sarah hymas

The Narrow Stage

michelle-performing

It was a marathon – all thirty three feet of the narrowboat’s aisle: three shows in one evening. The first was still in daylight, the second two after dark, which was when the show really came alive. We had the most minimum of lighting, and as we read the story of Tib, Dan and … (best not spoil the story as caches and zap codes are up until the end of the year at least), I was reminded of reading under bedcovers at night, and how totally absorbing and encompassing that was for my imagination.

Whatever I was told, or, in this case, was telling, seemed totally believable. And so it seemed to our audiences. They all entered into the spirit of building the possibilities of what and who could evolve from the original premise.

We had one rehearsal in situ although had the boat’s dimensions taped out for a day previously. Add people dotted up and down the stage and we were really dancing in the crowd. Making the most of the boat’s length was always central to our performance (arff arff), to bring the intimacy of the spoken voice close to everyone there, which may be uncomfortable for some, but I am sure they’ll all have left with certain phrases and images spinning in their heads.

Inevitably the lighting emphasized this, focusing on our IMG_0048mouths in the main, freeing me, at least, to forget the external, my physical presentation, and pour all energy and focus into the voice and its delivery. The contained space of the narrowboat added to this aural dynamic, as well as providing a challenging screen for Helen to project images and text on to. Wood everywhere – what a wonderful acoustic.

Each performance had a very distinctive character – perhaps created by the audience’s personality, aided by the start time. This difference really altered the peaks and curves of the story, where the humour or sorrow emerged, and, perhaps most crucially, how much detail we got on opening a lock. One day. Next project.

Where Water is its own Performance

With the story trail being previewed this weekend and ready for the public on Monday (eeek) our attention turns to the performance. Following our site visit we were able to finetune the piece to embed it to its narrowboat stage. And with the story trail episodes all in place we were also finally in the position to insure the live performance connected with all the other elements of the story – as well as the contributions from participants.

towpath_night_03The performance is another layer to this many layered story. Plus it has the benefit of us all engaging fully with you, the joys of liveness that comes from performance. This immediacy is what makes the performance, especially with its focus on the present timeframe of the story – the past and possible futures being covered elsewhere. It will also feature the origami boats, more projections and fleeting references to text from caches and zap codes.

As with everything else about the story, it has only been possible because of being made by four of us. The fabric of humour, politics, fantasy, improvisation and theatrics gives the forty minute show a real energy. We’ve written it so it doesn’t matter whether you trail before or after the performance.

With it being on Friday evening, there’s the weekend in which to explore the rest of the story. Equally we’re imagining people will have trailed the other episodes before coming to the story. Just like the trail, it won’t matter where your entry point is, just how to piece it together and what you take away from it. Just like water, it has a cycle, where there is no start, no end.

 

 

Untangling the Tib

What you have above is the inner workings of our collective mind. Hmm. Step away, and be grateful you can. We’ve just had to get closer and closer to the swiggles and arrows, to comb them out and smooth out their relationship to each other. Which reminds me of Kurt Vonnegut’s description at the beginning of Slaughterhouse 5 of how he writes plot:

I used my daughter’s crayons, a different colour for each main character. One end of the wall paper was the beginning of the story, and the other end was the end, and then there was all that middle part, which was the middle. And the blue line met the red line and then the yellow line and the yellow line stopped because the character represented by the yellow line was dead. And so on.

character map june dev labWhich in turn reminded me of this arch Vonnegut explanation of writing stories. He makes it seem so simple. Which of course is how you want it to appear. So perhaps foolish of me to reveal the minds-map. Especially as it may only serve to confuse: the characters you may be able to read of here, if you squint, do not appear like this in the story. Like all people they’ve changed in some way, certainly they do not entirely represent their early incarnations.

Let’s take the purple line, called Clown in the above. No longer. Nor is the ‘she’ ‘he’ ‘we’ idea we sketched out. Instead we have a fluid character call Tib, who might (you’ll have to follow the story trail) carry all the elements of he/she/we. Tib is also the name of a river in Manchester. Once a river, then a sewer, next… ?

Counting fifty millionths of a nanosecond…

As you already know the story for the trail is all about water... I don’t mean just water as an environment, but the threat that is facing water. And the biggest deal I think is that no one knows what the consequence is. Yes, we know seas are warming, becoming more acidic, and that obviously threatens the marine life already balanced to the chemical make up of the sea, but what actually will happen is really anyone’s guess.

Our story is not concerned with the sea, per se, but the water in the canals and rivers of Manchester. (Although you could argue, that just as all oceans are the same body of water, the cycle is delicate and interconnective) There is a prophetic element in our story, dealing with the various possibilities of what will happen to our water in the future.

flotillaWe found research about water memory suggesting that water is more fragile than we’d suspected, to the point where the hydrogen bonds within its molecular structure can be broken down within fifty millionths of a nanosecond. This has potentially disastrous outcomes when you consider the ongoing degradation of plastics – what generally ends up in the water: be it canals, drains, the sea. All the plastics that have been made are still in existence in some form. Plastic breaks down and breaks down to microscopic particles, but as yet it has not completely disappeared. Water, fragile as some suggest, is vulnerable to this morphing of plastic. In some, possibly not too distant, future it may no longer be written as the familiar H2O compound but a new unfamiliar descendant. Cue mythological creatures that have adapted to such an environment….

 

No Spoiler Alerts

With most of the story written and tallied (all of it won’t be completed until we have YOUR contributions once you’ve walked the trail) I can confidently say I would have never written this story on my own.

