SHAMBOLICA! Presents CINEMENTALITY

In the month of November, Klaus "The Strong Man" Clown after a boozy weekend in the pub in the ghostly town of Stonehaven was contemplating new ideas.

He was stuck. His mind stuck in a vat of toffee. He ogled over his gin thinking of movies past and present and it hit him. For he realised he didn't speak English, his mother tongue.  The common tongue of his land was that of the cinema.

Logo by Lewis MacDonald

Klaus felt an urge to do something on his own minus his brothers of colour and light, Tertre Rouge and Baron Punch.  The past few years of drowning himself in celluloid and the digital age had expanded his mind to a vast warehouse of knowledge. He needed a release of orgasmic proportions. To make way for the future of cinema.

With his mind expanded by the images and dialogue that had take him to new worlds, he sought out Marta from Little Bit of Theatre when putting the finishing touches to CHASM at Studio 41.

"Marta!" he cried! "I need your help. I need a space to exhort the cinematic ramblings in my mind." "Klaus my dear, come hither and we will host your most Shambolic of minds".

Come the 12th November 2012 in the shoddy basement of the 13th Note in Glasgow.  Klaus entered the stage caged in a gold mask to shelter the audience from the brimming, glistening wad of cinema that was crammed into his mind like a badly boxed oversized puzzle.

Accompanied by the eclectic and cataclysmic soundscapes of Tertre Rouge, Klaus let out a giant roar of fervour, passion and an accelerated version of film history and theory.

What unfolded was a frenetic contextualisation of the history of Klaus's experience in the realms of the wonder of cinema.

Klaus channeling the spirit of his master Mark Rylance, made his way from the Lumiere brothers to the Great Train Robbery of 1903 to Hitchcock to Orson Welles to Goddard and Spielberg.

Churning his mind like an overworked, overheated projector Klaus let the images flow from his mind to his tongue where they transformed into words of love and passion.

Inviting members of the audience up to the microphone to bellow out the name of their favourite actors Klaus turned his performance into a sort seance of the meaning of cinema.

Klaus baptised the end of his performance by sacrificing a copy of his favourite Swedish detective, Wallander in ode Kenneth Branagh who had been knighted that same week. The meanings are endless.

The performance concluded with Klaus transforming himself into a 1920's film camera and then running out of film before dispersing into the darkness.

Stanley Kubrick once wrote: "A film is - or should be - more like music than like fiction. It should be a progression of moods and feelings. The theme, what's behind the emotion, the meaning, all that comes later."

Special thanks to Marta and Little Bit of Theatre and all those who were involved.  Greatly appreciated.
Soundtrack for the performance by Thomas F Newell can be heard HERE!!!

In similar related news:  The soundtracks for "Cinementality" and the performance "Cinemorgue" are related pieces and have been selected for the upcoming show "Reuse/Aloud" by Newbridge Project in collaboration with Basic FM.  More details to follow.