I've been remiss at posting here. I have a stack of thoughts and reports waiting.
But just to quickly flag up I am making a small piece called Earpiece in the Sandpit tomorrow (with music from the deliriously brilliant London Snorkelling Team) and another small piece The Fetch in the Scratch Interact on Wednesday. In a fortnight I'm remote collaborating with marvellous Paul Clarke in Overlap at BAC/Mayfest.
3 pieces in a fortnight? It's been a bit like that the last few months - and that's just the little things - hence my blogger silence. But I promise to post more soon, more to myself than on the off-chance that anyone is missing me.
Friday, 1 May 2009
Wednesday, 11 March 2009
The Moon, The Moon
Here's a link to a little online theatrical piece I've helped make recently. Click the image.
It's theatrical because it is part of the online advance for The Moon, The Moon, a new piece by old muckers Unlimited Theatre, and if you go to see the show, which I recommend, you might enjoy a pleasurable shudder of recognition at one moment.
And it's also theatrical because if you choose to follow it through, it will lead you wherever you are into a little private performance. No longer than five minutes. We worked very closely with Unlimited to wrangle it into a shape where not only is it simple and playable (and we hope at least a little bit beautiful) but it also resonates in form and tone and look with the play and its themes. I hate some online-games-to-promote-theatre that are basically a ridiculous flash game, the way you play them being completely disconnected from the rest of the work. We wanted this to be...well... something.
Hope you like it. But also appreciate any posted comments, as critical as you like, right here.
P.S.
Generous comment from Chris Wilkinson on the Guardian Blog. Anyone thinking from reading that I made this by myself (ha!) please check my comment there.
It's theatrical because it is part of the online advance for The Moon, The Moon, a new piece by old muckers Unlimited Theatre, and if you go to see the show, which I recommend, you might enjoy a pleasurable shudder of recognition at one moment.
And it's also theatrical because if you choose to follow it through, it will lead you wherever you are into a little private performance. No longer than five minutes. We worked very closely with Unlimited to wrangle it into a shape where not only is it simple and playable (and we hope at least a little bit beautiful) but it also resonates in form and tone and look with the play and its themes. I hate some online-games-to-promote-theatre that are basically a ridiculous flash game, the way you play them being completely disconnected from the rest of the work. We wanted this to be...well... something.
Hope you like it. But also appreciate any posted comments, as critical as you like, right here.
P.S.
Generous comment from Chris Wilkinson on the Guardian Blog. Anyone thinking from reading that I made this by myself (ha!) please check my comment there.
Sunday, 1 March 2009
The best flashmob in the world?
Click the picture if you've not seen the BBC clip.
Brilliant. Anyone can make their own Morph, and together they embody just what was great about his work. It's so perfectly authentic a tribute.
Friday, 30 January 2009
Stuff seen and played
Not so much. I'm mostly lost in 24 DVD seasons when I am not working. My last DVD compulsion, The West Wing, felt like eating dark chocolates, I'll just have one more... Whereas 24 is like an MSG-packed Chinese buffet, guzzling adrenalin-drenched narrative set-pieces, but I don't feel full yet...
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Last week I went to Scratch Interact, a night of treats curated very properly by the lovely Glue Theatre in the in-between spaces of Southwark Playhouse.
Glue's opener delivered a box that wriggled out a man who then - having failed beautifully to gather attention from the pre-show crowd - managed to get presents and sweets from many.
Deborah Pearson's Break Up With Me invited you into a toilet cubicle with her to do just that, however you chose, delicately responsive to its own conceptual knots, beautifully poised.
'The Minuting Hill Carnival', a minute version of Notting Hill's, refereed by a representative of the Honourable Society of Faster Craftswomen, who before she sold me a nugget of jerk chicken on a cocktail stick, made a joyful band of us playing tiny instruments. Gorgeous how just as much glee came from playing it tiny, it was the play that counted. Lovely and messy.
Emer O'Connor then delivered a piece of storytelling, at first staged and delivered to the back walls. Perfectly good performance but not at all responsive to us or the space, and her volume inevitably causing alarm to the theatre staff worried about the 'main show'. As soon as we moved in closer so she was actually performing to us in the space with her, it suddenly came alive. Which raises very interesting points for me about liveness and scalability.
Emily Smallwood took a pair of us into the disabled toilet. One was sat down on a white towel and asked to listen through headphones to a recording of a story. The lights were then turned off. The other then shared an embrace with her in the corner. Then the lights back on, one was asked to record a story while the other listened, very close. This piece worried me and it's still with me. I loved her assurance in the disjuncture of these elements, the light and darkness, the very living intimacy of the exchanges and near brutality in heightened awareness of the other people in the room. Fantastic sensibility.
Sam and Chris from Glue then led a lively round-table discussion for the good number of us present. But there should be more of us. This night is quarterly and make sure you make (something for) the next one.
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I found and played Gravitation by Jason Rohrer. Both he and his work are fascinating. There's a granularity and bumpiness I really like together with a breathtaking fluidity of concept and mechanic.
I really want to play Between. I need a live partner. If anyone wants to play it with me, drop me a line at theconeydoctor splat gmail and let's sort out a session.
