UNDER CONTRUCTION:A new water-based production is aiming to make a big splash with audiences as its cast take to a swimming pool instead of a stage, writes MICHELLE READ.
AS I ENTER a rehearsal room in the Lagan Valley LeisurePlex last week, a shipwrecked sailor is being accosted by a series of tropical sea creatures. "Jellyfish, what about jellyfish?" shouts director Zoe Seaton, as the other actors manifest everything from crabs to swordfish between hearty bouts of appreciation at each other's inventiveness.
This is one of the "dry" rehearsals for Portstewart-based theatre company Big Telly's new swimming pool show Sinbad. In 2005, the company developed and created its first pool show, the highly successful Little Mermaid, which toured throughout Ireland, the UK and internationally.
Seaton, and her collaborative partner Paul Boyd, admit that show was a huge challenge with a steep learning curve, but clearly it hasn't put them off. When I ask what drew them back to the unusual environment of a civic pool, Boyd replies: "Coming out of Mermaid", we had unfinished business. We had lots of ideas that we hadn't managed to put into the other show". They both agree that they have also become rather smitten with the whole concept (confiding that they're even starting to plan a third show in their heads). Seaton offers that there is a feeling of ownership over their new skill set too, both creative and technical, and that they didn't want another company to steal their thunder. "We knew if someone else did this now, it would feel like they were taking our thing."
Always a company with a strong visual performance style (their publicity material describes their work as "a fusion with other art forms to create a unique sense of spectacle"), Big Telly was set up in 1987 by Seaton and Jill Holmes (now director of the Market Place Theatre, Armagh). The company celebrated its 20th anniversary last year and Seaton wonders if their name now seems like something of a misnomer given their focus on the immediacy of live performance.
Company development manager Linda McCracken tells me that the name came about when a friend of Seaton and Holmes, who had a child with severe learning difficulties, took him to the theatre and he pointed at the stage and said it was "like a big telly". This sounds to me like the perfect way to name a company and I sense that it may also be the background to an ethos of accessible theatre-making that has lead quite naturally to the current show. "Well," Seaton confides, "initially we were just seduced by the novelty of the water and the lights and the mono-fins" (more of which later), but she seems extremely comfortable directing from the side of a pool. "We do do plays as well," she comments, "it's just we're always interested in adding another element like music or dance or circus."
BACK IN REHEARSALS, the cast are brain-storming a sequence where Sinbadrealises the ocean around him is full of unusually perky sea-life. "What if he throws something into the water and it comes shooting straight back out again?", someone suggests. "Yes," says someone else, who worked on the previous show, "but it would have to be thrown from just under the surface - otherwise the throw won't carry." The technical challenges of working in a swimming pool become increasingly apparent to me over the day and in the break some of the cast explain how they hold their breath a lot outside rehearsals just to extend their lung capacity. Whereas the show will be stage-managed by professional divers using oxygen, the actors themselves will have to manage their breathing with only the occasional snorkel for help.
Helen Ashton, an actor and aerialist who also worked on Little Mermaid, tells me it's a tough but exciting environment to work in, but even she had to get used to the process all over again. "The first week was all about building up speed and stamina," she says, "and even then most of us had some injuries." When considering casting for the original show, Seaton and Boyd wondered whether they would need to use athletes rather than performers, but after initial development workshops they realised that the strong performative elements required professional actors. It's no surprise, however, that all the cast have life-guarding or competitive swimming in their backgrounds.
Muscle-strain and drowning potential aside, there seems to be a good atmosphere in the rehearsal room and I'm struck by the involvement of the cast in the creative process on what seems a very technical show.
Boyd reflects that "some rehearsals are technically lead, while others are musically lead", but both Seaton and Boyd admit that the devising work I've just watched is relatively rare. Seaton comments of her cast, "they're really inventive, so with this sequence we said we'd have an improv session", but she notes that a lot of the rehearsal is about learning and drilling tightly choreographed routines.
Does this mean that the finished show will be closer to Disney than drama, I wonder tentatively. And is that where a push towards accessibility necessarily leads? Seaton doesn't think so. She suggests that in something like the Disney ice shows, promoters are "only looking for spectacle".
