Had a quiet morning/afternoon/day in work so just started reading newsletters and looking at various art and culture type things that are coming up over the next while, and it appears that there’s lots and lots of exciting things coming up!
There are some new shows opening in the Galway Arts Centre, launching tomorrow at 6pm. The first show is the intriguingly titled ‘Post-Fordlandia’ by Megs Morley and Tom Flanagan which is described as a "filmic exploration of the mythologies surrounding Fordlandia, Henry Ford’s empty ghost town in the Brazilian rainforest.” Intriguing! I did a little research (i.e. looked it up on Wikipedia) and found that Fordlândia or "Ford-land" is a patch of land of about 10,000 km² in the Amazon Rainforest, that Henry Ford came upon in 1928 and used as a source of cultivated rubber to be used for the Ford Motor Company, creating an industrial town, which is now abandoned.
The second show is called ‘The Peoples’ History of Galway’ and the Galway Arts Centre is showing an exhibition featuring new work by Ceara Conway, Roisin Coyle and Simon Fleming, as part of month of events in various venues in Galway. I certainly think Ceara Conway’s work is worth a look - I have yet to check out Coyle and Fleming’s work but living on the same street as the Arts Centre, I have no excuse for not dropping in for a gawk!
Further afield, the 2011 PhotoIreland festival has been announced. Lots of interesting exhibitions and talks, and the workshops teaching wet collodion photography and other fancy 19th century techniques certainly caught my eye. Unfortunately, they’re a bit on the expensive side at about €500 each so sadly, attending out of mere curiosity will not be happening. There is an intimidating number of exhibitions being shown - some that stand out are 'The Shadow of James Joyce' by Motoko Fujita - an homage to Finnegan's Wake, and 'The Arc of Realism 1911-1997' - a collection of work by Zofia Rydet, documenting her creative journey from realism to surrealism and back to realism by the end of her career. I always find it interesting to see how an artist's output changes over the years, and adapts to different movements, and the choices they make when developing their work. Rydet had to make a choice between documenting the world around her in an accurate way or creating her own poetic vision, and I'd certainly be interested to see the contrast and battle between the two.
The exhibition 'The Art Books of Henri Matisse' has opened at the Chester Beatty Library and runs until September 25. I’ve never been to an exhibition in the Chester Beatty before but it looks like this exhibition might be worth a look. The Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera exhibition runs in IMMA until June 26th so might be an idea to try and catch both, if you feel so inclined. The exhibition sounds amazing, and Kahlo’s work is outstanding when you see it in person, a must see Apparently there’s been massive queues to go see it so maybe pick a time when it’s not likely to be so busy.
Still in Dublin, there will be a public reading and interview with the author Edmund de Waal at City Hall, Dublin next Wednesday 8 June 2011, at 6:30pm. De Waal is the author of the book ‘The Hare With Amber Eyes.’ His reading from the book will be followed by an interview chaired by Eileen Battersby, literary correspondent for The Irish Times. The event begins with a wine reception at 6.30pm and forms part of the celebrations for Year of Craft 2011. Tickets are €10.
As a crafts fan, I checked out the Year of Craft 2011 website and found all sorts of interesting things, some really original little events like this "Breakfast At Tiffany’s - Special Screening & Craft Maker Talk" event - a private tour of the exhibition Ornament followed by 'Elevenses' and a special screening of Breakfast at Tiffany's, and then a discussion with two of Ireland's finest jewellers about their style icons and inspiration, and what makes a piece timeless, in their opinion. All for the bargain price of €10! Amazing. I love the originality of the event - it seems a little frivolous and vacant, but fun nevertheless!
I’m seriously considering taking part in this Beginners Creative Textile Course - a workshop in which participants experiment in making sample textiles that can then be used for brooch and card making, and the like. It takes place out in Spiddal and costs €50 or €40 if you’re unemployed. It takes place on June 19, and again on July 17.
The Cork Midsummer Festival (11-26 June) has a really interesting and diverse programme. Ukuleles, tea dances, acrobatics, porn addiction, pop up homes…it has it all! The 'electro-opera' Tomorrow, In A Year in particular sounds interesting for fans of The Knife and might just be worth a wander down to Cork.
MOST IMPORTANTLY, tickets go on sale tomorrow for the Galway Arts Festival…the highlight of which is pretty darn fantastic – Cillian Murphy starring in the world premiere of Enda Walsh’s ‘Misterman’. This promises to be very exciting (if it equals Walsh’s awesome play ‘Penelope’ from last year’s GAF, it’ll be doing well) and is a must see. As someone who is gutted they never got to see Murphy in ‘Disco Pigs’ (the play version, I mean – I’ve devoured the film many, many times), I’m very excited to finally witness a Walsh-Murphy collaboration!
