Friday, June 18, 2004

18 Jun 2004

This has been bugging me for a few days.  I think I’ll redesign the way news is ordered on this website – I’ve been knowing that this post will be the first one on the next page of news – so I’ve been hesitating posting until I decided I had something worth saying.  Which would be a long time, so… I’ve gotten over the hurdle, and just thought “screw it”.

Probable recode of the ordering of news sometime in the near future (perma-links will remain unaffected as a design criteria, naturally), so that is something for me to look forward to.  And perhaps the other three visitors to this website…

Soooo.  Year 11 Political Theatre was tonight.  That’d make a convenient scapegoat for a lack of posts over the past few days, so I’ll use it ;).  It hasn’t really chewed that much time, but if it works, don’t knock it…  Technically, the show was pretty amateurish.  Hmm.  Don’t try and make smart remarks about that word, or I shall request the army of zombies be unleashed upon you.  Or Nikky and the book “The Future of Killing in Our Schools”.  One of the above.  It was more… challenging in terms of content than last years (perhaps that is a personal thing, I don’t know – no human is objective, naturally), although perhaps less humorous.  By that I mean there were no random cries of “SANG CHOY BOW!!” in the middle of the show.  Heh.

Okay, I think the humour was several notches above last years.  But it wasn’t just about humour, fortunately – because that would be boring.  It was challenging, engaging and, whilst some bits of it were fairly poor (I could name acts and/or people, but won’t ;)), others were immensely powerful.  Both the first class and their movement piece (lost in a world in which technology surrounds and overpowers human interaction, where people move systematically and uncaringly, ignoring the presence of a confused and lonely person, who, overwhelmed by her surroundings, screams, collapses to the ground, and then joins in the mindless, repetitious movement of the whole cast in a form of mechanical existence), and the second with their haunting crippled army (a people struck and afflicted by the society in which they live, portrayed by the use of crutches and intense, heavy music complete with strobe, whilst images of September 11 are projected onto a screen behind the actors), score fairly highly so far as I am concerned.

Especially the second class.  Technically it requires more (to good effect, I would say), but I think the use of featureless masks and equipping the entire cast with crutches was the most powerful aspect of the entire night.  We (technical) didn’t do a great job with it (e.g. it could have been way better), but that was still easily the highlight of my night.

There were, of course, a whole range of other acts.  Beatboxing from the guy who got into SACS Idol, didn’t come, and still managed to rank 5th on the voting system (someone didn’t tell us he wasn’t going to be there, so the record was still in the database when the application was deployed… malicious audiences suck!), and a few other interesting scenes… good, but those two major scenes outdid everything else.

Compared to last year?  Possibly not as humourous.  Although, that said, the styles and content of the two were so completely different, it depends very much on the audience.  I’ll say this much, though – the beer hats stayed in the props cupboard this year.