A version of "Following the White Rabbit" took place at Devises Street Festival on August Bank Holiday Monday. For me it was a highly challenging day that enabled me reconfigure what I want out of the performance that up until that point I wasn't able to put my finger on.
The festival itself is an incredibly lively and busy event. I was amazed by the amount of great performance and vast amounts of people. However, this made walkabout element of this piece really challenging having to interact and navigate the way through hoards of people. It was great to see how the rabbits were responded to and how much attention they received. This enabled me to question how the rabbits interact and perform. I began to question whether the use of text was the best way for the character to come across strongest to the audience? Text isn't something I am particularly good at, so why have I made the white rabbits speak. I feel that I could choreograph movement that could resonate a lot more meaning than the text I have decided to work with. When and if the rabbit does speak it needs for a reason, not just for the sake of it. For the next performance I am going to work more intensely on the movement side of things. Making the piece more of a walkabout dance performance.
The majority of the performance is a structured improvisation as I felt that this would enable the performers to deal and respond with the ever changing landscape that you are confronted with in Street Theatre. However, I feel that by doing this I have made the piece quite messy. The characters lost clarity. As way to control this I want to set more material to interrogate the intention of the movement and what I want to say in the piece. This then can build more of a language for the rabbits to play with while performing.
In this performance I was able to try out a new prop for the rabbit hole. An umbrella once opened material falls down from each side so that it creates an small rabbit hole space for one person at a time to interact with the rabbit. This was a really hard prop to get people to want to interact and enter the rabbit hole with the rabbit. This I think was because the rabbit masks are not soft. They are quite surreal. It is also because I hadn't fully decided how to get people in. People need to feel safe or intrigued and if the performers are not comfortable the audience won't be. I also think the way that the performance was structured, it put to much pressure on the prop and thus didn't have a surprise element that I wanted. It almost needed to be an object that was quite transient. It would pop up in random places and get people interested that way. The interaction with the object still needs a lot of work.
I still haven't been able to integrate the pervasive media element as yet as organising everything else has been quite over whelming. I didn't realise how much work I had got myself into! However, later this week I am going to be working pervasive media studio to create an interactive devise for inside the umbrella rabbit hole. I am excited about the prospect of doing this!
Bournemouth By the Sea was a really enjoyable festival and white rabbits really fitted in with its location. Doing the performance in a large park space enabled the rabbits to pop up around the park and move through different landscapes, from open grassy spaces to wooded areas. It made me realise the importance of visual perspective when seeing the rabbits. Allowing space for them to be seen from afar to close up.
