desperate men

http://www.desperatemen.com/
so... the desperate men festival. i had so much fun. I want to do more street shows. we did the bike dance, lots of fun, reherasals pay off! I saw a few acts but was busy doing our thing really.

We did the tandemonium - it's last outing. It was good working with the feral choir, it would be much much better if the tandemonium was more automated tho - so pedalling really makes a variety of sound. esp if you can pedal backwards and forwards. Maybe even that pedaling forwards makes distance and peddaling backwards makes noise? Not so much a walk about sound as a noise when we get there? Or maybe best if you can choose - definitely good to be able to switch bits off.

I have a bit of a diary of the day here:
Plan the day - costume changes, times to be places, time to eat?
Do a bit of dancing & warming up.
Meet the others, dress - up, make - up, warm up. No room or time for a run through so cycle up the road talking through the routine.
To the DM's shop, meet them etc... try the grass in the chosen location - too difficult! Choose a new spot. Do routine, enjoy it so much we decide to do it again. Do a lap of honour with Lois on my shoulders.  Attempt to immitate the scateboarders. they're much better than me!
Have a go on the desperate drummers box drum - a little box on a string round his neck. also admire his stripey all-in-one fleece lined suit, i want one! Got card from photographer who took loads of photos, Laurie also filmed it, must get copies.
Saw Vreni's Berni the Buzzard show - good classic street theatre, hilarious, involved vreni getting a good cold dunking in the fountains and her side kick transforming into a baywatch pamela anderson to rescue her. Most of the show - most of most shows? - is about being a bit crap? Berni certainly couldn't be shot from a cannon, we're certainly better at posing that at bike tricks, the fire show lady was really showing off her poor fire skills and even the fire hoop and playing soprano sax isn't that hard to pull off.  It's not what you do, it's the way that you do it.
I didn't see the puppets show but i enjoyed a little chat with them. I liked the origami boats, you made a boat, filled it with symbolic goodies from developing nations and shipped it to europe and the US. The direction of the fountains slowly shunted them across. Just on their own they're lovely and with the political slant as a backdrop I think it's a lovely way to share info and keep ideas alive in peoples minds. I commented that agit-prop is dead and political theatre isn't so common (so vital?) at the moment. Somehow we got to discussing how Brecht used comedy and other devices to stop people getting carried away with the piece. This was intended as a way of keeping them focussed on the message and the need to think issues through themselves.

I rushed back to the house to grab the instruments I'd forgotten... and rushed up to clifton to get the tandemonium. all a rush but Mel was late too so no problem. Got the tandemonium down to the Full Moon and met the Feralistas, got dressed up again. Put on my facepaint and deliberately smeared it all over my face. Trying not to look to 'joker' like, I want to be messy and uncontrollable looking, not like any particular character.

The Ambling Band were still down the bear pit when we arrived, Me, Mel, Steve,  Becky and Richard. We had a bit of a join in with them - hard when you can't really tune yourself. We took the tendemonium into the tunnel to get the acoustics - harder to hear the singing otherwise. It was a very close fit. The tandemonium looked a little odd, not being ridden or played - the choir were focussed on the singing, i was kinda caught between two - three things even as i'd brought lots of instruments - kids instruments, junk instruments, real instruments... just stuff to make noise with. so i was caught between bowing bike wheels, bowing my saw, singing and making the most of the tandemonium. It's still a splendid thing tho.
We moved outside to do some 'yoiking' which i hadn't done before. I missed the begginging as i was tidying up the instrumetnts but it seemed to be passing exagerated noises over distances, with a physical 'mime' of the noise being passed - in anyway you fancied. I found it like a hilarious drama game, loved. it. One point to note is that the resident street drinkers were really unhappy about having their territory invaded by wacko artists and did give us, and other performers, verbal abuse and actually grabbed the wig off my head at one point. I got it back easily but none the less, it was a step beyond heckling. I felt I didn't want to just  leave because we were being hassled. We did a different following game of eliciting lyrics from passers by and singing them in various ways.

