Thursday, September 10, 2009

Make-over for 969

You are in the right place! You are still at the Paydirt blog, just that I have just replaced the first draft poster with our new-look poster.

The whole play has a new gloss - slicker transitions and lots more polish. You'll remember that our initial impulse was to look at the city through three different lenses - portrait, still life and landscape. So obviously, the portraits are the easy part. We've collected some beautiful stories, all based on the 'come to Egoli to seek your fortune' theme. I'm loving the way all these stories fuse, and mirror the heroine's central story.

The landscape part is a little trickier - there's so much we wanted to do - from the glitzy shopping malls to the yellow cake mine dumps. But we couldn't take too much time away from the momentum of the story, so we just focused in on downtown - an incantatory meditation on streetnames and getting to know the maze.

The still life aspect was largely missing from our Grahamstown run, but now we're working in some beautiful moments. Some objects are so typical of the Joburg experience - keys and locks and alarms and gate remotes come to mind. Hawkers on street corners selling car chargers and sunglasses. But it depends where you move on the grid of the city. For some its the oily vetkoek for sale at taxi-ranks. The handwritten signs held by beggars on street corners - some plaintive: "no job no money no food pliz help", and sometimes more creative ones: "My dog is arrested for eating Robert Mugabe's shoes. need money for bail". Tiny hairdressing salons with bad wigs on polystyrene heads.

What's your archetypal Joburg still life?


What

Monday, September 7, 2009

A month?

Really? A whole month since our last post? I guess that's what happens with handmade home-brewed theatre making: so busy rewriting, reblocking, fundraising, moving sets around, sourcing sound effects, solving transport problems and praying for a stage manager that you don't find time to blog!

Aah well, a lot has happened since the whirl of festival. This brand new little wobbly baby is getting stronger legs at last. This strange but compelling mixture of ghost story, love story, quest story is starting to settle.

I saw my first performance in front of an audience - a tiny audience of trainee arts and culture teachers. They laughed a bit, (in the right places, thankfully) and hung on tenterhooks (at least one tenterhook) and didn't notice me in the lighting booth, swearing, muttering, holding my breath, shaking my head and scribbling on my prompt copy of the script (new endings, new bridging moments...) I felt like I needed to pick up the whole play and just shake it vigorously until all the bits fell into their proper places. It was a bit like that. I wrote a whole new ending coz I felt cross that it seemed to end on such a downbeat note - a real winter play.

And then, we did a free performance for the lovely National Arts School kids, to thank the drama department for so kindly letting us use their theatre for rehearsing in. We spent a chaotic day polishing, working some transitions, developing one of the backstories, and - wow, something really ignited that night. I sat in the lighting booth spellbound - missed two cues because I was just enjoying the rollicking performances of three talented actors stretching their muscles and starting to play a bit, to explore the edges of their comfort fields.

What fun. Jessica is incandescent at the moment. Ndu's wistful Thandeka is kind of heartbreaking - its such a common, ordinary tale really, there are thousands of young girls lost and searching in this city, but she gives it a quiet integrity somehow. She's anywoman, but she could be your sister. Watch this actress. When she's smoking up screens and stages in five years time you can say, you saw her in Paydirt first.

And Nhlanhla let out that impish playful spirit of his that night. Lovely to see, when the actors really start trusting each other and feeling that its ok for them to try new stuff out, its not going to throw anyone, they're just jolling.

So, with a few more tweaks and tugs, we'll be ready for our run in the 969 Festival next week. We play alongside some very hot new plays and are so excited to do this on our own stomping ground. 15th - 19th September, every night at 20:30 - Wits Downstairs Theatre.

See you there?
 
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Paydirt by Tamara Guhrs and Paydirt cast is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 South Africa License.