superheroes, the classic hero

They community needs them but don’t love them – their morals are black and white

The Warrior good example of a film

Myth of the cowboy – ACTION HERO a company that have done a show called Western