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Posts Tagged ‘Blow photo magazine’

Constellations

Posted in Photography, Theatre, tagged , , , , , , on September 18, 2012| 1 Comment »

This is Constellations, by Paperdolls, which is currently running at D-Light studios as part of Absolut Fringe 2012. I’ll attempt to describe what it is, but that won’t be easy as I really don’t know what it is; it slips outside most of the normal categories that you might use to describe something like this. It’s a dance piece that takes place mostly in the air. It’s an acrobatic display that eschews all the cheesy narcissistic showing off which that normally entails. It’s a piece of performance art that revolves around the use of Japanese rope bondage. It’s a gig with a full band (Wolfbait) in the corner who blast out terrifyingly loud and intense noise rock. It’s eerie and unsettling and totally unlike anything I’ve ever seen before.

The photograph above is an exposure of 6 minutes and 17 seconds, and was taken during the first section of the show. I shot it during a dress rehearsal so for that reason you can’t see the audience in the shot. They would normally be sitting around on mats. Most of the cast are sitting still in the centre of the room for this part, while one of them has her arms tied behind her back.  She then performs various acrobatic exercises with a partner, while her arms are still bound in this way. There is a real tension during this section as you can’t help thinking that if she slips, she can’t even use her hands to stop her face hitting the ground. There’s a huge level of trust involved between the participants, and watching it is like being privy to some sort of intimate, normally private, ritual. Soon after this, the whole thing goes completely nuts, but the enjoyment of this thing is all about not knowing what is going to happen next, so I’m not going to spoil it. It runs until this coming Saturday and you can book tickets here. Highly recommended.

Thanks to Karolina at Blow Magazine and Emily and Fionnuala at Paperdolls for facilitating this. This photograph has just been published in number 4 of Blow Mag’s Absolut Fringe 2012 special editions. You can check them all out here.

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The Last Supper

Posted in Photography, Theatre, tagged , , , , , , on September 12, 2012| 1 Comment »

I took this photo at the dress rehearsal for Elevator, which is running at the Absolut Fringe 2012 festival. Doing these shots at theatre productions has turned out to be a little bit trickier than I initially thought. The concept is that the length of the exposure corresponds to the length of a scene, so each shot is therefore a photograph of a scene. The problem though is that many productions don’t have such rigid divisions into scenes, and even if they do, the transitions between them may not be at all obvious. I managed to nail the one above though I think.

Elevator is about a bunch of rich kids who have gathered together for a party when one of their number goes missing. All the action takes place in one room. There’s a lot of talking, flirting, arguing, partying, drug-taking, and recounting of debauched episodes from the past; and all of this is interspersed with musical numbers. The centre of the set has a huge couch that the actors sit on, lie on, dance on, and get off with each other on. Because the couch is a bright white colour, nothing in front of it comes out in the long exposure photograph, so it looks to me more like a dinner table than a couch. There are about seven actors in this photograph and they were all moving around quite a lot, so it’s pretty surprising that there is such clarity in it, and that at various points in the image, they can be made out very clearly.

This thing definitely has legs.

Thanks to Karolina at blow photo magazine, Louise at thisispopbaby and Ste Murray for facilitating this. You can see a whole bunch of great work that other photographers are doing at this year Fringe in blow magazine’s Absolut Fringe special editions.

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My Night In The Museum

Posted in Photography, Theatre, tagged , , , , , , , on October 1, 2011| 2 Comments »

As I mentioned in the last post I was in Collins Barracks the other night photographing the Macnas show, On The Edge Of Things Is A Fierce Beauty, which closed off this year’s Absolut Fringe festival. I had been scouting out the location during the week and discussing it with the site manager at Collins Barracks, trying to figure out if there would be an elevated vantage point that I could shoot from. It looked like it was going to be a problem as the square in which the show was to take place is surrounded on all sides by buildings that make up the Museum Of Decorative Arts and History. The museum itself was to be closed on the night and I didn’t hold out much hope that I was going to be allowed to wander around inside on my own. (more…)

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Blow & Absolut Fringe

Posted in Photography, Theatre, tagged , , , , , , , on September 14, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Last week I got to try out something new with this project. I had been thinking of trying to expand out the long exposure photography idea into other sorts of public gatherings or events apart from gigs, and one of the ideas that occurred to me was theatre. I heard that Blow photo magazine were looking for photographers to take shots at the Absolut Fringe festival so I suggested trying out some of my long exposure photography at a few of the shows. (more…)

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