Stratford-Upon-Avon
Posted on Saturday, July 31st, 2010 in: Cities and Adventures
No Comments Yet - click here to leave one
What to say about Stratford Upon Avon?
It’s a toy town.
I mean, make no mistake, as toy towns go, it’s a very nice toy town. For a start, it’s the home of the Royal Shakespeare Company which is, as previously established, a Good Thing. It’s got some of the most excellent theatre going on that you are likely to see for £5 of your English pounds (if you’re under-25, that is…) and this is its major draw. Stratford was the birthplace of our Mr Shakespeare and oh boy has he left his mark on the town. You will be lucky to leave without buying a mug entitled ‘Yea Olde Stratford’ or possibly a tea-towel bearing the serene, almost enigmatic face of the scribbler. Whether Shakespeare imagined when writing Hamlet that his face would be used for drying dishes in the future, no one will ever know. You are likely to have a drink in a pub somehow related to his works, or maybe stay in a bed and breakfast honouring his plays, or possibly even have a local drink that is somehow derived in his honour – yeap, there’s no getting round it, Stratford is heavy on the dude.
But personally, for me, Stratford Upon Avon is all about the swans. I mean it’s about patching and theatre and lighting too, but if you take those out of the equation and for a moment play purely the tourist, then it’s about the swans. Spend any great amount of time working in the town and you quickly discover that besides the theatre, the place you are likely to spend most of your time is along the canal or the river, looking at swans and listening to brass band music played on a weekend, or to the cricket scores being blasted out over a loud speaker that can probably be heard half way to Warwick. I lived in Stratford for just under a month, and when not working, my main occupation was to sit by the river and watch boats and swans go by and read about witch hunts in the early modern period and write plays. (All of the above seeming the most apt response to being in the town.) On a weekend there’s a market by the Royal Shakespeare Theatre where you could buy anything from Indian dreamcatchers to home-made soaps with bits of raspberry in, and of course there was the perpetual traffic of little tourist boats paddling up and down the waterways.
Other than that, though, there really isn’t much to do for a stranger in town. If you’re a local the situation is clearly different – the family I was lodging with seemed abuzz with perpetual activity, from local amateur productions of plays to continual production of baked goods to raise money or test recipes or just have legendary ‘pudding parties’ in local villages, to football matches and skating challenges, not to mention while working 9-5 – but as a stranger whose sole occupation is based around cable and electricity, your day off can quickly become something of a muddle. Unless you’re already involved in local activities, and unless you’re sticking around long enough to get involved, there’s really only so much soap you can buy or so many Shakespearean monuments you can visit. The near-by hubs of alternative activity – Leamington Spa, Birmingham or Warwick – aren’t much to write home about if you’re by yourself, and quickly the project on a day off becomes one of filling it. My first serious day off work was spent in quest for a cheap haircut, under the slightly naive belief that everything was cheaper outside London and that after a year, even I should probably consider getting a trim. I eventually received a haircut for free, from a lovely trainee hairdresser from Zimbabwe who admitted as she practiced her art that she had never once seen a show by the RSC and didn’t really have any interest in theatre whatsoever. Her bosses laughed and said they’d been invited to see the latest show at the theatre for free, but had drunk a little bit too much before going in so didn’t really get the plot and prefered modern dramas…
“Stratford is a dump,” was the opinion of another local resident. “No one who works in Stratford would ever actually live in Stratford. You’ve got to live in the countryside, which is beautiful, and keep boats, and never, ever go into Stratford unless you’re actually being paid.” In the coffee shop which I quickly established as my base of operations on those days when work merely consisted of changeovers and where I would sit for hours writing and nursing one much-loved muffin, even the character of the tourists became kinda apparent. This is a town where your visitor will not only complain about the level of the music being played in the back room of the cafe, but they will name the composer and opus as they do it to politely request that the works of Mr Mozart, while very fine, be turned down a little so they can hear themselves think. Outside the cafe was a regular pair of living statues, complete with gold-sprayed ruffs and Tudor trousers (not a flattering fashion…) who would occasionally jerk into life, inducing screams from passing gaggles of teenage tourist girls in headscarves or neat school uniforms, who’d never seen such things before.
