Colin Warren: the blog

I was very fortunate to be able to attend a performance of ‘small metal objects’ by Back to Back Theatre in the local Westfield shopping centre today. It was a very special experience to sit in a tiered bank of seats in the middle of shoppers going about their various activities.

The actors mingled in amongst the people and were miked-up, with us listening in via headphones. It must have looked rather odd for about 100 people to be sitting there with headphones on, and nothing else seeming to happen. At first we could hear the actors and didn’t know where they were and it was a bit weird to sit and listen in a conversation knowing it was for us to hear, but we didn’t know who was speaking. Maybe we didn’t have to know, but once we could see the actors and how they were part of the activity of the shopping centre, it changed the dynamics and became more of a play within a play(s). Once the actors walked into view, they stayed around the vicinity in front of our seating.

People were walking past doing their business, some looking at us, and mostly not knowing that we were listening in on a conversation – a sort of eavesdrop on a one small interaction taking place amongst a whole lot of other things going on. There were people at the ATMs, claiming bonus shopping vouchers, having a coffee, meeting each other, and walking around the actors without knowing that they were also somehow being part of the action.

The play also gave me a perspective on performance, and that there has so be an observer, someone to watch, for the activity to be legitimised. Well, maybe not legitimised, but for it to have meaning outside the performers.

It felt quite profound to be participating in something ‘on the sly’ and struck me that there would be so many of these interaction, conversations, negotiations, etc. going on that we never really know about. We’re usually all too busy to notice or care… An excellent play, and thoroughly enjoyable.

Last Friday night we went and saw the play The Arrival by Spare Parts Puppet Theatre based on the book The Arrival by Shaun Tan. It’s quite an amazing book and I was wondering how it would be interpreted as a play. I thought it was well done, a fairly simple set, clever projection/animation and music, to create some amazing images/ landscapes and atmosphere. I came away uplifted and with a deeper understanding of what my parents, and many of their generation may have experienced when that came to this country.

A review of the book captures it better than I can:

Tan captures the displacement and awe with which immigrants respond to their new surroundings in this wordless graphic novel. It depicts the journey of one man, threatened by dark shapes that cast shadows on his family’s life, to a new country. The only writing is in an invented alphabet, which creates the sensation immigrants must feel when they encounter a strange new language and way of life. A wide variety of ethnicities is represented in Tan’s hyper-realistic style, and the sense of warmth and caring for others, regardless of race, age, or background, is present on nearly every page. Young readers will be fascinated by the strange new world the artist creates, complete with floating elevators and unusual creatures, but may not realize the depth of meaning or understand what the man’s journey symbolizes. More sophisticated readers, however, will grasp the sense of strangeness and find themselves participating in the man’s experiences. They will linger over the details in the beautiful sepia pictures and will likely pick up the book to pore over it again and again.—Alana Abbott, James Blackstone Memorial Library, Branford, CTCopyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

It’s at GPAC in Geelong on May 31 as part of a national tour. Catch it if you can…

While a way overseas recently I lashed out on a new lens for my big camera. One of the people I was traveling with had a local contact and this person was able talk the lingo and managed to drive a hard bargain for me which saved me a few dollars. This lens (100mm f/2.8) takes both portrait and macro photos and I’ve had a bit of a play around and thought I’d post a couple of shots of some shells on the blog.

I suppose the idea is to capture an essence of the subject while framing it in a nice composition using light/shade and colour. It’s fun, and I’m learning a little more about photography. Now keeping a lookout for interesting subject matter.

I’m using a program called MacJournal to write this blog and have recently upgraded to version 5.

I’ve been fiddling with a new theme (just couldn’t get Cutline to work so have gone for Freshy) and I wanted to try and insert and image in this posting and see if it will upload with the posting to my WordPress site…

This is a photo of the old clock on the Old Square in Prague. I just dragged and dropped it into MacJournal, resized it a little and then clicked on the ‘Send to Blog’ link. Voila – it works! So, maybe a bit more colour appearing on a screen near you…