AWESOME NIGHT!! I just finished the week of workshops that I ran in Exeter with a group of superb young teens. The culminating performance this evening was amazing, absolutely thrilling. I pushed these guys during the week to take on all kinds of challenges, pushed them to think above, to think beyond, to think harder, and I was lucky to have a group that, at every juncture, was hungry to rise to the challenge. The closing event was in the Black Box studio space at Exeter Phoenix art gallery. The space is windowless, so it allowed the performance to happen in total darkness. I mean, total. The group had spent the week writing about, talking about and photographing aspects of Conflict, so it made sense for the show to take place in the black to heighten the confusion of the audience. So we did that. These young artists read some of the writing they’d developed, but they read it in different unexpected locations throughout the space so we were all in constant flux, moving from place to place, pushing the envelop on uncertainty. Because the space was pitch black the group turned on their phone lights so that the artist’s writing/faces were lit only by intimate light and nothing else as they read ... all of us, audience and performers crowded around them. There were no seats and no specific places for the audience to settle in, nothing certain, no safe nest. After each piece was read the sea of lights winked off to black and we moved en-masse through the blindness, through the crowd to the next location… and then the phone lights bloomed to surprising life again, shining from above and below through the inky black and onto the next poem being read. Since the audience wasn’t seated they had to move from one spot to the next to be able to hear and see everything that was being performed thus totally breaking down all of the expectations concerning what a “show” is all about and what the audience’s role is in it. People came to see a show. They ended up being part of it. We closed by sitting in a circle on the floor, our phones on the ground shining up towards the night ceiling like some digital camp fire. We recited a piece about what our uncertain dreams for ourselves are, and then we pointed the lights at the audience and asked them what their dreams were. They were shocked, but game, their answers heartfelt and rich. The whole performance was fluid, intellectually athletic, chilling, creatively demanding, emotionally overwhelming (one woman broke into tears) and intensely rewarding. It’s the sort of well crafted high-art event that you’d expect from a tightly knit group of seasoned artists, not from a loose knot of teens who only spent four days working together. It was an incredibly complex show and I can’t explain it all here right now, and there’s much more to tell. Hopefully one of the people filming/recording it will provide links here soon. Suffice it to say that I was honored to work with this group. They had no idea what to expect, but they went for it regardless. Awesome support staff too which is not always the case with residencies like this! That’s my day job. I get to do it all of the time, have done for many years, and it kicks ass, especially when I get a group like this one. I hope they keep pushing from now on. Wish you had been there. We were all buzzing afterwards: the group, the staff, the audience, me. Im still buzzing from it now. I expect I will be for a long time. See you Sunday night for the Prude rock show in London! Ill bring some buzz with me!
Posted on: Thu, 30 Oct 2014 22:52:59 +0000
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