So all things considered… with my best tourist face on… Stratford Upon Avon is probably worth a weekend of your time, particularly if you’ve booked your tickets to the theatre first, but make sure to see the swans, avoid the souvenir shops, and if you’re staying for long, pack your football boots and a good recipe book first…
Covent Garden
Posted on Friday, July 30th, 2010 in: London
No Comments Yet - click here to leave one
How I have managed to get through over a year of this blog and not talked properly about Covent Garden is a mystery….
Okay, so, once upon a time, in the deepest darkest depths of the early modern period, Covent Garden was a proper fruit and vegetable market renowned for prostitution and gin. It sat bang smack in the middle of all sorts of dubious goings on; riots, murders, bored aristocrats running wild, drunken locals and notorious playhouses where you really weren’t there for the quality of the verse. In the Victorian era you could throw in the added joy of rookeries – slum areas where event the coppers went with fear, and where the easiest route from A-B was through someone’s basement or across the crumbling rooftops. Yet somehow through all this Covent Garden hung on in there and in recent years has become one of the tourist-friendly, shopping-tastic hubs of central London.
So now you have posh restaurants, markets selling hand-crafted bits of stuff, fashion stores and soap shops, street performers on stilts or doing acrobatics while juggling knives. (The phrase you are most likely to hear from any street performer… ‘ladies and gentlemen, reach into your pocket for some money to give to us to say thank you for our act… then fold it….’) The performers are absolutely one of the draws of Covent Garden, savvy and spectacular and worth the watching; so are the musicians. In the pit below the main covered market area you will find string quartets and opera singers doing the Good Bits from classic music, while in the cobbled streets around you can find anything from the greatest hits of Queen done on electric guitar and harmonica, to the Chinese sheng player churning out traditional classics of the motherland. Sometimes you get larger structures coming in, from giant trampolines to the traditional merry-go-round of the fair and of course, the obligatory Punch and Judy Act which is forever associated with Covent Garden as its starting place and geographical patron.
There’s also plenty of more formal tourist-catch attractions. The Royal Opera House dominates the eastern end of the market, and while the tickets are getting cheaper it remains the prime source of gentlemen in ties and women in silk dresses leaving the area in the later hours of the evening. The London Transport Museum sits on the southern corner next to the warren of Jubilee Market, while the departure of the Theatre Museum next to that remains to this day something of a tragedy. Restaurants abound, ranging from the silly, where a piece of bread and some butter in a jar can cost as much as a hot dog with extra onions from the vender below, to the slightly less discovered Thai and Vietnamese Restaurants tucked away at the end of half-seen alleys towards the river and Trafalgar Square.
St Pauls Church sits on the western corner of Covent Garden, with a churchyard round the back that is something of an escape route from the business of the market itself. You’re also with easy throw of Drury Lane and all its theatres, Leicester Square and Holborn – do not, guys, do not take the underground between any of these stations and by the time you’ve got down to the Piccadilly Line platform and waited for the train, you could probably have walked the distance overground yourself. Distances are deceptive in this part of town; judicious wiggling through unlikely streets is the secret. Thinking of secrets, you’ll also find near Covent Garden the not-very-secret-at-all Masonic headquarters, based in a building about as subtle as a scud missile fired at an oil refinery, complete with little shops nearby offering various medals and bits of ribbon to denote this or that other highly hush-hush status within the order.
All things concluded, Covent Garden is a lot of fun and well worth visiting at pretty much any time, whether as a passer-by looking for an interesting shortcut between Cambridge Circus and Aldwych, or as a tourist looking for an interesting time. The one rule is – don’t go there with too much cash in your pocket. Despite your best intentions, you’ll probably spend it before you’re done.
From a Shallow Angle
Posted on Friday, July 30th, 2010 in: Lighting
No Comments Yet - click here to leave one
There will come a point when I put up different photos to these… spectacular amazing photos far better than these… but as the last time I was in a position to take the afore-mentioned photos we were half way through a tech session and there were dimmer problems with the ACLs on stage left, I didn’t, and so can’t. So, with possibly the easiest of all challenges I’ve ever set in my time on this blog…
… guess where I was working on this day…
The Power of Public Copyright
Posted on Wednesday, July 28th, 2010 in: Misc., Writing
3 Comments so far - click here to join in
Was anyone else really, really frightened when they heard that the BBC was making a 21st century version of Sherlock Holmes?
Was anyone else really, really relieved to discover that actually, it was good? Oodles of fun, and strangely both respectful and innovative. Full marks!
