collaborating and writing

the rehearsals for 'the old hotel' are getting very exciting, although at the moment we are still devising rather than really rehearsing. We have decided to have just one actor in the site, telling stories one-on-one to audience members, whilst the performers online act as ghosts or memories for those stories. We are focussing one story in particular which was devised by Jonny during the perforamnce at 'Sitelines210407', which was about a relationship which focussed around visits to seedy old hotels and eventually deteriorated. jonny made the story really interesting by talking about the hotel rooms as if they were a character - perhaps his lover - in the story.

suzon has been producing some fantastic graphics which allow us to do some really exciting stuff wth the webcam, with the 'subject' in different positions in relation to the camera, coming up close, moving further away disappearing behind 'walls' and re-appearing in windows. During the performance, the camera will be on the actor and he (and the on-site audience) will be able to respond to the online performance as it will be projected onto a wall in the site. We need to work out how what the actor is saying will be fed into upstage, as there is no sound element with the webcam bit.

my paper is well underway, a couple of thousand words to go. I feel like it is a bit muddled and less coherent than last time, so am looking forward to getting to the end so i can go back through and organise it better. Although I felt very restricted by last time's 5000 word limit - and even make a habit of compaining that 10,000 is too short (what a geek) - am finding it tough to expand without waffling, having packed what i felt were my most important ideas into the smaller word count for last time. Have tried re-structuring and hope when i read back through it will be ok... hmmm...

moving on

so, the next stage of 'the old hotel'...

i have started collaborating with artists Suzon Fuks and James Cunningham (www.igneous.org.au) who are based in Australia and Liz Bryce, based in New Zealand. We are meeting regularly in online stage software Upstage (http://upstage.org.nz) to devise a performance for the Upstage performance festival 070707. The piece will be based around the threads of stories that began to be told at 'Sitelines210407'. The online element of the performance will be projected back into the 'real' space of the old hotel, like a ghost of the building and a live performance will take place in the space with two actors simultaneously with the online performance. The performance in the space will be feed back into the online performance by means of webcam.

We have been trying out different ways of using still and moving (animated/webcam) imagery in upstage, its all pretty exciting. I have had a tutorial with Vicki Smith from Avatar Body Collision (http://www.avatarbodycollision.org/) on using the webcam. Here's some screen grabs from my experiments with it: