Author: HJ Giles

Olympics opening ceremony details revealed

Politics, Rambles

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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-18392025

The Olympic Stadium will be transformed into the “British countryside” for the opening ceremony of the London 2012 Games on 27 July.

A cast of 10,000 unpaid workers will help recreate country scenes, against a backdrop featuring farmyard animals and landmarks like Glastonbury Tor.

The opening scene of the ceremony, which will cost the same as 1200 teachers’ annual salaries, will be called “Green and Pleasant”, artistic director Danny Boyle revealed.

He added the show would create “a picture of ourselves as one proud, undivided nation.”

“The best way to tell that story is through working with real people,” said Boyle, revealing that the ceremony will open with a parade of NHS nurses, Polish builders, traditional British civil servants and Scotch clansmen wearing their tartan regalia.

“We’re thinking about giving the audience scorecards, so that they can vote for their favourite national hero in the parade,” he added, a small trail of spittle involuntarily running from the corner of his mouth.

The set will feature meadows and hills, with families taking picnics, people playing sports on the village green and jolly farmers spraying the fields with industrial chemicals.

A river of sparkling gin and tonic will wind its way around the traditional British buildings in the set: a church, where a female vicar will be marrying specially selected gay couples; a village hall, complete with jam competition; and a working slaughterhouse, where the traditional farmyard animals will be turned into burgers and sausages for sale to the audience (£8.50 each).

One billion people worldwide are expected to watch the opening ceremony, and international news commentators are already practising sneering cultural superiority to compete with British coverage of previous years’ opening ceremonies.

The world’s largest harmonically-tuned bell will ring inside the Stadium to start the spectacle. “We’ve got real families to donate 900 pink-cheeked children from all the local boroughs,” said Danny Boyle, shifting in his jeans, “and what plans we have for them!”

Among the other features will be two bear-pits filled with benefit claimants, who will compete for their weekly hand-outs through a series of inventive gladiorial combats using hand-crafted British weapons.

“We really want this ceremony to be for everybody,” the director said, clouds of sulphurous smoke puffing from his nostrils.

The set will feature real grass, an oak tree and teflon clouds held up by a human pyramid of beggars and prostitutes. Black blood seeping from his eye sockets, the director explained: “We really wanted to make sure we gave something back to the community by providing a role to all those who might not otherwise be able to take part in the Games.”

When asked if they were going to give people their houses back, he said “What do you mean. Ha ha ha.”

The home nations will be represented in the set by titanic blood-red phalluses topped with a thistle, a leek, a rose and flax.

“We’re trying to represent everyone’s dreams in this ceremony, and I personally hope it will be a proud reflection of every individual in this great country,” said Danny Boyle, tearing the last remnants of the latex mask from his face to reveal the skeletal visage of Azathoth, Archduke of Hell.

The ceremony will close with the launch of ground-to-air missiles from the houses surrounding Olympic Park, detonating in a co-ordinated display of coloured lights that will rain burning nuclear death on the indifferent population below.

http://www.protestlondon2012.com/10reasons.html

Class Act: So how did it all go?

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This post was meant to be written some weeks ago, rather than almost a month after the end of the show. I’d hoped to give some very immediate reflections on the audiences and that final show high — but it wasn’t to be. That’s something that often happens with blogging projects — and a combination of no longer paying myself for my time and having a huge backlog of other work has seen me putting it off til now. But that means I can now look back on the project with some distance, with enough time for it all to sink in. Here we go.

I ended up making a much more close-to-finished project than I’d expected. For a seed commission and a two week development period, we ended up with a really cohesive show, a piece that just needed refining and polishing rather than a half-built experiment. That’s probably partly because was burning to make it — that I felt very clearrly the urgency of talking about what we were talking about. That, and the practical factors: a supportive venue and a half decent budget.

Some other things about what I made took me by surprise. a big one, gratifyingly, is that it ended up being really fun. The audience very evidently had a great time every night. I always aim at having some fun for the audience, but this show felt like a total blast. I know now that this needs to be a much bigger part of the marketing — it’ll help people get over the political theatre hump is I talk more about the fun. “The most fun you’ll ever have while declaring class war” is probably a good line.

