Prague Scenofest

I have just got back from a week spent at the Prague Quadrennial scenography festival where I did a five day workshop with the French Scenographer Jean-Guy Lecat, who worked on many productions with Peter Brooke. Throughout these five days I worked with nine other people, all of different nationalities on a short piece that we devised together inspired by a news story about rubber ducks who were released in to the ocean after their container capsized in a storm, and spent up to fourteen years trapped in currents on the Atlantic before being washed up on shores all over the world. The international flavour of the story mirrored rather nicely the many different directions we had all come from to meet in Prague, and gave us an immediate potency to work with. Our performance mainly came from a box-like structure made from paper and bamboo (the only materials we were given) which we enclosed the "ducks" within, and with some beautiful lighting and piano music, we depicted the struggle to escape and then the fear of not knowing where to go with the new found freedom. A lot more could be said about the whole process and the performance itself but time is under pressure this week! But one of the things that stuck out in the feedback after the three performances (there were two other groups, who did some incredible work) was the neglection of words in all of them. We had all seemed to get rather stuck on some beautiful images and based our performances around them, which is reflective of our culture as a whole these days. For our group at least, we became somewhat trapped by the form of the ducks and not knowing how to give them words to speak, and so instead relied on sounds and movement but words are still the foundation of theatre. In Aristophone's The Birds which was one of the themes for the whole quadrennial, the birds speak quite naturally.

The Squirrel Play

I had a great morning working with Elyssa today on the squirrel piece. Things have changed quite a bit since the first meeting.
Lou has decided to completely drop out which has meant that Elyssa had to totally reassess the piece and the narrative of it as she will now be the only performer. She has also wisely decided not to push the piece too quickly and cancel the performance this weekend and try and find another space, sometime in July, so that she can keep the motivation going and develop it further. I am excited about this as it means I can be involved after I get back from Prague.
It was really interesting to have a discussion about dramaturgy - of this piece and in general, in terms of how things change but how they often come full circle to the original origins of the idea, whether that be just a tiny part of it; i.e. in this example, it was Elyssa who was originally thinking about the piece, as a response to an article she found about grey squirrels as menaces in a magazine, and then thinking about them in terms of the 'other' and our attitudes to immigrants, and preserving our English identiy, whatever that is. Then after enthusiastic discussions with Lou, she was brought on board, characters developed and a love story between the squirrel and the jam making lady developed. However, things have now returned somewhat to their origins, but that process has not been forgotten. The character of the squirrel is still prsent. We had an interesting discussion about how the way you devise work, the strategies you take and the process you develop, can often or in Elyssa's opinion, always, inevitably become the dramaturgy of the piece itself. With hindsight, looking back at the nature in which the piece was conceived, it is clear that it was always going to be a one-woman show.
Things Elyssa needs to think about now in working on the final stages, as she has most of the elements in place:
-Identifying the three stages of the preserve-making, which I think we have almost really. Trying this out practically in a performance context, and working out where these are going to sit within the piece, as the tension of having something cooking on stage could be disastrous, if trying to focus the audience's attention on another element.
-Play with the squirrel mask as this will help develop the character - do we want him to be presented as a victim or a nuisance? This will effect greatly the message of the piece.

Things are getting busy!

All sorts of opportunities have come up - which is great as they are informing my research paper but I'm finding I'm very busy!
Yesterday I joined the Punchdrunk design team at the BAC to help with decorating some of the rooms for the upcoming production of Masque of the Red Death. It all seems very exciting as they're taking over the whole building and there's a hell of a lot of work to do, but there's something rather beautiful about returning the building to it's original Victorian era, even if it is going to be very dark and spooky! It will be interesting to return in a couple of weeks when I get back from the Prague Quadrennial and see how things have progressed.
I also met up with Elyssa again at the weekend to see what she'd come up with so far. There were a few things to think about:
- How to introduce the piece. Elyssa had tried speaking to the audience as herself before then going in to character. Not sure if that works yet. A bit of time needs to be spent for the transition, building up the set for example, setting out the table of jam making equipment.
- She is thinking of having a live actress to play the radio voice, but where will she be positioned? Within the house too? Up on a shelf perhaps!
- Lou was playing the guitar, and possibly going to be wearing a squirrel mask but for me that wasn't quite working. I think her moving downstage continuously to interact and then moving upstage to sit on her tree stump was too jarring. But this makes the dream sequences complicated, if she is not going to be involved. How will the squirrel be represented?
Today I found out that Lou will not be appearing at all which I think in a way will solve some of these problems and give Elyssa the chance to just think about developing her own character, but some of these issues still remain. How for example are the squirrels going to be conjured up? All remains to be seen in rehearsal at CPT tomorrow.