It's going to be a busy summer!!
Showing posts with label Play. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Play. Show all posts
Thursday, June 2, 2011
Friday, May 28, 2010
At Play...
And so on Sunday, we performed our play. As mentioned in an earlier post, it was an adaptation of a Raymond Carver story ‘What We Talk About When We Talk About Love’. We were performing it as part of the One Act Festival organized by the Galway Youth Theatre. The story centres on 2 couples – Herb and Terri, and Nick and Laura – who are sitting around drinking gin and talking about love. Donnacha was playing Herb, the main character of the piece and he immediately inhabited the character of the slightly sozzled doctor, who tells one story after another irritating his poor wife, played brilliantly by Marie, along the way. Nick and Laura are the slightly more idealistic couple, still very much in love, not quite as battered down as their counterparts. John played Nick, with an amazing Southern accent, and great comic timing, while I ambled along as Laura as best I could!
We’d put an awful amount of work into the play – hours of rehearsal, over countless evenings. We had one minor heart attack a week before the play was due to performed when we realized we actually maybe didn’t know the lines as well as we should, so we set about rectifying this quickly. We worked out our movements, our reactions, John and I worked on a little dance routine (including a practice session in the Róisín Dubh one Saturday night) and we felt by the end we’d put together a good play, and we were confident that the story was strong enough to keep the interest of the audience.
The weekend came along and we crammed in the last few practice sessions. The nerves were slowly building as was the realization that we were actually going to have to perform this thing! In front of people! And more specifically, in front of our friends who might decide it best to shun us forever if the performance was a disaster. Sunday came along, as it is wont to do, and we had our technical rehearsal – which was actually very exciting! It was pretty amazing to have it sink in that this was actually happening and there was no going back! That evening, we all gathered at Nun’s Island and prepared to hit the stage.
We found out we were going to be 5th. This was not a fun prospect, as we had to sit in the front row of the audience and watch 4 other performances, and keep a hold of our nerves at the same time. The first act started and immediately I wanted to run out of the building – they were brilliant! As were the ones that followed – we had some job to follow them! After the 4th act, I felt strangely calm as we got out of our seats and began to prepare the stage. Luckily the lights prevented me from seeing the crowd too clearly, so in a way we could pretend they weren’t there. And so we began!
We started well, no-one froze and forgot their lines, our accents were ok and the audience laughed – a lot! Lines we didn’t realize were funny got big laughs, while bits we thought were funny maybe didn’t get quite as big a reaction. That was great, but in a way I found it hard to stay in the moment and not laugh along with the audience. About halfway through, I think we lost it a little – the second half wasn’t as good as it had been in rehearsals, but we were still happy with it. We’d a bit of a blip where a section towards the end got skipped over, but the audience didn’t notice. And then we were done!
Twenty minutes on the stage felt like maybe 5! It was incredible. I felt really strange immediately afterwards – I couldn’t believe we’d just done what we’d done and we’d survived! We didn’t make a massive mess of it, sure it wasn’t the best we’d done but still – we did it and it was a great achievement! The rest of the night felt like a dream as we watched the rest of the acts, and then quickly debunked to the nearest pub for a well-earned pint or two, along with the other groups who’d performed! There was a lovely atmosphere, everyone complimented everyone else and there was a great sense of camaraderie. We then finished off the night with a dance in the Róisín (it seemed only right) and then our adventures in theatre-land were well and truly over!
The day after was amazing, I was really filled with a sense of achievement and pride in what we’d done. I can really see how people love being on stage – it’s quite an amazing feeling! Would I do it again? Sure, but only on a small scale! I can’t see myself auditioning for any big shows – but maybe I’d like to get involved in the organization of one in the future. All I know for sure is, it was an amazing thrill and now I’m looking for my next project!
We’d put an awful amount of work into the play – hours of rehearsal, over countless evenings. We had one minor heart attack a week before the play was due to performed when we realized we actually maybe didn’t know the lines as well as we should, so we set about rectifying this quickly. We worked out our movements, our reactions, John and I worked on a little dance routine (including a practice session in the Róisín Dubh one Saturday night) and we felt by the end we’d put together a good play, and we were confident that the story was strong enough to keep the interest of the audience.
The weekend came along and we crammed in the last few practice sessions. The nerves were slowly building as was the realization that we were actually going to have to perform this thing! In front of people! And more specifically, in front of our friends who might decide it best to shun us forever if the performance was a disaster. Sunday came along, as it is wont to do, and we had our technical rehearsal – which was actually very exciting! It was pretty amazing to have it sink in that this was actually happening and there was no going back! That evening, we all gathered at Nun’s Island and prepared to hit the stage.
