Thanks to Kaush Patel we now have a dvd of the Japanese Fairy Tales performances from the summer. It's great to finally have a film of the performances that reflect the work we put into them and that we can be proud to show off. The dvd will be on the You Tube from Sunday, and there will be links to this site.
We had a group showing at Staffordshire Performing Arts this Wednesday instead of the usual drama workshop. I felt very proud watching it. There were certainly things I would have changed if we did them again, but that will always be the case. In all, the performances were as picturesque as I had hoped, helped by the fantastic extra costume design from Becky, and Sam's backdrops looked great (although we could only see the bottoms of them). All of the performers were very natural in their presentation, and looked extremely confident. They were very familiar with the material, and the style of performance that we had devised.
Now it is time for Konnektiv to move on, a new chapter is opening up for us, and I am not quite sure which way it is taking us. However I did have a bit of an epiphany this week during a conversation with Merv. I had been really stuck on how to take the cycles of life theme forward. I'm worried I will sound like a mad hippy, and I'm also worried that I will scare people off with my crazy ideas.
However, there is no point letting worries stop me taking this thing the way that I want to. I want to look at cycles of life (including themes of death and rebirth). I really think that this has to be done by first looking at death. How is death portrayed in film/theatre/books/video games? What do we make of the stories of death? What does death mean to us? How can we portray our own ideas of death in a way that make sense to ourselves and others? Once we have done this, the rebirth element can come later. However we need to examine death first.
Anyway, the next step is to approach the Newletter and see if they will do us an article looking for some new members. We have lost members to education, pregnancy, illness and the winter nights, and the group is feeling a bit small. That's fine for me, I'm happy to have a small group; it's better in many ways. But I just think that as the Performing Arts people are keeping the Centre open for us especially late on a Wednesday night, we need to have plenty of members so they think it's worth while.
It may be that the artsy drama-ish populace of Stafford don't want to come out of their houses on dark cold winter nights to experiment with ways to experience and portray images and themes of death, but you never know. We may start of a fashion.
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