Back from Edinburgh!

I'm back from the Edinburgh Festival where I spent the past 10 days working on The Wooster Group's La Didone and still amazed at the scope of the festival--hundreds, no, thousands of events every day. The city is more or less occupied by an invasion of artists.

I had a wonderful time despite being too busy with our show to take much in except a hard-edged Poppea from the Vienna Schauspielhaus and Matt Schickele's engaging pub show. He's a wonderful songwriter and I look forward to hearing more of him in New York!

I was also pleased to see that La Didone was pretty well received by the local press. Here are a few links to reviews, which also include some of the more up-to-date photos.

The Guardian
The Evening News
The Scotsman

And here are a couple of my photos of the work in progress. The Theater, the Royal Lyceum on Grindlay Street, was amazing, with a beautiful interior and a raked stage that made everything look good. First, the balconies:


Outside the theater:


Our crew and their crew hard at work building the grid during load in:


And a shot of our publicity, which shocked each of us as we found it wandering the streets from the theater to the closest coffee places.


One of the revelations for me on this trip was how good the coffee was! I love tea, and I expected more of it, but instead I found a thriving coffee culture that rivaled the Bay Area, with little Italian expresso places sprouting up everywhere and freshly brewed coffee to take away at all the pubs. And the best tea-or-coffee accompaniment I've tried in a long time, caramel shortbread (otherwise known as millionaire's shortbread). Thanks to Kamala for alerting me that it needed to be on my Edinburgh food list!

What's is all about?

I enjoyed this segment from WNYC's Leonard Lopate show yesterday and one comment stuck with me. Discussing Pilobolus' long-term success, the executive director Itamar Kubovy said that the secret is to create a world on stage that people yearn to join. I think that about sums it up.

Lots of exciting stuff here right now--I went to see the Bread and Puppet show in the Lincoln Center Out of Doors Festival today. They definitely made a world on stage I longed to join, in fact I was fantasizing about going up to their barn in Vermont for a summer and working on the show, kind of a semi-grown up collective theater vision of running off to join the circus. It was fabulous, and I hope to blog about it when I have a little more time. Also stopped into the exhibit at the Lincoln Center Library for the Performing Arts on Merce Cunningham and his collaborators. I looked at the first few things, got absorbed in a video, and vowed to come back before it closes in October so I can take the time to really enjoy it and watch some of the footage.

Light Shows & the Sumer of Love

We went to see the Summer of Love exhibit at the Whitney Museum yesterday and I was totally taken with the images and examples of light shows from rock concerts in the late 60s. I had no idea such a genre existed! One of the first pieces we happened upon had these gently undulating ribbons of color that changed fairly dramatically when you watched over several minutes. It was like a music visualization on iTunes, except that these were all made with real stuff: colored liquids and oils, slide projectors, overhead projectors, chemicals making reactions. Color and light actually made from color and light. I hadn't realized how removed from actual stuff we had become until I noticed how shocked I was at the lovely low-tech nature of these works and how gorgeous some of them were. Another fascinating corner of the exhibit was a set of 24 slides owned by Andy Warhol and used in his light shows.

Here's a few good pictures from another exhibit of a couple of years ago, and here's a video made for the Whitney by Joshua Light Show, one of the main light show creators/groups (they now use computers as you'll see if you watch the video through). I was quite taken by the photographs of their work and their group, including one with a whole wall of equipment that reminded me a lot of being on tour.

I also just now remembered being capitvated by a show in the Great Small Works Toy Theater festival a couple of summers ago that was entirely performed on, with and through an overhead projector. Maybe I'll start to look for one, or an old slide projector...