..before it closes, I just thought I'd post a quick reminder that Simon Banham is currently exhibiting elements of our design work for last summer's Coriolan/us, in the World Stage Design 2013 exhibition, now open at the Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama - including a full interior model of hangar 858, and my video document combining the live screen and headphone mixes from a single performance...…

Giving myself a little time and distance to reflect on the realities of our run of Coriolan/us last month, I have been spending some of my days slowly reviewing and combining the continuous camera and headphone feeds that we generated and broadcast live within the work – and which were captured and recorded on the evening of our penultimate performance.

Revisiting the details of these mixes, as they formed and unfolded in real time, I have been consciously avoiding the…

Before more detailed traces and remnants of our Coriolan/us project begin to gather, I thought that I would mark its completion with a quick camera phone image, snapped across that portion of hangar 858 temporarily designated 'rome', a few minutes after being vacated by the 350 of us who had populated it for the duration of our final performance last Saturday.

After Coriolan/us - Hangar 858, St Athan, 22:00, 18th August…

The site for Coriolan/us this coming August has officially been announced - Hangar 858 - a decommissioned WW2 aircraft hanger in St Athan, South Wales. Built in the late 1930's, and beautifully directly engineered, the vast open space contained and framed below its sweeping single span cast cement ceiling is providing us with both a place to realise this work, and also a context within which we can start to locate it.

On our latest site visit we were accompanied…

At the heart of any event - memorable or otherwise - something concrete is happening. An obvious statement in itself, but still an acknowledgement that has engaged my thoughts a lot in recent years. And is again.

As I find myself focusing more and more on the structures and behaivours that might balance our intentions for Coriolan/us, I am enevitably asking myself what I might really be wanting to happen there. And over the past few days - as my thoughts have turned towards…

Last year I was approached by the Swiss company Trickster-p, and asked to design a proposal for the second work within their ongoing trilogy of theatre installation pieces, structured as audio led journeys through theatrical environments - not a form that I have an affinity for, as they well knew - but that in itself made the conversation interesting.

My own intentions - coming very much from a desire to help enable the company's poetic, while also looking for a literal physical…

A few short days in Glasgow, catching up with old friends and new - discussing Lifeguard, a new work with Adrian Howells and the National Theatre of Scotland, planned for this coming autumn. A work that hopes to locate itself within a recently derelict public baths in the city, requiring - excitingly - at least a partial restoration of one area of the site.

I have been asked to look at light. And am very happy to do just that. It is a site that can only clarify my ideas as I…

I always look forward to site visits. Even when they are likely to end in disappointment, they are still revealing. The collective decision to step beyond the theoretical that provokes them is always helpful in itself. Looking for somewhere to meet, a place where our intentions might actually happen - in reality - requires a pragmatic engagement with what we might really be doing that can only clarify.

It is always what things are, in their actuality, rather than what they may or may…

Rosa Casado and I [foreground] snapped at a successful 'bring your own wine and headphones' silent concert experiment in a small Madrid apartment last weekend - courtesy of colleagues Gichi-Gichi Do.

And the sound experiments continue...

...next stop Wales.

Mike's full blog at less than fragments

Follow…

As Mike and I simultaneously turn up the heat on our Coriolanus process with the new year, trading thoughts over distance for little while longer, it seems that we have reached that familiar turning point where we both start re-asking the hard and big questions - but this time in order to really answer them.

It is a turning point that I always enjoy. The chance to challenge my assumptions, sweep away the debris and start to nail some things down. And then we can really start…

...and slightly less of a tangent:

A couple of rebuilt sections of the web archive are back online - still developing, and just as informal as ever, but hopefully a little easier to navigate - and a new set of 25 performance stills from the opening of 'The Persians' have been added to archive #2 - courtesy of the camera, and eye, of Simon…

At the risk that these periodic fragments may seem increasingly like a series of tangents, I have just posted a selection of police cctv surveillance footage from work that Mike Pearson, Ed Thomas and I were doing together in Cardiff, back in the autumn of 2002 [ less than fragments, post title standing still in…

A day in Cardiff. Mike and I met a cast of fourteen actors, with colleagues from the Royal Shakespeare Company and National Theatre Wales, for an open cold reading of the full unedited text of Coriolanus, amongst an informal gathering within the public space of the Senedd in Caridff Bay. Culminating, as the building closed its doors for the day, out in the last of the afternoon sun, on the building’s steps.

My sincerest thanks to everyone involved. Being able to meet the…

This is a bit of a tangent - I have just posted a small video record of part of a sound work I was commissioned to make for Weymouth’s seafront last summer, straight after completing The Persians -  but bear with me, there is a connection, or at least a reason. 

The reason for the post is that I have been thinking about sound. 

Over the past two weeks a couple of the technical team that worked…

...for anyone interested in a look at what has been in mine and Mike's shared head space most recently...and to start with something visual: I have posted a video from last month's Patagonia: enactment + autopsy

Full less than fragments blog page always available directly at mikebrookes.com/blog

Cheers