Lost in Translation: The Remix - Brought to you by Pablo.

So, December approaches and we are working all steam ahead towards our presentation of Lost in Translation in Liverpool at St. George’s Hall. Since the piece was first shown throughout Canterbury in June it has undergone a number of changes. Back then we traipsed around the city centre, all dressed in white, carrying our white suitcases, and setting up a number of installations to represent various cities: Belfast, Oxford, London, Leeds, Liverpool, and Inverness. Lost in Translation aimed to map these other cities onto Canterbury city centre. However, in preparation to the piece being taken to Liverpool we have had to find a way of transposing this into an indoor environment. Since the venue is the beautiful and historic St. George’s Hall there were a number of practical limitations to take into account: no sticking tape onto the walls, no painting the floor, etc. As a creative exercise this has been a very interesting process. How does a project transform when the setting changes? How can the structure of a piece alter, whilst its spirit remains the same?

So, in answer to these questions, this is what we will be doing in Liverpool.
We will place 17 suitcases, one for each city participating in Portrait of a Nation (www.portraitofanation.net), around St. George’s Hall as if they were lost property (lost property – lost in translation, see, we are a witty bunch). These will all be different suitcases: old, new, trendy, practical…. Each of these suitcases will have a micro installation inside it, or spilling out to its immediate surroundings. Some of these installations will reprise our work for the Canterbury tour this summer (i.e. the a cut-out of the Thames snaking out of a suitcase), others will be completely new. The aim of each of these installations is to work as a mini-interpretation of each city (sometimes concrete, sometimes abstract). How do you fit a city into a suitcase? All suitcases will be interactive. For example, people will be free to rummage through some, whilst they will be able to take something away with them in other cases, or even leave something behind. The way in which the public should ‘relate’ to each suitcase will be clearly indicated in a set of instructions on the inside.
That all begs the question as to what we, as performers, will be doing during the day. We will still have the personas of lost tourists. We will be in our white costumes, with our white suitcases. Walking around the building individually we will directly talk to the public, asking them where they are from, what city they have visited…. Like tourists we will be collecting things. So, we will ask people to five us something from their city (whether it is a train ticket, receipt, or whatever they just happen to be carrying, or we will be able to write something down). We will then cover ourselves with these bits and bops, pinning them to our clothes and suitcases, or even allowing people to write directly on us. So, throughout the day we will become moving, changing, human-installations.

This new version of Lost in Translation will be shown at St. George’s Hall in Liverpool on Monday the 1st of December, from 2pm till 6:30pm, as part of the closing events of the Capital of Culture year.

POST POSTSCRIPT - Rick Reflects

So the dust settles on a new performance. I still have 2 bags of table, desk and bedside lamps in my living room and I only picked up the shoes I left at the venue a couple of days ago.
We’re making to do lists and having planning meetings for the next project we’re delivering.
Feels very much like the post-performance week.
How did the show go?
Well, it sold out days in advance.
Hooray!
Planning and execution smooth and pain free.
Despite the potential havoc posed by a piano, failing light bulbs, and all the other little things that come up in the course of things, the show went smoothly.
Transitions, cues, moves and interruptions - just so.
Oddly enough, as smooth as it felt (and appeared?) it didn’t stop changing and growing until the point of performance. Endings, ways of holding hands, smiling, and shapes, orders all were subject to change until the audience were in.
Two solid days of rehearsal on the weekend prior to the show, we had drawn a solid line under the development of material. Hmm… the best laid plans of mice and men eh?
I think its ok though. It made the piece feel more alive when in its midst.
Site responsive work of the kind that we have made here lends itself to the ephemeral, knowing it is a one-off, a fluke in time, destiny…
In this space a gasp, a laugh, childlike characters in masks or something more sinister scatter and explode like fireworks flashing inconsistently, now near now far.
It won't be quite like that again.
It’ll splinter and reform, maybe to be something very different. For now we have to leave it packed up in bags and car-boots, quietly awaiting a revisit.

An Accidental Collective Lesson in How to Give Good Blog: Don’t be tardy with one’s posts. With apologies… Daisy's POSTSCRIPT rehearsal 29/07/08

How do you feeeeeeel?

I will freely admit that leading this rehearsal was quite nerve-racking. Firstly, I don’t think I am designed for leading – in the traditional sense, I have no interest in directing, and that’s why I like devising. Our process thus far has been all four of us, in a room, and something melding together. This time we have designated these four rehearsals so that we all get a wide-open opportunity to explore the stuff that we want to out into the pot. Which is great and different and potentially incredibly useful. And also very scary. Secondly, the idea behind this bring-anything-to-the-table style starting point of the process was designed to give the project the best possible start. This project was not being created in answer to a commission; it was coming directly from ‘us’ (the motley quartet; the collective ‘us’; the royal ‘us’). Even if the stimuli or exercises did not come from somewhere personal, they involved the personal investment of ‘I want to make something about this. Basically even in these early stages, I think we knew that this project was going to be ‘our baby’ and as such even the dipping of one’s toe into the shallow water of ‘starting points’ seemed vital and important (I acknowledge this should not forgive the use of the over-sentimental term ‘our baby’, but it’s all I’ve got right now…)

Alright, Daisy, but what did you actually do?

