So I’ve had this blog idea for a while. But I’ve been letting it stew because I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to say…
Space.
A couple of weeks back now we did the exercise where we recreated a film scene live on stage. Bryony’s group recreated the famous ear cutting scene from reservoir dogs. It was in this performace where something lit a spark in my mind, in terms if staging. At one point Hal removes the camera from it’s fixed station and follows bryony through to the workshop,whilst the scene in front of us was still alive. It sounds simple but it’s stuck with me for so long because it was so effective, and I think I’ve nailed down why so… 1) it did something the film couldn’t, it gave us an extra scene. Even though not much happend to tied up chole. The fact we got two simulatinous veiws of the same time, within the same narrative unlocks the potential to discover more story within the same time. A sense of dramatic irony maybe? 2) live gets a whole other meaning. “Live perfeomance emerged not as a condition of physical proximity and co presence, but as a correlate of time” is written by sarah bay-cheng, this technique not only exemplfyes this quote but it also adds to it, not only do we have a co presence to the stage, but the fact that the camera lead us to a place out of sight gives us another co presence. As we saw action transport from stage to off stage (whilst stage was still being used) it became a more incluvise experience. We we’re let into the secrets of the character. 3) it was tidy. One thing that bugged me about the hotel is how out of place the camera looked on stage around this 1930 esque look, it became distracting. Potentially having the camera ready to go just off stage and follow characters to different rooms. Gives us more space and doesn’t harm the overall look of what’s on stage. This technique has so much potential to play with… Let’s not forget it.