Another big one, strange to have at the same time, is that it was much angrier and much more forthright politically than I’d originally intended — it ended up being much more activist than I’d planned. I wanted to do the project to work out what I thought about class, and early on in the research period I started to figure it out and ended up really wanting to shout about it. Now that I’ve got that out of my system, I think the next iteration, while still being forthright, will have more subtlety and uncertainty about it.

A last surprise was that at least one person in every audience told me that they thought the show would work really well in schools. For something as deliberately radical and with as many of the trappings of performance art as this show, that’s pretty gratifying — but also confusing. It wasn’t a direction I’d planned to take the show. Should I? Can it be a classroom and an art venue piece? How would I make that happen?

The biggest failure was narrative. I’d wanted the show to feel like it had a solid narrative arc — not a story, but a coherent intellectual and emotional journey. Too many people told me that it felt bitty for that to have succeeded. Given that making the show really was a process of coming to understand class for me, the easiest fix would be to give it a personal narrative frame — talk about my own changing understanding. This has the added advantage of making me seem less expert and teacherly, and more on the same level as the audience.

Working heavily with games opened up whole new possibilities for me. I’ve used game elements before, but not to the same depth as in this show. There’s a lot of development that can be done here — a lot of tweaking to make the mechanics perfect. It’s difficult to talk about this without spoiling some stuff! But I know it’s one of the other major areas to develop.

What else? Next time round, I want to be able to pay someone to work on it with me as a full-time pair of outside eyes. I was happy to work by myself, but I’m going to need that collaborative dialogue to make it as good as it could be. I need to perfect the delivery, my stance as performer. I also need to do some cutting and switching on the monologue parts, to make them flow better. And there’s a hundred other bits to fix — there always is.

It’s going to have to wait until the autumn, though. I’m off to Italy next month with This is not a riot, and then it’s Edinburgh’s summer festivals — a busy period of work for me and a vortex that sucks in everyone’s time for a month on either side. But the aim is to have a few months of development in the autumn and winter, ready to do a full strength run in the spring, support willing. See you soon.

Day One
Days Two and Three
Day Four
Day Five
Day Eight
Days Nine and Ten
Reflection

Class Act: Days 9 and 10, spit and polish

Events, Theatre

I said these were the toughest days. It’s been two days of going over every moment of the show as closely and carefully as I can, making sure it all does what it needs to, that it’ll all work the best it can. The work is very focussed and definite — identifying and solving the problems that come up in runs — and in a way that helps, but in another way there’s this big overarching terror. By the final days you’re totally committed to the overall shape and purpose of the show: what you’re trying to achieve, which was left open at the outset, is now decided. So what if you’re wrong?

By this point, I’ve got to believe totally in what I’m doing. All the work now, the big changes and the tweaks, are within this frame I’ve already set, so I have to believe that the overall concept for the show is right, that the audience will enjoy it, that it will do something artistically and politically powerful. That’s a lot to pile on a rehearsal! and you can’t avoid the doubts.

I’m writing this on the morning of day 11, the day it opens. This is my most hated 24 hours in all of theatre. It’s worse than writing funding applications, it’s worse than waiting for replies, it’s worse than 14-hour tech rehearsals. It’s the point where I’ve done everything I can: I think I know what that is, and what it’s for, and I think I’ve made the show as good as it can be, and I think that’s pretty damn good. But I won’t know until the audience arrive! and I think I’ve done everything I can to make sure they’re there, but that’s a big fear too. All in all, it’s a day of total and impotent terror. For me, anyway.

What I’m longing for is the moment in a few hours when the audience arrives and I get to start performing. As soon as it begins, I’ll feel great. I’ll be talking to them, responding to them, being live in the room with them, and that’s why I love doing theatre. the bit in the bar afterwards, the post-mortem, that’s just a little extra, and the feedback there is useful, but it’s really about that live moment. That’s what all the last two weeks of work have been about, getting there, and making sure the moment is great. I hope you’re there to share it.

Day One
Days Two and Three
Day Four
Day Five
Day Eight
Days Nine and Ten
Reflection