Red Head Reflection

Imitating The Dog has worked for over 20 years fusing live performance with beautiful technical feats. In their most recent production, which they performed for the last time at the Belgrade Theatre, Coventry, the company re-tell Joseph Conrad’s classic novel, ‘Heart of Darkness’, and examine its relevance in 2019, stepping in and out of a cinematographic lens. 5 performers, 3 screens, 2 live cameras and an incredible tech team work effortlessly together to negotiate race, gender, nationalism, colonialism and themes of exploitation and violence, as the character Marlow (Keicha Greenidge) travels up the Congo river, and through a war torn Europe to retrieve Kurtz. Lighting is cleverly used to turn a white backdrop into a green screen, and characters are transported to the inside of a plane, an office, a barren landscape, and a concentration camp on the screens above them. Camera angles and clever movie trickery are cut between to continue the narrative, as we see snippets of a b...

Stans Cafe are a Birmingham based theatre company, who have worked since 1991 under the direction of co-founder, James Yarker. In 1998 the company created their performance ‘It’s Your Film’, which had a total running time of just four minutes, with only one audience member present at a time. Lucky for us, the show has been resurrected for a modern audience and I got the pleasure of seeing it. The audience member is positioned inside a pitch black booth with a narrow hole in front of them. Suddenly the show springs to life, and a mirage of images flashes before their eyes; a wedding ring, an intense telephone conversation, a city skyline and a smoker just to name a few.   For a four minute show the company don’t half pack in their content! A mixture of mirror and lighting trickery, and what the company describes as ‘Victorian illusion’ blends to seamlessly replicate the camera angles, cross fades and scenes of a real film, and having the opportunity to witness their techniqu...