We found out we were going to be 5th. This was not a fun prospect, as we had to sit in the front row of the audience and watch 4 other performances, and keep a hold of our nerves at the same time. The first act started and immediately I wanted to run out of the building – they were brilliant! As were the ones that followed – we had some job to follow them! After the 4th act, I felt strangely calm as we got out of our seats and began to prepare the stage. Luckily the lights prevented me from seeing the crowd too clearly, so in a way we could pretend they weren’t there. And so we began!
We started well, no-one froze and forgot their lines, our accents were ok and the audience laughed – a lot! Lines we didn’t realize were funny got big laughs, while bits we thought were funny maybe didn’t get quite as big a reaction. That was great, but in a way I found it hard to stay in the moment and not laugh along with the audience. About halfway through, I think we lost it a little – the second half wasn’t as good as it had been in rehearsals, but we were still happy with it. We’d a bit of a blip where a section towards the end got skipped over, but the audience didn’t notice. And then we were done!
Twenty minutes on the stage felt like maybe 5! It was incredible. I felt really strange immediately afterwards – I couldn’t believe we’d just done what we’d done and we’d survived! We didn’t make a massive mess of it, sure it wasn’t the best we’d done but still – we did it and it was a great achievement! The rest of the night felt like a dream as we watched the rest of the acts, and then quickly debunked to the nearest pub for a well-earned pint or two, along with the other groups who’d performed! There was a lovely atmosphere, everyone complimented everyone else and there was a great sense of camaraderie. We then finished off the night with a dance in the Róisín (it seemed only right) and then our adventures in theatre-land were well and truly over!
The day after was amazing, I was really filled with a sense of achievement and pride in what we’d done. I can really see how people love being on stage – it’s quite an amazing feeling! Would I do it again? Sure, but only on a small scale! I can’t see myself auditioning for any big shows – but maybe I’d like to get involved in the organization of one in the future. All I know for sure is, it was an amazing thrill and now I’m looking for my next project!
Wednesday, May 12, 2010
Less Jessica Tandy, More Sissy Spacek…
At the moment, my main activity is rehearsing for a play I’m involved in with some friends. It’s an adaptation of Raymond Carver’s short story ‘What We Talk About When We Talk About Love’ (well, it’s a mixture of the story and the original draft of it – ‘Beginners’). We’re taking part in a competition – there’ll be about 6 or 7 other groups putting on plays, and each performance is about 20 minutes long. The story is great, it’s a perfect piece for a play of that length as it’s simple, with great dialogue and it’s not overly complicated. Rehearsals are going ok for the most part, except my big problem at the moment is the American accent I need to speak with. I’m not good with accents. At all. Any accent I try to pull off inevitably ends up sounding English in some way.
At the beginning, I thought I was managing to pull off some sort of American lilt to my accent, that it was going ok. But then we had a rehearsal where we recorded us doing a run through of the play – and it pretty much just sounded like me just speaking normally, with some sort of sinus problem. So I’ve been practicing and practicing, but on Sunday night, I was horrified to realize I was just sounding like the old lady in Driving Miss Daisy…
Not what I was going for.
So one of my friends sent me the following clip, telling me he believes I could pull off a similar accent…
This accent is a lot more appealing and it rings more true for my character (who isn’t a geriatric old woman).
So I started practicing and thought it was going well…until rehearsal yesterday. Oh. My. God. Awful. One of the others in the play started laughing when I pronounced the word ‘nightmare’ in a crazy, overly-dramatic, Southern-sorta accent “sounds like a nightmaaaaAAAAre.” More work is needed, ‘subtlety’ is the key I think.
And I’m just going to have to watch ‘Badlands’ constantly for the next week and a half.
At the beginning, I thought I was managing to pull off some sort of American lilt to my accent, that it was going ok. But then we had a rehearsal where we recorded us doing a run through of the play – and it pretty much just sounded like me just speaking normally, with some sort of sinus problem. So I’ve been practicing and practicing, but on Sunday night, I was horrified to realize I was just sounding like the old lady in Driving Miss Daisy…
Not what I was going for.
So one of my friends sent me the following clip, telling me he believes I could pull off a similar accent…
This accent is a lot more appealing and it rings more true for my character (who isn’t a geriatric old woman).
So I started practicing and thought it was going well…until rehearsal yesterday. Oh. My. God. Awful. One of the others in the play started laughing when I pronounced the word ‘nightmare’ in a crazy, overly-dramatic, Southern-sorta accent “sounds like a nightmaaaaAAAAre.” More work is needed, ‘subtlety’ is the key I think.
And I’m just going to have to watch ‘Badlands’ constantly for the next week and a half.
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