All
Tomorrow’s Parties – ATP to its friends – is unlike
other festivals. Firstly, it’s held in Butlins, Minehead. The
benefits are obvious: showers, beds, kettles, even a TV, as well as
the culinary delights of Pizza Hut and Burger King and some pretty
perturbed-looking Redcoats.

The
other notable feature of this festival is that you won’t find
Panic! At the Disco headlining here. ATP is a haven for obscure
indie, post-rock, electronica and the odd foray into hip-hop –
basically, the kind of thing you have to be a fairly serious music
fan to pay for a whole weekend of.

A
chosen band or artist selects each festival’s line-up. Past
‘curators’ include Mogwai, The Mars Volta and Tortoise.
This time the mantle falls, surprisingly given their stature in
comparison with such legends, to Texan post-rockers Explosions In The
Sky.

The
first highlight comes on Friday evening, as Tokyo’s Mono
craft a deep, brooding, relentless wall of sound. Epic,
guitar-heavy, vocal-less noise creates an overriding mood of beauty
juxtaposed with darkness. A great start to the weekend.

Disappointingly,
the same can’t be said for Explosions In The Sky
themselves. There’s a weird atmosphere around the main stage: a
huge perma-tent and vomit-inducing carpet just aren’t conducive
to losing oneself in the music. Also, the PA really isn’t loud
enough. Not much is gained from this set that you can’t get
from listening to Explosions on CD fairly loud – and that can
be done in much nicer surroundings.

Later that night
Four Tet tries to make the indie kids dance, failing miserably for the most part.
Classics like ‘Hands’ and ‘Glue of the World’
are beefed up, extended and mixed in with newer, clubbier material.
Pauses between tracks are confusing, as if this show can’t
really decide whether it’s a gig or a DJ set, but altogether
it’s good fun: shame the crowd doesn’t seem to ‘get’
it.

What was a minor quibble for Four Tet becomes a major problem for Saul
Williams, who comments repeatedly on the awkward shuffling of the
(overwhelmingly scruffy, male, twentysomething) audience in response
to his staccato hip-hop and diatribes on race as social construct.

The
crowd is back on more familiar ground for long-established art
rockers …And You Will Know Us By The Trail of Dead.
Their set is joyous, the scuzzy complexities of their sound
translating well to a PA modified with extra amps so that, for the
first time this weekend, we leave with an agreeable ringing in our
ears.

Atlas
Sound also deserve honourable mention. Delicate, deadpan male and
female vocals recall Sonic Youth, as distorted guitars over a
background of pulsating, reverb-heavy looped samples create a
distinctive and impressive sound. Next up are Animal
Collective, offering something largely unrecognisable from either of their two most recent records. This is no bad
thing: the band’s live sound is heavy, intricately layered and
interesting.

Broken
Social Scene, meanwhile, bring the festivities to a triumphant
close. Inviting an ‘ATP orgy’ of J Mascis and member of
Explosions and the Constantines on stage, the band confidently
perform brass-laced versions of favourites like ‘Ibi dreams of
Pavement’ and ‘Shoreline 7/4’ alongside new
material.

And so it’s with smiles on our faces that we brave the M5 to be back in time for Monday morning tutorials. A wet weekend in Butlins has never seemed so cool.

It is not a set
designer’s favourite play, the one with nineteen scenes in nineteen different
locations, but at least Spring Awakening does it with a sense
of irony.

For once you reach that nineteenth scene, and you think you have
encountered the worst of the stage directions, you are hit with the fruitiest
and most ludicrous of them all: Moritz Stiefel, with his
head under his arm, comes stamping across the graves.

I suppose that is
just one of many reasons why Spring Awakening is rarely
tackled either in professional or amateur theatre. With a cast of 37 characters
it is something of a behemoth of a play.

And then there is the content: teenage
rape, abortion and suicide. If that has semi-raised an internal eyebrow
somewhere on your mother’s side, it is quite astonishing to think the play was
written well over a hundred years ago.

Back in the 1890s,
they did not have the technology available to us now to bring the different
scenes to life. Our current idea for creating these different locations is
to leave the stage as a blank canvas, and suggest the different spaces with
careful lighting and suggestive pieces of flown physical set.

Without the need
to lug hulking great flats on and off, we hope the scene changes will be much
more fluid and add an ethereal quality to the vivid world these children
inhabit.

As for poor Moritz
and his disembodied head, that is very much a work in progress. As a Member of
the Magic Circle, I had tried to design an illusion that would enable us to
have a truly decapitated boy, carrying his talking head under his arm. But for
that detail, we would have had to sacrifice the stomping across the graves.

It
looks like we will end up resorting to old fashioned methods after all: the
willing suspension of disbelief. Something I have learnt from this project is
that it is all too easy to let technology get in the way and all that really
counts is the relationships between characters, the essence of our theatre.

We are still a way
off achieving all that and for the next three weeks, this is where our
attention lies. Between now and opening night, let us hope there are not too
many times when we would all sooner exit pursued by a bear.