The Long, Wet One
Today, we had the absolute pleasure of performing our latest (and last version) work in progress as part of Mimetic Festival at The Vaults. The latter has housed our office for the past couple of years so, as you can imagine, we have made a secure bond with the industrial, trail rattled Vaults. We’ve never actually performed there though so it was great to see the space transformed by the festival and be a part of that.
Very unlike our last show CELL, the aesthetic of In Our Hands is grimy, dirty and scruffy. It’s industrial and it’s practical, to reflect a fisherman’s attitude so really, the Long, Wet One was the perfect place to perform it.
Now, most of you are probably thinking that the Long, Wet One is some kind of horrible euphemis, which i’m sure, someplace, somewhere around the world, it is. But, our Long, Wet One is one of the performance spaces within The Vaults. Having previously been flooded for a long time (and now drained, thank god), this particular tunnel is one of the few that has retained it’s leaky charm. The brick tunnel walls are alive with all kinds of things and the humidity inside is akin to that of a greenhouse. That said, this dripping, sweaty hole in the ground literally made the perfect home for our show this Saturday.
So, wet ones aside, back to the show. Show day is always pretty crazy, there’s a lot to get through in short space of time and we often find ourselves running towards our start line. Today was no different really but with the addition of Super-Sherry (she is going to run the Bath ½ marathon with no training tomorrow - NUT!), our fantastically brilliant lighting designer (and operator) for the day, things were made a hell of a lot easier.
We survived the tech and blasted through the show to a bloody awesome audience. I know everyone says that but truly, they really were great. The show has changed a huge amount since our last work in progress in a theatre space in Cornwall. I think it’s fair to say that in Cornwall, we bit off a bit more than we could chew, concentrating on generating material to show rather than making it hang together and actually get our heads around what we were doing.
That was a good lesson though as we promised ourselves to not create any more material, in terms of narrative and length of time but work on detailing and tightening the current action. For some reason, maybe perhaps because it has changed so much since Cornwall, it feels like a really long time since we performed it there. It feels like we’ve been shut away for a while so I was feeling even more anxious than normal putting it in front of an audience. In addition to that, Mimetic is also a festival that supports Cabaret, Puppetry and Mime and we were programmed alongside some of the most exciting puppetry there is out there at the moment - *no pressure*
One of the most noticeable and enjoyable things about tonight was the audience’s reaction, the humour they pulled out in the bits we no longer laughed at and the heart they pulled out in the bits we no longer felt for. By doing this, the audience reminded us of those moments, made us re-find the joy in them. It was exciting and exhilarating and I can’t wait to perform it again (not until next year *sigh*)
Sometimes, I don’t think audiences necessarily comprehend the huge, huge role they play in our work. Not only in creating it but also in inspiring us to perform, to want to do it for them, to want to do it for us. When you get a crowd like that, it’s a win/win situation.
Molly