Hello again!
Last week I had just come back from my 6 week overseas holiday to the most fantastic first week back at work. I was joined by 5 wonderful artists, including Fin who you know from the workshops plus four fantastic young people from the Riverland who were actors and assistants for the week. Together we read, talked and played with the BigSmoke Script that Fin has written.
On Tuesday we were joined by students from Renmark West PS and Renmark PS for a range of creative play workshops. My group built a cardboard box city which included a Hotel for Dogs and Cats, and Motel for Mice, more hotels, bridges, houses, a War Memorial, and a bus! The next day in rehearsal I got the actors to play and explore in the cardboard box city which was great fun for them and for us to watch. They learnt lots about the characters Bethany and Jimmy from the script. We kept rehearsing the play on Thursday ready for the performances on Friday. Unfortunately one of the actors, Hew, got really sick so Ian (our multi talented composer) stepped in.
On Friday Renmark West PS and Renmark PS came in the morning and Renmark JPS in the afternoon to watch a work-in-progress performance. It was a bit like a rough copy of the performance. The actors read their lines from the script and there were some potential bits of set and costume used that we were trying out. After the shows we talked to the audience to see what they liked and didn’t like and anything that wasn’t clear or things they would like to see in the city and in the play.
This feedback will help us all with the next part of our job making the ‘good copy’ of the performance. We will be rehearsing the play in between February and April and will tour around the Riverland at the end of April next year.
Thank you to everyone who contributed to a wonderful creative week – Fin, Kath, Ian, Em and Hew; Alysha, Brianna, Lizzie and Abby who were awesome assistants and actors; the teachers and students who can and played and watched and talked with us about the show and all the other grownups who came and gave feedback as well! I hope to see you all at the show (and probably before then in the supermarket!)
Have a great summer break ~ julie
Finegan Kruckemeyer – Playwright
Hi everyone. I’ve just returned to my island home in Tasmania, and am coming down from the amazing week spent working on Big Smoke. Over five of the hottest days ever, we got together as a creative team. The other artists – designer Kathryn Sproul, composer Ian Moorhead, director Julie Waddington, and actors Emma Beech and Hew Parham – are all my friends, but it was a long time since I’d seen them, and living together in a house at Calperum Station for a week was a great experience.
Every day we worked on the script, talking about the story, the characters and the city they sit in – what needed to be changed, and what felt right already. From now, I have to go off and write the final draft, so it was really important to get the time hearing everyone’s ideas.
Including yours! What was brilliant was having an audience of local kids to come and watch the show, share ideas, do drama classes, imagine your own city adventures, and hang out. Thanks so much – you’re really making this a Riverland play, made for you, and using your ideas, even the crazy ones (but no, we’re not having a giant chicken, okay!)
Emma Beech – Actor (Bethany)
Being a Barmera girl born and bred, it is always great to return home to work on a show and enjoy my mum's cooking. It was very exciting to come and work on Big Smoke with such a great team, acting opposite Hew as Jimmy, and getting to get my mouth around the excellent words of Fin that had come from the young folk of the Riverland. Fins script was great from the start- funny, cool, interesting- as an actor I had so much to play with from the very beginning. Bethany is the kid I would've wanted to of been!
Even though my partner in acting crime, Hew, got very ill, Ian stepped into the job with gusto and we had a great time as the Crime Fighting Two (duo). Julie, Kathryn and the RYT team were brilliant to work with and our audiences were lovely and gave excellent suggestions for us to work with the next time we all get together.
The Riverland has done well making this show happen- can't wait to come back. Oh, and staying out at the Station with all the team, the big stars and the animals was definitely very very special!
Ian Moorhead – Composer (and Jimmy understudy)
Well... what a week. I'd just come off a 4 month tour around Australia so it was great to jump straight back into a new and exciting project. Julie has assembled a fantastic creative team and it's always fun as a composer to feed into other artist's creativity at this point in a project. By the end of the week I was starting to get a sense of how the music may sound. There is so much room in the script for me to have some fun with sound.
Unfortunately Hew, our wonderful actor got sick in the last couple of days and lost his voice, so I had to step into his role. Those of you who came to see the showing at the end of the week got to see me in the role of Jimmy. I had great fun playing opposite Emma and discovering Fin's writing from another angle.
Thanks to all for a wonderful week.
Kathryn Sproul – Set and Costume Designer
My name is Kathryn & my role during the week was to explore ways to build the world that the play will happen in. During the creative play workshops we looked at all the wonderful drawings done by the students & listed all the things that make up a city. The more I listened to the adventures of Bethany & Jimmy as the actors worked on the play, the more I wanted the city to look like it grows out of their memories. For the workshop performances, I created the city Bethany and Jimmy were in by making paper cut-outs of city buildings and projecting them onto the walls. I also played with the way the space will be set up, where the audience will be seated – it seemed to work well with the audience inside the city!
Hew Parham – Actor (Jimmy)
My name is Hew and I am playing Jimmy in the project that is when my throat hasn't swollen up like a balloon. Luckily before that I got to have a great time working on the script, looking and taking inspiration for my character from all the fantastic drawing the kids had done. Me and my cast buddy Em got to work with a whole bunch of fantastic kids, where we tried to encourage them to imagine the sounds of the city, and how they might work together like a Bethany and Jimmy, play stuck in the mud like Robots, and be really quiet and invisible when the other group snuck through. I had a great week and I can't to perform the show next year!