Yay! I left the house!
So I went to Newcastle (Live Theatre, to be precise) with my drama club (we are the Turrets. If you are a member of an established British youth theatre group, you may have heard of us and our sister group, Jackass) to watch a theatrical installation. It was bloody marvellous.
The flyer, which I have in front of me now, says:
"inGrained in the Memory
Presented by The Empty Space
Four days ago a team of artists were challenged to create a theatrical installation that would breathe life into the unseen spaces of Live Theatre.
Welcome to their world..."
It was brilliant. Insane, but brilliant. Every room had a different piece in it; there was a couple of bits of acrobatics, some monologuing, some dialogues, physical theatre, puppetry...
To start with, I was a bit nervous. They took us into a totally dark room and you know, shut the big metal doors after us 0.o And there were sofas, but of course it was dark, so I ended up sitting on Joe by accident. But once they got started, it was awesome.
The first room was a monologue about poverty, illustrated with dead chickens and vegetables, then there was a really good one upstairs about the search for inspiration...it was just a man sitting at a table with a bit of paper in front of him and another actor egging him on, and every time he had an idea two people turned the handle on this big mechanism, but his inspiration kept failing as the handle stopped turning, and there was this big "ooooh...awwwwww..." atmosphere. And...erm...(I'm trying to go through in chronological order, which makes it harder; I can remember all the acts, just not when they were.) on the next floor there was a room which just had a woman on the end of a climbing rope attached to a pillar, trying to get to the door and being hauled back.
I think the one that came after that was one of my favourites, the woman walking up the wall. They had us split into three or four groups and one group stayed on each floor, looking over the railings (there's a hole in the corner of each floor, so you can see down into the lobby) And then there was a woman on one of the beams, and she just slid off and put her feet on the wall and started walking around. Because her hair and her skirt were falling behind her, it really looked like she was caught in a wild storm, and they poured corn over her so it looked like rain, and she caught in her skirt and then dropped it on the guy on the ground. It was really disorientating. It's hard to describe.
And they took us to the dressing rooms where we were allowed to wander freely and there were several installations there, and then we went outside and they had a washing line, and they used clothes to get a simple puppet effect, and that was quite cool.
Finally there was another acrobatic act from the same woman as did the wall-walking, involving a lot of fabric strips hanging from the skylight. I do like that kind of act. It amazes me, especially since I am incapable of climbing more than five inches up the rope in PE.
And then they gave us cup-a-soup in the first room and people hung around and talked and drank soup. That too was muchly nice. Only there were no spoons, so stirring the granules into the water involved using the parsnips from the first act ^^
So, yeah. Really good show, especially considering how fast it was put together.
And we went out for a meal afterwards, too :)
The flyer, which I have in front of me now, says:
"inGrained in the Memory
Presented by The Empty Space
Four days ago a team of artists were challenged to create a theatrical installation that would breathe life into the unseen spaces of Live Theatre.
Welcome to their world..."
It was brilliant. Insane, but brilliant. Every room had a different piece in it; there was a couple of bits of acrobatics, some monologuing, some dialogues, physical theatre, puppetry...
To start with, I was a bit nervous. They took us into a totally dark room and you know, shut the big metal doors after us 0.o And there were sofas, but of course it was dark, so I ended up sitting on Joe by accident. But once they got started, it was awesome.
The first room was a monologue about poverty, illustrated with dead chickens and vegetables, then there was a really good one upstairs about the search for inspiration...it was just a man sitting at a table with a bit of paper in front of him and another actor egging him on, and every time he had an idea two people turned the handle on this big mechanism, but his inspiration kept failing as the handle stopped turning, and there was this big "ooooh...awwwwww..." atmosphere. And...erm...(I'm trying to go through in chronological order, which makes it harder; I can remember all the acts, just not when they were.) on the next floor there was a room which just had a woman on the end of a climbing rope attached to a pillar, trying to get to the door and being hauled back.
I think the one that came after that was one of my favourites, the woman walking up the wall. They had us split into three or four groups and one group stayed on each floor, looking over the railings (there's a hole in the corner of each floor, so you can see down into the lobby) And then there was a woman on one of the beams, and she just slid off and put her feet on the wall and started walking around. Because her hair and her skirt were falling behind her, it really looked like she was caught in a wild storm, and they poured corn over her so it looked like rain, and she caught in her skirt and then dropped it on the guy on the ground. It was really disorientating. It's hard to describe.
And they took us to the dressing rooms where we were allowed to wander freely and there were several installations there, and then we went outside and they had a washing line, and they used clothes to get a simple puppet effect, and that was quite cool.
Finally there was another acrobatic act from the same woman as did the wall-walking, involving a lot of fabric strips hanging from the skylight. I do like that kind of act. It amazes me, especially since I am incapable of climbing more than five inches up the rope in PE.
And then they gave us cup-a-soup in the first room and people hung around and talked and drank soup. That too was muchly nice. Only there were no spoons, so stirring the granules into the water involved using the parsnips from the first act ^^
So, yeah. Really good show, especially considering how fast it was put together.
And we went out for a meal afterwards, too :)