Back at base camp- the pub, i met a woman who is doing a facinating project... you draw all over a piece of paper - it has to be a certain type of paper - with a graphite pencil - not all pencils have enough graphite - then pass an arm with a pick up on it over the paper. whenever it meets the drawing it completes a circuit (graphite conducts electricity) and a sound is made! Amazing. reminds me of the occilators that were made as part of the noisy bike project. Also reminds me of the DRAW project which dorkbot are doing - they want to explore mechanised (?)  drawing, removing the person from the drawing in some way. It was partly this idea which lead me to the 'Colour Wheels' project which i've just started on - mapping the city from a bike perspective, seeing where the bikes intereact with eachother, street furniture, roads etc. The project involves mounting a paint reservoir on to a bike so it releases paint onto the wheel with controlled flow. Then off we go! traces of our passing will be left in waterbased paint, that will be the 'art' that people can see, long after the action has moved on. I want to document it photographically, maybe shots of everywhere the paths meet, maybe series's of no trails, one trail, multiple trails.... maybe comments from viewers? maybe time laps film... maybe follow the trails and map them on an actual map? Maybe take the routes and have different layers of where each bike went, overlay them with no map beneath or show them over a different background - of what tho? Of a bike? Of a wheel? Of a photo of the confluence of colour trails? Over a much larger or smaller map of bristol? Over and over themselves? Over and over themselves at different sizes? A very very drawn out way of making a pattern.


One of the other acts I saw was a site specific circus piece, tumbling, physical theatre... Nice to watch... slick, funny... explored schitzophrenia, not sure how seriously. Basically, very good and clever but professional but missing something for me. The older I get the more I seem to separate narative from other skills. It's not that I want dance, circus etc to have no narative, or skills to be done in isolation, and I love characterisation and story and narative... I think I prefer to either be taken into someone's narrative world (storytelling via whichever medium, books, theatre, street theatre, comedy, film, puppets etc) or not! And if not then just let me put a narrative on top of whatever your're showing me with your skills be it dance, art, acrobatics etc

another conversation I had was arround 'applied art' - if i understand it right then I am not an applied artist at all, maybe i'm 'conceptual' the most pretentious type around! I like the idea of being a popular entertainer,, just make people laugh! that appeals to my wanting to strip away pretention but I always lean the other way... So i'm not an applied artist, even if what i'm doing takes ages and is really fiddly - take the cassette crochet for example, great idea, might make people think, be amazed or intreagued by the textures or any number of reactions but what it isn't is great crochet! Great for me, a great material, a painstaking process etc etc but it's not a highly skilled process. And i probably never will do stuff that is finely crafted. I make lovely baskets but, lovely as they are, they're not exemplary basketry, they're made from herbs, wild plants, they're records of a place and an echo of time.

I took the tandem home to the cathedral then hung around the full moon helping and checking out some other stuff - the mighty jungulator - improised prog rock possibly? With a VJ, not her images apparetly. I love impro, this wasn't really my thing but they were enjoying themselves. The thing that i'm taking away with me from this is that i need to get better at technology or to make some friends who are... now where are those lovely dorkbot guy's? I also liked the contrast of the loud prog rock and the tiny yurt it was in. maybe that's coz i like yurts. They didn't need much help but I set the fire wok up and primed it, tidyed up a little and promissed to come back to hand out sparklers.

I went to see the dance performance - which i intend to review so see a late blog post I hope!

after the dance I went back to the full moon again... Indulged in FairShare banquet, yum! Missed  what might have been really inspiring for me - i'll have to take inspiration from the idea instead - there was a band... they had fairy lights on a rope that was slung quite low - looks like a slack rope,, but too worn and a bit frayed I though - but low and behold, it was a slack rope. The band played a bit, sung some songs then he got up on the rope walked a bit and sung? All I saw was him swinging on the rope before doing a roll off it. wonder who that was and if theyr'e on you tube. So yeah, i was already thinking of singing on the rope if i get good enough, maybe i could have a whole band!!! How can i thread playing the saw, singing possibly? flute or whistle, slack rope... it'll be a mission.

I played the saw there a bit and met various ideas - a harp would be a good instrument to have a saw jam with... mic'ing up and putting effects on it would be a good plan. so many ideas, so little time.