Authors, you see, are starting to be dead long enough. When a writer dies, a clock starts ticking, and 70 years after their death, an alarm bell sounds that proclaims ‘here is their work! Have it for free and go crazy…’ Thus in the last 12 months the world has gone a bit Sherlock Holmes-tastic as across the globe people wake up to the realisation that not only can they now go treading all over these characters, but they can make them do kung fu too and get away with. Thankfully, in the case of Holmes it’s currently been a mixture of huge fun and surprisingly reverent… in a strange sticking-to-the-spirit-if-n0t-the-plot kinda way… although needless to say no movie will ever exceed Basil the Great Mouse Detective for sheer adventurous/detecting kaplunk. (Not a real word. But a good one.) But hang on in there and soon other estates will start coming up too as authors start being dead long enough… D.H. Lawrence (be afraid), T.E. Lawrence (also be afraid, but in a better way) and George Orwell (respect) could wake up in the next few years to discover that their amorous characters are conducting epic love affairs against the background of world war one in the Arabian Peninsula while totalitarian powers chase them with rats through an underbelly of socialist dissent…
Let’s just hope that Steven Moffat is there to catch them when that moment comes…
The Virtuous Burglar
Posted on Tuesday, July 27th, 2010 in: Lighting
No Comments Yet - click here to leave one
This is possibly going to be the first post in an emerging category… and while technically it’s an abuse of my blog since it has nothing to do with writing or fantasy, hell, it’s my blog, so I’ll do it! (And no one has yet told me that I can’t. So there.)
I’m lighting designer for a production of the Virtuous Burglar, being performed at the Edinburgh Festival. And while I’ve been lighting designer for plenty of stuff that I’m not going to name because, let’s face it, my artistic credentials aren’t exactly glorious and neither was it, I’ve got a good feeling about this one. I mean, I say that now… I haven’t yet got up to Edinburgh and sat at the lighting desk and looked at a fixed rig shared with seven other shows and thought ‘oh shite what now’ but it is my contention that even if, even if this should happen, the Virtuous Burglar would probably still be worth the 54 minutes of your time that it currently runs at.
When I first read the script my initial thoughts were ‘oh god, it’s a farce, how depressing’. I get depressed by farces as they’re usually not very funny. With, that is, the notable exception of Michael Frayn’s Noises Off which goes down as one of the few bits of theatre where I’ve laughed so hard I’ve had an asthma attack. (Michael Frayn = A Good Thing. Go see plays by him.) (Alistair Beaton = A Good Thing too. Just in case you’re wondering.) But then good news! The Virtuous Burglar is by Dario Fo, who I was forced to study at AS-Level Drama and who despite the rigours of the AS-Level syllabus (designed to destroy any joy in anything) I loved. In a kinda pedantic Italian way, but again, howled with laughter all the way through Accidental Death of an Anarchist. So that was kinda a look-up.
Then we had the read-through. These are soul-destroying occasions which as a technician you invariably leave with two thoughts: 1. Oh my god what have I got myself into and 2. How on earth have the actors managed to do so much work on their texts already? I haven’t even got a sharp pencil and a ground plan…
Yet strangely, even in the read-through, I was starting to giggle. And by the first run it was really quite funny. And even in the sound plot, another event guaranteed to undermine the strength of any reasonable soul, it was actually heading at high speed towards hilarious… don’t ask me why, don’t ask me how, certainly don’t ask me if I had anything to do with it because as this post presently stands I haven’t even touched a dimmer, let alone recorded its intensities into a cue… so the sneaky suspicion is growing on me that actually, this might almost be quite good.
With which in mind! Let me do the flagrant advertising bit now and say, dear reader, if you are in Edinburgh in this coming month, the Virtuous Burglar is running at the Assembly Rooms for the whole festival at the comfortable hour of 2.15 p.m. and while I cannot yet guarantee that the lighting will be an LED-tastic orgy of sexy luminescence, I can promise you that though you have the face of iron and the hangover of a recklessly liberal Viking, you will laugh. Lots.
A Coven of Black Leather Jackets
Posted on Monday, July 26th, 2010 in: Writing
3 Comments so far - click here to join in
I am a fantasy writer, and I know this because I own a black leather jacket.
Every profession has its own uniforms. Soldiers were khaki, police wear blue and black, doctors wear white, techies wear steelies and writers are no exception.
