All entries for Saturday 19 March 2005

Medea 7 –Spiderman has nothing on me and Owen

Okay so it's been a week since the performance, but it's still fresh in my head, honest! It was a great success, even mathematicians thought it was 'stunning and not at all pretentious' and that is not only shocking but something to be proud of. I think we re-established in some of the invited audience minds what theatre is about, and that I think is more than any of us were anticipating.

Thursday was the day of actually putting together the piece from the mini-groups and actually building the 'set'. Me and Owen played spiderman most of the day, me on the catwalk and him on a ladder, casting webs of string around the place to hold up the collage, booths and shadow boxes. Credit too to Holly who played with my nerves as she lay precariously half over the edge and fumbled with the collage string. Meanwhile the brickies were underneath building a wall. Later there was more work to be done in my lofty domain, I meddled in the lighting work James and Rhys were doing and then toyed with the projector and discovered how uncomfortable it is to stay in the same awkward position for ten minutes.
The Chorus (of whom I had the littlest inclination to what they were actually going to do….*pause, why am I writing like an English student?) Came out of what seemed to me like nowhere to deliver a great rendition of choral speaking, movement and tableaux not to mention creepy whispering. I'd been looking forward to seeing the chorus perform since I'd seen glimpses of the masks and facepaint, and I thought they were the perfect introduction to the acting parts of the production, linking the original myth and greek style to Jack and Zoe's far more colloquial argument. Speaking of which I had to supress my own giggles at their argument fortunately everyone in the audience was giggling too, so I got away with it. The silhouettes were a kind of bridging point between these two parts of the performance, whilst their subject was the traditional myth of child slaying, their form of course was far more modern and worked very well. (See the gallery for the dark side of Sophie).
Of course there were a couple of cock ups in the performance on Friday, and unsuprisingly they were in my sphere of influence. My American-friendly-fire style of projector cap bombing of the audience was not really my fault, the slow motion realisation of the cap slipping off was followed by another slow motion moment of me reaching across to grab it and subsequent missing and having to cover the lens. But as some people pointed out, my persecution of the girl below me was all linked with the themes of the installation. Hey at least it wasn't a knife hey Rothelite? It also took a while to move the film down onto the chorus and Jack and Zoe in the sheet since Owen had convinced me that we should chain the projector down for safety, we were perhaps over-zealous though and found the projector too secure to actually move, but it only took a few seconds to unclip the chains and the whole thing ended in success. Oh it was my friends who destroyed the wall too, women! Chuh!

So yes, I think it was Ian who said 'This is what I came to Warwick to do' and I couldn't agree more, definitely the most impressive thing we've done yet, and we've got two more years to go from strength to strength, which we will.

: 19 Mar 2005 13:56 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem