BAC Freshly Scratched

Time is ticking… slowly and surely towards the presentation at BAC, Freshly Scratched. This is a chance for companies to try out their ideas on stage for further development to the works. Each company will perform a duration of 10 minutes followed with feedback sessions afterwards. This is a great oppotunity for us to explore different methods of telling a story of <Autumn. 秋天>. 

This is an invitation for anyone who like to see our progress to the piece. We’ll present at BAC Studio 1, 2pm-, Sunday 15th July 2007. We all hope to see you there, and give us support and feedback-!

 

“Autumn” opened the UNCHARTED Festival!

       

 We finally put our first production in public, and had great responses from our first audience who visited our shows. The good news is we’ve got into the “Freshly Scratched” at BAC, which will be presented on Sunday 15th July 2007. This is a real chance as well as challenge. For this first production particularly, we shaped the piece into the style of performative installation, which will be restructured for the ‘Scratch’ event to more or less like a conventional theatre setting of black box studio. However, the most challanging point will be how we want the piece to be communicated towards our audience. What message do we want our audience to carry on? The 10 minutes showing at the Scratch will be the next chance to see how the piece is growing.

Well, here are some production photos from our first production of ‘Producing <Autumn, 秋天>, 12 June 2007, Experimental Lighting Studio, CSSD.

   

   

Translation in Motion

We’ve taken a lot of inspiration in this project from poetry and from  moments in London where the East and West come together, even in small and quiet ways.  One of those moments come from the Underground.  Poems on the Underground has done a season of translation of Chinese Poems in it’s 63 Series.  We’ve been taking a look at them ourselves.

Listening to a Monk from Shu Play the Lute

The Red Cockatoo

Work in Progress

 We’ve finally had a day in our space and have a real idea of how things can come together.  Here are some stills of our improv work today, the quality isn’t great because I’ve pulled them from the rehearsal videos, but it gives you a peek at the room and Billy & Shu-yi at work.

Inspiration

A Breakthrough

We have finally figured out how to interact with our audience and found a clear structure to compose our installation around. Yesterday we talked about what it was, out of all the ideas that we’ve been tossing around, that we really wanted to communicate.  It is very close to what it was way back when we started focusing on the themes of intimacy and isolation in an urban environment.  We want our installation to highlight the pull and the dicotomy between two kinds of moments: intimate and isolating. 

Our audience will be able to view the installation in two different ways.  Some will see it alone, as the only audience member for version of the installation that happens once and is over.  Others will be in a group of ten that sees a version of the installation loop for as long as they stay.  We hope that these two extremes of how the work is experienced will highlight our themes in the way the event is built.

 Content will be organized to higlight these themes as well.  We are working to create a mix of video, still projection, live action, and static physical objects that will work together in a realy clear and simple fashion.  We are trying to think of the installation as a labratory where we can test out each image and influence, that will eventually contribute to the finished play, one at a time.

 I hope it works and that we can have to courage to keep it that simple.

Woman’s Monologue

It’s a blessing to be a bisexual. You get to enjoy another kind of happiness which most of people are doomed to have one.

You are an artist. We are both artists. There is no limit in the world of art.

You should listen to Bowie. You’ll like it. I’m sure.

You asked me why I gave up classical music. I told you I was fed up with compromising and conformity. You said there is only one Mozart and he is unique. I said that’s why.

 You asked me why I was crying. I said I didn’t catch the time of grieving for Jim Morrison or John Lennon, so I have to make the best of it for Hide. You didn’t know him, as usual. You should’ve so then u wouldn’t feel so lonely. He was one of you, too. He was beautiful, talented and different.

She looks different

When she plays rock music, she is different, and she looks different in the camera.  She could be so wild, passionate as hell.  Sometimes, it would be too messy for my camera to follow, but she is in her most truthful moment.  That is her!   

When she plays classical, she is a beautiful ‘actress’ on screen with stunning music.  When she rocks, she is just her, and no one else could replace this girl on my screen.

All on you, nothing on me!

I enjoy seeing men get high.It makes me have so much going on inside, because I know how good it feels.I feel for it, and I share their happiness and highness.I know exactly how it is to be hard and stiff, and it’s a blessing that you could offer this feeling to the others.It is the uncontrollable sensation that makes men so beautiful.It’s raw, it’s naked, it’s honest, it’s truthful, and it shows the beauty of manhood. 

You would tense your body, stretch yourself upward, sounds come out from your mouth without control. At the same time, you enclose it, you enclose your body and want to keep that feeling within you. 

Through the touch and breath, you are sharing your happiness with him, the kind of happiness that you truly know how it is.In a pair, we play with it, and make it double!All on you, nothing on me!This is exactly what I want to capture when I have a human being on screen, no matter what I am filming. 

Café in Seven Sister Road

Seven Sister Road

, a scruffy street in
London with a mixture of people from all over the place: dirty road, doggy people, un-fancy store, dogs wandering around with no owners……  In a way, this kind of scenery was a cultural shock for me when I first came here, but at the same time, I want to capture it, to capture the feel of it, the sound, the texture of the place, everything!  I particularly like to go to one of the café there, which looks relatively nicer than the others.  People in the café are usually older than me, and they speak languages which I cannot distinguish, maybe they are some kind of Eastern European or Afro-Caribbean languages.  I was particularly attracted by the sound in the café, and I liked the mixture of the loud conversations from people in another language and the sounds of the radio.  This is a very noisy mix, but it makes a very distinctive feature of that place.  

 

I didn’t know much about coffee at the beginning, and I randomly ordered an Americano.  At first I felt it was very bitter, but then I got used to it, as if I got used to my life in
London, that you accept the bitter side of life along with the beauty and excitements. I especially liked the Banana Cake they made in that café, because it was so different from the Chinese banana cake that I ate in
Hong Kong.  Even though I found it a bit too sweet for me at the beginning, which I couldn’t finished the whole piece for the first few times; but then, I could.