Tracking Shot

An original visual theatre performance created in residency at Villa Nappi, Associazione Inteatro, Polverigi, Italy

Project blog: http://trackingshottheperformance.blogspot.com/

Although the opening night for Tracking Shot was over a month ago, I’m still assimilating everything that I learned and experienced on my European placement project in Polverigi, Italy. I was a pleasure working on this project first as Writer and then as Assistant Director and Stage Manager. Being a part of such a diverse team, adapting to a new working environment and meeting day-to-day challenges meant that I’ve been able to explore my own strengths and weaknesses, learning new aspects of building narrative structures while revising old ways of working.

A detailed documentation of our process and production can be found on our project blog but I’m going to use this space to briefly outline our idea and process.

Notes from Polverigi: 1

I’m on a residency project in a little town called Polverigi in Italy these days. The project I’m collaborating on with fellow classmates from Saint Martins will be produced in the middle of May with the support of Associazione Inteatro.

We’ve been debating the nature of stories, narratives and memories as we devise the piece. In the meanwhile, these are some notes from the process so far. More on the project as our ideas develop:

Crease: Scenography in a Book

This is a small side project I’ve been working on. The idea came to me one Saturday morning when I was contemplating my stationery (yes, I do this often), and since it refused to leave, I went and found a Moleskine to put it in.

The thought was to create a small piece of dramatic scenography contained within a book. The performance consists of opening the book when instigated by a four-line verse which tells the story of a man who takes a walk amongst it pages.

This is the verse followed by images from his journey:

He walked in, to the trees

over the undulating crease

of a landscape lit with time

fading on a sinking golden line

…

…

All images and text are copyright Ruchita Madhok, 2010. All rights reserved.

If you wish to reproduce these images for any purpose, including research, please request permission at contact[at]ruchitamadhok[dot]com

Thames River Project

This was our very first project on the MA PD&P at CSM. It was quick, collaborative and a great way to begin the year together

When: presented October 12, 2009

Where: CSM, Back Hill

Who: Aimi Gdula, Adele Han Li, Martin Schanbl, Rannva Karadottir, Ruchita Madhok

Brief: To research and study the river Thames. To then use the dramaturgy of the river in a time-based work or proposal

Our aims: To bring the river back into the consciousness of London; to provide a platform for people to rediscover their relationship with the river and to emphasize the Thames as the birthplace of London.

Our idea: To construct 4 cubic ice spaces from frozen Thames water that literally bring the river into the streets of the city.

These cubes would effectively block the traffic at Parliament Square and on the Oxford, Piccadilly and Holborn Circuses since each would be 15m x15m x 15m, with an opening on one side and open from above.

Cameras in sets of fours will be installed on four different boats which will be running for 24hrs a day. Live footage of from these cameras would be projected onto the walls of each of these cubes. The public would be able to physically enter these womb-like spaces that would muffle the sounds of the city and create a quiet, contemplative environment inside the ice. The installation would be open 24hours a day with projections running all day and all night varying with the boats’ routes along the river.

Locations for the ice cubes

one of the cubes at Oxford Circus

Scale and dimensions of the ice cubes

daytime view at Oxford Circus

night time view at Oxford Circus

projections would last all through the day and night

We hope that through this series of installations, the viewers are confronted with a direct experience of the Thames. We propose that the ice cubes remain on display until the ice has melted down and thus a cycle is created as the water brought out of the Thames flows back into it. As the ice melts, the city will emerge over the edges of the cube, the river flowing away.

In retrospect, I think our tutors were right in describing this as a radical idea. The idea of blocking traffic in central London and freezing 15m high blocks of Thames water sounds outlandish, but given that we had no real constraints to deal with, we decided to take the idea to the extreme. We spent a good deal of time deliberating, discussing and deciding to reach this concept. When we did, we were all unanimously convinced of it, and I think that’s why we enjoyed the process so much. We took a simple idea that everyone agreed on, worked it out a little and – since there was no budget to consider – we thought big and dreamt bigger. This is why I enjoy being a student: thinking out of the box and challenging oneself come with no strings attached!

Now I wish we could actually build this!

(All material contained herewith including images and concept are copyright of the authors of this project as mentioned above. All rights reserved)

Movement Sketch: Mending Wall

First presented at CSM, Back Hill in the Black Space Performance Lab on November 10, 2009

Conceived, improvised and performed by: Ruchita Madhok and Payal Wadhwa

Over the course of 3 weeks, the students of the MA PD&P attended a workshop taken by respected choreographer and dancer Athina Valha. An artist and director herself, she works with multi-disciplinary teams of people. Her workshop with us focussed on the relationship of the body to a performance space, to itself and to other bodies that inhabit a performance space. We learned many interesting ideas and concepts from her through intense 3 hour sessions in which we really put our bodies to the grind. I’ve never really been a performer, so the whole workshop was an entirely new experience for me. For a change I learned what it meant to be “directed” and to “perform” and to convert an idea into a physical, bodily expression.

At the end of the workshop, we were required to create “movement pieces” as a final assignment.

Payal and I decided to start with a piece of text and see where it would/could take us in terms of physical expression. The text we selected was Robert Frost’s Mending Wall. We decided to ascertain only 3 points in the narrative and improvise the rest in-performance.

The are a couple of pictures from our visualization process in which we used studio chairs to build this idea of a wall:

How does one mend an existing wall?

