the timboucher experience

Took myself down to the Charles Theatre again this afternoon for the second installment of Wagner’s Ring cycle, Die Walkure. Somewhere around these parts lies another article about that, but this was one easier to swallow. The first time around took some getting used to the production company (from Valencia) and their vision of how this all ought to be staged and then translated into film. This time I was able to step into that world more easily on a psychological level, since I knew the rules of how it functioned, what laws operated and how characters and the deus ex machine, literally, worked. So the tech stuff, the sci-fi costume antics and the rest sank down into the background for me during this piece, allowing the depth of the various actor’s talents and the enormity of Wagner’s writing as a dramatist to unfold at their own pace. Never during the four plus hour performance (with two intermissions) did I once get bored. Moreso my problem with such long pieces has been about getting comfortable in a confining movie theatre seat.

Also attended a YouTube play festival over at the Annex Theatre, an independent arts venue and living space in Baltimore’s Station North Arts District. I liked the basic concept of the festival, that of staging YouTube videos as live-action performances. Some of it was beautiful, some of it was indecipherable, some of it idiotic in a good way, some of it in a bad way, and a few bits in it really had the kind of dramatic power in them that make you remember why you go to live events in the first place and don’t just sit around watching YouTube forever. My favorite was probably the one about the fat Mexican kid falling into the river and cursing his friend out, followed by the Neda getting shot one…

Watched also “Les Diaboliques” this weekend, along with Ingmar Bergman’s excellent (though not maybe as good as “Seventh Seal” or “Wild Strawberries”) “Tinsel & Sawdust.” According to the jacket of that DVD, Bergman kept up parallel and largely separate careers on the stage and with film. This movie tells the story of a traveling circus owner, his mistress and their miserably poor circus coming into a town where the owner’s wife and children now live. Some great stuff comparing and contrasting the worlds of circus life and “legitimate” theatre, as the traveling troupe and an established theatre troupe in the town get mixed up in all kinds of inter-character intrigue. Really worth watching.

Also caught part of the Penn State game this weekend at the bar. Sports has never been my thing, but I’ve begun viewing it lately from the traveling performer lifestyle/professional entertainment business and culture. There’s a lot to be drawn in historically, since most of the folk theatrical research I’ve been doing has been around festivals, fairgrounds and religious holy day celebrations. Sports and aesthetic competition have always been intertwined with such things - sometimes inseparably so. It will be an interesting fish to fry.

My next heavy research topic though will be opera, now that I’ve got a nice foothold into the domain, some of the terminology and a bit of a frame of reference worked out for it all. In the meantime, I’m doing a historical tour of the Hippodrome Theatre tomorrow as part of Free Fall Baltimore, a city-wide thing that includes many performances and events all through the Autumn (such as the Peabody Opera Potpourri performance I attended last week).

One of the things I really want to start looking at is audience make-up and interactions around operas versus other kinds of “lower class” performance rituals. Haven’t got a hell of a lot of exposure yet but have begun seeing some consistent trends: that opera audiences are usually quite talkative and vocal with one another about their opinions during intermission, etc. Maybe not more that theatre audiences, but definitely moreso than movie audiences. Which makes the adaptation of opera and some of the stage rituals to a cinematic establishment at times a bit odd or jarring.

On the homefront, I’ve begun work on a Halloween costume which I might be able to find other performative uses for. I finally snagged myself a maybe five foot plastic jointed skeleton from a temporary storefront that used to house a Circuit City but now sells fake blood and any number of cheap “sexy” Halloween costumes from China for $19.99. I was gonna replicate the clown being chased by a skeleton bit from a 1930s circus photo I found, but decided to modify it to fit in the front. My idea was to wear all black (including a facemask) and attach its limbs to mine in various articulations, thereby enabling me to make it dance or move around - like a marionette or other kind of puppet. I’ve been thinking of the “laughing skeleton” archetype you see in the medieval Danse Macabre/the Grateful Dead paraphernalia, or also in that awesome movie, The Last Unicorn - that skeleton which guards the clock that’s a portal to another dimension. You know what I’m talking about, right?

Tonight I modified all the joints, so that each end of each one has a wire run through it which then ties it to the corresponding joint, also wired. This way, if any of the plastic joints fail, the whole act doesn’t fall apart. Next will be putting together some kind of harness to give me the types of articulation I’m after for. I’ll post videos of all this when I’ve got it all done. Would be awesome to find a way to use the skeleton in a juggling routine!

• Two riders on a winged horse: one a bandit
• Skeleton Hiccups
• There’s No Such Thing as Humans!
• No-sword
• The need for heroes