Day eighteen: Mind Out / In A Thousand Pieces

First, family: thanks for all the thoughtful discussion on my last post! I really enjoyed reading it. I love the interpretations from all your different backgrounds. I had no idea you all were so interested in this.....exciting!

As for today, it was a two-play day after a 9 am class. Probably staying in tonight to binge on 30-Rock re-runs.

The first play was called Mind Out. It was definitely interesting, and sometimes insightful. It was kind of like watching a big acting exercise for 75 minutes, with a brief musical interlude three-quarters of the way through. Each of the five actors (three women, two men) had one other person to verbally direct what to do. So, basically, the dialogue would be something like:

Person 1: You pick up a chair. (Person 2 picks up a chair)

3: You take the chair to the table. (Person 1 takes the chair to the table)

2: You sit in the chair. (Person 3 sits in the chair.)

Etc., etc. Okay, that example sounds really boring. It was actually how they started the play, so at first, it was kind of boring. But since the style is so interesting, I remained intrigued. They switched who was directing who every once in a while, too, but it never got confusing. It was a lot funnier than I expected, like when one person would start pouring tea, and another would have to run across the room to stop pouring it. (I know, totally ingenious humor. But it still works!) One of the main points of the play was to create commentary about when people get too caught up in trying to act according to what they assume other people are thinking. I know I've been guilty of that many-a-time. They got that across, but I do think it could have been about 20 minutes shorter.

They had this fantastic, seemingly random musical interlude, where 3 men came in from offstage playing a catchy song on a trombone, a trumpet, and a base drum (? a huge one around his neck). The guy with the drum was dressed in a penguin suit. Needless to say, it was fun to watch.

The program says "devised and performed by....", not "written," so I assume they all collaborated and just started improvising this type of performance in rehearsal, until they found a somewhat cohesive story line that stuck. I like that way of going about it; the product nearly always ends up pretty (forgive me) organic.

The second show I saw was unquestionably more serious. It's called In A Thousand Pieces, and it's a commentary on sex trade in the UK. This show, too, was definitely interesting. At the start, they had a lot of choreographed movement, that wasn't exactly dance, but wasn't just walking around. It got a little repetitive. The three women also mimed being raped, and that lasted a long time and was difficult to watch. But I think the point of all of that being repetitive may have been to give us a very, very mild version of the frustration and anxiety that comes from something being repeated over and over. Overall, they (The Paper Birds theater company) experimentally and artistically expressed quite a few of the emotions and facts surrounding sex slavery.

I don't know much about the subject, so it was definitely informative. Some parts of it were a lot like a PSA, but I think that's part of what they were going for, so I didn't mind. They used a projector for a lot of it, too, with short clips of interviews of all sorts of people who were asked about the issue. (But the women would usually be doing the voices of the people shown in the videos.) It was mostly to demonstrate the amount of ignorance that surrounds the subject.

It's an intense subject, and they dealt with it pretty well. Something interesting was that the three women are British, but they were portraying all kinds of women from other countries, who were moving to the UK for the first time. Their investment in the issue seemed genuine and admirable, though, and not self-righteous. Overall, the whole experience was moving and well-performed. They also had a man onstage the whole time playing piano music when needed. I'm still not sure if there were supposed to be any implications about a man being so present in this story about women. The theater company is comprised of only women, too. He didn't do anything but play the piano, but still...they chose to place him onstage, so I don't know.

In other news, I got to see Andrew Bird in concert last night. It was incredible. Absolutely the best concert I've seen, ever. We got to go to one of his few acoustic shows, where his band isn't there and he mixes all of the music onstage, himself. That sounds like, "oh hey, that's neat," but that's not even close. I mean, yes, neat. But I was totally blown away, far more than I expected (and I expected a lot). He starts playing one part of the melody on his violin, and uses recording pedals to get that down and put it on repeat. Then he plucks the violin for a different part of the song. He layers that on top, adds whistling, guitar, clapping, whatever he wants, etc. etc. Finally, he pieces it all together for the whole song and adds his clear, perfect voice (no exaggeration) and beautiful lyrics. I mean, that is performance! Honestly, I don't even want to write about it because I'm doing it no justice. He also used this cool, spinning double gramophone. Go, go, go see him!! I think he's touring some parts of the U.S. later this year.