Let There Be Light...?

At 11.30am, two and a half hours before the start of the Ghosts From the Basement afternoon performance at the Cecil Sharp House, two strangers introduced themselves to each other for the first time. Toy theatre set, meet stage. Stage, meet toy theatre set. After my initial viewing of the room a month ago, I had gone away with a nice fuzzy, vague idea in my head of how big the stage area would be...likewise, the people organising the event had a nice, fuzzy idea of how big this girl's toy theatre scenery would be. Wham, bam... one glance made it absolutely clear that the dimensions of both were absolutely incompatible with each other. What followed was a hasty decision to position the toy theatre scene next to the stage. It looked lovely. It would mean that the audience would have to shift their glace by about 30 degrees each time a sequence took place. It looked fine, I felt relaxed. So long as the two crucial ingredients were put in place - music, and light - all would be fine.


The music sequence - a one minute track called 'The Garden of Zephirus' by Dead Can Dance, was in the diskman on the sound desk. The plan was haphazardly in place - once an act had finished, and the next act had set up for their performance, the sound guy would play the track, and this would cue the sequence. But did all the acts understand what was going on? What if someone wandered onstage at this point and the audience's eyes immediately followed them? We would just have to wait and see. And now, where is that lighting guy....
It was twenty minutes before the event was due to begin that we realised we had no light. Lights had been fixed on the main stage - there they were, I could see them pointing upwards to illuminate the beige curtain that hung behind the musicians' heads. There they were - my lights. And to the left, there was my life-sized toy theatre, shrouded in shadowy dimness - or, what William Morris would possibly have called Vagueness. Sometimes strong, dramatic words just don't fit the bill - meeker ones like Disappointment are so much more effective. Lack of light was to be the downfall. What a silly little reason for a dream not to go to plan. And why, why oh why don't I carry a couple of torches around in my bag?
Well, we carried on, the performances started, and oh what beautiful enchanted music followed. And at times I forgot my racing thoughts and just smiled to be part of such a beautiful event in this strange, subterranean dance studio with its Dim, atmospheric lighting on a freezing saturday afternoon in September. And when each act finished, like clockwork the music changed to our slightly eerie medieval forest dance track, and we continued to tell the story of our tree passing through the seasons, and our king and queen separated by the departure of the magic bird at the end of summer and reunited by its return in the dead of winter.......and through the dimness it seems that people did turn their heads, did sense what was taking place, were curious, and did perhaps allow the music around them to mingle with the pictures taking shape before them.






Light. Because if you're trying to guide peoples' eyes towards something a little out of the ordinary, they need to have an easy path to follow. Music and light..not the final add-ons, the very bones of a ritual event. I've learnt that for sure..

But dear readers, it's been a wonderful exploration and it might well be that we haven't reached the summit of this little line of investigation. In fact, I don't think I've even started. What this experiment did lead to was a conversation with the wonderful, ever-open-minded and adventurous musician who originally gave me the go-ahead for the project, and the conversation went something like this:
me: you see, next time this needs to be done in a stage space with at least an extra metre in depth. And it needs to be planned around the visuals from the very conception.
him: well, here's my idea. I think we should come up with a story, and I will create a soundtrack for it - an album's worth of songs, to be performed live - perhaps the band perfoms to the side of the stage. And your visuals tell the story, brought to life by the music. What do you think?

Readers, what do you think I think...?


NB. in the meantime, it's time to go electronics shopping....I'm buying a handheld projector and whilst I'll be quite happy not to cut up any cardboard for a while, I'm more than keen to start finding out what happens when these medieval worlds are projected through a digital lens...