The Lunchmeat crew, who provided the stage design and visual mapping for this big annual event held at the New Stage of the National Theatre in Prague, asked us to do some live Tagtool drawing on Sunday 15 April to accompany the performance by Monika Načeva of the two poems ‘Some Trees’ and ‘Anticipated Stranger’ (in a Czech translation) by the American poet John Ashbery. Although we arrived to set up our equipment in the afternoon there wasn’t enough time for me to have a proper rehearsal or discussion about the drawing I would do to accompany the poems. I got a copy in the original English of the two poems to read only about an hour before the performance began – so my drawing was very much an improvisation!
Here is a short video that Dima made – unfortunately it is rather dark and doesn’t show all of Monika Načeva’s peformance.
As this part of the programme was entitled ‘A tribute to John Ashbery’, with his poems being introduced and read in English by Tim Wright, I was a little embarrassed that my small visual contribution was so thoroughly unprepared!
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