Struck

Struck was made over two months a year apart, January 2022 and January 2023, at the West Village Theatre in Calgary.

It takes further an idea from the devising of The Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst: video foley. In film, a foley artist performs sounds in time with the picture — coconut shells for a horse’s gallop. Here it is the picture that is performed: visual elements are made live, in view, to support or underline what the actors do, and have to be timed and framed with them.

The four cameras of Crowhurst were not enough: the stage was rearranged constantly, and montage needed more pictures at once. A video router, switched by code first written for The Wooster Group, took the system from four camera inputs to nine: a Canon C100 on a wireless link as the roaming point of view, and seven small SDI cameras on microphone arms above the foley tables.

The first workshop also led to projection used as light: four projectors, at different angles, carve the space with simple line drawings. In one scene two actors sit in an airplane whose cabin, aisle and wings are drawn by a rear projector, while a projector above gives the cabin lights and one in front lights their faces.