Romantic novelists, according to my Mum, wear skirts and floral-pattern silk scarves and don’t tend to have such good parties as the crime novelists. Thriller writers incline more towards the blue jeans-and-shirt end of the spectrum and, I am finding out, fantasy and science fiction writers wear black leather jackets. And either have very big hair indeed, or almost no hair at all. (I’m afraid I fall into the big hair category. My hair doesn’t have to be long to be big; there are strange and repellent electromagnetic forces at work somewhere in all this lot.)
What most fantasy writers aren’t, it turns out, are female or under 35. I mean, don’t get me wrong, there are some fantastic female science fiction and SF writers out there – figures like Ursula le Guin or Anne McCaffrey spring immediately to mind – but the industry is largely dominated by blokes. I was surprised to find myself the only female and under-35 attendee of an SF event a few weeks ago, and even more surprised to discover that while I stood out like an iceberg in the Sahara, at least I had, as if by magical instinct, brought my black leather jacket. Perhaps it’s a genetic condition – all those who are born with the disposition to write fantasy/SF are also immediately destined to be the owner of the obligatory coat, without needing to be told. In much the same way it seems all people are born knowing the chorus of ‘We All Live in a Yellow Submarine’ but not the verses.
It’s a curious thing, being an unlikely candidate for membership of the black-leather-coat-coven. Writers are generally a grouchy bunch anyway, since while you may talk to your peers in merry and jovial tones of monsters you have written and rights you have sold, the thought is always lurking at the back of your mind… you’re the bastard who nabbed my shelf space…
Remarkably, it’s even possible that writers hate writers more than they hate publishers, which is an achievement since no matter how successful you are as a writer, and how well you’re published, the second you get a single editorial note from your publishing house the certain and irrevocable realisation dawns upon you that actually, your editor is a philistine nit who can’t understand the brilliance of your life’s work. And if you happen not to be no.1 in the bestseller charts right here, right now, then it has nothing to do with the words you’ve written… it’s because the publisher isn’t trying hard enough, damnit! And worse, it’s because they’re trying too hard with that writer there, that ungrateful bastard whose wouldn’t recognise a coherent sentence if it danced the polka on his bellybutton wearing stiletto heels, your bloody publisher is wasting there time on him and you’ve got to stand at a party and hold a drink and smile… keep on smiling… at that… bloody… useless… writer!!
And so on.
Me – I don’t know many fantasy writers. Instead I have something of the opposite problem to the one described above. In my work as a lampie, and more commonly in my condition (now ended, yay!!) of being a perpetual student, not even the black leather jacket seems enough to let people actually believe a word I say, when I say I am a fantasy writer. It is, perhaps, unfortunate that I am forced not only to admit to being a writer, but a fantasist too – and thus open to mis-understanding. I mean, for a start, admitting that I’m a writer isn’t something that comes up commonly in conversation.
“So, you’re the lighting technician?” quoth your average theatre profession.
“Yes, I am,” I reply.
“How many watts can the dimmers take before they trip?”
“2.4 kW, but personally I think they’ll bite the dust at 1.8.”
“Really, really, that’s interesting… uh, incidentally, you aren’t a fantasy writer, are you?”
… is not a line of conversation that ever really crops up. And that’s absolutely fine with me, since, let’s face it, admitting that I dream of dragons will probably not enhance my street cred in the world of well-kept spanners and steel-capped boots. Keeping strategically schtum seems the way to go.
But every now and then the day ends and we all go down to the pub, or there’s a lunch break and so-and-so is talking about their hobbies and what they do for fun and someone asks me and… well… I can either lie (‘Yes, I like white-water rafting and keep a yoyo collection’) and try and bluff my way through the conversation, or I can own up to the fairly simple truth that I sorta like writing books for a living. First few times I admitted to this I expected a barrage of questions and a reasonable amount of shame – ‘you do what? What books? Why? And you call yourself a lampie when you’ve betrayed the sacred cause to have another career on the side?! Get back to Mordor, loser!’ But actually the truth is far more mundane. 90% of people I admit this to, ignore it. Blithely skip over the sentence to the point where I sometimes wonder if I’ve uttered it. Which is sometimes a bit of a blessed relief, as it saves having to explain the whole psudonym, writing-business. And sometimes is utterly befuddling. I mean, as hobbies go, professional novelist is, if nothing else, a conversation starter and I’ll be the first to admit that socially, I’m pretty damn rubbish and any starter will do. (I write much better than I speak. And tragically, write other people much better than I write myself. Sigh.) But generally polite moving-on is the order of the day, and I sometimes leave wondering whether the thought in the mind of the person I’ve admitted this to isn’t ‘yeah… fantasist… says it all…‘
Perhaps its not. Perhaps it really is just that daft a profession that really, there’s nothing to be said. Or perhaps not even a black leather jacket is enough to earn a reputation for writing… perhaps the time has come to go to the next level of fantasy-writer nerd-tastic, and I should learn how to back-comb the hair, or maybe just shave it off entirely, and see if that makes the difference…
Henry IV (Pt.1!)
