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Showing posts with label Halloween. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Halloween. Show all posts
Wednesday, October 29, 2014
Wednesday, October 29, 2014
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Unfortunately, while I can't fault their ambition, and though there's a lot of neat stuff inside Las Maravillas, it doesn't really work. First suspicions that this wasn't going to be a mindblowingly intense experience came as we were being ushered down to the basement. The person guiding us down said "I'm supposed to be telling you a story right now, but I haven't got time".
I'm not the hardest person to please in the world, but when the first contact we have with the show says they can't be bothered to perform it sets off some worryingly loud alarm bells. I was there on a press ticket, but I'd imagine this would have annoyed me even more had I forked out £10 (or £15 on the weekend). If the rest of the show had hugely improved from that I might not have mentioned it, but throughout you get the sense that a few members of the cast have their minds elsewhere.
For example, throughout the show you travel with a group of 6 or 7 other audience members. At one point you're split up and come back together and another person has been added to the group. He's then plucked from among us and something grisly happens to him. I'm guessing the intent is to create a sense of danger, terrifying us by blurring the lines between participant and performer. This didn't happen because the first thing he said, in a slightly annoyed tone, was "Are you group 6 or 7?" followed by him gently shoving me out of the way for apparently sitting in the wrong place - all of which combine to make it a bit difficult to maintain the illusion that we're in the afterlife.
This is a shame, because for every slightly surly cast member there's three or four that are genuinely giving their all. The experience is segmented into a series of rooms, each occupied by an inhabitant spirit who performs/tests you. I don't want to spoil exactly what happens, but the sad skeleton lady with the straw in the first room was genuinely spooky and slightly touching, as was the sad skeleton lady in the room with all the cotton wool. On the actually-pretty-unsettling front are three masked, predatory women who writhe aggressively around one of the rooms. What they all share is a willingness to get right up in the audience's face, as if daring us to maintain eye contact with them.
Paradoxically the best of these actors also finds themselves in the most awkwardly designed room. The 'finale' of the show involves meeting a woman who beckons you from behind some branches. You poke your head through and she cradles your face, speaking softly and insistently about your relationship with her, before asking me to dance with her. Amongst everything here it was this intimate moment that genuinely creeped me out.
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| Photo by @LilyLippy |
Problem is she has to have this one-on-one moment with everyone in your group, so by the time the last person gets to talk with her they'll have been waiting for more than 10 minutes. The room we wait in is nicely designed, full of spooky stuff and has a creepy ambient soundtrack playing - but it increasingly feels like a waiting room. A few of my group got bored waiting and just left, unceremoniously popped back into the basement of a community centre.
There's a distinct lack of momentum in the way we progress through it, which is a shame because there's a hell of a lot of potential here. The production design is an excellent example of maximising a budget; the atmosphere crammed with tiny little design touches. There's a make-do canniness at play; for example, repurposing hairnets as spider-webs, cleverly designed gory blindfolds and the well-realised idea of changing the texture under the audience's feet as a way of marking transitions between spaces.
Some of these rooms are striking installations in their own right; impressive even if divorced from the show around it. An early room is lit by strobe lights and pulsating sounds, disorientating the audience by refusing to let us focus on exactly what the weird objects around us are made of. A later room with a clock motif is similarly beautifully lit, shadows of cogs and gears floating around the space.
It's so obvious that a lot of careful thought and subsequent hard work has gone into Las Maravillas that I feel a bit guilty criticising it. But unfortunately, for all these wonderful flourishe the audience were often made to feel like a bit of an inconvenience. This prevents us from becoming immersed in the show and as soon as our minds are elsewhere the illusion shatters.
Now, all these criticisms could maybe be chalked up to opening night jitters. Maybe once the bugs are ironed out audiences on other nights really will be able to lose themselves in the Aztec Underworld. I really hope The Dreamery achieves what their goals over the next few nights, but I left a bit disappointed.
'Las Maravillas: The Lost Souls of Mictlan' is at The Rose Lipman Building until 1st November, Tickets here.
Tuesday, October 30, 2012
Tuesday, October 30, 2012
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What is there to write about a night like this? I stood in a dark room full of flashing lights and listened to essentially the same song for about six hours. Mission accomplished! Putting on a night like this can seem disarmingly simple, you just need a good sound system, a nice space, some toilets and bar and some DJs and you're set, right? Obviously it’s not as simple as it sounds, I've been to enough crappy, badly organised and oversold nights to know that. Fortunately Drumcode go to great lengths to create a nice atmosphere to dance in, and even though the night takes place in some pretty grimy industrial surroundings, there’s an unmistakable attention to detail that you just don’t get at a lot of other nights. From the moment you enter until the moment you leave you’re gently but firmly in a solid pair of hands.
