On the glass door of the gallery is a poster for a showing of John Cassettes film Opening Night. A woman bent over or bowing. 

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The gallery is carpeted in bright red carpet - like on the stage Myrtle Gordon performs on in Opening Night. There are too many white hire chairs laid out facing a wall.

 

The sound recording room is lined with the same red carpet.

 

Night 1: an audience is invited to watch the film Opening Night projected onto the wall of the gallery. Seated among the audience and in disguise are Gill Addison, Kath Duggan, Daniel Oliver and Simon Vincenzi. They pretend to watch the film along with everyone else.

 

Night 2-5: Each night one of four parallel plays is recorded live. 

 

In the sound recording room is The Narrator who speaks the instructions of each play. Their voice is manipulated to sound like Gena Rowlands.

 

In the gallery are Gill Addison, Kath Duggan, Daniel Oliver and Simon Vincenzi who speak the parts that are written for them. Each night has a guest performer who speak the voice of any extra characters that found their way into the scripts. Their voice is manipulated to sound like Gena Rowlands.

 

The composer takes on the disguise of one of the four of them each night and interrupts the progression of each play with prerecorded soundtracks.

 

On each of the four nights the gallery is equipped with (too many) microphones, costumes and props that appear in that nights play as well as drinks, snacks and red herrings.

 

An audience is invited to enter the ‘recording gallery’ or sit in the bar to listen to the live recording.

 

The recording of each play takes place over an extended period of time of unknown duration. The Narrator attempts to maintain a professional pace and tone in each of the recordings. The charters of Gill, Kath, Daniel and Simon maintain their distance, each enacting a version of the description that makes sense to their own understanding of it. Placed against the detail of the narrated text a more abstract and conflicting version is played out. What the audience see and hear may not match. Each night becomes more chaotic or more spare or more fractured. An evening of feedback…

 

Each night finishes with ‘last orders’ at the bar and a DJ set made up of tracks that appear in An Exquisite Corpse: Behind the Scene.

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