 |
 This
morning there are three long-tailed tits in the
crab apple tree, one female pheasant at the feeder.
After a couple of days on location I'm back in the studio organising
some printing. Instead of drawing stone walls, trees and crows the
most exciting thing I have the chance to draw today is the vinegar
pot when we go to the fish and chip restaurant for lunch. *Sigh!*
However, it's the big night at last and at 7.15 the drums roll
and the curtain goes up on Alice, who soon follows the
White Rabbit down the rabbit hole.
|
 |
 It'll
be All Right on the Night
 The
Mad Hatter has a familiar look: he keeps fit each morning by
doing a paper round which includes our street (no, not in his
Mad Hatter costume).
That feisty Dormouse, the one with the Italian accent,
is my other half in the backdrop painting department: Rita.
She's the most multi-talented rodent I've ever had the pleasure to work
with.
Nancy, our pianist, has been ill. She made it through
the rehearsals but had to step down at short notice for the final performances.
Wendy our producer went to a rival group's production
at Ossett Town Hall at the weekend, explained our predicament and asked
for help; Richard, the Priory Players' pianist, stepped
in at the last minute.
'There's no people, like Show people' are there?
 Drawing
and Dancing
Must put in a word for the Nine of Spades, one of the
girls in the chorus; all the young dancers were giving it all they've
got but '9' seems like a natural; her actions flow with the music and
she seems able to invest an arm movement or a turn with relaxed expressiveness.
I guess that dancing is like drawing; it not just a case of going through
the motions, you have to 'become' what you're doing. In drawing, a meticulous
tracing of a photograph might turn out to be lacking in life while in
dance a technically perfect performance might seem slightly wooden.
 
A Dance to the Music of Time
Daisy (or is it Buttercup?), the pantomime cow, while
not as elegant as number '9', is still very sprightly considering that
she dates from 1988. My Mum made the costume in that year and Nancy the
pianist tells us she has repaired the costume on dozens of occasions since.
Animal costumes can have enormously long lives. A radio carbon date on
a piece of reindeer antler that got chipped off the head-dress of an English
mummers' play costume revealed that it dated from the middle ages.
So Daisy the cow might still be dancing in the year 2605. 
Richard Bell, richard@willowisland.co.uk |
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