10.16
Hotel Acceptable, Almeira-ish.
Q. We checked in during daylight hours, so what’s the construction site doing here?
A. You’re in Spain.
12.09 An in-room e-flurry.
13.58 Practising.
01.08 A punctual lobby call & departure from the hotel at 16.00…
… to the venue I…
II...
III...
IV...
… with adjoining construction sites…
Unpacking the ‘bus & into the theatre I…
II...
III...
Dressing room of the Mystic Maestro…
A dressing room of the Disciples…
Biff is mixing FOH from a hard angle. He has been told this is because the bass sounds better from the side. Errr – OK!...
Sylvain the Hero with Solar Voyager…
The LCG Sound Check I…
II…
The first & most noticeable fact, to the experienced eyes of a well-travelled Happy Gigster, entering this venue…
El Auditorio M. Maestro Padilla fue construido en el año 1992 por el Arquitecto D. José Segui. Su propiedad es pública-municipal dependiendo del Excmo. Ayuntamiento de Almería.
… is the total absence of privacy / security for the performer. We arrived & walked in an open front door, through the foyer, along a public corridor, down the stairs to the basement & to the corridor of artist dressing rooms, which have no locks. This is astonishing, and likely to be so even to a performer who has not been stalked, nor subject to harassment by innocent audients who only wanted to say hello & while saying hello get their box of vinyl & CD covers signed & while the covers are being signed take photos – they just couldn’t help it!
There is no door between public & performer spaces, no security person sitting at the liminal / transition zone, no locks on dressing room doors. This is more than surprising: it is negligent.
Sure enough, at the end of our performance, while The LCG were playing the merchandising stand in the foyer & I was changing, a fan appeared in the dressing room corridor waving a vinyl cover of Exposure: he just walked down the stairs. Where boundaries governed by courtesy, consideration & politeness are known & understood, invisible barriers are tangible. My professional life suggests that a thick door with someone sitting by it is, in a performance world mediated by commerce, more effective.
When we tell Holders of Authority at our (Italian & Spanish) venues of our concerns, the conventional response is – it’s safe! This is a lie. Venues are rarely safe, and today’s venue is a defining example of how unsafe & vulnerability may be designed into buildings. Whoever built this one was ignorant of the functions it had to serve.
Overall, a good performance.
Then, our final meal together, upstairs at the venue, and this a further example of basic problems when security is absent. We were told I will sit with your things while you are eating. Except, that is, when we were actually going for our meal & no-one was around with our instruments. So, everything was moved upstairs to a room adjoining the ad hoc dining room.
Our meal became the final meeting of this Guitar Craft Course, which would once have been termed Level Five – Special Project. Comments were invited, and several good points made. One of the team had been able to better define their aim in being here: to get closer to music. Another, who did not have “the sensibility” to photography (ie sensitivity), nevertheless had clearly experienced in Barcelona, at the flash when we were walking offstage, the intention to take.
Back to hotel, a milling in the lobby. The first departure tomorrow is around 05.00.
"Effective action begins when we cease to concern ourselves with being effective."