Coming up with ways to improvise a wall on stage

A big thanks to Petya for helping us with lighting. Here’s the video from the performance thanks to Pat Ku and some “movement pictures” courtesy Duygu Ozturk.

Note: The music we’ve used is from the film Le Fabuleux Destin de Amelie Poulain. It was composed by Yann Tiersen and all copyright rests with the creators. No copyright infringement intended here by its use.

The performance itself is only an exploration of how movement based work can be created. It was intended to be a study or a sketch of a performance and is in no way a finished piece of work. Given some time, we’d definitely like to work with different kinds of text and try out other methods too.

The feedback was quite positive from our tutors and we’re really glad we took this approach to the assignment. We got a new perspective doing it. Sometimes as directors or visualisers, we have certain expectations from our actors, but up until this point, it was really difficult to understand what it is that a director demands from a performer and how a performer can deliver on what is required of him/her.

Stretching Space @ Kala Ghoda Arts Festival ’10, Mumbai

So many months ago, when Ruchita was in Ahmedabad, figuring out life, the universe and what the heck she was supposed to be doing with it, she went picture-taking with her Nikon D50 one day and came back with an idea.

That idea transformed inside her head and on her computer screen and became a series of collages of spaces she encountered on her picture making trips to the Old City and around Paldi village. She drags stillwater, the hooked nose and jeetpal around the city with her, annoys them endlessly while fidgeting with her digital files until she makes 12 collages she really likes. Then she puts them away and returns to Mumbai

Fast forward one year and stillwater sends her a call for entries to a photography group show at the Kala Ghoda Arts Festival 2010 in Mumbai. Ruchita thinks. Then decides to send her collages in as an entry: just to play with the curators a bit.

A month later they say Yes, they would like her to put up a wall at their exhibition.

And now you have it: Stretching Space a selection of my photo-collages running at the KGAF ’10 from February 6 to February 14, 2010. It’s open all-day, everyday on the pavement outside Max Mueller Bhavan at Kala Ghoda

Here is a collage from the set. Click on the image to see a larger version. To see more, please visit my Flickr set at this address

Incident @ Central Saint Martins, Back Hill

On December 2, 2009, I was part of a group from our class that performed a site-specific piece of work under the guidance of Geraldine Pilgrim, noted theatre director, visualiser and artist in the UK.

In the UK it is a growing trend to create performances and installations that are made specifically for certain sites such as buildings, parks and public spaces. These works derive their inspiration and often their content from the space in which they will be performed. They rely on the histrocial use of the space, its relevance in the local ecology and place in contemporary myth and culture. Sometimes these spaces are abandoned buildings doomed to demolition, sometimes they are open-air public areas like train stations or bus shelters and other times they are working edifices like museums, schools or colleges.

Our tutor Geraldine Pilgrim has been creating this work for many years, even before it became such a widespread phenomenon to bring theatre into such unexpected spaces, and is the artistic director of the Corridor group. To find out more about their work, visit their website here. Before working with the Corridor group she had her own visual theatre company called Hestitate and Demonstrate which was funded by the Arts Council back in its day.

Our Workshop and Performance

The assignment: INCIDENT
BRIEF: A site – specific project involving research and practical application around a selected given theme; culminating in student showings of site- specific performance/installations in selected sites either in a chosen space in the Back Hill Building or within walking distance of the college.

THEMES: Each group will select collaboratively one of these subjects as a starting point, to create a performance/ installation which lasts a maximum of 10 minutes inspired by their chosen space. Each group will find a site and get permission to use it for their performance installation.
•    A Memory
•    A Celebration
•    A Suicide
•    AN Affair
•    A Dream
•    A Crime

Or a combination of any of the above
ENVIRONMENT: Select a space inside or outside and create an environment in accordance with the chosen theme/s
COSTUME: Create or find a costume for your own character in the performance/installation
OBJECTS: Use one object or more if required
MOVEMENT: You can create a still image, or movement can happen within the piece. You may also use Puppetry/animation of objects
TEXT/SOUND: Maximum one sentence of text plus live or recorded sound or just live or recorded sound
LIGHT: You can use practical light i.e. table light, torch or theatrical light   You do not have to use light but must consider it.
VIDEO: You may also use video and animation as part of your installation

The Green Group

Our group consisted of the motley leftover people who hadn’t been able to find a group in time. We bonded together over the 10 days of this assignment and were rather pleased with our process and outcome. My fellow Green Groupers were: Baron Kim, An Li, Jin, Artemis Katsampani and Zsofi Kocsmarszki.

Our Site: The Back Hill building where Central Saint Martins’ BA and MA course in Performance Design and Practice are located used to be a printworks building at one point in time. Our studios are located in the basement and sub-basment of the college and, hidden away in the BA studios, we found a new room the morning we started this project, that had not been there before. It was a planchest and locker room filled with cupboards and storage racks. Perfect! We felt inspired the minute we walked into it together and decided to develop our performance there.

Of course, things don’t always turn out the way you plan them: sometimes they turn out even better! Once we had lit the space, we knew this was going to be something special.

Our final theme was DREAM. The audience entered in groups of 6 and the total duration of the piece was about 4 minutes. We were supposed to perform it only 3 times, but it proved so popular that we did 5 encores. Here are images from my sketchbook and also the final performance (without the audience)