-------------
Last week I went to Scratch Interact, a night of treats curated very properly by the lovely Glue Theatre in the in-between spaces of Southwark Playhouse.
Glue's opener delivered a box that wriggled out a man who then - having failed beautifully to gather attention from the pre-show crowd - managed to get presents and sweets from many.
Deborah Pearson's Break Up With Me invited you into a toilet cubicle with her to do just that, however you chose, delicately responsive to its own conceptual knots, beautifully poised.
'The Minuting Hill Carnival', a minute version of Notting Hill's, refereed by a representative of the Honourable Society of Faster Craftswomen, who before she sold me a nugget of jerk chicken on a cocktail stick, made a joyful band of us playing tiny instruments. Gorgeous how just as much glee came from playing it tiny, it was the play that counted. Lovely and messy.
Emer O'Connor then delivered a piece of storytelling, at first staged and delivered to the back walls. Perfectly good performance but not at all responsive to us or the space, and her volume inevitably causing alarm to the theatre staff worried about the 'main show'. As soon as we moved in closer so she was actually performing to us in the space with her, it suddenly came alive. Which raises very interesting points for me about liveness and scalability.
Emily Smallwood took a pair of us into the disabled toilet. One was sat down on a white towel and asked to listen through headphones to a recording of a story. The lights were then turned off. The other then shared an embrace with her in the corner. Then the lights back on, one was asked to record a story while the other listened, very close. This piece worried me and it's still with me. I loved her assurance in the disjuncture of these elements, the light and darkness, the very living intimacy of the exchanges and near brutality in heightened awareness of the other people in the room. Fantastic sensibility.
Sam and Chris from Glue then led a lively round-table discussion for the good number of us present. But there should be more of us. This night is quarterly and make sure you make (something for) the next one.
-------------
I found and played Gravitation by Jason Rohrer. Both he and his work are fascinating. There's a granularity and bumpiness I really like together with a breathtaking fluidity of concept and mechanic.
I really want to play Between. I need a live partner. If anyone wants to play it with me, drop me a line at theconeydoctor splat gmail and let's sort out a session.
Screaming nostalgia
Late on a Friday night, the foxes screaming outside, inside my head screaming receipts. I'm blogging everywhere else for distraction so I might as well do it here too.
In homage to the foxes, this sprang to mind.
Proper nostalgia. I saw them in '89, beautiful screaming. It stayed inside me to force its way out to open The Bound Man, which I directed in '97 first in college, my ticket to run away from academe into the theatre. When it hit BAC we reconfigured the opening with the help of two classes of 8-year-olds, asking them to imagine the forest of this dark fairy tale and then - yes - to imagine the tree that was them, and then to use the piles of art materials to make their tree however they liked in the middle of the forest in their imagination. Those 60-odd pictures becoming then an installation of a forest that the audience walked through to enter the space. And we recorded the kids singing Caribou in a round, after helping them through a text analysis of the lyrics so we all knew what we were singing. They nailed it.
They came to see the show in a special performance. It's true that all you need to do as a director then is watch them watching it, and mark very precisely the moments when you see them engage and disengage, heat and cool, that precision tells you when it's working and when it's not. But in the Q&A afterwards they mostly wanted to know how the stage punch worked, if it was a real gun, why that boy was wearing a dress.
In homage to the foxes, this sprang to mind.
Proper nostalgia. I saw them in '89, beautiful screaming. It stayed inside me to force its way out to open The Bound Man, which I directed in '97 first in college, my ticket to run away from academe into the theatre. When it hit BAC we reconfigured the opening with the help of two classes of 8-year-olds, asking them to imagine the forest of this dark fairy tale and then - yes - to imagine the tree that was them, and then to use the piles of art materials to make their tree however they liked in the middle of the forest in their imagination. Those 60-odd pictures becoming then an installation of a forest that the audience walked through to enter the space. And we recorded the kids singing Caribou in a round, after helping them through a text analysis of the lyrics so we all knew what we were singing. They nailed it.
They came to see the show in a special performance. It's true that all you need to do as a director then is watch them watching it, and mark very precisely the moments when you see them engage and disengage, heat and cool, that precision tells you when it's working and when it's not. But in the Q&A afterwards they mostly wanted to know how the stage punch worked, if it was a real gun, why that boy was wearing a dress.
Wednesday, 21 January 2009
The Obamathon
I love Stoke Newington International Airport. Last night, a party which completed the celebration from the Election All-Nighter, with DJ's remixing the Big Man's speech, drink and revelry and little performances.
And so many people, I guess that we all recognise this is a moment where we want to remember where we were and who we were with. Or at least, we hope that we will want to remember.
Lovely to think about friends who were there in DC, especially those who worked on the campaign in small ways, how happy they are.
Beautiful big pictures here. Thanks to AP for the tweet.
And so many people, I guess that we all recognise this is a moment where we want to remember where we were and who we were with. Or at least, we hope that we will want to remember.
Lovely to think about friends who were there in DC, especially those who worked on the campaign in small ways, how happy they are.
Beautiful big pictures here. Thanks to AP for the tweet.
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