Bob Frith's VEIL BLOG MARCH 2007

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Wed. 28.03

So, Loz has stayed on after last weeks course and is busy in the music room making and retuning instruments to Arabic quarter tones. Katherina is in London reworking the staging, and Alison and I are trying to get back on track with making for Veil.

I’m getting stressed about this, there are so many distractions. I think we’re about a month behind the schedule I started out with – but I hope that the meetings on Sunday and Monday with the whole creative team will bring us back onto track.

Sat. 24.03

This week has seen a master-class at the H+B Centre – run by Victoria Lee and Loz Kaye. Put simply, we looked at what Loz and Victoria consider to be the principles and processes underlying Horse + Bamboo’s work, and both have worked with, and watched, the company over many years. The participants were 12 individual artists who work, or have worked, for H+B, most of them free-lancers. The intention was to bring together performers on touring productions with the artists who run the company’s outreach programme and look at the common territory – focusing on masks, puppetry, music and staging. I stayed flitting round the outside recording by taking notes, filming and photographing with the intention of putting the material onto the website as a resource for ourselves and others.

A very good week it was too. A brilliant and intelligent group of people who produced many real insights into our work. Indirectly I’m sure it will all feed into the making of Veil, and fittingly the last discussion of the week hovered around this new project – reminding us that every new creative piece is an adventure into the unknown, full of risk and danger, but at the same time the only place where such principles and processes can ever properly be discovered.  

Sat. 17.03

Yesterday Alison and I went to London to meet Katherina and discuss her design ideas. K used a model box, which we haven’t (properly) ever done before. It was a very useful way of interpreting ideas that I had only seen before in sketch form. We talked for four and a half hours before we had to leave – but only got through three-quarters of the script. In fact we had to go just as we hit the biggest problem. Frustrating, but we were all a bit brain-dead by that point anyway.

K’s basic ideas are good. She has a great attitude, not precious, able to move things around and scrap things when they’re not working. But the problem is in effecting a really quick transition, near the end of the show, when things quickly return to the beginning. It was clear that the mechanisms we have are too clunky to allow that to happen. Although the design is for a middle-scale stage, 12 metres across, it nevertheless has to have the flexibility and dexterity of a Punch-and-Judy booth. That’s not easy but it has to be or the whole concept stumbles.

We rushed off to catch the train, mooching over the problem. It was great to have done this, to have met and had an interim discussion before the April get together of all the collaborators. During the meeting so many things about the script were touched on. There’s barely a scene that hasn’t been modified in some way as a result.

Fri. 9.03

A quiet week after the hectic days following the news that our grant application had been rejected. We've held planning meetings and had discussions with Katherina on her latest ideas about the staging. She's anxious to work through to the end of the show before Alison and I go down to London in a weeks time. Otherwise our efforts have moved to developing the staging for 'Storm In a Teacup', a 30 minute show that Alison is re-working and goes into rehearsal next week in preparation for a short tour.

 

Mon. 5.03

On Thursday I met with Alison to go through Katherina’s designs for the first few scenes (currently there’s 24 scenes that make up the Veil script). The next day we had a telephone discussion with Katherina. This whole thing is a new process for us as the design is normally integrated into the conception of the piece. We realise that there is a risk in doing it this way; primarily the risk of losing the integration of story with design that’s the central feature of our approach to theatre, in the same way as it is for Improbable, IOU, or Kneehigh. But there’s also the possibility of gains too, of new ideas, fresh approaches – but only just as long as the whole thing ‘clicks’. So this stage is important, it’s the first real test to see if we’re clicking!

Most of our questions we have are about details – will a certain shape allow enough space for hiding a puppeteer, for example? The process of talking this through with Katherina was positive and constructive; we seem to be speaking the same language, it does seem to be clicking, even if there's a long way to go. Still, the thing we miss most is not being together in the same room to have the discussion, and really brainstorming ideas as a team. So we’ve agreed to go down to London and spend the day with Katherina once she’s sketched out the ideas for the whole staging concept in order to do just that.

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CONTACT BOB FRITH bob@horseandbamboo.org