Our first blog entry has to begin by thanking the Arts Council England for funding and the Coronet for facilitation. Fu-fa-fabulous!
The Melodramatic Elephant in the Haunted Castle is the culmination of several years of research into the history of the Coronet. It has a deep-focus on the actress, Marie Henderson, who has hitherto been consigned to the margins of academia. She was the actress-manageress of the Elephant and Castle Theatre from 1875-1880 and was reported as having gone mad after the theatre burnt down. Our challenge is to creatively bring her to life: the pleasures and pains, the life-pangs of a Victorian actress; one who transfixed her audiences with performances that put the oomph of drama into “melos.” She will be ghost skating through our artistic timeline, materialising at pivotal moments in the history of the Coronet. This might include the WW2 Blitz and a coda section when Marie trips the light fantastic with raving clubbers. She will transport us from the age of corsets and crinoline to silicon implants, from Bedlam to Brexit and beyond.
I will be using drawings as a medium to explore ideas and emotions, akin to a visual storyboard. The aim is to produce a narrative body of expressionistic imagery that responds to the architectural spaces of the Coronet and poignantly documents its final heart beat. Because our project is fundamentally sociable and public, there is the challenge of inspiring others to participate in the process of making and thinking. I look forward to sketching out the memories and experiences of people who once visited the Coronet as a cinema and those who still club today and sent into a trance with the musical beat. The icing on the cake would be discovering a senior resident, one who is over 100 years of age, who has a story to tell about the Coronet when it was a theatre.
Collaborating with John Whelan and the People’s Theatre Company is top of my creative agenda. John has worked on history-based community arts projects in Southwark, but probably none on this scale and ambition. The durational nature of this project will allow John and the actors to become more involved in the development of a poetic play about the history of the Coronet and even get to source their own period clothing in more nuanced detail.
John and I will be exploring ideas and themes of mutual interest. For example, the origins of theatre and how this fused with music to create the melodramatic play and its link to cinematic forms of expression; my educational background was in film studies. We want to show how performance and melodrama are still relevant in
contemporary society.
John Whelan also comments on the project:
Where do you start with the Melodramatic Elephant, a kindly elephant once asked? You start with the trunk of an idea of course! Great fun with the old mind map bringing to life our initial ideas and plotting the structure of the play and its artworks. It was interesting even from the start how both Constantine and myself sparked ideas and you could see air literally being breathed into this exciting Arts Council funded project at the Coronet. Love the ghostly photo and its almost as if the spirit of the melodramatic actress Marie Henderson was with us in the room.
All the Worlds a Costume! Really enjoyed our visit to the South London Theatre to look at potential costume for the production. It was like being in the biggest dressing up box in the World! It was fantastic to see room after room with costumes and accessories from the ages and the staff were so lovely and helpful and made the trip that bit more magical.
