Location Location Location!

The great news this week is that at last we have the go ahead on a university house for the 'House of Memories' project.  Thanks to Otago Uni property services we have the use of a lovely old villa with seven rooms.  It's on the university campus in Castle St and about five minutes from my office in the Phys ed department.  Each room in the house will have its own performance installation ranging from dance to video, music and voice recordings and photography. Almost all of the performers and contributors, including sound composition, will be by people with sight impairments.  The piece reflects their stories and their relationship with an idea of home, as both a physical place and a place in the heart.  It raises questions about how we create a place of ease in our lives, a place where we feel we are in our element.  For some people in the house it's an activity where they feel they are at their best and most liberated.  Technology too, plays an important part, as for one man it is his aural connection to the world via a cacophony of technology, where he makes his mark.

One room will be set aside as a maze which visitors have to negotiate without their sight, via sound and textural cues.  This will be interesting!

At this stage the performance will be held over two nights, tentatively June 25 and June 27.  A Friday night and a Sunday night (June 26 is Midwinter carnival in Dunedin which I don't want to clash with).  This is just before the 2010 Dance Symposium on interdisciplinary practice begins.  Entry will be by booking only because space in the rooms is limited and I want to create a sense of intimacy, playing with boundaries between spectator and performer.  Three of the rooms will have some degree of participation from the audience (including the maze) which should make it more fun and interactive. I am hoping to have three shows a night, each with fifteen guests, who will be rotated around the rooms, three at a time.  It is a lot of work for the performers but I think they are up for it and we can manage it so it's not too arduous.  Only five of the rooms will be active at any one time so some performers will get a rest in between a showing.  Have to say, it took a while for me to get my head round this - we will have to try it out.  Choreographing an audience is never an easy thing.

This week I met with Marty Roberts from the Theatre Department at the uni and he has agreed to help with lighting and some of the theatrical considerations. Yay! He's an excellent lighting designer.

Next week I hope to hold our first production meeting, all going well and create a timeline.  There's a lot to do but rehearsals are underway.

A Show Without Sight


Yesterday I went to quite an extraordinary show at the Allen Hall theatre at the uni.  It was put on by the theatre studies students and before you even entered the theatre you were blindfolded and led to a seat.  As I was one of the first I waited for about 10 minutes before everyone was seated.  It was quite a scary experience to have my sight taken away.  Immediately I felt vulnerable and concerned about my safety.  I had no sense of where I was in the room even though I had been to that theatre before. I had an overwhelming desire to peak but I resisted and was determined to stick it out.  When the performance started there was a series of noises, loud and soft, near and far, interspersed with voices.  The voices were very theatrical and rhythmical building to a crescendo and then dropping away.  I was aware of many voices, male and female.  The rhythm seemed more important than the content which I often couldn't make much sense of anyway. Every now and again different smells were released into the audience.  One smelt like a woody kind of incense, another a very gentle perfume.

What was really interesting to me was my relationship between my inner world and outer world shifted dramatically.  I almost felt like I was in a dream and occasionally felt quite sleepy.  I was more aware of my body and how I was feeling than I normally am and generally felt more internally orientated and less externally orientated.  It was like a dream with no visuals.  Gradually I relaxed around my feelings of heightened vulnerability and let myself just enjoy the passing show.  At the end when we were told to remove our blindfolds I was both relieved and surprised to discover a room of about 40 people seated on cushions around me.  I felt like I had journeyed in another world.  Food for thought...