"We're looking for theatrical inventiveness," she counters. "We do want spectacle but also a sense of following a character and a story." She says that although there is no dialogue in Sinbad and lots of visual comedy, there is also considerable peril and because the piece is under-scored all the way through, it is highly dramatic. She suggests that by comparison, "Disney would be closer to a firework display", and I understand her to mean "nice to watch but lacking real drama".
"Right, we're moving into the pool now" calls the stage manager and the cast go off and change into their togs. Yes if there are "dry" rehearsals, then it stands to reason there must be "wet" rehearsals and these take place in a large diving pool bedside the main pool. The "wet" rehearsals are a tightly scheduled affair, partly to facilitate public access to the pool but also because the actors can only be in the water for short periods. It was beautifully sunny during my visit and I would have loved to jump in with them but being in the water for up to three hours every day carries obvious health and safety issues.
BOYD POINTS OUT that this is also one of the hidden challenges of touring the shows and that different pools, particularly internationally, have different chlorine levels and water quality, which can have a huge impact on the swimmers, not to mention the set and costume. Stage manager Lisa-Marie Cooke confides that the chlorine in particular is a nightmare - "it eats through everything".
Her other main concern, she says, compared to a regular show, is making sure the cast are safe and dry, between shifts in the water. Watching her handing props to submerged actors with a towel wrapped over her clothes, I realise the same could be said of her.
Seaton staggers the pool time for the actors, sending half off for a break while the others swim through a routine I had watched being marked in the rehearsal room; the stage direction "now tumble" makes much more sense in context. Seaton explains that once in the water the performers have to work out the mechanics and timing of the routines themselves as she can't get in with them, and as they swim through the piece again and again, she patiently looks on while they stop to figure out the logistics of turning in sync and reaching the same place at the same time.
This particular sequence features three attention-starved clownfish who keep Sinbad afloat because they need an audience for their comedy routine. As I watch three grown men do synchronised swimming in red lycra body-suits, I'm struck once again by the playful absurdity that live theatre can make possible.
EVENTUALLY, SEATON calls time and the exhausted actors climb out and take a break while their rested colleagues jump in and start to work on another sequence. This routine involves the previously mentioned mono-fins and Seaton explains that the company discovered this type of large, heavy-duty, single flipper on Little Mermaid. In the diving world mono-fins are worn primarily by free divers, whose aim is to get as deep as possible and back up again without oxygen.
The fin is primarily designed for speed and watching the actors using them it's impressive. It really does make them seem eerily fish-like as they suddenly change direction underwater and shoot across the floor of the pool.
Seaton says it was this distinctive piece of kit, along with the sheathed leg costumes in Little Mermaid, that helped children suspend their disbelief to the point that some asked how the mermaids were brought to the pool, and wondered if there was a special tank. It seems clear from Seaton's delight at this response that the creation of theatrical magic and the inspiration of wonder in her audience is one of the driving forces behind her artistic vision.
Of course, theatre is always collaborative, and Seaton says she has a great team working with her. Across town set designer Stuart Marshal is busy overseeing the building of two giant pontoons that will metamorphose into a boat and an island. Meanwhile, lighting designer Conleth White can hardly contain his excitement at the prospect of using both rock concert and theatre lighting to bathe the space with colour, adding yet another dimension to the spectacle.
As I watch a bunch of shrieking schoolkids learning to swim, I try to imagine this pleasant but functional space transformed into the setting for a tropical adventure, sans Disneyfication.
Big Telly's production ofSinbad opens at the Lagan Valley LeisurePlex, Lisburn, today and runs until Sunday as part of the Belfast Children's Festival. It then tours to Leicester in the UK and returns to Northern Ireland at the Cascades Leisure Centre, Portadown, from June 11-15 and at Omagh Leisure Centre from June 18-22. It is hoped that Sinbad will tour the Republic later in the year. www.big-telly.com
Under Construction is a series of occasional articles in which writer/performer Michelle Read looks at how new theatre is being developed and created in Ireland.
