Everything, all at once now.

The next month is going to be insanely busy, but I'm looking forward to it. As I wrap up my MA, the first steps into the next phase have already fallen into place. And of course, are overlapping! I'm on a roll. Just a matter of keeping the momentum up through the next couple of weeks.

I did manage to do 2 runthroughs of my show yesterday, the last one with an audience member who hadn't seen my work before! Both runthroughs felt really solid and my audience member was interested in what was going on. I'm happy to have gotten the show to this point since I've got things that are future looking happening this coming week.

Here's a brief overview of what the end of August and beginning of September hold for me:

- do my final show at Wimbledon College of Art!
Will post my performance schedule here in a separate entry this weekend.

- fly to Vienna to interview Pamela Z
Lucy pointed me to her work early on in the course, I blogged about it here. Very excited to see her live and get a chance to talk with her about her work and the themes and common interests we might (or might not) share.

- Movement for Dorks at Burning Dork
I'm running a workshop with the dorkbots where I get to test out my strategies for getting tech-based artists out from behind their gear. This will be a prototype of workshops I'd like to lead in the future and I'm really curious to see how it goes! I think it'll be fun. The dorkbot crew have been an amazing community for me here in London. Don't think I've blogged about them here before. Will try and do an entry in the future when I have more time. Oh, and yes, to add to the ridiculousness: the camp is being held in DORKING. naturally. ;)

- AV Lab 1.0, Medialab Prado, Madrid
I will be heading to this workshop in Madrid for the last two weeks of September. Get to collaborate with a bunch of interesting sounding A/V artists from all over the world. Great opportunity to start finding a broader community doing similar work to me and also a great chance to finally get to Madrid!

OK, back to this weekend's activity: assembling/finalizing documentation!

21 August runthrough

Managed to do a full run through yesterday without crashing Isadora.

I spent the morning organizing some final bits of tech and writing my notes from Tuesday into an actual score sheet that I could reference during the run. The score has ended up being 6 sections with a reprise of the second one towards the end. I don't have the sheet with me here at home, so will have to wait to post it later.

The runthrough felt spotty but overall I think the score is going to work. Most of the sections run between 10-15 minutes, which is perfect timing for the 90 minutes I have allocated as "performance" times over the weekend. The run yesterday ran about 70 minutes including some hiccups.

Watching the video recordings of the performance continues to be really helpful for me to get perspective on what I'm doing. I will tend to fixate on the parts that weren't working and extrapolate that to the whole performance "not working". Reviewing video shows me that I was right about the parts that I thought weren't working, but also shows me all the parts that are working.

Plan for today: I'd really like to try and run through it TWICE. Will be exhausting but interesting.

Plan for weekend: Get documentation to at least 75% completion. I'm feeling the time crunch and know that this is the last serious chunk of time I have to concentrate on it while I'm locked out of rehearsal space for the bank holiday weekend.

Last week wrap up.

Finally got a chance to upload 2 more batches of videos from last week. The week ended with final tech setup and trying to work out what to do with two projectors. Having two dramatically changes the dynamic in the room, in a way that I like and want to work with.

Big thing that I noticed yesterday is that I feel there is now an even bigger "Stage" area to the room. I will be breaking that wall with my own movement, but I can't gauge how audiences will respond until I have an audience. The only thing I know from past experience is that most people respond to projectors by ducking out of the way of them or avoiding them altogether. This would cut off about half of the space once both projection areas are revealed and leave everyone squished into one corner. I'll probably end up being more explicit when I invite people to move as they wish around the space and tell them they can walk in front of the projector beams.

I haven't had many visitors to my space, so I'll do my best to anticipate and plan for it and then make adjustments once I have people in the space with me. That all said, time has not been wasted! The time alone(ish) in my space has allowed me to rehearse and rehearse and rehearse.
Which one needs to do as a performer! This week I have begun working up to a full run of the "performance" section of my work, which I have scheduled to be an hour and a half. So far I've made it to 40 minutes. The thing that seems to be ending the run throughs is that I crash the program! This only happens when I try to record something on a track that is already playing. An easy mistake, especially when you're in the throes of performing, but I hope that the continued rehearsals over the next 7 days *gulp* will smooth this out as I become more comfortable with the final structure of the show and the technology setup in its final configuration. And it'll happen during the shows. I have no doubt of that! I'll take it in stride. It's Isadora telling me that she's done with that performance. :)

So finally, the clips I uploaded yesterday are going to be the final video clips as the run throughs are getting too long to easily review, digitize and publish to the internet. I've got a bunch of other things I need to be pulling together for the final assessment outside of rehearsal time which take precedence over video clips. Will still update progress here on the blog though.

Here are some clips that contain my favorite pieces from the recent uploads. In both of them, I noticed that I interacted directly with the TVs that I have dotted around the space. I haven't been prone to do that much, thinking that they're mainly there for the audience to play with. But of course, I can use them too and really should do.



This second one starts off a little rough (with wacky iMovie jump cuts...), but I like how the video inspires the sound and how I was able to connect the recorded and live actions through echoing and complementary sound and movement.



Second half to above video: