I was watching a video with a friend; it looked like cctv footage. The camera was static, focusing into a theatre, from a high position behind the stage. So we could see the the stalls and the stage, and a door behind the seats. The whole space was well lit, so it was not performance night but a normal day, maybe an auditions day. There were very small groups of people sitting, not more than three people in each group and probably just two or three groups. So the seats were quite empty.
A beautiful woman came through that door. She was well dressed with a blouse and a skirt, high heels and long, straight black hair. She walked into the theatre. It looked like she was going to audition for those people on the sits.
Suddenly just on seeing them she got agitated and angry while walking towards the stage said something about how upset the situation was making her and when she walked upstairs and into the stage she did not stop there. Without even looking at the small audience, she walked through a door that was out of the camera frame and walked out.
Some how the images looked a bit cartoon-like. That and the bizarreness of the situation made me think that what I had just watched was some kind of entertainment. Then we were shown the same scene with footage from another cctv camera, positioned in a different place in the theatre. This one was positioned opposite the camera that had taken the images we had seen previously. What we could see now was the backs of the groups of people sitting, and the whole of the stage, including the door through which the woman had exited. So we saw her again coming into the theatre and walking to the other door agitatedly; the same scene from a different perspective. As the video finished I expressed my shock at the scene. “it is for real! I thought it was fiction, or something!” The images now were sharper and less colourful than before, so more real-like. We marvelled at the woman’s attitude and the inexplicability of her action.
Then we were shown images of rooms outside the theatre but inside the same building. There was the hall, and a wide corridor; the typical theatre hall. It was busy as if it was some important day, it could have been performance day but it was too well lit, it was daytime, so it could be more likely an auditions day. It was so busy, a second woman was talking with some one else who was very far away from her, but they could not walk towards each other to talk more comfortably because of the crowd. The camera closed up to this woman’s face. She was smiling and in the same state of surprise as us, maybe more amused. There was no noise, and if there was, there was only the conversational roar of the crowd. In any case this woman was not trying to make herself heard by the person she was talking to. She was speaking in silence, very slowly and clearly, trying to make sure that her listener could read her lips. We tried to do this too. She was commenting on this woman who just walked out of the audition after hardly having walked in. “She just walked out”, we understood. We could make out some of the words from reading her lips.
Then we were shown another video. This was taken that morning. Some one was calling at the woman’s flat door. The woman got out to the door opening it just enough to show her head. She had obviously just got out of bed. She explained the caller that she was extremely happy, that she had had a beautiful night with her partner. The caller interrupted and said she should get ready for the theatre. There were more images of this woman going through her morning, including the scene at the theatre where she had entered, got agitated and left, but they seemed to be not so important and they passed quickly and without leaving an impression on me.
Then after she had walked out, she was explaining to some one why she had done that, what had happened to her. Something in the theatre had enraged her to the point of loosing it. She explained it but no one could understand it to the point of being sympathetic to her, not us watching the video and not the person actually talking to her.
This person started to tell her off badly. She said that she thought she was irritable because she had not quite got out of bed mentally. She was still affected by the good time she had had with her partner and could not cope with being out in the real world and in her opinion that was what had happened to her and she needed to get her act together.
Then there were again images of the woman who was lip-talking, and this time we could understand even more than we had understood her the first time round. We could understand everything she was saying, actually it felt we could almost hear it perfectly. She was amusedly slagging off the woman who had walked out of her audition.