Posted on Sunday, July 25th, 2010 in: Misc.
No Comments Yet - click here to leave one
Oh my god I love this play.
Henry IV was, according to 1066 And All That (the book I never quite had the guts to reference in my historiography essays…) a Bad King who wisely resigned half way through his reign in favour of Henry IV Pt.2. There is my one and only medieval history joke out of the way. Now read on.
Now, so far, I seem to have loved every single production of Henry IV that I’ve seen. This means one of three things:
1. I’ve got very, very lucky.
2. I’m easily pleased.
3. The plays are just that damn good.
Pick whichever one seems most likely…
… and I am thrilled to report that the production (so far of only pt 1) that I saw at the Globe on the South Bank fits perfectly into my catalog of plays-what-I-have-loved. The Globe is in many ways a hard taskmaster, if only because by Act 5 your knees and lower back are generally in so much distress from standing that if what’s happening on stage isn’t of the highest bloody order then your mind is just not going to get off your own physical distress enough to care. (If it happens to rain as well, then you’re seriously screwed.) Therefore! All praise to this season’s production of Henry IV in that by Act 5, as various kings/princes/wannabes were bashing away at each other with swords and various soldiers/drunkards/dukes/knights were dying/feigning death all over the place, I was still hooked. For obvious reasons, the Globe just doesn’t do theatre like other companies, and at the point where Hal was high-fiving the audience anyone left hoping for a little sonorous intoning of sacred texts is probably going to have to leave. It’s a play about oodles of stuff, but mostly about Falstaff and Hal, the fat knight and the heir apparent, and in the case of this production they were absolutely brilliant. When you can go from laughing so much it hurts to feeling a shudder down your spine at the promise of things yet to come, then you know there’s something excellent happening on stage.
Go spend five pounds.
Go see!
Women in Lighting
Posted on Thursday, July 22nd, 2010 in: Lighting
2 Comments so far - click here to join in
A few months ago, I mentioned in passing in a room full of techies, that I was a member of a relatively young organisation called Women in Lighting.
A male lampie in attendance, who I’ll guess we’ll call Ebenezzer for the purpose of this story, immediately embarked on something of the following rant:
“Jesus, I hate f-ing things like that, I mean, you’re not f-ing discriminated against any more, you women, you’re like totally not, I’ve worked with f-ing women in the industry and it’s not like you need an organisation. I mean I think it’s actually sexist for women to have this thing, like, you know, sexist against men!”
Now, I already owe Women in Lighting a lot, and I’ve only been a member a few months, so I figured I’d take this time to answer a few points raised…
I do not consider myself a feminist, although, it turns out that possibly, I am. The reason I was surprised to discover that I was one was because, until very recently, there had been no circumstance to test this assertion. At no point had I been (to my knowledge…) challenged on the basis of my gender, and thus whether I had anything resembling a gender-political conscience hadn’t really been tested. And whatdayaknow? I do…
That’s not to say equality = sameness. After all, I fully confess that men are physically stronger than me and are thus better suited to certain tasks. Like, say, moving steel deck. Oh woe. And there are men out there that are better techies, and there are women out there that are better techies – of course there are, I mean, obviously and of course! The point is this; that I do not wish to be judged as a woman, I wish to be judged as a person, real and whole, and not on the basis of whether I have breasts and, heaven help us, the quality of both the same.
