- I've been busy
- when I've not been busy, my time's been taken up with procrastinating (quelle surprise)
- lots to say - but don't know where to begin
and.. - I've been 'unmasked', by no other than the Geo Goynes team themselves - eek!
My thin veneer of a 'disguise' was seen through immediately! To be honest, I'm not surprised in the least, I had thought initially that being incognito would give me more freedom to write what I want without impunity but very quickly realised this wasn't the case at all. If anything I was more constrained with the effort of changing the names of productions or people so for a while now I haven't bothered. I'm a-coming out of that closet.
That's great on one level, but now I know that Root Experience (aka the Geo Goynes production company) might well read it, I feel strangely self-concious and thumb-tied! I guess this would be worse if I had anything 'mean' to say about them, but I don't - they were brilliant to work with - hurrah! This was a complicated production and there were lots of things that could go awry both from a technological perspective and given that we were working closely with participants. So it could be very stressful at times; however I always felt Simon and Jess were in control and did not heap any further stress on us than necessary - quite the opposite in fact, we were protected from it where possible and were always treated with respect and trusted to do our jobs. This might read as obvious stuff, and so it should be - but sadly in my experience this has often not been the case, so it's darned refreshing to work with people who are serious about what they do, trust their actors and are organised and respectful! Right, that's quite enough gushing for one post (winky face).
I really enjoyed the rehearsal process - or more accurately the devising process - it great to be involved in creating the narrative in which our characters would inhabit. Without giving too much away (because it is still a work in progress which has most definitely 'got legs'), it's set five years in the future where such a thing as 'quantum technology' exists that enables corporations to predict an individual's future. There's a heinous news broadcasting corporation Prospects Live (think The Daily Mail) who has access to this future prediction technology and are regularly ruining people's lives according to what their future selves are alleged to have done (or will do). Our characters are heading up a gorilla organisation with the purpose of bringing down Prospects Live by working with a hacker to get a virus on to their mainframe which would destroy their future prediction programme. This is with the help of other shadowy people (i.e. the participants) who have also seen their lives unravelled as a result of their broadcasts.
There were three of us 'team leaders' who each would have a number of audience members/participants who we would lead on an adventure, solving clues, having clandestine meetings with hackers, honey-trapping Prospects Live employees, tailing others whilst avoiding deadly agents and Prospect Live security staff. Our stories would run concurrently, so we would often run into one and another providing an extra frisson of danger as we'd primed the participants that anyone with a headpiece was likely to be an enemy agent. It was fast-paced, fun, crazy and at times ridiculous with over-zealous actors acting as security staff and actual security staff who witnessing what looked like the theft of a laptop frogmarched one team-leader and his troupe of participants back to the theatre. Impressively he did not break character at all and managed to convey to his team that he was only pretending to the security staff (who blatantly refused to read the prepared leaflet explanation) it was theatre as ruse to deceive them. To be fair, some of what was going on as part of this experience would look really bad to security, so they were only doing their job; but to have approached every potential interested party individually would have been a logistical and no-doubt very expensive nightmare. I myself (despite explaining what we were doing to the security man at my base in a derelict street of houses and him seemingly happy at my explanation) had the same security guard turn up in the middle of my spiel, every night, and giving me a hard time about what I was doing there and necessitating me having to act my socks off declaring him to be a Prospects Live agent.
I really enjoyed the rehearsal process - or more accurately the devising process - it great to be involved in creating the narrative in which our characters would inhabit. Without giving too much away (because it is still a work in progress which has most definitely 'got legs'), it's set five years in the future where such a thing as 'quantum technology' exists that enables corporations to predict an individual's future. There's a heinous news broadcasting corporation Prospects Live (think The Daily Mail) who has access to this future prediction technology and are regularly ruining people's lives according to what their future selves are alleged to have done (or will do). Our characters are heading up a gorilla organisation with the purpose of bringing down Prospects Live by working with a hacker to get a virus on to their mainframe which would destroy their future prediction programme. This is with the help of other shadowy people (i.e. the participants) who have also seen their lives unravelled as a result of their broadcasts.
There were three of us 'team leaders' who each would have a number of audience members/participants who we would lead on an adventure, solving clues, having clandestine meetings with hackers, honey-trapping Prospects Live employees, tailing others whilst avoiding deadly agents and Prospect Live security staff. Our stories would run concurrently, so we would often run into one and another providing an extra frisson of danger as we'd primed the participants that anyone with a headpiece was likely to be an enemy agent. It was fast-paced, fun, crazy and at times ridiculous with over-zealous actors acting as security staff and actual security staff who witnessing what looked like the theft of a laptop frogmarched one team-leader and his troupe of participants back to the theatre. Impressively he did not break character at all and managed to convey to his team that he was only pretending to the security staff (who blatantly refused to read the prepared leaflet explanation) it was theatre as ruse to deceive them. To be fair, some of what was going on as part of this experience would look really bad to security, so they were only doing their job; but to have approached every potential interested party individually would have been a logistical and no-doubt very expensive nightmare. I myself (despite explaining what we were doing to the security man at my base in a derelict street of houses and him seemingly happy at my explanation) had the same security guard turn up in the middle of my spiel, every night, and giving me a hard time about what I was doing there and necessitating me having to act my socks off declaring him to be a Prospects Live agent.
Actually, talking of acting, us team members agreed that it was 30% acting and 70% project management. I have to say it wasn't the most subtle and nuanced piece of acting I've ever done, and many times I felt I was channelling the spirit of Doc Brown in The Back To The Future Trilogy ("we have to get our hands on that virus - we must not fail!"). That said, it was amazing for thinking on your feet, confidence and ability to deal with problems as they arose - not least my special-needs (dis)ability of getting lost!
The first couple of performances felt like a stressful nightmare with all manner of things (mostly technical) going wrong. It's such a complicated piece of immersive theatre and taking place on the streets on Victoria with Joe-public (and Joe-security guards) and all that entails all around us, there was loads that could go belly-up. That said, the last two performances I started really feeling in my element and it was brilliant. We had some really excellent feedback and I'm sure as it evolves, us as actors will also be able to access more subtlety and authenticity in our performances. I really look forward to Geo Goynes touring in the hopefully not-too-distant future and I predict that it will be good!
