From Action to Scene

Now that the Terra Lume programme has finished and the February workshop season is coming to an end, I will be using this space to post documentation and reflection on many of the events I participated in, or witnessed, over this past glorious month.

First up is From Action to Scene, which was the title of the nine-day workshop led by Naomi Silman at LUME, 1 - 9 February 2012. On the evening of the ninth, there was an open invitation to participants in other workshops and residents of Barao Geraldo to come to an end-of-the-course showing of work, documented here in images.

The first part of the evening saw a serious of solo pieces set in and around the buildings and gardens of Sede do LUME, each piece inspired by a fairy tale character, developed from stories brought to the workshop by participants. We thus saw LUME awash with petulant princesses, sanguine storytellers, and bewitched beasts. Audience members were led astray by a world-weary Pied Piper of Hamelin, seduced by a masochistic mermaid, and bedazzled by a wild man of the woods. Weaving through this LUME Wonderland was a very skittish Alice, who eventually led the audience into the Banqueting Room, where they encountered not only the to-be-expected Mad Hatter and a Dormouse (well, lots of dormice actually, very drunk ones they were too) but also lots of surprise guests at the tea party, as a whole host of fantasmagorical characters enacted their strange rituals amongst and around the audience.

For those of us taking part, the evening was an opportunity both to show off some of our individual work, and to showcase some of the ensemble techniques that grew from the training.

The solo fairy tale characters were inspired by the texts we chose to bring to the workshop, but each of us found that our delivery of our texts and images were informed and moulded by the daily workshop material. As a personal example, the text I had chose came from The Little Mermaid. On Naomi s instruction, a long section of text and action was reduced to three key moments: first, the Mermaid s desire to be human and her willingness to suffer for her heart s desire; second, the taking of the potion that would enact the desired change and the terrible painful consequence as her tail rips open into two legs; and third, her arrival at the ball in the Prince s castle where they meet, yet he is unable to see her as a potential lover.

Having, in an earlier workshop, worked on the development of human-animal hybrids, Naomi suggested that I play the Mermaid with that energy - so my presentation became the story of Little Mermaid, as played by an adoelscent cat!

Other of the training exercises that we had used made their way into the presentation: our chest-thrusting stacatto-actioned Torero poses were used as a short ensemble transition moment, as was a nebulous slow walk to the song Row Row Row your Boat...

The Banquet scene was an opportunity for many of the improvisations that emerged from the workshop to be built into one mad-cap mellee using a variety of techniques. from the first Tableaux Vivant of characters pursuing surreal individual actions with an odd-bod assortment of objects (umbrellas, tea pots, lanterns, hats, toy guns, fruit crates) - which the audience encountered in action as they entered the space, set in the round - to the last nonsense-language song and dance, via a percussive laying of the table, a nightmarish Riddle guessing game, and an interactive band of banditos doing dirty deals with the magic potion...

What was really astonishing was the level of complicity developed between the performers in just nine short days -all down to the tough love and tender nurturing from Naomi in what was a very intense but highly satisfying workshop experience.