Back in June when we first came together to discuss our interests: what we wanted from the story, what we wanted others to get from it, and what we cared enough about to focus on; we cooked up this mythic idea, spanning from 1804 to 2060, with reincarnated characters, super-evolutionary species and a water deity.

helenI don’t know what the others thought then but I was thinking how the hell are we going to pull this off? Naturally I didn’t voice the doubts. Just smiled courageously and offered to start the draft of the present time frame. Don’t look up. Don’t look down. I kept telling myself. One small step. Etc etc. Sure it was baffling at times. You know how annoying it is when time-hopping stories just don’t add up, if something happened in the past that disintegrates the place or humans involved in the future scenes? Well, we had a few near misses. And a few events that couldn’t have happened in places that hadn’t been built yet. And a few of those moments when you just don’t know what the hell is going on…

The beauty of collaboration is that someone spots the glitches. Not everyone can be totally close to the each element of the story, so there’s always someone with that gorgeously benign and essential ‘objective eye’, that cunning mirror that reflects your ambition and mistakes, illuminates them. So between the four of us we’ve created this amazingly fluid, playful story that could not happen anywhere but Manchester and will hopefully live on in all readers’ minds and hearts whenever they walk the streets and waterways of the city.

And that’s just the story content, I couldn’t have begun to make zappars and formatted geocaches by myself.

Site Visit with Cream Tea

CastlefieldSo off we went for a site visit to Castlefield, the narrowboat that’ll be the venue for our performance, It’s owned by the Bridgewater Heritage Boat Company who operate from Worsley, so a whole new section of the Bridgewater Canal for two of us and a whole new experience – crusing on a narrowboat – for two of us. Inevitable then we were a bit excited.

castlefield 2

Worsley itself is a magnificent testament to the age of canals – with a grand sweeping pedestrian bridge over the canal with gorgeously neat sets and curved dressed stone at the bridge’s entrance.

In between measuring up the performance space and discussing the script we managed to ooh and ahh at the extraordinary Barton Swing Aquaduct whose mechanism is such it can swing while holding the canal water in it, and enjoy the stacked cream tea (at lunch time) that comes with the trip.

cream-tea-on-boatMy advice: don’t have breakfast. They’re extraordinarily generous.Two and a quarter hours later, we’re full of possibilities for what the performance can deliver, scones and a wonderment for canal travel.Bridgewater canal

Falling for the Medlock

IMAG0266Back in the baking months of this gorgeous summer, Maya and I had a research day to follow the course of the River Medlock – find where it rose and where it sunk beneath Manchester. And for me, as an outsider to Manchester, to get a feel of the maze of culverts and open waterways this city straddles. We were on bikes so our ability to zip about the streets added to the thrill of the chase.

medlock tunnelI can’t reveal everything we discovered that day on this post as it would spoil your treasure trail hunting, but one thing safe to share is how fascinated I was with a river so shallow (and so cluttered with tyres, unpaired shoes and other rubbish) can hold such a potent place in my imagination. How the discovery of something I previously knew nothing about and is, for the most of my time in Manchester, out of view, can have such influence when I walk the streets. It seems to echo the pace of pedestrians overground: that very ordinary element of a city has suddenly been heightened. It’s current, depth and hydro-dynamism is increased by its invisibility. Of course, this apparent absence is what love affairs are made of.

 

Geocache is Go

For the purposes of this project I had my first geocaching experience. It sounded vaguely interesting: a game that involves searching for hidden containers, with the help of a hint or clue and a loose location. There are Muggles – people who aren’t geocaching, who need to remain oblivious of what you’re doing – adding an extra element of tension/secrecy/suspense.

So far so so interesting. I was learning about them because some of the Tale of the Towpath episodes are hidden within geocaches around Manchester for people to find and piece together during the festival.

geocache_discoveryHelen, the geocacher and digital artist of the team, decided the best way for us newbies to really get it was to search for one. I was happy enough to go along with the plan, although I was really anticipating what the piece of print we’d be making would end up being. However, that afternoon we were mucking about with digital aspects.

Through the app we selected one nearest to us in Manchester (there are millions of these things scattered throughout 185 countries) and were directed to a tree with a bird house in a park. Around which we walked and walked, all of us peering into tree branches, behind bushes, scuffing the grass, looking around a statue, poking at mounds, until I spied something that looked not quite right but not quite out of place either.* Found it!

In the thrill of finding the cache we forgot about Muggles and ooo’d and arhhh’d loudly, attracting the attention of the only other park visitor as we unraveled the log slip to add our names to finders list. But it was tremendously exciting. It was code breaking, physical exploration and highly tuned instinct all rolled together.

Suddenly the use of these as part of our story trail became vivid. In the hunt for caches, the canal and various venues in Manchester will rise into our story, into the imaginations of the trail hunters. We could leave items (‘tradeables’) in the cache, offer a three dimensional, physical as well as digital, experience, and hopefully recreate that excitement of discovery, of solving clues in the caches while the story unraveled for people on the trail.

What also appealed to me about the hunt was being sent somewhere I may not know and given a reason to scour it, to explore it with sharp eyes and a hunger. Regardless as to whether there is a tradeable in the cache (which is probably a tiny trinket), the thrill rests on the hunt; the search rather than the find; the process rather than the end. It’s like the best of journeys – the getting there is as important as the eventual end point. Which is, after all, what stories are all about.


*In the interests of geocaching etiquette I can’t tell you any more than this in case I spoil it for someone…