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.