On a cold January Tuesday I turned up in Winchester with my camera bag and a hat that kept my ears warm to photograph a workshop that Fluid Motion Theatre Company were doing with a GCSE drama class.
The cathedral was, as ever, a bit fruz (I have no doubt that heating a cathedral is a tough job, but cuddling up to a lukewarm radiator is a bitter experience). I lurked in the background with my camera & did my best not to embarrass the Future Generation as they recited the ghost speech from Hamlet to inanimate objects of their choosing, but I did get a few funny looks. I even have some of those funny looks recorded for posterity.
It was a good workshop! It was, it was. I should like to go to more & work with Fluid Motion again. The only time I studied drama in school was in Year 7 and it terrified me. I’m pretty intrigued by it now. I first met Fluid Motion when they were doing a Shakespeare workshop at Southampton’s Adult Learning Festival (which is that time I did Life Modelling With Arty Drapes On For The Safety Of The Children Even Though There Weren’t Any Children Around, which . . . yeah, makes perfect sense). I did not wow the room with my interpretation of Beatrice, but I like to tell myself that’s because I didn’t get time to immerse myself in the text beforehand. Cough.
(Actually, I did study Much Ado About Nothing when I was 17 and liked it very much; for my essay I was allowed to write about the way the relationship between [character] and [character] underlies the play, and while most people in the past had gone with romantic couples, I went with Don Pedro and Don John because I AM A REBEL and I actually kind of like Don John, which can’t be good and I certainly wouldn’t like him if he were a Real Boy, but I like his speeches. But my POINT, and I used to have one, is that I hadn’t obsessed over & analysed Beatrice before my grand moment of acting.)
Our drumming + belly dancing went beautifully, though. Just so you know.
I took the following shot while I was fiddling with my camera and drinking tea in the Education Centre (it was cold and they were kind). When I was studying my degree, some of my peers referred to this type of photography as “flâneuring”. I would have liked to have shot some portraits in the cathedral, but I wasn’t really supposed to be singling out unfortunates, and anyway, if I’d had my way I’d have put them all in costume.
Yeah, I love portraiture. It’s some hippie-born agape thing, so I suspect, and when all’s said & done I’m such an inveterate hippie.
