The final cast is: me (Miriam Barr), Christian Jensen, Sabrina Muck, Daniel Larsen & Anna Kaye Forsyth. DJ & electronic musician Steve Riley will be handling the music, the entire first two albums from Nine Inch Nails' instrumental Ghosts series. And can I just say how awesome it has been to have the chance to play around with their music! Thank you creative commons and copyleft agreements!
We started out with the albums, the concept of 'ghosts of the modern age' and 5 poets.
Over six months later, we now have 18 poems each written to a specific track from Ghosts I or II. These encompass solo performances that confront such characters from history as The Wright Brothers, Kerouac, Billy Holiday, Hans Christian Anderson, and Lewis Carroll. We've got poems in three-voices about Te Whiti & Marilyn Munroe, and poems in two voices about Huxley, Friedman, Rosa Parks, Da Vinci and Jung. We go partying with Sigmund Freud, cooking with Kate Sheppard, to Family Planning with Ettie Rout and we have coffee with the famous artists of renaissance Florence. There is the melding of song and spoken word, the layering of multiple voices and as always, brand new frontiers to play with.
We'll be performing a preview of Echoing the Ghosts at Salut Bar in Whangarei on August 8th at 1pm - lunch and a show on a winter afternoon, and we try this experiment out on the public!
Echoing the Ghosts is planned to debut in Auckland as part of the Going West Festival's Literary Weekend and Metonymy 2010, at the Corban's Estate chapel on September 18th @ 7pm (show will be over in time for those who follow rugby to get to the game after the show).
We then have a final performance in the city at Galatos, in association with the Moving Image Centre on September 25th @ 7pm.
We can't wait. By way of a set we are working on the concept of giant picture frames and all sorts of different lamps. We'll see how we go. For now the task is one of memorisation and music cues.
In other news, a little bird suggests that MAYBE we have a brand new literartist. I can't announce it until he confirms for sure, but we're all really looking forward to the addition.
Daniel & Christian will both be performing on August 14th at ZineFest in Whammy Bar & Wine Cellar at St Kevin's Arcade in the city.
Most of the group will be performing at the Cutting Edge Conference night out on September 23rd - should be interesting. We've done a lot of stuff related to mental health and this event is in that vein, but as it applies to drug and alcohol abuse. As I said, should be interesting - will likely be a different crowd from our typical shows, but that's always a good thing.
So it's busy busy busy.
Christian has taken on most of the organising as we come close to our official hand-over time. I have been co-directing Ghosts with Christian as my last hurrah as Creative Director and will hand the role over entirely once the curtains fall on Echoing the Ghosts on September 25th at Galatos.
I can't wait to see what Christian is going to do with us after Ghosts wraps and where his direction will take us. I've been giving him our original and ever-evolving wishlist - we want choreography, we want dance, we want more visuals again, we want live musicians, we want all sorts, I've worked in the multiple-person performances and the beginnings of theatre-influence; now Christian will take it forwards, build upon it, add new things in. It's gonna be good.
For me the best bit is I get to relax for a mo' and just focus on my own poetry and my own performance. Selfish perhaps, but it's necessary sometimes. And... oh my... is it 2010? Far out, it's been a while!
