Bob Frith's VEIL BLOG DECEMBER 2007

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28.12

There are still 12 masks of mine to be painted; probably Alison has a similar amount to finish. The mobile set pieces need painting too – the flats, and various pieces of furniture. I’ve spent some time the past couple of days making a start on these jobs. Yesterday I also went shopping in ‘Hijab World’ in Bolton, one of the few shops that advertise abayas, and bought 5 male scarves. My son wanted a snack and we stopped at a caravan offering halal burgers and such like. We bought a couple of egg parathas and got talking to the two men serving. They were Iraqi Kurds, and had set up their business on the scrap of wasteland 5 years ago. I explained a little about Veil, and they pointed me to a Kurdish restaurant around the corner.

 

20.12

Painted the set today with Hannahs help. It looks good – different from Katherina’s design in that we’ve had to acknowledge the way the rostra fitted together created vertical and horizontal lines that weren’t on the model. But the ochre base remains – suddenly the set looks ready for a show…

In the slightly mad rough and tumble to get Veil up and ready it’s easy to overlook the massive cuts by the Arts Council that are affecting almost 20% of arts organisations, including many puppet and touring theatre companies. H+B have heard that we will receive grant support for the next three years, with a 2.7% increase each year – slightly above inflation. This, I understand, is provisional, and will be confirmed in a month’s time. Meanwhile I’m hearing about other companies that have had their grants cut – Norwich Puppet Theatre, The Peoples Show, Freehand, London Bubble – and many others. Our colleagues at the Dukes in Lancaster have had their grant cut by 50%. It was only a year ago that we planned to open Veil at the Dukes. When they were unable to reconsider this for 2008 (after our first grant application was turned down) we wondered why - now it's clear.

Of course we recognise that the time had come for a shake up in arts funding, and undoubtedly the Arts Council are damned if they do, damned if they don't; plus there are rumours that 80 new companies will benefit by receiving support for the first time. But whenever the Arts Council do this sort of thing it always seems so cack-handed, creating an environment where rumours and uncertainties abound. Lyn Gardner, in her Guardian blog, points out that it is always very difficult to talk openly and honestly because of the fear that the Arts Council will see you as ‘rocking the boat’, and that fear is increasingly an aspect of ACE patronage. Apart from anything else it creates a climate where spin and hyperbole trump any intelligent debate. Where are the transparencies and peer review processes that ACE insists arts companies apply? My sympathies for anyone caught up in this…it puts my own frustrations with regard to finding the money to create Veil in very clear perspective.    

18.12

The set has been undercoated; a new backcloth delivered; most of the costumes and all the masks have been made. Our helpers, Emma and Hannah, are making an enormous difference to getting things done on time. The puppet cart has been completed, Emma finishing the work that Laura started; and Hannah has finished the archaeologist’s tent and the odd costume-cum-shadow screen that we need for the Birth in the Desert scene.

So, there’s now just the little job of painting the set, the puppets and the masks. These will have to be finished over the holidays. Julie and Loz are both working on In the Shadow of Trees which runs until Christmas Eve, so the music and technical work for Veil has come to a halt. We’ve asked Emma to continue working with us throughout January, so we’ve someone able to work in the background, doing the making jobs that are bound to arise. Vanessa and Jonny will also do some making work during the rehearsal period so, all in all, I think we’ve all bases covered.

13.12

Since Friday our theatre space - where we've been assembling Veil  - has been taken over by ‘In the Shadow of Trees’, which moves today to Lawrence Batley Theatre in Huddersfield for a Christmas run. I’ll now start putting down plastic sheeting and tying back curtains so I can begin painting the Veil set. This, I hope, will be finished by Christmas; then after a few days over the holiday Alison and I will get the masks painted. By New Year these should - have to - be completed, and the first week of January we’ll be setting up everything with Julie, ready for rehearsals to start on the 7th.

 

           

4.12

Erik Knudsen visited this morning. Today’s session was arranged last time we looked at the rough-cuts of some of the filmed sequences. Most of them had worked well, but the final sequence – almost at the end of the story – a sequence that needed to tie up a lot of the storyline threads was disappointing. Not a spark – it looked all wrong; and the technical idea, to combine a filmed image with (a kind of) puppetry by using a silk screen threw up unexpected problems. The silk didn’t work at all well as a projection surface – too silvery, not enough contrast.

So we faced the morning with some trepidation. Expecting problems we had racked our brains looking for possible solutions but all of us accepting that perhaps the whole concept had to be junked. Anyway Erik had worked things into a rough sequence. We gloomily considered the issues, going somewhat round in circles until we decided just to look at what Erik had produced.

Wow! First time…a bit rough in places but you could see immediately that it was what we needed. Erik, as surprised as anyone. Great when rehearsals work out like this!

The odd thing is that the extra rough-cut nature of Erik’s film probably solved the problem. Instead of the clumsiness of moving from a smooth cinematic image to a puppet ‘cloth and sticks’ image, we went from rough moving image to another rough moving image – and they inhabited the same world.

 

 

READ AN INTERVIEW WITH BOB FRITH ABOUT VEIL HERE.

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CONTACT BOB FRITH bob@horseandbamboo.org