Performance Day of “Clay Walkers”

Well the day I’ve been looking forward to and in a way dreading has come and finally finished.

A quick recap on the last two weeks of rehearsals;

We as a group had a few problems in our dress run two weeks ago due to weather, however it wasn’t because it was raining (which is blessing for England). In April across England had a few weeks of freak sunny and hot weather, which for our performance would be a pain. Walking a cycled route continuously for 8 hours would (and did) cause some bother for us. Something as a group we struggled with. Getting the first stages of heat stroke during a dress run wasn’t fun.

Upon reflection we decided to try and perform another dress run of “Clay Walkers” a week before the actually assessed performance. Sadly this didn’t happen as other assessments had clashes for us to rehearse as a full group. One other issue that was brought up by Rachel was our clay figures (inspired by Antony Gormley) were too small to make an impact on the audience members. We had tried other methods to get the figures bigger and tried many products to get the figures to stand, but alas to no avail.

So today (Wednesday 6th May 2015) is the day of the actual performance. I honestly didn’t think we would of got as wet and as tired as we did. As a group we arrived promptly at the cathedral gardens for 8:55 to set everything up ready for the ever growing crowds of people who were excited to be a part of Clay Walkers. In my dreams really, at the beginning of the day the weather was suitable for us to work in sun was out with a little bit of wind.

But in traditional english  weather the high heavens rained down within an hour of the clay walkers performance began and continued throughout the day. My mood dropped quite quickly from being really positive to really negative about the project. I don’t think I would of lasted as long as I did if I didn’t get the support from both Beth and Georgia.

Conan and Rachel came along at different points of the day to see how we were progressing on with the creating of figures. Well I say figures, halfway through the assessed performance we were advised by Conan to slightly change the idea of self image to creating something that connects and links to Pottergate. So Beth started making bricks and engraving words and emotions on to them then sticking them upon a wooden chopping  board. From this idea it lead on to re-creating the Pottergate from salt dough within the garden. (As shown in the picture below)

We finally finished creating the performance at 3pm this afternoon 2 hours earlier than we first predicted many weeks ago. I think Conan and Rachel were impressed with all the work we created on our own as there wasn’t anyone there that want to participate in our performance no thanks to the rain and very strong winds.

Now that the site specific performance is over I’m glad it went well its just a shame the weather let us down and no one was able to experience the life of a potter and create some wonderful art form.

Till the final blog post

Bye

 

Clay Walkers final product