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Movie Magic

21/5/2010

Look! Links to the short vids we made last year for the Mashpit website:

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1001 Things You MUST Do Before You Die
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We never found out who this boy was, he was just a miracle which appeared

Hard Night Panda 01, 02 and 03
Its not the drinking, its how we're drinking...

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Some reasons for theatre

21/5/2010

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Here's a thing I wrote to promote Elimination Rounds and be offensive, and a text from Drowning Bird which was done by Joel from inside a cardboard box.
YOU DON'T YOUR NEED YOUR COLOURED GOGGLES FOR THIS SHIT

Or: "Towards an Undead Theatre"

Remember how your youth group leader used to take someone hip, like Eminem, and say: "You know, there was this guy called Jesus, and he was pretty much doing what Eminem is doing, 2000 years ago, in Jerusalem.” And you believed him, right? That youth group leader sure knew how to make something old and irrelevant look new and appealing: he compared it to something you cared about. It’s an old trick, and you’ll find it works with just as well with Shakespeare, and poetry, and lots of other dead things. In this article, I’m going to try and be like that youth group leader, only I want to tell you about theatre. As we all know, theatre was murdered by TV and film long before we were born. Or was it? Can it be resurrected? Do we need what famous zombie director Peter Brook (11 and 12) called for: an Undead Theatre?

Let me begin.

There's been a lot of fuss recently about cinema realising that it can "do 3D."

No it fucking can't. Theatre can do 3D. Effortlessly. Everything it does is totally in all directions. Look at all the dimensions. It can do smells too. At the end, the performers and you have been through something together. You know the phrase “break a leg?” Actors can break legs. In theatre, things actually happen to people and you’re there to witness it.

So forget Avatar, taste the next big thing. You might not have heard about it. It’s not on at Readings, or the Embassy. It cost less than a million dollars to make. It’s a theatre show.

Binge Culture's Elimination Rounds, is, in conclusion, a theatre show. It is better than Jesus. In it, there’s a leafblower, a feeding frenzy, a live band, and a lion mauling. People pretend to be in danger. People get sort of naked. Gravity exerts its force upon objects. Wellington is built onstage and destroyed by a monster.

My gosh, you say, can theatre do all this? Can it really be as hip as Eminem? To which I reply: heck yes, kid, and you won’t even need your 3D glasses.

*****

You know, not all performers are naturally extroverted.
Many of them are quite shy, off the stage.
Actually, a lot of people get on the stage for the same reasons that a lot of people get drunk.
When you're on the stage,
Or on the piss,
You get to be funnier than you are in everyday life.
You get to be bolder.
More flirtatious.
You get to do things you wouldn't normally get to do.
Because people are generally more understanding when you're drunk.
Or acting.

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Young Victorians

17/5/2010

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Left to Right, Alex Lodge and Jack Shadbolt, in costume

Get amongst it! These shows are coming up at BATS featuring fellow Victoria grads which are guaranteed delicious:

Four of the Threespoon crew are bringing you a new play, Tea For Toot: Friday 21st - Saturday 5th June 2010 (no show Sun/Mon). Its inspired in part by Enid Blyton, so it should be a jolly good show, old chap.

The Intricate Art of Actually Caring returns to Wellington Tuesday 1st - Saturday 5th June 2010. Don't miss out. Here's that snazzy website again.

All the info is, of course, on www.bats.co.nz

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Comedy

5/5/2010

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Seeing the hilarious Sammy J at Downstage last night added to a feeling that other performers have a bit to learn from comedians in terms of audience acknowledgement and presence. From Sammy's casual remark on the topic of his home renovation: "I've knocked down the fourth wall and now I've got a great view of the audience" to the almost unnoticeable "bless you" as one of us sneezed in the middle of an emotional speech - it just seemed, you know, right. As in, not a big deal. Here's to that.

Before that I'd been enjoying this clip from Sight Is The Sense That Dying People Tend To Lose First as a kind of cross between stand-up and performance art. It seems to me like a twist on the idea of the comedian in this context as a sort of educator, the one against the many, getting up and sharing with us how the world really is. And again, we've got a part to play in the performance.

In a not unrelated vein, here's a really interesting article exploring the pleasures and perils of audience interaction (as recommended by Tim), and it reminds me of some recent debates on theatreview about active audiences, and some problems we've had with our own work. Who really has the power in these situations, who's really taking the risks?

"On the Edinburgh Fringe in 2008 one company had the not-so-bright idea of making an interactive show about Auschwitz, which cast the audience as Jews being led to the gas chambers. The performers (who played the camp guards) were so hectoring and aggressive that one critic physically resisted them. After the show, artists and critic got involved in a brawl, and the show’s director was given a formal warning by the police."

And I'm sure it seemed like such a clever idea at the time...
Full article

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Progress: Re-reading an old game

4/5/2010

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From the file marked "obscure and tangential":

Returning to 1994's Transport Tycoon after maybe 10 years of not playing it (the things you can do when you're not rehearsing anything), I'm interested in how political it all is, the ideology. I think Brownlee and friends would enjoy it, since it behaves like their kind of world.

The game puts you in charge of some kind of privatised transport company, linking industries and towns with trains and planes, and then as time goes forward, with monorails and jets. There is, thank god, no government or citizenship on the isometric map- you're answerable to no-one but the market. Its a disturbing little window into behaviour in a world which doesn't require ethics. That church where your busstop wants to be? Bulldozer tool! Plane crash with 21 on board? Why wasn't it full to capacity?

I used to spend all day in this mindset. I was just playing trains.

This time round I've left it running for days at a stretch and its now 2500AD, I have 150 trillion dollars, the coal keeps gushing out of the mines, and the world, though more populated, is the same as it was back at the millenium. The cities will grow forever.

There are no national parks in Transport Tycoon.

***

I dislike listening to CDs these days, not because they're clunky or scratch easily, but because they don't keep a playcount so it doesn't feel like I'm making any progress.

-Ralph

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Movie Magic

Some reasons for theatre

Young Victorians

Comedy

Progress: Re-reading an old game

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