2021: August and September
2021: snapshots from the year
August and September
August - Drag Me To Love, and Look At Me, Don’t Look At Me
So in August, I finally got the chance to get my hands on the bespoke lighting rig at Paines Plough’s Roundabout. The tented venue has (pre-Covid) been a much-loved venue at the Fringe for many years, and I’ve seen some shows in there that quietly open your heart up, stomp on it and breathe life into it in turns, and then return it to you, somewhat changed before you leave the tented in-the-round venue. The LED rig that fills the venue is a bit of a delight, so getting to have a play with it at last felt like a particularly geeky birthday present.
There is a moment in the Lady Gaga sequence where that rig does all the things I’ve ever wanted it to do. The lights and the music and the bodies and the story dancing together to tell us something we didn’t know we needed to know.
I had a ball with Bonnie and the Bonnettes creating this new version of Drag Me To Love in Roundabout in Newcastle, and then I worked with Sam, the lighting programmer, remotely so that he could oversee the new in-the-round version of RashDash’s Look At Me, Don’t Look At Me when Roundabout reached Brixton.
Also during August, I put in a funding app for Stage One of a project of my own. More on that later. (It’ll be the October to December entry).
September - Drag Me to Doncaster, and the Bob Graham Round
September began with me driving down to CAST in Doncaster to put Drag Me To Love into it’s first end-on venue, with a view to it touring on full tungsten rig, as opposed to the full LED rig we’d had in Roundabout. Saying goodbye to the Bonnettes after the show that night was hard. They’ve so quickly become one of my favourite companies to work with. It has been a bit of an honour.
In the latter part of September, The Enemy went back into rehearsal at National Theatre of Scotland’s Rockvilla in Glasgow. I wasn’t there for the readthrough on the first day, as I was down in the Lake District where my partner A and I (and Kayla the dog) were doing road support, along with the mighty Boff Whalley, for Dan Bye’s Bob Graham Round. It was good to have the These Hills Are Ours team back together again, and driving into Wasdale in Boff’s camper as the late afternoon sun slanted across the valley was one of my favourite moments in the whole month.
At the end of September, I was interviewed for an artistic director job. I was called back in for interview and got down to the last two. You don’t hear many people talking about jobs they didn’t get, and in some ways it feels strange to write about it on here, but that process was important for me: it taught me a whole bunch of things about who I am as an artist, and it finally put paid to ‘just a lighting designer’ nonsense that sometimes people tell me, and sometimes I find I tell myself. It has taken me many years, I think, to understand that the art I make is richer for the breadth of my experience, and because I work in different disciplines.