The weather had taken a turn for the chilly and wet over the last few days, and I was dreading having to queue outside in the miserable night waiting to get in. It’s a particular annoyance of mine to have to spend ages waiting to get in when I already have a ticket. Last time I saw Adam Beyer was at the Hearn Street Car Park in April, and I remember miserably queueing up outside in the cold and the rain. People huddle together, desperately clutching print outs with barcodes on them waiting desperately to get in, trying to fight off boredom and the cold. But there was a good omen! Earlier in the week, Drumcode sent me an actual honest-to-god ticket through the post, with a hologram and everything! In this age of online booking, getting a physical ticket in the post is a rarity, and there was a nice sticker in the envelope too.
When I entered the place at about half 11, it was relatively sparsely populated. I picked up a drink and had a look around, realising that at some point over the last few years I've been here before. The night takes place in the arches under a railway bridge, and they soar pretty high over your head. There are six of these, two of them are taken up with DJs. The other ones are bars, toilets, chillout spaces and a cloakroom. Even though the place becomes pretty damn busy later on, there’s still always room to move around and if you need a place to sit down and rest for a minute there’s always somewhere to go. They've got a load of portaloos set up in two of the arches, and I'm pleased to say the queues weren't too long, and they stayed pretty bearable throughout the night. It seems a like a pretty prosaic thing to mention, but (literally) crappy toilet facilities can kill a night like this stone dead, especially if everyone starts pissing against the walls because they don't want to queue up.
One of the main reasons I enjoy these sorts of nights is the general niceness of everyone there. We’re all in the same boat, so to speak and one person acting violently would ruin it for everyone. You can go to clubs in Soho or Camden where there's always at least one knuckle-headed bruiser just waiting for the wrong person to catch his eye. But here there’s a certain expectancy that you’re going to be a good Samaritan if you see anybody having trouble. This ranges from someone who’s dropped something on a crowded dancefloor, at which point people will generally clear a small space to help someone find it, or to making sure that the boggle-eyed, sweaty and confused guy staggering around in the frantic glare of a strobe light like a shot elephant is alright.
So it was a nice crowd and a pretty well-dressed one too. This was after all a Halloween party, and costumes ranging from the lame and to the elaborate were on the dancefloor. Gore and blood seemed to be on the cards, and occasionally you'd see something lurching out of a cloud of dry ice like a refugee from Silent Hill. Some of the fake injuries were disarmingly realistic; it’s weird to be dancing next to someone who looks like they’ve had their face sliced up with a cut throat razor, or had the skin peeled off their bodies. There was also a face-painting station by the front door, so throughout the night the amount of people wandering around bleary eyed with smeared Jokerlike skulls painted on their faces only increased.
This enthusiasm for the macabre was matched by the organisers and Drumcode had made a nice effort to create a Halloween mood. Behind both DJ booths were two excellent backdrops. In one room were two large skulls, and throughout the night they had different things projected onto them. They were faintly hypnotic at times, with huge staring eyes looking around at the crowd. After a few hours I realised that you can get a surprisingly large amount of design variety on a skull template, I saw blood trickling down them, Day of the Dead influenced designs or electroshock bolts running down past the staring, googly eyes. In the other room there was a display made up of coffins, skulls and pumpkins, with blue and green graveyard spotlights illuminating the scene.
Aside from this, there was also a freaky Halloween live show happening in one corner of the room. People in professional and disgusting looking zombie makeup were being held in a cage in the corner, lurching around and grabbing at anyone foolish enough to get close to the bars. When they were out of the cage I saw them being leashed on a chain, and led around by a kinky gas-mask wearing long-coated person who treated them with the disdain a zombie deserves.
All of this stuff, enjoyable as it is, is stage dressing though. What we're here for is the music. But it's difficult for me to write about techno sets like these. What is there to say? Frankly for me, one song melts into the next without any noticeable gaps, and the DJs while obviously talented slightly interchangeable. What's important is the constant hammer smack of the beat, which very quickly has a hypnotic effect. The acoustics here are great, the percussion beating hard off the brick walls, and thumping deep inside your lungs. Occasionally within the throbbing drum beat you get a little synthetic melody or vocal sample that only underlines the heavy nature of the rest of what you're hearing. It's a sensory overload, something that gets deep inside you, working its tentacles into your brain, your arms and your legs.
It's strange how time seems to get a bit elastic when you're in a place like this, something that was amplified by the clocks going back mid-way through the evening. You wander into a place at midnight, and 6am can feel like a very very long way away, but then the music takes over and suddenly you're sweaty, used up, scuffed up and it's very early in the morning.
So I can't really pick out a DJ that I particularly liked more than the others. Maybe there are techno connoisseurs out there who are shocked that I can't tell the difference between the sets of say, Maetrik or Joseph Capriati. Don't get me wrong I think they were both great, but I just don't have the critical faculties to be able to pick out any distinguishing details between them. But not being able to describe why I like it, I do know THAT I like it, and anything that can keep me on two legs dancing for 5 hours or so has got to be worth a damn.
All images used with permission of wo0 photography : wo0.co.uk
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