We came, We saw, It sank

Last night was the kickoff of the Pittsburgh International Festival of Firsts (PIFOF)

http://www.pgharts.org/PIFOF/index.html

The festival is running concomitant to the Carnegie International

http://www.cmoa.org/international/

The Carnegie International is this festival run by the art museum every couple of years to bring the newest most cutting edge visual art to Pittsburgh. It was started ages ago. Andrew Carnegie thought it was easier to bring the world to Pittsburgh then it was for Pittsburghers to get out and see the world. PIFOF is being presented by the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust and Carnegie Mellon Drama and is supposed to apply the same theory to theatre arts. My boss put together the festival and booked several cutting edge mostly visual (read non-text) companies.

The lead off event was Theatre Titanick

http://www.titanick.de/

Their show "Titanic" is about the building and subsequent sinking of the liner. Last spring my Tech Design class spent a significant amount of time doing some preliminary work on the show before the festival had any technical staff. The show is hard to describe, but there is live music, a lot of huge props/apparatus, fire & pyro, and something like 8000 gallons of water. This time to make it more interesting they performed the show on a barge in the Allegheny river moored just off of Heinz field. Most of the local tech and management was provided by former students.

I guess because my class had done the advance work I was invited to see the show as a guest of the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust. While the regular audience of the show watched from a grassy berm by the stadium, Trust guests got to watch from a Gateway Clipper boat on the river. It was kind of fun, lots of people kinda dressed up for the opening (I don't think anyone really knew what was appropriate), and there was an open bar. If you wanted to you could stand on the top deck or one of the walkways below, or there was seating inside the boat, which included heat. At first the boat parked itself kinda far away from the show and it was hard to see and hear, but over the course of the show the captain managed to sneak us in closer and I think by the end we really did have the best seats in the house, but for a while it was a little disappointing. There were a lot of chatty people on the boat finding the show hard to follow. That was unfortunate too, but I bet that was true where ever you watched from. A couple of those people spent quite a bit of time arguing if the water was deep enough for them to actually sink the boat. I believe they may have been disappointed by the application of theatrical illusion.

I think the most fun moment for me was when our boat was pulling up and we saw that there really was a respectable audience. Since this is a free event, and the first event, there was no way to know whether anyone would show up. Because the weather has been turning colder and the material is a little avant-garde for Pittsburgh everyone with the festival had just crossed their fingers and hoped for the best. The weather last night was fine, and as we pulled up you could hear little cheers of "they came, they came." That was fun.

Anyway, good show, fire, water, and pyro by Zambelli - and its free. More shows tonight and tomorrow. If you're in Pittsburgh you should check it out.