Ken Bourke Biog

WHERE I COME FROM

I grew up in Terenure in Dublin.  In my early teens I was bitten by the theatre bug and I was never happier than when I was rehearsing or performing a play, either in school or in the local youth club; William Shakespeare, Sean O’Casey and Oscar Wilde were my bed-time reading. 

HUMAN RESOURCES

After secondary school, the first eight years of my working life were spent in the Personnel Department of Irish Life Assurance.  By day, I spent time working in various aspects of Human Resources: recruitment, training, and staff development, but most of all, industrial relations.  By night, I became a student in the College of Industrial Relations, learning about things like psychology, organisational behaviour and the joys of the collective bargaining process. 

COLLECTIVE BARGAINING

My love of theatre took a back seat for a while, as I played my part in the various rounds of negotiations between the company and the trade unions.  I would listen to the angry outbursts and the impassioned speeches of the negotiators on both sides of the table.  In my capacity as minute-taker, I would try to capture both the practical and the emotional content of what was being said.  In particular, it was my job to chart the subtle changes of emphasis that took place over the course of each hour’s debate, and I soon became aware of how theatrical the whole business of negotiation can be.  Looking back, I think my first “scripts” were the minutes I wrote after those management/union negotiating sessions.

THEATRE

In time, the call of the theatre could not be ignored, so I left my steady, well-paid, pensionable job, with all its attractive prospects, and I embarked on a writing career.  That was in 1986.  Three years later I had my first professional production with a play called Wild Harvest, with Druid Theatre Company in Galway, and I was well and truly hooked.  During that time, I became aware that the rehearsal process is like a many-sided bargaining session, when a writer delivers a new script to a director and a group of actors, and everyone fights their own corner, while hopefully they are all still pursuing the overall goal of a scene, an act, or a play that will engage, entertain and satisfy an audience.

I have been writing plays ever since.  I have worked with mainstream theatre companies all over Ireland, with community theatre groups, theatre-in-education, children’s theatre, and actors-in-training. 
Over the years two main strands have appeared in my work.  One strand is comprised of plays that emerged from my own creative imagination, like Wild Harvest, The Hunt for Red Willie, Little Rudolf, and Buck Jones and the Body Snatchers, although all of these have also grown and developed in collaboration with other theatre practitioners.  The other strand is comprised of plays which I have written for specific groups of people, like The Narrow Ground in Belfast, The Beloved and Casa Lisa in Dublin, and The Comer Story and The Lost Prince in Kilkenny; with this kind of writing, the stories, the personalities, and the hopes and fears of the participants are all reflected in the finished product.

FENG SHUI

I first became aware of Feng Shui around 1992, when I read an article by William Spear.  The article led me to a series of workshops in London, and the workshops led me to a professional training programme with William which I shared with a diverse group of students from different parts of the world. 

The more I learned and experimented, the more I recognised Feng Shui as something which I had been doing for years on an intuitive, reflexive, level.  I never take my environment for granted; I always look for the best physical conditions for whatever it is I’m doing, whether that’s writing a play, or running a workshop, or changing a light-bulb.  I also recognised that the Chi, or energy, which Feng Shui harnesses, is the same energy that I have felt when performing on the stage, as I reached out to make a connection with the audience, right to the back row of the auditorium.  It is the same energy that I feel as I imagine the action of a new play.  I respond to the way things sound and the way things look in a piece of theatre, but most of all I respond to the way it makes me feel, at a physical level.  For me, this physical awareness, the kinaesthetic sense, is at the heart of Feng Shui.

THE FIVE TRANSFORMATIONS

When I look back on my experience in Human Resources, the theatre and Feng Shui, it seems to me that there is a common thread which runs through all these areas.

Shortly before I left Irish Life, I completed a large work-based project as part of my HR studies: the focus of the project was technology-related change.  I looked at technological changes that had been introduced into the company over the previous number of years, and I examined the impact these changes had on roles, relationships and the working environment.  At the time, Organisation Development was a favourite phrase among management theorists, and I soaked up a lot of diverse views about the nature of organisational change and the stages it goes through.

Later on, as I immersed myself in playwriting, and as I puzzled over the complexity of human emotion and its portrayal in stories, I came across the work of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and The Grieving Process.  Her description of the five stages of grief sent me running to look again at the traditional five-act play structure, to see the parallels that exist there.

Then, through Feng Shui, I started to learn about one of the key concepts in traditional Chinese philosophy: the Five Transformations.  This is a simple, elegant model of change as it arises in the natural world.  It is a model which can be used to describe the turning of night into day, or the cycle of the seasons, or the stages in a product-development or training process.  It can even chart the various emotional states we go through when confronted with the necessity for change.

Contact me on 086.0788704 for further information about my Feng Shui practice, or visit
http://kilkennyfengshui.blogspot.com/