Sunday 11 October 2009

UNFOLDING KING LEAR

UNFOLDING KING LEAR
3 free performances:
Thursday 29
Friday 30
Saturday 31 October

7pm (2 hours duration)

Judith E. Wilson Drama Studio,
Basement, Faculty of English,
9 West Road

50 seats maximum per show: please book your seat by writing an email,
specifying which night you would like to attend: jh580@cam.ac.uk

Age rating: 8+
______________________________________________________________________
A few explanations:

A company of artists ~performers & musicians from various disciplines~
collaborate in reading, playing & enacting one of Mr William
Shakes-peare's great divided master-works.

The texts we use are a newly configured edit which presents the quarto
of 1608 and the folio of 1623 together. So sometimes a scene itself
falls into a dialogue of its own division:

Quarto: 
Albany. He knows not what he sees, and vaine it is
That we present us to him
Edgar. Very bootlesse.

Folio:
Albany. He knows not what he saies, and vaine is it
That we present us to him
Edgar. Very bootlesse.

This is a collaborative piece of work which intends to be a committed
inquiry into text and performance. Also it is a clown show, a great
stage of fools. We call it 'UNFOLDING King Lear' because the work is not
about definitive readings or interpretations, nor is it about closing
down on the perpetual questions of what it means to be a play, or a
person, or a thing.

These performances are prepared collapsing together our combined
disciplines in performance, art, puppetry, dance, improvised music,
critical inquiry & personal curiosity. So the players are at odds as
well as at one with one another, in humour and in body, as they make
something in front of you: reading from the page but also by heart,
playing and questioning what it is to play a play ...

___________________________________________________________________

Comments on a previous work by Jeremy Hardingham,
Unfolding king lear a model
(a solo show which is attempting to be a collaborative work)

" a solo in which Hardingham seems to be, at one and the same time,
chewing and regurgitating King Lear, in a sort of terrible parody of
circular breathing techniques ….. it is the complexity, not as styling
but as argument, that ultimately is moving and impressive and jags in
the mind: for all the ferociousness of his inquiry into language and
object and abstraction and absence, as ever his work is alive with the
essentially theatrical discovery of how the individual, buffeted (as
Lear is) by what seem to be malign extraneities, contains and embodies
all the graces and desolations of properly collective response, and
spells out in poetry and grunting the massed chorus of aloneness."

- Chris Goode

" Terrifying, painful and utterly compelling"

- Lyn Gardner (The Guardian)

See also?

Andrew Haydon's blog:

http://postcardsgods.blogspot.com/search?q=unfolding+king+lear+a+model

and for more information see:
http://incarnatemundstuck.blogspot.com/

No comments:

Post a Comment