I went to Halifax on Thursday with Mel and Katie to see a play, the name I'm pretty sure is Lost Soul Music... or something to that affect. The play ran over three evenings and each night had 2 stories, but the stories were independent from each other so it didn't matter that I only attended one of the nights. The first story was one character monologuing with the occasional song, the set was various things one might find in someone's house, but most of it was covered in brown paper and there were certain quirks to some of the props, biscuits stashed in a hollowed out book and a teapot that doubled up as a watering can. The story itself wasn't extremely riveting, I did drift off in to Robyn world a few times but was quite easy to pick up anything I hadn't heard, however it was quite sweet and the character (who reminded me of someone but I never quite put my finger on it) was very likable, and had an interesting turn of phrase.
The second story had 3 parts that came together in the end, the link being a river, there were 3 people in this part and each took turns telling a story. The first part of the story involved a young boy and a suicidal man, the two that were not narrating helped demonstrate the story, one playing the man and the girl controlling a handmade puppet to represent the little boy, the puppet was kind of creepy but the story was interesting so wasn't too distracting. One thing about the play was that on the poster for it, it said; "No Happy Endings", which is essentially true but that line made it unnecessarily sinister when the stories both had quite sweet, sentimental aspects to them.
The other art related thing I attended this week was at Trinity Arts, where a performance piece was shown on Friday (I am unsure what it was called), it also had about 6 video pieces, some paintings and some hats. As far as logistics go (I hear this is supposed to be involved in the whole fine art blog...) on of the main things to note is the videos, only one of them you could hear and the rest you had to put on earphones and sit on the pew and watch. it also had a little sign ay 'press play', which is a little like when in films people send videos for blackmail etc.
The performance piece was a girl dressed as a marionette, with rope attached to her wrists and ankles attached to the pillars in the church dancing to a guy playing piano/drums. I found the piece quite stressful to watch, there were quite frantic moments in the music and the dancing and the ropes would get tangled, maybe a feeling of stress was the desired affect?
