Throughout Sampled Festival at the Junction Theatre, Cambridge, Chloe will be giving her response to the festival on this blog. You can follow the main live blog here.

12:23 Watching the first set of  scratch performances my main reactions are of curiosity, due to the concept of scratch  (pieces that are unfinished, beta tests almost, and are open for audience feedback) one cannot help to want to see more.

The first of the four performances was by Chris Bailey, opening with lots of audience interaction, and bringing them into the theory and concept of the performance itself. Opening with a quote from  Hitchcock Bailey giving accounts of video stores and travel, this was presented in the form of juxtapositional monologues using temporal reference as a difference between sections (off mic) and accounts of time with his father – his monologues seemed much darker with an adolescent presence of sarcastic and dry broken stories and humor.

Beady Eye’s cooking ghosts was a far more abstract piece. With use of projectors and technology, Kristen Fredericksson presented feelings of nostalgia and child-like natures with eery undertones. With no dialogue in the piece, the audience is left devising their own impressions of what’s happening in Fredericksson’s performance. However the uses of quite dark symbology and a ghostly projection system on a white box left me with a sense of something more than just nostalgia, I’m not sure what such an emotion is but what I do know is that I’m taking away the poignancy of interpretation of a dramatic piece.

 

14:51 Molly Naylor and the Middle Ones: My Robot Heart. This was a storytelling show set to a mellow acoustic soundtrack. Naylor presents a heartwarming approach to the themes of love and fear, and how the two intertwine. Naylor introduces herself as the main story line in the three-part narrative and presents her own accounts of love and its problems, she then speaks of a robot in Japan and alongside this, the third section is a fictional story by Naylor about three characters linked by family and their struggles with love. Naylor weaves real life experiences with story telling to create a heart-warming and  uplifting performance.

 

Sunday

12:25 Ross Sutherland takes an alternative approach to poetry using film footage from an ancient video tape with an odd mixture of shows and clips from pop culture footage. His subjects range from personal emotions and memories to philosophy of dreaming to film commentary, all the while they are jigsaw puzzling beautifully together over ancient looking videos of old Fresh Prince Of Belair episodes and Hollywood classics such as Jaws and Ghost Busters. Sutherland has a wonderful way of rhythmically illustrating the footage and gives different perspectives of how to view it. Sutherland’s style is comical, unique and entertaining and, besides, who knew that a whole new level of poignancy could be brought to the Fresh Prince?