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Why?
Mar 17, 2015 15:23:38 GMT
Post by Brian Astbury on Mar 17, 2015 15:23:38 GMT
This section is here in the hope that people will have memorabilia such as photos, cuttings, posters to fill in a huge gap, the result of the South African Archives having descended into chaos, losing all our documentation that was sent to them. These included all our letters, newspaper cuttings, programmes, accounts, and most of the photos and negatives. Fortunately, back in the 80s, I was asked to do an exhibition of the work of The Space at Riverside Studios in London and the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh to accompany a production of Medea with Yvonne directed by Barney Simon. Bee Berman sifted all the negative sheets containing the photos used in the book and sent them to me. Otherwise we would have nothing. Unfortunately, this means that there are many productions of which we have no record...
If you have anything please scan it in a send it to us here.
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Why?
Mar 25, 2015 18:50:12 GMT
Post by Medea on Mar 25, 2015 18:50:12 GMT
Brian was out of town when Barney Simon arrived to direct Medea. Perhaps he was at The Market, staging Don't Drink the Water. I was to design and build the set. The stage was raked up to Medea's tent in the center at the back. Barney wanted this structure to open out and transform for the final scenes. This was possible, but would need much more sophisticated rigging than the cheap handyman's staples, nails and string that I was using to hold it in place. It was an impossible ambition for me, then, on that budget. The outside of the tent (where Medea , unseen, later killed her children) was designed like the entrance - the major and minor labia - of a huge vagina and womb. I doubt that I even told Barney. There were many layers and folds of cloth held in place by hidden strings. We also disagreed on the musician's role and presence. Barney had brought in Mike Dickman to improvise a soundtrack on instruments based on early Southern African bows, gourds, rattles. I helped Mike make these, and had the idea that, rather than sitting off to the side , seen but as if almost invisible, the musician should be prominently placed as a visual counterpoint or chorus, perhaps up high on an archaic platform lashed together out of sticks and poles, as a kind of horned shaman or priest, dressed in layers of goat skin, fleece. Barney hated this idea. I loved it. I did my best to swallow my disappointment. If these contributions of mine were so off the mark, what did I know, anyway. Poor Barney had to deal with more that a set builder with ideas of his own. With Brian away, Dimitri would have been the person best suited to light the show. But Barney and Dimitri had not clicked. They barely communicated, dodged each other. Barney was convinced that Dimitri was trying to sabotage his production. I cannot remember Dimitri's side of this, except I have an idea that he was busy, perhaps rehearsing another production. We had a crisis as the technical rehearsals approached. A few months earlier a young assistant lighting designer based at the Nico Malan Opera House had volunteered to help 'with anything' at The Space. He was called at late notice and arrived and was shown over the rudimentary lighting box. I later learned that other theatres very seldom re-arranged the lights, they simply re-aimed and focused them. I was accustomed to seeing Brain up a ladder for a day and a night, moving our lights around, creating a new set-up for each fresh production. This is a lot of work. The patterns would then be linked in a plugging and testing session, and tried out in a cue to cue rehearsal before the actors were bought in. With Medea we started this process in the early evening. Barney would call out to X (I have forgotten his name) asking to see various lights added or subtracted from the pattern. "Can you do that?" "Yes, no problem". After five minutes the new pattern would fade up , and Barney would either modify it, or move on. By four in the morning we were ready for a test, from the first fade-in to the last. The lights faded up, Barney called for the next change, and was asked to wait a minute. Ten minutes later the next setting was shown. Barney asked to see the cross fade, "Faster, it must be like a heartbeat" (or a breath, or a sigh, I forget). Ten minutes later the first pattern would reappear then, after a long pause, the next. I did not want to interfere. I knew how the box worked. My first task in the theatre had been learning (during a lunch hour show) to operate the dimmer board. Eventually I offered to help. The poor man had learnt something at The Nico, but it had no application in our primitive system. He had been offering Barney a perfect pattern for each moment, selecting from all the dimmers, and all the available circuits, and all the available lights, without any idea of how to make them flow from one into the other, or overlap. There was no practical compromise in his design to enable the lights to be pre-plugged and pre-set. It literally took ten minutes to unplug and replug the tangled nest of wiring from scene to scene. I have no memeory of how we resolved this, except it was done, and it worked. Did we, the backi stage crew, do it, or did we get Dimitri to come in during the day while Barney slept?
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