Imaging Messiah...Five days to show time…

Rehearsal Notes from Dr. Pat Bishop....


"So we have to be seen. We shall be heard – that’s for sure. But how will we look?!."

This is “Performance Art!! Sometimes, having more than one artistic core discipline puts one into transdiciplinarity –an intellectual position to which one is committed. How do I know what I hear until I see what I’m singing, playing, and all the rest?

But we have had the exhaustion of CHOGM and we are a week to show time and we can only now shape the visuals, the sounds, the movement and so on. I’m writing this at 3:00 a.m – 7 days to show time. (Thursday 3rd December 2009) Mondira, my friend, with the bells on her feet and that incredibly polite understanding of what movement is, “falls in”… and Michael Lucien’s Malick dancers arrive with their white skirts and the confidence that they can dance to anything which they hear. Malick understands what “show time” is. And so we put in Xavier’s drums, and the Soogrim Ram tassa boys and we let them loose.

Writing this at 3 in the morning and I am on a high because “Messiah” without changing a single note becomes a truly T & T tribute to the Baroque. Watch Eddie and Mondira plead “Comfort ye, my people” and you are reduced by the beauty and the intensity of the place by the sheer beauty of the voice, the dancer and the bells on her feet…and you begin to understand that this is no search for “impertinent vanities”.

This is not a process which lends itself to blue print. It’s like making a very large painting and trusting your paint!! Wish us luck because this is a HUGE picture!


Pat Bishop
Port of Spain
December, 2009

Comments

  1. Oh gosh man. I excited all the way in the cold lol. really wish I could be there.

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