“I would never judge you because your a woman,” or “of course I look at breasts, so do all men,” would probably be the two majority retorts. The latter – well, there’s a whole can of worms waiting to be opened up there and if anyone wants my Sociology 101 analysis on the nature of gender/sexual identity, just lemme know…
As for the former, sure, there are a lot of guys out there – great guys – who would not judge me because of my femininity. They’d judge me because of my wiring, and go from there… and that’s how it should be! Sink or swim, let it be because of my qualifications! But there still seem plenty working in the technical side of theatre who don’t get it. Sometimes its an innocent thing – an attitude of ’she’s a woman, she can’t do it, let’s keep her safe’ that leads them to chose a man for a job that a woman perfectly if not more qualified at – or the same attitude that leads to the addition of the word ‘darlin’ to make alright the sentence that went ‘yeah, if it’s okay with you, I’m going to send one of the lads, just because, you know, it might be kinda tricky… darlin….’ Sometimes it’s just people being tits. Because people sometimes just are.
And yes, this is active (if perhaps unconscious) discrimination and yes, it’s the minority position. Men are in the majority in theatre lighting, and I have learnt 99% of what I know from men who looked at me entirely as a lampie-in-training and where kind and generous with what they knew and did what they did absolutely superbly, with the added bonus that it mattered not who did the job so long as it was done well. Although that said, it is impossible to give the battle cry of ‘men – do not generalise about women!’ when in order to make a concise argument, women find themselves generalising about men. If you don’t mind me saying, I will, as a good historian, acknowledge the own hypocrisy of that argument and then with a swift academic vigor, move on.
No – my main reason for joining this ’sexist’ organisation is, if you don’t mind me waxing sociological on you, a bit more complicated. Your 1st year LSE sociologist basically is worried about identity – who and what you are within society.
For example, I say:
“I am a woman.”
“Ah-ha!” (quoth our sociologist) “But what is a woman?”
“Well,” I say, adjusting my hair pointedly, “a woman is the female of the species – she has babies, wears dresses and will probably chose wine over beer.”
“So all women have babies?” demands our sociologist.
“Well, no, some women may chose not to have babies…”
“So all women wear dresses?”
“Well, no, it’s just something that sometimes women can do to make themselves feel feminine…”
“So its feminine to wear dresses?”
“Well, yes, but you can be feminine while not wearing a dress…”
“So a woman doesn’t actually have to have babies or wear a dress to be a woman?” exclaims our sociologist, by now looking rather smug.
“Well… as you put it like that… no.”
“And can men wear dresses?”
“Well… yes….”
“Ah-ha!” he exclaims and then trots off smugly to write a paper on the subject.
Gender, it turns out, is a lot more complicated than simple biological function – its an identity, built up out of ideas of ‘wears and dress and has babies’ into a figure that society accepts and can classify. (Don’t even ask about sexuality. Whole other story.) But in technical theatre you can rely on one thing above all else – there’s only one gender identity going on, and it’s a bloke. Every cliche is somewhere founded in a little grain of truth, and there’s a sackful of truth in the cliche of the lampie who drinks excessively, lives on a diet of cigs, beer and cornish pasties, swears like a Satanist, and treats exciting bits of technological development with an almost libidinous affection. And to mingle in techie society, to be accepted as part of it, your average woman will, at some point, have to behave like your average bloke. Sometimes worse; will have to prove themselves to be one of the society, and it’s a man’s society. The word we’re heading for is macho, or machismo.
And fine. Okay. We all do it; it’s like finding yourself putting on a Scottish accent in Glasgow even if you were born in Cambridge – you may not consciously angle to do it, you may not realise you’re doing it at all, but the need to mingle with a social group just pushes your vocal chords over the edge. I’m not a militant feminist, I have no desire to ask technical theatre to change its ways. But I would like to ask it to expand its horizons; to look beyond the macho lampie world that has been constructed and say ‘hell, I may be a bloke who likes my beer, but actually, there’s no shame in liking a cuppa tea and a movie with the girls…’
So coming back to the very beginning of this tale, I’m back in the green room with Ebeneezer being told that I am the member of a discriminating group, and I have, I’m afraid, one simple answer. Cast aside, Ebeneezer, your pre-conceptions! It’s not about biological equipment, who is stronger and who has babies more reliably, it’s not about a conspiracy of bitter spanner-wielding female lampies looking for a bit of a bicker – it’s about introducing a new idea, a new identity into the world of technical theatre. Don’t write angry letters to your union about our existence, do the smart thing, go one better. Open yourself up to a world of tea and biscuits, of friendly social events and affection that isn’t shared over hangovers, in short…
Join us.
www.womeninlighting.com
Graduated!
