In our twice weekly training and
explorations with Suzuki training at Melbourne Suzuki, we have been
doing improvisations with moving & changing statues, and playing
with tempi and relation... all sorts of things that I won't go into
because that's not my point. Just training and improvising without an
overall objective has become insufficient. So I've written a play
called Mute about the beauty of silence and a woman who cuts tongues, for our regular participants so that we can work towards
a performance derived from our explorations. It may not be a text
book reason to write a play, but hey. I'd like to include it in the Auto Da Fe Theatre program.
In the play I have a character named
the Foley Artist who will be creating the wind and other sound
effects. The idea started because actors wearing
microphones are eew and mixing electronic sound with acoustic - eewer. It's like there are two competing stages. So I thought if a foley artist
could produce effects like they used to do in the radio days we could
still have the 'wind blowing through the dark forest' without
recourse to amplification and just include that creative magic in the performance act.
I actually worked in radio-drama in the '60's (that old huh?) at the ABC in Sydney on Forbes Street when I was a kid. A series called the Hamburg Secret - from memory produced by David Cahill?... kind of like The Famous Five - we were two kids who discovered how the Germans were hiding a submarine in our local estuary. I was entranced by the foley booths. Fake doors, tea-cups, bells, guns, hammers... The technician was always telling me to leave it alone. I was a passive smoker back then. All the actors instructing me in correct studio protocol, cryptic crosswords by the ash tray, smoking Pall Mall... Camel Plains saving a cough till the end of a take. That's my grandfather Marshall Crosby on the left there
I actually worked in radio-drama in the '60's (that old huh?) at the ABC in Sydney on Forbes Street when I was a kid. A series called the Hamburg Secret - from memory produced by David Cahill?... kind of like The Famous Five - we were two kids who discovered how the Germans were hiding a submarine in our local estuary. I was entranced by the foley booths. Fake doors, tea-cups, bells, guns, hammers... The technician was always telling me to leave it alone. I was a passive smoker back then. All the actors instructing me in correct studio protocol, cryptic crosswords by the ash tray, smoking Pall Mall... Camel Plains saving a cough till the end of a take. That's my grandfather Marshall Crosby on the left there
he was a radio days star - had a series called 'Officer Crosby' I believe. He was long gone before I came along.
I'm looking forward to the challenge
of scrunching grease-proof paper for walking through forest
undergrowth, dress-scissors through linen for cutting a tongue with the mix of voice
and the wind balanced live... mm, creating the wind... we could all blow through
our lips?
