New Angus short film

In preparation for the launch of the new H+B website tomorrow - and also to help Esther sell the 2013 tour of Angus - Weaver of Grass - we asked our wonderful technician Christina Eddowes to make a short film of the Angus show (although she was told by Esther 'not to give away the big set-pieces').

This is it - hope you like it! If you bump into Esther let her know (she's in Edinburgh and Glasgow at the moment). By the way Loz Kaye, our Musical Director responsible for putting together the music for the show, created the special mash-up of music for the film. 

At The SSC

In three days time the touring company, Mairi, Frances, Jonny, and Mark, will reassemble after a well deserved week-long break and travel to Edinburgh where Angus - Weaver of Grass will open at 4pm on Thursday 16th at the Scottish Storytelling Centre. Once there they will give 10 performances, finishing on Sunday the 26th. 

Horse + Bamboo formed in 1978 and has been touring shows since that time, but we've never yet performed at the Edinburgh Festival. So this is a first for us, and it's going to be an interesting experience. One of the reasons we've never performed at the Festival is that it's very difficult to find the right venue. Anyone who thinks that touring is just a matter of sticking a few props and screens on the stage, opening the doors and then stepping out from behind a curtain and acting away is sadly misinformed. Each show we put on takes between 4 and 5 hours to unload and assemble the set and props, including the lights, projectors and sound equipment. After that it's sensible for the performers to have a minimum of an hours break before they perform; an hour in which they relax and focus their attention in preparation for the performance. So we usually ask the venue for an absolute minimum of 5 hours to 'get-in'.

In Edinburgh at Festival time, even at a professional, well-equipped, and understanding venue like the Scottish Storytelling Centre, you get an hour and a half. This is because they put on four shows by four different companies each day, and each company has to install their own show afresh for each performance. I've heard of venues that allow you just 15 minutes. Of course at the SSC we can have most of our lights already rigged and focused, and some of the screens (I hope) can be hidden behind the SSCs stage curtains - but for us anyway an hour and a half is going to be a tough ask. I guess it is for most theatre companies, but Angus is highly technical, with a load of puppets, masks, props, projectors ...you'll get the picture if and when you see it. 

There's also the issue that the depth of the stage at the SSC is about 60cms short of what we need to project the video images at the right size. Touring around venues is always a matter of compromise on something - blackout, acoustics, lack of curtains, changing rooms, even having a stage at all can be a luxury - so having a stage-depth problem is par for the course. But it's going to create some problems for us. Fortunately the SSC have given us a technical day before the show opens to sort this, and any other problems out. 

We're going to be helped enormously in this by Christina Eddowes, who works as part of the arts team at H+B as a creative technician. Chris has been preparing for these problems all of last week, and will be going to Edinburgh for the duration in order to support the performers. As I say, it's going to be an interesting experience.....

Angus and the Dragon!

One of the more complex puppet jobs for Angus - Weaver of Grass, something that Alison Duddle is working on with Christina's help, is carving and assembling puppets based loosely on Sicilian marionettes. This is for a section of the show relating to Angus leaving Uist for war; it was the last time he was seen on the island before being returned as an invalid, with unspecified mental health problems. 

It's the beginning of a section of Angus's life that we know almost nothing about, and it heralds what must have been, for him, the traumatic period that eventually led to his breakdown. Because of the lack of information, among other things, I've chosen to represent this whole period at a kind of remove - giving it an archaic feel both formally as well as in the storyline. The going off to war puts me in mind of a tourney, a word incidentally I've always loved because not only does it mean 'taking part in a tournament', but because it sounds (and looks) so like 'journey' - and both of these things Angus surely undertook at this point in his life.

In particular I'm reminded of the anonymous pre-Shakespearean Tom O'Bedlam: 

....By a knight of ghostes and shadowes

I summon'd am to tourney

Ten leagues beyond the wild world's end.

Methinks it is no journey.

A wonderful lyric poem and allegorical journey that also inspired Kenneth Patchen's Journal of Albion Moonlight.

Above the photographs show Alison assembling the Dragon, which has yet to have its wings fitted, and the head of Angus as a Knight, with the armour that Christina has been making and fitting to the carved wood. 

Excitement at the Boo!

Some real excitement today! We had to move the set out of our theatre space (the Boo) as there's a performance there on Saturday. 

Before doing it Alison and I looked at how Christina's (Christina Eddowes - one of the arts team at H+B, responsible for technical areas and the building) films looked. We looked at the fire sequence, the straw-man sequence, and the weaving at Craig Dunain sequence, all parts of the 'Angus' script. Everything worked wonderfully - the film of hands weaving grass projected onto the Craig Dunain screens (above) were especially ravishing... 

Image for the poster

We had a great yesterday. It was the day Joanne B Kaar finally met up with us at the Horse + Bamboo workshop in Rossendale, having travelled down from Caithness. Mark Whitaker and Jonny Quick were also around, along with the H+B team, so we had a very concentrated day covering everything we could possibly think of that involved Joanne.  

One main objective was to try out the masks on Mark and Jonny (who will play Angus in the show), with the intention to find an image that we could use as a poster image - given real urgency by the fact that tomorrow is the deadline for the Edinburgh Festival Fringe programme.

We looked at Jonny as a young Angus, as he might have been before going off to the Second World War:

The highlight was unveiling the swallow-tail coat and the 'sunburst' hat that Joanne has recently made, and Mark wearing them as the older Angus. We spent a long time photographing this - feeling it was the right image for the poster - and Christina Eddowes, our technical wunderkind added projected background of grass taken on Uist. The results were stunning:

New (year) ideas

A week back at Horse + Bamboo and things have moved on considerably, even after having a day at home with the seemingly inevitable cold. Alison and I spent three sessions talking through the script - which I last looked at early in September. After 4 months of it resting it was time to come at things afresh, and it was exciting just how many new ideas and possibilities emerged. The set too (the photo above was taken last summer when we were putting together a rough version) came in for reconsideration. 

The experience of working in Berneray (in July last year) with a rough set had made me feel that it was unnecessarily limited, and having reworked Alison's show Red Riding Hood this winter, which uses three wheeled frames very effectively, we both felt it might be useful to employ something similar for 'Angus', and that the use of mobile screens would give us more possibilities suggesting the various stage spaces (homes, hospitals) than relying totally on curtains on tracks. 

So next week work will start, for me, with looking at these new approached to the staging, and Alison will start planning some of the wooden puppets for the show. Christina, our technician, will soon be working closely with us - looking at how the lighting and video projections will best work within the set design. On Tuesday we're all planning to travel together to the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester to look at the 'Dark Matters' show and kick off a discussion about the use of projection technologies....