Posted on Sunday, July 18th, 2010 in: Lighting, Writing
4 Comments so far - click here to join in
So, I’ve graduated from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts. I should add, I’m not sure what my final grade was – I mean, I think it was quite good, but as the piece of paper I was given didn’t say (nor did anyone else’s say, if you’re wondering) then only cunning mathematics and a whole complex system of philosophy may hold the answer to that question…
You may notice I’ve started a new category in my blog – Lighting – in honour of the fact that from this moment on, my cunning life-plan is this: to be gainfully employed in the world of theatre lighting as much as I possibly can and in those (surely far-between!) moments when not being employed in the above manner, to while away my sorrows by writing as many books as there are bytes on my computer. And maybe a few plays and graphic novels as well, just as soon as I’ve cracked the art of getting my character names to capitalise nicely. (You’d be amazed what an art it is…) As life plans go, I’m sure my Dad would be quick in pointing out that it’s not as good as being, say, a doctor – at least from the point of view of his supported old age. But it will, with any luck, combine the two things I love – theatre and writing – into one gainfully structured life from two utterly chaotic ones, since I firmly believe that no writer can just be a writer and not go a little mad, and likewise, no freelance lighting technician can just do lighting and not go equally bonkers.
With which said…
… deep breath…
I am a freelance lighting designer and technician based in London. When I lit Pericles I went in too steep and didn’t consider the potential of cross-light enough; on Midsummer Nights Dream my cold profile cover was too narrow (although I’d argue that was the fault of the kit list, not necessarily my focus!) – on the Tree I think the cover was a bit too wide and I really should have thought harder about the follow spots. On A Lie of the Mind I went too shallow – BUT! Birdies are cool. Let no man even attempt to deny it – birdies are entirely, utterly brilliant. On Macbeth my profiles were focused too hard, but I have learnt that there are other ways to animate a scene without using wheels and that toplight is startling in sensible doses; strobes are cool but sunfloods can be curiously programmed with a little cunning. If stuffed a two-point cover can do the round but beware low grids, tight walls and tall actors. On Into the Woods I learnt that a ten minute fade is no shameful thing; from the National Theatre I learn that parcans can be brilliant and a 5k at 15m is surprisingly dim; that window gobos have nothing on profiles well-focused; that sometimes bounce is useful if you just charge straight at it with a cry of kill and sometimes it’s a right pain in the backside, especially if you’re sat uphill. I discovered that you really should check if your birdie bulb in a practical is 12V or 240V before testing this too empirically; always keep your 3-5 pin converter with the glaciator; Mac IIIs can invert their face panels if you’re trying to read them upside down in a darkened grid, there is no such thing as too much L200, neither is there such a thing as L120 that isn’t high temperature if we’re being serious about this. NEVER give your gaffer tape away, and always label your screwdriver. Tea is good. Biscuits are better.
All these mistakes I have made in the last… oh… three, four years? Good news being, is that I am very unlikely to make them ever, ever again.
Shamans
Posted on Friday, July 16th, 2010 in: Glossary
2 Comments so far - click here to join in
The shaman has been a cultural figure in most societies for a very long time. Not necessarily as someone called the shaman, mind – the job title’s gone through a lot of evolution. But generally, throughout history, there has been someone who does the job. A mushroom-eating wise one who communicates with the spirits; a tribal elder; a keeper of history and lore; a knower of stories – arguably even the local vicar had a certain shamanistic something about him for a while, and I challenge any theological historian to deny that the Holy Ghost hasn’t moved in some remarkable ways in his time.
And naturally, in the realms of urban magic, there are shamans too.
They tend to take on two forms. In institutions such as the Tribe – a medley of outcasts and angry social pariahs – the shaman is a leader, a keeper of memories or, more often, feuds, a guide and a mentor, such as it is. In less structured societies, the shaman can fulfill a more flexible role. They are the ones who see the truth of things – not a simple black and white truth of ‘my dog has five legs and this is a lie’ – but rather the truth of things that are just beneath the surface. They are the ones who see the hands that built the streets, who see the shadows that lie just below the shadow that you cast as you walk, who know which lampposts hide the dryads and which alleys you should and should not walk down once the lights have gone out. They walk a fine line between the world that is, and the world that is just below the surface, and as a result can make for excellent counselors, albeit not very good tour guides.