I began by making two of us stand in front of the other two and performing an action repeatedly, or continuously. It began with handshaking (and went on to patting, poking etc [This is a bastardised Alison Oddey exercise – she says, “This exercise if about fostering the objective and subjective at the same time. The aim is to work spontaneously and instinctively, rather than thinking and interpreting the ideas of the image” Devising Theatre, Routledge, page 178]). The pair shook hands continuously and the other two had to shout out whatever associations / words / feelings came into their heads when looking at the action. It was an experiment of sorts, but I also wanted to see to what extent we could attempt to not censor our associations (even if they were poo, or aubergine…). This was inevitably harder than anticipated. But it served as an interesting warm up and introduced ideas of free association that I wanted to carry through the rehearsal.

And then?

I had brought in a huge array of objects to play with (something which had worked well in Laura’s rehearsal and which we had all agreed should be pushed further and in different directions). I lay them out on a table (they included, amongst other things: a glass jar, a compact, a boot, a dress, a teddy bear, a selection of images, cups and saucers, a teapot, books and various other curio). I laid out the chairs in the style of a ‘traditional’ dining room drama (sofa, two chairs straight on to the audience) and asked them each to pick an object and to find a place in the ‘scene’. They were not to pre-determine any factors, but just ‘go’ – which was very unfair of me and they gave it a good go. Accidental Collective improvising (‘faux’) naturalism was never something I thought I would see. When I clapped my hands they had to freeze – in an oppositional, ‘id’ moment where innermost, ambiguous feelings were captured in a moment – and then they had to go back to the improvisation. This carried on and we cut out dialogue from the impro, which seemed difficult, unnecessary and unhelpful. The silent impro interspersed with these dark, funny, surreal freeze-frames was much more interesting. The objects really carried the exercise, as they did not have predetermined characters or personas, rather the object dictated an action or task, which dictated a characteristic and so on. I began to introduce music (I wanted piano music, but in a pre-rehearsal flurry, settled for a Mozart Clarinet Concerto CD…) The exercise/impro became more manic with the music and the freeze came when the music stopped, and then the action continued began again, and we tried it the other way too. It became like some dark, delicious, messed up grown-ups’ game of Musical Statues. In the discussion that followed this, the general consensus was that it was something we had found difficult (I think because of the self-consciousness involved in asking three people who consider themselves ‘non-actors’ to perform a task so associated with ‘acting’), but that was worth revisiting…

And what’s with all these objects?

Finally, we had a little story time. I read this (abridged) extract from Vladimir Nabakov’s Transparent Things, Penguin, pages 12-14. This part of the book involves Hugh Person finding a pencil in a drawer in the Ascot Hotel, in which he is staying. Nabakov then preceeds to tell the elaborate history of this pencil. [This abridged extract does it no justice, go away and read it, it’s dead good. And to The Nabakov Estate - if I’ve made any typos please don’t sue me]…

“It was not a hexagonal beauty of Virginia juniper or African cedar, with the maker’s name imprinted in silver foil, but a very plain, round, technically faceless old pencil of cheap pine, dyed a dingy lilac. It had been mislaid ten years ago by a carpenter who had not finished examining, let alone fixing, the old desk, having gone away for a tool he never found. Now comes the act of attention.

In his shop, and long before that at the village school, the pencil has been worn down to two-thirds of its original length. The bare wood of its tapered end has darkened to plumbeous plum, thus merging in tint with the blunt tip of graphite whose blind gloss alone distinguishes it from the wood. A knife and a brass sharpener have thoroughly worked upon it and if it were necessary we could trace the complicated fate of the shavings, each mauve on one side and tan on the other when fresh, but now reduced to atoms of dust whose wide, wide dispersal is panic catching its breath, but one should be above it, one gets used to it fairly soon (there are worse terrors). On the whole, it whittled sweetly, being of an old-fashioned make. Going back a number of seasons (not as far, though, as Shakespeare’s birth year when pencil lead was discovered) and then picking up the thing’s story in the ‘now’ direction, we see graphite ground very fine, being mixed with moist clay by young girls and old men. This mass, this pressed caviar, is pressed in a metal cylinder which has a blue eye, a sapphire with a hold drilled in it and through this the caviar is forced. It issues in one appetising continuous rodlet (watch for our little friend!), which looks as if it retained the shape of an earthworm’s digestive tract (but watch, watch, do not be deflected). It is now being cut into the length required for these particular pencils (we glimpsed the cutter, old Elias Borrowdale and are about to mouse up his fore arm on a side trip of inspection but we stop, stop and recoil, in our haste to identify the individual segment). See it baked, see it boiled in fat (here a shot of the fleecy-fat-giver being butchered, a shot of the butcher, a shot of the shepherd, a shot of the shepherd’s father, a Mexican) and fitted into the wood.
[…]
Thus the entire little drama, from crystallised carbon and felled pine to this humble implement, to this transparent thing, unfolds in a twinkle. Alas, the solid pencil itself as fingered briefly by Hugh Person still somehow eludes us!”

So I asked everyone to imagine a history for an object and tell us its story. The stories ranged from fantastical to mundane and I found them fascinating, as did everyone else, and they were essentially monologues. No one was sure if they had the full potential for material. Anyhoo, that was my rehearsal – and I survived.