Sarah Owen reflects on their second residency at the Nest

One of the last things I said before I finished my second residency at the Nest back in July 2022 was a tongue-in-cheek promise that it wouldn’t take me three months to write my blog about my experience, after I did exactly that last time. In my defence, I didn’t lie. However, taking eight months to write it instead was not exactly my intention. But! Better late than never, and I think I can (and I will) argue that it’s sort of appropriate for a person who spent their Nest residency working on a stage musical about time to also be consistently dogged by time as a concept. 

For the uninitiated – my name is Sarah, and I’ve been working on my musical, Once Upon Two Times, for a couple of years now. It started out as an electronica concept album, before I decided to try and turn it into a stage musical, because why not. I’ve been fortunate enough to have two residencies with Talking Birds during this time – the first of which was instrumental to me actually getting started on the script, which I had entirely failed to do up until that point. After that first residency, however, life and time and everything in between got in the way, and I found the project had definitely fallen by the wayside. Luckily for me, I was given the chance to do a second residency, from June-July 2022, which needed to work around my busy work schedule. As a result, it was a little different to my first residency, where I had been at the Nest five days a week, for two weeks. This time, my residency would be the exact same number of days, but spread two days a week across five weeks.

I experienced a very interesting side effect of this – a side effect that, in part, became one of the defining aspects of my residency: connecting with other artists. Because I was only in two days a week, it meant that during the course of my residency, quite a few different artists were also doing their residencies at the same time, but for less weeks than I was (because they were doing more days in the week). This meant that over my five weeks, I got the chance to meet and talk with lots of fantastic and creative people, all doing different projects and art forms and all with their own approaches to working as an artist. One of the things I’ve always really loved about the Nest is that they encourage a shared lunchtime, which gives people the chance to really connect and talk to each other, whether about our projects or just anything that comes to mind. It was really encouraging and genuinely helpful to talk through creative blocks and consider different approaches, as well as to just appreciate how different people view the world and how they express that in their artwork. And then, of course, the best part was making new artist friends – in fact, I got on with some of the other artists so well that we ended up making a little group chat to make sure we kept in contact.

In addition to this, another artist doing a residency was sharing my studio with me on the days that I wasn’t in the Nest. As a result, we never met in person because we were never in the building on the same day! But we were both able to witness the other person’s work developing over the weeks as our studio space became filled with more notes and sketches that were left pinned on the wall. In fact, we ended up leaving post-it notes to each other, welcoming each other over to our side of the studio and explaining what our projects were all about, explaining what we had done over our couple of days that week, what we were struggling with, and even being able to offer advice and solidarity. Our residencies both spanned over the same number of weeks, and so it really felt like we were working right alongside each other, even though we never actually met in person. 

The other connections that I made was with artists working professionally within the industry. Before embarking on this project, I had never attempted to write a script before, let alone a full-blown musical. As a result, I’ve felt somewhat out of my depth, and so asked Talking Birds if I could speak to people within the industry to get a sense of whether or not I was on the right track. Thus, during the course of my July residency, I had a brief mentorship with a musician (Amy) and a dramaturg (Ola), which was unfathomably helpful in figuring out what I was doing, as well as challenging my ideas regarding what was the ‘right’ way to do things. For example, Amy sat with me and deconstructed some of the music I had written so far (which was extremely cool), and then asked why I was so set on rearranging the music for orchestra (answer: because I thought that’s what you were meant to do for musicals) when, actually, there was no reason I couldn’t use synthesised instruments, which I knew really well. Just because it’s not the normal way to go about things, doesn’t mean it can’t be done – in fact, that might even be a good reason to do it. And then, speaking with Ola about the first twenty pages of my script really gave me a new insight into how I could approach the opening, especially with drawing the audience into the story and possibly even telling it in a slightly different way. Things that I had considered to be set in stone were now a lot more flexible, which gave me the chance to rethink how I’d approached telling the story as a whole. But at the same time, it was all very encouraging – I was on the right lines, but there was still room to develop the idea further and make it even better!

On the last day of my first residency back in November 2021, I’d made a huge step forward – actually starting the script, and finishing the first half of Act One. By the end of this second residency, not only had I done a lot of writing, with roughly 80% of the entire script done, but I’d also made huge steps forwards in rethinking how to approach the music, as well as garnering a better understanding at what I should work on next in order to improve and edit the script. There is a lot of work left to be done – but I’m extremely proud of what I’ve achieved, and the fact that all of that has come alongside forming friendships and connections that I never would have had the opportunity to make otherwise just shows how invaluable this residency has been for me.