On a You Tube recky right now, this is a link to Jan Svankmajer's Ailce. Delightful strange animation of the story. Pretty dark too- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zeIXfdogJbA
I have just found the oldest Alice in Wonderland film on You Tube. It is great. There is such a beauty to silent films. Check it out on-
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zeIXfdogJbA
As the project has gone on I have realised how influenced I have been the film of Donnie Darko... the Rabbit costume, focus on time. It has always been one of my favourite films, I should embrace it's influence further.
"The Wind Up Bird Chronicle" by Haruki Murakami has provides for beautiful poetics when thinking about Alice in wonderland in life today. I have been particularly interested in the phone conversations that happen at the beginning of the book, only taking 10 minutes to understand each other. I like the idea of using a telephone to engage with someone.
As part of the research for this performance I am really interested in time, not only because the white rabbit in essence represents time, always being late for a very important date, but the notion of ever-pressing time that is present in western society.
The First of the poems that I have found that represents a quality of time T.S.Elliot's Burnt Norton below is the first section
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
The final paragraph from Tim Dooley's "In the palm of my hand" resonates the essence of things passing us by.
If we open the door, if we open our eyes, everything here
seems paved or clothed, labelled or priced, stamped
with its destination, encrypted with its time of arrival.
It is the sidelong looks more in recognition than
desire that release the unchanelled: the palest hint of
a blush, sky in the mirrorglass of offices, what
a girl called 'that Thomas Hardy kind of foolishness'.
The bite of the pickled chilli in the pitta salad
in Gig's fish bar in Tottenham street has it. The heron
standing on the effluent pipe looks out for it.
Daily we brush against it or glimpse it beyond our touch.
What we walk through, fail to say, or try to hold.
I found this image of the skeleton of a Rabbit. I have found this really useful in terms of how the human skeleton and rabbit skeleton are different. Using this as a way to make movement.
It have also been drawn to the nonsensical nature of Alice in Wonderland and became very drawn to Edward Lear's "Book of Bosh", particularly his limericks!
On the 31st July I am going to be having my first try-out of the performance at the Bristol Harbour Festival. This is not going to encompass all the elements of the initial proposal rather working just with the live performance of the character of the white rabbit with 2 performers. I am planning to play with ideas for 2 days- workshopping material and teasing out the key elements of what the white rabbit is and its role to play in the later performances.
Will the white rabbits speak?
Will the all the performers be trying to portray the same thing or different manifestations of the white rabbit?
How much interaction should the characters have with the passer- by audience?
Will the characters have objects to play with such as alarm clocks?
What is the physicality of the rabbit - part human part animal? just animal? just human? or something completely other?
Or will that change with the different people and places they journey to?
Are they both going to the same place?
Do they even know where they are headed?
Are they lost?
The list goes on. I am keen to play and see what happens, if unexpected things happen. I want this part of the process to open and un- product based.
There is a quote from Tim Etchells that describe the endless possibility of play and thus the importance that has when making work.
Play as state in which meaning in flux, in which possibility thrives, in which confines or what is real are blurred, buckled, broken. Play as an endless transformation, transformation without end and never stillness…”
