Highly Strung

I've just discovered that there's an exhibition at the Peter Potter Gallery - HIGHLY STRUNG that brings together three artists whose work revolves around weaving. One of these is Angus McPhee, the others are the Spanish-Australian Dani Marti and the Danish Lise Bech. It opened on the 5th March and closes 16th April, and sounds worth a visit.

It's part of the Lost Landscapes programme, that traverses boundaries between art, ecology, archaeology and local history. 

The Peter Potter Gallery is at 10 The Sands, Haddington, East Lothian EH41 3EY - 01620 822 080.

A list of jobs

Luke, who has been with us this past two weeks, has now returned to London. He used his time on a mini-internship with Horse + Bamboo making models of the Angus set, then turned his attention to shadow puppetry looking at ways of creating woven puppets. He finished his stay here by making an experimental minute long animation using grass... 

Meanwhile Alison and I continue with mask and puppet making. The table of jobs looks like this:

Set  Screens, lighting, sound Armchair Platform/s and bed Hospital trolleys and screens The hospital garden

Masks Old Angus with flat hat Mother Young Man Angus Nurse Middle-aged Angus  Mature Angus  Joyce Photographer Old sister Costumes for all the above

Puppets Sisters Baby Angus Boy Angus Horse Straw Man Straw Daughters Straw Red Calf Large Horse Angus Warrior marionette Horse marionette Dragon marionette The Hospital Season cranky show

Signs etc as Angus grows up Flat masks etc for the 'journey out of war' sequence/mirrors

Grass cap for opening Bridles and saddle, horse harness Hospital weavings – caps, trousers, jackets, harness etc Bonfire Large woven horse Woven blanket

Film 1a sea, family Film 1b Gaelic world, chart, hoods and caps, grasses, bridles Film 2 falling men, medical release papers, soldiers, ships etc silent section – home, rushes in a wind Film 3 a garden, weaving close up hands Film 4 horse/airplane, certificates, suitcase, airplane, home

Music

Masks and puppets underway...

  

ABOVE: The young Angus (covered in cling-film); the old Angus (covered in furniture polish) - both waiting for papier-mache; putting the paper layers on the young Angus; and experimenting with rush shadow puppets.

Alison favours cling-film whereas I prefer furniture polish as a release agent over the clay model. On a more detailed mask such as the older head and face, furniture polish allows more detail, as there's always the danger that cling-film will 'fill in' the small lines and holes in the model. 

By the end of the day I had managed 3 layers of paper - with luck I should have all 5 on by the end of tomorrows sessions. The remainder of the day will be a catch-up with Loz Kaye, the MD for 'Angus' and perhaps an opportunity for the first detailed discussion about musical ideas for the production.

At last...practical work really begins

It always takes a while, after a period of office work, to extract oneself and get to make a base in the making room once more. But it has finally happened. We've a visitor from London, Luke Davies, working with us for two weeks and he has been making a small model boxes of the set for us to experiment with. Alison has started making a head for a puppet of the (very) young Angus; and I've begun to model a clay head of the old Angus in order to make the first mask. Outside the sun is shining too...

A week's break... and such a lot happens

I'm back after a week's half-term break in Dorset, during which time I mulled over the current script in the light of the work Alison and I had done the previous week, when we erected a (very) temporary stage and looked at the setting for the production. It's always far easier for me to picture how a script will work once a staging layout has been clarified.

As a result a number of significant changes have been made - clarifying the filmed and animated sections; adding a large horse puppet at two important parts of the story; changing a 'story within a story' section in order to help the narrative; and adding some new visual twists and turns. I discussed this new version with Alison this morning and I've now sent off copies to our main collaborators. 

Alison has tonsillitis and went home early, preparing to think about the Rashin Coatie story we're incorporating into the show. She clearly had been doing some research because within a few hours she sent me a link to another blog - http://grasspuppet.blogspot.com/ (which unfortunately seems to have dried up in 2008). The blog was written by Jumaadi, an Indonesian living in Australia whose father taught him how to make puppets from grass when he was 6:

During this period Esther travelled north, meeting Joyce Laing once more at the Art Extraordinary Gallery in Pittenweem, Fife, and further discussing how we can use Joyce's knowledge of Angus and her collection of his work; as well as the possibility of using her voice as a 'narrator' within the show. Esther also saw the National Theatre of Scotland's 'The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart' which she raved about, and visited The Maltings in Berwick-Upon-Tweed. All this in the course of developing contacts and links for a potential tour of the Angus show.

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.