Way out West (incorporating Way up North)

Rio stories, fit the fourth

Well, we managed to open, and all things considered it was a pretty good show. The theatre crew are very nice, but I would rate them as among the very worst technicians I have had to deal with. Even the specialist lighting crew hired in for the festival (presumably because the organisers realised how useless the locals were), were barely able to undertake one task at a time. My worst nightmare of a UK techie would shine like a rather drunk and sweaty star in their company. My favourite moment, among many, was the point, about 12 hours into the fit-up day, when, in order to make the last dozen or so lights functional, they started dismantling the ones that were already rigged and flashed out. When I protested, their response was; you’ve done these ones what’s the problem? As though a working lantern has its own extra-corporeal identity, and its physical reality is therefore fair game.

The Rio audience is also a strange thing, for starters, we had an altogether different slant on starting the show. Don’t wait for the audience, we were urged, they won’t come in until they hear the show has started. This particular show has about fifteen minutes of silent action at the beginning, so we might have had a long wait. Once we had the audience in, they were the most restless and fidgety I have seen in a long time, ebbing and flowing in and out of the auditorium, changing seats, opening sweets and so on. There is a long section, towards the middle of the show, where two performers, naked but for the three foot tinfoil and cardboard stars that they hold, stand centre stage and discuss the various types of silence. This is a very meditative (and actually quite funny) part of the show, and a Brazilian woman in front of us chose that moment to start opening wrapped sweeties, when shushed by the surrounding patrons, she chose to pick a fight, not very sotto voce, with those around her. As for mobile phones, the opening ten minutes or so, were a positive cacophony of ring-tones, once we’d got past the ‘I can’t speak now, I’m in the theatre, yes, the theatre…’ moment, it all calmed down, with only the occasional call being received.

The show also has at least three false endings, during each one, about half the stalls (and presumably the balconies too), got up and ran for the exits, only to creep back in, rather sheepishly, when they realised it was still going on. In the minibus on the way back afterwards (we all but one eschewed the inevitable party), I proposed that they do a show consisting entirely of endings, and that the only way the show could actually finish would be when there was no audience left. This proposal was not received with massive enthusiasm for some reason.

Nature notes; The theatre (and to a certain extent, this hotel also) is overrun with tiny fire ants, these are about a tenth of the size of a British ant, but much nastier, they climb up your trouser legs and bite your ankles, not venturing any higher than your knees, thankfully. The bite they leave itches madly for several hours. While we were onstage the other day, I was entranced to spot a tiny yellow and black lizard, about an inch and a half long, pop up out of a crack in the stage. Plainly not in a lizard friendly environment, I chased it upstage until it was tired enough for me to pick it up and have a look at it, then deposited it outside the back of the theatre, where it stood a better chance of finding prey.

posted by Lampy @ 10/08/2006 09:02:00 pm