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Behind the Scenes with Lorelei Harris, producer of Dreaming of Fat Men
Interview conducted by Lauren Dee
Ed. note: Dreaming of Fat Men isn't your typical radio production: In making
it, Lorelei Harris invited four women into a radio studio in which a culinary
feast was served, and she taped the conversation that ensued as the meal was
consumed.
> What was the initial inspiration behind the making of Dreaming of Fat
Men?
The initial inspiration for Dreaming of Fat Men was utterly banal. I was out
for dinner with friends one evening and, looking around the table, realized
that all the women present (including myself) had bizarre relationships with
food and the process of eating. This is not to imply that we were all anorexic
or bulimic - just that the ways we approached food were loaded, overlaid,
encoded and conflated with factors that had little to do with physical
nourishment. More than this, we had all developed ways of dealing with this and
talking about it socially: something like watching a very elaborate and formal
dance being executed unwittingly before one's eyes. I remember thinking at the
time that if I could capture this in sound, if I could render it transparent,
what a program it would make. I couldn't think my path through to something
that wasn't po-faced or didactic or patronizing, so there it rested for a few
years until the idea of staging a feast came to mind.
>The logistics of its production are so unique - can you explain how it
came together?
I knew what the structure would be before I started with any of this: a feast
for four fat women, overlaid with material gleaned from individual interviews
recorded separately beforehand. By the time we went into studio with the feast,
I had recorded for several hours with each woman. With this material in mind, I
also had a running order for the evening. The feast did not happen randomly: it
was highly structured with a director on the studio floor (me) moving the women
through the material. Further to this, one of the women acted as "ringmistress"
for the evening.
Once the notion of the feast was in place, the logistics of the piece were in
fact quite simple. Obviously, the key to planning the piece was the feast
itself. First, the selection of the venue was of paramount importance. With a
completely private occasion in mind, I ruled out a restaurant straightaway. In
the end, I went for the simplest venue: the main drama studio of the station.
This done, it was a case of sitting down with the sound engineers and planning
the microphone design. The set ended up rectangular with the women sitting one
at either end of the table and two on one side, each woman facing a microphone
suspended above her.
Then, the decor: the bottom line for me was that it had to be fun. I wanted to
create an exotic playpen for the women for the evening. We dressed the studio
like a sumptuous boudoir with lots of pink; low lighting and flowers; candles
and crystal and china. The substantive point here was that I wanted to give
them visual triggers for a sound piece. I knew that the feast would provide me
with an audio context for the program.
> How did you find the women who participated in the feature? How much
did you prepare them for the recording session?
Because of the work I did at that time on a daily basis, I was extremely adept
at "trawling" for people. I knew the "ringmistress" beforehand and decided to
use her because she's extremely articulate, sings like an angel and is
wonderful at improvisation. As far as I can remember, I got the other women by
asking around. I pre-interviewed quite a number of women. I didn't want women
who were unwell with food disorders or women who would be coy about their
relationship with food. I also needed a spread of accents so that one could
distinguish between the women. And I needed women with the ability to tell the
stories of their lives.
By the time I found the four women who were included in the feast, I knew that
I had all these things. What I didn't know was how they'd interact on the night
or what the chemistry between them would be. None of them had ever met before
and they came from very different backgrounds, so there was a quite a high risk
involved. I didn't really prepare them for the evening further than asking them
all to dress up for the occasion and instructing them to react verbally as they
entered the studio for the first time. What actually happened was that when the
studio sat down, I had four strange women sitting alone in a reception room
looking at each other and a looming disaster looking at me. So I sent somebody
down the road to a bottle store to buy champagne....
> How much tape ended up on the cutting-room floor? Was any of the
material collected to risque to use in the production?
About six hours' tape ended up on the floor. Dreaming of Fat Men was a vile
program to edit. The women were cutting in on each other all the time. Their
language 'progressed' with the evening and the station has a policy on decency
in relation to these matters. It was very difficult. All of the material was
too risque but most of it was useable, if that makes sense. The real problem
lay in keeping the tension of the erotic sub-plot that emerged during the
night.
> How did the public respond to the piece when it aired? How have men
reacted to the story, compared to women?
Dreaming of Fat Men was received with a mixture of amusement, affection and
bewilderment. Men tend to respond to the raunchiness of the women while
objectifying them because of their size. Women tend to approach the piece as
co-conspirators. However, it's hard to generalize. One woman of my acquaintance
was deeply distressed by the breaking of taboos; by the auto-eroticism. Another
(very thin) woman was almost violently angry with me for making the program,
feeling that it trespassed upon secret terrain.
> Do you think of Dreaming of Fat Men as a political piece or more of
four personal stories woven together?
Of course Dreaming of Fat Men is a political piece with a small "p." It is
feminist in its orientation and in its attempt to provide an arena to women in
relation to this issue. It is subversive in its humour and its form. But then I
think decent radio is by definition political.
> What role does humor play for you as a tool in storytelling,
especially in the case of sensitive subjects?
I don't set out to incorporate humor. If it happens, that's great. If not, it
doesn't worry me. Anyway, I suspect I think more in terms of irony or wit.
Being funny for me, as I've already indicated, is about playing with forms, not
being funny ha-ha.
The most difficult thing about approaching politics or other sensitive issues
through humor is that most humor isn't really funny and a humorous approach to
matters of the soul depends on a fine balancing act that doesn't often work.
Personally, I'm not at all fond of comedy: it bores me to tears in the main.
What is of interest is the way in which we can play with traditional forms to
say things which are hard to articulate. I think the humor in Dreaming of Fat
Men works because it's actually about exploring profound pain and it sits on a
knife edge doing so.
One thing I did that teetered on the brink of failing in its attempt to use
humor to explore a complex cultural, political and emotional issue was a piece
called Confession. It amused me deeply to make. I had the 1952 Archbishop
McQuaid catechism that was taught to an entire generation of Catholic children
in Ireland set to music like a cross between a bad church choir and a Gilbert
and Sullivan operetta. I set up a confessional booth in the main street of
Dublin and invited passersby to come in and confess over a PA system to the
tune of "Salve Regine." I recorded with priests and psychoanalysts, police
interrogators, etc -- And it's fine, but it's not funny. I think it fails
because it offended too many Catholics here and didn't offer the possibility of
communality to those who weren't Catholic, both in Ireland and elsewhere: a bit
like a map without the right coordinates....
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