A weekend in Natimuk part 1

I've just got back from a long weekend in Natimuk a small town (527 people) about 25 kilometres from Horsham on the Wimmera Highway. It's about a five hour drive from Adelaide across some really boring territory. Anyway, why was I there and why am I telling you this? Well, every two years Natimuk has the Nati Frinj an Arts Festival held over a weekend. I think it's more or less this weekend every two years. Natimuk is an odd place, its very close to Mount Arapiles which is apparently one of the finest climbing venues in the world featuring everything from the equivalent of nursery slopes to truly magnificent and challenging climbs. I'm not a rock climber so I am prepared to take their word for that. Anyway the town has a group of residents who live there because of the climbing, they also (logically enough) have a group of residents who work in agriculture or who are retired farmers etc. For the purposes of this article however there is the local artists community. Thriving and containing some very well known Australian visual artists. Once again not really my area. But they decided to have a festival every two years. This was (depending on who you talk to) either the third or the fourth and I was there because Theatre Group Gumbo, a Japanese company that I work with, went there for very personal reasons I won't go into. The festival is largely focused on visual arts and while I didn't see all the exhibitions the ones me and my partner looked at were all very good (sometimes a little deep for me I have to admit). We saw an amazing performer called (I think) Tony Yap who has developed a dance form starting from Butoh and then going off into many interesting areas. It was a collaboration with a double bass player (no name I'm sorry) and a local artist called Anthony Pelchen who was Gumbo's connection with the Festival. We also met Tubby the Robot. Do catch up with this guy if he comes to a shopping centre or other venue near you, especially in the Eastern States as he is great. Fantastic character well loved by the kiddies. To my experience. We were booked to perform in the Soldiers Memorial Hall. It was a very hot weekend and of course there was no AC. There was three phase but no in house lighting at all. I knew that so I took a car load and set it up myself. We got in at 9.00am on the Friday with our first performance at 9.30pm Friday night. 12 hours, no problems I thought. It took me and my ever faithful sidekick (my partner Jo) two hours or a bit more to set up the small rig I had brought, focus (no real blackout which made that interesting)and plot some states into the board. We had to play hunt the power point for a while to find different circuits to power some of my gear and the PA. The performers arrived very timely just as we finished setting up. It's now 11.30am. The first rain storm occurred about now. Yep the first, more later. Gumbo's style is very physical and very stylised and takes some shaking down into new spaces, They need a fair amount of time to work this out in the area they need to perform in,kinda like dance performers in weird spaces. This can take some time and during the three or four hours this was going on the storms gradually got longer and louder. I basically busk Gumbos' shows from a preset range of scenes. This is important because two shows are rarely identical and they play off the audience so much that sometimes they go off in a totally improvised direction and I need to go with them. I mention this because of an event that I will soon describe. Mean while Ian (sound guy) and I sat and waited. Eventually about 3.30pm we were given the cuts and the additions to the script and were told a run through, no costumes would start at 4.00. It did, more or less. We had been offered some hot soup and the guys went to get some which held us up a bit. So off we went. The storms by this time were very close and very loud and very very wet and about 40 minutes into the run a huge clap of thunder went off, one of my lights went out and one of the actors yelled "It's smoking." It was. It was a brand new Icolour 4, never used before. I unplugged it and on we went using the one remaining Icolour and the lights on stands. Anyway, we finished the run through and a break was announced and we started (or were due to start) the dress rehearsal at 7.00pm. At 6.45pm the lights went out. All over town. In fact everywhere within a 60 mile radius. Ooops. I will finish the story later as I now have to go out. ...