Some of the students on the MA Contemporary Performance Practice course at Salford University have brought together a mini-festival of online performances, available to view on the New Adelphi Theatre website. The selection included a durational performance, installations, films, and an interactive questionnaire.
'The Language Of Light' by Scarlett Rose, was an audial and visual journey through an imaginary art gallery, using poetic language for the storytelling, soundscapes and visuals. The piece was allegorical representing the author's journey through her teens into womanhood. We followed her whispered narrations and met her alter ego, The Shut-Eyed Poet who was destroying red roses (ie: the author herself one assumes).
Owen Davey's contribution to the festival was a set (or triptych) of three short films, all recorded on the 7th May, the day of the Flower Moon. The first film, Mossidawn was the day's dawn as seen through his window. A weird experimental style filming full of overlay, eerie sounds, ghostly apparitions and a bright orange alien at the end. The second film, Crystalwald was filmed at midday in a park on a camera phone. Again the out-of-focus techniques and overlays, but this time done by using a bicycle mirror to create natural obfuscations. Finally, Flowermoon itself. A large planet-shaped circle centre screen with images filmed infornt of it and behind it again with overlay and finished with the moon covering the sun in bright colours.
'It's About Time' from Mark Reid, was literally about time. It consisted of a list of 100 statements about time {"ten minutes is a long time to wait for a train" / "love outlasts time" / "It's the time you take that matters"}. Each statement was meant to provoke thought and conversation and we were invited to live chat, write responses, send images, links or sound files to contribute to the discussion, if we were so inspired to do so. Of course we were in no way forced to contribute, but we were at least able to think about and reflect upon these statements as stimuli to further thought on Time.
'Lineage' by Amanda McCambley was another installation piece using mixed media of aural, film and music. Here, McCambley's theme was identity, and what it meant to her, and how she perceives herself and how other perceive her, and whether in fact any of that matters. She asks, 'What am I?'. and do we, or even her think in terms of 'tribe', 'heritage' 'labels'. The films are deliberately out-of-focus and extremely bright making them rather difficult to watch for more than a few seconds at a time. Again there is poetic narrative, and again she takes us on her journey. It finishes with a film of here putting her long African dreadlocked and coloured hair into three very different but traditional African hairstyles. One assumes each denotes a different 'tribe', a differnt 'belonging'.
There was also a further piece in the mini-fest; a durational performance by Vick Podemska called 'The Raven Of 100 Feathers'. This, according to their website involved him sticking pins into his skin, ritual body art, pain and blood; and so I gave this one a wide berth!
Reviewer - Chris Benchley
on - 20/5/20
No comments:
Post a Comment