Live from UNIMA 2008: Day Four

Read yesterday’s review here. Follow with Flickr pics here.

Day Four: Omigod, the rain!

Continuing on with our second last day of bunraku building, we all hurriedly tried to finish our papier mache. I was about second or third in being the fastest, since I was ahead of some of the others to start with: by the end of the day I finished last. I’m so slow!!

Anyway, there’s not many pics, since it was pretty much the same as yesterday, but here’s a great one. At the end of our day - 9am to 8pm! - the last of us tried to dry our papier mache faster by sticking it under a hairdryer. It may have worked: we had to leave before they were fully dry, so we might not even finish our bunraku heads until tomorrow. Well, all except one girl, who managed to get it done today!

You can see in the background of the pic, Hilary (from Spirits Dancing), who is laughing because Nori said to an onlooker that they could only come in if they had lollies. You see, a lot of Japanese people dropped by (by accident) to say hi to him, and one of his friends sat down and helped one of my classmates (a volunteer, who, because she had to keep leaving to help other people, was way behind), and then he offered us sugar ball lollies to share. So Nori has just made a joke, and Hilary and I - and the rest of the group - just laughed our heads off.

While we were waiting for things to dry, we made our neck pieces for the heads - or rather, Nori made them and we sort of finished them off. We ran out of time to make them from scratch ourselves. (See Flickr for more pics… Hey, Nat, there’s a pic of my muesli breakfast… Yum!)

Anyway, we stayed till 8pm to try and finish everything before our last day tomorrow, but had a dinner break at about 6. We found an Asian restuarant and had just ordered when it started pouring (after it being a rather warm day) - and we’d left our papier mache heads outside to dry! Kathy and I raced back to rescue them, it pouring down with rain by then, but luckily we saw Francis (the volunteer) walking in our direction and I asked her if they were still outside. She told us they’d been rescued by Nori and were all ok. Thank god!

Once the day was over, everyone from the class went to see Z for Giraffe, which I saw yesterday, so I simply went back to the hotel. On the way I bought some things: a big overnight bag, which I’m going to exchange for one of my backpacks (simple luggage: big backpack for clothes, etc.; smaller one for day-to-day use; and my laptop) on the way home since I’m going to have too much stuff to fit everything. I also bought some small towels and a party bag (only sturdy bag I could find), both of which I’ll pack my bunraku head in for the ride home. I neglected to include puppets for my return trip home, and miscalculated my luggage severely! Anyway, it’s all solved now: plus I got that UNIMA bag the other day too!

Ok, time for bed. Tomorrow, last day of bunraku, a possible panel discussion for which Nori is one of the speakers, and another show to review! UPDATE: Read the next day’s post here.

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