The broadband is dicky, much has happened and I haven’t been able to record it. But here’s yesterday’s sequence of events.
First thing, Tom bailed. Slipped away in the night with his whiffle hurling bats. Everyone very sad. Massage vouchers, a prize left over from last week’s show, were still hanging around so they decided to make it a girlie event – yet again I got a bit of a prize I hadn’t won. Poetic justice.
Skirmatas, the cameraman, came along – low point when he came into the massage room when each of us was lying face down under a towel. I asked him to leave.
Grim mood all day. The assignment is one hundred litas. At the sculpture park the day before – no, I haven’t even been able to talk about the sculpture park experience – Kornelya had given each team a hundred lita note. Except Justin’s team who had better things to do than visit a sculpture park, despite being put under a lot of pressure by Kornelia.
open bracket
More positively, we’ve asked for a day to do some workshops, a talk, make some work, at the Technology museum – a fantastic ex-energy station with all the plant still in situ. I’d gone the other day and found trays and trays of Lithuanian and Cyrillic type blocks alongside a magnificent printing press. Just imagine what you’d do with those. Great location, great stuff in there, it’d make fantastic footage. It took a long while for them to pick up on this but finally, they’ve bitten.
We’ve also asked for a day at the Observatory. There’s one eighty km away and apparently it’s fantastic.
close bracket
The grim mood continued all day – collaboration isn’t working for many but there is, underneath the grimmness, a sense that the only thing keeping our pulses beating is the delicate web of solidarity between us.
The screening of the show. This is where we have to watch it at the TV studio, then for the last ten minutes the cameras turn on us and Egmontas, the host. They film us responding to the audience votes and announce the prize and, officially, the next week’s assignment. It’s always horrible.
The show has been edited better this week, though inexplicably, they’re still showing hot air balloon footage and the Ania scene. It’s not like we haven’t given them masses of action.
Egmontas the host isn’t there, we don’t know why. Some technician has placed a number of bananas on each table. Of course, some people start putting these in their bags, so he puts more bananas out. This hasn’t happened before.
One of the reporters does the host thing and we all get up and leave, without a word. We leave the building and walk home. It feels sublime. It’s the first thing we’ve all been able to do together, in block solidarity.
Apparently they were intending that we vote one or some of us off with the bananas.
I mean, really.
pics and skirmantas story later.
