Friday, July 18, 2014
Trying to cope with Jesus (without White Ted)
This week it’s been WHITE TED AND THE RIGHT TO DIE in the daytime and THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO JESUS QUEEN OF HEAVEN at night.
It’s a strange feeling switching from one set of rehearsals where I’m the writer into another set where I’m the performer.
I’m not even sure I can describe it.
On one of the days I found myself in the evening back in the same room I’d been in during the day. And how different it seemed. The room was constructed out of the space left over from the tiered seating in the large theatre above, and I’d ben aware of the ugliness of it, the complete lack of any proportion or beauty to it. The lack of daylight.
These vile rooms tend to be the norm in modern buildings, exspecially educational ones, and I hav a theory it’s actually very damaging for people to spend much time in them. They communicate such a depressing and discouraging view of the human spirit.
During the day, the ugly booming acoustic seemed just like another element of the prevailing ugliness: it became a profound challenge by night.
How to keep the voice alive in a deadening space. How to keep the voice at the right volume - not just acoustically but emotionally too: so that it communicates instead of impedes.
I’ve always wanted it to be impossible in my plays for the actors to ‘learn how to do it’ and then do it on auto-pilot for night after night. I’ve always wanted to to write plays that insisted their performers remain creatively alive right through them.
Well I did that. And now I’m in one. There’s some kind of poetic justice at work here..
To stay fully present and alive... That’s tough. And wonderful. Both when performing and when living.
Maybe art mirrors life in ways I never suspected. And life mirrors art....
THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO JESUS QUEEN OF HEAVEN ArtSpace @ Castle Terrace, August 3rd-23rd at 10.30pm.
Subscribe to Posts [Atom]