Great Fire in London

A couple of days in London, killing several birds with one visit. On the train back my Angus-mind keeps returning to two things in particular. First an extraordinary exhibition of paintings and sculptures by Anselm Kiefer at the White Cube gallery. Some months ago I blogged about Kiefer's work and how our set might gain something from incorporating some of the textures of his drawings. In the White Cube show the richness of the surface texture of the paintings is extraordinarily rich and quite ravishing - and it often looks as if it's in danger of falling off, so the paintings have an odd vulnerability, suggesting something like a ridiculously slow-motion theatre rather than the usual permanency one associates with painting. 

 

The second is the show 2 Dimensional Life of Her by Fleur Elise Noble (above), part of London International Mime Festival. I saw this at the Barbican this evening, just before rushing off to catch the late train. It was full of inspiring techniques, and I couldn't help spending almost as much time weighing up how some of the effects were achieved as simply enjoying it all. Probably the highlight of the show is when the whole stage appears to be on fire, and it's a truly powerful sequence despite understanding that this is simply a trick of film. I swear I felt the heat coming off the stage, and the fact that the characters we had been seeing were made largely of paper just added to the power of the scene. I'm planning a bonfire in 'Angus' and this convinced me that, done well, it could be really stunning. Oddly, despite the overwhelming visuals, I also realised that it was the accurate and very loud sound of the fire that was ultimately critical in making us believe in it.

Progress

This is the (very) rough set Alison and I have created in our workshop. We've done this in order  to work out the heights and levels we'll need as playing areas, and from that in turn we've worked out what size of puppets we'll need to make. In the course of doing this we were also able to decide on a number of other things - so the upper level (above the bar) will be a crawl floor which will enable us to operate marionettes from that level; equally we liked this unbleached, stained, fabric quality (Anselm Kiefer again). Each of the cloths can act as a screens for projections, film and lights, so much of the eventual colour we use in the production will achieved through the use of light and projection.

The whole exercise was an excuse, too, to go through the script and look at, in a very broad brush-stroke way, how the story would unfold on a stage. Doing this, a number of things were - as ever - changed, or added to. 

As a result of this work we have been able to prioritise the jobs we'll start on (next week). Alison on a puppet of Angus as a boy and a similar 'sister' puppet. I'll start making three masks representing Angus - one as a handsome young man, one in middle-age, and one as an old man. I'll also be able to send the dimensions of the set to Chris Spears on Berneray so he can create the wood frames that will enable us to reproduce this rough, full-size, 'model' set in the Community Hall on the island. The other piece of news was hearing, last night, that the hall committee have agreed to hire us their hall for a week in May.

Work begins..

Images from Deep Time Cabaret 2008

Work on Angus started last week; though slowly. Alison and I found two half-days to talk about the script, and Esther is in Scotland, starting to talk about a tour of the show. Next week we'll clear out our workshop and start for real - making a space for a stage area, and beginning perhaps to make puppets and masks.

We spent a lot of the time talking about the set; about how it might work; its feel and its look. I brought in a book about the work of Anselm Kiefer, the German painter whose work I admire. I hope that the set will have the feel of some of his work - the worn, tired but not exhausted look of it. In particular it'll be about how the films will work projected onto the stage cloths. Not using pristine and taut sheets, but slightly tainted and knocked around fabric, combined with rich black and white film. It emerged from our discussions that the design should use colour carefully, placing occasional rich textures against a general muted monochrome, and using straw or grasses among muds and dust as a playing floor.

One of our starting points is the set for 'Deep Time Cabaret', a show that we developed for touring in 2008. The subject and approach will be very different, but there is something about the organic way the DTC set (above) developed - the mixture of simple forms, rough fabric drapes, and projections, that will be similar to the Angus work. We will also use suspended lamps, hand-held cameras and levels within the stage that can be easily transformed by the cast.