April 2022

We have been experimenting with the text on two scenes. The Prelude and Poem One (of the six). These are two very different scenes and by focussing in closely on them we are getting a better understanding of the dynamics of the text and its possibilities. 

The first poem presents a Covid briefing in lyric and has turned into a clowning exercise. Partly set in a Covid government briefing, it is delivered by Bozo the Clown and his partner in crime Mad Doris. When we performed a scratch of this scene, the audience laughed - a lot! We hoped they'd find it amusing, it was a bit of a surprise how funny they found it. 

The Prelude is not at all funny. It is also very text heavy, being a set of prose poems about key news events in early 2020. We decided to pre-record the text and have the actors move to their own voices with a DV8 influenced physical theatre performance.  The challenges were to do with the disengagement this then created from the moving body to the text's meaning. Easy to sort, but an interesting one.