The Paper Cinema Theatre Company bought an extremely innovating, experimental and ground-breaking performance to LPAC in October 2012; giving us valuable insight into how a professional contemporary performance art theatre group puts on a polished performance.
Based on Homer’s Odyssey, The Paper Cinema combines ancient Greek literature and the use of live recordings, a camera and projector to tell a story in a way the audience would have never experienced before. The small theatre company are multi-instrumentalists, creating a orchestrated score and sound effects to create an immersive soundtrack to accompany a live film made of hand-made sketches drawn by the actors placed infront of a camera projected onto the theatre wall.
Watching this live feature film was extremely captivating, and having the musical accompaniment gave a new meaning to the simple yet effective sketches. I have never seen another performance like this, and felt it was extremely compelling and exciting. When entering the auditorium, the first thing I look at is the stage. For this particular performance it was full of instruments, wires, lights and screens. I had no idea what to expect, when the performance started I was immediately focussed on the screen. The performer’s knew exactly what they were doing and it was clear they were passionate about the liveness connected to the performance. They were constantly creating new sounds, for instance there was a motorbike being shown to be going fast, the object used to create was a drill next to a microphone. Although the idea was so simple the end product appeared very complex.
This performance encouraged us to experiment with for our performance. We experimented with the ideas of live cameras within our performance, unfortunately we discovered these concepts didn’t fit with our overall idea of using blindfolds and headphones to explore the idea of Headspace to create an immersive performance.
Caitlin Clark, Sophie Wright
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